Justice Hall (10 page)

“My other brother, Lionel, was as I said six years younger than I. Lionel was sickly as a child. Every nursery ailment laid him low, every cold threatened pneumonia. When I entered Cambridge, just after his twelfth birthday, he had some foul illness the doctors thought might well carry him away. Instead, it seemed to burn him clean, and when I came home for Christmas I found him outside, building a snowman in the freezing cold, with Ogilby fretting nearby.

“He grew stronger physically, went off to school, did sports, even. All seemed well, until he entered Cambridge.

“There he did what is called ‘falling in with a bad lot.’ That is the other side of an incestuously tight society: Once a young man falls in with a group of young men interested only in gambling and drink, there is no escape.

“He was sent down, of course. Rather than coming here, he went to London. Shortly before my cousin came out to Palestine for good, Lionel was involved in some huge scandal, and had to leave the country. He spent the next twelve years in Europe, moving from place to place with his friends, wintering in the south of France. He only came back to England once during the following years, when Father died in 1903. Lionel himself died in the spring before the War—his lungs, apparently, weakened by drugs and drink and an accumulation of careless living.”

Marsh took a deep breath. “However. Just after the new year of 1914 Lionel wrote our brother—the head of the family, of course—to say that he had married and his wife was expecting a child. He asked Henry—told him, actually, in no uncertain terms; I’ve seen the letter—to increase his monthly stipend to account for his wife and the child. Henry went immediately to see this for himself, and found Lionel living in Montmartre with an older woman who looked little more than an amateur whore. But they had a marriage licence, and the woman’s condition was obvious, so he came away. What could he do?

“Henry and his wife Sarah wrote to me, of course. I might have tried to do something about it, but by the time the letter caught up with me, it was accompanied by a telegram informing me of Lionel’s death.

“The child was born three months after the marriage, six weeks before Lionel died. A boy; Thomas is his name. He is now nine and a half, has lived his whole life in France, and none of us has ever set eyes on him. None of us has any idea what kind of person he will be.”

He took another careful breath. “Which is why he and his mother are coming to London on Tuesday. Phillida and I will go down to meet them the following day. I need to look at the child. It’s not that I mind in the least supporting the two of them—Lionel wished it, after all—but since Thomas is next in the line of succession after me, I must at least find out if he bears any resemblance to my brother.”

Marsh had been studying his boots as he talked, but now he looked up, first at me, then at Holmes, one dark eyebrow raised quizzically.

“I for one should be rather surprised if he does. You see, by all accounts, from the time he left Justice to take up his place at Cambridge, Lionel was what you might call flamboyantly disinterested when it came to women.”

   Marsh’s ambulatory tale had taken a fair time in the telling, interrupted as it was by the antics of the dogs, the side-trip to inspect the herd of deer, another diversion to see the state of the sheep, and occasional stretches when Marsh had simply pulled away to gather his thoughts, or his strength. We had trudged more or less continuously cross-country for a good two hours, although we had only travelled three or four miles in a straight line from where we had begun. The sun was not far from the horizon, Alistair looked ready to drop, and I really thought it time to turn back. Even the dogs had ceased to bounce.

Marsh, however, had other plans. We had for some time been coming up at an oblique angle on the high wall that surrounded Justice; as we entered into its very shadow, the duke dug into his pocket and brought out a key the length of his hand.

“I need a drink,” he stated, and made for a stout iron gate set into the stones.

I could only stare at his back, hunched over the lock. Holmes was every bit as bemused as I.

“Not a statement I’d have expected to hear coming from that man,” he murmured. Then he added, “However, I can agree with the sentiment.”

The iron gate debouched on a narrow, overgrown path leading through some decidedly unmanicured woods. Sunlight glinted sporadically through the trees, and I wondered if we were planning to negotiate the return journey by torchlight. Sunset came early, in November.

