Death Called to the Bar (21 page)

‘Can you remember exactly what he said, the words he used, Mrs Dauntsey?’

She frowned. Powerscourt thought she looked even more attractive when she frowned. ‘I can’t,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t decide if he said unusual, or strange, or
worrying. It was something along those lines.’

Powerscourt groaned mentally as he thought of the problem of asking Barton Somerville if he could cast an eye over the Inn accounts. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said hopefully,
‘that he brought any of the Inn accounts down here, to look at them over the weekend, perhaps?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ll have a look in his study and let you know, if that would be helpful. Perhaps we should move on to what you wanted to talk to me about, Lord Powerscourt.
Then we could have some tea.’

Powerscourt felt rather nervous all of a sudden. ‘The matter is exceedingly delicate, Mrs Dauntsey. It touches on the most delicate and intimate of subjects, one we discussed last time, if
you recall, about children and heirs and all sort of thing. If you have any objection, please tell me now.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey did not blush, or look down, or ask to be excused. ‘I am sure, Lord Powerscourt, that you would not be raising such a matter if you did not think it might be
important.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Dauntsey, thank you. Sometimes, I must confess, I think this area may be of the utmost importance, at others I feel I may be wasting my time.’

Outside the sun had gone in and a fierce wind was whipping through the trees. Rain was now lashing against the windows of the Dauntsey drawing room.

‘Perhaps I could put my concern to you in the form of a fairy story, Mrs Dauntsey. I hope you like fairy stories?’

She smiled. ‘I have always been most devoted to fairy stories and plays about magic islands like Prospero’s in
The Tempest
or Illyria in
Twelfth Night
. Alex and I saw
Twelfth Night
a couple of months ago in Middle Temple Hall. It was the three hundredth anniversary of its first performance in 1602 in the very same building. It was extraordinary. Sorry,
Lord Powerscourt, I’m holding you up.’

‘I went to that performance too. Perhaps we passed one another, like ships in the night.’ Both
The Tempest
and
Twelfth Night
, he remembered, featured shipwrecks. The
current fate of Mrs Dauntsey? Certainly she didn’t look very like one shipwrecked now, he thought, her beauty shining through the pain of bereavement.

‘A long long time ago,’ he began, ‘when the world was young, there was a small kingdom perched high up in the mountains. These mountains were much higher than any we have in
this country. Snow sat on the highest of them for most of the year and only the bravest of the young men climbed to the very top. Their customs were very different from ours. This, after all, was
long before the invention of the telegraph or the spinning jenny, the telephone or the motor car, of paved roads and of great steamships. The people of the Mountain Kingdom, for that was how its
name translated into English, had never seen the sea. But their land was rich. There were fertile valleys as well as the great summits. Their horses were beautiful and very fast and could race most
of the day without being tired. The seasons were beautiful, Mrs Dauntsey. In spring the slopes of the mountains would be covered with flowers. In summer the sun shone but the streams that came down
from the hills were always cool. In autumn the trees lost their leaves in a blaze of colour, yellows and gold and black and hectic reds. And in the winter the snow sat on the turrets and the
battlements of the Royal Palace until it looked like fairyland.

‘The people were ruled over by a King, who was getting old at the beginning of our story, but he had a son, a handsome Prince who would succeed him. As the Prince grew to manhood he looked
about him for a beautiful girl he could marry. None of the daughters of the nobles pleased him very much. He began to despair until a wise old man told him about the child of a king two little
countries away, who was said to be very beautiful indeed. So our Prince rode off to the Kingdom of the Plain and fell in love with the Princess. Eight months later they were married. Two weeks
after that the old King died in his sleep and the Prince and Princess became the King and Queen.’

You’d better get to the point, pretty soon, Powerscourt said to himself or you’ll be here all day.

