‘Time went by, some more years passed and still the King had no heirs. The nobles became restless and began to plot among themselves as nobles always do. The citizens were fearful of the bloodshed that might follow his end. The King went on a journey, accompanied only a by a few faithful followers, to a temple in the mountains where the holy men lived. They listened to his story and told him to travel further on still, up into the high mountains. When he had lived among the snows for ten days, he was to return to the holy place for his answer.
‘On his return, the holy men gave the King their message. Now in this kingdom there were no laws about relations between the sexes, only customs. So it was the custom for husband and wife to be faithful, one to the other, but it was not a legal obligation. The Queen, they told the King, must lie with your brother, or any of your cousins, until she be with child. And you also must lie with her so nobody will know that you may not be the father. The peace of the kingdom demands this, they said to the King. For if you have no son and heir of your own blood, what will happen to the kingdom?’
Powerscourt stopped. Elizabeth Dauntsey looked at him carefully.
‘Don’t tell me the story stops there, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, ‘with the King still up there in the mountains.’
‘I’m afraid that’s where the manuscript runs out, Mrs Dauntsey, I’m truly sorry.’
She rang the bell and ordered tea. ‘Well, let me see if I could help you out, Lord Powerscourt, with the story, I mean. I’m not a storyteller like yourself and I could only speak for the Queen, I think, not for any of the other characters.’
She stopped and a faint twinkle came into her eyes. ‘How can I put this? I think my contribution to the story, speaking for the Queen of course, is that it is always very important for a wife, especially if she is a Queen and married to a King, to obey her husband at all times.’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘How very well you put it, Mrs Dauntsey, and what an important moral to take from the story.’ By God, it’s true, he said to himself, those faint reports from Lucy’s relations must be true. Where does that leave my investigation, he asked himself. His brain was reeling.
‘Tea, Lord Powerscourt?’ she said as the butler departed once again to the wider realms of Calne. ‘You must be thirsty after telling all those stories.’ Powerscourt saw that the subject had been closed by the arrival of the Darjeeling. He felt oddly relieved. He wondered briefly which of the characters in Twelfth Night Elizabeth Dauntsey might have been. Cesario? Who certainly had been shipwrecked. Probably even in Powerscourt’s biased eye, she was too old for that. Olivia perhaps, with her great household and unruly relations? Certainly, he thought, you could hide Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek well out of sight in the dusty recesses of Calne. She brought him back from his daydream.
‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, somebody informed me the other day that you have had additions to your own family. Is it true that you now have twins?’
Edward had punted back to Folly Bridge very slowly. There was no sign of their previous adversaries and no more rude comments about Edward standing at the wrong end. Sarah leant back on the cushions, her hand trailing in the water, and peered at Edward through semi-closed eyes. Eventually the motion of the boat sent her off to sleep. Edward smiled down at his passenger, so innocent as she lay there, her head slightly to one side, her red hair bright on the cushion. Then they had walked through Christ Church, marvelling at the size of Tom Quad. London’s Inns of Court could hold their heads up against most Oxford colleges but this quadrangle had no equal near the Strand. Lots of politicians, Edward informed Sarah, had been at Christ Church, Canning and Peel and Gladstone and Lord Salisbury.
‘Would you like to have been to Oxford, Edward?’ asked Sarah, staring at a group of undergraduates about to go into Hall. She thought Edward would look nice in one of those gowns.
‘I don’t think so, Sarah. I’m not sure I would fit in. Most of these people are very rich.’
It was only in the train back to Paddington that Sarah raised her fears about Queen’s Inn. They were alone in their compartment and Edward was polishing off the remains of the sandwiches and the apples from the picnic.
‘How long do you think it will be, Edward,’ she said rather sadly, ‘before they catch this murderer?’
‘Oh dear,’ said Edward, ‘I hoped a day in Oxford would take your mind off it all. I know it’s easy for me to say it, but you mustn’t worry. Nobody’s going to want to harm you. Lord Powerscourt is one of the best investigators in the country and that policeman is very sharp. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’
‘It’s not me I’m that worried about so much, Edward,’ said Sarah, her eyes large and bright as she looked across at him. ‘Who worked very closely with Mr Dauntsey? Who worked closely with Mr Stewart? Who must know a lot of the secrets they knew? Who is the best-informed person in the Inn about that huge fraud case? In every case, Edward, the answer is you. I’m so worried you’re next on their list.’
‘That’s ridiculous, Sarah,’ said Edward, secretly touched by the amount of her concern – surely she must care for him, maybe he should hold her hand. ‘I’m not going to be on anybody’s list. It’s absurd. I’m in more danger crossing the road.’
But all of Edward’s protests came to nothing. Sarah remained convinced he was in great danger. An offer by Edward to come and meet her mother the following week did something to calm her. He may not like being interrogated by my mother, she thought, but at least he won’t get killed.
It was no longer enjoying the pride of place it had occupied at the time of Powerscourt’s last visit to his brother-in-law William Burke, but it still took a fairly prominent position. It sat in the centre of the lowest row of bookshelves to the left of Burke’s fireplace. It was taller than the others and its black cover gave the Book of Numbers an air of great authority. Powerscourt wondered if the benchers of Queen’s Inn had a similar volume, a financial Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant of the Inn’s accounts.
‘Alexander Dauntsey, William,’ Powerscourt began, ‘the chap who got poisoned, was apparently very worried about the accounts before he died.’
Burke’s reply was the same as Powerscourt’s had been down in Calne. ‘Which ones, Francis? Estate? Personal? Chambers? Queen’s Inn?’
‘Exactly the same question that I asked. Two were more or less eliminated, his chambers’ because their clerk is so efficient, and the personal ones because they were usually in good health. So that leaves us with the estate and the Inn. Mrs Dauntsey couldn’t remember which one it was.’
‘Strange how even very intelligent women often get a mental blank about money, Francis. Take your sister, my beloved wife, highly intelligent woman, not the slightest idea about money.’
‘Some of them must be good at it, William. Women, I mean. Exceptions that prove the rule. Anyway, the reason I am here is to ask you which of those two you think more likely and what kind of irregularities we might be talking about that would worry a cool and experienced barrister like Dauntsey. The estate accounts or the accounts of the Inn?’
William Burke took a careful sip of his white port. ‘This really is guessing in the dark, Francis. But I think it is less likely to do with the estate accounts. They will follow the same sort of pattern year after year. There may be some exceptional event like a bad harvest. But even then they work like a see-saw.’
‘See-saw, William?’ Powerscourt had a mental image of his daughter going up and down on one. The twins, when their time came, could have an end each.
‘Sorry, see-saw in the sense that a bad harvest is bad for the people whose crops fail, but very good for those whose don’t because the prices go through the roof. I don’t think there have been any natural disasters that could have affected things . You didn’t see any sign of natural catastrophe down there in Kent, Francis? Vesuvius-type eruptions? Fire and brimstone consuming the cities of the plain? Death of the firstborn?’