Justice Hall

CHAPTER SEVEN

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.”

“But . . . why?” Why would a young aristocrat, so eager that he signed up the very day he turned eighteen, commit a capital offence a year later? Why would a boy of noble birth not have received a lesser sentence? Why would a Hughenfort . . . ?

“I don’t know. I do know he was blown up in February, when a shell hit his trench and buried him in the mud along with half a dozen others. He nearly died before they dug him out, and spent the better part of a month in hospital and on leave. And then as soon as he went back up the line he was in heavy action—even in the desert we knew that the Germans were on the very edge of breaking through, so all hell must have been loose in France. I should suppose the boy’s nerves must have been dicier than anyone imagined, otherwise his commanding officer would have pulled him out.”

Marsh dropped his head into his hands, both elbows on the scarred wooden table. “He wrote a last letter to Henry. ‘Dearest Pater,’ it begins, but it doesn’t say anything of substance, only some memories of summer evenings at the Hall and the hope that he can remain—” Marsh’s voice wavered, then caught. “—remain brave. Ah, sod it all, I wish I’d known the poor little bastard.” He stood up so fast he nearly upended the heavy table and hurled his half-empty glass into the fireplace. “Sorry, I need to . . . ,” he began, and waved in the direction of the public house’s back door. His stride showed little indication of the four measures of strong drink and the pint and a half of ale he’d put away in a short time. The inn went deathly still; when he had passed through the door, I felt the villagers’ resentful eyes settle on us: What had we done to their duke?

When he came back past the bar, the duke stopped to have a word with Franks before resuming his place. More drinks soon joined the collection, although a number of the glasses on the table were nearly full. Before we’d had more than a couple of swallows, however, Marsh got to his feet again, more circumspectly this time.

“We shall miss the dinner gong if we do not leave, and that will make my sister cross. Not that I mind making Phillida cross, but I prefer to choose my fields of battle instead of declaring outright warfare.” As he told us this, his pronunciation deliberate, he took up his overcoat and began to button it on with equally deliberate fingers. We followed his example, and the dogs, familiar with the sequence of events, rose, shook themselves, stretched with eager yawns, and trotted over to put their noses at the door.

When the cold air outside hit Marsh, he stumbled against Alistair, but recovered immediately. I was glad to see that we were not about to attempt the now completely invisible path through the wall and into the parkland; instead, we turned up the road, which, though equally difficult to see, was identifiable by the surface underfoot and the occasional lighted cottage along its length, and which presented no brambles at our legs.

Marsh began to recount the history of the Franks family—the arrival of the publican’s grandfather during the third Duke’s time, the family’s losses during the War, and an elder son in trade down in London, but I did not listen much, being more interested in keeping my feet on the track and wondering just how late the Hughenfort family took dinner. It would take us at least an hour and a half, even at a brisk pace, to circle the wall and follow the entrance drive, and our pace could hardly be termed brisk.

It would appear, however, that part of the evening’s sequence involved a telephone call from village to Hall, because before we reached the metalled main road, a set of powerful head-lamps approached from the direction of the Justice gates. They turned into our track, caught our figures, and halted. The driver’s door opened; Holmes and I piled into the back, followed by the dogs.

Marsh came last, Alistair’s surreptitious hand on his elbow. He dropped hard into the seat, but before the hand could retreat, he seized it and gripped it hard for a moment before letting go. “Good night, my brother,” he said, and Alistair shut the door.

Marsh closed his eyes, smiled to himself, and muttered something under his breath. I realised with surprise that it had been in Arabic: “Eyes like a cat,” he had murmured. A phrase I had once heard him apply to Ali when we were crossing the desert by night.

With this phrase two things became clear. One, that despite his recent injuries, Alistair would be walking alone to Badger Old Place through the moonless night. And two, that Marsh was very drunk indeed.

He sobered during the drive back to Justice Hall, and went up the steps with straight back and steady pace.

“Have you rung the gong yet, Ogilby?” he asked that gentleman.

“Not yet, Your Grace. Lady Phillida suggested they might wait a while longer.”

