Justice Hall (29 page)

I thought she would remain silent; after a few moments, however, her eyes were drawn to those of the alabaster boy, and she moaned. “Oh, Lord. I was afraid this might happen. Well, I suppose you’ll have to hear it—but not here, not with the children back and servants going past outside the door. Come, the garden.”

It was not a great deal colder out of doors than it had been in the chapel, although it was by now fully dark. I did not see that standing in the darkness for the conversation would offer any more security than would a warm room of the house—the dark hides listeners as well as walls do—but I had not reckoned with Iris’s intimate knowledge of Justice. She strode down the paths as if she possessed a cat’s vision, warning me of steps and turns. After a minute we crossed an expanse of crunchy gravel, took two steps up onto a wooden platform, and patted our way to seats on the bench that ran along the sides. We were in the Palladian music house I had noticed in the garden, set in a sea of pale gravel. If we kept our voices low, no-one could approach close enough to hear us without warning, and there was no space in which two children might be hiding.

Besides, I thought: Some conversations are best held in the dark.

“Yes,” she began. “You’re right. Gabriel was my son, although I don’t see how you could have known.”

“Your voice, when you speak of him as much as I’ve made you the last couple of days. It’s not the voice of an aunt.”

“And yet I was. Scrupulously so. I sent him no more gifts than I sent any of the other children in my family, for Christmas and birthdays. I never gave him the faintest reason to think Henry and Sarah were not his parents; I’m positive of that.”

“I’m sure you’re right that he never suspected. He’d never have written that last letter had he not thought of them as his true—and, I have to say, much loved—parents.”

“He was a loving boy. He deserved the home they gave him.”

“How… ?” I asked.

“How did it come about?” I was more interested in how they had got away with it, but this would do as a beginning. “It was more or less as I told you—there weren’t many lies in that story. Marsh’s parents looked at Henry—approaching forty, married for ten years with no sign of a child—and they turned the pressure on Marsh. He and I had been friends since childhood, most of our friends and families thought we’d marry sooner or later, so why not do the thing now? Marsh and I had a long talk—at The Circles, in fact, not Hampstead Heath, although for once without Alistair—and we decided that if we both had to marry for the sake of our families, we might as well marry a friend.

“So we did. However, both of us drew the line at making a spectacle of a farce, so in the end we had a private ceremony, one October afternoon when we knew all the family would be away. There were no guests, just Alistair and a friend of mine as witnesses.
Fait accompli;
I thought my mother would die with disappointment. And although the physical side of things seemed fairly peculiar—I mean, Marsh was like a brother to me—we both had enough of a sense of humour, and a sufficiency of champagne, to legally consummate the marriage.

“And wouldn’t you know it, once was all it took. By Christmas I was sure, and I was in a right state. I had a life I loved in London and Paris, and the thought of becoming a man’s wife and a child’s mother, everything that entailed, what it had done to my mother—it was driving me frantic. I had to tell Marsh, of course, even though I’d worked myself into such a state that I was convinced that this proof of virility would somehow transform him, turn him into his father. Or more to the point, into mine.

“But he surprised me. He could see that a child would kill us both—not literally, but
inside
. Selfish, but true. I was even considering an abortion, but then he pointed out that while we might have a child we didn’t want, his brother wanted one he did not have. If I could bear to live with the thing for the remainder of the nine months and go through labour, two problems might be solved.

“It was like a light going on. I’d felt like I’d been shut into a trunk that was growing smaller and smaller, then suddenly the lid opened and the light poured in, and my panic was transformed into good will towards all.

“The only one who was not entirely happy about it was Sarah. I think, especially at first, she took it as a personal affront, she felt so keenly her own inability to bear Henry a child. Her ‘failure.’ But as soon as Gabriel was born, in the most remote Italian village we could find, I put him into her arms, and she just… melted. After that, Sarah
was
Gabriel’s mother.”

“And you never regretted it?”

“Of course I regretted it! Never for long, but from time to time my arms longed for him, I’d find myself wishing I’d kept him so I could hold him, watch him grow up. Let Dan be a part of his life, you know. But Sarah was very generous with me—amazingly so, considering how she felt. She would let me know when they were passing through Paris, sent me photographs, never objected to my writing the occasional auntly letter. She was a fine woman. It was Gabriel’s death that killed her, not the influenza.”

“Who else knows about all this?”

“The only person I’ve ever told is Dan. We met long after Gabriel was born, but I had to tell her. Some of the servants here may have suspected, when a few weeks after the wedding I went from feeling ill to bursting with happiness, then we left for Europe, and Henry and Sarah went away too shortly after that, only to return with a newborn in the autumn with no signs of milk or post-partum recovery. I assume that Marsh will have told Ali. And Sarah’s doctor must have known—my own believes I had a stillbirth.

“But in general, society assumed that since they lived in Italy anyway, at least until the old duke died, it was not unusual that their child was born there. And since Henry looked like a taller version of Marsh, and Gabriel inherited my height, Henry appeared more like Gabriel’s father than Marsh ever did.”

We sat in silence for several minutes, and then I sighed to myself. With his son’s death unexplained, Marsh could not leave Justice, lest he be turning the family’s honour over to someone who had in some way been responsible for that death. The death of a junior officer on the Front might easily have been arranged by someone a step or two down the line of succession, just as the accidental shooting of a duke could have been the work of the same hand. Or not by a direct heir, but by Sidney, who had proved himself more than ready to accept the candidate Thomas.

“Wouldn’t it simplify matters,” I remarked, “if the boy Thomas were kind-hearted and intelligent and physically the very image of Lionel at the age of nine?”

