Justice Hall

CHAPTER SIX

Six people escaped with gratitude from the lunch table, scattering in all directions to marshal thoughts, and energies, before the dinner hour would bring us inexorably back together. Holmes and I went up to the rooms we had been given, which were in the oldest, western wing of the house but which had been made comfortable by efficient fires and an actual modern bath-room between them. My own room was a festivity of blue and gold, with a froth of silken drapes on its four posters, a counterpane of delicately embroidered silk, and terrifyingly pale carpets on the floor. Mahmoud would have given it me as a joke; of Marsh, or his sister, I could not be sure. Holmes was given the King’s room, all heavy red velvet and massive carved bed; the king had been George I, whose visit had no doubt precipitated a large part of the grand rebuilding and propelled the Hughenforts to the brink of penury.

Marsh’s suite was down the corridor in the same wing, we had been informed by Ogilby, although I thought it had pained him to admit that the new duke was sleeping down here rather than taking up rooms in the grander central block. I thought Marsh had probably kept rooms he’d occupied as a schoolboy, and decided to interpret that as an encouraging sign: Making a large space over to his taste would have been a declaration of permanence.

When we had boots on our feet and coats over our arms, we descended the noble stairway into the Great Hall, beneath the dome where the waters of Justice were poised to spill. A young house-maid broke off polishing a spotless display cabinet to accompany us to the so-called library. It was empty, but we followed the crack of billiards to the next room.

The library might be neutral ground for the family, but this was a male enclave, heavily masculine with dim Victorian colours, a smattering of animal heads, and the patina of ten thousand cigars over the velvet drapes and leather sofas. And dark: Other than the lamp-lit table itself, the brightest spots in the room were the areas of pink female flesh in the paintings decorating the walls and the unusually luminous ceiling, where light seemed to shift and play. Over the elephantine fringed table I glimpsed the waters of Justice Pond, the low, wintry sunlight sparkling off its fountain-stirred surface onto the plaster and beams above us.

How, I wondered, could I ever have mistaken Alistair for an Englishman? Dressed in plus-fours and boots he might be, with a Norwich jacket belted around his stocky frame and a soft cap on the sofa waiting to go onto his head; nonetheless, everything about him shouted “foreigner.” His stance, his scowl, the way his fingers tugged at his lower lip in the absence of moustaches—he looked like Feisal in fancy-dress.

His cousin, on the other hand, presented the very essence of English Lord. He was bent over the green table, studying the lay of the balls, and ignored our entrance as assiduously as he was ignoring his fidgeting companion. The birch-and-ivory cue rocked three times over the prop of his fingers, then with a sharp crack his ball flew over the green felt and into its pocket. Two more followed, one of those a complicated ricochet shot, and then the table was clear. He replaced the cue in its rack, picked up a smouldering cigar from its rest on a small table and took a last draw before circling the burning end off in the bowl, then picked up a squat glass with half an inch of amber liquid in it and swallowed it down. He caught up a heavy tweed jacket tossed over the back of a leather armchair and strode towards the French doors, giving a short whistle between his teeth. A pair of retrievers scrambled out from under the billiards table and shot out in front of us. Marsh held the door for us; as I went past him, I smelt whisky.

He set a brisk pace through the formal terraces and around the western wing. The perfect lawns stretched away in all directions, nestling around the Pond and gardens, speckled with deer and broken by enormous oaks and beeches, set here and there with buildings—a Gothic-style boat-house on the lake, a Palladian music house surrounded by trim gravel nearby, and a picturesque ruin atop a distant hilltop. As we marched up the grassy slopes, I kept an eye on Alistair, but he was not about to admit to weakness by being left behind. Past the layered centuries of stonework we went, along the path that followed the northern bank of the stream, and up the parkland until the house and lake had disappeared and we were in the park proper.

There, Marsh’s pace slowed. He glanced over his shoulder at the lagging Alistair, and for the first time noticed his cousin’s infirmity. However, he did not then exclaim, as the Algernons had, “What happened to you?” Instead, he watched Alistair approach, then stepped forward to tug the injured man’s shoulder down and squint at the plaster. One brief look, and he stood away.

Alistair met his eyes, and shrugged. “An accident. In London.”

Marsh’s gaze lingered on the other man’s; emotion moved not so much across the duke’s face as in the muscle beneath it, an emotion composed of apology and bewilderment, that he’d spent hours in his cousin’s company without taking notice. I saw Marsh’s hand come up to trace the scar on his face, a thing Mahmoud had done when deeply troubled. Marsh was no more aware of his gesture than Mahmoud had been, and I clasped to myself this sign of Mahmoud’s presence beneath the unknown exterior. Then Marsh turned away, and we were walking again across the manicured landscape as if nothing had happened—although this time at a slow stroll.

