Death of a Chancellor (21 page)

With a last look at the roof Chief Inspector Yates departed on his business. The patterns may have only been ornamental, Powerscourt thought, but they were incredibly graceful. They didn’t
look as though they were made of stone at all, but of some much lighter substance, as if a fifteenth-century stonemason had managed to spray the roof with icing and it had set for five hundred
years.

The congregation for Holy Communion was slightly larger than the one for Matins, Lady Lucy observed. The service was held in the Lady Chapel where the size or lack of size of
the congregation was less apparent. The two old ladies were still there. Perhaps they never leave, she thought, hiding away overnight in some dusty corner of the huge building to pass the night
with the rats and the departed saints. The drunk and the very thin old man had gone, but were replaced by a couple of elderly gentlemen in rather better health who spoke the responses in loud and
self-important tones. There was an ascetic young man with a wide-brimmed hat on his knees who looked as if he was undergoing some profound religious experience, a mystic perhaps. Certainly he
looked as if flagellation and hair shirts might not have been too far away. The choirboys were still there, looking, to Lady Lucy’s eyes, even more frightened than they had done that
morning.

‘The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him
in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.’ A look of rapture, a look of ecstasy crossed the face of the young mystic as he took the bread in his hands. Lady Lucy remembered Francis telling her
about the bitter controversy that had racked the Church of England some years before. It concerned, she thought, something called the Doctrine of the Real Presence. Very High Church Anglicans known
as ritualists, the ones closest in religious position to the Roman Catholics, believed that the bread and wine were transformed in the Communion Service into the real body and blood of Christ. The
opposite party, principally Evangelicals, contended that such beliefs were incompatible with the doctrines of the Church of England. Anybody who believed in the idea of the Real Presence was
effectively a heretic and should be expelled from the Anglican Church. One or two of these cases had actually ended up in court, one or two parsons had actually gone to jail, and, in the most
farcical case, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself had eaten a consecrated wafer at the heart of the dispute. At the time of its consumption the wafer was over four months old.

The little congregation filed out of the Lady Chapel, the young man staying behind to kneel in front of the cross. Lady Lucy was closer here to the faces and expressions of the choirboys as they
made their way towards the north transept and the cloisters. She could see no improvement.

Powerscourt spent most of the rest of the day reading the back copies of the
Grafton Mercury.
He had an appointment after evensong with Vaughan Wyndham, Organist and
Master of the Choristers of Compton Minster, the employer and conductor of the late Arthur Rudd. Patrick Butler had assembled a great mountain of newspapers to the right of his desk. ‘You
don’t mind, Lord Powerscourt, if they’re not exactly in the right order, do you? I always mean to sort them out week by week but there never seems to be enough time. Now I’ve got
to go and talk to a man at the printers.’ With that Patrick Butler had grabbed his hat and rattled off down the stairs. He returned at various points during the day, searching hopelessly for
some notes on his desk, crawling about on the floor to retrieve some material for the printers.

At first Powerscourt found the experience of reading these papers in the wrong order rather exhilarating. Reports of a bumper harvest in one paper might be followed by accounts of the longest
period of rainfall in the county records in the next. Descriptions of cricket matches could be followed in the next paper in the pile with a sad account of the early departure of the local football
team from the FA Cup. Eventually Powerscourt decided he had had enough. He spread all the papers out on the floor and reassembled them in the correct order. It took, he checked, precisely thirty
minutes. It could be his way of saying thank you to the editor. Then he read them all, a year and a half’s worth of
Grafton Mercury
at a single sitting.

