Death of a Chancellor (2 page)

The
Fearless
sank at that moment into a particularly deep trough. As she rose out the other side a wall of water flooded over Powerscourt and Fitzgerald.

‘That’s the other bloody thing,’ said Johnny bitterly, never a happy sailor. He was hanging on to the rail with both hands. ‘Ever since we left, this bloody boat has been
either going up and down like this,’ he ducked as another helping of ocean cascaded over them, ‘or rocking from side to side. It’s drunk all the time this boat, that’s what
it is. Why can’t the damned thing move along on an even keel? They cost a fortune, these bloody boats, Francis. You’d think they could make them go along steadily, like a train. I
mentioned the fact to the Captain the other day.’

There was a temporary lull in the weather. Fitzgerald plunged his right hand deep inside his clothes and produced an enormous flask.

‘This is what you need on a night like this, Francis. Naval rum. Fellow in the catering department gave it to me. Said it’s the stuff they give the sailors before a battle. Makes
them fighting drunk, he said. Seems to me you’d need to have the bloody stuff twenty hours a day, battle or no battle, to survive on these wretched vessels.’

Powerscourt smiled. He suddenly remembered Johnny Fitzgerald turning green and being sick over the side on a yachting expedition years before when there was barely enough breeze to fill the
sails. ‘I’m very curious, Johnny,’ he shouted into the wind, ‘to know what the Captain said.’

‘What the Captain said when?’ Fitzgerald yelled back.

‘When you complained about the ship not travelling like a train.’ Powerscourt had turned very close to his friend’s ear. Johnny Fitzgerald laughed.

‘He said to me, Francis, “You’re a hopeless case. Don’t think I could convert you to ships any more than I could convert the Hottentots to Christianity. Here, you’d
better have another drink.’’’

Fifty miles to the west of Lady Lucy’s hotel, Andrew Saul McKenna finally decided that he must get up, even though it was five o’clock in the morning. McKenna was
butler in the great house of Fairfield Park, situated in the tiny village of Hawke’s Broughton in the county of Grafton in the west of England. He knew something was wrong. He had heard
strange noises in the night. He thought, or had he imagined it, that he heard a muffled scream. Now there was no noise, just this overpowering sense that something was terribly amiss in his little
kingdom. He lit a candle and climbed rapidly into his clothes for the day, left out in neat piles the night before.

McKenna’s first thought was for the master he had served for the last fifteen years. Mr Eustace’s bedroom was one floor below. McKenna could still remember his master coming round
the desk to shake him by the hand when offering him the job.

‘I do hope you’ll be able to stay with us for a long time,’ he had said with a smile. Eustace was Chancellor of the Cathedral of Compton, responsible for the archives and the
famous cathedral library.

Now McKenna was tiptoeing down the back stairs in the middle of the night, his stomach churning with worry and fear. A floorboard creaked as he made his way along the corridor. Outside he could
see, very faintly, the trees shaking slowly in the wind. He passed an ancient statue of a Roman goddess, lost in thought. For a big man, he moved very quietly.

Andrew McKenna paused before he opened the door to his master’s bedroom. There was a loud creak when you opened it, he remembered. He’d meant to have the door oiled for weeks now. He
gripped the handle firmly and twisted it open as fast as he could. There was no noise this time.

Nothing, he thought, nothing could have prepared anybody for what he found inside. As he moved slowly across the room towards the great four-poster bed, he found the long discarded habits of
childhood had returned to take temporary occupation of his brain. His hands moved automatically into the folded position. He said two Our Fathers. He closed his eyes briefly to avert them from the
horror. Hail Mary, full of grace, his lips muttered, his hands moving along the beads of an invisible rosary, blessed art thou among women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. As he took in
the full horror lying across the bedclothes, he realized that the words in his brain suited his master much more than they suited him. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen. Charles
John Whitney Eustace, Master of Fairfield Park, Canon and Chancellor of the Cathedral of Compton, had died in the most terrible fashion. There were still two hours left before the dawn. Pray for us
now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