“You two have been busy?” Marsh asked us.

“Reasonably so,” Holmes replied. “We have just returned from Dartmoor, a somewhat interesting case involving land fraud and family inheritance. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. You look tired, is all.”

“Nonsense. You, on the other hand, look distinctly unwell.”

“I have put on nearly a stone and taught myself to sleep in a feather bed again. How could I be unwell?”

“Mahmoud, we—”

“Do not use that name here.”

Holmes caught his arm and forced him to stand still. Deliberately, he said again, “Mahmoud,” and followed it with an Arabic quotation: “A man feels shame at the mistreatment of his brother.”

He might have been speaking Mandarin Chinese; Marsh reacted not at all to the guttural syllables. He merely said, “In Palestine, you may have known a man of that name. You may even have considered yourself to be his brother. Here, there is no such man.”

“Whatever the trouble, it would be best if you were to permit us to help.”

“Trouble? What trouble can I possibly have? I own more land than a man can walk in a day, possess more works of timeless art than many museums, occupy a position at the right ear of the nation’s power. I have men to cook my food and polish my shoes, women to lay my fire and starch my collars. Nine hundred years of British authority is in my bones, and I have returned to the land of my family. How could that possibly be construed as ‘trouble’?”

I tried to hear a bitterness in his voice that would match the worn expression on his face, but I heard only a mild, inescapable litany of fact. I could not bear it.

“You once said to me,” I told him, “after we were ambushed on the road to Jericho and Holmes taken captive, that trouble came because you neglected your rightful state. That you were a man who went about on foot, and permitting yourself to ride in a ruler’s motorcar was a foolish thing. You do not belong here, with your mouth at the ear of power. You are a scribe, and belong in Palestine, with your ear to the mouths of others. That is where you are happy.”

“Happiness is nothing. And another man said those words” was his implacable reply.

Holmes tried again. “Mahmoud—”

Before any of us could react, Holmes was sprawled on the ground with a furious English duke standing over him, right arm drawn back for a second blow. “You will not use that name!” he roared.

“Then tell me why!” Holmes bellowed back. He clambered to his feet and stuck his face into Marsh’s. “Explain to me why . . . that man has ceased to exist!”

Marsh teetered on the edge of his fury, and I made ready to leap on his shoulders and pull him off Holmes. Then, in the blink of an eye, the shutters slammed down, the homicidal rage was folded back into its cage; control was regained. In that brief instant of transition, Mahmoud looked out from those dark eyes, but he was gone in a flash, and a middle-aged Englishman was studying the reddening jaw of the man before him. His own flush faded, and he nodded.

“It is true, I owe you that much. The man you speak of is not here, but his debts remain. I will explain, and then you and Mary can pack your bags and be safely home in Sussex before my sister’s friends begin to arrive.”

The two dogs that had skittered away in a panic at his outburst were now back, shrinking at his knees and grinning nervously until he thumped their ribs and sent them off in search of throwing sticks. We drifted after the dogs, and Marsh began to explain.

“One cannot begin to speak of the seventh Duke of Beauville and the state of his affairs without looking first at how the family’s history has shaped him. That, after all, is the entire point of the English aristocracy: continuity, and responsibility. If you wish to understand the current duke, you will have to permit a lesson in history.

“The family presence in this country begins with Hastings in 1066. When William came to claim the crown of England, among his nobles was a man barely twenty named Richard de Hughfort. The younger son of a minor landholder, he had nothing but the sword in his hands, the horse between his knees, and the head on his shoulders. He acquitted himself well on the field of battle, won the eye of the Conqueror, and was given responsibilities.

“Some months later, with the Conqueror’s forces well established in the south, young Richard happened upon three armed knights entertaining themselves with a farmer’s wife. The farmer lay dead, the twelve-year-old boy who had tried to defend his parents lay in a heap, the other children fled, and the wife . . . Well.

“Unfortunately, the three knights were William’s men. And not just any men, but knights who had brought with them men-at-arms and full purses. Richard, as I said, had no name and had joined with little more than his sword. Which he raised without hesitation to come to the defence of a peasant woman and her family.

“He killed two of the knights and drove the other off—three experienced, armed fighting men. Richard received a wound in his breast, from the point of a sword that slipped under his armour. He helped the woman bury her husband, accepted a drink of water—the family records are quite meticulous about noting that, for some reason—and left her to nurse her injured boy.

“He rode into William’s camp leading two horses with knights slung over their backs, and knelt in front of the Conqueror, sword offered, to receive his punishment. They were important men, after all, and William could not afford to let their deaths—over a mere peasant—go unavenged.

“But he did. He looked down at Hugh’s bare neck, bent before him, but instead of using the edge of the sword, he used the flat, and knighted Richard. You’ve never heard this story?”

