David Dickinson: Death of a Chancellor

The Fearless sank at that moment into a particularly deep trough. As she rose out the other side a wall of water flooded over Powerscourt and Fitzgerald.

‘That’s the other bloody thing,’ said Johnny bitterly, never a happy sailor. He was hanging on to the rail with both hands. ‘Ever since we left, this bloody boat has been either going up and down like this,’ he ducked as another helping of ocean cascaded over them, ‘or rocking from side to side. It’s drunk all the time this boat, that’s what it is. Why can’t the damned thing move along on an even keel? They cost a fortune, these bloody boats, Francis. You’d think they could make them go along steadily, like a train. I mentioned the fact to the Captain the other day.’

There was a temporary lull in the weather. Fitzgerald plunged his right hand deep inside his clothes and produced an enormous flask.

‘This is what you need on a night like this, Francis. Naval rum. Fellow in the catering department gave it to me. Said it’s the stuff they give the sailors before a battle. Makes them fighting drunk, he said. Seems to me you’d need to have the bloody stuff twenty hours a day, battle or no battle, to survive on these wretched vessels.’

Powerscourt smiled. He suddenly remembered Johnny Fitzgerald turning green and being sick over the side on a yachting expedition years before when there was barely enough breeze to fill the sails. ‘I’m very curious, Johnny,’ he shouted into the wind, ‘to know what the Captain said.’

‘What the Captain said when?’ Fitzgerald yelled back.

‘When you complained about the ship not travelling like a train.’ Powerscourt had turned very close to his friend’s ear. Johnny Fitzgerald laughed.

‘He said to me, Francis, “You’re a hopeless case. Don’t think I could convert you to ships any more than I could convert the Hottentots to Christianity. Here, you’d better have another drink.’’’

Fifty miles to the west of Lady Lucy’s hotel, Andrew Saul McKenna finally decided that he must get up, even though it was five o’clock in the morning. McKenna was butler in the great house of Fairfield Park, situated in the tiny village of Hawke’s Broughton in the county of Grafton in the west of England. He knew something was wrong. He had heard strange noises in the night. He thought, or had he imagined it, that he heard a muffled scream. Now there was no noise, just this overpowering sense that something was terribly amiss in his little kingdom. He lit a candle and climbed rapidly into his clothes for the day, left out in neat piles the night before.

McKenna’s first thought was for the master he had served for the last fifteen years. Mr Eustace’s bedroom was one floor below. McKenna could still remember his master coming round the desk to shake him by the hand when offering him the job.

‘I do hope you’ll be able to stay with us for a long time,’ he had said with a smile. Eustace was Chancellor of the Cathedral of Compton, responsible for the archives and the famous cathedral library.

Now McKenna was tiptoeing down the back stairs in the middle of the night, his stomach churning with worry and fear. A floorboard creaked as he made his way along the corridor. Outside he could see, very faintly, the trees shaking slowly in the wind. He passed an ancient statue of a Roman goddess, lost in thought. For a big man, he moved very quietly.

Andrew McKenna paused before he opened the door to his master’s bedroom. There was a loud creak when you opened it, he remembered. He’d meant to have the door oiled for weeks now. He gripped the handle firmly and twisted it open as fast as he could. There was no noise this time.

Nothing, he thought, nothing could have prepared anybody for what he found inside. As he moved slowly across the room towards the great four-poster bed, he found the long discarded habits of childhood had returned to take temporary occupation of his brain. His hands moved automatically into the folded position. He said two Our Fathers. He closed his eyes briefly to avert them from the horror. Hail Mary, full of grace, his lips muttered, his hands moving along the beads of an invisible rosary, blessed art thou among women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. As he took in the full horror lying across the bedclothes, he realized that the words in his brain suited his master much more than they suited him. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen. Charles John Whitney Eustace, Master of Fairfield Park, Canon and Chancellor of the Cathedral of Compton, had died in the most terrible fashion. There were still two hours left before the dawn. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

The rain on the deck of HMS Fearless had stopped. The spray and the waves were as powerful as ever. The night was still an impenetrable black. Powerscourt was wondering if this happy return might become an anticlimax. He had heard stories from men in the Army about upsetting reunions, so passionately desired over such a long time, so eagerly awaited on the long journey home, but where people found they had little to say to each other after the initial euphoria had worn off. Time had ensured that there was too little experience left in common after a long separation. After a fortnight, one man had told him, he realized he was living with a complete stranger he didn’t know at all. Powerscourt didn’t think that was going to happen to him. He groped about inside the folds of his sou’wester and produced a pair of binoculars. They were of the finest and the latest German make. The Kaiser had sent whatever he could to the Boers to confound perfidious Albion, guns to kill the British, ammunition to keep killing them, binoculars to find them. He peered despondently into the gloom.

‘Don’t suppose you’ll see anything yet, Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was peering into the water below. ‘How deep would you say this bloody water is?’ he went on, as if he saw himself being sucked overboard right down to the bottom of the ocean floor where there were no reviving bottles to console the living or the dead. ‘Very deep, I should think,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Half owre half owre to Aberdour

It’s fifty fathoms deep

And there lies good Sir Patrick Spens

Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.’

Lady Lucy checked her watch again. Time seemed to be moving very slowly this morning. Twenty to six. Still an hour and a half to go before the dawn as the helpful hotel people had told her the night before. Francis is coming, she said to herself, remembering the mantra she had used like a comfort blanket when she had been kidnapped by a gang of villains and locked up on the top floor of a Brighton hotel. He had found her then. She checked the children once more and returned to her vigil by the window. Francis is coming. She smiled again.

Andrew McKenna was shaking slightly as he stood by his dead master’s bed. Part of it was shock. Part of it was anger that anybody human could have done such a brutal thing to his gentle master. Part of it was that he simply didn’t know what to do. He felt suddenly that he was the lone representative left on earth of Charles John Whitney Eustace, charged with special duties towards the dead. His master had been quite small in life. Now, lying on this bloody bed, with blood dripping on to the floor, he looked smaller still.

McKenna knew that terrible scandal could follow the discovery of the body. The newspapers would invade this remote corner of rural England and titillate their readers with exaggerated stories of vicious and violent death before dawn. The rest of the staff would want to come to pay their last respects. The women would turn hysterical if they saw this bloodied corpse, the men would turn homicidal towards the unknown perpetrators. The only thing to do for now, he said to himself, is to fetch the doctor who lived but a few hundred yards away. But he couldn’t leave the remains of his master where they were. Somebody else might come in and find him. So the only thing to do was to move him. To move him now. McKenna shuddered violently as he thought of carrying this corpse, of all corpses, anywhere at all. And where should he take it? To the doctor’s? Some early-rising farmhand might spot him walking along the village’s only street with blood and gore running from the package in his arms. Then he remembered the spare bedroom above the stables, recently refurbished and remote from the main part of the house.