Death Called to the Bar

by David Dickinson

  Some people might have wondered how Sarah reconciled her earlier resolve to have nothing to do with her colleagues at work with an afternoon tryst with a young man, even if he seldom spoke. That had not proved too difficult. For a start, she told herself, most of the men she had been warned against on her secretarial course were older. They were married. They had families. Edward fitted into none of those categories. Anyway, she thought, Edward was perfectly harmless. Everybody knew that.

  It was only after about fifteen minutes delay that Edward began to grow seriously worried. I’ll go at twenty past, he said to himself. Twenty past came and went and Edward was still there. There were vague rumours, nothing substantiated, nothing Edward would ever have allowed any of the men he devilled for to take into court, but rumours nonetheless that Sarah’s mother was ill and liable to be difficult. Half past came and half past went. Edward was reluctant to abandon the afternoon because he had arrived two hours early. He had spent them learning about the story of the collection and about the most famous of the pictures. He had astonished himself by asking one of the curators two questions about one of the Fragonards. And on his afternoon vigil, he could console himself with surreptitious glances at the Powerscourt house and wonder about what was going on inside. He hoped he might meet the other twin this time, but then he wondered if he, an outsider, would be able to tell the two of them apart.

  ‘Edward, I’m so sorry.’ Sarah was out of breath and put a hand briefly on Edward’s arm as if to slow herself down. ‘I’m so glad you waited.’ All the way there on the trains Sarah had been wondering if Edward would write her little notes, as he had with the invitation, or would he actually speak? He spoke.

  ‘Take a seat,’ he said, escorting her to a wooden bench just outside the house. ‘We’ll go in when you’re ready.’

  Sarah wanted to say Well Done. Nine consecutive words from Edward in Queen’s Inn would be a day’s portion, if not a week’s. Now it was tumbling out.

  ‘Have you been here before, Edward? Can you tell me about the place?’

  Sarah watched as Edward collected his thoughts. She wondered if he had realized how much conversation might be involved on this sort of afternoon. Or had he thought they would peer at the pictures in silence?

  ‘Named after Sir Richard Wallace. Illegitimate son of fourth Duke of Hertford.’ Edward had reverted to staccato prose once again. ‘All Hertfords collected pictures and things. Wallace died. Left everything to wife. Wife lived here for last seven years of life. Famous for smoking black cheroots. On her death left all to the nation. Pictures and stuff, not cheroots. Now here for ever.’

  Sarah wondered about the black cheroots. Where had Edward found that out, she wondered? Once a deviller, she recalled, always a deviller. You could root out facts about art galleries as easily as you could those about court cases.

  ‘Shall we go in? You’d better lead the way, Edward.’

  Edward wondered if Sarah had been to this sort of establishment before. He was constantly amazed by the number of people who didn’t even know where the National Gallery was. He had planned a route round some of the more dramatic pictures, the ones that should interest a newcomer. The armour he had resolved to ignore, and the furniture he would leave to the end. Edward was bored to tears by armoires and escritoires and secretaires and writing tables and garderobes and commodes and wardrobes. He led them rapidly across the hall and into the Housekeeper’s Room.

  ‘This one,’ he whispered, ‘very bloody, but very dramatic. Painter French Romantic, name of Delacroix. Called The Execution of Doge Marin Falier.’

  The painting showed the interior courtyard or loggia of a great Venetian palace. White marble stairs led up to a higher level. Lining the stairs and crowded round a figure at the top were noblemen, some dressed in rich costumes. A beautifully dressed Moor with an orange headband stared into the courtyard below, as if he were expecting trouble. At the top a Venetian senator held aloft a bloody sword. At the bottom of the steps, a few feet from the supercilious Moor, the headless body of the former Doge Marin Falier lay flat on the ground.

  ‘What’s going on, Edward? Why did this poor man have his head chopped off?’

