Justice Hall

CHAPTER TEN

I’m afraid I gaped at the woman. For a couple of seconds before my jaw snapped shut and my hand went out, I must have resembled a stunned fish.

“How do you do?” I managed.

“Quite well, thank you. Despite the foul weather. It wasn’t raining in Paris; it began halfway across the Channel, like walking through a curtain. Alistair, you look marvelous.”

She was English, but had lived long enough in France to have a fairly pronounced accent, and she presented her cheek for Alistair to salute as a European would have done. She then noticed a damp but formal presence lingering in the background.

“Ogilby, that is you, isn’t it? Good heavens, you haven’t changed a whit since I was in pig-tails! What is your secret? I’ll sell it and make us a fortune.”

Torn between pleasure and professional dignity, Ogilby allowed himself a personal response, inadvertently revealing a great deal about Iris Sutherland’s one-time popularity in the house. “No secret, Your Grace, just clean living.”

She shook her head sadly. “Oh, dear, that will never catch on, not in Paris. But, you want to know what to do with my machine, yes? I wonder, Marsh, if you might put me up for a couple of days?”

“Of course—there’s always a place for you at Justice, you know that. But I should warn you that Phillida and Sidney are here, and there’s to be a week-end party.”

“Oh how very jolly,” she said, not sounding jolly in the least. “Birds, drink, dancing to the gramophone, and a lot of terribly British conversation. If I’m very lucky, we’ll even have charades. Ah well, if I’d wished for civilisation, I’d have stayed in France. So yes, Ogilby, if you’d be so good as to store my machine under cover. My bags are in the boot, keys are in the ignition. It’s a self-starter,” she added. “You shouldn’t need the handle.”

Ogilby headed off to summon motorcar-movers and luggage-carriers. The woman’s blue gaze watched his retreat, and she leant close to murmur, “Marsh, that man is ancient—he was old when I knew him; he must be a hundred by now. Why haven’t you let the poor thing retire?”

“I offered, he refused. And he’s not even seventy. Give me your coat.” He transferred the garment to the arms of a handy house-maid, added gloves and hat, and offered the newcomer his arm for the stroll to the so-called library. “What will it be?” he asked her. “Something hot or something strong, or both?”

“Oh, both would be a life-saver. One can either drive a motor or be warm in it, not the two at once.” Inside the warmth, she went straight to the fire, standing practically in it and moving not at all as Marsh bent to throw more logs onto the low-burning flames.

He had to brush past her silk-stockinged legs to do so; it came to me that I had never seen him as comfortable with a woman, not even his sister. It also came to me, more or less simultaneously, that the framed pictures on the right end of the mantelpiece had been rearranged, that the handsome young second lieutenant was missing, and that a younger version of this woman was in the family group that remained.

Marsh told the maid—Emma, the young woman I had encountered on the stairway—to bring hot coffee made strong in the French manner. Iris gave her hands a last brisk rub over the flames and said she’d be back in a moment, then marched out of the warm library. No-one had to tell her where the cloak-room was, I noticed.

Marsh dropped into a chair and lit a thoughtful cigarette. His first reaction to her appearance on the Justice front steps had been surprise and the pleasure of greeting an old friend. Now that reaction was retreating, to be replaced by a sort of concern over what her arrival meant.

It was nothing to the speculation that was racing through my own mind. His wife, clearly long estranged, yet welcomed back as a comfortable, long-time companion? Alistair, as ferocious in his protection of Marsh as he had been of Mahmoud, without a trace of jealousy? (And I was watching for it, you can be sure.) And Ogilby—in my experience, a man’s servants were often more vigorous in their efforts to safeguard their master than even the man’s friends, and yet Ogilby, too, reacted to her as a long-absent member of the family, not as a wife living shamefully, even scandalously apart from her husband.

I cursed my own absent husband: This was no time to be away in London.

“You know why she’s here?” Alistair asked Marsh in a low voice.

“I suppose so. She has the right, certainly. She might even have something to contribute.”

“Your sister will not be pleased.”

“Then Phillida can remain behind.”

The door opened and Iris Sutherland came back in. “My God, Marsh, what mad and profligate genius thought to place a radiator in the lavatory?”

“Henry put them all over the house, when he and Sarah came back to England after Father died. He said it was an attempt to keep Sarah from freezing, after all the winters she’d spent in Italy. Actually, I think it was make-work to keep the estate builders employed over the winter. I don’t believe he ever expected the things to work.”

“It’s glorious in there; I’m surprised you don’t lose guests regularly, find them camping between the fixtures. Is it possible I may escape England without a case of chilblains?”

“That,” replied Marsh carefully, “will depend on how long you stay.”

