Death Called to the Bar (7 page)

But for Edward afternoon tea had been an epiphany, a revelation. He tried to remember the last time he had been able to speak so freely and knew it was a long long time ago. Now perhaps he would
be able to do what he most wanted to do in the world, speak to Sarah Henderson. Sarah had many admirers in Queen’s Inn and the Maxwell Kirk chambers, but few as devoted as Edward. He knew the
softer tread of her shoes on the staircase as she went up to her attic quarters, he would watch her swinging walk as she made her way across the courts. Three times he had made up his mind to speak
to her, three times he had promised himself that this time he would not fail. But he did. Until today he had been bound to fail. But now, with the confidence engendered by Powerscourt tea and
Powerscourt muffins, now he would try once more.

Mrs Bertha Henderson had been in a state of growing excitement all afternoon. She managed, with great difficulty and considerable pain, to make a small cake. The effort
involved in beating the mixture to the proper consistency exhausted her. As the cheap clock on her little mantelpiece moved on towards early evening she consulted it more and more often. Half past
four. Quarter to five. Mrs Henderson was doing mental arithmetic in her head. Ten minutes to the station in Kent, forty-five minutes or so to Victoria, half an hour, maybe less, to their own little
station in Acton, five minutes’ walk and Sarah would be home. Five o’clock passed and half past. Mrs Henderson was torn now between excitement and worry. Had anything happened to the
trains? Had there been some delay at Victoria, always notorious for inefficiency at peak hours? Had anything happened to Sarah? For today was the day of Mr Dauntsey’s funeral and her Sarah,
along with all the members of his chambers and the benchers of the Inn, had gone down to see him off. And, in Mrs Henderson’s excited imagination, not only would she hear the details of that
poor Mr Dauntsey’s funeral and burial, but she should receive some intelligence about the treasures of Calne, the fabulous house where the Dauntseys had lived since time immemorial. Mrs
Henderson had looked the family up once in the Dictionary of National Biography in the big reference library in Hammersmith but there were so many entries for so many different branches of the
family that she had given up, overwhelmed by the available knowledge. One or two Lord Chancellors, back in the seventeenth century, she remembered, a Dauntsey who became a key figure at the
Restoration Court of Charles the Second, a libertine involved in the foundation of the Hellfire Club.

From her vantage point in the window Mrs Henderson could see the local residents making their way home. It was ten to six before she finally caught sight of Sarah, wearing her new black coat and
hat, looking rather tired, Mrs Henderson thought, as she let herself in and sat down by the fire.

‘I’ll just put the kettle on,’ Mrs Henderson sang, as she made her way to the kitchen. ‘I’ve made a cake. I’ll bring it in with the tea. It’s only a
little cake.’

‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ said Sarah, wondering how much effort must have gone into that fairly simple domestic activity. She felt that her mother might be disappointed
with her tales of the day. She suspected that her mother had been building up her hopes for days, looking forward to tales of magnificent drawing rooms and ornate long galleries, with possibly
– Sarah felt her mother was perfectly capable of this – some young scion of the Dauntsey clan, of remarkable beauty and even more remarkable wealth, on hand to fall in love with her
daughter and carry her off to marriage and glory, a sort of Kentish equivalent of Mr Darcy, as Sarah had put it to herself on the train.

‘Well then,’ said her mother, setting the tray with the tea and cake on the table between them in front of the fire, ‘how was your day, my dear?’

Sarah took a large gulp of her tea. ‘It was all rather tiring, mama,’ she began. ‘Just before midday the carriages came to take us to the station. Mr Kirk, he’s the Head
of Chambers as you know, had arranged all that.’

‘I hope you didn’t have to pay for that, dear,’ said Mrs Henderson, concerned lest her daughter’s inadequate wages should be frittered away on the cost of carriages.

‘No, no, Mr Kirk saw to all of that, mama.’

‘Who did you sit next to?’ said her mother eagerly. It was this hunger for every detail that Sarah found irritating, dearly though she loved her mother.

‘I sat next to Mr Kirk, actually,’ said Sarah, helping herself to a slice of cake.

‘Next to the Head of Chambers himself,’ said Mrs Henderson proudly. ‘Remind me, dear, is he married, Mr Kirk?’

‘He is, mother, he has four children and he is very old, he must be nearly fifty.’ That, Sarah felt, should put paid to that particular fantasy.

