Death of a Chancellor (47 page)

‘I’ve left you a letter, Powerscourt. I wasn’t sure today was going to go well.’ The Dean began speaking to the spire in front of him, then turned to look down at
Powerscourt. Powerscourt saw that the Dean’s face was white, turning grey. Down below a collection of tiny dots in uniform were staring upwards at the Dean’s last moments.

‘Come back! For God’s sake, man, come back!’ Powerscourt yelled at him. ‘You can still come down the same way you went up! I could come and get you with a rope, if that
would help!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had raised himself into a sitting position against the wall. ‘I’ve heard of the Good Samaritan but this is
ridiculous. Bloody man must weigh fifteen stone at least. He’d pull you both down to your deaths for sure. Don’t think Lucy and the children would approve.’

Powerscourt looked at the rope he had found in a corner of the upper tower and put it down again.

‘Dean!’ he shouted once more. ‘Turn back, man! For God’s sake, turn back! You’ll get yourself killed!’ He looked up the face of the spire. The Dean was now
over halfway to the top, moving ever more slowly. Powerscourt suddenly remembered that there was a statue of the Virgin at the top, next to the risen Christ. Another prayer began.

‘
Anima Christi, sanctifica me,
Soul of Christ be my sanctification.’

Powerscourt heard the sound of footsteps rushing up the stairway to the clerestory beneath him.

‘Body of Christ, be my salvation.’

Powerscourt leant out of the door as far as he dared and shouted up into the sky, ‘Come back, man! Come back!’

‘Blood of Christ, fill all my veins, water from Christ’s side, wash out my stains.’

In the nave the voices of Canon Gill and Richard Hooper had fallen silent. The words of a Catholic prayer, the Anima Christi, Soul of Christ, punctuated with great groans, filled the air.

‘Passion of Christ, my comfort be. O good Jesus listen to me.’

Powerscourt saw that the man had only another fifteen rungs to go before he reached the top. Somehow, in spite of the terrible deaths, he hoped that the Dean would reach the pinnacle. Then the
investigator in him fired one more question up into the morning sky.

‘Dean,’ he shouted. ‘Did you act entirely alone?’ It was, he realized, an absurd question to put to somebody two hundred and fifty feet above the ground, blood pouring
from his wounds, desperate to reach the statue of the Virgin before he died.

‘Yes. Alone.’ The voice was little more than a groan now. The prayer went on.

‘In thy wounds I fain would hide. Ne’er to be parted from thy side.’

Chief Inspector Yates, panting heavily, was inspecting Johnny’s wound. One of the other policemen tried to step out of the window on to the spire. Powerscourt pushed him back.

‘Guard me when my life shall fail me. Bid me come to thee above.’

The Dean was but a few rungs from the top now, way above Powerscourt and the others in the upper tower. Then something seemed to happen to his lower leg. He looked as though he might fall. Just
in time he reached aloft and pulled himself up, holding on to the feet of the Virgin. Then his other arm reached her waist.

‘With all thy saints to sing thy love. World without end. Amen.’

It was hard to tell the precise sequence of events at this point. The statue, designed to withstand the storms and gales of centuries, was not designed to take the weight of a fifteen-stone man
holding on to it for dear life. Very slowly the Virgin began to lean. Then she leant a little further. Then she fell, breaking into several pieces on the cathedral roof before tumbling to the
ground. The Dean seemed to hang suspended at the top of the spire. Then he too fell, a last Hail Mary following his passage back to earth, bouncing off the side of the spire, rolling over the
parapet of the upper tower, crashing on to the roof of the east transept, then a final sickening crunch of flesh and bones as he landed on the ground twenty paces from the Chief Constable. Ambrose
Cornwallis Talbot, Dean of Compton Cathedral, was dead before he touched the ground. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

Two burly policemen were carrying Johnny Fitzgerald down to earth. Powerscourt sprinted along the clerestory and down the stairs. The cathedral dedicated to the Virgin was empty. Canon Gill and
Richard Hooper had departed. A dark blue police cloak had been placed over the body of the Dean where he had fallen. Dr Williams, summoned to attend the morning’s events by the Chief
Constable, had made a cursory inspection.

‘He’s dead, of course,’ he said to Powerscourt and the Chief Constable. ‘Let’s pray that he’s the last.’

‘He is,’ said Powerscourt quietly, staring sadly at the dark blue cape that covered the battered body of the Dean. ‘It’s all over now.’

The Dean’s letter was three pages long. Powerscourt found it on the study desk in the Deanery, addressed to himself, written in a flowing copperplate. Ambrose Cornwallis
Talbot spoke of his growing disillusion with the Anglican Church, a disillusion that gradually turned into hatred. He said it was a Church that had turned its back on belief in favour of comfort,
that had sacrificed the difficult truths of the Christian faith in favour of a quiet life in the countryside and the pomp and privilege of its bishops in the worldly surroundings of the House of
Lords. Its buildings were in the wrong place, in the countryside rather than in the cities, where a national Church should be based with the vast numbers of the urban poor rather than in the
upholstered comfort of parsonage and rectory. Soon, the Dean continued, the Anglican Church would be completely filled with the wrong sort of worshippers, devotees of the numinous cadences of
Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the soaring beauty of the anthems of Purcell and Byrd. But a Church was not meant to be a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the English language or
the anthems of centuries past. It should be rooted in the present, daily confronting the problems of God’s people, preaching Christ’s Gospel where it was most needed. It was in his own
former parish in the slums of London’s docks that his Anglican faith had finally ebbed away with the tides. So great was the personal crisis that his doctors ordered him to take a quieter
position in Compton. Nine years ago the Dean had joined the Bishop in the Catholic faith. The Bishop, with a more acute sense of history than his, had first suggested the reconsecration of the
minster to the true faith on the Easter Sunday of its thousandth anniversary. The Dean had organized it, the slow process of secret recruitment, the appointment of the Archdeacon to carry out the
negotiations with Rome. Reluctantly they had sanctioned his mission to Melbury Clinton, realizing that it was a terrible risk, but believing him when he said he could not carry on out without the
consolation of regular celebration of the Mass. All three had been members of Civitas Dei for the past seven years. The two missing vicars choral had found out about the Archdeacon at Melbury
Clinton. The Dean had packed them off to a new life in Canada with six months’ wages in their pockets.