“Well,” said his wife, with equal care, “I rather thought I might go to Town with you on Wednesday. To meet the boy.”

It made sense, that Iris Sutherland would wish to lay eyes on young Thomas Hughenfort, her husband’s nine-year-old nephew and heir, the boy who might keep her from inhabiting Justice Hall as its duchess. And if, as it seemed, she had been close to the family before Marsh and his cousin decamped to Palestine and left her to her life in Paris, she might indeed have something to contribute to the discussion. If nothing else—and despite any irregularities in this marriage—the lady had a good head on her shoulders.

The coffee came, steaming hot and the consistency of India ink. Marsh pawed through a cabinet, brought out a bottle of Calvados brandy, and held it up for approval.

“Oh Marsh, you remembered! Yes, that would be absolutely perfect. Do you know, I believe that’s the very bottle we drank from after your father’s funeral. Could that have been—Good Lord, twenty years ago?”

“I’m afraid so. And it probably is the same bottle. Does it taste poisonous?”

“It tastes heavenly.”

I expected him to add a dollop to his own cup, as a hair-of-the-dog, but instead he added from the jug of hot milk. Alistair took his black; I had milk in mine. With a cup in my hand, it was difficult to fade quickly and politely away, but I was very interested to see more of this new Marsh—yet another unsuspected side to the man.

When we were settled again, Marsh took out his cigarette case and offered one to his wife and me, then to Alistair. When they were all three lit, he resumed his cup and said to her, “How’s Dan?”

I seized on the name. Aha!—Iris has a man in Paris, and this marriage, as I thought, was of convenience only. No wonder they were friends; no wonder Alistair wasn’t worried.

But: “She’s fine. Sends her greetings, says I should scold you for passing through Paris and not stopping with us.”

“We were in a hurry.”

“Yes. I was sorry to hear about your brother—but I wrote to you already about that. Henry was a good man, in his stolid British way. Would that he had lived a long time.”

If he had (all four of us no doubt were thinking), we should not be gathered here. Had Henry, Lord Beauville, lived long, or even had he remarried and fathered a son or two, Marsh could have returned to Palestine following the funeral. I put down my half-empty cup and stood to go; these people had many things to communicate, and I was definitely superfluous to requirement.

“If you don’t mind too much, I’d like to sneak a look at the Greene Library,” I said.

“You needn’t go,” Marsh told me (“No, do stay,” urged Iris), but I assured them I would see them at luncheon, and I went.

Half an hour later, comfortably set in the intoxicating Greene Library with a stack of books and an armchair near the window, I glanced up to see three figures draped in voluminous waterproofs and rubber galoshes, walking in a line off into the park, the dogs gambolling ahead. Half an hour after that, a single figure, the tallest of the three, came back down the hill with two sopping dogs at his heel. Another forty minutes, and Marsh and Iris reappeared, arm in arm and heads bent together against the noise of the rain on their waterproof hats. After a while, the gong went, and I folded up my books to see what Mrs Butter had caused to be made for us.

Alistair was downstairs already. Marsh and Iris came in together, their colour high from the onslaught of fresh air, their good cheer somewhat modulated from the earlier high spirits, but with an element now of unity of purpose.

And still Alistair was not troubled.

When we were served and drinking our soup, Marsh said to his cousin, “Iris agrees that we need to know more about Lionel’s wife and the boy.”

“Of course she does.”

“Perhaps you ought to come down with us on Wednesday, and tail the woman back to her house in Lyons? It would be nice to know where she and the boy live, if they live alone, or . . . you know.”

“Marsh,” I interrupted, but he took no notice.

“It’s a vulnerable age,” he continued, “nine, and if she’s living as she shouldn’t, it could give us a clear—”

“Marsh,” I said again, sharply. He turned his eyes to mine.

“Let me follow her. Alistair would stick out, and there’s a hundred places he couldn’t go.” And it would make me feel as if I were doing something, I did not say aloud.

“My cousin will manage. He is very good at it.”

“He’s very good in . . . other places, but in London, following a woman and a child? Marsh, I am trained to this. There are few better.” No time for false modesty.

He looked surprised, Iris puzzled, Alistair relieved. The two men consulted without words—the first time I’d seen them do that, here—then Marsh nodded. “Very well; you and Alistair. You can act the happy pair, and follow her into crowds or the cloak-room.”

Not what I had in mind, but the compromise was acceptable, and we finished the meal in peace.

Afterwards, Marsh announced that he and Iris were going for another walk (I refrained from glancing at the streaming window) and Alistair said that he was due to meet his nephew for a discussion of the Badger farms. This left me either to interview children and servants, or to take to the Greene Library.

It was no difficult decision.

