Justice Hall

CHAPTER EIGHT

I woke during the night with the feeling that I had heard voices raised, but when I came fully awake and identified my surroundings, all I heard was silence, and after a time a clock striking four. I settled back into my feather pillows and pulled the thick bedclothes back over my ears, grateful that I was not a house-maid whose job it was to lay fires before dawn.

(Although my ears persisted in thinking it had not sounded much like a house-maid; that it had in fact sounded like Ali. An invention from the recesses of memory, no doubt, summoning the rise and fall of long conversations overheard through walls of canvas and goat’s hair.)

In the morning, I was alone in the tapestried bed. The sky was an expanse of grey, although it was not yet raining. I washed (calling down blessings on whichever duke it had been whose sense of luxury extended to hot water taps in the guest bath-rooms) and dressed, taking myself down the back stairway so that I might have another look at it. This time, with the electric light supplemented by that seeping through the mullioned windows, I noticed that one of the carved pelicans was standing on a knob set with the date 1612. Its builder had either been to Knole or had been responsible for that stairway as well, I thought as I continued slowly down the stairs, studying the chipped, faded, glorious walls, until I was nearly flattened by an oncoming maid intent on her burden. I dived to one side, so surprising her with my sudden movement that the tea tray nearly came to grief despite her concentration.

“Ooh!” she squeaked. “Oh, you didn’t half give me a turn. That is to say, begging your pardon, mum, I didn’t see you there. Was there something I could do for you?”

“The breakfast room,” I said. “I forgot to ask directions last night—no, no; just tell me which way it is. If you take me there, that tea will get cold. But first, tell me your name?”

“It’s Emma, mum. And you’re sure you don’t want me to take you? Well, when you get to the foot of these stairs you go through that door there, and straight down the corridor for just a little way and then to your right. Then—”

Her instructions seemed to send me in a circle and the tea was probably cold anyway when she had finished, but I thanked her and went on. How hard could it be?

Had I depended on her verbal map, I might have found the breakfast room in time for luncheon, but by following the odours instead of her directions I had no great trouble.

The room was, as I had expected, a more intimate chamber than the formal dining room of the night before, although no less ornate in its way. It was on a more human scale, for one thing, so that one could crackle toast without being intimidated by echoes, and although the ceiling was thick with gilded grape-vines from which swung an exuberance of frescoed putti, and the walls were more than half mirror, the fat cherubs seemed happy enough to oversee the meals taking place below, and the silver in the mirrors had tarnished to a comfortable dimness.

Alistair was there, bent over a plate with a folded newspaper beside it; Holmes presented a similar figure across the table from him. Both men looked up at my arrival, and Alistair rose to pour me a coffee from the steaming samovar-style pot.

“Are ladies permitted in this club, gentlemen?” I asked.

“Difficult to keep them out, I should think,” Holmes answered, holding my chair for me. He was his usual self again, last night’s rage well concealed.

“What excitement is occupying the world today?”

“One Lady Diana Hamilton was sent to prison for stealing two rings and three brooches from friends who had rescued her from an ‘unfortunate and distressing situation’ in a Paddington hotel. And the Chancellor of the Exchequer acknowledges the receipt of two pounds sixteen shillings’ conscience money from ‘X.Y.Z.’ The world of crime is, I fear, not only singularly dull, but not even terribly remunerative.”

The usual complaint. “Is Marsh down yet?” I expected to be told he was still abed, nursing a pounding head, but apparently not.

“Here and gone,” his cousin replied. “I believe he is interviewing the cow-man Hendricks in the estate offices.” I could not but wonder if a hung-over Marsh Hughenfort would be an ill-tempered creature or an exquisitely silent and sensitive one, but I did not see that I could enquire. I should, no doubt, see for myself before the day was through. Alistair went on. “Phillida and Sidney are in London for the day. Marsh asked me to show you the house this morning. If you wish.”

“I should love to see Justice Hall,” I said with pleasure.

He looked taken aback at the enthusiasm in my voice, and retreated into his newspaper, leaving me to ladle out a bowl of porridge and reflect on, as Holmes had put it, the workings of cause and effect. In Palestine, Ali had kept me—Holmes, too, but particularly me—at arm’s length, if not at actual knife’s point. He resented my presence, grumbled at the extra work we created, refused to grudge me an iota more responsibility than was absolutely necessary. He would happily have abandoned us in the desert, had it not been that Mahmoud developed an inexplicable interest in us.