Powerscourt had hoped for more information about Civitas Dei, but suspected that Talbot was being faithful to its principles of secrecy to the last.

Single human lives, the Dean went on, had little meaning to him in comparison with the glory of the enterprise and the reclamation for the Catholic Church of a cathedral that had been stolen
from it at the Reformation. He had, throughout, acted entirely alone. He hoped and prayed that the events of Saturday and Sunday would mark the sounding of the tocsin, a trumpet call that would
signal the beginnings of the return of the people of England to the Holy and Apostolic Church, that the lives of the isles would once more be carried out to the slow rhythm of the Church’s
calendar and the central mystery of the Mass.

John Eustace had changed his mind about making the journey to Rome. So had Arthur Rudd, who had referred extensively to his doubts in the diaries he had kept which had perished with him in the
flames. Edward Gillespie had been overheard telling a colleague that he proposed to tell Powerscourt in person all about the conspiracy. He had, the Dean went on, deliberately echoed the deaths in
Compton at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries as a tribute, a memorial to those faithful Catholics who had given their lives for the true religion in 1539 and 1540. He reminded
Powerscourt that as a gesture to a more squeamish age he had killed all his victims before the burning and the disembowelment. He had no regrets, for he was the servant of a higher Truth, the pupil
of a greater authority, the handmaiden of the only true faith.

‘Let me conclude, Powerscourt,’ the Dean’s letter ended, ‘with the words of Thomas Babington Macaulay which have been an inspiration to me for years: “The Catholic
Church is still sending forth to the furthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with
which she confronted Attila. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when
idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a
broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s.”’

Powerscourt read the letter twice. Then he folded it up and put it into his suit pocket. He felt numb before the Dean’s diatribe, sad that his life had ended in such a terrible fashion.
Then he thought of the families of John Eustace and Arthur Rudd and Edward Gillespie and grew suddenly very angry that one man could think he had the right to play God, to take away human lives, to
leave behind broken families who would mourn for years. Not only mad, he said to himself, but bad. He wondered about the people the Dean had betrayed, the baptized he christened in one faith while
believing in another, the young couples he had married in his deception, the funerals and burials of those who believed they were under the care of a Protestant priest and going to a Protestant
destination.

Two days later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were making their way once again across the Cathedral Green. The sun was still shining but there was a bitter wind. They were going to
say their farewells to the minster at Evensong. They would both be back, in a month’s time, for the wedding of Patrick Butler and Anne Herbert. Patrick had threatened to expose him in the
pages of the
Mercury
if they failed to turn up.

Johnny Fitzgerald was recovering fast in the upstairs room of Anne Herbert’s cottage, entertaining her children with tales of four-eyed giants who lived in caves in the Punjab and
six-legged horses who galloped at incredible speed across the veldt in South Africa. The Bishop of Exeter had arrived to take charge of the ecclesiastical proceedings. The Catholic Bishop from Rome
and his party were sent back to the eternal city, escorted by the police as far as the Dover boat. The Bishop and the other members of the Chapter who had converted were to be dispersed around the
Catholic churches of England and Wales. The Chief Constable was preparing a report for His Majesty’s law officers on the strange events at Compton. Patrick Butler had scarcely been seen since
the service of dedication, working around the clock on a special edition of his paper. Powerscourt had written again to Mrs Augusta Cockburn, naming her brother’s murderer and telling her
that he had been brought to a kind of justice. There would, he said, be no trial with its attendant publicity. He passed on the opinion of Mr Drake, the Compton solicitor, that it was unlikely that
the legal wrangling about the will would be complete before Christmas. In Drake’s view maybe even next Easter would be too soon.

‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee O Lord,’ Canon Gill and Richard Hooper were taking the service, spoken not sung in the absence of the choir, ‘and by thy great mercy
defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.’ The two old ladies who had attended all the earlier services were back in position. Powerscourt looked at Lady Lucy, now fully recovered
from her ordeal in the crypt. Tonight, over dinner at Fairfield Park, he was going to propose an expedition to St Petersburg, a place as remote from Compton as he could imagine. In the morning they
were to return to London.

Richard Hooper was reading the Nunc Dimittis. ‘Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.’ His clear tenor voice rang out across the wooden angels and
the wooden instrumentalists that adorned the choir stalls. Powerscourt was drawn once more to the names on the back. Fordington and Writhington. Grantham Borealis. Alton Australis. Yetminster
Secunda.

‘May the Lord bless you and keep you.’ Canon Gill’s soft voice caressed the great cathedral as he spoke the closing prayer. ‘May the Lord make the light of his
countenance shine upon you and be gracious unto you and give you his peace.’

Hurstbourne and Burbage. Minor Pars Altaris. Netherbury in Terra. Shipton in Ecclesia.

‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen.’

Perhaps they’re a message, Powerscourt thought, a message from the distant past into the unknowable future, inscribed here on the wood of centuries. Beminster Secunda. Lyme and Halstock.
Wilsford and Woolford.

And their names liveth for evermore.

Winterbourne Earle. Gillingham Minor. Chardstock. Teynton Regis. Bishopstone.