Death on the Nevskii Prospekt (2 page)

Outside it was raining heavily, great drops splattering on to the lakes and soaking the cloaks and the fur caps of the Cossacks on their endless patrol outside the walls. Upstairs was quiet now.
The four daughters had gone to sleep. She could hear the faint steps of the guards as they patrolled the hallway on the lower floor. Suddenly Alix began to bleed, as she had not bled for months.
There was no child. As one of the Montenegrin sisters put it, a tiny ovule came out. Then her abdomen deflated, the pains stopped. The palace doctors confirmed that she was not pregnant. She was
suffering from an amnesia-related condition and should rest in bed, they told her. As they left her room she began to weep as though she had never wept before and would never be able to stop. On
and on into the terrible future, a future where she had thought there was hope but now there was only despair, her tears would flow. She might be able to staunch them for her children but it would
not be for long. This was the worst day of her life, in a life that had so many contenders for the position. She was humiliated. Alexandra had no doubt that word of what had happened would reach St
Petersburg in a day or two, and how society would laugh at her. They had never taken to her, those aristocratic women of the capital, and she had never taken to them. Now the story of her troubles
would shoot round the salons and she would be laughed to scorn. And inside the palace, she knew, there would be a campaign against Philippe, orchestrated by the doctors, amplified by the courtiers,
prosecuted by the uncles. She hoped her husband would hold firm. But you could never tell. She prayed through her tears, she prayed to the icon of the Madonna in her tiny private chapel: Mother of
God, hear my prayer, Mother of God hear my prayer. Don’t let them take Philippe away. Please don’t let them take him away from me. He’s my only hope.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was lying on the ground at the junction of the nave and the transept of Wells Cathedral, staring upwards. He was inspecting one of the most dramatic
features of any cathedral in Britain, the famous scissor arches that curved and swung and swept upwards towards the roof.

‘My goodness me, Lord Powerscourt,’ said the Dean, inspecting his prostrate visitor. ‘I know you asked me if you could lie on the floor, but I didn’t think you meant it.
Are you all right down there?’

‘Perfectly happy, Dean, thank you very much. I thought I could get a better idea of what things must have looked like when your tower began to lean and crack open back in thirteen hundred
and something or other.’

‘Thirteen hundred and thirty-eight,’ said the Dean with a faint note of irritation in his voice. He liked people to do their homework properly. ‘Anyway, I think you’ll
find the cracks were more apparent higher up than they were at ground level.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Dean,’ said Powerscourt, rising nimbly to his feet. ‘I have to go and have a tutorial from your librarian in a quarter of an hour.
He’s promised to tell me all about the cracks and your clever master mason William Joy who invented the arches and saved the building. The great curves, I’m told, transfer weight from
the west, where the foundations sank under the tower’s weight, to the east where they remained firm. I’m going to write it all down in my little black book.’

And Powerscourt patted one of his pockets which gave out a dull thud of reassurance. The Dean sighed as he looked around his kingdom of space and light.

‘I envy you, you know, Lord Powerscourt. You come here and you work hard and then you move on to another cathedral for your book. We’re left here with all the problems of the damp
and the lack of money and the lack of interest. I sometimes wish I’d stayed where I was as Vicar of St George’s in Bristol.’

Powerscourt looked closely at the Dean. ‘I think you’re wrong there, Dean,’ he said quietly. ‘Your problems may be formidable, the lack of money difficult, but you are
charged with the upkeep in fabric and liturgy and service of one of the most beautiful buildings in England. It is I, and many others, who envy you, you know.’

The Dean patted Powerscourt on the shoulder in a gesture that might have been a sign of friendship or a truncated blessing. He moved off towards the Chapter House.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had not intended to become a historian of cathedrals. He was just under six feet tall, clean-shaven, his head crowned with a set of unruly black curls, his eyes blue,
inspecting the world with irony and detachment.

