Sarah knew she was looking anxious as she went to sit on the opposite side of the fire. She wondered if she could tell her mother about Edward as a means of avoiding telling her about Mr Stewart, though quite what she would actually say about Edward she had no idea. Her mother had, she felt, been fairly unmoved about the death of Alexander Dauntsey, even though she, Sarah, had been so very upset.
‘Something went wrong at chambers today, dear, didn’t it?’ Mrs Henderson took a preliminary sip of her chocolate. ‘I can tell.’ Privately Mrs Henderson suspected that Sarah was not very accomplished as a shorthand typist. As a child she had been clumsy, awkward with her hands, often dropping things. Her mother could not imagine how she would be able to keep up to the exacting standards of an Inn of Court. In fact, she could not have been more wrong: the twenty-year-old Sarah was a very different character from the child Sarah and knew very well how highly her work was valued.
‘It’s Mr Stewart, Mr Woodford Stewart, mama. He’s disappeared.’
In spite of all the months of conversations about the Inn the name of Stewart had not yet been entered into Mrs Henderson’s filing system.
‘Mr Stewart? Is he one of the porters?’
‘No, mama, he’s a KC in a different chambers from mine. He is or was a great friend of Mr Dauntsey. They were going to work together on that big fraud case I’ve been telling you about.’
‘Mr Bunkerpole? I read about him today in the paper.’
‘Puncknowle, mama, pronounced Punnel, like funnel on a ship.’
‘I don’t need lessons in pronunciation from my own daughter, thank you very much, Sarah.’ Mrs Henderson paused to take a large mouthful of her chocolate. ‘So what do they think has happened to this Mr Stewart? Has he run off with somebody?’ Mrs Henderson’s paper and her magazines contained regular features about wicked men running off with people who were not their wives and causing great unhappiness. Less than a year ago she had given Sarah a long lecture on the Dangers of Being Run Away With by Wicked Men which Sarah had completely ignored.
‘There’s no sign of any running away, mother. That’s all nonsense. People think he may have been murdered, like Mr Dauntsey.’
The minute she said it, Sarah regretted it. She was only trying to take out a pathetic revenge for the pronunciation remark, this over her mother who was ill and in pain all the time and might not be around much longer. Surely now her mother would be worried.
‘He might well have run away with somebody, Sarah. People like that always take very good care to keep it secret. That’s probably why nobody knows where he is. He’ll turn up sooner or later, maybe travelling in the South of France under a false name, mark my words.’
For some reason that Sarah had never understood, the wicked runners away always seemed to end up in her mother’s version in the South of France. The place seemed to carry spectacular undertones of villainy, a Mediterranean equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah, in her mind. But she doubted it would have much appeal for Mr Woodford Stewart, whose holidays, she had overheard somebody telling one of the policemen that very afternoon, were usually spent in the Highlands where he could pursue his twin delights of walking the hills and playing golf. But she knew how difficult it would be to shake her mother’s belief in the running away theory. She tried.
‘I don’t think any of the policemen or Lord Powerscourt think he’s run away, mother. They think he’s disappeared or he’s dead.’
‘This Lord Burrscourt, Sarah. Is he a friend of the Punchbowl man?’
Sarah was gripped by a moment of panic and a moment of total recall. She was back in the doctor’s surgery with Dr Carr, old and white-haired now, the man who had looked after her father so well in his last, fatal illness. Dr Carr was talking to Sarah and her mother, his voice weary now after forty years of dealing with the sickness of London’s poor, a dead look in his eyes. He had almost finished describing the likely course of her mother’s illness, when he told them that in a few cases, not many at all in his experience, the mind began to deteriorate, not into senile decay as the doctors called it, but the memory began to fail, particularly about what had happened very recently. Sarah looked closely at her mother before she spoke. The last drop of chocolate was being drained with great enjoyment. She prayed that her mother was tired today, maybe the pain had dulled her wits.
‘Lord Powerscourt, mama, is the man the benchers brought in to investigate Mr Dauntsey’s death. I shouldn’t think he knows Mr Puncknowle at all. Edward says that Lord Powerscourt once solved a murder mystery for the Royal Family.’
‘What sort of age is this Lord Powerscourt?’