“I can’t be bothered changing, Ogilby. And I’m sure my guests are famished. Give us five minutes, and ring.”

I scurried up to my room to rid myself of overcoat and muddy shoes, and was straightening the pins in my hair when a hollow reverberation began to rise through the house. We reached the drawing room before the Darlings, and were thus witness to the astonishment followed by vexed disapproval with which Lady Phillida greeted the sight of her brother, still dressed in mud-spattered tweeds and holding what was clearly not his first drink of the evening. She then glanced at us, saw that we were similarly under-dressed, and her face went polite again.

“We’d have been happy to wait—but it does not matter in the least. In fact, it’s rather fun to be Bohemian; the business of changing is so stuffy, don’t you think?”

Bohemian or not, Sidney Darling stepped forward to present his properly clad black arm for me to go into the dining room upon, leaving the rest to sort themselves out as best they would. He deposited me at Marsh’s right hand.

We were seated at one end of a table that could have accommodated thirty with ease. As it was, a great deal of empty wood stretched out to one side, and only two of the room’s forest of candelabra had been lit for us, a pair of Baroque silver objects that reminded me of the fountain outside, although I could not make out any pelicans in the tangle of figures. A display of plate glinted on a side-table, and the walls glimmered here and there with gilt. Three footmen and Ogilby were on hand to ensure we did not starve, die of thirst, or pull a muscle in reaching for the salt.

I wondered if the family dined in such lonely splendour every night, and on the whole imagined not. There would be a smaller family parlour, or the breakfast room put to dual purpose. I was honoured, if uncomfortable, not only because my two-year-old walking skirt was so severely below the standards of the room, and our dinner companions so out of sorts: The room was also physically chill, without a few dozen warm companions to supplement the fires, and it was probably just as well that I was wearing wool and not silk.

After several false starts, and eschewing both beekeeping and theology as unpromising, we embarked on a conversation concerning Opera. Darling with relief seized on the stage as a point of communication with the guests—or half of them, at any rate, since my passion for warbling sopranos is fairly cool. Holmes, however, admitted to an interest, and so the two men kept the conversational ball in motion, aided by the occasional remark from Lady Phillida or myself.

Marsh drank steadily.

Tenors and librettos, set design and the acoustics of various halls kept the silence at bay, although after ninety minutes of it, Darling was beginning to repeat himself and any real interest was long since exhausted. Lady Phillida and I had a chatty moment over the meat course about fashion, when she asked where my skirt had come from. I was tempted to tell her that Gordon Selfridge’s had a good selection of them on the rack, but instead gave her the truth, and the name of the married couple who made most of my clothes. She raised an eyebrow, but not, it transpired, a disapproving one.

“They’re quite well known,” she told me, as if I might be unaware of this fact.

“Yes, they do beautiful work. And she has an extraordinary eye for fabric.”

“It’s rather surprising,” she said, then hastened to explain. “That they would take you on, I mean. I understand they have quite a long waiting list of clients.”

And I, clearly, was not quite up to snuff. The extraordinary thing was, I reflected, she had not intended an insult. “They were my mother’s tailors,” I told her. “And relatives of hers. Cousins or something.”

I could feel Lady Phillida’s shock from across the table, although she was too well bred to allow it onto her face. That one would admit to blood ties with tailors was perhaps forgivable, but—Jewish tailors? She gaped at me for a moment as if I’d demonstrated an unsavoury habit, and then pulled herself together. Funny, I thought, taking up my fork again, she doesn’t look Jewish.

Oh, this was going to be a long week-end.

In vino veritas, or so it is said. I did not expect to prise a great deal of veritas out of our host while he was in his cups, but it was worth listening to whatever flotsam might wash up from the depths of his ducal mind on the flood of whisky, ale, and claret he was consuming.

Unless he simply passed out on the hearth.

However, he continued to hold his various liquors well, simply becoming ever more taciturn as the meal wound to its close. With such a small gathering, I hoped we might overlook the ritualistic segregation of women and the subsequent reassembly in the drawing room, and to my relief it was so. In fact, Lady Phillida excused herself with a head-ache, and although her husband hesitated, in the end he came down on the side of joining her and leaving us three to finish the evening.