Powerscourt would have had to say, if asked, that there was not much in these newspapers that would have informed the citizenry about the wider world. Of events in the continent of Europe, of
events in London, of events even in the neighbouring county there was nothing at all. The
Grafton Mercury
did not run to accredited correspondents in St Petersburg or Vienna, in Paris or
even in Westminster or Whitehall. That was not its job. But its readers would have been very thoroughly informed about what was going on around them, a weekly budget of births, marriages and
deaths, reports of the decisions of the county council, of the local court cases, of harvest festivals and outbreaks of bad weather, of the activities of every local society across the entire
county of Grafton. Powerscourt thought the paper became livelier and more adventurous with the arrival of Butler as editor. Youth had replaced crabbed old age, he thought, and it showed on the
page. As he read, his mind was registering what was not there in these papers as much as the printed stories themselves. There had been no murders. There were no reports of death in mysterious
circumstances. There was only one unusual story about the cathedral in the seventy-eight back copies he read through. Some months before, strange pagan signs had been found, daubed on the floor
beside the high altar. Powerscourt thought Return of the Druids might have been a little strong for the headline. He suspected Patrick Butler had written the headline and the story himself. It
referred extensively to a prehistoric site just across the county border which was a centre for followers of ancient cults. But there were no reports of further incidents. Powerscourt felt sure
that if Butler had been able to discover a scintilla of evidence for further pagan activity, however small, it would have featured heavily in the pages of the
Grafton Mercury.
There was one
constant refrain that ran with increasing frequency through the pages. Powerscourt felt desperately sad each time he came across another report. The young men of the county had signed up for
military service with the local regiment. There were glowing descriptions of their departure, the military bands playing, the young men marching off together to the war in South Africa. Now they
were dying. Once a fortnight or so another death would be reported, another family heartbroken at their loss. There was talk of erecting a permanent memorial to the fallen in the cathedral when the
war was over.

Powerscourt felt slightly disappointed as he headed back towards the minster across the windy expanse of the Green. He had hoped that there might be some clue hiding in the back pages that would
bring him enlightenment. There was none. Evensong was nearly over when he returned, an anthem by Thomas Tallis soaring up to the roof. Lady Lucy was not to be seen. Powerscourt presumed she must
have gone home. He was glad. He was growing increasingly worried about her obsession with the choirboys. He knew it all came from the highest of motives but he felt she was in danger of becoming
ridiculous, something he had never encountered before in all his years of marriage.

He noticed that the builders had finally arrived. There was a battery of scaffolding in the crossing, the part of the cathedral where the nave met the transepts, underneath the tower that served
as the launching pad for the spire. As he looked up Powerscourt saw that this must be the highest point inside the cathedral, a couple of hundred feet above the ground. The top of the scaffolding
was next to a wooden trap door that led to the higher parts above. Waiting to be transferred the following day was an enormous pile of masonry slabs, destined to replace the broken sections further
up. The workmen had spread thick dust sheets all over the surrounding floor. The Dean had complained to Powerscourt a couple of days before about the delays in the work, and about the enormous cost
of having to operate at such high levels.

‘The Lord is meant to provide,’ he had said indignantly to Powerscourt, ‘but our constant fear is that one day he may forget about us here. He may have better things to do. And
then what will happen to his crumbling buildings?’

The choir had finished. The silver cross led the way towards the cloisters once more. The two old ladies were definitely leaving the cathedral, nodding politely to Powerscourt as they hobbled
past, chatting quietly to each other about the service they had just attended. He watched them go, almost pleased to be the only person left inside. The lights were still on in the choir, casting a
faint light back down the nave. The Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary was completely silent as Powerscourt went back to stare up at the scaffolding.

Maybe it was the silence that saved him. He heard a very faint creak up above that might have been a rope running along a pulley. Powerscourt looked up. Then time stood still. The first thing
that flashed across his mind was the memory of Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto which he had listened to with Lucy in London weeks before. There was one passage where the orchestra falls
silent and the piano descends down the scale, falling, falling, falling, it had seemed to Powerscourt at the time, as though it was going to drop off the edge of the world. The descending notes
didn’t stay with him for long. For he realized that these great slabs of masonry stone were falling from their scaffolding and would land on top of him any second. He turned and dived full
length through the entrance to the choir. He slid several feet along the polished floor and came to rest against the edge of the choir stalls. He hit his head hard against an ornate piece of wooden
carving.