The narrow swath of woods ended at a wooden fence and its flimsy gate, both of them shaggy with lichen. The gate’s hinges, however, opened without so much as a squeak; I deduced that this was a regular escape for the seventh Duke of Beauville. The lane we found on the other side of the gate led into a village; Marsh, a man of his word, led us straight to the public house.

It was an inn, two storeys of ancient, leaning ramble with a faded sign proclaiming DUKE’S ARMS hanging over the door through which we all, even Marsh, had to duck our heads. The room inside was warm and smokey, low of ceiling and even dimmer than the dusk outside. Brass gleamed around the bar, however, and the rush-scattered stones beneath our feet had none of the reek of long-spilt beer.

Half a dozen patrons sat in two groups; judging by the nods and greetings they exchanged with our leader, this was by no means his first visit here in his four months of residence at Justice. I, the only woman in the place, created more of a stir than the entrance of the duke himself, and the only curious looks were directed at Holmes and me. The dogs made a bee-line for the enormous fireplace and collapsed into a satisfied heap on the black hearthstones, quite obviously at home there.

Marsh turned to us. “A pint? Sherry? They could probably do you a cocktail, if it wasn’t anything too complicated.”

Holmes agreed to a pint, I said I’d have a half, Alistair merely shook his head, and Marsh gave our orders to the ruddy-faced man behind the bar, ending with, “And I’ll have my usual, Mr Franks.”

Marsh Hughenfort’s “usual” turned out to be a double measure of whisky, downed at a toss, followed by an only slightly more leisurely pint. A fairly committed regimen for a man who had spent twenty years a teetotaler.

For Alistair, the innkeeper’s wife came through with a pot of tea. He, too, had clearly been here before. As she approached our table in the corner of the low-ceilinged room, Marsh picked up his pint glass, cradling it to his chest as if to warm himself.

“Evening, Mrs Franks. How’s Rosie today?”

“Worlds better, Your Grace, bless you. That syrup you sent down tastes like the devil’s brew, she says, but she sleeps just fine, and the cough’s clearing up.”

“Mind you don’t give her too much.”

“I measure it out like you said, Your Grace. And I watch the clock, every four hours, no sooner. I’ll be ever so careful. Anything else for you now?”

“In ten minutes you can have your husband bring us the same, thank you.”

“Opiates for the masses, Marsh?” Holmes asked when the woman was out of earshot, referring to the soporific effects of the cough potion. None of us mentioned Mahmoud’s generous dose of pure opium paste that had nearly been the death of Holmes a few years before, but all of us had it in mind.

“The child’s cough was painful to listen to; customers were staying away. I thought a night’s sleep might make everyone feel better.”

Holmes set down his glass, and it was clear that he had dismissed the plight of little Rosie Franks from his mind. “How did your—,” he began, then stopped.

A man carrying with him the palpable aura of cow barn stood a few feet from our table, hat in hand. Literally so, but also figuratively.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Your Grace, but I was out the—oh.” His gaze had fallen from Marsh to the empty glass before him; his face fell as well. “Missed me chance, have I? Sorry to bother you, Your Grace. Another time.”

“Tomorrow morning, Hendricks? When you’ve finished the milking, come and see me.”

The man’s face brightened. He pulled on his cap, rubbed his palm against his trousers (which improved the state of neither), thought the better of shaking any aristocratic palms, and tugged his hat instead, wishing us all a happy evening as he retreated.

Holmes, for once, was sidetracked. “What was the significance of the glass?” he enquired.

Marsh very nearly smiled. “When I first started coming in, once they grew accustomed to me, they began to bring me their problems and disputes. Not that I mind—it’s part of what you might call the job—but it looked to dominate my visits here. So I let it be known that if they could catch me before I’d finished my first drink, I’d help them; otherwise they’d have to wait until my mind was clear. It’s become a sort of game between us. They’re considerably more scrupulous about following the rules than I am—I would have gone ahead with whatever is troubling Hendricks, but he’d have been uncomfortable.”