“In its outline alone,” Holmes told him.

“What William said then became the family motto, drilled into successive generations of impressionable minds: Justitia fortitudo mea est. ‘Righteousness is my strength.’

“I will not force on you the next eight and a half centuries of family history; if you’re interested, look for it yourself in the green library. Richard was not given a high degree of authority—William was no fool; he well knew that any man who would place righteousness over common sense was no person to command an army—but he gave him a degree of trust, and more to the point, some land.

“Which is where my family has stood ever since, both on the land and in the attitude. We are loyal unto death to our monarch—except for those odd occasions when a strain of fanatic comes to the surface, and makes us see the king’s cause as unjust. This, as you might expect, has led the family into trouble once or twice. For the most part it has been hothead younger brothers who chose righteousness over loyalty, but once or twice it was the earl, or later the duke, who made his stand, and then the foundations shook. The second earl wavered onto Mary’s side, and Elizabeth took his head for it, stripped the family of its lands, and declared the title attainted. By great good fortune, however, the earl’s son had already proved himself to be a queen’s man, and the title was soon restored. Then in Monmouth’s Rebellion the seventh earl took his men and marched on London. He, too, lost his head; and again, had his younger brother not already proved himself a trustworthy friend to James II, we should not be standing here today.

“My father, Gerald Richard Adam Hughenfort, was the fifth Duke. I was his second surviving son. My elder brother, Henry, was seventeen years older than I, with two stillbirths in between us. Our brother Lionel was born when I was six. Mother died a few weeks after his birth, and five years later Father remarried. Phillida was born the year I went to university.

“My elder brother married when he was thirty. Henry was the perfect heir—did an adequate degree, took a responsible and interested view of the land, wasn’t too wild in his trips into London and the Continent. He didn’t even gamble much, which is the thing that usually brings down houses like Justice.

“What’s that fool dog into?” he asked, and interrupted his narrative to investigate. When the putrid rabbit had been removed from its adoring finder and buried, we turned back to the path, and to Marsh’s tale.

“So it did not matter all that much to Father that his second son, Maurice, found Justice dull, detested farming, and was interested only in the study of history and language and foreign peoples. I was, as they say, ‘the spare,’ but since the heir himself was healthy, strong, and sensible, there was no cause for concern.

“I made the grand tour as most young men did after university. However, when I reached Venice, my eyes went east, not south to Rome. I crossed the Adriatic, worked my way through Yugo-Slavia and Turkey, then sailed from Rhodes to Alexandria and Cairo. I saw the pyramids, the Nile, the beginnings of the African continent, but the only thing that truly called out to me was the desert to the east.

“I joined up with a group of ragged and corrupt nomads crossing the Sinai—not Bedu, just traders. When I laid eyes on the Judean hills, I was home.

“I lived there for ten months that first time, before my cousin was sent to fetch me back to England. I stayed here, the obedient son, for over a year. At the end of it, Henry’s son Gabriel was born and thriving, my younger brother, Lionel, was seventeen and by all appearances on a straight course, and I was both superfluous and smothering.” Alistair glanced at Marsh and then swiftly away again, and walked on with his eyes glued to the countryside ahead; I wondered what Marsh had left out, or lied about.

“You may have an idea how terribly tight-knit a stratum of the social order we are even now—and the higher, the tighter. We’re an entire society of in-laws and cousins: Our sisters go to balls on the arms of the brothers of boys we went to school with; members of our fathers’ clubs command our Guards regiments. Holidays would be at an uncle’s hunting lodge, our Saturdays-to-Mondays spent at the country house of a mother’s childhood friend who was also a second cousin; our chaperones—”

He caught himself. “You see the picture. After the desert, the stultifying drawing-room air was killing me. It was certainly driving me mad; I used to dream about the desert, about dry warm sand trickling down across my face and burying me, and would wake happy at the thought.”

This self-revelation was more than he had intended; he veered away, to look over a herd of the spotted deer that had caught his attention, and it was a while before he resumed.

“After a year here, my parents eventually had to admit that I was a lost cause, and permitted me to return to my life in Palestine. My cousin spent his long vacations with me for the years of his university, which made them think that they were keeping track of me. When my cousin finished his degree, he joined me permanently.

“And all was well. Until my brother’s son Gabriel died.”

The control in his voice held, but with the last word, we could hear the effort. Not, I thought, because of any particular affection he felt for the boy as a person—how old had the child been when his uncle left the country? A few months?—but because his nephew Gabriel had been the foundation stone on which the entire weight of a noble family rested. With the heir snatched away, unmarried and with no son of his own, the order of succession took a very different track. But Marsh was going on with the story.

“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.”