Sarah smiled at the transparency of her mother’s behaviour. ‘He’s in his early forties, I think. His wife’s just had twins. Edward and I saw them last Saturday. They’re very sweet – the twins, I mean.’
‘Your father’s sister had twins long ago. Bad lot, both of them. Your father used to say how unfair it was. One bad one might just be bad luck, but two bad, it was terrible. Nearly killed the parents.’
Sarah wanted to ask what form this wickedness had taken. Had they, perhaps, ended up in the been-run-away with category? But there was a tightened look about her mother’s lips which hinted that the topic was now closed. Suddenly Sarah decided to float her idea of a treat to her mother. She felt so sorry for her, so frail, growing less and less able to cope all the time.
‘I’ve been thinking, mama, about a treat for you when the weather gets better.’
‘A treat, my dear? I don’t think people get treats at my time of life and in my condition.’
‘Listen carefully, mama. It would involve putting you in a wheelchair some of the time, but we could say you’d twisted your ankle. People wouldn’t have to think you weren’t very mobile. Anyway we’d get you down to Queen’s Inn and we could wheel you round the courts and you could meet lots of these barristers we’ve talked about so often. With any luck we could get you invited to lunch in the Hall, as a guest of one of the barristers. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’
Mrs Henderson looked rather frightened all of a sudden. Sarah suddenly remembered that they had hardly had time to talk about the disappearance of Mr Stewart so at least her mother wouldn’t worry about that.
‘I’ll have to think about that, Sarah. It’s very kind of you to suggest it, very kind indeed. I’m not sure I feel strong enough for it now, let alone in a couple of months’ time. And I’ve got nothing to wear.’
‘Just think about it, mama, you don’t have to decide now.’
Later that night, after Sarah had helped her mother up the stairs and into bed, she decided that she needed some assistance in the planning of this escapade. Tomorrow, she decided, she would talk to Edward.
Lord Francis Powerscourt had evolved a new routine all of his own in his new house in Manchester Square. After breakfast he would go and see the twins, sometimes talking to them or reciting poetry if they seemed to be awake, and then he would cross to the Wallace Collection for a ten-minute visit. Usually he would go and look at some of the paintings in the Great Gallery on the first floor where the Gainsboroughs and the Van Dycks held sway, but today he was looking at the hardware of death on the ground floor. Just round the corner, on this very floor, he thought, there were some exquisite pieces of craftsmanship, a French musical clock that could play thirteen different tunes including a Gallic equivalent of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, an astronomical clock, again from France, where you could find the time in hours, minutes and seconds, solar time as on a sundial in hours and minutes, the sign of the zodiac, the day, the date of the week, the time at any place in the northern hemisphere, the age of the moon and its current phase, and the position of the sun in the sky or the moon if it was night. But here, right in front of Powerscourt, resting innocently inside their glass cases, lay a couple of daggers from India and a tulwar, previously owned by the Tipu Sultan, which could have ripped a man’s innards out or cut his throat so that he would die inside a minute, pausing only to reflect, as the light faded fast from his eyes, on the exquisite carvings on the sword blade and the diamonds and gold inset into the pommel. Upstairs Watteau’s musicians danced out their private version of a pastoral heaven. Downstairs lurked long swords from Germany with very sharp edges, thin rapiers from Italy intended to cut and thrust their way into their victims, a curved Sikh sword that could cut a person in two, an Arabian shamshir with a walrus ivory grip which would leave terrible wounds. Above, Gainsborough’s Perdita, one-time mistress of the Prince Regent, gazed enigmatically down the Long Gallery. Down below stood suits of armour, rich men’s attempts to counter the stabs and the slashes and the thrusts, armour for men, armour even for horses, armour that grew so heavy that most warriors discarded it, armour designed to replicate the fashions of the day so that the Elizabethan Lord Buckhurst, in his armour with its peascod doublet with a point at the waist and an extravagantly puffed trunk hose reaching from waist to middle thigh, could probably have clanked into court at Greenwich or Westminster without anybody paying much attention. Upstairs gods danced across the sky and various versions of heaven, mythical and Christian and metaphorical, were on display. Down here – Powerscourt looked suspiciously at a deadly Italian falchion, a broad sword tapered to a vicious point at the end – was a stockpile of weapons that could send a man to heaven or hell in less than ten seconds.