  ‘Falier Doge of Venice. Meant to be constitutional ruler like our King Edward. Power very limited. Falier wanted to smash the constitution and make himself tyrant. Nobles found out. Nobles cut his head off. Byron wrote poem about it. Byron fond of blood and gore. Painter probably knew poem. Painter also fond of blood and gore, probably fonder even than Byron.’

  Sarah looked closely at Edward who was perspiring lightly from all this conversation. She hoped it wasn’t going to make him ill.

  ‘Going somewhere bit more peaceful now. Still Venice.’ Edward led the way into the small drawing room where a pair of unusually large Canalettos looked across the Basin of St Mark from opposite directions. One showed the view from the mouth of the Giudecca Canal with the Customs House on the left out to Palladio’s Church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The companion piece looked out from the steps of San Giorgio back to the mouth of the Giudecca Canal. The water was pale green, the sky a light blue with fluffy clouds. Small groups of Venetians discussed their business on the quays. Gondolas carried cloaked men and bales of cargo across the bay. A couple of sailing boats lurked at the edges of the picture. The great Venetian symbols, the Doge’s Palace and the huge baroque dome of Santa Maria della Salute, reminded the viewer of the topography of the city. In both paintings there was an air of great calm as if Venice were at peace with itself and the world, as if these scenes had existed for hundreds of years past and would go on for hundreds of years into the future.

  Again that hand briefly on Edward’s arm. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Sarah. ‘I would so much like to go to Venice, wouldn’t you, Edward?’

  Edward nodded. ‘English on Grand Tour bought Canalettos,’ he said, ‘like photographs on your holiday. Only in colour. Time for some froth and fluff now.’

  So far, Edward hoped, Sarah had not realized how deliberate their itinerary was. Edward was taking them to the places where he had done his homework. If Sarah had wanted to stop in front of the Greuzes or the Watteaus, Edward would have been lost for words. As it was he was heading straight for Fragonard.

  ‘The Swing,’ he said quietly. ‘Frenchman. Eighteenth-century. Name of Fragonard.’

  In a dreamy forest of varying shades of green an attractive girl rode on a swing, dressed in layers of pink silk. Behind her, in the shade, an elderly gentleman in a dark green suit controlled the strings of the swing. Convention dictated that he was her husband. And on the far side of the girl, who was hiding him from sight of her husband, stood a handsome young lover in a pale green suit with a flower in his buttonhole, his hand stretched out towards the girl. One of her feet was much higher than the other on the swing, giving a view of her legs, and her slipper had fallen off her foot and was flying upwards through the air.

  ‘Edward!’ said Sarah, giggling to herself. ‘Just look where that young man’s looking! You’re very naughty showing me this one, nearly as naughty as that girl in the picture. Haven’t you anything more decent to show me?’

  Edward smiled at her. ‘All right, Sarah. Not naughty, these ones. But fantastic all the same.’

  Edward took her to the first-floor landing where the world of François Boucher awaited them. This was a world where the laws of gravity and reality, of time and space, had been suspended, a world where naked gods rode chariots across the sky and semi-naked goddesses scattered pink roses among the clouds. Clothes were the exception in these fabulous landscapes although some scanty shifts were included from time to time so the artist could show off his brushwork. There were putti everywhere, plump little cherubs rolling back clouds or performing arabesques in the sky or gambolling playfully on the surface of the sea. Almost everything was subordinate to the naked female figure. A judgement of Paris was constructed in such a way as to give three different perspectives on the female form, groups of nude women frolicked on th
e waves, a glorious naked Venus caressed her husband Vulcan, god of fire and armourer of the gods. These were the wilder mythological poems of the wilder mythological poets translated on to canvas in shades of pale blue and pink and diaphanous green, a world of rococo and make believe and fantasy.

  ‘My goodness me,’ said Sarah, ‘how absolutely wonderful. I wouldn’t tell my mother this, Edward, but I like them, I really do. I think they’re marvellous. Are there any more?’

