possibly help with their inquiries. He picked up a fresh sheet of paper and wrote ‘Silkworkers Feast’ at the top. Then he began writing an account of what happened hour by hour until the murderer struck. If you were in a job where details mattered, he said to himself as he reached eleven o’clock and the Haut Brion began to flow more freely, the least you can do is to make sure that your facts are right.
Lord Francis Powerscourt was with his brother-in-law William Burke in his vast office in the City of London once more. Burke was seated behind an enormous desk thick with files in neat bundles that made him look like a First Sea Lord or the Viceroy of India.
‘For God’s sake, William,’ said Powerscourt, ‘can’t you come and sit in one of these chairs by the fire. You’re too terrifying behind that thing. You look like some American tycoon about to ruin his enemies.’
Burke laughed. He took up a sheet or two of paper from his desk and joined Powerscourt on the other side of the marble mantelpiece.
‘I have some interesting news for you, Francis, about our friends the Silkworkers. Remaining liverymen still alive, no further deaths overnight, I trust?’
‘All left alive present and correct, as far as I know,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I wouldn’t vouch for tomorrow, mind you. Or the day after.’
Burke grunted and fished around in his pockets for a pair of spectacles.
‘There are two ways of looking at what’s been happening here, Francis. One benign, the other sinister. You can’t take a view until I tell you what’s been going on. The Silkworkers have been in existence since the early fourteenth century. Nobody is certain about the exact date of their foundation but various records begin to appear after thirteen thirty-eight or thereabouts. To understand the current controversy in the company, you have to go back to a little known codicil to a document believed to have been written in thirteen fifty, just after the Black Death of thirteen forty-eight. This wretched codicil was only discovered in the Silkworkers archives three or four years ago. All kinds of people have been excavated from their lairs to pronounce judgement on it, university professors, cathedral librarians, every archivist who could be found within a twenty-mile radius of Temple Bar. All of them, with one exception, say it is genuine. I’ll tell you about the exception in a moment.’
Burke helped himself to a large cigar from a brass and silver humidor on the table in front of him. ‘You have to imagine, these wise men say, what it must have been like just after the Black Death. Thousands and thousands of Londoners were dead. Contemporaries said you could catch the stench of rotting bodies far outside the city walls. The dead were piled so high on some streets that the survivors had to tread on the corpses to continue their journeys. Think most of all, the professors and the rest of them say, of the effect it must have had on men’s minds. Their God, they felt certain, had deserted them. Perhaps this was the beginning of the end, the Book of Revelation come to Lombard Street and Cornhill, the number of the beast replacing all the numbers they had in their early ledgers. Maybe the plague would return over and over again until there was nobody left alive.’
Burke paused and blew an enormous smoke ring up to his intricately plastered ceiling. ‘With me so far, Francis? You are? Not too difficult? Good. Now to this wretched codicil. Nobody knows who drew it up or to what document it was attached. The bearded ones believe it may have been part of a new version of the Silkworkers’ constitution. Certainly the memory of the Black Death must have been paramount in the minds of those who wrote it. I asked one of the few experts who seemed to be under seventy years of age to make me a modern translation. I couldn’t make much sense of the original.’
Burke picked out one sheet of paper from his pile and began to read.
‘“As we have suffered most grievously in person and in property from the recent onslaught of the Great Mortality” — that’s the Black Death to you and me — “we, the Wardens of the Company, have introduced this codicil to assist our successors in time of plague, pestilence or peril. At such times, if the Prime Warden and his three colleagues deem that there is a great danger or threat to the persons, property or families of the Silkworkers, they may take such steps as they think fit to safeguard those persons, property or families for posterity. Thus the ancient misteries of the Silkworkers,” I know you’re going to ask, Francis, misteries comes from the Latin ministerium which means occupation, “may be preserved for the future to rank alongside the other misteries in the City of London. May Almighty God bless our deliberations at this time and preserve us in body and mind until the last days.”’
