David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

Johnny sprinted to his friend and knelt by his side. Powerscourt was unconscious and he seemed to Johnny to have a most unhealthy colour. Johnny ripped off his own shirt, the finest silk that Jermyn Street could provide, and did what he could to staunch the flow of blood. He put his jacket over Powerscourt to keep him warm and dashed off to Number 8. Lady Lucy was pacing nervously up and down the hall.

‘Lady Lucy,’ Johnny Fitzgerald panted, ‘Francis has been shot. It looks bad. He’s at the top of the staircase on the first floor. Can you get Rhys and the footman to improvise a stretcher? I’m going to get a doctor, man we both knew in South Africa, lives round the corner. He’s wonderful with wounded people. Don’t move Francis, for God’s sake, don’t move him at all till I get back with the doctor.’

Lady Lucy felt numb, icy cold on receipt of the news. He had come through so much, her Francis, so many campaigns, so many battles, so many dangerous investigations. Now she might lose him. She could not believe it. She refused to believe it. She tried, briefly, to imagine a future without Francis and she knew she could not bear it. Even with all these children, she thought, she would find it intolerable. She pulled her coat tight around her and waited for the doctor.

Johnny Fitzgerald set off at full speed across Manchester Square, over Marylebone High Street and a hundred yards or so up Marylebone Lane before turning left into Bulstrode Street. In his mind’s eye he saw not the great hulk of the side of the Wallace Collection or the fashionable hotel opposite, or the shadowy buildings with the lights being lit in their windows. He saw his greatest friend bleeding to death, surrounded not by his friends but by the Old Masters of centuries long past. Even Francis, he thought, with his great love of art, wouldn’t want to go like that. Number 16 had the nameplate. Dr Anthony Fraser, it said, universally known during his time in the Army as Dr Tony.

The scene on the landing now resembled one of those melancholy religious paintings showing Christ being taken down from the Cross that might have lined its walls. A bloodied Powerscourt lying unconscious on the ground. Lady Lucy, representing the weeping women, not actually weeping but gazing at her husband and praying with all her strength for his safe recovery. Rhys the butler and Jones the footman, hovering with the stretcher, might have been Roman soldiers perhaps, come for a last look at the one they had called the King of the Jews.

Dr Fraser knelt down by the side of his new patient. He felt Powerscourt’s pulse and grimaced slightly. Then he stood up.

‘Let me introduce myself. My name is Fraser, usually known as Dr Tony. I knew Lord Powerscourt in South Africa. You must be his wife,’ he bowed to Lady Lucy, ‘and you must be his staff. We must get your husband on to the stretcher you have managed to bring. Your house is across the square? That will be best for now. I have sent for some nurses.’

They manoeuvred Powerscourt on to the stretcher and the four men took him, rather like a coffin going to its last resting place, Lady Lucy felt, to the big bedroom on the second floor of Number 8 Manchester Square. There was now a fire in the grate. The sheets on the bed had been changed. Extra chairs had been brought in for those on attendant and nursing duty. The doctor examined Powerscourt very closely.

‘There is an exit wound here on his back – the bullet must have gone straight through him. And it has narrowly avoided both his heart and his lungs. I shall wait for the nurses before we clean it all up and put on the dressings. In the meantime I will give your husband an injection against the pain.’

Dr Fraser sat with Powerscourt for over an hour, Lady Lucy on the other side of the bed. The doctor, Lady Lucy observed, was a short slim man in his middle thirties whose hair was beginning to recede. He had a prominent nose and very bright eyes. When the nurses arrived, she left them to it and went to order some tea in the drawing room.

‘Lady Powerscourt,’ the doctor began about a quarter of an hour later, ‘we have done what we can to clean the wound. We could have done more but there is always a slight danger to the patient in carrying out over-vigorous measures at this stage. I shall be going back to keep watch for a little while longer when I have finished my tea.’

Lady Lucy looked at him with pleading eyes. Already, she felt reassured by his presence. ‘What is your judgement, doctor? Will Francis…’ she paused for a moment to fight back the tears, ‘pull through?’

‘Your husband has received a most serious wound, Lady Powerscourt,’ said the doctor. ‘I would not hide that from you for a second. I have seen far too many people with similar wounds to his in South Africa. In the case of your husband it’s simple. We must keep the wound clean. In time we can give some assistance for it to heal. The room where he lies must be kept clean. No infection can be allowed to get anywhere near him. But he has also sustained a serious blow to the head. I have no idea when he will wake up from his coma, Lady Powerscourt. So much depends on the will, his will to live. If he despairs, he will die. I have seen men die from wounds that are less serious than his and I have seen men recover from wounds that were worse.’

‘What can we do, Dr Tony? Everybody in this house wants Francis alive.’ The thought of the twins with no father struck Lady Lucy yet again and she had to turn away for a moment.

‘I believe there is a great deal you can do, Lady Powerscourt, believe me. Many of my colleagues would have taken your husband to hospital. I thought of that and rejected it. If he had gone to hospital he would have been placed in a ward full of people as seriously injured as he is, or worse. Death would call every day if not every hour and constantly reduce the numbers. Here your husband is surrounded by love and his loved ones. I think we should keep him quiet tomorrow and the next day but after that your children should go and talk to him, whether he is awake or not. Maybe they could read to him. Other people could read to him, talk to him. The more activity, the better I believe it will be for your husband. If all is quiet people could think they have gone to that eternal silence before their time is due.’

‘So there is hope, doctor?’ Lady Lucy was looking at him very closely.

‘Oh yes, Lady Powerscourt. Of course there’s hope. Let us not forget that. Let us never forget that. There is always hope.’

Lady Lucy felt a small, but definite, onset not of hope but of resolve, of determination. Maybe it was courage. She thought of her love for Francis, she thought of all her ancestors who had marched and sailed and fought and died for their country across the centuries. Maybe some small portion of their bravery would come to help her in her ordeal. If she was not brave, she knew, Francis would surely die.

Those first two days seemed to most of the inhabitants of 8 Manchester Square to be like a dream. Thomas and Olivia refused to believe their father was seriously ill until Lady Lucy took them in to see him. Thomas turned white and stared at his father for a very long time. Olivia rushed off to her room to pray for her Papa’s recovery. Dr Tony came at regular intervals. The nurses changed over every eight hours, keeping endless watch over their patient, making him comfortable, washing his face, taking his pulse, entering their findings into a large black notebook. Lady Lucy kept vigil when she could. She had made a private arrangement with Johnny that one of them should be awake when the other was asleep and vice versa. The staff tiptoed about, popping in every now and then to look at Powerscourt. The flowers began arriving late the first morning. William Burke sent an enormous bunch. Lady Lucy thought how amused Francis would have been as the bouquets began arriving from her relations, dozens and dozens of them, enough to open a bloody flower shop, she could hear him saying. Soon a whole wall in the Powerscourt bedroom was lined with flowers. Only the twins were immune to the change of lifestyle, Lady Lucy convinced that it would take the Second Coming to make the slightest dent in Nurse Mary Muriel’s routine.