David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

Lady Lucy removed her hands at the end. Suddenly, overcome by the strain and her memories of the days when death seemed so close in Manchester Square, she started to cry. Powerscourt held her in his arms and said nothing at all. He had known it was coming, this request. He hadn’t known how difficult he would find it to give her an answer. For three days he stared at the dark blue waters of the Mediterranean and took little walks along the coast as his strength returned. He was being asked to give up his career. If he had stayed in the army, he told himself, he would have been exposed to much more danger than he was as an investigator. Was it unmanly to give up his own interests for those of his wife and children? He wondered what his male contemporaries would have said about that. He tried to make a comparison, to draw up a balance sheet between Lady Lucy and his children’s happiness and the dangers of an undiscovered murderer roaming the streets of London, and he knew he couldn’t do it.

He watched Lady Lucy a lot in those three days. He saw the joy in her face when she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t noticing. She’s so happy I’m alive, he said to himself. He saw the grace of her movements as she walked into a room or crossed a street and he knew he was as much in love with her as he had been the day they were married. When he told her he was giving up detection she ran into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. ‘Francis, I promise I won’t mention it again unless you do,’ she told him. ‘Now let’s go and have a very expensive dinner and an early night.’

For a long time afterwards Powerscourt was to wonder if she chose her moment when he was still quite weak. Would he have given the same answer if he had been at full strength? For he found life growing more difficult as they returned from Positano and back into their London routine. Only Powerscourt had no routine now. Buying more newspapers in the morning, taking longer and longer walks in the afternoon, was no compensation for the lack of purpose in his life. He didn’t think you could enter your occupation in some survey or census as Father. It wouldn’t do. He began to grow listless. He found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. He drank too much in the evening. Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald held an emergency meeting with Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke, a great financier in the City of London. It was Johnny who came up with a possible answer.

‘Look here, Lady Lucy, William, I’ve got an idea. Remember what happened to me first of all. I used to be a bit wild, drinking too much when I wasn’t working with Francis on a case. Now I’ve got my first bird book coming out soon and they want another two after that. I’m not saying that Francis should start watching the lesser peewit or the great praticole or any of that stuff, but he’s so clever he could write books about lots of things. Maybe he could describe some of his greatest cases – but I suppose they’d be too delicate for that.’

Johnny paused and took a sip of his glass of William Burke’s finest Chablis. ‘I know,’ he said, leaning forward in his excitement. ‘How about this? Do you remember during our art case there was that character who was arrested for Christopher Montague’s murder and we had to get him off? Buckley, that’s the man’s name, Horace Aloysius Buckley. He was going round the country attending Evensong in every cathedral in England when Francis and the police caught up with him in Durham, I think, no, it was Lincoln. Anyway, after he was acquitted there was a party in that barrister Charles Augustus Pugh’s chambers, and I asked this Buckley person if there wasn’t a book about the cathedrals for the general reader, thinking that he could have stopped home if there was and not spent all that money on the train fares. He said there wasn’t. So there we are. Francis becomes an author. Francis writes histories of cathedrals. He’d like that. He dedicates one of the books to Mr Buckley, maybe. Bloody cathedrals are like bloody birds, they’re everywhere, England, France, Germany, Italy, there’s enough to keep him going for years.’

So here was Powerscourt, many months after his trip to Positano, travelling nearly six hundred years back in time to learn about the scissor arches that saved Wells Cathedral.

He had grown to love the strange vocabulary of cathedrals, the ambulatories and clerestories, the chantry chapels and the Angel Choirs, the sacristies and the triforia, the transepts and the cloisters, the choir stalls and the fonts, the Chapter Houses and the stained glass windows, the recent memorials to the dead in the Boer Wars, the tattered flags that had once led soldiers into battle and death. He was still astonished at the sheer size of them, how twelfth-or thirteenth-century men could have built these massive monuments to their God. He had talked to contemporary masons and carpenters and architects about their perspective on the buildings. He had tried to discover what the citizens of the cathedral cities thought of them when they were built, but no records survived. He had talked to the present-day citizens, the shopkeepers, the tradesmen, the lawyers, the publicans, the Deans and Chapters, about what the cathedral meant to them now in the first years of the twentieth century. For the citizens, he discovered, the cathedral was like a remote grandparent with eternal life, part of the fabric of their lives and their families’ lives as far back as their memories extended and the city records survived. The cathedral, in Gloucester or Hereford, in Salisbury or Norwich, brought honour to the city and growing numbers of visitors to inspect its glories. But nowhere was it seen as a beacon of faith, a monument to man’s quest for the eternal or the spiritual. Cathedrals were friendly, cathedrals were beautiful, cathedrals were awesome feats of construction, but they were not the light that shineth in darkness. Even the Deans, like the Dean of Wells, the men responsible for the running of these vast buildings and the scheduling of their daily services, approached their task, Powerscourt felt, in the manner of men organizing the Post Office mail delivery system or planning the transportation of an army across a continent. The cathedral, in Canterbury or Worcester or Exeter, must have seemed to its people at one early point to tower above society, to float next to heaven far above the mundane concerns of the city. Once it was a miracle. Now it was just another cog in the wheel, like the town hall or the public library.

Sarov, Russia, July 1903

The film of dust, thicker than the smoke from a cigarette, less dense than a cloud, rose some twenty feet above the road and a long way out on either side. The roads were dusty in the summer of 1903 and not designed to carry so many pilgrims. These travellers had come from all over Russia, mystics from Siberia, Holy Fools from the Crimea, mountain people from the Caucasus, peasants in their rough clothes from the very heart of Russia. The sick had come as well as the healthy, amputees brandishing their crutches as they limped along, desperate mothers holding pale and diseased children in their arms, or pushing them in home-made handcarts, children who looked as if they might never reach their destination. The pilgrims carried icons of St Serafim or the Virgin, many of them muttering prayers to themselves or their paintings every step of the way. Some carried baskets of food, others had resolved to fast until they saw the relics of the saint installed in glory in the new cathedral. The mad and deranged had come, sometimes shrieking out their private visions at the side of the road, sometimes screaming in pain as the Cossack horsemen or the police beat them into silence. And at the heart of this progression of pilgrims, travelling in their imperial troikas, Nicholas and Alexandra, Emperor and Empress of All the Russias, were bent on the same journey of pilgrimage to the same destination as their subjects. Word of their journey had spread through the villages they passed. Crowds would come out to stare and shout oaths of loyalty to their Emperor, never before seen in these remote parts and never seen since.