Death of a Chancellor

by David Dickinson

  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.

  ‘The cover story is slightly different. You must make up the bed as if nobody had ever slept in it. And of course you must clear up the blood in the bedroom. I shall say that your master came to see me late last night, feeling very unwell and complaining of chest pains. I kept him here overnight as I judged that the walk back to Fairfield might kill him. I watched over him all night. Later this morning I shall return to Compton and bring Wallace back again, as if to fetch the body. We’ll say he died shortly after ten o’clock this morning. I shall send word up to the house once Wallace has gone with the imaginary body.’

  Dr Blackstaff paused. ‘Are we breaking the law?’ he whispered. ‘Are we going to end up in jail?’

  ‘Don’t see how we are breaking the law, sir. Poor Mr Eustace is already dead.’

  ‘And,’ said the doctor, stopping his carriage shortly before the entrance to the stables, ‘I shall tell anybody who asks that he most definitely did not want people peering at him when he was dead.
Indeed, I shall say that he repeated that wish to me only last night as he sat by my fire, looking very pale and ill. Got that, McKenna?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Andrew McKenna, and he loped off along the path to start his late master’s journey to the undertakers and to the grave.

  Powerscourt was back at his post on deck. He watched as the black turned to dark grey, then to a paler grey as visibility grew from fifty yards to two hundred and then to half a mile. A thin pencil of land was visible ahead of him. When he raised his binoculars he could see a tall spire somewhere near the centre of Portsmouth. He could see the naval buildings lined up along the quayside and the multitude of dockyards, repair workshops and training stations that marked it as the centre of the Royal Navy the greatest seafaring power on earth. His heart was beating faster. He remembered the words Lady Lucy had said to him in the drawing room of their house in Markham Square on his last evening in London and again on the station platform the following morning as the train took him away. ‘Please come back, Francis. Please come back.’ Now the moment, of all moments the one he had most longed for, had nearly arrived.

  It was Thomas who claimed he saw him first. He had appropriated the binoculars from his mother, in true male fashion, and thought he recogniszed another figure with binoculars on the deck of HMS Fearless.

  ‘There he is!’ he shouted. ‘There’s Papa! Up at the front of the ship with the binoculars!’ He shouted at the very top of his voice, ‘Papa! Papa!’ and waved furiously as fast as his hands could move. The other people waiting at the quayside for their loved ones smiled at the little boy and his enthusiasm. Now they were all waving, all three of them, Olivia standing on tiptoe so her father would recognize her across the water.

  Then Powerscourt saw them. He put his binoculars down and waved for all he was worth. Johnny Fitzgerald had stolen a naval flag from somewhere and was waving it above their heads like a banner. Powerscourt thought he was going to cry. These three little figures, waving as though their lives depended on it, these three, not the mighty ships with their great guns, not the peaceful English countryside that rolled back behind the city, these three were his homecoming, his landfall.

  He came down the gangway as the church bells of Portsmouth rang the hour of eight. He embraced Lady Lucy. She was crying. He picked up Thomas in his arms and kissed him violently. He hid Olivia inside his cloak and squeezed her till she thought she might break.

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was home.

  2

  John Eustace came from a family of four. His elder brother Edward had died serving with his regiment in India. His twin brother James had moved to New York where he dabbled unsuccessfully in share speculation. His elder sister Augusta Frederica Cockburn was the first to hear the news of his death, and the first to set out for Hawke’s Broughton.

  Life had not been kind to Augusta Cockburn, née Eustace. She had been born with some of the features thought desirable in a young woman. She was rich, very rich. She had a great deal of energy. She was tall, with a face adorned with a long thin nose and large protruding ears. Her fine brown eyes, one of her best features when she was young, had grown suspicious, almost bitter with the passing years. Her marriage at the age of nineteen, an act, she told her friends at the time, largely undertaken to escape from her mother, had seemed glorious at first. George Cockburn was handsome, charming, an adornment to any dinner table, a good fellow at any weekend house party. Everyone thought he had money when he led Augusta up the aisle at St James’s Piccadilly all those years ago. He did have money, after a fashion. But he had it, as his brother-in-law once remarked, in negative quantities. He was always in debt. Some scheme, launched by the artful dodgers on the fringes of the City of London, was bound to attract him. The schemes invariably failed. He began to chase after other women. He began losing heavily at cards. After ten years of marriage Augusta had four young children, all of them looking distressingly like their father. After fifteen years of marriage they were all she had left to live for, George Cockburn being seldom seen in the family home and then usually drunk, or come to steal some trinket he could take to the pawnshop or use as a stake at the gambling tables. The very generous settlement bestowed on her by her father at the time of her marriage had almost all gone.

  Many families progress upwards as they move through life. They move into larger houses to accommodate their growing numbers. Augusta found herself carrying out the same manoeuvre, only in reverse. The family moved from Mayfair to Chelsea, from Chelsea to Notting Hill, from Notting Hill to an address that Augusta referred to as West Kensington but that everybody else, particularly the postmen, knew as Hammersmith.

