‘I’m less mobile than I was even then,’ said the senior tutor, subsiding into his chair once more. ‘College is in much better shape, mind you. That terrible man who was Master then, he’s gone. Dropped dead in the Senate House Passage. I’d say the Good Lord called him home if I believed in the Good Lord. New Master believes in proper food. Thank God for that too. And proper wine. Place used to be like a second rate boarding school in the victualling department. Now it’s more like a London Club.’
Powerscourt smiled. He noticed that the old copies of The Times were still piled high around the old man’s chair. Soon they might be as high as his head.
‘Now then, Powerscourt, mustn’t keep you from your work.’ Gavin Brooke reached across to a little table and brought out a letter. He searched all his pockets for his spectacles before discovering that they too were on the table.
‘Reformation, you said in your first letter. That’s what you want to know about. We’ve got just the man for you here in college. Young fellow by the name of Broome, Jarvis Broome. It’s his special field of expertise. He’s expecting you now. And then you asked about a theologian. After lunch I’ve arranged for you to see our Dean. He’s very sound on all that sort of stuff.’
Powerscourt thanked the old man and was about to take his leave.
‘I was thinking the other day, Powerscourt, about my books,’ said the old man, gazing up at the shelves where a long row of works by Gavin Brooke, Senior Tutor and University Lecturer in Modern History, were prominently displayed. ‘At the time I wrote the early ones on Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, some of the participants were still alive. Did you know that the last surviving member of the British delegation to the Congress of Vienna didn’t pass on until 1885? Now they’re all dead, all those people I wrote about. Every single one of them.’ The old man shook his head.
‘Maybe you’ll meet them all on the other side, Mr Brooke. You could give history lectures up in heaven. I’m sure your subjects would flock along. They can’t have very much to do up there.’
‘Be on your way, young man. I tell you what they’d do, all those people I wrote about if I met them in heaven or hell. They’d probably be like all the other bloody historians I’ve met down here. They’d say I had the emphasis wrong. Even more likely they’d tear my books to shreds.’
Patrick Butler actually had three different proposals of marriage, carefully written out and currently incarcerated in his back pocket. First he had gone to the poetry section of the County Library and made copious notes. Then, late one evening when his reporters had all gone home, he composed them in his office surrounded by the normal detritus of his trade. The first was heavily dependent on the love sonnets of Shakespeare. The second was equally reliant on the work of John Donne, though even Patrick, who was not easily shocked, had been a little embarrassed at some of the language employed by the Dean of St Paul’s. At least he hadn’t ventured as far as Rochester. And the third was entirely his own work. Cynics might have said that it sounded too like one of his own leading articles in the Grafton Mercury, but it was late by this stage and Patrick was growing tired.
‘Look, Anne,’ he said, standing by a rectangular row of bricks, now only a couple of feet high and almost invisible in the long grass. ‘This is where the high altar must have been. The choir must have been down there by that wall on the left.’
‘Are you sure, Patrick?’ said Anne, feeling that this was not after all a particularly romantic spot.
‘I think so,’ Patrick replied, leading her further down towards the remains of the nave. ‘And I think they’ve put the Lady Chapel at the wrong end, if you see what I mean. It’s right down at the far end. I think it should be up here somewhere. Maybe the masons looked at their plan the wrong way round.’ The Lady Chapel, he thought, that might be better for his purpose. At least a lot of it was still standing.
Lord Francis Powerscourt was trying to work out how many times he must have walked this short route from the porter’s lodge to the last staircase by the river in the three years he had lived there during his time in Cambridge. Five or six times a day say forty times a week, three hundred and fifty a term, a thousand a year, three thousand times altogether. He was passing the hall and the kitchens now where the young Powerscourt, rather nervously, had intoned the Latin Grace before dinner. Quid quid appositum est, aut apponetur, Christus benedicere dignetur in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. The words came back to him automatically. Powerscourt didn’t think he would have described the food in his time as being like that served in the clubs of London, certainly not in any of the ones he belonged to. It was much worse than the second rate boarding school derided by his former tutor. Here was the staircase. He walked a few paces forward and peered down at the river, still meandering in its sluggish way along the Backs. To his left was King’s where the famous Chapel was hidden from sight by the buildings of Clare. To his right the solid mass of Trinity and the glory of Wren’s great Library inside.
Jarvis Broome was a handsome young man, cleanly shaven, with a large collection of ancient volumes stacked in neat piles around his desk. He showed Powerscourt to a chair with a view of the college lawns and a brief sliver of river.
‘Gavin Brooke tells me you want to know about the Reformation, Lord Powerscourt. Is there anything in particular I can help you with? I’m writing a book on the subject, though God knows when I’ll ever finish it.’
There, thought Powerscourt, is the world’s difference between the scholar and the journalist. For Patrick Butler, surely more or less the same age as Jarvis Broome, not finishing an article, not finishing all the copy for his paper would be professional suicide. For Jarvis Broome, finishing too soon, finishing without having read all the available material, finishing without coming to a considered judgement, would leave him open to the savagery of his peers.
‘I should explain, Mr Broome, that I am investigating a series of murders in a cathedral, Compton to be precise. They are about to celebrate one thousand years of worship in the cathedral, or the abbey, as it was, this Easter Sunday.’
Powerscourt did not give the young scholar any details of how the murders had been committed. ‘What I would like to know,’ he went on, wondering how long it would be before Jarvis Broome had a shelf full of his own books like Gavin Brooke, ‘is how much opposition there was at the time. Not so much to the question of the King’s divorce and the establishment of Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England, as to the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’
‘Now that is a most interesting question, Lord Powerscourt.’ The young man got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room, in exactly the same fashion, Powerscourt noted wryly, as he had done when writing his history essays over twenty years before.
‘I’ll try to be brief, Lord Powerscourt. I could go on all day about this. Let me say, as a preamble, that history is always written by the victors, as I am sure you know. I am certain that there was much more opposition to the various moves in the course of the Reformation than we know about. Some of the opposition will have fallen away, like water through a colander, as it were, and we shall never recover it, we shall never find out about it at all.’
A pair of college gardeners were trimming the edges of the lawns outside. Through the slightly open window Powerscourt could hear a couple of thrushes singing happily in the Fellows’ Garden on the other side.
‘Three points, I think, are worth considering,’ said Broome. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the angry complaint of a fellow undergraduate of his, also studying history, but with a different tutor. ‘Is it because bloody Gaul was divided into three parts?’ he had said bitterly. ‘Every time I take an essay to the wretched man there are always three points to be considered. Why not two, or four or five, maybe even seven? Why not just one, for God’s sake? Why is it always three?’