Death Called to the Bar Read Online Free PDF Page B

terrible perils was herself a spinster of over fifty. There was much speculation among the girls that some such error might have wrecked her life, a long affair with a
married man who refused to leave his wife perhaps, a lover who ran away and deserted her at the advanced age of twenty-eight.
    Sarah had been very fond of Dauntsey. She adored the sound of his voice, quite light, not one to dominate a courtroom by sheer power of delivery, but it had great variety. It danced, she used to
say, as he leant back in his chair, feet caressing the desk, and dictated the course of an opening or closing speech. Unlike many of his colleagues, he seemed to find dictating the most natural
thing in the world. Sarah knew that he always had one eye on the movement of her pencil, waiting till it stopped before he carried on. He had charm, lots of charm, Sarah thought, remembering how
polite he always was and how he took the time and trouble to inquire after her sick mother.
    Had Dauntsey or any of the other barristers known how central a role Queen’s Inn in general or their chambers in particular played in Mrs Bertha Henderson’s life they would have been
astonished. Every evening Sarah had worked there she was quizzed on the day’s events when she went home. It wasn’t intrusive, the questioning, it wasn’t rude but it was
persistent. Her mother was almost bedridden with arthritis in her early fifties and could only just get around their small house in Acton. She also suffered from a rare form of cancer which meant
she might only have two or three years left to live. Queen’s Inn had become an alternative world, a world she could escape to in her imagination during the daytime when the external world of
London’s shops and buses and traffic and movement was closed to her. She could have told you, Mrs Henderson, what prints were on the wall of every room on her daughter’s staircase. She
could have told you what cases the various gentlemen were currently engaged on. Sarah would bring law journals home so her mother could read about her heroes in print. By now, her daughter
suspected, she could have carried out a perfectly respectable prosecution or defence in a simple case in the county court. Queen’s had become for her a serial story like the ones they
published in such quantities in the women’s magazines she read so avidly.
    Mrs Henderson had said to Sarah that she would have liked to attend Dauntsey’s funeral. But, she went on, she had had a trial run the day after his death was announced to see if she could
walk to the end of their road. Just over halfway down, only fifty yards from her house, she reported, her legs simply gave out and a kind stranger had had to help her back to the sanctuary of her
home. Could Sarah, therefore, be extra vigilant in reporting the proceedings? Sarah had smiled and promised a detailed account whenever the funeral might be.
    Sarah was working on a secret treat for her mother in the springtime. There was only one snag in the scheme. It involved a wheelchair, and wheelchairs, even the mention of wheelchairs, brought
her mother to rage and despair. Sarah always wanted to cry when this happened. She felt so sorry for her mother. Wheelchairs, Sarah knew, spelt the end in her mother’s mind, the end of
activity, the end of choice, the start of dependence, the start of the long, maybe short, decline into the final immobility. But if the wheelchair enabled her mother to be whisked round
Queen’s Inn, to see the various courts and the rooms where the lawyers who now peopled her imagination actually lived, what a delight that would be. With luck they could make the short
journey to the Inner and Middle Temple and her mother could rest in the beauty of Temple Gardens and watch the majesty of the law stalk past her en route to the Central Criminal Court. What a day
that would be! Sarah had one brother and one sister, both older, both living away from home. To her great irritation the