David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘Think nothing of it,’ said Elizabeth Dauntsey. ‘You said in your letter, Lord Powerscourt, that you thought I might be able to help you in some way. Please tell me what it is.’

Powerscourt paused for a moment. ‘As I said, Mrs Dauntsey, I have been asked by the benchers of Queen’s Inn to investigate the circumstances of your husband’s death.’

‘Do you find the benchers easy to deal with?’ Elizabeth Dauntsey was very quick with her interruption. ‘Some people find them rather difficult,’ she went on.

This was not, Powerscourt felt, the conversational tone one would expect from a lady whose husband had been murdered so recently. Levity rather than grief seemed to be the order of the day. Maybe Elizabeth Dauntsey was one of those unfortunate people who always speak their mind. Maybe the rules for widows had changed now they were free of the long shadow of Victoria’s forty years of mourning.

‘The benchers?’ Powerscourt smiled at his hostess. ‘Well, let me say that I have found easier people to deal with.’ Most murderers of his acquaintance, he might have said, were easier to deal with than Barton Somerville and his colleagues. ‘But my purpose here at Calne is not with the benchers, Mrs Dauntsey. There are two reasons behind my visit. The first is mundane – would you mind if I talked to your family solicitor? It is sometimes helpful.’

‘Not at all, Lord Powerscourt. The man you want is Matthew Plunkett of Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett in Bedford Square. He’s already been to see me. I shall drop him a line telling him to expect you and to help you in your inquiries.’

‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt, wondering how old this Matthew Plunkett would prove to be. ‘I have found,’ he went on, looking carefully at Elizabeth Dauntsey, ‘in all my investigations that the more I know about the deceased,’ deceased was a more neutral word than victim, less upsetting than murdered man, he thought, ‘the easier it becomes to work out why he perished in the way he did. I have only one side of your late husband, the professional aspect. You don’t need me to tell you that lawyers are economical with the truth. They are very cautious with their words. Some of them measure out their version of the truth as though it were some tiny amount of a very expensive medicine being poured on to a rather small spoon. I need a broader picture of Mr Dauntsey, madam, and I am sure you can provide it.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey looked sad for the first time in their conversation. This time her voice was very soft and had no hint of raillery.

‘Tell me what impression you have formed so far, Lord Powerscourt, and I will do what I can to fill in the gaps.’

Powerscourt paused and looked at Mrs Dauntsey very closely for some time. ‘Mercurial,’ he said. ‘That, I think, is how some of his colleagues would have summed him up. A man of very great gifts, an advocate who could be brilliant, absolutely brilliant in court, a man who could dazzle juries and judges with his eloquence. But the brilliance had another side. Brilliance often does. On the bad days your husband lost all his gifts. It was as if he mislaid them or he never had them. In court on the black times he was hopeless. Of course, there were far more good days than bad ones, but it may have meant that he never rose quite as high, his fees and refreshers were never quite as great as those of some of his distinguished but less gifted contemporaries.’

Powerscourt looked at Elizabeth Dauntsey again to see if she was bearing up. She was.

‘I think he was a kind man, your husband. I think he was popular with his colleagues. I think people in his Inn liked him. But I also sense, though nobody ever said this, that he was a private man, that there were areas of himself that were closed off.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey smiled again. ‘How strange that you should have said that Alex had areas of himself that were closed off, Lord Powerscourt. Most of his house here is closed off, certainly all the grand bits, they have been for years. But that’s not relevant. I think what you say about Alex is fair, very fair. He could be mercurial at home too, you know. We had what he called his black days sometimes when he could hardly speak to me.’

She leaned forward and put her head in her hands. Powerscourt thought she was more beautiful than ever.

‘And he was a private man in some ways.’ Elizabeth Dauntsey was speaking quietly, as if fearful of waking the dead. ‘Even after ten years of marriage there were times when I felt shut out, that he’d gone off somewhere else. Alex believed in God, which is becoming rare these days. He was very kind to the servants. He was a great believer in the Liberal Party even though he had always loathed Gladstone. He was a passionate devotee and player of cricket. One of his ancestors was turned back at the Dover boat, you know, at the time of the French Revolution. He was taking a team to play a match in Paris. Can you imagine, Lord Powerscourt, spin bowling in the Tuileries or the Bois de Boulogne while severed heads were dropping to the ground from the guillotine?’

She paused for a moment, then carried on. ‘And Alex was very fond of children.’

Suddenly Powerscourt knew from the tone of her voice that Elizabeth and Alexander Dauntsey had never had any children, that this loss might have blighted their marriage. He could not begin to imagine the depths of pain and despair it might mean for both man and woman, this desperate longing to have what your friends and neighbours were blessed with but you were not, a different but no less painful form of bereavement.

She looked at Powerscourt with tears in her eyes. Powerscourt knew he must speak now, he must steer her away into different ground or she might collapse and his interview would be at an end. But she battled on.

‘We never had any children, Lord Powerscourt. That was very hard for both of us. I think Alex would rather Calne was inherited by a son of his than pass to one of his nephews, but it doesn’t matter now, it doesn’t matter at all.’

‘Was your husband a sportsman, Mrs Dauntsey? Fond of hunting and fishing, that sort of thing?’

Powerscourt had no idea why he asked that question, maybe he was trying to move away from children as fast as possible.

‘No, he wasn’t.’ The tears had been vanquished. ‘He often quoted that line of Oscar Wilde about the English country gentleman galloping after a fox being the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. He was very fond of Italy, Alex, not the well-known places except for Venice which he adored, but the medium-sized cities with great histories, Cremona and Urbino and Ferrara and Parma, places like that.’

‘I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear, Mrs Dauntsey, that there are fantastic rumours about your husband’s interest in art circulating round the courts of Queen’s Inn. The stories grow more fantastical in the telling.’

‘Tell me the most outrageous,’ she said, smiling at the investigator. Powerscourt felt rather weak.

He smiled back. ‘The most outrageous, which I must have heard about five or six times, was that, in a fit of modernity, Mr Dauntsey had thrown all the Old Masters into the cellars and replaced them with modern works by the French artists known as Impressionists. It was furthermore alleged – I’m beginning to sound like a lawyer myself, Mrs Dauntsey, – that he was intending to strip out the ancient oak panelling and replace it with contemporary wallpaper by Edward Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey smiled a beautiful smile. She rubbed her hands together in delight.

‘Excellent, Lord Powerscourt, I do like that. The truth, however, is more prosaic. Some of the Old Masters were indeed taken down, but that was on advice from a very earnest young man from the National Gallery who said the air was too damp for them and they should be stored elsewhere. I believe we still pay a large amount of annual rent for their storage at a London gallery. The panelling was taken down because it had some rare form of woodworm and had to be repaired. How prosaic the truth is.’