David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

The living of the Temple Church was in the gift of the Inner and Middle Temples. The elders of those Inns of Court, concerned that eloquence should be confined to the legal profession and not be displayed by what they regarded as the inferior body of the Church, usually picked somebody with a good speaking voice, audible at the back of the church, who gave very short and very undistinguished sermons. Even on Sundays, after all, lawyers were busy people. The present incumbent, one Wallace Thornaby, was a tall, balding man in his fifties who had learned long ago, at the start of his ministry in the Temples, that it was never a good idea to argue with the lawyers.

As the Reverend Thornaby made his way up the nave behind his choir, Powerscourt saw that it was going to be standing room only in the Round Church at the end. People were going to be packed in there as though they were at a football match. Maybe there would be an overflow congregation outside, close, he suddenly remembered with a shudder, to the spot where the body of the other dead lawyer Woodford Stewart had been found.

The priest began by leading his congregation through the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect of the Day. He recited the bare facts of Dauntsey’s career and introduced the first speaker, a lawyer from Gray’s Inn who had worked on numerous cases with the dead man. Much of this was technical stuff about Chancery and the Queen’s Bench Division and the Court of Appeal, and Powerscourt’s brain drifted off. Who had killed Alexander Dauntsey? Porchester Newton, in a fit of pique after he lost the election to bencher? Some old criminal whose conviction and imprisonment he had secured? Had he made some startling discoveries about the monies of Queen’s Inn? From the little he knew so far Powerscourt doubted that. And what of the mysterious Maxfield, still undiscovered, still with twenty thousand pounds waiting for him in the vaults of Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett? Did Mrs Dauntsey know more than she was saying? Behind that beautiful and haughty reserve was she hiding some information vital to his inquiry?

With a start he realized that the man from Gray’s Inn had departed and the congregation had risen for a hymn. With a guilty grin he saw that even here the legal profession had made their mark.

Day of dark and doom impending

David’s word with Sibyl’s blending

Heaven and earth in ashes ending!

O, what fear man’s bosom rendeth,

When from Heaven the Judge descendeth

On whose sentence all dependeth!

There was more, to Powerscourt’s delight, a verse later.

Lo the book exactly worded

Wherein all hath been recorded

Thence shall judgement be awarded.

When the Judge his seat attaineth,

And each hidden deed arraigneth

Nothing unavenged remaineth.

From the Middle Temple and from Queen’s, from Gray’s Inn even unto Lincoln’s Inn Fields, yea, even from the Inner Temple, Powerscourt said to himself as another lawyer climbed into the pulpit to give his contribution, the judges shall come to pronounce not on the living in the dock before them, but on the dead in some celestial court, not on the crimes they may have committed on earth, but on their prospects for a place in Paradise. Maybe they would have new livery, fresh colours and fresh gowns, white possibly, to pass this eternal judgement. Powerscourt only sat up from his reverie when he realized that the man was talking not about the law but about cricket.

‘Many of you’ – the man was called Fraser and came from the Middle Temple, Edward told Powerscourt afterwards – ‘would have said that Dauntsey’s heart, the most important thing in his life, was his work here, in Queen’s Inn. I do not believe that to be the case. I would suggest the cricket pitch at Calne, or that extraordinary house that is Calne, or something indefinable that you might call the spirit of Calne had better claims on his heart. I am not sure how many of you have seen the vast interior of that house, room after room, hall after hall, gallery after gallery, boarded up, covered in dust sheets, protected from dry rot but very little else, an exquisite interior, probably one of the finest in England, merely holding time at bay and not showing off her glories to the world. Alex Dauntsey dreamed of restoring that house, of bringing it back to what his ancestors had made. His periods of depression were, he told me once, the greatest cross he had to bear for they ensured he would never be consistent and respected enough at the Bar to earn sufficient money for his task.’

Mr Fraser paused and looked carefully at his audience. They were spellbound, even the eldest bencher of Queen’s, who was reputed to be ninety-six years old, hanging on his words.

‘And if the house was his dream unfulfilled, then the cricket pitch was where some of his dreams came true. Alex never played very well on away matches, he was, as he said to me in the slips once, only happy at home with his own deer watching over him. Even those of you who do not know much about cricket and cricketers will know that the tribe is divided, on the whole, into bowlers and batsmen. Bowlers are more prosaic, they are instruments of speed and cunning and attrition and, occasionally, guile. You do not imagine that bowlers would be poets or composers. Batsmen, on the other hand, can display grace and style and class that can take your breath away. Giorgione would have been a batsman if cricket had ever arrived in Cinquecento Venice. Keats, I am sure, would have been a batsman. He would have played some beautiful strokes and got out for a disappointing but exquisite thirty. Alex was a batsman. I once saw him score a hundred and fifty and then get himself out. He refused to let the scorer enter his total in his book, insisting his runs be attributed to someone else. ‘They were hopeless,’ he said to me, ‘unworthy opponents.’ On another occasion I saw him score twenty-five not out at Calne with the light fading and two of the fastest bowlers I have ever seen racing in to bowl at him like the Charge of the Light Brigade. ‘Best innings of my life,’ he said to me after that.

‘One of my children once asked me, in that disconcerting way that children have, if I thought Gladstone was a great man. I was on my way to court at the time so I just told him Yes. He never asked me about it again. Was Alex a great man? I think that’s the wrong question in his case. Greatness was not what he was about. But he was a man of enormous personal charm, a man with a mind that worked like a rapier, the finest companion I ever knew and the best friend I ever had.’

There was complete silence in the church as Mr Fraser returned to his pew. If you listened very carefully, you could hear some of the women crying. Powerscourt wondered if Sarah, so devoted to Dauntsey, was among them. After that there was an anthem from the choir, ‘I Know that My Redeemer Liveth’ from Handel’s Messiah. Try as he might, Powerscourt was unable to find any references to judge or jury, earthly or celestial in it. A bencher from Queen’s Inn spoke about Dauntsey’s contribution there. Powerscourt thought the man must have given the same speech before. Then a final prayer from the vicar and the congregation, with that look of relief people often have when leaving church services, streamed out into the windy sunshine. Powerscourt saw that the porters were being particularly assiduous in their duties. He observed, but did not disturb them, that Sarah was leaning heavily on Edward’s arm as if the service was still upsetting her.

Exactly one hour after the last person had departed, Powerscourt presented himself, as stealthily as he could, in the back parlour of the porter’s lodge. A fire burned brightly in the tiny grate and a junior porter was despatched to hold the fort while Roland Haydon, the Head Porter, conferred with Powerscourt.