The library was cosy. A pair of decanters stood on a tray with the appropriate glasses for port and brandy. Marsh picked up the nearest decanter, which happened to be the port, splashed some in three of the glasses, and handed us each one without asking if we wanted it. He sank into an armchair and stared into the flames; I thought he had forgotten we were there until he spoke.

“I’ve never been shot, myself,” he informed us, sounding reflective. “Stabbed, yes; cut by a broken bottle, run down by a lorry, beaten, burnt, even trampled by an enraged camel once, but never shot. I wonder how it feels.”

“It doesn’t feel,” I responded. “The body ceases to communicate with the mind; all the person registers is a profound sense of shock. That was my experience, at any rate.”

He took his eyes from the fire. “You? You’ve been shot?”

“With a pistol. A few weeks after we left you—the same case we came to you to avoid, in fact.”

“Where? Where did he shoot you?”

“It was a she. In my shoulder.” I rested my hand on the fabric over the puckered scar, and was startled when Marsh laughed merrily.

“Never had I met a woman such as you. Do you remember when Ali—”

He froze over the name, and at the intrusion of a life that was over. Then he set about retracing the thread of his thoughts.

“So, being shot resembles a deep stab wound. Not the surface cuts—at those the body screams from violation. The mortal wounds are too terrible for the mind to acknowledge, so it retreats. Interesting. That is encouraging. You see, I find myself wondering sometimes what young Gabriel felt. Knowing it was coming, having to stand upright and proud despite the state of his nerves, waiting for his men—his own men—to raise their rifles and take aim at his chest. What a death, for a boy of eighteen. Poor bloody little bastard.” The picture in his mind had gone far beyond suspicion: He clearly had no doubts concerning his nephew’s fate.

He downed the wine in his glass and went to the tray again. This time his hand fell on the other decanter, and brought back a glass with enough brandy in it to stupefy an elephant. He drank half of it straight down as if it had been water, fingered the scar on his face, and then noticed what he was doing and shifted the glass to his right hand.

“When Alistair and I were boys,” he said, his voice just beginning to slur, “we would meet at a hut old man Bloom the gamekeeper kept in the woods, and listen to his stories. There was one day . . .” Tales of boyhood foolishness carried him along until he had reached his goal of insensibility, until his voice faded and he sat as if he’d been clubbed, far beyond speech, veritable or otherwise. Holmes stubbed out his half-smoked cigar, removed the glass from Marsh’s senseless fingers, and went to fetch Ogilby.

They came back with a muscular young man who looked enough like the morning’s footman to be a brother. Between them, the footman and Ogilby got Marsh upright and supported him out of the library. Holmes and I stood and listened to the muttering, bumping progress of the men.

To my surprise, however, Holmes made no move to follow them. Instead, he went to the tray and dashed into a glass a smaller dose of Marsh’s anaesthetic. He then paced to the end of the room and back, took a cigarette from the box on the table and lit it with sharp, tight movements, then sucked in only two or three deep draughts before flicking it irritably into the fire. He returned to his glass, topped it up with a harsh clatter of crystal, and stalked off into the adjoining billiards room.

I found him outside the French doors, glaring across the gardens at the darkness with a fresh cigarette between his fingers. There was no moon and the terrace lights had been shut down, but the distant patter of the Pond’s fountain reached our ears, and a faint breeze stirred the nearby leaves. I was conscious, however, only of the waves of emotion pouring out of the silent man beside me.

Holmes was in a rage.

I knew Holmes as a man of great passions, but they tended to be volatile—or at least, swiftly brought to rein by force of will. I had only occasionally felt in him the deep, burning pulses of an uncontrolled fury; the sensation inevitably made me wish to creep silently away, far away.

Instead, I waited in the open doorway, listening to the falling water and the sharp whistle of breath through his taut nostrils, until he had smoked his cigarette to the end. Only then did I speak.

“What is troubling you, Holmes?”

He flung the near-flat butt to the ground and ground it beneath a vicious boot-heel, then went back into the house.

