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.’
‘Sorry,’ said Powerscourt. He was struck once more by the image of Elizabeth Dauntsey in her slim elegance gliding through the deserted drawing rooms and empty galleries of Calne, hoping maybe to find inspiration in the portraits of the ancestors who lined the walls. ‘Dauntsey could have had an illegitimate child with some other woman,’ he continued, ‘somebody he could maybe adopt or make his heir later on. That chap whose widow left the Wallace Collection to the nation, he was illegitimate, but he was still able to inherit the lot. I don’t think, forgive me, that he’d want to breed from any old stock. I can’t see Alexander Dauntsey hoping to produce his heir with some common female who was prepared to bear his child for money.’ Powerscourt paused and looked closely at the teddy bear. Already it was beginning to show signs of wear and tear, from the twins or Olivia. The fur on one arm had almost disappeared as if some strange disease had struck. One eye was slightly out of position, giving the bear a rather sinister aspect as if it was looking in two directions at once.
‘I can’t very well advertise in the newspapers, Lucy, can I? Would anybody involved with the late Alexander Dauntsey, especially in a child-bearing capacity, please get in touch with Francis Powerscourt, of Manchester Square?’
Lady Lucy shook her head. She knew what was coming. In a number of his previous investigations Lady Lucy had activated for her husband the vast tribe of her relations to report on particular individuals, whether they had fallen out with their wives or husbands, whether they were having affairs, who had been jilted in love. Powerscourt attributed the success of the venture to one important difference between the sexes. Women, he believed, were more curious than men. Women liked gossip more than men. What else were institutions like hairdressers’ and ladies’ luncheon clubs for, in heaven’s name. Women were more interested in human relationships, their rise, their decline and fall, their occasional recoveries. Women, in his view – and he did not condemn them for these characteristics – were able to talk, gossip, if you will, about a particular topic or person or relationship for hours longer than their male counterparts. The final proof of his theory, in Powerscourt’s view, had been given to him by one of London’s leading booksellers, who informed him that women outnumbered men by a factor of four to one in the purchase of the novels of Miss Jane Austen.
‘Do you think, Lucy, that you could rouse the team? Bring them out of retirement or wherever they’ve been to report on Elizabeth and Alexander Dauntsey? Not a clarion call, not a drumbeat, just a whisper, it all needs to be very quiet. I don’t suppose any of your relations live anywhere near Calne, Lucy?’
Lady Lucy blushed slightly. ‘I’m afraid, Francis, that I have a second cousin twice removed who lives on the other side of Maidstone. Her husband is very rich, something in the City, I think. I’m sure they move in the same circles as the Dauntseys.’
‘Put the word out, please,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and holding his wife by the hands. ‘What do you say to dinner out, Lucy? It’s all those young people we had here earlier on this afternoon. I’m feeling quite reinvigorated.’
Powerscourt and Chief Inspector Beecham were greeted by a bizarre sight when they went to meet Joseph the steward in the Hall on the Tuesday morning after Edward and Sarah’s tea in Manchester Square. The top half of the tables were roughly laid out with knife, fork and spoon. Each place had its own wine glass. And circulating round this phantom feast were the waiters who had served at the real one. It was, Powerscourt thought, like looking at the three ages of man. The old boys were back, swaying slightly as they carried round their dishes of imaginary vegetables, the veteran nearest Powerscourt with a face that looked like a parchment map. The regular staff of the Inn, middle-aged mostly, looked as if they served imaginary guests every day of their lives. The young men, two of whom did not look to be properly awake yet, were carrying bowls full of imaginary soup, or filling glasses with water Joseph had put in empty wine bottles. Powerscourt thought the prospect of it being turned into wine were slim.
‘I thought this would get them into the swing of things,’ said Joseph cheerfully, emptying a couple of wine glasses into a bucket. ‘I’ve told them all to be ready to answer questions in a few minutes.’
Chief Inspector Beecham had gone to Dauntsey’s place and sat down in it, looking carefully at the passing waiters.
‘Gather round!’ said Joseph and a macabre circle assembled round the place of the poisoned bencher. ‘Lord Powerscourt!’ He introduced him like a major-domo.
‘Thank you all very much for coming in today,’ he began. ‘I know it can’t have been easy for you. Now, do any of you remember anything about the feast? About Mr Dauntsey’s death?’
There was a certain amount of shuffling and then one of the regular waiters spoke up. ‘We’ve talked about this a lot, my lord, on the night itself and earlier this morning. We don’t see how the poor gentleman could have been poisoned at the feast. They started with that terrine. We took the plates up to the High Table and nobody could have known which one was going to Mr Dauntsey, no one at all. Then there was the soup, my lord. How are you meant to put a drop of poison into a bowl of soup when you’re carrying two at a time? It’s not possible. Same with the wine, you don’t know whose glass you’re going to refill when you collect a fresh bottle from the wine room. If you wanted to kill the whole lot of them’ – Powerscourt suspected this might be the preferred option for this particular waiter from the vehemence with which he said it – ‘that would be easier. The cook slips the poison into the soup and off you go. Or you add something special to half a dozen bottles of wine and finish them off like that. But one person, no, not possible.’
The waiter stared at them rather defiantly, as if he thought they would contest his findings. They did not.
‘First class,’ said Chief Inspector Beecham. ‘We agree with every word of that.’
It is a rare, almost impossible event for an investigator like Lord Francis Powerscourt to come face to face with the man whose death he is investigating, for the living, as it were, to meet the dead. But it was happening now, the day after the phantom feast in the Hall. Edward had been the midwife to the meeting.
‘New benchers,’ he said cryptically to Powerscourt, ‘always have portrait done. Hangs in Hall or library.’ Now Edward mentioned it, Powerscourt remembered seeing some of these portraits displayed in prominent positions. He recalled, in particular, the two full-length Gainsboroughs of previous benchers behind Alexander Dauntsey in the Hall on the night of the feast. ‘Painter man wants to see somebody from Inn. Check he’s got the details right.’
Powerscourt and Edward were walking along the Mall that runs from Hammersmith Bridge along the river in the direction of Chiswick. Some of the houses were recent but there were also some fine eighteenth-century specimens looking out over the Thames. Number 35, The Terrace, Powerscourt learned, was where their painter lived, a man by the name of Stone, Nathaniel Stone.