Now, the basis of our relationship was turned upside-down. He had actively sought us out to ask for help; his present identity, though to all appearances a comfortable fit, left him stranded on unfamiliar territory when it came to action. In Palestine, he had deferred only to Mahmoud; in England, his bone-deep yeoman nature demanded a banner to follow. He was not exactly lost, but with Mahmoud so vehemently refusing to lead anyone anywhere, Alistair was definitely casting around for familiar landmarks. To put himself into a friendly footing with “Amir” was jarring, but if it helped move Marsh a few inches more in the direction of Palestine, he was willing to try. In Palestine, he had willingly walked thousands of miles on foot in the service of king and country; he had baked and frozen and scratched at flea bites; killed, spied, defused bombs, and even committed torture when it proved necessary; in England, it would seem, he was willing to bring me a cup of pallid coffee and offer us a tour of Justice Hall.

Holmes, however, demurred. With Alistair’s warning about the eye-to-the-key-hole propensities of the Darling clan, to say nothing of servants, clearly in mind, he folded his newspaper onto the table and said, “I too shall venture into London for the day. A matter regarding the young man of whom we were speaking yesterday afternoon. Solid information concerning his actions has become a priority.”

“Do you want—,” I began, but he was already dismissing my offer.

“I shouldn’t dream of cutting short your week-end, Russell. You enjoy yourself while I expend shoe-leather on the dirty cobblestones.”

“Thank you, Holmes,” I said dryly.

I made haste to finish my toast, then followed him up the stairs and helped him pack a few things in a rucksack. He still maintained his secret bolt-holes across London, and would no doubt retrieve from them anything else he needed, from false moustaches to armament.

“I should really rather come with you, Holmes,” I told him in a voice too low to be heard beyond the door.

“Of course you would. But I believe the cause will be better served by dividing our forces.”

“And inevitably I must be the one to remain behind and make tedious conversation over the dinner table.”

“My dear Russell, had you spent the last few years nurturing informants and contacts in the less salubrious portions of London instead of frittering away your time in lecture halls and libraries . . .”

“I know, I know. When will you return?”

“Saturday, or perhaps the following morning.”

Which only indicated that he planned to be away for less than a week. Unless, that is, something came up. Which it generally did. I handed him his shaving case.

“I’ll let Marsh know. Will you go as yourself?”

“I think not,” he replied. “This investigation needs to remain sub-rosa. The combined drawing power of the names Hughenfort and Holmes would start a fox before the hounds. We wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves think, for the ‘view halloo’ of the tabloid journalists.” He did up the buckles on the rucksack, then paused. “See what you can turn up about the boy yourself. Ask to see the letters he wrote his father, particularly that last one. Look closely at any belongings he may have left. I should be particularly interested if he left a diary, papers, whatever. You know the drill.”

I did indeed.

“And over the week-end, particularly when the house guests arrive, listen and watch closely. Map out currents, as it were. And before you protest that you do not know what we are looking for, I am aware of that minor problem, and can only trust that you have sufficient mental flexibility to work a case that is not yet a case.” He swung the rucksack over his shoulder, and then, with his hand on the door-knob, paused. “But, Russell? Watch yourself. I believe that as the investigation develops, we will find that these placid waters have been concealing any number of powerful tides.”

He closed the door on my “good-bye,” leaving me alone with Justice and her populace.

When Holmes had driven off for the day—or the week—Alistair and I descended the decorated stairway and passed through a door set into the wall opposite the foot of the stairs, nearly at the end of the old, western wing. It led to a tiny room, little more than three doors and a scrap of wall. Alistair closed the first door behind us, then sidled past me to that on our right, which was tiny, off-square, and locked. He had the key, an object no more than a century old.

The door opened onto another set of stairs, although these were of stone, narrow and steep and treacherously uneven, spiralling down into the depths beneath the house. Electric light bulbs had been strung from metal staples along the wall.

