David Dickinson: Death in a Scarlet Coat

‘Good to see you’ve arrived at last!’ said the Chief Constable. ‘No idea why it took you so long. Now then. We’re going to charge. Skeggs and me and the three of you. Like the cavalry. I’m in command, of course. I’ll give the orders. Take the madman from the rear. Take him off to the nearest asylum quick as we can. Now then, what are you waiting for? Fall in! Prepare to advance!’

Nobody moved. Johnny Fitzgerald whispered to Powerscourt that he was happy to knock the Chief Constable out. One blow should do it, he said. He’d been thinking of it all day. Powerscourt said it was Charles’ call, his land, his county, his brother.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Charles Dymoke. ‘If you charge he’ll turn and shoot. Somebody might get killed. Hold your peace. I’m going to talk to him.’

Charles set off towards his brother. James was now very close to the lake. A faint breeze was causing ripples on the surface. On an island in the middle a couple of herons watched the proceedings with care, their long necks turned towards the action. It began to rain.

‘James?’ Charles was only about ten feet behind his brother. James turned round. As he did so, the Chief Constable, having moved Blunden and Merrick into the front line, yelled, ‘Charge!’ and pointed his finger towards the lake as if he was back in India, attacking the natives. What James saw was a group of five men charging towards him, some waving their pistols in the air. He must, Powerscourt decided, have thought they were coming to kill him.

James raced towards the lake. He plunged into the water as he had done before. Chief Inspector Skeggs knocked Charles to the ground as he hurtled past. James took the stick in his right hand and whirled it round his head a few times. Then he shouted as loud as he could. His voice must have carried back to the house.

‘Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him;

But when I looked again, behold an arm,

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

That caught him by the hilt, and brandished him

Three times, and drew him under in the mere.’

The wooden stick, Excalibur, the sword of Arthur in James’ befuddled mind, floated away on the surface of the lake. ‘Tennyson,’ said Charles, scrambling to his feet, ‘ Idylls of the King . I think he knows most of it by heart. He’ll have turned into Sir Bedevere or somebody by now. Better if it was Merlin but I doubt it.’

The charging party stopped at the edge of the water. James was up to his neck. Charles had reached the edge. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald watched, some ten feet away.

‘Stop!’ said James. ‘Stop! All of you! And you, Charles! This is it! This is the end!’ With that he pulled the gun from his pocket, placed it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The explosion echoed round the lake. After a minute where he seemed to totter very slowly from side to side, James Dymoke fell into the water. A small red ring formed round the place where his body had been. The ripples stretched back towards the shore and out to the island. Charles dived into the water but he had little hope.

‘I’ll have to get Jack Hayward to pull him out,’ he said sadly as he returned to dry land. ‘He always knows what to do in these situations.’ Jack Hayward, Powerscourt thought, always at hand to retrieve the body of a dead Candlesby, young or old.

The military party had dissolved with James’s death. Inspector Blunden and Constable Merrick were trudging slowly towards the house. The Chief Constable was addressing the faithful Skeggs.

‘If only Powerscourt and his friends had done what they were told,’ he said, ‘everything would have been fine.’

‘Everything would not be fine.’ Charles Dymoke had a vicious tone in his voice now, water dripping down his shirt and his jacket. ‘If you hadn’t indulged your taste for petty heroics with that ludicrous charge, my brother wouldn’t have felt threatened. He might still be alive. You stupid, stupid man. Get off our land now! Get out of our house! Go on, before I put the dogs on you!’

The Chief Constable slunk away, muttering something about the merits of military discipline no longer being taught properly in schools. Charles went to stand in front of Powerscourt. He looked extremely young.

‘Nobody knew …’ He began to cry, very quietly. ‘Nobody knew about it but me. James didn’t have more than a month or two to live. The disease had taken over. The worst thing is,’ the tears were coming faster now, ‘I said to the doctors that they should tell him. How long he had left, I mean. If I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have known he was dying. He wouldn’t have killed himself.’ Powerscourt gathered the young man into his arms and held him very tight for a very long time.

Lady Lucy was waiting for him when Powerscourt returned to the hotel an hour or two later. He told her about the death of James and the latest lunacies of the Chief Constable. ‘I’ve got a confession to make, Francis,’ she said. Powerscourt wondered what was coming. ‘When the Chief Constable was going on and on about the secret source I suddenly thought it wouldn’t take very long to identify Lucy, Lucy Carter, I mean. So I left the saloon and drove down to the village. I put her lying down on the back seat in case anybody saw us and brought her back to the hotel.’

‘Where is she now?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Mr Drake has found her a room here nobody knows about. She’s fast asleep up there now. I told her mother Lucy could act as my maid if she needs to stay away for a while.’

‘Let me just recap a moment here, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘You went from the Hall to the village to the hotel in the Ghost? That’s right, isn’t it?’

Lady Lucy nodded. ‘I did,’ she said proudly. ‘It’s not all that difficult, driving, once you have got used to it.’

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy went back to London after the third funeral. The Chief Constable tried to bring a case against every male in Candlesby Village but failed at the committal hearing, where the judge threw the case out and criticized the prosecution for wasting the court’s time with nonsensical claims. Charles Augustus Pugh, retained by Powerscourt for the defence, shared a bottle of champagne with him afterwards. The following week the Home Secretary announced that the Chief Constable had resigned, on health grounds. Johnny Fitzgerald announced that they had probably taken him off to the nearest asylum.

Henry, now Lord Candlesby, began a programme of serious retrenchment at the Hall. It was, he said, a nonsense to be living with that much debt and he set about reducing it in a sober and responsible fashion. People said he was a changed man.

Powerscourt always remembered the case of the murdered Earls as having to do with Charles, who was neither murdered nor the murderer, but now a frequent guest at the Powerscourt house in Markham Square. Charles had stood with Powerscourt on the strip of land between the lake and the mausoleum at Candlesby Hall after James’ funeral shortly before Christmas and quoted Shakespeare. His stammer seemed to be gone for ever, banished by the terrible events at his home. ‘Let us hope’, he said, ‘that “Our revels now are ended.” Three corpses should be enough for anybody.

‘Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.’

‘I think my father strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage, you know, Lord Powerscourt. The candles flickered for a little time. I always loved him so much, you know, even though he was such a terrible man. I have thought since his death that it was appropriate that he, of all people, was wearing those clothes the night he was killed. All his life he was a hunter, a hunter of women, a hunter of money, a hunter of fowl and foxes, a hunter after power and the gratification of his own desires. How right therefore that he should be dressed as Master of the Hunt and meet his death in a scarlet coat.’