The noise was muffled by the dust sheets. The blocks of masonry smashed on to the stone floor of the crossing. Bits of broken stone ricocheted across the transept and down the nave. The dust of
ages rose from beneath the cathedral stones and flowed outwards like a whirlwind. The Pillar of Smoke has come to Compton Minster, Powerscourt thought groggily and we shall all be consumed. Shards
of stone flew off and cracked the wooden seats at the top of the nave. Then the lights went out.

As he rose, very unsteadily, to his feet, Powerscourt could feel the blood flowing freely down his temple where he had hit the carving. His brain told him that he had stopped beside the stall of
Chisenbury and Chute. Grantham Australis was next door. His leg must have been twisted in the fall. He limped off very slowly towards the high altar. The great gold crucifix beckoned him on towards
the place of sanctuary. Then he heard the doors close. He was locked in, shortly after five thirty in the afternoon. There must be fourteen hours to go before they would open again to greet another
day. Lord Francis Powerscourt sat down in front of the altar and tried to collect his thoughts.

As he sat there by the altar Powerscourt tried to remember his own actions just before the fall of stone. Had he touched anything by accident? Had he inadvertently pulled on
some mechanism that could have caused the avalanche? No, he decided, he had not. There was only one conclusion. Somebody had just tried to kill him. That didn’t bother him very much. People
of one sort or another had been trying to kill him for years. He wondered suddenly if the killer was even now heaping the coal high on to the fire in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall. Tonight, ladies
and gentlemen, we have another treat for you. After the earlier delicacy of the vicar choral, we now present another dish, Roasted Powerscourt. He shuddered and massaged his injured leg once
more.

He staggered to his feet. He began to make his way slowly down the north ambulatory away from the altar. His hands felt the outline of the tomb of Abbot Parker, the last abbot but one before the
Dissolution of the Monasteries. The Abbot felt very cold. His long thin face was wet. Powerscourt realized that he was leaving a trail of blood wherever he went. He looked back at the altar cloth,
hanging stiffly in its place. No, that would never do. He took off his coat and jacket and ripped off one sleeve of his shirt. He folded it into a makeshift bandage and wrapped it round his head.
With dust all over my clothes and a bloody shirt on my forehead, I must look like a tramp now, he said to himself, one of those lost souls who haunt the lonely services in the cathedral looking for
salvation, or warmth. He abandoned the Abbot to his fate and moved across to the opposite wall. His fingers felt for the extraordinary memorial to the Walton family from the year 1614. There were
two semicircular niches inside a marble frame. On the left was a little statue of the father, with a red cloak over a black robe, Powerscourt remembered from the hours of daylight, kneeling before
a marble plaque, hands clasped in prayer. Facing him, also kneeling, also praying, was his wife, clad entirely in black, more pious perhaps than her husband. Beneath them, aligned according to age
and height, were their eleven children, also kneeling in prayer, the boys beneath their father, the girls beneath their mother. The smallest was only a couple of inches high. Powerscourt wondered
what terrible disaster had carried off the entire family. Maybe it had been the plague. Maybe Chief Inspector Yates would know.

Powerscourt paused beside the chantry chapel of Robert, Lord of Compton, passed away sometime in the fourteenth century, he remembered. The light from the great windows was very faint now. The
stained glass didn’t seem to let very much of it in. Powerscourt’s hand felt the dust from the falling masonry already lying thickly on the stone. Half the monuments in the cathedral
must be covered with it already. He wondered if the murderer was coming back to make sure he was dead. Or had the murderer watched the explosion from some high place up there on the scaffolding?
Powerscourt didn’t think he could have seen anything through the storm of dust that poured out of the broken floor. Had the murderer rushed off to close all the doors? Did he believe that
Powerscourt was dead, one unfortunate victim of the accident to be discovered by the verger in the morning? Or was he intending to come back and finish Powerscourt off?