David Dickinson: Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

Outside it was raining heavily, great drops splattering on to the lakes and soaking the cloaks and the fur caps of the Cossacks on their endless patrol outside the walls. Upstairs was quiet now. The four daughters had gone to sleep. She could hear the faint steps of the guards as they patrolled the hallway on the lower floor. Suddenly Alix began to bleed, as she had not bled for months. There was no child. As one of the Montenegrin sisters put it, a tiny ovule came out. Then her abdomen deflated, the pains stopped. The palace doctors confirmed that she was not pregnant. She was suffering from an amnesia-related condition and should rest in bed, they told her. As they left her room she began to weep as though she had never wept before and would never be able to stop. On and on into the terrible future, a future where she had thought there was hope but now there was only despair, her tears would flow. She might be able to staunch them for her children but it would not be for long. This was the worst day of her life, in a life that had so many contenders for the position. She was humiliated. Alexandra had no doubt that word of what had happened would reach St Petersburg in a day or two, and how society would laugh at her. They had never taken to her, those aristocratic women of the capital, and she had never taken to them. Now the story of her troubles would shoot round the salons and she would be laughed to scorn. And inside the palace, she knew, there would be a campaign against Philippe, orchestrated by the doctors, amplified by the courtiers, prosecuted by the uncles. She hoped her husband would hold firm. But you could never tell. She prayed through her tears, she prayed to the icon of the Madonna in her tiny private chapel: Mother of God, hear my prayer, Mother of God hear my prayer. Don’t let them take Philippe away. Please don’t let them take him away from me. He’s my only hope.

Wells, England, Spring 1903

Lord Francis Powerscourt was lying on the ground at the junction of the nave and the transept of Wells Cathedral, staring upwards. He was inspecting one of the most dramatic features of any cathedral in Britain, the famous scissor arches that curved and swung and swept upwards towards the roof.

‘My goodness me, Lord Powerscourt,’ said the Dean, inspecting his prostrate visitor. ‘I know you asked me if you could lie on the floor, but I didn’t think you meant it. Are you all right down there?’

‘Perfectly happy, Dean, thank you very much. I thought I could get a better idea of what things must have looked like when your tower began to lean and crack open back in thirteen hundred and something or other.’

‘Thirteen hundred and thirty-eight,’ said the Dean with a faint note of irritation in his voice. He liked people to do their homework properly. ‘Anyway, I think you’ll find the cracks were more apparent higher up than they were at ground level.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Dean,’ said Powerscourt, rising nimbly to his feet. ‘I have to go and have a tutorial from your librarian in a quarter of an hour. He’s promised to tell me all about the cracks and your clever master mason William Joy who invented the arches and saved the building. The great curves, I’m told, transfer weight from the west, where the foundations sank under the tower’s weight, to the east where they remained firm. I’m going to write it all down in my little black book.’

And Powerscourt patted one of his pockets which gave out a dull thud of reassurance. The Dean sighed as he looked around his kingdom of space and light.

‘I envy you, you know, Lord Powerscourt. You come here and you work hard and then you move on to another cathedral for your book. We’re left here with all the problems of the damp and the lack of money and the lack of interest. I sometimes wish I’d stayed where I was as Vicar of St George’s in Bristol.’

Powerscourt looked closely at the Dean. ‘I think you’re wrong there, Dean,’ he said quietly. ‘Your problems may be formidable, the lack of money difficult, but you are charged with the upkeep in fabric and liturgy and service of one of the most beautiful buildings in England. It is I, and many others, who envy you, you know.’

The Dean patted Powerscourt on the shoulder in a gesture that might have been a sign of friendship or a truncated blessing. He moved off towards the Chapter House.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had not intended to become a historian of cathedrals. He was just under six feet tall, clean-shaven, his head crowned with a set of unruly black curls, his eyes blue, inspecting the world with irony and detachment.

For many years Powerscourt had worked in Army Intelligence in India. When he left the military he and his great friend and companion in arms Johnny Fitzgerald had embarked on a successful career as investigators, solving murders and mysteries right across Britain. The year before, in 1902, he had been shot and very badly wounded at the end of a murder case involving one of London’s Inns of Court. For days he had been on the brink of death, his wife Lady Lucy and a team of doctors and nurses in constant vigil by his side. Several months after the accident, when he was well enough to travel and to climb a few hills, she took him away to a hotel in Positano in Italy to convalesce. Powerscourt loved Positano, hanging on to its cliff above the blue water, the streets often replaced by stairs as you climbed towards the top, the foundations of the houses horizontal rather than vertical, or so the natives said, and the legends of pirates and abductions of Black Madonnas that peopled its turbulent history. And then, on the fifth morning, in a scene Powerscourt later referred to as The Ambush, Lucy sat him down on the balcony of their sitting room that looked out over the sea and took both of his hands in hers. Powerscourt had replayed the scene in his mind virtually every day since.

‘Francis, my love, I cannot tell you how happy we all are to see you getting better. I want to ask you something today. It is important, it’s very important to me.’

She paused and Powerscourt could see that she must have been rehearsing this speech in her mind for days if not weeks. ‘I don’t expect an answer today, Francis. I don’t expect an answer tomorrow. Only when you’re ready.’

Powerscourt thought she was delaying the heart of her message. Only when he looked into the steadfast courage in Lucy’s blue eyes did he know that she was trying to spare him. He thought he knew what she was going to say. He had been expecting it for some time.

‘Francis, I want you to give up detection, investigations, murders, mysteries, all of it. You know I have never tried to stop you in the past, I have never asked you and Johnny to abandon a case because it was dangerous. But that last case with the bullet wound in the chest nearly killed you. You were unconscious for days. You didn’t see the agony for our children, for Thomas and Olivia as they thought their Papa might be dead. Children don’t want that at the age of nine or seven. The twins would have had to grow up without a father at all. You’re a very good father, Francis, no mother and no child could ask for better. But surely the greatest gift a father can give his children is to stay alive for them, to be there as they grow up, to help and bless them on their way into the world. Dead fathers may be heroes, they may even be martyrs, but they don’t help their children with their homework or teach them how to play tennis or read them bedtime stories. Children need fathers built into the brickwork of their lives, into the patterns of their days and the weeks of the passing years. They don’t want that contact to be with some stone monument in a cemetery with rotting flowers lying at the side of the grave.’

Lady Lucy paused, her hands still locked into her husband’s, her eyes watching his face. ‘Think of the number of times you have nearly lost your life, my love. When you were investigating the death of Prince Eddy, the Prince of Wales’s son, Johnny Fitzgerald was nearly killed because your enemies thought he was you as he was wearing your green cloak. When you looked into the death of Christopher Montague the art critic, you and I were nearly killed in Corsica with mad people pursuing us down a mountain road and firing guns at us. In that cathedral case they tried to kill you by dropping a whole heap of masonry on top of you from high up in the building. A few months ago you nearly breathed your last on the first floor of the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. It can’t go on, Francis. Please don’t be cross with me, my love, I’ve nearly finished. I don’t know if you remember the day you came back from the dead, when Johnny Fitzgerald was reading Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and little Christopher smiled his first smile at you. We were all hand in hand then, by the side of your bed, you and me and Thomas and Olivia and Christopher and Juliet, all joined in a circle of love. I want you to remember those faces, to think of them on that day, as you make your decision. I know it won’t be easy, I know how much satisfaction you take from another mystery solved, from the knowledge that other people will now live because the murderer has been caught. I just want you to think of your children’s faces and the love in their eyes and the relief in their hearts when their father came back to them. Please don’t let them go through that again. And remember, Francis, you know it’s because we all love you so much.’