David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

Powerscourt sat himself down at the desk once more. He hadn’t come here to look at the paintings on the wall. He began a systematic examination of John Eustace’s kneehole desk. The drawers to the left-hand side were filled with business correspondence. There were bills from the local shopkeepers, details of repairs to the house, correspondence with his bank. The bottom two drawers were filled with letters from friends and acquaintances. Powerscourt would much rather have seen John Eustace’s own letters to his friends. They might have told him something about his state of mind. He took a note of the addresses of his two most frequent correspondents, a country clergyman in Norfolk and an archdeacon in Oxford. Maybe they could tell him something.

If the left-hand side of John Eustace’s desk rendered unto Caesar, the right-hand side belonged to God. The first two drawers related to his work in the cathedral. The third contained bundles of sermons. Powerscourt riffled through John Eustace’s thoughts about the meaning of Lent, about the Christmas message, about how it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Powerscourt suspected John Eustace might have had some difficulty with that one. But the bottom drawer was the most interesting of all. It too contained sermons. But whereas all the ones in the drawer above had been stacked in neat piles, in the bottom drawer Powerscourt found that the pages were all confused. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself was jumbled up with the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the five thousand had alternate pages with the forty days in the wilderness, the parable of the fig tree was mixed up with turning the water into wine. Powerscourt took all the pages out and laid them on the floor. Perhaps I am doing this in tribute to John Eustace’s memory, he said to himself. For he felt that whatever desecrations might have happened to the dead man, somehow he would want his sermons left intact. After half an hour they were all reconstituted and replaced in their drawer. All except one. John Eustace’s sermon on the first verse of the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, had two pages missing. Powerscourt realized as he stared at the Roman numerals at the top of the first page that all the sermons had the dates of composition on them. The tongues of men and of angels had been composed fifteen months before. It seemed to have been the last sermon John Eustace ever wrote. Maybe he adapted some of the older ones for other occasions. And two pages of the six had disappeared.

Powerscourt leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the fleshy features of Raphael’s Renaissance Pope. Most probably somebody took the missing pages after the death. But why? A dark suspicion crossed Powerscourt’s mind. He took two more pages from the sermon. Then he looked back and took a page from Lazarus, preached three years before, and from the parable of the fig tree, written five years earlier in 1896. Handwriting, he knew, changes slightly over time. The next time he went into Compton he would take his pages from the sermons of the late John Eustace into the offices of Drake and Co. and compare them with the scripts of the various wills. He thought he knew what he would find.

‘So what are you going to do about that young man?’ Hilda Davies, previously Hilda McManus, had been Anne Herbert’s best friend at school.

‘What do you mean, what am I going to do about that young man?’ said Anne defensively. The two were having early morning tea in the little house on the edge of the Cathedral Close. Anne thought she was uncertain about her feelings for Patrick Butler, the editor of the Grafton Mercury, so she had invited her best friend around for an exchange of views.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean, Anne. Let’s not beat about the bush. What are you going to do about Patrick Butler?’ Hilda Davies had been described in one of her school reports as a forceful personality in class. The passing years, the acquisition of a rich husband and three children and a large house, had made her almost domineering. Her servants called her a bully behind her back.

Anne felt she was under attack. ‘Well,’ she said defensively, ‘I like him well enough.’ A month before, the three of them had attended a concert together and Patrick had taken them out to dinner in the town’s finest hotel.

‘Such a pity, I always felt, that your first husband died on you, Anne.’ Hilda made it sound as though Anne was personally responsible for his passing. ‘Such respectable people, clergymen. And such prospects too in a place like this. I’m sure Frank might have become the Dean at least.’

‘Are you saying that newspaper editors aren’t respectable people?’ Anne was beginning to feel cross.

‘I grant you he is good-looking, that Patrick,’ condescended Hilda, ‘but why can’t he find a proper job like other people?’

‘What’s wrong with newspaper editors?’

Hilda Davies felt it was not the time to mince words. ‘For a start,’ she said, ‘I don’t think they’re quite respectable. Lots of the county people round here’- Hilda obviously thought of herself as being at the very epicentre of county and Compton society – ‘wouldn’t dream of asking one of them to dinner. You’d have to check the silver after they’d gone.’

‘If you’re suggesting that Patrick is in the habit of going out to dinner and pinching other people’s spoons, then you’re sadly mistaken.’ Anne, normally so placid, was in danger of losing her temper. She remembered that their schooldays had been punctuated by occasional very vicious rows.

‘It all depends on the society one keeps,’ said Hilda, casting a superior glance at the fairly humble furniture in Anne Herbert’s little drawing room. ‘If you want to consort all your life with the minor clergy and the poor vicars of Compton, then I suppose it might be all right.’ She paused briefly before firing another salvo. ‘It’s not just that they’re not quite respectable. Journalists are known for having a number of serious deficiencies in their character.’

‘And what might those be?’ said Anne.

‘Horace has had a lot of dealings with them, especially when he goes up to London on business for the firm.’ Horace was Hilda’s long-suffering husband. He was a partner in a firm of Compton solicitors. Once a year at most, to the best of Anne’s knowledge, he ventured forth to the metropolis. She suspected he would have gone more often if he could for a respite from his domestic bliss.

‘Drink,’ said Hilda firmly, shaking her head at the hazards of a reporter’s life. ‘They all drink far too much. Maybe not when they start, but it gets most of them in the end. Horace said he knows of a number of them who have ended up destitute, their poor families abandoned for the spirit bottle.’

‘Patrick doesn’t drink very much,’ said Anne defensively.

‘He may not now, but he will. They all do in the end. And they’re unreliable. Never home at a respectable hour like my Horace. Think what appalling parents they must be.’

‘Patrick is very good with the children, he couldn’t be kinder.’

‘That’s only until he gets his hands on you, my dear. Then it will change. You can’t possibly contemplate being married to such a creature.’

Anne Herbert wondered suddenly what it would be like if Patrick Butler got his hands on her. She thought it might be rather agreeable.

‘And what about his family? Are they proper sort of people?’ said Hilda with a sneer on the word proper.

‘They’re a perfectly respectable family Patrick’s people. His father is a schoolmaster in Bristol.’