David Dickinson - Death in a Scarlet Coat

The band played on. The people inside the gondolas showed no sign of coming out. The traffic up in the servants’ quarters showed no sign of abating. But everybody else began to assemble round the bonfire, some holding bottles of champagne. To the left and right of the revellers the other great houses of Grosvenor Square and Park Lane stood dark and silent in the night. To the front, Hyde Park stretched out across a sleeping London towards Kensington and Notting Hill. The tumbril, pulled by two tall footmen, came to a stop at the side of the bonfire. In front of it two more footmen carried a large table and a set of steps. The crowd back at the dance floor began to open out like the waters of the Red Sea. A dark-haired aristocrat, dressed in the robes of a hereditary peer of the House of Lords, was making his way towards the bonfire.

‘Go for it, Wiggers!’

‘You tell them, Wigs!’

‘Hurrah for Wigmore!’

Lord Richard Peregrine Octavius Wigmore, one of the principal architects of the defeat of the Budget, was moving down his grounds to address his people. Sandy was right in front of the bonfire, standing close to Winterton. Selina was still being whirled round the dance floor by a handsome hussar with a scar on his left cheek, oblivious to bonfires and high politics. One of the footmen held the stairs steady while Wigmore climbed on to his table. You could never tell what a lot of champagne might do to a man, even if he was a lord. Wigmore tottered uncertainly towards the very front of the table. The two footmen appeared by his side as if by magic. Good servants will support their masters at all times and in all places. He banged his foot on the table. Gradually the crowd fell silent.

Wigmore raised his hands to the crowd. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘before I say a few words, I think we should give thanks to those who made this evening possible. I hope you will agree with me that our manner of giving thanks fits perfectly with their contributions to this occasion. Let us give thanks for the Welsh wizard’s greatest friend in politics, President of the Board of Trade, Winston Churchill!’

Two of the enormous footmen pulled a guy, like those seen on Bonfire Night, out of the tumbril. The face of Churchill, at once babyish and devious, glowered from the top. The footmen held it aloft for a second or two to be inspected by the crowd. Then they hurled it into the bonfire where it flared up immediately. Sandy thought it must have been treated with petrol.

‘Our esteemed Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith!’ In went the incumbent of Number Ten Downing Street, the flames catching hold of the hairs on his head. Once again there were huge cheers from the crowd.

‘Finally, the man we have to thank for this evening and this celebration, our revered Chancellor, David Lloyd George!’

The loudest shouts so far shot up into the night sky of London where the stars were clear and bright. ‘Lloyd George! Burn him, burn him!’ the crowd shouted, waving their fists in the air. This went on for some time. Indeed Sandy thought it could have gone on for ever if Wigmore hadn’t called it off.

‘My friends,’ he went on, ‘I have been reading my history books to find a precedent for what has just happened in our great capital. It took me a long time. Marlborough’s triumphs, Wellington’s many victories over the French, even Nelson at Trafalgar did not seem appropriate to what the Lords did two days ago. I think we have to go back further than that and I think we have to take our greatest playwright with us.’ He paused. Sandy Temple, who had heard him often in the House of Lords, thought he was more eloquent in his own back garden than he had ever been speaking from the red benches.

He spoke very quietly when he resumed.

‘“This day is called the Feast of Crispian.”’ Silence had fallen over the great crowd. Even the revellers in the gondolas held their peace. ‘At Agincourt a small, dispirited English force defeated a larger, better equipped army of Frenchmen. The underdog triumphed as it did today. The people who bore the brunt of the fighting would never forget it.

‘And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’d;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition.’

All across the grass, from one end of the garden to the other, the revellers linked arms and swayed slowly in the night air. Wigmore was still speaking softly, resisting the temptations of the battlefield shout.

‘And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon St Crispin’s day.’

Lord Wigmore looked round his audience, still swaying like flowers in a spring breeze.

‘The band will cease playing at six o’clock. But I propose that we round off our evening in a fitting manner. Love of country, love of England underpinned everything we did today. Let us therefore all sing the National Anthem.’

For some reason the huge crowd took it fairly fast, unlike the funereal pace it was normally sung at. Sandy Temple thought they made it sound like the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’. As the crowd began to drift home he found that Selina was still dancing, her head resting on the shoulder of another young officer. Suddenly Sandy made an important discovery. This, he realized, was the world Selina wanted to live in, the world of London high society, of powerful men and powerful women, of salons and luncheon parties and extravagant dinners where politicians rubbed shoulders with great financiers and newspaper magnates and the new class of millionaires. She wanted to be a chatelaine in these high-flying gatherings. But for him? Sandy knew they were not for him, these evenings. At best he would be a sardonic observer. He would never belong. There could be no point in marrying Selina. They would only make each other unhappy. He took a last look at her waltzing in ecstasy round the floor and walked on through the atrium and out of the front door into the pale light of dawn filling the Mayfair morning. He would write to her this evening. Like Theseus, he had abandoned his Ariadne on the island, dancing the dances of the transported with the god Dionysus himself. All Sandy had to do now was to remember to change the sails.

Inspector Blunden was back behind his desk. Powerscourt and Constable Merrick were seated on either side of the round table in the centre of the room.

‘I’ve put out a general alert for Bell,’ said the policeman, ‘ports, railway stations, and such hotels as we can reach. I often wonder how anybody was apprehended before the invention of the telegraph.’

Constable Andrew Merrick, emboldened perhaps by his previous success with Oliver Bell and his non-existent alibi, was holding his hand up as if he was back at school.

‘Well, Constable Merrick, what do you have to say for yourself now?’ Blunden felt he couldn’t be too harsh with the lad after his good work.

‘Sir, my lord, you asked me to think about how we might find out more about the movements of the middle Mr Lawrence, sir, Carlton Lawrence, the one reportedly seen at the railway station, sir.’

‘What of it?’ said Blunden. ‘I’m not sure how much credence we can attach to that evidence now. Maybe Bell was trying to throw mud in our eyes.’

‘Well, sir, my lord, we could ask at the station. Ask if anybody else saw Mr Lawrence, I mean.’

‘Very good, young man. We’ll make a detective of you yet. But that wasn’t what you were going to say before, was it?’