That night Lady Lucy added another prayer to her collection. She prayed that God would save and preserve her Francis, that He would keep him safe from the devices of his enemies, that he might live long as father to his children and husband of his wife.
The main court of Queen’s Inn looked like a convocation of ravens to Powerscourt as he crossed it at about nine thirty on Monday morning. Down every stairway they came, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in threes and fours, ravens in pack formation. Papers were checked, ties adjusted, fragments of dust flicked off gowns that had spent the last few days on a hook at the back of a door, wigs settled firmly in place. Then the convoy set off, arms flapping in their gowns, to the welcoming embrace of the Royal Courts of Justice or the Old Bailey. The whole procession must have taken ten or fifteen minutes, one or two latecomers actually running at full speed across the grass so as to reach their courtroom on time.
Edward was not among them. Edward was a solitary bird this morning, still devilling into the fraud case of Jeremiah Puncknowle, now expected to start later that week.
‘Can you spare me half an hour, Edward?’ asked Powerscourt respectfully as his young friend sat down with his papers.
‘Of course, sir,’ said Edward, who would have laid down his life for Powerscourt or his family.
Powerscourt led the way out of the Inn down the Strand and into a quiet corner of the Regent’s Hotel, looking over the river. He ordered coffee.
‘I apologize for all the secrecy, Edward. I very much need to ask you for some information. But I think it could be very dangerous for both of us if we were overheard in Queen’s.’
Edward looked sceptical for a moment.
‘Think of it like this, my friend,’ said Powerscourt, taking a large gulp of his coffee. ‘Suppose it was something to do with money that led to the two deaths. I know for a fact that Dauntsey was very worried about the accounts in the period before he died.’ Powerscourt took care not to let slip where his information had come from or that it might have related to accounts other than those of Queen’s Inn. ‘If the murders are to do with the money, then anybody else found inquiring too closely into the finances may well end up murdered too.’
Edward nodded. ‘You’re not going to get murdered, are you, Lord Powerscourt? I couldn’t bear that, not after the way you and your family have been so kind to me.’
Powerscourt grinned. ‘I have absolutely no intention of departing this life and leaving Lucy a widow and the children a life without a father. Why, there’s hardly been time so far to get to know the twins properly. Anyway, Edward, I am presuming that the accounts are not available for general inspection by members of the Inn. I believe that there must be some official who supervises the payments of rent for chambers and bills for food and so on, though that person would not necessarily know the true state of the accounts.’
‘There’s a new Financial Steward who came last year,’ said Edward. ‘The chap who did the job before, man by the name of Bassett, kept going till he was seventy-five before he stopped. For some reason they all stay for a very long time. There’s only been six of them in the Inn’s history.’
Six in around a hundred and forty years, Powerscourt said to himself. One every twenty-five years or so.
‘But I presume, Edward, that these stewards do not necessarily know the true picture of the accounts. They know all about the bread and butter stuff but not any investments that may have been made, or monies or property that may have been inherited.’
‘That’s true,’ said Edward. ‘There have been all kinds of rumours about the wealth of Queen’s. At one end of the scale it’s the poorest Inn of Court in London, at the other it owns most of Mayfair and half of Oxford Street. But what do you want me to do?’
‘Can you get me the names of all the people who have been benchers here and the dates of their death?’
Edward dropped his coffee cup on to the hard floor. The cup shattered into a thousand fragments. The coffee concentrated in one narrow stream and made for the nearby carpet. The whole room looked round and stared at Edward as if he had ruined their morning. ‘I’m t-t-t-terribly s-s-sorry,’ he stammered to the elderly maid who arrived at remarkable speed to clear up the mess.
Powerscourt, disturbed by Edward’s full-blown stuttering, decided to keep talking for a while until calm returned to his mind.
When the maid was out of earshot Powerscourt continued. ‘If we have those dates, we can look at the wills in Somerset House or wherever they keep them. The wills won’t tell us a great deal, but they will give us an indication of how much may have been left to the Inn, or perhaps to the benchers. Now, they may have invested five per cent of their income from the rents for years and years and made a tidy sum, we just don’t know and the wills won’t help, but they’ll be a start. Do you see my point, Edward?’
Edward nodded. Then it was his turn to grin. He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. ‘I was thinking how difficult it was going to be, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said. It was all right. He was in control of the words again. Sometimes they were just so elusive, so slippery. ‘Then I remembered. There’s a little guidebook they give to all prospective members, everybody who’s interested in coming here. I think they give it to visitors too, sometimes. It lists all the benchers in the back, and the dates they served. Some places retire people in their late sixties or early seventies. Not here. Once a bencher, you’re a bencher for life. It’s like the Supreme Court in America.’
‘So,’ said Powerscourt, suspecting that his job had suddenly become a lot easier, ‘can you remember, and please remember too that one particular answer to this question will make me very happy, are the dates given in years only, or do they include the month of the year as well?’
Edward thought for a moment. ‘You’re in luck, Lord Powerscourt. They must have been very concerned with accuracy. Very proper, I suppose, for the legal profession. You do get the month. And in most cases you get the day of the month as well.’
One hour later Powerscourt was staring at his list of names. There were, he had counted, just over a hundred benchers who had served Queen’s Inn since its foundation. Now he was in a basement room in Somerset House where details of all the wills up to 1858 were recorded in enormous dark brown ledgers. Clerks of the Court of Canterbury had entered the main points of each will as they reached them. Historians, necrophiliacs, any of the deranged who wanted this material had to copy the wills they wanted out of the big books. The room was in the shape of a rectangle with a long oak table in the centre. There were enough chairs for about twenty ghouls, Powerscourt saw, though only five were occupied this morning. A little light filtered through from glass skylights set into the ceiling that was the floor of the courtyard outside. The electric lights on the walls gave off a slightly yellowish tinge as if they weren’t connected properly to the supply. There was a strange smell, a compound of sweat and dirt and the musty odour that came from so many opened ledgers. Ferocious notices were pinned up everywhere, warning of the dangers of misbehaviour. Writing in the ledgers guaranteed life expulsion from the premises. Spilt ink was almost as serious with a ban of five years. Marking the covers of the ledgers with a penknife or sharp nib would bring a fine of twenty pounds. And, sitting at a high desk at the far end of the room, underneath a fading picture of Queen Victoria on her Jubilee, were the guardians of this Valley of Lost Things, two enormous curators with identical handlebar moustaches, wearing a Prussian-looking uniform of dark blue. They stared relentlessly at their customers with an expression of the deepest suspicion. Powerscourt thought they must be former sergeant majors, ferocious drill at the double in the Somerset House courtyard an extra punishment, perhaps, for the miscreants and defaulters among the ledgers.