In his life as an itinerant scribe, Mahmoud had observed the Arab rules of hospitality with his clients, although in that land the rituals had centred around coffee rather than alcohol: When coffee ceased to be offered, or accepted, business was concluded. The unlikely parallel amused me; Holmes, however, was back on the scent.

“Does that rule apply to any guests you might bring here? Is our conversation now limited to record bags of grouse and the breeding lines of retrievers?”

Marsh shrugged—and even that was an English shrug, not the eloquent, full-shouldered gesture of Palestine. “I’ve not brought a guest here before. Other than my cousin,” he added, making it clear that Alistair was not guest, but family.

“In that case,” said Holmes, “I should like to ask how your nephew Gabriel was killed.”

The question took me by surprise. I had thought the cause behind Marsh’s tension when he pronounced the words
Until my brother’s son Gabriel died
was the upheaval that death had inflicted on the family, particularly on Marsh’s own future. Holmes, on the other hand, had traced the tension further back, to the boy’s death itself, and indeed, he seemed to have hit it on the head: The bleak, dying-man look settled back onto Marsh’s face; his right hand crept up to finger the scar on his face, which the sudden clamp of tension had drawn into a sunken gash. He drained his glass, looked around to catch the landlord’s attention, and waited until the next round was on the table. He ignored the beer, picking up the smaller glass and looking into it.

“They said, ‘died in service,’?” he told us at last, but he had to throw the fiery contents of the small glass down his throat before he could get the rest of it out. “I think he was killed by a firing squad.”

   I do not know which of his companions let out the sound, something between pain and disbelief, but it could have been any of the three of us—even Alistair, who must have heard the story before. Alistair squirmed in his chair and dug a pen-knife out of his pocket, eyeing the pile of logs on the hearth, but after a minute, he folded the knife away. Holmes slumped down into the hard chair and prepared to listen, fingers steepled over his waistcoat, eyes half closed and glittering in the firelight like those of an observant snake.

“I only began to suspect it a few weeks ago,” Marsh resumed. “My brother Henry had been ill for a long time before he died, so that I found his affairs in chaos. I have to say, Sidney did his best, but Henry tended to take back certain responsibilities, and then not carry through. There were unpaid feed bills from three years ago, notifications from the builders concerning urgent roof repairs set aside. Last month, among a collection of papers concerning the local hunt, I happened across an envelope with some things belonging to Gabriel. An identity disc, half a dozen field post-cards, a couple of letters addressed to Henry. And the death notifications.”

His fingers started to go back to the scar, then he caught the movement and changed it to run the hand over his face, rasping the stubble with his callused palm. “Have you ever seen an official notification? Of course you have; who hasn’t? Well, in the first years of the war the notifications of executions were apparently blunt to the point of being brutal. And to top matters off, they stopped the family’s pension payments. But after an awful lot of these came through the War Offices, and local councils started having to provide support for the survivors, and questions began to be asked in Parliament, the powers that be began to think it might be considered punishing the innocent, that it might prove more politic to act humanely towards the families left behind. So they disguised the truth and reinstated the war pensions.

“Gabriel’s notification says ‘died in service’ like all the others, but the wording is different, more ambiguous. And the sympathy of the King and Queen is pointedly omitted.”

“That is hardly conclusive,” I objected.

“I think it is. And I think my brother knew. Henry kept a diary, although it’s for the most part simply a list of where the hunt went this day or how many birds were taken on that, with the occasional farm details. But he wrote one entry, in August of the year Gabriel was killed, in which he reflects on the nature of bravery and cowardice. Only a few lines, but it’s as if he was bleeding onto the page. Add to that the fact that he wouldn’t let his wife send out memorials. Sarah wrote to me about that one; she couldn’t understand. She was a gentle thing—ill a lot, but a good mother to the boy. My brother wouldn’t have told her that Gabriel’s death was anything but honourable, for fear of her health. As it was, Sarah died the following winter in the influenza epidemic. Other than Henry, and the four of us sitting here, no-one knows. I suppose Ogilby might suspect the truth; Ogilby knows everything that goes on in the house, but he won’t have breathed a word.”