For many years Powerscourt had worked in Army Intelligence in India. When he left the military he and his great friend and companion in arms Johnny Fitzgerald had embarked on a successful career
as investigators, solving murders and mysteries right across Britain. The year before, in 1902, he had been shot and very badly wounded at the end of a murder case involving one of London’s
Inns of Court. For days he had been on the brink of death, his wife Lady Lucy and a team of doctors and nurses in constant vigil by his side. Several months after the accident, when he was well
enough to travel and to climb a few hills, she took him away to a hotel in Positano in Italy to convalesce. Powerscourt loved Positano, hanging on to its cliff above the blue water, the streets
often replaced by stairs as you climbed towards the top, the foundations of the houses horizontal rather than vertical, or so the natives said, and the legends of pirates and abductions of Black
Madonnas that peopled its turbulent history. And then, on the fifth morning, in a scene Powerscourt later referred to as The Ambush, Lucy sat him down on the balcony of their sitting room that
looked out over the sea and took both of his hands in hers. Powerscourt had replayed the scene in his mind virtually every day since.

‘Francis, my love, I cannot tell you how happy we all are to see you getting better. I want to ask you something today. It is important, it’s very important to me.’

She paused and Powerscourt could see that she must have been rehearsing this speech in her mind for days if not weeks. ‘I don’t expect an answer today, Francis. I don’t expect
an answer tomorrow. Only when you’re ready.’

Powerscourt thought she was delaying the heart of her message. Only when he looked into the steadfast courage in Lucy’s blue eyes did he know that she was trying to spare him. He thought
he knew what she was going to say. He had been expecting it for some time.

‘Francis, I want you to give up detection, investigations, murders, mysteries, all of it. You know I have never tried to stop you in the past, I have never asked you and Johnny to abandon
a case because it was dangerous. But that last case with the bullet wound in the chest nearly killed you. You were unconscious for days. You didn’t see the agony for our children, for Thomas
and Olivia as they thought their Papa might be dead. Children don’t want that at the age of nine or seven. The twins would have had to grow up without a father at all. You’re a very
good father, Francis, no mother and no child could ask for better. But surely the greatest gift a father can give his children is to stay alive for them, to be there as they grow up, to help and
bless them on their way into the world. Dead fathers may be heroes, they may even be martyrs, but they don’t help their children with their homework or teach them how to play tennis or read
them bedtime stories. Children need fathers built into the brickwork of their lives, into the patterns of their days and the weeks of the passing years. They don’t want that contact to be
with some stone monument in a cemetery with rotting flowers lying at the side of the grave.’

Lady Lucy paused, her hands still locked into her husband’s, her eyes watching his face. ‘Think of the number of times you have nearly lost your life, my love. When you were
investigating the death of Prince Eddy, the Prince of Wales’s son, Johnny Fitzgerald was nearly killed because your enemies thought he was you as he was wearing your green cloak. When you
looked into the death of Christopher Montague the art critic, you and I were nearly killed in Corsica with mad people pursuing us down a mountain road and firing guns at us. In that cathedral case
they tried to kill you by dropping a whole heap of masonry on top of you from high up in the building. A few months ago you nearly breathed your last on the first floor of the Wallace Collection in
Manchester Square. It can’t go on, Francis. Please don’t be cross with me, my love, I’ve nearly finished. I don’t know if you remember the day you came back from the dead,
when Johnny Fitzgerald was reading Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and little Christopher smiled his first smile at you. We were all hand in hand then, by the side of your bed, you and me
and Thomas and Olivia and Christopher and Juliet, all joined in a circle of love. I want you to remember those faces, to think of them on that day, as you make your decision. I know it won’t
be easy, I know how much satisfaction you take from another mystery solved, from the knowledge that other people will now live because the murderer has been caught. I just want you to think of your
children’s faces and the love in their eyes and the relief in their hearts when their father came back to them. Please don’t let them go through that again. And remember, Francis, you
know it’s because we all love you so much.’

Lady Lucy removed her hands at the end. Suddenly, overcome by the strain and her memories of the days when death seemed so close in Manchester Square, she started to cry. Powerscourt held her in
his arms and said nothing at all. He had known it was coming, this request. He hadn’t known how difficult he would find it to give her an answer. For three days he stared at the dark blue
waters of the Mediterranean and took little walks along the coast as his strength returned. He was being asked to give up his career. If he had stayed in the army, he told himself, he would have
been exposed to much more danger than he was as an investigator. Was it unmanly to give up his own interests for those of his wife and children? He wondered what his male contemporaries would have
said about that. He tried to make a comparison, to draw up a balance sheet between Lady Lucy and his children’s happiness and the dangers of an undiscovered murderer roaming the streets of
London, and he knew he couldn’t do it.