‘And the train?’ her mother pressed on. ‘Had Queen’s Inn organized a special train to take you all down?’ Mrs Henderson had heard of special trains. She herself had
never had the privilege of travelling in one. Now, perhaps, her daughter could remedy the situation. That would be a good piece of information to pass on to Mrs Wiggins next door, always boasting
of the progress her son was making in the Metropolitan Railway. As far as Mrs Henderson knew, he sold tickets at Baker Street station.

‘No special, mama,’ said Sarah with a smile. She knew the way her mother’s mind worked but there was one piece of news which, while not having the knock-out punch of a special,
did have a certain weight of its own. ‘But Mr Kirk had reserved three first class carriages.’

‘Three first class carriages,’ Mrs Henderson repeated, awe and wonder in her tones. ‘Three.’

‘I was still talking to Mr Kirk, mama, about this big fraud case that’s coming up soon. There’s a great deal of work I’ve got to do over the next few days. In fact I
talked to him all the way to Calne.’

‘Do they have a station of their own, the Dauntseys?’ asked Mrs Henderson hopefully. The Dauntseys of Calne, she said to herself. How well it sounded. And her own daughter, borne
there in splendour from Victoria station in a first class railway carriage, conversing with the Head of Chambers himself.

‘I think they used to, mama. Somebody told me that they owned a lot of the land used to build the railway. But the station is only ten minutes’ walk from the house.’

‘You didn’t all have to walk on a day like this, Sarah? There was a terrible wind up here at any rate. It could have wrecked people’s hair.’

‘But you wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the park, mama,’ said Sarah with a smile, ‘it starts very near the station. Thousands and thousands of acres of it. And deer,
lovely little deer, trotting all over it. I was told there are hundreds and hundreds of them. They’ve been there for hundreds of years.’

Mrs Henderson smiled quietly to herself. Thousands of acres and hundreds of deer should be able to flatten anything the Metropolitan Railway and Mrs Wiggins might have to offer.

‘And what was the house like, Sarah? Big, was it?’ Sarah suspected her mother imagined a building three or four times the size of Buckingham Palace.

‘Well, we didn’t see a great deal of it, mama. It’s enormous. They say there’s a room for every day of the year and a staircase for every month.’

Mrs Henderson was overwhelmed by this news. Three hundred and sixty-five rooms? It was scarcely credible. She wondered what they did in the leap years. Perhaps they had a room with open double
doors in the middle. In leap years they would just have to close the doors to add on the extra room. But she mustn’t divert herself. More intelligence was coming from Sarah.

‘We went across two great courtyards, mama, one called Brick Court, I think, and the other one Reservoir Court.’

Funny, Mrs Henderson found herself thinking, there was Mr Dauntsey leaving all these courts at his home to go and work in a whole lot of different ones in London.

‘Just inside Reservoir Court there is the Great Hall, mama. That’s where Mr Dauntsey’s coffin was until just before the service when the pall bearers came to take him away.
It’s a huge room, with great portraits of previous Dauntseys all over the walls and dark oak panelling everywhere. It’s where the servants used to eat in the seventeenth century when
most of the house was built. They had an enormous oak table in there, about the length of our road I would say, where they all used to sit.’

‘How many pall bearers, Sarah?’ asked Mrs Henderson, leaning forward now in her chair, her eyes bright with curiosity.

‘Six, mama. Two gentlemen from chambers, two from the estate and two members of the family. So all parts of Mr Dauntsey’s life were there. They walked very slowly, mama. I remember
thinking the coffin must have been heavy because Mr Dauntsey himself can’t have weighed very much. They went out across the two courts and turned right at the main entrance to reach the
family chapel. Then there was the most extraordinary thing, I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Sarah paused. Mrs Henderson looked expectant. Sarah looked slightly embarrassed as she went on. ‘It was the deer, mama. It was as if they knew what was going on. A whole lot of them, I
don’t know, thirty or forty maybe, came and stood very still about twenty yards from the funeral cortège. As if they were paying their last respects. One of the young barristers said
afterwards that he’d never seen a man go to his funeral service with an honour guard of his own four-legged friends.’

‘Did they stay like that for the service?’ asked Mrs Henderson. ‘Were they still there when you all came out again?’

Sarah laughed. ‘No, they weren’t that patient. I looked round just before we went into the service and they were all trotting off. Maybe they thought they had done their
duty.’

‘And the service, Sarah? What was that like?’

Sarah was beginning to realize how the victims of the Inquisition must have felt as their interrogators kept on and on with their questions. She helped herself to a large slice of Protestant
cake.

