David Dickinson: Death of a Chancellor

McKenna took a deep breath. He found that his hands were making the sign of the cross. He pulled out all the bedclothes and rolled them round his master till he looked like a wrapped-up sausage or an Egyptian mummy en route to the burial chamber deep inside a pyramid. He tried putting the body over his shoulder like a fireman rescuing somebody from a blazing building. That didn’t work. The body kept slipping. Between the bed and the door he found that the best way to carry his master was in his arms, like an overgrown baby wrapped – the biblical reference came to him again from Christmases past – in swaddling clothes. Going to a stable, he said, his mind on the edge of hysteria now, like they did all those years ago.

The journey to the kitchen passed off without incident, apart from the fact that Andrew McKenna had started to weep and had no hands to wipe away his tears. Outside the back door they were hit by the force of the wind. McKenna reeled like a drunken man. The real disaster came on the way up the stairs to the bedroom above the stables. McKenna slipped and almost fell over. Desperately he reached out his left hand to steady himself against the wall. The body fell out of his grasp and began rolling down the stairs. It stuck four steps from the bottom. Summoning the last of his strength McKenna picked his master up once more and went up the stairs as fast as he could. He dumped John Eustace on the bed and went down the stairs two at time. Out in the fresh air he stood still for a moment, panting heavily tears still rolling slowly down his cheeks. He noticed that a spot of blood had escaped from the wrapping and fallen on to his hand. He set out to wake the doctor. His hands were out of his control by now. They were shaking violently from the strain of carrying a corpse a couple of hundred yards in the dark. Pray for us, his lips were moving as he swayed up the village street, pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

Six o’clock at last. Just two hours to go now. Lady Lucy decided the time had come. The children would never forgive her if they missed the boat’s arrival. They could have breakfast downstairs in the great dining room that looked over the harbour. Just over four hundred days have passed, she said to herself happily as she woke Thomas and Olivia on the morning their father came home from the wars.

Powerscourt and Fitzgerald had company in their night watch on deck. A cheerful ‘Good morning, gentlemen’ announced the presence of Captain Rawnsley himself, fresh from his command post and his instruments on the bridge.

‘There’s just an hour and a bit to go before the dawn,’ he announced as if sunrise and sunset followed the orders of the Royal Navy. ‘I hope to take the ship into the harbour at first light. We shall dock at about a quarter to eight. The first passengers should be able to disembark on the stroke of eight. Then,’ he smiled broadly at Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘you will owe me fifty pounds.’

Johnny had placed the bet one day out of Cape Town, refusing to believe that anybody could calculate their journey time so precisely in such an unreliable and dangerous thing as a boat. He laughed.

‘Touche, Captain,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t have the money on me at this moment, forgive me. Too dangerous carrying money around on the deck of one of these things.’ He waved an arm dismissively at the surrounding bulk of HMS Fearless.

‘But come, gentlemen, we are having a special breakfast at seven o’clock. I hope you will be my guests. A little champagne might ease the memory of the fifty pounds, Lord Fitzgerald?’

Johnny tried to persuade Powerscourt that his only reason for placing the bet had been to make sure that they did actually reach Portsmouth at precisely eight o’clock in the morning. ‘Fellow like that Captain, Francis, nothing like a bet of fifty pounds to make sure you got home at the time you’d told Lucy. Stands to reason, if you ask me.’

Powerscourt didn’t believe him.

‘Dear God, why would anybody want to do that to John Eustace, of all people?’ Dr William Blackstaff was fastening his boots on the edge of his bed with Andrew McKenna in dutiful attendance. Blackstaff, like John Eustace, was in his early forties. They had known each other for over ten years. Every Wednesday, without fail, they had lunch together in the upstairs dining room of the White Hart Hotel in Northgate in the little city of Compton . At weekends they walked together over the hills. In spite of his walks Blackstaff was thickening out. The beginnings of a paunch were showing through the tweed suits he always wore, a collection so large and varied that the children in Compton always referred to him as Dr Tweed, amazed in later years to discover that his name was not Tweed at all but Blackstaff.

‘We must have a plan,’ he said, making the final adjustments to his tie. He had served in the Army for five years and some memory of the need for proper staff work had stayed with him all his life.

‘Yes, sir,’ said McKenna, looking out into the dark night beyond the doctor’s windows. ‘It’s going to be light in under an hour or so.’

Blackstaff stared vacantly at his friend’s butler. ‘Let me just try to think this through, McKenna,’ he said. ‘Please tell me when there is a flaw in the plan.’ Dr Blackstaff paused, well aware that his mind was so tinged with grief and shock that he probably wasn’t thinking straight.

‘We take him out of the stables at once,’ he said. ‘But where do we take him? We could bring him here, but that’s not going to solve the problem, is it?’

‘The chief difficulty, it seems to me, sir,’ said McKenna, ‘is that the family are going to want to look at the body in the coffin. And that’s impossible.’

‘This is the best I can do for now, McKenna,’ said the doctor, moving heavily towards his front door. ‘I take my carriage with the covers up along the road towards the house. I stop about a hundred yards away in case anybody hears the noise. You bring the body down from the stables into the carriage. I shall take it into Wallace’s the undertakers in Compton. Old man Wallace knows how to keep his mouth shut. He can put the body in the coffin and seal it up so tight that nobody can get at it.’ Blackstaff and McKenna were climbing into the carriage by now, groping their way with the reins in the dark.

‘The cover story is slightly different. You must make up the bed as if nobody had ever slept in it. And of course you must clear up the blood in the bedroom. I shall say that your master came to see me late last night, feeling very unwell and complaining of chest pains. I kept him here overnight as I judged that the walk back to Fairfield might kill him. I watched over him all night. Later this morning I shall return to Compton and bring Wallace back again, as if to fetch the body. We’ll say he died shortly after ten o’clock this morning. I shall send word up to the house once Wallace has gone with the imaginary body.’

Dr Blackstaff paused. ‘Are we breaking the law?’ he whispered. ‘Are we going to end up in jail?’

‘Don’t see how we are breaking the law, sir. Poor Mr Eustace is already dead.’

‘And,’ said the doctor, stopping his carriage shortly before the entrance to the stables, ‘I shall tell anybody who asks that he most definitely did not want people peering at him when he was dead. Indeed, I shall say that he repeated that wish to me only last night as he sat by my fire, looking very pale and ill. Got that, McKenna?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Andrew McKenna, and he loped off along the path to start his late master’s journey to the undertakers and to the grave.

Powerscourt was back at his post on deck. He watched as the black turned to dark grey, then to a paler grey as visibility grew from fifty yards to two hundred and then to half a mile. A thin pencil of land was visible ahead of him. When he raised his binoculars he could see a tall spire somewhere near the centre of Portsmouth. He could see the naval buildings lined up along the quayside and the multitude of dockyards, repair workshops and training stations that marked it as the centre of the Royal Navy the greatest seafaring power on earth. His heart was beating faster. He remembered the words Lady Lucy had said to him in the drawing room of their house in Markham Square on his last evening in London and again on the station platform the following morning as the train took him away. ‘Please come back, Francis. Please come back.’ Now the moment, of all moments the one he had most longed for, had nearly arrived.