The rain on the deck of HMS
Fearless
had stopped. The spray and the waves were as powerful as ever. The night was still an impenetrable black. Powerscourt was wondering
if this happy return might become an anticlimax. He had heard stories from men in the Army about upsetting reunions, so passionately desired over such a long time, so eagerly awaited on the long
journey home, but where people found they had little to say to each other after the initial euphoria had worn off. Time had ensured that there was too little experience left in common after a long
separation. After a fortnight, one man had told him, he realized he was living with a complete stranger he didn’t know at all. Powerscourt didn’t think that was going to happen to him.
He groped about inside the folds of his sou’wester and produced a pair of binoculars. They were of the finest and the latest German make. The Kaiser had sent whatever he could to the Boers to
confound perfidious Albion, guns to kill the British, ammunition to keep killing them, binoculars to find them. He peered despondently into the gloom.

‘Don’t suppose you’ll see anything yet, Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was peering into the water below. ‘How deep would you say this bloody water is?’ he went
on, as if he saw himself being sucked overboard right down to the bottom of the ocean floor where there were no reviving bottles to console the living or the dead. ‘Very deep, I should
think,’ said Powerscourt.

Lady Lucy checked her watch again. Time seemed to be moving very slowly this morning. Twenty to six. Still an hour and a half to go before the dawn as the helpful hotel people
had told her the night before. Francis is coming, she said to herself, remembering the mantra she had used like a comfort blanket when she had been kidnapped by a gang of villains and locked up on
the top floor of a Brighton hotel. He had found her then. She checked the children once more and returned to her vigil by the window. Francis is coming. She smiled again.

Andrew McKenna was shaking slightly as he stood by his dead master’s bed. Part of it was shock. Part of it was anger that anybody human could have done such a brutal
thing to his gentle master. Part of it was that he simply didn’t know what to do. He felt suddenly that he was the lone representative left on earth of Charles John Whitney Eustace, charged
with special duties towards the dead. His master had been quite small in life. Now, lying on this bloody bed, with blood dripping on to the floor, he looked smaller still.

McKenna knew that terrible scandal could follow the discovery of the body. The newspapers would invade this remote corner of rural England and titillate their readers with exaggerated stories of
vicious and violent death before dawn. The rest of the staff would want to come to pay their last respects. The women would turn hysterical if they saw this bloodied corpse, the men would turn
homicidal towards the unknown perpetrators. The only thing to do for now, he said to himself, is to fetch the doctor who lived but a few hundred yards away. But he couldn’t leave the remains
of his master where they were. Somebody else might come in and find him. So the only thing to do was to move him. To move him now. McKenna shuddered violently as he thought of carrying this corpse,
of all corpses, anywhere at all. And where should he take it? To the doctor’s? Some early-rising farmhand might spot him walking along the village’s only street with blood and gore
running from the package in his arms. Then he remembered the spare bedroom above the stables, recently refurbished and remote from the main part of the house.

McKenna took a deep breath. He found that his hands were making the sign of the cross. He pulled out all the bedclothes and rolled them round his master till he looked like a wrapped-up sausage
or an Egyptian mummy en route to the burial chamber deep inside a pyramid. He tried putting the body over his shoulder like a fireman rescuing somebody from a blazing building. That didn’t
work. The body kept slipping. Between the bed and the door he found that the best way to carry his master was in his arms, like an overgrown baby wrapped – the biblical reference came to him
again from Christmases past – in swaddling clothes. Going to a stable, he said, his mind on the edge of hysteria now, like they did all those years ago.

The journey to the kitchen passed off without incident, apart from the fact that Andrew McKenna had started to weep and had no hands to wipe away his tears. Outside the back door they were hit
by the force of the wind. McKenna reeled like a drunken man. The real disaster came on the way up the stairs to the bedroom above the stables. McKenna slipped and almost fell over. Desperately he
reached out his left hand to steady himself against the wall. The body fell out of his grasp and began rolling down the stairs. It stuck four steps from the bottom. Summoning the last of his
strength McKenna picked his master up once more and went up the stairs as fast as he could. He dumped John Eustace on the bed and went down the stairs two at time. Out in the fresh air he stood
still for a moment, panting heavily tears still rolling slowly down his cheeks. He noticed that a spot of blood had escaped from the wrapping and fallen on to his hand. He set out to wake the
doctor. His hands were out of his control by now. They were shaking violently from the strain of carrying a corpse a couple of hundred yards in the dark. Pray for us, his lips were moving as he
swayed up the village street, pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

Six o’clock at last. Just two hours to go now. Lady Lucy decided the time had come. The children would never forgive her if they missed the boat’s arrival. They
could have breakfast downstairs in the great dining room that looked over the harbour. Just over four hundred days have passed, she said to herself happily as she woke Thomas and Olivia on the
morning their father came home from the wars.