He watched Lady Lucy a lot in those three days. He saw the joy in her face when she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t noticing. She’s so happy I’m alive, he said to
himself. He saw the grace of her movements as she walked into a room or crossed a street and he knew he was as much in love with her as he had been the day they were married. When he told her he
was giving up detection she ran into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. ‘Francis, I promise I won’t mention it again unless you do,’ she told him. ‘Now
let’s go and have a very expensive dinner and an early night.’

For a long time afterwards Powerscourt was to wonder if she chose her moment when he was still quite weak. Would he have given the same answer if he had been at full strength? For he found life
growing more difficult as they returned from Positano and back into their London routine. Only Powerscourt had no routine now. Buying more newspapers in the morning, taking longer and longer walks
in the afternoon, was no compensation for the lack of purpose in his life. He didn’t think you could enter your occupation in some survey or census as Father. It wouldn’t do. He began
to grow listless. He found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. He drank too much in the evening. Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald held an emergency meeting with
Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke, a great financier in the City of London. It was Johnny who came up with a possible answer.

‘Look here, Lady Lucy, William, I’ve got an idea. Remember what happened to me first of all. I used to be a bit wild, drinking too much when I wasn’t working with Francis on a
case. Now I’ve got my first bird book coming out soon and they want another two after that. I’m not saying that Francis should start watching the lesser peewit or the great praticole or
any of that stuff, but he’s so clever he could write books about lots of things. Maybe he could describe some of his greatest cases – but I suppose they’d be too delicate for
that.’

Johnny paused and took a sip of his glass of William Burke’s finest Chablis. ‘I know,’ he said, leaning forward in his excitement. ‘How about this? Do you remember during
our art case there was that character who was arrested for Christopher Montague’s murder and we had to get him off? Buckley, that’s the man’s name, Horace Aloysius Buckley. He was
going round the country attending Evensong in every cathedral in England when Francis and the police caught up with him in Durham, I think, no, it was Lincoln. Anyway, after he was acquitted there
was a party in that barrister Charles Augustus Pugh’s chambers, and I asked this Buckley person if there wasn’t a book about the cathedrals for the general reader, thinking that he
could have stopped home if there was and not spent all that money on the train fares. He said there wasn’t. So there we are. Francis becomes an author. Francis writes histories of cathedrals.
He’d like that. He dedicates one of the books to Mr Buckley, maybe. Bloody cathedrals are like bloody birds, they’re everywhere, England, France, Germany, Italy, there’s enough to
keep him going for years.’

So here was Powerscourt, many months after his trip to Positano, travelling nearly six hundred years back in time to learn about the scissor arches that saved Wells Cathedral.

He had grown to love the strange vocabulary of cathedrals, the ambulatories and clerestories, the chantry chapels and the Angel Choirs, the sacristies and the triforia, the transepts and the
cloisters, the choir stalls and the fonts, the Chapter Houses and the stained glass windows, the recent memorials to the dead in the Boer Wars, the tattered flags that had once led soldiers into
battle and death. He was still astonished at the sheer size of them, how twelfth-or thirteenth-century men could have built these massive monuments to their God. He had talked to contemporary
masons and carpenters and architects about their perspective on the buildings. He had tried to discover what the citizens of the cathedral cities thought of them when they were built, but no
records survived. He had talked to the present-day citizens, the shopkeepers, the tradesmen, the lawyers, the publicans, the Deans and Chapters, about what the cathedral meant to them now in the
first years of the twentieth century. For the citizens, he discovered, the cathedral was like a remote grandparent with eternal life, part of the fabric of their lives and their families’
lives as far back as their memories extended and the city records survived. The cathedral, in Gloucester or Hereford, in Salisbury or Norwich, brought honour to the city and growing numbers of
visitors to inspect its glories. But nowhere was it seen as a beacon of faith, a monument to man’s quest for the eternal or the spiritual. Cathedrals were friendly, cathedrals were beautiful,
cathedrals were awesome feats of construction, but they were not the light that shineth in darkness. Even the Deans, like the Dean of Wells, the men responsible for the running of these vast
buildings and the scheduling of their daily services, approached their task, Powerscourt felt, in the manner of men organizing the Post Office mail delivery system or planning the transportation of
an army across a continent. The cathedral, in Canterbury or Worcester or Exeter, must have seemed to its people at one early point to tower above society, to float next to heaven far above the
mundane concerns of the city. Once it was a miracle. Now it was just another cog in the wheel, like the town hall or the public library.