‘For the first few years,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘everything seemed perfect in this highland Garden of Eden. The harvests were good, the people were contented, peace reigned
inside and outside the little kingdom. There was only one shadow across perfection. The new King and Queen had no children. Now it was the custom in this land that each new King had to be the son
of the previous one. Nephews, younger brothers, distant cousins just wouldn’t do. The custom dated back many centuries to a time when civil war had torn the country apart. On that occasion
when the old King died, the courtiers tried to put his younger brother on the throne in his place. The nobles would have none of it, declaring him not to be the rightful sovereign and plunging the
country into a civil war that lasted fifteen years.

‘Time went by, some more years passed and still the King had no heirs. The nobles became restless and began to plot among themselves as nobles always do. The citizens were fearful of the
bloodshed that might follow his end. The King went on a journey, accompanied only a by a few faithful followers, to a temple in the mountains where the holy men lived. They listened to his story
and told him to travel further on still, up into the high mountains. When he had lived among the snows for ten days, he was to return to the holy place for his answer.

‘On his return, the holy men gave the King their message. Now in this kingdom there were no laws about relations between the sexes, only customs. So it was the custom for husband and wife
to be faithful, one to the other, but it was not a legal obligation. The Queen, they told the King, must lie with your brother, or any of your cousins, until she be with child. And you also must
lie with her so nobody will know that you may not be the father. The peace of the kingdom demands this, they said to the King. For if you have no son and heir of your own blood, what will happen to
the kingdom?’

Powerscourt stopped. Elizabeth Dauntsey looked at him carefully.

‘Don’t tell me the story stops there, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, ‘with the King still up there in the mountains.’

‘I’m afraid that’s where the manuscript runs out, Mrs Dauntsey, I’m truly sorry.’

She rang the bell and ordered tea. ‘Well, let me see if I could help you out, Lord Powerscourt, with the story, I mean. I’m not a storyteller like yourself and I could only speak for
the Queen, I think, not for any of the other characters.’

She stopped and a faint twinkle came into her eyes. ‘How can I put this? I think my contribution to the story, speaking for the Queen of course, is that it is always very important for a
wife, especially if she is a Queen and married to a King, to obey her husband at all times.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘How very well you put it, Mrs Dauntsey, and what an important moral to take from the story.’ By God, it’s true, he said to himself, those faint reports
from Lucy’s relations must be true. Where does that leave my investigation, he asked himself. His brain was reeling.

‘Tea, Lord Powerscourt?’ she said as the butler departed once again to the wider realms of Calne. ‘You must be thirsty after telling all those stories.’ Powerscourt saw
that the subject had been closed by the arrival of the Darjeeling. He felt oddly relieved. He wondered briefly which of the characters in
Twelfth Night
Elizabeth Dauntsey might have been.
Cesario? Who certainly had been shipwrecked. Probably even in Powerscourt’s biased eye, she was too old for that. Olivia perhaps, with her great household and unruly relations? Certainly, he
thought, you could hide Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek well out of sight in the dusty recesses of Calne. She brought him back from his daydream.

‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, somebody informed me the other day that you have had additions to your own family. Is it true that you now have twins?’

Edward had punted back to Folly Bridge very slowly. There was no sign of their previous adversaries and no more rude comments about Edward standing at the wrong end. Sarah
leant back on the cushions, her hand trailing in the water, and peered at Edward through semi-closed eyes. Eventually the motion of the boat sent her off to sleep. Edward smiled down at his
passenger, so innocent as she lay there, her head slightly to one side, her red hair bright on the cushion. Then they had walked through Christ Church, marvelling at the size of Tom Quad.
London’s Inns of Court could hold their heads up against most Oxford colleges but this quadrangle had no equal near the Strand. Lots of politicians, Edward informed Sarah, had been at Christ
Church, Canning and Peel and Gladstone and Lord Salisbury.

‘Would you like to have been to Oxford, Edward?’ asked Sarah, staring at a group of undergraduates about to go into Hall. She thought Edward would look nice in one of those
gowns.

‘I don’t think so, Sarah. I’m not sure I would fit in. Most of these people are very rich.’

It was only in the train back to Paddington that Sarah raised her fears about Queen’s Inn. They were alone in their compartment and Edward was polishing off the remains of the sandwiches
and the apples from the picnic.

‘How long do you think it will be, Edward,’ she said rather sadly, ‘before they catch this murderer?’

