David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

January 1901

There was just one figure on the deck of the ship at four o’clock in the morning. Surely only a madman would venture into the open on such a night, the sky above black as pitch, illuminated by neither moon nor stars, the fierce wind cutting across the decks, a relentless rain slanting down from the invisible sky, the spray from the prow of HMS Fearless, one of the Royal Navy’s newest destroyers, washing and swirling round the madman’s feet, sloshing its erratic way towards the gunwales where it returned to the foaming sea. On the bridge the Captain stared at his instruments and wondered whether he should decrease his speed in case his most eccentric passenger turned into a man overboard.

But Captain William Rawnsley did not alter his course or his speed. One part of his mariner’s brain was permanently, subconsciously, attuned to the beat of the great engines beneath him, the finest and the most modern that the engineers of the Clyde could produce. As long as that heart beat strong and sure he was confident that his ship would do whatever he asked of her. And Captain Rawnsley had made a promise to the madman on the deck in Cape Town at the very start of their journey back to England. He would deliver his passenger on to dry land at Portsmouth at eight o’clock in the morning of Friday the twenty-fifth of January in the year of Our Lord 1901. No earlier, no later. The Captain knew his passenger the madman was anxious to see his wife and family who had been informed of his time of delivery. The Captain himself, as he told the madman, was equally anxious to return to his home. He had a pair of twins waiting for him. And Captain Rawnsley had never seen them since they were born three long months before.

The madman was clutching the rail of the ship very tightly in his lookout post some twenty yards from the prow where the sea crashed over the Glasgow steel in angry torrents. Sometimes he peered up at the empty sky as if willing some stars or some fragment of moon to come out and cast light on his journey. Sometimes he stared straight ahead, mesmerized by the relentless crashing of the waves or the white line of spray along the side of the vessel. Sometimes he stared out to his left as if he might spy land, a faint outline that would mark the coast of England.

Always he thought of the people waiting for him at the other end. Lady Lucy, wife of his heart and love of his life, Thomas, his son, and little Olivia, his daughter. He had not seen any of them for over a year, four hundred and five days since he had waved goodbye at that melancholy railway station. For the madman was Lord Francis Powerscourt and he was going home. He wrapped his great sou’wester ever more tightly round his body and stared yet again at where he thought England must be. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, he muttered to himself, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters.

Thirteen months before, the Prime Minister himself had despatched Powerscourt and his small private army to South Africa to improve the British Army’s intelligence in the war against the Boers. Even now Powerscourt could still remember the exact words of his orders: ‘The whole structure of military intelligence in South Africa is wrong. War Office can’t sort it out. Useless bloody generals can’t sort it out. They think the Boers are here. They’re not. They’re over there. The generals plod over there. By the time they arrive, Mr bloody Boer has disappeared again. Difficulties in the terrain, they keep telling me. Rubbish. Faulty intelligence, maybe no intelligence at all.’ It had taken Powerscourt and his companion in arms Johnny Fitzgerald a year to sort out the problem, but he had left in place a whole new system of intelligence gathering, based on the speed and mobility of the African scouts he recruited, and the information gleaned from hundreds of black spies.

Some thirty miles north-east of HMS Fearless another figure was peering out to sea. Lady Lucy Powerscourt was rubbing at the window of her hotel room on the sea front in Portsmouth. Surely, she thought, the hotel people could keep their glass cleaner than this. The visitors wanted a proper view of what was going on down below in the harbour. But all she could see were the lights on the shore and a dark, impenetrable blackness behind.

When she married Lord Francis Powerscourt some eight years before, he had left his career in Army Intelligence and become one of the foremost investigators in Britain, solving mysteries and murders that once went right into the heart of the Royal Household itself. Neither she, nor indeed he, had ever imagined that he would be recalled to the colours and sent to the other side of the world to help in a grubby and difficult war. She had found his absence very hard to bear. Only the children rescued her from depression. Thomas sometimes had a way of flicking his hair off his forehead that replicated to the last detail the behaviour of his father. Then, for what seemed to Thomas to be completely unaccountable reasons, she would sweep him up into her arms and smother him with kisses.

Lady Lucy was fully dressed. She turned from her lookout post and glanced at the sleeping children. She smiled. They had taken their father’s absence in totally different ways. Thomas had an enormous map of Southern Africa on the wall in his bedroom, covered with stars and dates for the places his father had been. The map itself was now scarcely visible. What the little boy did not know was that his father never put his real location in his letters in case they were captured by the enemy. When he was in Natal, he told Thomas he was in the Transvaal, and vice versa. So Thomas’s map was accurate in the sense that his father had been in all the places ringed with stars, but never at the time marked on his wall.

Olivia had never seen the point of the map and the stars. Instead she had appropriated a photograph of her Papa from the drawing room and she drew dozens and dozens of pictures of him, scarcely recognizable to anybody else, but a constant record of her devotion. She made her Mama keep a list of all the things she had to tell her father about, her new shoes, the pony in her grandmother’s stable in the country, her new friend Isabella on the other side of their house in Markham Square in Chelsea.

Lady Lucy checked the time once more. Half-past four. Not time yet to wake the children. She prayed that the ship would arrive on time. Perhaps they would be able to spot it better from the quayside. At six o’clock, she said to herself, I shall wake Thomas and Olivia and get them dressed. They will be so excited. She smiled again. After four hundred and five days, an hour or two was nothing, nothing at all.

On board HMS Fearless the rain seemed to have grown still more powerful. Captain Rawnsley and his officers on the bridge could just see a second madman come to join the asylum on deck. Even through the roar of the elements they could hear him shouting to the first lunatic.

‘For Christ’s sake, Francis, why do they have to put these bloody guns in the middle of the floor? You’d think they’d put them higher up somewhere.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had banged his knee on one of the Navy’s latest and most lethal weapons as he crossed the deck to join his friend. ‘It’s bloody inconsiderate of them, that’s what I say.’

‘Good morning to you, Johnny. Mind how you go now. You don’t want to fall overboard at this stage.’

‘One of those bloody officers up there,’ Johnny Fitzgerald gestured vaguely towards where he thought the bridge must be, ‘has just taken a bet with the Captain person that one of us will fall in.’