The wall against my right shoulder was worn smooth by ten thousand passing shoulders before me. The stairs ended at a corridor with an arched roof and a floor so worn, the dip in the centre nearly duplicated the ceiling in reverse. The walls brushed our shoulders as we passed, single file, then turned to the right, and the narrow passage opened into a room.

In the recent past, it had been used as a cool storage room for barrels of wine and kegs of beer, but it had not been built for that purpose, and no doubt the servants were relieved to have given it up. It had been a chapel, I thought; its groined arches still bore traces of a plaster finish, and beyond it the dark maw of a tunnel, suitable for the passage of individuals less than five and a half feet tall.

Alistair stood and allowed me to explore the space without comment. I stepped behind one of the dusty barrels; when I spoke, my voice rang hollowly against the stones.

“This part of the foundation is old,” I observed in surprise. “Those arches have to be Norman.”

“This part of Justice is built on the foundations of a Mediaeval abbey,” my guide told me. “The family owned the land adjoining the abbey; after Dissolution, the second earl, who was a friend of the king, arranged to have the abbey grounds added to his. Seems the abbot had spoken treason against Henry, so they hung him from one of the trees in the park. He was actually a relation of the family—nice irony. The monks would have had a mill on Justice stream, and taken fish from the Pond. Marsh thinks this was the crypt. Within a few years, it was in use again as a chapel, only this time in secret, for the earl’s wife remained a Roman Catholic. But before it was an abbey—”

“—it was Roman,” I exclaimed.

Alistair came around the corner into the adjoining room and joined me in staring down at the scrap of mosaic flooring revealed when a small patch of the cracked Mediaeval tiles had been rucked up.

“Before that, Roman,” Alistair confirmed.

“How on earth did this just stay here?” I couldn’t believe some renovator or antiquarian had not got his hands on it—heavens, if my fingers itched to see what lay beneath those tiles, why hadn’t some duke along the way decided to have a look?

“The stairs were bricked over, some time in the early nineteenth century. It wasn’t until about thirty years ago that Marsh’s father had the bricks down—some project Phillida’s mother had in mind for the stillroom near the kitchens. That tunnel was built by the second Duke in the 1750s. Seems he had a peculiar aversion to the continual passing of servants through the main rooms. This was his attempt to cut down the traffic. It comes out in the kitchens, or did, until it was blocked off. I remember when they had the bricks down; it was just before Marsh went off to Cambridge, so I must have been eleven or twelve at the time. I was here a lot, then, even though no-one much liked his stepmother. But they didn’t use the tunnel very long; after two house-maids fell on the stairs, the duke had the wine moved and locked it up again. It was probably the same reason that the end was bricked up in the first place, even though servants were cheap then.”

I could well believe those stairs would bring brisk-moving house-maids to grief. They were soldiers’ stairs, narrow and turning so as to be defensible by a single swordsman. Not that the original builders could have anticipated much swordplay, against enemies pouring into the house from the depths of the crypt.

With a last reluctant glance at the enticing fragments of Roman mosaic, I followed my guide up the steep stairway. At the top, Alistair shut down the lights and let me pass so he could lock the small door. As I reached for the latch on the door through which we had entered, I glanced at the smaller door’s twin and asked him where it went.

“Up,” he said, unnecessarily. “To the roof, eventually. Justice is riddled with nooks and crannies. When Marsh and I were children, we used to crawl all over the place—lock each other in obscure rooms, hold pitched battles in the tunnel, stage duels up on the roof leads. It’s a wonder we weren’t killed a hundred times. Once I was climbing these stairs and Marsh was waiting on the next level with a claymore in his hand. Another time he rigged a trap that would have shot me out over the battlements if I hadn’t seen it.”

“Good training exercises,” I commented. I ducked my head under the outer door frame to get back into the hallway at the end of the 1612 staircase; when I straightened, I found myself the target of two pair of pale and accusing eyes.

They belonged to a boy of perhaps eight and a girl a couple of years older; between their haughty expressions and the shape of their facial bones, there was no doubting their parentage: These were the Darling children. By the looks of them, no name could be less appropriate.

“What were you doing down there?” the girl demanded.

“Who are you?” the boy chimed in.

“You’re the friend of Uncle Marsh,” the girl said to me, and then to her brother, “She’s one of the friends of Uncle Marsh.”

“She doesn’t look like a friend of Uncle Marsh.”

