By the end of the first course of the Whitelock Feast Joseph, the steward of Queen’s Inn, was reasonably pleased with the evening so far. The Hall looked magnificent. The candles were glittering in their places on the tables and the walls. The portraits of the great lawyers of the past looked down on their successors. Along the bulk of the great room were trestle tables of oak, supposed to be as old as the foundation itself. On the raised area at the north end was the High Table reserved for the benchers of the Inn. On the walls behind them two full-length Gainsboroughs of previous Lord Chancellors, sombre and forbidding in their dark robes, presided over the proceedings. And above them hung one of the treasures of the Inn, Rubens’ The Judgement of Paris, where a bucolic-looking Paris, son of the King of Troy, held up a ruddy apple in front of three scantily clad goddesses. So popular was this painting with the citizens of the capital, its great appeal possibly residing in the nakedness of the ladies, that the Hall was opened to the public once a week during term-time so the pilgrims could pay tribute in person. American visitors sometimes expressed surprise that it was not a courtroom scene they were seeing, with learned friends appearing before some frosty judge, but they seemed to recover quite quickly. A plaque beneath it announced that the painting was paid for by the generosity of past and current benchers and benefactors.
The first course had been a terrine, a rather intricate terrine principally composed of glazed cured salmon and Beaufort cheese. That had been easy for Joseph’s motley army of waiters to serve. The more active service of bringing the plates with the food already in place from the kitchen to the Hall was shared between his regular forces and the young auxiliaries. Joseph had been more impressed by the old than the young. They shuffled about their tasks very slowly but they didn’t speak too loudly or nearly drop the plates like the young.
It was the soup that really worried Joseph. It was one of the new chef’s special favourites which he claimed to have devised for the members of the Imperial Family in St Petersburg, Borscht Romanov, a beetroot-based broth laced with herbs and a Russian vodka whose name even the chef could not pronounce and lashings of sour cream. Joseph watched with dread as his waiters began the long march with a soup bowl in each hand from the kitchens, over a wet floor, into the Hall and onwards for what was, at its longest, a journey of over a hundred and fifty yards. One hundred and sixty-two guests, eighty-one voyages of the Borscht Romanov. One man tripped in the kitchen and had to be removed from duty altogether as he had pink stains right down his shirt front. Two of Joseph’s young men had watched the regular waiters and imitated them, gliding rather than walking with the elbows tucked in tight to the body. The other two held the bowls too far away and were in permanent danger of tipping forward.
Disaster struck the feast shortly after eight thirty, but it didn’t come from the waiters. Just as Joseph was congratulating himself on the safe arrival of the soup, he glanced up towards High Table. The benchers were arranged in order of seniority, radiating outwards on either side of the Treasurer in the centre, the top official of the Inn. At the edge, in the most junior position, sat one Alexander McKendrick Dauntsey, KC, right in front of one of Gainsborough’s Lord Chancellors. Dauntsey, to Joseph’s experienced eye, looked like a man who might have been drinking heavily before the feast. He was perspiring freely and his face was turning grey rather than white. Joseph watched as he took three mouthfuls of his soup, and then, very suddenly, and very violently, pitched forward on to the table, his bowl of soup tipping forward in a pink stream across the white tablecloth and on to the floor. There was a crack as Dauntsey’s face hit the wood and a trickle of blood ran from his chin to join the beetroot broth, Borscht Sanguinaire rather than Borscht Romanov. The mixture of blood and borscht continued to drip slowly on to the floor, a pinkish red that looked like watered blood. After a couple of minutes the Hall had fallen completely quiet, only for the silence to be broken by the Treasurer in what seemed to be a very loud voice.
‘He’s drunk. Bloody fool! Leave him there. He’ll come round in a moment. Carry on.’
Two of Joseph’s waiters were on hand with mops and cloths to clear up the mess. Joseph indicated with pouring signals that all the glasses were to be topped up to help restore the mood. Soon the noise levels were back to normal and the soup was being cleared away. As the feast progressed through roast venison with juniper, tiramisu with dark and white chocolate sauce, accompanied by Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Domaine du Vieux Telegraphe, Joseph became increasingly worried about Dauntsey. He made no move of any kind. Everybody else in the Hall was growing redder or pinker by the hour. Dauntsey’s face had turned a sort of chalky white. Nobody took any notice of him at all, as though collapsed drunks or worse were a regular feature of the Whitelock Feast. Joseph knew how much store the Treasurer set by tradition, how he would hate to disturb the glittering occasion. This particular feast after all, the finest one in the Queen’s Inn calendar, was his favourite.
Yet Joseph too had as much loyalty to the Inn as the Treasurer or anybody else present. Perhaps it was because he had come to London from Italy looking for work over thirty years before and had found a job as a temporary waiter at the Inn. Now, of course, he was a permanent fixture, who had watched many of the silks progress from nervous lisping students to giants of the Old Bailey and the Royal Courts of Justice. He knew how damaging it could be to the Inn’s reputation if word flew round the gossip-ridden world of London’s barristers that the people of Queen’s had been eating reindeer and drinking some of the finest burgundy in the capital while one of their number had collapsed into his soup and been left to rot by his peers as they carried on with their feast. Joseph knew that if he consulted the Treasurer, then the other benchers would all have to give their views. That was what it was like working in a place full of lawyers. Every last one of them had to have their say. Invisible judges and imaginary juries were ever present in the deliberations of Queen’s Inn. Nothing could have been guaranteed to destroy the atmosphere faster. But, Joseph reasoned, if Dauntsey was simply removed, as if he were an empty dish of potatoes or vegetables, so to speak, it would attract much less attention. It was only that Dauntsey was considerably larger than the Inn’s best serving dishes. Joseph took the four strongest men in his command into a little alcove between the Hall and the kitchens.
‘Listen very carefully,’ he said. ‘We’re going to move Mr Dauntsey. He’s the gentleman who has fallen into his soup at the top table. I want to stick to the usual channels we’ve been using this evening. So I want you two,’ he pointed to two of his regulars, ‘to go up behind the top table, as if you were going to serve the benchers, and I want you two,’ he nodded to a couple of his young recruits for the evening here, ‘to go round the back of the right-hand bench, as you have been doing all evening, and reach Mr Dauntsey that way. Don’t rush but don’t stop until you have got him into the library. I shall hold the door at the back of the benchers’ table open for you. Good luck.’
Joseph led his pincer movement up the Hall. He suspected that his waiters were more or less invisible to the barristers by now. Benchers, for some strange reason, sit on chairs at the Whitelock Feast. It was stipulated in the original bequest. Joseph’s plan was that they should simply lift the chair and Dauntsey all in one movement and take him out. It went without a hitch. Nobody asked what they were doing. Nobody challenged them at all. The Treasurer, in charge at his top table, did not even look sideways as his colleague was swiftly and silently removed. It was as if the waters had closed over a sinking ship. The surface of the ocean returned to normal.