  Edward smiled. ‘Not here. Probably in National Gallery. Nothing else as exotic as Boucher here.’

  Sarah lingered in front of the rising and the setting of the sun.

  ‘Boucher had important patron, Madame de Pompadour, official mistress of Louis the something or other,’ Edward whispered. ‘Kept wolf from door later on by designing tapestries for royal tapestry factory.’

  ‘Where now, Edward?’

  He led them halfway down the Great Gallery on the first floor, past a couple of sombre Van Dycks, a gorgeous full-length Gainsborough, and a sumptuous Rubens landscape. He stopped in front of a young man with a turned-up moustache, an elegant black hat and very fashionable clothes. Even back in the seventeenth century painters were keen to show how versatile their brushwork could be. This young man had a beautifully depicted ruff with a dark grey kerchief hanging from it, and a very intricate white cuff on a richly embroidered jacket. A faint smile played across his lips as if he were thinking of a secret or a joke that only he and the painter knew. It all looked totally spontaneous as if the young man had walked in and parked himself on Franz Hals’s canvas the afternoon before.

  ‘That’s the Laughing Cavalier,’ said Sarah knowledgeably. ‘Everybody knows him from the advertisements. Isn’t he by Franz somebody or other?’

  ‘Good,’ said Edward solemnly. ‘But work originally called Portrait of a Young Man. Franz Hals. Dutchman. Early sixteen hundreds.’

  ‘But why,’ asked Sarah, ‘do we call The chap The Laughing Cavalier?’

  ‘Painting up for sale,’ said Edward, now firmly back in cryptic mode, ‘forty or fifty years ago. Nobody paid much attention. Nobody heard much of Hals chap. Fourth Marquess of Hertford takes a fancy to it. So does a Rothschild. Big battle in the auction rooms. Sells for six times its asking price. Newspapers drawn to battle between a Marquess and a Rothschild, supposed to be as rich as Croesus. Laughing Cavalier makes better copy than Portrait of a Young Man. Not good title. Look carefully.’

  Sarah inspected the gentleman on the wall carefully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see what you mean,’ she said, frowning slightly at Edward.

  ‘Look again,’ he replied. ‘He’s not laughing, he’s smiling. And look at his clothes. No indication he’s a cavalier at all. Just the name stuck.’

  Sarah looked round the gallery. The place was going to close in ten minutes’ time and they were the last people there apart from a solitary curator lost in his own thoughts in the far corner.

  ‘Last picture, Sarah. Another portrait. Different story.’ Edward led her ten yards away from the Laughing Cavalier and stopped in front of another young man. He had a head ringed with dark brown curls and a dull red beret on top. His face was pale and handsome. He was looking slightly to the left of the painter. The young man wore a dark brown robe with a gold chain. Some people thought they detected a hint of a smile on his red lips. Others felt he had more serious matters on his mind.

  ‘Titus,’ said Edward gravely, moving back a few yards to get a different view. ‘Titus Rembrandt. Terribly sad story. Titus’s mother dead. Rembrandt married again. Rembrandt declared bankrupt the year before. Rembrandt not able to sell any pictures. The Dutch people in Amsterdam didn’t care for them, didn’t commission any. God in heaven. It’s as if the English abandoned Shakespeare. Under the rules of the guild, Titus and the second Mrs Rembrandt had to administer the production of his etchings and the sale of his paintings. It’s terrible.’

  Sarah noticed that Edward was speaking in perfect sentences now and that he was more animated than she had ever seen him.

  ‘There’s worse,’ he said. ‘Much worse. The second Mrs Rembrandt died. Then Titus died. This Titus here, the boy in the painting, died before his father. Rembrandt had to bury his own son.’ Sarah thought there might be a tear in the corner of his eye now as he recounted the various disasters that befell the great painter.

  ‘When Rembrandt died, one of the finest painters who ever lived, all he left were some old clothes and his painting equipment. How very sad! So if anybody ever says to you, Sarah, that the Dutch produced some great painters, that is perfectly true. They also turned their back on the greatest.’