“How would you know?” she retorted. “The only friend he’s ever invited here was that small man with the yellow hair who came when Mother and Father were in London.”

“He had a motor-cycle,” the boy informed me, sounding impressed.

Alistair had finally got the key to work and came out of the broom closet to rescue me. “What are you two doing here?” he grumbled. “Where is your nurse?”

“Miss Paul’s a governess, and she’s lying down with a head-ache.”

“I am not surprised. You go along back to the school-room and play.”

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” The child even sounded like her mother.

Alistair glared at her, then gave in. Turning to me, he said, “Lenore and Walter Darling.” It sounded less an introduction than the identification of two possibly noxious varieties of local wildlife. “This is Miss Russell. Now be gone.”

Lenore Darling ignored him imperiously. “Are you of the—”

“The Bedfordshire Russells?” I finished for her, rather fed up with the question. “Do I look like a Woburn Russell?” The family had been called “grander than God.”

“Actually, no,” the girl admitted, and went on before Alistair could resume control. “I ought to warn you not to say anything about Peter Pan. My brother might kick you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Peter Pan. The play by Mr Barrie?”

“I don’t know it, sorry.”

“Oh, that’s all right, then. It’s just that the family in the story is named Darling and my brother thinks Mr Barrie should have been stopped from using the name. Walter gets quite cross when someone makes a joke about Tinker Bell or the Lost Boys.”

Characters from a children’s play, I deduced, and wondered how we were to be rid of these two. Alistair’s flat commands fell on deaf ears. Perhaps he proposed to bind them to a newel post?

He turned down the corridor leading up the wing towards the front, and when the two children stepped off the stairs to follow, he whirled and went back to loom over them.

“I. Said. No.” It was like speaking to a pair of stubborn puppies. They dropped their eyes to study the toes of their shoes; Alistair took this as a sign of obedience, and gestured for me to continue. I thought, however, the meekness was an act, and indeed, as we went along our way we could occasionally hear a stealthy step, trailing a safe distance behind.

This evidence of insurrection annoyed Alistair, enough to distract him from his lectures on Justice Hall’s history and architectural styles. We moved rather rapidly through a drawing room done in pale, chilly blues, then a trophy room packed with the stuffed heads of large animals, the stuffed bodies of smaller creatures, and case after case of exterminated butterflies and beetles. This room opened onto an orangerie, with tiled floor and murals of picnicking black-haired aristocrats, and then a conservatory, inhabited by one enormous tropical vine with huge yellowed leaves pressing up to the glass, a dying palm tree, and not a lot else. We pushed our way through the dank, deserted glass house to the far end, where a door opened into the billiards room.

There Alistair prepared to lay in wait for our persistent tail, standing terrible and stern with arms folded, ready to explode when they crept through the door.

I touched his arm. “They’re doing us no harm. They must be restless for distraction here.”

“I do not like to be followed.”

Or disobeyed. “Of course not. But think about it: If you don’t allow children to practise following and watching, or to rig traps out over the battlements, where will your friend Joshua get his next generation of spies?”

He reared back, stared at me in astonishment, stared at the still-vacant doorway, then gave a loud bark of unexpected laughter and reached out to clout me hard on the shoulder.

“That is good, Mary,” he said, chuckling. “I do like the idea of two generations working for Joshua. Very well; we shall permit the brats to practise their skills on us. Just so you remember never to say a thing in this house that you do not want to find its way into nursery and servants’ hall before nightfall.”

Much cheered and able now to concentrate on his task, he led me through the public rooms on the ground floor, tossing out tit-bits about the various dukes, duchesses, and powers-that-be of their times. The Prince of Wales had descended on Marsh’s father for a few days of slaughtering birds, bringing with him half the court and despoiling the countryside of anything with feathers (to judge by the photographs commemorating the occasion). The current King had dropped in for tea on the terrace one sunny summer afternoon, which as obligatory social events go must have proved a bargain by comparison.

One long corridor, wrapping around the back of the dining room, chronicled a period of about ten years during which Justice Hall had stepped into the centre of the social whirl. Dozens of photographs, all eight inches by twelve and identically framed, recorded one week-end after another. The guests were assembled on croquet courts or picnic grounds, arranged up the great staircase in the Hall or around a leaping bonfire in the out-of-doors, posed with artificial spontaneity around a card table or with the day’s tally of birds laid out in neat lines at their feet. Some gatherings were as few as eight or ten guests, others a dozen times that, but all the groups looked as if they were having a good time.

