David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘Thank you, Mrs Dauntsey, thank you. Sometimes, I must confess, I think this area may be of the utmost importance, at others I feel I may be wasting my time.’

Outside the sun had gone in and a fierce wind was whipping through the trees. Rain was now lashing against the windows of the Dauntsey drawing room.

‘Perhaps I could put my concern to you in the form of a fairy story, Mrs Dauntsey. I hope you like fairy stories?’

She smiled. ‘I have always been most devoted to fairy stories and plays about magic islands like Prospero’s in The Tempest or Illyria in Twelfth Night . Alex and I saw Twelfth Night a couple of months ago in Middle Temple Hall. It was the three hundredth anniversary of its first performance in 1602 in the very same building. It was extraordinary. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I’m holding you up.’

‘I went to that performance too. Perhaps we passed one another, like ships in the night.’ Both The Tempest and Twelfth Night , he remembered, featured shipwrecks. The current fate of Mrs Dauntsey? Certainly she didn’t look very like one shipwrecked now, he thought, her beauty shining through the pain of bereavement.

‘A long long time ago,’ he began, ‘when the world was young, there was a small kingdom perched high up in the mountains. These mountains were much higher than any we have in this country. Snow sat on the highest of them for most of the year and only the bravest of the young men climbed to the very top. Their customs were very different from ours. This, after all, was long before the invention of the telegraph or the spinning jenny, the telephone or the motor car, of paved roads and of great steamships. The people of the Mountain Kingdom, for that was how its name translated into English, had never seen the sea. But their land was rich. There were fertile valleys as well as the great summits. Their horses were beautiful and very fast and could race most of the day without being tired. The seasons were beautiful, Mrs Dauntsey. In spring the slopes of the mountains would be covered with flowers. In summer the sun shone but the streams that came down from the hills were always cool. In autumn the trees lost their leaves in a blaze of colour, yellows and gold and black and hectic reds. And in the winter the snow sat on the turrets and the battlements of the Royal Palace until it looked like fairyland.

‘The people were ruled over by a King, who was getting old at the beginning of our story, but he had a son, a handsome Prince who would succeed him. As the Prince grew to manhood he looked about him for a beautiful girl he could marry. None of the daughters of the nobles pleased him very much. He began to despair until a wise old man told him about the child of a king two little countries away, who was said to be very beautiful indeed. So our Prince rode off to the Kingdom of the Plain and fell in love with the Princess. Eight months later they were married. Two weeks after that the old King died in his sleep and the Prince and Princess became the King and Queen.’

You’d better get to the point, pretty soon, Powerscourt said to himself or you’ll be here all day.

‘For the first few years,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘everything seemed perfect in this highland Garden of Eden. The harvests were good, the people were contented, peace reigned inside and outside the little kingdom. There was only one shadow across perfection. The new King and Queen had no children. Now it was the custom in this land that each new King had to be the son of the previous one. Nephews, younger brothers, distant cousins just wouldn’t do. The custom dated back many centuries to a time when civil war had torn the country apart. On that occasion when the old King died, the courtiers tried to put his younger brother on the throne in his place. The nobles would have none of it, declaring him not to be the rightful sovereign and plunging the country into a civil war that lasted fifteen years.

‘Time went by, some more years passed and still the King had no heirs. The nobles became restless and began to plot among themselves as nobles always do. The citizens were fearful of the bloodshed that might follow his end. The King went on a journey, accompanied only a by a few faithful followers, to a temple in the mountains where the holy men lived. They listened to his story and told him to travel further on still, up into the high mountains. When he had lived among the snows for ten days, he was to return to the holy place for his answer.

‘On his return, the holy men gave the King their message. Now in this kingdom there were no laws about relations between the sexes, only customs. So it was the custom for husband and wife to be faithful, one to the other, but it was not a legal obligation. The Queen, they told the King, must lie with your brother, or any of your cousins, until she be with child. And you also must lie with her so nobody will know that you may not be the father. The peace of the kingdom demands this, they said to the King. For if you have no son and heir of your own blood, what will happen to the kingdom?’

Powerscourt stopped. Elizabeth Dauntsey looked at him carefully.

‘Don’t tell me the story stops there, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, ‘with the King still up there in the mountains.’

‘I’m afraid that’s where the manuscript runs out, Mrs Dauntsey, I’m truly sorry.’

She rang the bell and ordered tea. ‘Well, let me see if I could help you out, Lord Powerscourt, with the story, I mean. I’m not a storyteller like yourself and I could only speak for the Queen, I think, not for any of the other characters.’

She stopped and a faint twinkle came into her eyes. ‘How can I put this? I think my contribution to the story, speaking for the Queen of course, is that it is always very important for a wife, especially if she is a Queen and married to a King, to obey her husband at all times.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘How very well you put it, Mrs Dauntsey, and what an important moral to take from the story.’ By God, it’s true, he said to himself, those faint reports from Lucy’s relations must be true. Where does that leave my investigation, he asked himself. His brain was reeling.

‘Tea, Lord Powerscourt?’ she said as the butler departed once again to the wider realms of Calne. ‘You must be thirsty after telling all those stories.’ Powerscourt saw that the subject had been closed by the arrival of the Darjeeling. He felt oddly relieved. He wondered briefly which of the characters in Twelfth Night Elizabeth Dauntsey might have been. Cesario? Who certainly had been shipwrecked. Probably even in Powerscourt’s biased eye, she was too old for that. Olivia perhaps, with her great household and unruly relations? Certainly, he thought, you could hide Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek well out of sight in the dusty recesses of Calne. She brought him back from his daydream.

‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, somebody informed me the other day that you have had additions to your own family. Is it true that you now have twins?’

Edward had punted back to Folly Bridge very slowly. There was no sign of their previous adversaries and no more rude comments about Edward standing at the wrong end. Sarah leant back on the cushions, her hand trailing in the water, and peered at Edward through semi-closed eyes. Eventually the motion of the boat sent her off to sleep. Edward smiled down at his passenger, so innocent as she lay there, her head slightly to one side, her red hair bright on the cushion. Then they had walked through Christ Church, marvelling at the size of Tom Quad. London’s Inns of Court could hold their heads up against most Oxford colleges but this quadrangle had no equal near the Strand. Lots of politicians, Edward informed Sarah, had been at Christ Church, Canning and Peel and Gladstone and Lord Salisbury.