‘Oh dear,’ said Edward, ‘I hoped a day in Oxford would take your mind off it all. I know it’s easy for me to say it, but you mustn’t worry. Nobody’s going to
want to harm you. Lord Powerscourt is one of the best investigators in the country and that policeman is very sharp. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’

‘It’s not me I’m that worried about so much, Edward,’ said Sarah, her eyes large and bright as she looked across at him. ‘Who worked very closely with Mr Dauntsey?
Who worked closely with Mr Stewart? Who must know a lot of the secrets they knew? Who is the best-informed person in the Inn about that huge fraud case? In every case, Edward, the answer is you.
I’m so worried you’re next on their list.’

‘That’s ridiculous, Sarah,’ said Edward, secretly touched by the amount of her concern – surely she must care for him, maybe he should hold her hand. ‘I’m not
going to be on anybody’s list. It’s absurd. I’m in more danger crossing the road.’

But all of Edward’s protests came to nothing. Sarah remained convinced he was in great danger. An offer by Edward to come and meet her mother the following week did something to calm her.
He may not like being interrogated by my mother, she thought, but at least he won’t get killed.

It was no longer enjoying the pride of place it had occupied at the time of Powerscourt’s last visit to his brother-in-law William Burke, but it still took a fairly
prominent position. It sat in the centre of the lowest row of bookshelves to the left of Burke’s fireplace. It was taller than the others and its black cover gave the Book of Numbers an air
of great authority. Powerscourt wondered if the benchers of Queen’s Inn had a similar volume, a financial Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant of the Inn’s accounts.

‘Alexander Dauntsey, William,’ Powerscourt began, ‘the chap who got poisoned, was apparently very worried about the accounts before he died.’

Burke’s reply was the same as Powerscourt’s had been down in Calne. ‘Which ones, Francis? Estate? Personal? Chambers? Queen’s Inn?’

‘Exactly the same question that I asked. Two were more or less eliminated, his chambers’ because their clerk is so efficient, and the personal ones because they were usually in good
health. So that leaves us with the estate and the Inn. Mrs Dauntsey couldn’t remember which one it was.’

‘Strange how even very intelligent women often get a mental blank about money, Francis. Take your sister, my beloved wife, highly intelligent woman, not the slightest idea about
money.’

‘Some of them must be good at it, William. Women, I mean. Exceptions that prove the rule. Anyway, the reason I am here is to ask you which of those two you think more likely and what kind
of irregularities we might be talking about that would worry a cool and experienced barrister like Dauntsey. The estate accounts or the accounts of the Inn?’

William Burke took a careful sip of his white port. ‘This really is guessing in the dark, Francis. But I think it is less likely to do with the estate accounts. They will follow the same
sort of pattern year after year. There may be some exceptional event like a bad harvest. But even then they work like a see-saw.’

‘See-saw, William?’ Powerscourt had a mental image of his daughter going up and down on one. The twins, when their time came, could have an end each.

‘Sorry, see-saw in the sense that a bad harvest is bad for the people whose crops fail, but very good for those whose don’t because the prices go through the roof. I don’t
think there have been any natural disasters that could have affected things . You didn’t see any sign of natural catastrophe down there in Kent, Francis? Vesuvius-type eruptions? Fire and
brimstone consuming the cities of the plain? Death of the firstborn?’

‘It all looked fairly peaceful to me, William. Deer running about, spring flowers everywhere, the vast hinterland of that house smothered in dust jackets and sheeting. So, it must be the
Inn, or perhaps I should say it is more likely to be the Inn. What could be going on there?’

Burke rose from his chair and wandered over to the window. He looked out into the square below, a couple of pedestrians going home, a lone policeman plodding along the opposite side. He came
back and sat on his sofa.

‘I can’t say I know very much about how an Inn of Court organizes its finances, Francis. They must have somebody, I presume, to arrange the collection of all those rents for the
various chambers. I doubt if anything fishy could be going on there. If they pitched the rents too high, presumably the barristers might decamp to Gray’s Inn or the Middle Temple.’