“Marsh’s stepmother enjoyed entertaining,” Alistair said, seeing me stopped in front of one panorama of at least fifty people in fancy-dress, masks in hand. Professional beauties, members of Parliament, one well-known tycoon, and three royals, with a handful of actors for leavening.

“Must have been quite a time.”

“We were already in—we were out of the country by then,” Alistair amended, mindful of ears. “This particular one, I believe Phillida wrote Marsh about. Yes—there’s Darling.” Indeed, the handsome young man, tall and slim and blond in the fancy-dress costume of Napoleon, was standing at her side. We went through the dining room, Alistair pointing out the Cellini ewers and the Adam plasterwork, a fairly uninhibited painting by Caravaggio and a somewhat dim one on the opposite wall by Van Eyck, a huge cabinet displaying several hundredweight of identical Sèvres porcelain, and an attractive but incongruous inlaid screen taking up one corner of the room, no doubt the booty of some family member who’d spent time in India. At the moment it was screening from our eyes two fledgling spies, which fact Alistair either did not notice or, considerably more likely, chose to overlook.

The dining room gave way to a music room of Jacobean plasterwork painted in orange and white, rather like plunging into an enormous bowl of apricot cream; then another drawing room, its walls completely taken up with a series of paintings depicting some momentous historical event that appeared to have involved a landing on a storm-swept beach followed by a lot of red-clad men riding horses with huge hindquarters up a hill towards a vaguely Germanic castle. After this room came the Great Hall, and up its stairway we went, to pass through the columns of chocolate-and-cream alabaster into an absolutely stunning long gallery.

The gallery glowed with light and felt warmer than its actual temperature. Its walls combined a pale yellow silk with white detailing and a collection of family portraits that somehow contrived to look like affectionate friends rather than the stern eyes of a disapproving Past. One could almost imagine them joining in the conversations of family members taking their exercise beneath that densely intricate plaster ceiling, strolling up and down the whole bright length of the room while the rain or snow came down on the terraced gardens outside of the mullioned windows, turning the curve of Justice Pond to a thing of pewter solidity. There was even, I saw, a folly on the top of the distant hill, crumbling artistically.

One of the primary reasons for country houses of this sort, I reflected, has always been intimidation. Less a family home than an assertion of power, the country house was the focus of the estate’s energies: The more powerful the landholder, the grander the house. Badger Old Place might be an organic extension of the countryside—its roots old as the hills themselves—but where it was an essentially domestic piece of architecture, Justice Hall was military history in stone and mortar, a weapon from battlement to Great Hall, intended to keep the peasants and all potential enemies in their place. Well, it was certainly working on me: I was well and truly intimidated, and feeling more and more like a country cousin with cow dung on her boots. Since the invention of Culture in the sixteenth century, these people had been skimming the cream off European art and artistry, bringing it here for the pleasure of the few, perfecting the art of being first and foremost. Lady Phillida drew to herself an aura of privilege in the same way the long gallery drew light; I crept along its edge, feeling every inch the mongrel parvenue.

Holmes came from country squires—minor squires, true, but at least he spoke the same language. I, on the other hand, was the result of a cross between Jewish merchants and American tycoons: half outsider, half nouveau riche, completely beyond redemption.

I escaped the beautiful room wondering how many more priceless works of art and exquisite vistas were going to sear themselves onto my soul before the tour was over. We entered a state bedroom hung with silk hand-painted chinoiserie wall covering and the matching silk bed hangings; from the door came the brief sound of footsteps crossing the bare boards at the side of the carpet down the centre of the long gallery. Alistair came to a halt and raised his voice.

“Were a person to wish to follow another without being noticed, he might do well to remove his shoes.”

Utter silence radiated from the long gallery. Then a small voice called back, “We’re not allowed to remove our shoes. It makes Miss Paul quite cross.”

“Life is full of decisions,” Alistair commented. Having delivered himself of this philosophical dictum, he went cheerfully on into the next room.

The sound of footsteps ceased to dog our heels.