‘A little later for the tea would be most agreeable, Mrs Dauntsey. My journey was fine. Your park is looking very well with all these early flowers.’
‘I think it likes the spring, our park. It always looks good about now. But come, Lord Powerscourt, before you disclose your business, I have something to tell you. I don’t know if it is important or not but you did ask in your letter if I could think of anything unusual Alex might have said in the month or so before he died.’
Powerscourt nodded gravely. ‘Have you thought of something, Mrs Dauntsey?’
She looked down at her hands briefly. ‘There was something, I hope it’s not too trivial. It must have been in the weeks after he was elected a bencher, you see, and there was quite a lot that was new to him about all that.’
She paused and looked closely at Powerscourt as if he could help her. He gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.
‘He said it more than once, I’m certain of that, Lord Powerscourt. He said he was very worried about the accounts.’
‘Whose accounts, Mrs Dauntsey? Your own personal accounts? The estate accounts perhaps? Some extra expenditure needed for improvement, maybe? His legal accounts? Or the Inn accounts, which I suppose he now had access to after his election?’
‘What a lot of accounts you can rattle off at a moment’s notice Lord Powerscourt! Do you think it’s because you’re a man?’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘I think it’s because of my brother-in-law. He’s a mighty financier in the City of London. When I called on him the other day he was surrounded by records of income and expenditure and ledgers and an enormous volume called the Book of Numbers which contained the secrets of all the other accounts.’
Now it was Mrs Dauntsey’s turn to smile. ‘It must be very useful having a brother-in-law who’s good with money, Lord Powerscourt. Nearly as good as, maybe better than having one who’s a doctor. You don’t have one who’s a medical man, do you?’
Powerscourt did a lightning audit of Lucy’s vast tribe of relations. Not one of them, he realized, had entered the medical profession.
‘No doctors,’ he said, ‘one or two naval men, plenty of soldiers, probably enough to form a small regiment. But to return to your husband, Mrs Dauntsey, do you have an idea in your mind of which kind of account he was talking about?’
‘I’ve thought about that a lot,’ she said, ‘particularly as you were coming to see me today. I don’t think it was our personal accounts and I don’t think it was to do with the accounts of his chambers. That clerk they had ran those as if it was the Bank of England. That leaves us with the estate and Queen’s Inn. I’m honestly not sure which one it would have been, I’m afraid. Alex kept the estate accounts very close to his chest.’
‘Can you remember exactly what he said, the words he used, Mrs Dauntsey?’
She frowned. Powerscourt thought she looked even more attractive when she frowned. ‘I can’t,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t decide if he said unusual, or strange, or worrying. It was something along those lines.’
Powerscourt groaned mentally as he thought of the problem of asking Barton Somerville if he could cast an eye over the Inn accounts. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said hopefully, ‘that he brought any of the Inn accounts down here, to look at them over the weekend, perhaps?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll have a look in his study and let you know, if that would be helpful. Perhaps we should move on to what you wanted to talk to me about, Lord Powerscourt. Then we could have some tea.’
Powerscourt felt rather nervous all of a sudden. ‘The matter is exceedingly delicate, Mrs Dauntsey. It touches on the most delicate and intimate of subjects, one we discussed last time, if you recall, about children and heirs and all sort of thing. If you have any objection, please tell me now.’
Elizabeth Dauntsey did not blush, or look down, or ask to be excused. ‘I am sure, Lord Powerscourt, that you would not be raising such a matter if you did not think it might be important.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Dauntsey, thank you. Sometimes, I must confess, I think this area may be of the utmost importance, at others I feel I may be wasting my time.’
Outside the sun had gone in and a fierce wind was whipping through the trees. Rain was now lashing against the windows of the Dauntsey drawing room.
‘Perhaps I could put my concern to you in the form of a fairy story, Mrs Dauntsey. I hope you like fairy stories?’
She smiled. ‘I have always been most devoted to fairy stories and plays about magic islands like Prospero’s in The Tempest or Illyria in Twelfth Night. Alex and I saw Twelfth Night a couple of months ago in Middle Temple Hall. It was the three hundredth anniversary of its first performance in 1602 in the very same building. It was extraordinary. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I’m holding you up.’
‘I went to that performance too. Perhaps we passed one another, like ships in the night.’ Both The Tempest and Twelfth Night, he remembered, featured shipwrecks. The current fate of Mrs Dauntsey? Certainly she didn’t look very like one shipwrecked now, he thought, her beauty shining through the pain of bereavement.
‘A long long time ago,’ he began, ‘when the world was young, there was a small kingdom perched high up in the mountains. These mountains were much higher than any we have in this country. Snow sat on the highest of them for most of the year and only the bravest of the young men climbed to the very top. Their customs were very different from ours. This, after all, was long before the invention of the telegraph or the spinning jenny, the telephone or the motor car, of paved roads and of great steamships. The people of the Mountain Kingdom, for that was how its name translated into English, had never seen the sea. But their land was rich. There were fertile valleys as well as the great summits. Their horses were beautiful and very fast and could race most of the day without being tired. The seasons were beautiful, Mrs Dauntsey. In spring the slopes of the mountains would be covered with flowers. In summer the sun shone but the streams that came down from the hills were always cool. In autumn the trees lost their leaves in a blaze of colour, yellows and gold and black and hectic reds. And in the winter the snow sat on the turrets and the battlements of the Royal Palace until it looked like fairyland.
‘The people were ruled over by a King, who was getting old at the beginning of our story, but he had a son, a handsome Prince who would succeed him. As the Prince grew to manhood he looked about him for a beautiful girl he could marry. None of the daughters of the nobles pleased him very much. He began to despair until a wise old man told him about the child of a king two little countries away, who was said to be very beautiful indeed. So our Prince rode off to the Kingdom of the Plain and fell in love with the Princess. Eight months later they were married. Two weeks after that the old King died in his sleep and the Prince and Princess became the King and Queen.’
You’d better get to the point, pretty soon, Powerscourt said to himself or you’ll be here all day.
‘For the first few years,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘everything seemed perfect in this highland Garden of Eden. The harvests were good, the people were contented, peace reigned inside and outside the little kingdom. There was only one shadow across perfection. The new King and Queen had no children. Now it was the custom in this land that each new King had to be the son of the previous one. Nephews, younger brothers, distant cousins just wouldn’t do. The custom dated back many centuries to a time when civil war had torn the country apart. On that occasion when the old King died, the courtiers tried to put his younger brother on the throne in his place. The nobles would have none of it, declaring him not to be the rightful sovereign and plunging the country into a civil war that lasted fifteen years.