“It probably would. Oh dear, poor Marsh.” She fell silent for a moment, then gave a curt laugh. “And to think, two weeks ago, Dan and I were sitting in a lovely noisy bar, getting pleasantly drunk with Djuna Barnes and Sinclair Lewis.”

“Two weeks ago Holmes and I were tramping in the rain across Dartmoor, getting horribly wet with the sheep and the ponies.”

She laughed again, her voice ringing out across the invisible terraces and cultivated shrubs, then shivered, as much from the relief of confession as from the cold. “In that case, you deserve some warmth and a drink before dinner. And you will want to tell your Holmes about this conversation. Come.”

We stumbled back along the dark terraces to the house, its windows glowing and the noises of unsubdued merriment spilling from its long gallery upstairs. From the sound of it, the guests were practicing nine-pin bowling along the length of the floorboards, to the accompaniment of shrieks of hysterical laughter. The duke might be tossing in his fevered bed, but the guests would play, regardless. As we climbed the decorated staircase, Iris shot an irritated glance at the trompe l’oeil pelican from whose place on the wall the rumbles seemed to emanate, but she said nothing. At Marsh’s door she said politely that she’d see me at dinner, and then slipped inside, but before I had my own door shut, she was back in the hallway, making grimly for the source of the sporadic rumble that vibrated through the bones of the house. I was not surprised when it ceased within minutes, not to resume.

I found Holmes before the fire in his room, the third of Gabriel Hughenfort’s diaries in his hands and a scowl on his face.

“Now, Holmes,” I said. “It isn’t all that bad.”

“Sophomoric,” he muttered.

I glanced over his shoulder at the pages he was reading, and chuckled. “Hardly surprising—he was seventeen. Every-one that age is consumed by earthshaking matters and philosophical speculations.” Holmes grunted and turned a page. “You have to admit that his observations on the natural history and farming of Justice are quite perceptive.”

“One might wish he’d stuck with badgers and squirrels and left the French philosophers in their place,” he grumbled, tossing the volume onto the chair-side table.

“He’d have grown out of it. He’d have made Justice a fine master. What do you think of the letters?”

“The official notification is not that used for an honourable discharge, but that is hardly conclusive, as whoever was filling out the form could so easily have taken up the wrong one. The one from the Reverend F. A. Hastings is considerably more suggestive.”

“I wondered if I was imagining that air of ‘I don’t care what anyone else says’ in his praise for the boy.”

“You were not. I should say Hastings knows a great deal more than he was willing to set onto paper. We need to speak with him.”

“And the letter from Gabriel?”

“Undated, much travelled, long carried, thrice wet,” he judged succinctly. “Written weeks in advance, then placed in his pack and either forgotten or else left there against the chance that he was caught without warning. Some soldiers had two or three such, lest one be lost in an attack.”

“Too ashamed, or too terrified, to write later?”

“There is no knowing. Yet,” he added, and reached for the journal again.

“Wait, Holmes. Put that down for a moment; I have something to tell you.”

He was surprised when I told him what I had discovered about Gabriel Hughenfort’s true parentage, but by no means astonished, and I felt again that he’d have put it together as soon as he knew Iris better. He tapped his teeth with his pipe. “An ideal solution, I agree, and not even much of a circumvention of the line of inheritance, since without a son Henry would have handed it over to Marsh in any case, and thence to Gabriel. Of course, had Henry had a son of his own after Gabriel, an ethical problem might have reared up. But he did not, and snipping Marsh out of the succession was neat indeed.”

“It is, however, by no means common knowledge.”

“Obviously not. My lips are sealed, Russell.”

“Other than the romance of philosophy, what do you make of the journals?”

He looked down at the volume he had held on to, lying across his knee, then picked it up and laid it on top of the others. “A son any man could be proud of,” he said painfully, and went to dress for dinner.

   In January 1914, Marsh’s brother Lionel Hughenfort had married a woman named Terèse, who was at least five years older than he, and six months pregnant when they married. She gave birth in early April, and christened the boy Thomas. Lionel died of pneumonia in late May. For the past nine and a half years, the family bank in London had issued cheques twice each month to an accountant in Lyons. He in turn dealt with the distribution of funds to Mme Hughenfort, who moved house a great deal. Once a year, representatives of the London bank travelled to Paris to meet with Terèse and Thomas, in order to reassure themselves—and the family—that the boy and his mother were still alive and receiving their monies.

That was, according to what Alistair and Iris told us Sunday evening and Monday morning, the only contact the boy’s mother would permit. No living Hughenfort had ever seen either member of this truncated branch of the family. This vacuum, inevitably, had been filled over the years by rumour and speculation, with the result that Terèse Hughenfort had become, in the collective mind of the English side, a raddled, aged harlot with bad teeth, hennaed hair, the wrong kind of lace on her garments, and a death-grip on her source of income, young Thomas. While the sixth Duke was alive, nothing further had been done about the boy, apart from an increase in the monies sent to cover the cost of schooling a duke’s nephew. I had the impression that the boy, and Lionel before him, had been sore spots in Henry’s mind, the less prodded the better.

When the title had passed to Marsh during the summer, locating the boy was one of his first tasks. Messages accompanied the next two cheques, and then a stern letter with the third. All three fell into the hole in Lyons. Finally, a bank employee was dispatched with the fourth cheque in hand, and an ultimatum to the Lyons accountant: There would be no further monies if the family did not hear from Mme Hughenfort herself with a suggestion for when and where the family might meet the boy.

She managed to drag the affair out several weeks, claiming a minor ailment, and the boy’s schooling, until the threat was made good, and no cheque was sent on the first of October. She capitulated, but declared that she and the boy would come to London. The Hughenforts would foot the bill, naturally—and (her letter ended, on a spirited note) she expected both tickets and hotel to be first-class; the heir deserved no less.