  Augusta did not take these changes well. She grew sour and embittered. Only the appeal to his nephews and nieces persuaded her brother John to keep her financially afloat. So when she heard of his death she resolved to set out at once, without the children, on a visit of mourning and condolence to Fairfield Park. Her real purpose was to discover what had happened to her brother’s money, and, if possible, to appropriate as much of it as possible for herself and her family. Thus could she restore the fortunes her wastrel husband had thrown away.

  It also has to be said that Augusta had not been a welcome visitor in her brother’s house. John Eustace found her constant complaints, the endless whingeing about poverty and the cost of school fees rather wearing, particularly as it began over the breakfast table when a man wants to read his newspaper. And she was bad with the servants, peremptory, short-tempered, always secretly resentful that there were far more of them than she could afford back in West Kensington or Hammersmith. They, in turn, had devised subtle forms of revenge. Her morning tea was never cold, but never hot either. Tepid perhaps, lukewarm. The junior footman, who was almost a genius at pipes and plumbing, would contrive an ingenious and elaborate system for the course of her stay whereby the water in the bathroom, like the tea, was never hot but never cold. In the autumn and winter her room would be so thoroughly aired that the temperature would sink almost to freezing point. Then the fire would be made so hot it was virtually unbearable. They had, to be fair to them, the servants, decided that in view of the tragic circumstances they would behave properly in the course of her visit to the bereaved household. But only, said the junior footman who doubled as a plumbing expert, only if she behaved herself.

  It was now three days since the passing of John Eustace. Andrew McKenna, waiting nervously in the Great Hall to greet Augusta Cockburn, had found them very difficult. He had never liked lying. He didn’t think he was particularly good at it. As he told the servants the sad news of their master’s death, he tried to sound as authoritative as he could. Grief overwhelmed them so fast they had no time to notice the anxiety in his voice, the slightly shaky legs. That too, he told himself, could have been put down to shock. But now, he knew with deep foreboding in his heart, he would face a much sterner test, Mrs Augusta Cockburn with the light of battle in her eyes. The trouble was, he said to himself as he waited for the sound of the carriage coming down the hill, that he still wasn’t certain he and Dr Blackstaff had done the right thing.

  Then the nightmare started. Leaving the servants to carry in her small mountain of luggage, she swept him off to the great drawing room at the back of the house, looking out over the gardens and the ornamental pond.

  ‘McDougal, isn’t it?’ she said imperiously, settling herself into what had been her brother’s favourite chair.

  ‘McKenna, madam, McKenna,’ said the unfortunate butler, wondering if he was about to develop a stammer.

  ‘No need to say it twice,’ snapped Augusta Cockburn, ‘I’m not stupid. I knew it was Scottish anyway.’

  She was twisting slightly in her chair to get a better view. McKenna was hovering at what he hoped was a safe distance.

  ‘Come here, McKenna! Come closer where I can see you properly! No need to skulk over there like a criminal.’

  Criminal was the very worst word she could have used. For Andrew McKenna had often suspected in th
e previous seventy-two hours that he was indeed a criminal. Some phrase about obstructing the course of justice kept wandering in and out of his mind. He blushed as he advanced to a new and more dangerous position right in front of Mrs Augusta Cockburn.

  ‘Tell me how my brother died, McKenna. I want all the details. I shall not rest until I am satisfied that I know absolutely everything about it.’ She made it sound like an accusation.

  ‘Well, madam,’ said McKenna, wondering already if his legs were holding firm, ‘he went over to see the doctor three nights ago. That would have been on Monday night. I believe Mr Eustace was feeling unwell, madam. The doctor thought he was not well enough to come home so he kept him at his house overnight. That way he could keep an eye on Mr Eustace, madam, and give him any attention he needed. Unfortunately the doctor could not save him. He died at about ten o’clock the following morning, madam. His heart had given out. Dr Blackstaff came to tell us just after eleven.’

  Augusta Cockburn thought there was something wrong about this account. The man spoke as if he had learned it off by heart, or had just translated it from a foreign language. Precisely what was wrong she did not yet know. But she was going to find out.

  ‘Hold on, McKenna or McDougal or whatever your name is –’

  ‘McKenna, madam.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me when I am speaking to you. You have begun at the end. I want you to begin at the beginning. What happened on the Monday? Was my brother feeling unwell? Did he complain about pains in his chest or anything like that? People don’t usually drop down dead with no warning at all.’

  ‘Sorry madam. Your brother went off to the cathedral in the normal way on Monday morning. He came back about five, I believe, madam, and had some tea in his study. James the footman brought it in to him. We served his dinner in the dining room at eight o’clock, madam. He would have been finished about a quarter to nine. Then Mr Eustace went back to his study, madam.’