  Ten minutes later Edward and Sarah were eating their first muffins in the Powerscourt drawing room. Olivia was there, and Thomas, and both twins, fast asleep. Listening to all these young voices, Olivia asking Sarah what it was like working in an Inn, Thomas discussing football teams with Edward, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of all of them, Powerscourt found it hard to believe that he earned his living investigating violent death and that his latest victim had been poisoned as he tucked into his beetroot soup. After tea they all trooped off to inspect the new typewriter. Sarah pronounced it an excellent model and astonished the children by typing perfectly coherent sentences as she looked over her shoulder. Olivia made her do it again with her eyes closed. Touch typing, Sarah explained, meant that you knew where all the keys were automatically so you didn’t have to look down to find the letter you wanted. Both Thomas and Olivia thought it was a form of witchcraft or magic. Powerscourt wondered how long it would take to learn. He suspected that the young policeman had already mastered it.

  ‘I want to ask your advice, Lucy,’ he said when Edward and Sarah had gone and their own children had departed to the upper floors.

  ‘Of course, Francis. Whatever you want.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the Dauntseys and their lack of children. I have no idea if it has anything to do with this investigation. Can you tell me what it would mean to Elizabeth Dauntsey, knowing you couldn’t have children?’

  Lady Lucy looked at a child’s picture book left lying on the sofa.

  ‘I’m sure you know as well as I do, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I think it must have been absolutely frightful. I presume she didn’t go into any details of what the doctors told them. I presume they have no idea who is at fault, although fault is the wrong word completely and I take it back.’ She bent down to pick up a diminutive teddy bear, bought for one of the twins, sitting upright against a side table.

  ‘Guilt,’ she went on. ‘I think you’d blame yourself for not being able to have children. I think you’d feel incomplete without them, that you hadn’t fulfilled your duty by being a mother. Every time you went out into the streets and saw all kinds of people, people with less money than you, people with less taste than you, people uglier than you, people stupider than you, carrying their children about or holding their hands as they learn to walk or watching them run about in the park, why, it would nearly break your heart. When you went to stay with people you would have to watch others getting their children up in the morning or reading them bedtime stories at night, it would be awful, just awful. You don’t think we’ve got too many, Francis, do you?’

  ‘Too many what, Lucy?’ said Powerscourt who had been thinking of Elizabeth Dauntsey going through Lucy’s litany of misery.

  ‘Too many children.’

  ‘No,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘Four isn’t very many between us. Two each. Lots of people have more than that, ten twelve, fifteen, imagine fifteen of them, Lucy, you could scarcely remember all their names. But tell me, is there anything a woman in such a predicament might try?’

  ‘I don’t understand, Francis,’ said Lucy, looking confused.

  ‘Might she try to get pregnant by a different man?’

  ‘And pass the child off as her husband’s?’ Lady Lucy looked as though she found the conversation distasteful. ‘Well, she might, I’m sure that’s been done often enough in
the past. Risky though, if the husband finds out. Or I’ve heard of people who go abroad for nine months or a year and come back with a child they say is theirs. It may be adopted, or the husband may have paid some other woman to have his child and then they pass it off as theirs. At least half the genes will be right that way.’

  Powerscourt remembered what Elizabeth Dauntsey had said about her husband’s love of Calne, his feeling for its past and its future. A man with that sense of historical continuity would find the lack of heirs more distressing than most.

  ‘It must have been pretty frightful for Dauntsey too,’ Powerscourt said. ‘That place meant so much to him, that sense of it belonging to Dauntseys past, Dauntseys present and Dauntseys future. Only there might not be any future, or a different future peopled by relations, your own flesh and blood of course, but not your own issue.’

  Lady Lucy smiled at him. ‘I always think issue is such a dreadful word, Francis. It’s a lawyer’s word, beginning halfway down the first page of some dreary document about inheritance or something.’