Burke laid down his cigar and blew a further smoke ring in the direction of a Lawrence portrait of an earlier City grandee on the wall.
‘That’s it, Francis. Except there’s a final paragraph after “the last days”, like a postscript. “Any changes proposed to the government of the Company in times of plague, pestilence or peril must be supported by the approbation of eight out of ten of the membership of the Company, their names or their marks to be recorded in the Company records. Any monies raised may be placed in property or other places. If the danger is great and the Lord of Hosts appears to have abandoned his people for the second time, the Company may be broken up, the monies divided in the following fashion: one half to the Prime Warden, one third to the Council, the remains divided among the membership according to their length of membership in the company.”’
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that must have set the cat among the pigeons when the Prime Warden realized the implications. Tell me this, William, what do your wise men think that reference to “have suffered most grievously in person and in property ” means right at the beginning?’
‘If they’re honest with themselves, they don’t know. A couple of the professors say it refers to the collapse of property prices at the time of the Black Death. If your friends and relations are dying all around, you’re not going to put your house up for sale. Prices would have collapsed, they say.’
‘They may just be reading the present back into the past,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You said earlier, William, that there was a great argument going on among the Silkworkers. Where does this codicil come in?’
‘Well, the key section is the bit about the authorities being able to take such action as they think fit if there is a great danger from plague, pestilence or peril. The party for change, led by our mutual friend, Sir Peregrine, think that the threat of war with Germany is such a moment of peril. They point out, quite rightly, that were that to happen, the value of the Silkworkers’ assets would fall like a stone thrown from a high building. It would be a financial catastrophe. Why not, says Sir Peregrine, sell up now and buy everything back when the war’s over and prices are still very low. They’d make a killing, a real killing, I tell you. I’ve told you before how rich these livery companies are. They’ve got properties all over the City, some of them maybe dating back to the Black Death itself, who knows. When you join the Silkworkers as a full member, not like the old boys in the almshouses, you have to promise to leave either monies or securities or property to the company in your will. There are millions of pounds on the table here.’
‘So Sir Peregrine is proposing that they sell up. Fifty per cent to the Prime Warden sounds a pretty good deal to me, William. And what’s to stop any of them taking all their share for themselves and never giving any back to the company when the peril or pestilence has ended?’
‘What suspicious minds you people have,’ said Burke, shaking his head sadly, ‘but as it happens, you’re more or less right. Three months ago, I think, Sir Peregrine proposed this vast sell-off of all their assets. He’s been canvassing for votes ever since. They’ve got a rather unusual membership, the Silkworkers. Most of the livery companies don’t want to have too many members on board — you don’t want to be paying for elaborate feasts for five hundred or more. But the Silkworkers have an ordinance that says only Silkworkers can be admitted to their almshouses. Rather than go to the bother of changing their statutes, they simply enlist everybody who isn’t a Silkworker already into the company when they are taken in at places like your Jesus Hospital.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ Powerscourt was leaning forward, ‘that all the old boys in the Jesus Hospital in Marlow are members of the Ancient Mistery of Silkworkers? That they all have a vote, for God’s sake?’
‘They do.’
‘You’re not telling me that all the pupils at Allison’s up in Norfolk are members with votes too?’
‘They’re too young,’ said Burke, ‘but I bet many of the masters are members. I’m virtually certain that the late bursar must have belonged.’
Powerscourt rose to his feet and began pacing up and down the room, as he did so often in his own drawing room in Markham Square. Walking the quarterdeck was how Lady Lucy referred to it.
‘I think you said earlier, William, that one of your experts had doubts about the authenticity of the codicil?’
Burke laughed. ‘Yes, and a most entertaining fellow he is too. Professor of History at Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity, said by his contemporaries to be the brightest interpreter of the past since Thomas Babington Macaulay. Name of Tait, Selwyn Augustus Tait. He’s thought to be unable to write a word of his books until he’s taken a pint