“Fools and butchers, all of them,” he stormed. “Sitting in their offices and deciding that an example must be made, that the men won’t fight without a threat hanging over their heads. The Romans practised decimation—line up one in ten and stab them to death to encourage the others. Pah! Idiocy.” He became aware that I was staring at him as he paced, and made an effort to pull himself together. When yet another cigarette was going, his voice came, taut with control.

“I was once asked by a family to investigate the death of their son. This was in the first year of fighting, when the War Offices just flatly told the families that their son, husband, whatever had been executed. In this case, for cowardice. Can you picture what news like that does to a family, already grieving? The father committed suicide. The mother wanted to know.

“Russell, he’d been scarcely more than an infant! A schoolboy, who’d lied about his age. Barely seventeen and at his third relentless rolling barrage his nerve broke. He dropped his rifle and ran, straight through deadly fire, over the tops of trenches, anything to get away from the ungodly noise. Desertion, cowardice—shell shock, for which the official cure was a hail of bullets. He couldn’t even stand upright, his nerves were so bad; they had to bring out a kitchen chair—”

He broke off, unable to continue the sentence. The old house waited in silence; when he resumed, his voice was deceptively quiet and reasonable. “Do you know, Russell, when I asked to see the boy’s file, I was told that only the individual involved had the right to see closed records. When I pointed out that the ‘individual involved’ was dead, I was informed that the records were therefore closed, full stop. The logic of the bureaucrat. I had to have Mycroft steal the file for me. That trial was a farce: no defence, no medical testimony as to the state he was in, two of the four witnesses had only hearsay evidence, a third was a personal enemy. And his wasn’t the only such; there have been outraged questions asked in Parliament. One October, in 1917 I believe it was, only one of the twenty-five soldiers executed that month had anything resembling a defence. There was effectively no right of appeal, no sending or receiving of letters, no mechanism for bringing in witnesses who weren’t immediately to hand. The entire system was a travesty, and ripe for abuse.”

Abuse, I thought: murder. After a while I said, “And you think . . .”

“Come, Russell; can you honestly believe that a son of this house could act the coward without reason? Justitia fortitudo mea est; it’s all but tattooed on their foreheads at birth.”

Abruptly, the rage loosed its hold on him, leaving him looking ill. He gazed at the dregs in his glass, then dashed them into the dying flames. A convulsion of blue-tinged fire reached up the chimney, and subsided. Without another word we followed in the direction that Marsh had been carried a short time earlier.

Holmes and I went to the end of the corridor, and there found the most ornate set of servants’ stairs I’d ever seen—except that they were doubtless the original central stairway of the house before its eighteenth-century transformation. The stairs were lit by a pair of electric bulbs, weak but sufficient for safety, and enough to give us an impression of dark colours and rich textures. It was a tapestry of a room, far more than just a means of changing levels in the house, from a time when the social life of the great families had begun to move up, away from the servant-populated Hall.

Pelicans had alighted here, too, I saw: carved atop the newel posts, painted into the walls, even incorporated into the plasterwork ceiling. I stopped to study the unlikely, ungainly, big-beaked creature brooding over the newel post; when it occurred to me that the nearly amorphous granite shapes guarding the main gates had originally been pelicans as well, my mind suddenly made the connexion.

“Sacrifice!” I said aloud. “Of course.”

“Sorry?” Holmes asked.

“The pelican. It’s an odd choice as the heraldic beast of a great house—I mean, they’re positively comical except when they’re actually in the air. But the pelican is a symbol of ultimate self-sacrifice—piercing its breast to feed its young. Zoologically inaccurate, of course, but it goes very deep in Christian mythology. The symbol was applied to the Christ, and later used in Mediaeval alchemy. See, you can even make out the painted blood on this one.”

Holmes stopped to peer with me at the red stream flowing down the breast beside the carved beak. Mutely, we both glanced upwards in the direction of Marsh’s rooms.

Self-sacrifice could take many forms; the only common characteristic was the high cost to the giver.

No wonder Marsh Hughenfort looked like a dying man, ripping out his own heart for the sake of his family.