David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

By eleven o’clock Powerscourt was back in the sanctuary, sitting on the steps in front of the high altar. He wondered if he could last through the night without falling asleep. He was, he knew, on the edge of delirium. The pipes on the great organ seemed to dance in front of him. He heard over and over again the muffled thud of the falling masonry. He could see himself diving again and again through the entrance to the choir. The faint noises he had heard from outside earlier on, horses’ hooves on the road, people talking to each other as they walked across Cathedral Green, had died out as Compton retired for the night. Sometimes he thought he detected scurrying noises at the back of the choir as if the cathedral mice had come out to play and sing some anthems of their own.

At twenty past eleven he thought he heard a creak coming from the west front. It was a prolonged creak, followed by a second one. Powerscourt remembered that there were two great locks on the door. The door opened very slowly. The murderer is coming back, Powerscourt said to himself. He’s coming back to finish me off. When he finds no corpse underneath those masonry blocks in the transept he’ll search the entire cathedral. He saw, or thought he saw – he wasn’t very sure what was real and what was delirium any more – a lantern moving slowly up the nave about a hundred and fifty yards away from his position in the sanctuary. Powerscourt was dazzled by the unexpected light after his hours in the darkness. He couldn’t see who was behind it. He looked around desperately at the high altar. He might have declined to remove the cloth to quench his wound but he felt the two heavy silver candlesticks might help to keep him alive. He didn’t think God would object to that. He realized suddenly that while he could see the lantern, the person behind it couldn’t see him. The light wasn’t strong enough to reach all that distance. The footsteps were very loud. Powerscourt was planning an ambush. If he could reach the back of the chantry chapel of Sir Algernon Carew on the far side of the choir, he might be able to knock the murderer out with one great blow from his candlestick. He tiptoed off across the presbytery.

Then he heard the voice. At first he thought the delirium was back for it was the voice he knew best in the world.

‘Francis?’ it said in a doubtful tone. ‘Francis?’

Powerscourt tried to run towards the voice but found he could not manage it.

‘Lucy! Lucy, my love, I’m here, I’m coming.’

Husband and wife met on the edge of the transept where the falling stone had almost killed Powerscourt six hours before. Powerscourt held her very tight. ‘Oh Lucy, I’m so sorry. I’m dripping blood on to your new coat.’

‘Never mind my coat, Francis, you’re injured. We’d better get you home.’

Powerscourt saw that the figure with the lantern was the enormous manservant of the Dean who had fetched him in the middle of the night Arthur Rudd was murdered. His shadow behind the lantern was enormous. Powerscourt pointed to the chaos in the transept.

‘All these masonry blocks were up there,’ he said to the two of them, pointing up to the roof. ‘They very nearly fell on top of me. Had to dive into the choir to get out of the way. That’s where I cut my head.’

With Lucy on one side and the giant on the other Powerscourt hobbled out of the cathedral and into the waiting coach. ‘How did you know I was here, Lucy?’ said Powerscourt, feeling giddy from the fresh air outside.

‘Johnny came back alone an hour ago. He rode off back into town to see if he could find you. He’s going to check back at the house at midnight to report progress. I came along in the coach to see if you were in the cathedral. I thought you might have been locked in. I had to wake up the Dean’s household to get the keys.’

Lady Lucy did not tell her husband that she had never seen Johnny Fitzgerald ride so fast, nor that he was using language she had never heard before. The two of them watched as the Dean’s enormous servant walked slowly back to his home on the other side of the Cathedral Green. Above them, on the west front, the remaining statues remained impassive at their posts, still depicting the story of their faith into the night sky.

Powerscourt was leaning back into his seat as the carriage clattered off towards Fairfield Park. One of Lady Lucy’s finest handkerchiefs had been wrapped around his forehead.

‘I didn’t like to say it in front of the Dean’s man,’ said Powerscourt, holding firmly on to his wife’s hand, ‘but I don’t think the falling masonry was an accident.’

‘What do you mean, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy, wondering if the shock and the injuries and the long period of incarceration were affecting her husband’s wits.

‘Somebody was trying to kill me, Lucy. That’s what I mean. If they had succeeded they could have taken my corpse away and done what they wanted with me. Maybe the force of the blow would have pressed me straight into the stone floor so I would have joined all those other bodies lying about all over the building.’

Lady Lucy thought of the terrible fate of Arthur Rudd and shuddered. She couldn’t bear the thought of her Francis being roasted on a spit. She held his hand ever tighter. She knew it was useless asking him to give up the case and return to London. Giving up cases was something Francis and Johnny Fitzgerald never did, however difficult and dangerous they might be.

‘But why, Francis? Why should anybody want to kill you here? You don’t know who the murderer is, do you?’

‘I have no idea at all,’ said Powerscourt bitterly, ‘about who the murderer is. But he sent me a message tonight. Either he was going to succeed, in which case we would not be driving back to the house a few minutes before midnight. Or he’s trying to warn me off, a couple of tons of masonry to get me out of Compton before he tries again.’

‘So what are you going to do, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy, glancing across at her husband. Even in the dark she thought he looked drained by his ordeal, six hours locked up in Compton Minster with the dead of centuries and their strange memorials, with a bleeding forehead and a strained leg.

‘Let me tell you, Lucy, precisely what I propose to do. I’m going to find this bloody killer. And I’d better find him soon, before he kills me.’

The Bishop of Compton would have described himself, if asked by St Peter at the gates of heaven to list his virtues, as a patient man. Patience and scholarship, after all, went together. For most of his adult life he had shuffled through the libraries of Britain in pursuit of his interest in the early versions of the Gospels. Books chained to their shelves, books that could not be removed from the floor where they were kept, books that nobody else had opened for a hundred years or more had been his daily bread for over a quarter of a century. In his youth the Bishop had dreamed of one spectacular discovery, a biblical Eureka, a modern version of Archimedes in his bath, that would make his name and secure his reputation. As time passed and no miracles were vouchsafed, he realized that steady labour and the accumulation of judgement were more valuable weapons in a scholar’s armoury than the blinding light he hoped for in his earlier days. But patience, certainly he had acquired that. Or he thought he had, until the events of yesterday evening.

The Bishop was pacing up and down around the croquet lawn in front of his Palace where vicious battles with ball and mallet in the summer gave the lie to the concept of brotherly love among the clergy. It was ten to eleven on the morning after his encounter with the two scholars, Octavius Parslow, senior keeper of documents at the British Museum, and Theodore Crawford, Professor of History at the University of Oxford. Before their dinner they had refused to give any view on the authenticity of the documents found in the cathedral crypt which Bishop Moreton believed were a kind of diary, kept by a junior monk during the last days of the abbey at Compton before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century. Two bottles of his better claret had failed to loosen their tongues into pronouncing a verdict of any kind. A bottle of the Bishop’s vintage port, which his wine merchant assured him was the equal of anything in the kingdom, had also failed. The Bishop’s patience finally snapped when Parslow inquired shortly after midnight if the Bishop had any more port in his cellar. ‘This stuff seems quite palatable to me for the depths of the country,’ he had said, pointing to his empty glass. Then the Bishop did something he had never done before in all his fifty-four years. He excused himself from his own dinner table and left his guests to their own devices. As he said his prayers by the side of his great four-poster he prayed for forgiveness, but even then, inappropriate words came to the Bishop from the book he knew so well. ‘Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.’