Mrs Dauntsey’s enormous butler ushered him into the drawing room. His mistress, still looking radiant in black, was sitting peacefully by the fire reading a novel. Powerscourt felt nervous as the pleasantries were exchanged. This was the third time he had been entertained in this house and, while the nature of his mission was not as delicate this time as it had been on his previous visit, it was still fraught with great potential for embarrassment. What if his theory about the mysterious visitor was wrong? Suddenly what had seemed so certain in Manchester Square seemed vaguer, less likely in this drawing room in Calne.
‘Mrs Dauntsey,’ he began, ‘yet again you have in front of you a man with a delicate subject to discuss. I must ask your forgiveness in advance if my theories turn out to be wrong.’
‘Have you come with some more fairy stories, Lord Powerscourt? I did enjoy the last one, most of the time. I was never sure about the end. Endings can be quite difficult in fairy stories, don’t you think?’
‘They can indeed, Mrs Dauntsey,’ Powerscourt smiled at his hostess, ‘but I’m afraid there is no fairy story this time.’
‘Perhaps there will be a surprise instead, Lord Powerscourt. Please carry on.’
Powerscourt took a deep breath. ‘I do not know if you are aware of it, Mrs Dauntsey, but on the day of the feast there was a mysterious visitor to Queen’s Inn. Every single member of the institution and everybody who attended the feast was questioned about who or what they had seen by the police.’
Powerscourt suddenly remembered that he had not mentioned his theory about the mysterious visitor to Detective Chief Inspector Beecham. Maybe he was failing in his duty. But he felt that if the police knew Mrs Dauntsey had been in her husband’s room a few hours before he died, she would be arrested immediately.
‘Little is known about the visitor. The person did not speak. They were seen in the vicinity of your husband’s rooms and they were seen again leaving the Inn by one of the porters where they did not say goodnight.’
He looked at her very carefully. There were no signs of nervousness at all. Maybe she was just a very good actress.
‘It only occurred to me very recently, Mrs Dauntsey, that the reason the mysterious visitor did not speak was related to gender. To speak would be to betray the fact that the visitor was female, not male. This was Viola turned into Cesario, come not to the Middle Temple Hall on Twelfth Night, but to Queen’s Inn on the day of the feast. I put it to you, Mrs Dauntsey, as the barristers say, that you were the mysterious visitor, that you walked into Queen’s Inn dressed as a man and that you visited your husband in his rooms. Am I right?’
Mrs Dauntsey remained silent for some moments. Powerscourt though he could see tears forming in her eyes. But she brushed them aside.
‘Yes,’ she said very quietly, ‘it was me.’ There was another period of silence.
‘Mrs Dauntsey,’ Powerscourt said, trying to be as emollient as he could, ‘I think it would be best if you told me the truth, all of it. I do not believe you poisoned your husband,’ – Are you sure about that, a small inner voice asked him insistently – ‘but I think your position is difficult. Had you owned up to being the mysterious visitor, or told us that you went to see your husband on that day, your position would still be problematic, but not as awkward as it is now. You see, the police do not know that you were the mysterious visitor. They have very suspicious minds. The fact that you have concealed this information up till now will leave them thinking you have something to hide. They may assume that you were the murderer. Juries have been known to convict on flimsier evidence than that, I assure you.’
Elizabeth Dauntsey rose from her chair and went to stand by the window. Even in her hour of difficulty her back was as straight as a soldier on parade. The rain was still falling, racing down the glass and dropping with a plop on the gravel beneath. One or two deer could be seen in the distance running quite fast from one place of shelter to another.
‘I wish I could make up fairy stories like you, Lord Powerscourt. Maybe that would make life easier.’
‘Take your time, Mrs Dauntsey, there’s no rush.’
She came back to her chair and looked into the fire for a while. ‘It all has to do with children,’ she said finally, ‘with Alex’s wish to have descendants for Calne and with my inability to give them to him. I’m sure he wouldn’t have married me if he’d known I was barren.’
A small trickle of tears broke through her defences and ran slowly down her cheeks. Powerscourt offered a handkerchief. ‘Why do men always have clean handkerchiefs, Lord Powerscourt? It’s always been a mystery to me that they’re never dirty.’ Elizabeth Dauntsey just managed a slight smile.
‘We’d reached the end of the road as far as my having children was concerned, Alex and I,’ she went on. ‘As you know from your last visit, we, or rather I, had tried everything possible to become pregnant. That wasn’t going to work. So Alex was going to try and find somebody else.’
This somebody, Powerscourt reflected, had managed to pass completely undetected through the filter of Lucy’s relations. This was most irregular. He waited.
‘About two months ago . . .’ Elizabeth Dauntsey paused and stared into the flames once more. ‘I’m sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I haven’t told this to anybody before, about two months ago, maybe more, Alex thought he had found somebody. She was a young woman in good health, she was married to a much older man, she had no children of her own and her brother played cricket for Middlesex. I’m sure that last fact must have been an important factor in Alex’s calculations.’
For the first time Powerscourt thought he detected a hint of sarcasm, dislike maybe, towards her late husband. He wondered about the different Elizabeth Dauntseys presented to him each time he came, as if she was like one of those Russian dolls with different characters packed inside each other.
‘We talked about it a lot,’ Elizabeth Dauntsey went on. ‘Alex kept me informed about what was going on, not in detail, just the broad picture. And then, the night before he died, Alex and I had the most enormous row.’
Powerscourt dreaded to think what the police might make of that.
‘We hardly ever rowed, Lord Powerscourt. And this one went on for a very long time. You see, Alex had arranged to go away for the weekend with this woman. As far as I know, it would have been the first time. They were going as husband and wife to some hotel on the Thames where Alex knew the owner so there wouldn’t be any questions asked. Her husband was going to be away at a medical conference.’
‘Is he a doctor?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘Yes, he is. He’s a Professor of something or other medical, I can’t remember what. That’s what the row was about, not about the husband, but about Alex going away with this woman. I knew why Alex was doing it. Part of me approved of it. But the other part of me couldn’t bear it. I shouted at him over and over again that he was betraying me, that he would destroy our marriage, that it would break my heart. The worst thing was that he never spoke. He hardly said a word, this man who earned his living by speaking and arguing in the courts of law. When we stopped rowing he went off to sleep in some other part of the house and he left very early the next morning. So if I hadn’t gone to see him that afternoon, I would never have seen him alive again. I had to tell him, you see,’ her voice began to crack slightly, ‘that I still loved him, that he had my blessing for the weekend, that he was to ignore anything I said the night before. I wanted everything right between us. I couldn’t bear it when he was angry with me.’
She stared at Powerscourt as if he could make things better.