‘All the usual stuff about I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ said Sarah with the world-weary resignation of a twenty-year-old attending her second funeral. ‘Mr Kirk read one
lesson. Mr Dauntsey’s brother did another. The vicar preached a sermon about how impossible it was to understand God’s purpose. One of the young barristers in the pew behind me was
whispering to his friend that it was equally impossible to understand the purpose of the vicar.’

Mrs Henderson shook her head at the flippancy of the young.

‘They buried him next to his father,’ Sarah carried on. ‘Nearly at the top of the hill. You could see most of the estate and the house and the deer and the cricket pitch, a
lovely place to end up in, I thought.’

‘Was the church full, Sarah? Fifty mourners? A hundred, would you have said?’

‘More than that, mama, some people had to wait outside the church, it was so packed. Hundred and fifty, maybe more. That young policeman came, which I thought was nice of him. And that man
Lord Powerscourt the benchers brought in to investigate Mr Dauntsey’s death. He was there.’

‘And the widow, Sarah? Was she very upset?

‘She looked very beautiful, mama, Mrs Dauntsey. Black suited her. And she had a black veil made of very fine lace, maybe it was a mantilla, which made her look rather
mysterious.’

‘I’m not sure people should look mysterious at funerals. I was taught they should look sad.’

‘I was never very close to her, mama. There was one odd thing just when they were lowering the body into the grave. You know how they have four ropes or runners round the thing before they
lower it into the ground? Well, Mr Dauntsey’s coffin sort of slipped. It looked for a second as if it might flip right over and fall in upside down. The bearers had a terrible time, almost
wrestling with it. There was a sort of collective gasp from the congregation, everybody holding their breath for a moment. Then it was under control again. Just think, mama, how awful it would have
been if Mr Dauntsey’s coffin had fallen in the wrong way round or the wrong way up.’

Mrs Henderson looked into the fire. ‘You could say, could you not, that the whole thing was a parable, a metaphor for Mr Dauntsey’s life. He ended up the wrong way round, the wrong
way up, slumped into his soup bowl at that feast. You’re not meant to end up murdered, not in this bright new century of ours.’

There was another note from Johnny Fitzgerald waiting for Powerscourt when he returned from the Dauntsey funeral in Kent. Peace, Powerscourt learned, had returned to the
troubled East London borough of Whitechapel where Johnny had been sent to check out Winston Howard, the man unsuccessfully defended by Dauntsey at his trial for armed robbery some years before and
recently released from prison. Reports from the East End had indicated that the ex-convict might bear a grudge against his legal team for his lengthy incarceration within the unfriendly walls of
Pentonville.

Johnny Fitzgerald claimed to have won prizes for his handwriting at school. Powerscourt had no reason to doubt it. But he wondered if decades of consumption of Pomerol and Meursault, of Chablis
and Chardonnay, of Bordeaux and Beaujolais and Muscadet and Armagnac and the other treasures of Johnny’s wine merchants might not have had an impact, the hand grown shakier with the passing
years, some letters and words virtually indistinguishable. Then there were all those hours peering at birds through those heavy German binoculars Johnny was so proud of. That must damage your
wrists. The Fitzgerald script was becoming more and more indistinct as it staggered its way down the page and over to the other side. There had, Johnny reported, been an obstacle, was it, in
Whitechapel. No, it couldn’t be obstacle, it was miracle. Surely not. Miracle in Whitechapel? Powerscourt read on. There was, at the present time, a major crusade being conducted in the
crime-ridden borough by the Salvation Army, ever vigilant for the propagation of the gospel and the salvation of souls. At one of these torch-lit rallies, Powerscourt read, the star turn of the
preaching department of the Salvation Army, God’s equivalent to W.G. Grace in Johnny’s phrase, had reaped a mighty harvest of souls. The sinners of Whitechapel had formed long queues to
confess their sins and be borne into the bosom of the Lord. And among those carried into this spacious resting place, Powerscourt learnt to his astonishment, was none other than Winston Howard,
former burglar, armed robber and vicious inhabitant of His Majesty’s prisons. So great was the conversion that Howard had taken to proselytizing in the unlikely quarter of Whitechapel High
Street. Johnny himself, the note went on, had been accosted by the prodigal only the day before and could only effect escape from the speeches of conversion by the purchase of four copies of the
Salvation Army newsletter. It was therefore unlikely, in Johnny’s view, that Howard would be contemplating violence against any of God’s creatures, or not for a while at any rate, as
long as the Salvation Army had him in their clutches.