David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

The little congregation filed out of the Lady Chapel, the young man staying behind to kneel in front of the cross. Lady Lucy was closer here to the faces and expressions of the choirboys as they made their way towards the north transept and the cloisters. She could see no improvement.

Powerscourt spent most of the rest of the day reading the back copies of the Grafton Mercury. He had an appointment after evensong with Vaughan Wyndham, Organist and Master of the Choristers of Compton Minster, the employer and conductor of the late Arthur Rudd. Patrick Butler had assembled a great mountain of newspapers to the right of his desk. ‘You don’t mind, Lord Powerscourt, if they’re not exactly in the right order, do you? I always mean to sort them out week by week but there never seems to be enough time. Now I’ve got to go and talk to a man at the printers.’ With that Patrick Butler had grabbed his hat and rattled off down the stairs. He returned at various points during the day, searching hopelessly for some notes on his desk, crawling about on the floor to retrieve some material for the printers.

At first Powerscourt found the experience of reading these papers in the wrong order rather exhilarating. Reports of a bumper harvest in one paper might be followed by accounts of the longest period of rainfall in the county records in the next. Descriptions of cricket matches could be followed in the next paper in the pile with a sad account of the early departure of the local football team from the FA Cup. Eventually Powerscourt decided he had had enough. He spread all the papers out on the floor and reassembled them in the correct order. It took, he checked, precisely thirty minutes. It could be his way of saying thank you to the editor. Then he read them all, a year and a half’s worth of Grafton Mercury at a single sitting.

Powerscourt would have had to say, if asked, that there was not much in these newspapers that would have informed the citizenry about the wider world. Of events in the continent of Europe, of events in London, of events even in the neighbouring county there was nothing at all. The Grafton Mercury did not run to accredited correspondents in St Petersburg or Vienna, in Paris or even in Westminster or Whitehall. That was not its job. But its readers would have been very thoroughly informed about what was going on around them, a weekly budget of births, marriages and deaths, reports of the decisions of the county council, of the local court cases, of harvest festivals and outbreaks of bad weather, of the activities of every local society across the entire county of Grafton. Powerscourt thought the paper became livelier and more adventurous with the arrival of Butler as editor. Youth had replaced crabbed old age, he thought, and it showed on the page. As he read, his mind was registering what was not there in these papers as much as the printed stories themselves. There had been no murders. There were no reports of death in mysterious circumstances. There was only one unusual story about the cathedral in the seventy-eight back copies he read through. Some months before, strange pagan signs had been found, daubed on the floor beside the high altar. Powerscourt thought Return of the Druids might have been a little strong for the headline. He suspected Patrick Butler had written the headline and the story himself. It referred extensively to a prehistoric site just across the county border which was a centre for followers of ancient cults. But there were no reports of further incidents. Powerscourt felt sure that if Butler had been able to discover a scintilla of evidence for further pagan activity, however small, it would have featured heavily in the pages of the Grafton Mercury. There was one constant refrain that ran with increasing frequency through the pages. Powerscourt felt desperately sad each time he came across another report. The young men of the county had signed up for military service with the local regiment. There were glowing descriptions of their departure, the military bands playing, the young men marching off together to the war in South Africa. Now they were dying. Once a fortnight or so another death would be reported, another family heartbroken at their loss. There was talk of erecting a permanent memorial to the fallen in the cathedral when the war was over.

Powerscourt felt slightly disappointed as he headed back towards the minster across the windy expanse of the Green. He had hoped that there might be some clue hiding in the back pages that would bring him enlightenment. There was none. Evensong was nearly over when he returned, an anthem by Thomas Tallis soaring up to the roof. Lady Lucy was not to be seen. Powerscourt presumed she must have gone home. He was glad. He was growing increasingly worried about her obsession with the choirboys. He knew it all came from the highest of motives but he felt she was in danger of becoming ridiculous, something he had never encountered before in all his years of marriage.

He noticed that the builders had finally arrived. There was a battery of scaffolding in the crossing, the part of the cathedral where the nave met the transepts, underneath the tower that served as the launching pad for the spire. As he looked up Powerscourt saw that this must be the highest point inside the cathedral, a couple of hundred feet above the ground. The top of the scaffolding was next to a wooden trap door that led to the higher parts above. Waiting to be transferred the following day was an enormous pile of masonry slabs, destined to replace the broken sections further up. The workmen had spread thick dust sheets all over the surrounding floor. The Dean had complained to Powerscourt a couple of days before about the delays in the work, and about the enormous cost of having to operate at such high levels.

‘The Lord is meant to provide,’ he had said indignantly to Powerscourt, ‘but our constant fear is that one day he may forget about us here. He may have better things to do. And then what will happen to his crumbling buildings?’

The choir had finished. The silver cross led the way towards the cloisters once more. The two old ladies were definitely leaving the cathedral, nodding politely to Powerscourt as they hobbled past, chatting quietly to each other about the service they had just attended. He watched them go, almost pleased to be the only person left inside. The lights were still on in the choir, casting a faint light back down the nave. The Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary was completely silent as Powerscourt went back to stare up at the scaffolding.

Maybe it was the silence that saved him. He heard a very faint creak up above that might have been a rope running along a pulley. Powerscourt looked up. Then time stood still. The first thing that flashed across his mind was the memory of Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto which he had listened to with Lucy in London weeks before. There was one passage where the orchestra falls silent and the piano descends down the scale, falling, falling, falling, it had seemed to Powerscourt at the time, as though it was going to drop off the edge of the world. The descending notes didn’t stay with him for long. For he realized that these great slabs of masonry stone were falling from their scaffolding and would land on top of him any second. He turned and dived full length through the entrance to the choir. He slid several feet along the polished floor and came to rest against the edge of the choir stalls. He hit his head hard against an ornate piece of wooden carving.

The noise was muffled by the dust sheets. The blocks of masonry smashed on to the stone floor of the crossing. Bits of broken stone ricocheted across the transept and down the nave. The dust of ages rose from beneath the cathedral stones and flowed outwards like a whirlwind. The Pillar of Smoke has come to Compton Minster, Powerscourt thought groggily and we shall all be consumed. Shards of stone flew off and cracked the wooden seats at the top of the nave. Then the lights went out.