David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

Six in around a hundred and forty years, Powerscourt said to himself. One every twenty-five years or so.

‘But I presume, Edward, that these stewards do not necessarily know the true picture of the accounts. They know all about the bread and butter stuff but not any investments that may have been made, or monies or property that may have been inherited.’

‘That’s true,’ said Edward. ‘There have been all kinds of rumours about the wealth of Queen’s. At one end of the scale it’s the poorest Inn of Court in London, at the other it owns most of Mayfair and half of Oxford Street. But what do you want me to do?’

‘Can you get me the names of all the people who have been benchers here and the dates of their death?’

Edward dropped his coffee cup on to the hard floor. The cup shattered into a thousand fragments. The coffee concentrated in one narrow stream and made for the nearby carpet. The whole room looked round and stared at Edward as if he had ruined their morning. ‘I’m t-t-t-terribly s-s-sorry,’ he stammered to the elderly maid who arrived at remarkable speed to clear up the mess.

Powerscourt, disturbed by Edward’s full-blown stuttering, decided to keep talking for a while until calm returned to his mind.

When the maid was out of earshot Powerscourt continued. ‘If we have those dates, we can look at the wills in Somerset House or wherever they keep them. The wills won’t tell us a great deal, but they will give us an indication of how much may have been left to the Inn, or perhaps to the benchers. Now, they may have invested five per cent of their income from the rents for years and years and made a tidy sum, we just don’t know and the wills won’t help, but they’ll be a start. Do you see my point, Edward?’

Edward nodded. Then it was his turn to grin. He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. ‘I was thinking how difficult it was going to be, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said. It was all right. He was in control of the words again. Sometimes they were just so elusive, so slippery. ‘Then I remembered. There’s a little guidebook they give to all prospective members, everybody who’s interested in coming here. I think they give it to visitors too, sometimes. It lists all the benchers in the back, and the dates they served. Some places retire people in their late sixties or early seventies. Not here. Once a bencher, you’re a bencher for life. It’s like the Supreme Court in America.’

‘So,’ said Powerscourt, suspecting that his job had suddenly become a lot easier, ‘can you remember, and please remember too that one particular answer to this question will make me very happy, are the dates given in years only, or do they include the month of the year as well?’

Edward thought for a moment. ‘You’re in luck, Lord Powerscourt. They must have been very concerned with accuracy. Very proper, I suppose, for the legal profession. You do get the month. And in most cases you get the day of the month as well.’

One hour later Powerscourt was staring at his list of names. There were, he had counted, just over a hundred benchers who had served Queen’s Inn since its foundation. Now he was in a basement room in Somerset House where details of all the wills up to 1858 were recorded in enormous dark brown ledgers. Clerks of the Court of Canterbury had entered the main points of each will as they reached them. Historians, necrophiliacs, any of the deranged who wanted this material had to copy the wills they wanted out of the big books. The room was in the shape of a rectangle with a long oak table in the centre. There were enough chairs for about twenty ghouls, Powerscourt saw, though only five were occupied this morning. A little light filtered through from glass skylights set into the ceiling that was the floor of the courtyard outside. The electric lights on the walls gave off a slightly yellowish tinge as if they weren’t connected properly to the supply. There was a strange smell, a compound of sweat and dirt and the musty odour that came from so many opened ledgers. Ferocious notices were pinned up everywhere, warning of the dangers of misbehaviour. Writing in the ledgers guaranteed life expulsion from the premises. Spilt ink was almost as serious with a ban of five years. Marking the covers of the ledgers with a penknife or sharp nib would bring a fine of twenty pounds. And, sitting at a high desk at the far end of the room, underneath a fading picture of Queen Victoria on her Jubilee, were the guardians of this Valley of Lost Things, two enormous curators with identical handlebar moustaches, wearing a Prussian-looking uniform of dark blue. They stared relentlessly at their customers with an expression of the deepest suspicion. Powerscourt thought they must be former sergeant majors, ferocious drill at the double in the Somerset House courtyard an extra punishment, perhaps, for the miscreants and defaulters among the ledgers.

Truly, Powerscourt thought, this room with its great brown books and their baleful contents and those dreadful guardians, this is the kingdom of the dead. We, the living who pass through here, are mere wraiths, doomed to wander in the world of shadows outside from the Strand to Aldwych to Holborn trying to forget that our own futures too will one day end up down here or in the sister chamber that holds the wills of later years. Did these rich men – for on the whole, he thought, you would have to be rich to qualify for a place in these ledgers – know that one day, hundreds of years after they were gone, complete strangers would come and inspect their wills, in an act that amounted to posthumous financial rape? Would the same fate happen to Powerscourt in his turn?

The names of former benchers fascinated him. James Herbert Pomeroy, passed away in the 1770s, left twenty pounds to his wife and a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Queen’s Inn. Edward Madingley Chawleigh, died 1780, left fifty pounds for the maintenance and education of poor students ‘that the poor might be afforded the advantages vouchsafed to us by birth’. Was Josiah Sterndale Tarleton, passed away 1785, the father of the Colonel Banastre Tarleton, painted with such verve and panache by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Tarleton had been engaged in the American War of Independence. Powerscourt could see the painting now, the young man in skin-tight white breeches and a green jacket studded with gold buttons, the smoke of a great explosion behind him and gathered around his person the varied accoutrements of war, a pair of horses, for the Colonel was of horse rather than foot, a mobile cannon and what may have been the colours of his company in deep red. Old Mr Tarleton had at least passed on before the disappointment of the loss of the American colonies his son had fought to keep. And then, Powerscourt remembered, this Colonel Banastre Tarleton had been the lover over many years of Perdita, one-time mistress of the Prince of Wales, still hanging on the walls of the Wallace Collection, painted by Gainsborough. Was Robert Fitzpaine Wilberforce, died 1792, the father or the uncle of the man who campaigned so effectively for the abolition of slavery?

By the time he left for the day Powerscourt had entered details of over twenty wills in his thick red notebook, specially purchased for the occasion. After a while he found he was concentrating on transcribing the material as fast as possible with little attention to the content. But he had made, he thought, one significant discovery. Every single bencher so far had left some money or property or investment to Queen’s Inn. Powerscourt wondered if leaving money to the Inn in your will was a necessary part of becoming a bencher. He hoped that somewhere in William Burke’s vast range of acquaintance in the City of London there was a man who could compute how much two hundred pounds in 1800 was worth today and the likely value of property that seemed to be dotted like stardust round the lawyers’ quarters in a radius of three or four miles.