David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

Powerscourt wondered why William McKenzie was taking so long to deliver his conclusions. Perhaps he didn’t believe them.

‘The house is called Melbury Clinton, my lord. It has been in the Melbury family for about twelve generations. They are an old Catholic family, my lord. They have priests’ holes all over the place, enough to fox Sir Francis Walsingham’s agents for days at a time, my lord. That’s what the butler told me.’

Powerscourt had been more than impressed with McKenzie’s knowledge of the key players of Elizabethan history.

‘They’re still Catholic, my lord. There is a little chapel where the Jesuits used to hide on the first floor. It’s about as far from the front door as you could get. Mass is celebrated in there twice a week, the butler told me. Once on Sundays when a priest comes from Exeter. And once on Thursdays at twelve o’clock. Those noises I heard in the woods, my lord, must have been the service.’

‘Are you telling me, William, that the Archdeacon goes all the way from Compton every Thursday to attend Mass in the little chapel at Melbury Clinton?’

‘No, I am not telling you that, my lord. The subject does not go all that way to attend Mass. He goes to take the service. The subject has been officiating at Mass at Melbury Clinton for the past eight years.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I can only go by what the butler said, my lord,’ William McKenzie replied. ‘And I didn’t want to press him too hard about the Thursday services. It might have seemed suspicious when I was meant to be working on a book about the moated houses of England.’

‘What exactly did he say about the Thursday services, William?’

McKenzie turned back a few pages in his notebook. ‘I wrote all this down in the train on the way back. He said a Jesuit came to celebrate Mass every Thursday.’

Jesuits, thought Powerscourt. The shock troops of the Counter Reformation, the Imperial Guard of the College for Propaganda in the battle for the hearts and souls of the unconverted. Christ Almighty. What on earth was going on in this sleepy cathedral town?

‘It makes sense of the bag, my lord. He must carry his Jesuit vestments to and from Melbury Clinton every week.’

‘It certainly does,’ said Powerscourt. ‘William, you have done magnificently. I shall have another assignation for you in the morning.’

That night Powerscourt had a dream. He was in a church, not the Cathedral of Compton he knew so well, but a large church that might have been in Oxford or Cambridge. The pews were full of young men, every available seat occupied, latecomers standing at the back. The organ was playing softly. At first there were no priests to be seen. Then Powerscourt saw a figure floating above the congregation like a ghost from the other side. He knew that the spectre was the wraith of John Henry Newman, the most famous defector from the Church of England to the Church of Rome in all the nineteenth century. The ghost of Newman was beckoning the young men to follow him out of the side door into the world outside. Gradually the pews began to empty. Then it became a rush. Finally it turned into a stampede as all the young men followed Newman’s lead and abandoned their pews, and presumably their allegiance to the Church of England. At Newman’s side was another spectre, arms outstretched to summon the true believers. The other spectre was the Archdeacon of Compton Cathedral.

Early the next morning Powerscourt was seated at the desk in John Eustace’s study, train timetable to one side of him, writing paper to the other. He wrote to the Dean, requesting the name and home addresses, if possible, of the two dead members of the community of vicars choral. Powerscourt was trying to avoid all human contact with members of the cathedral for fear it might endanger their lives if they were not the murderer, and endanger his own if they were. He still had occasional flashbacks to the falling masonry, his night vigil with the dead in their stone and marble. He wondered about the Bishop, apparently so unworldly, but with a record, Patrick Butler had informed him, of distinguished service in the Grenadier Guards. He wondered about the Dean, so impassive as he watched the horror being unveiled in the morgue. He wondered about the Archdeacon and his weekly pilgrimages to Melbury Clinton. He wrote to his old tutor in Cambridge, requesting the name and an introduction to the foremost scholar in Britain on the Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. He wrote to the Ferrers family of 42 Clifton Rise, Bristol, asking if he could call on them at four o’clock in the afternoon in two days’ time. He explained that he was looking into the strange deaths in Compton and wanted to talk to them. He did not specify the reason for his visit. He wrote to his old friend Lord Rosebery former Prime Minister in the liberal interest, saying that he proposed to call on him in five or six days to discuss his latest case. He particularly asked Rosebery if he could secure him, Powerscourt, a meeting with the Home Secretary. He wrote to Dr Williams asking for his co-operation in a very delicate matter.

‘So which Archdeacon is the real one, Francis? The Protestant one or the Catholic one?’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.

His correspondence complete, Powerscourt had joined the others over breakfast. Thomas and Olivia had gone to climb the trees in the garden.

‘God only knows,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe even God doesn’t know.’

‘Can you be a Protestant Archdeacon and a Jesuit Father at the same time?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Doesn’t each side think the other one to be heretics, if you see what I mean?’

‘I don’t know the answer to that one either,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But I’m going to find out’ He made a mental note to write a further letter to Cambridge requesting an interview with a theologian. ‘The other question, of course,’ he went on through a mouthful of bacon and eggs, ‘is whether it is just the Archdeacon who is a Jesuit or a Roman Catholic. Maybe there are other members of the Cathedral Close who are secret adherents of the old religion.’

‘Maybe they all are,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. Everybody laughed.

‘Seriously though,’ said Powerscourt, ‘this investigation has become exceedingly difficult. I dare not ask questions of the Bishop and his people. I feel it would be too dangerous, either for me or for any of us here, or for them if they were known to have been asked those kind of questions.’

William McKenzie had been working his way through a small mountain of toast, thinly coated with butter but without marmalade, at the far end of the table.

‘I’ve been thinking about the time, my lord. If the butler at Melbury Clinton is right, the subject has been celebrating Mass there for eight years. He travels in his Protestant clothes, if you like, and changes when he gets there. He’s like a spy in some ways, isn’t he, Johnny? But who is he spying on? It doesn’t seem likely that the Protestant authorities in Compton want secret information about what goes on in Melbury Clinton. Nor does it seem likely that the Catholic family in Melbury Clinton want secret information about what happens in the cathedral at Compton. It’s all very difficult.’

McKenzie consoled himself with a further intake of toast.

‘It comes back to my original question,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘Which one is the real one?’ He picked up a fork and speared a sausage which he held up for general inspection. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the Protestant Archdeacon sausage.’ With his left hand he impaled another sausage with his spare fork. ‘And this is the Jesuit sausage. It seems to me that the Protestant sausage,’ he waved the fork around in a menacing fashion, ‘is taking a lot of risks going off to Melbury Clinton once a week for eight years to turn into the Jesuit sausage. No doubt he picked the place because it’s so far away but somebody from there could easily have come to Compton and recognized him.’