Powerscourt and Fitzgerald had company in their night watch on deck. A cheerful ‘Good morning, gentlemen’ announced the presence of Captain Rawnsley himself, fresh
from his command post and his instruments on the bridge.

‘There’s just an hour and a bit to go before the dawn,’ he announced as if sunrise and sunset followed the orders of the Royal Navy. ‘I hope to take the ship into the
harbour at first light. We shall dock at about a quarter to eight. The first passengers should be able to disembark on the stroke of eight. Then,’ he smiled broadly at Johnny Fitzgerald,
‘you will owe me fifty pounds.’

Johnny had placed the bet one day out of Cape Town, refusing to believe that anybody could calculate their journey time so precisely in such an unreliable and dangerous thing as a boat. He
laughed.

‘Touché, Captain,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t have the money on me at this moment, forgive me. Too dangerous carrying money around on the deck of one of these
things.’ He waved an arm dismissively at the surrounding bulk of HMS
Fearless.

‘But come, gentlemen, we are having a special breakfast at seven o’clock. I hope you will be my guests. A little champagne might ease the memory of the fifty pounds, Lord
Fitzgerald?’

Johnny tried to persuade Powerscourt that his only reason for placing the bet had been to make sure that they did actually reach Portsmouth at precisely eight o’clock in the morning.
‘Fellow like that Captain, Francis, nothing like a bet of fifty pounds to make sure you got home at the time you’d told Lucy. Stands to reason, if you ask me.’

Powerscourt didn’t believe him.

‘Dear God, why would anybody want to do that to John Eustace, of all people?’ Dr William Blackstaff was fastening his boots on the edge of his bed with Andrew
McKenna in dutiful attendance. Blackstaff, like John Eustace, was in his early forties. They had known each other for over ten years. Every Wednesday, without fail, they had lunch together in the
upstairs dining room of the White Hart Hotel in Northgate in the little city of Compton . At weekends they walked together over the hills. In spite of his walks Blackstaff was thickening out. The
beginnings of a paunch were showing through the tweed suits he always wore, a collection so large and varied that the children in Compton always referred to him as Dr Tweed, amazed in later years
to discover that his name was not Tweed at all but Blackstaff.

‘We must have a plan,’ he said, making the final adjustments to his tie. He had served in the Army for five years and some memory of the need for proper staff work had stayed with
him all his life.

‘Yes, sir,’ said McKenna, looking out into the dark night beyond the doctor’s windows. ‘It’s going to be light in under an hour or so.’

Blackstaff stared vacantly at his friend’s butler. ‘Let me just try to think this through, McKenna,’ he said. ‘Please tell me when there is a flaw in the plan.’ Dr
Blackstaff paused, well aware that his mind was so tinged with grief and shock that he probably wasn’t thinking straight.

‘We take him out of the stables at once,’ he said. ‘But where do we take him? We could bring him here, but that’s not going to solve the problem, is it?’

‘The chief difficulty, it seems to me, sir,’ said McKenna, ‘is that the family are going to want to look at the body in the coffin. And that’s impossible.’

‘This is the best I can do for now, McKenna,’ said the doctor, moving heavily towards his front door. ‘I take my carriage with the covers up along the road towards the house. I
stop about a hundred yards away in case anybody hears the noise. You bring the body down from the stables into the carriage. I shall take it into Wallace’s the undertakers in Compton. Old man
Wallace knows how to keep his mouth shut. He can put the body in the coffin and seal it up so tight that nobody can get at it.’ Blackstaff and McKenna were climbing into the carriage by now,
groping their way with the reins in the dark.