Before retreating up the stairs to the sanctuary of the library, I made a quick dash through the rain to a rosemary bush I had noticed growing outside of the billiards room. Feeling more than a little silly, I dutifully laid the wet sprig onto the mantel below the portrait of Obediah Greene, and although I cannot know if it pleased his shade, it certainly made the air sweet.

I went to my room to fetch my pen and a block of writing-paper. When I got back to the library I found Alistair standing in the middle of the library, gazing up at Mr Greene. When he turned, I saw the large, lumpy file envelope he carried. Wordlessly, he held it out, and watched me carry it to the table I had mentally chosen for my own. I loosed the tie and poured the contents onto the pad of clean blotting-paper.

Three fat journals filled with boyish handwriting, five letters, a pair of identity discs (one the standard fibre tag on a neck-cord, the other a brass disc on a chain bracelet), a silver pocket-watch, a much-used pen-knife, several field post-cards, and a leather-bound Testament with the salty tide-marks of sweat staining its cover.

“When you have finished, Marsh asks that you give them back to him.”

“I will. Thank you.”

He turned to leave, but paused in the doorway. “There is a magnifying glass in the desk below the window. Should you need one.” Then he was gone, leaving me to paw through the personal effects of Sub-Lieutenant Gabriel Hughenfort, Earl of Calminster, ducal heir, enigma of the moment.

The identity discs might have been of value for a psychic reading, but all the necklace told me was that it had ridden on a man for longer than some I had seen, and not as long as others. The bracelet showed signs of dried mud, or possibly blood, but I did not see that laboratory attentions would tell me any more than that a man had worn it in mud, and possibly to die. The sweat-stained Testament had been given Gabriel by his mother, on his eighteenth birthday according to the inscription. The pen-knife looked to be a boy’s treasure taken to a man’s job. The letters GATH were scratched crudely into the side, and the shorter blade was bent so badly it was difficult to open. It also had a chip in the blade, I saw when I had finally prised it open. The longer blade was freckled with rust but was still razor-sharp.

I folded the knife away and took up the pocket-watch. Its cover popped easily, showing me hands stopped at 3:18 (How long after its owner’s death? I wondered). On the inside of the cover was engraved Justitia fortitudo mea est—the Hughenfort motto, carried with him always. I prised open the back of the watch, saw that the works would need some attention before it would run again, and put the timepiece with the other things.

The artefacts had taught me nothing, only that their owner had lived hard in a damp place, which was no surprise. I was left with his written legacy, and with a grimace, I picked up the more difficult first: the letters from the Front.

The field post-cards were the usual thing, their laconic printed phrases sending the message that their soldier was alive and fit enough to wield a pencil—or at least, to direct the pencil of an aide. I am quite well, Gabriel had ticked off, along with I have received your letter dated/parcel dated, after which he had written in a strong, tidy script: 29 December. The checked spaces on one card informed his parents: I have been admitted into hospital [wounded]/and am going on well/and hope to be discharged soon/Letter follows at first opportunity.

On that card, the signature was shaky, from nerves or injury I could not know.

The three letters written in Gabriel’s neat hand were another matter. All had come via the Field Post Office, so their envelopes were stamped with the usual black postal circle as well as the red triangle of the censor. The earliest was dated 27 December, 1917, sent from France, and contained four pages of news that sounded very like an extended attempt to whistle in the dark—aimed at reassuring not them, but himself. The next was from early April, although it did not seem to be the Letter follows that was promised by the post-card, since it made only passing reference to his time in hospital, saying merely that he was recovered but for his twisted knee and an irritating (his word) sensitivity to falling mortars. He sounded, truth to tell, not only recovered but positively bursting with optimism and good cheer. There were jokes about lice and cold tea, stories about his fellows, a matter-of-fact report on a gas attack, and one wistful passage about the Justice parkland in April. Compared with his earlier letter, Gabriel quite clearly had his feet beneath him, and looked to be having what survivors called a “good war.” I was certain there had been other letters between these two, but taking them as the only representatives, I found the change in his attitude and self-assurance striking.

I then took up his third envelope. This was thinner, and contained but a single sheet of paper. It had also had a much harder journey to reach Justice than the other two: a worn crease across the middle, one edge crushed in, the back of it looking as if it had ridden about in a filthy pocket for days, if not weeks. The glass showed me several thumbprint-sized smudges and the remains of no fewer than three crushed body lice. Sub-Lieutenant Hughenfort had carried this letter a long time before it had been posted.

The sheet inside was undated. It read:

Dearest Pater, Beloved Mama,

I write from a nice dry dug-out left behind by Jerry, who shall, with any luck, not be needing it again. I trust that you are well and safe within Justice Hall. I think often of the peace inside the Park walls, of how sweet the air smells after a mowing, the dash of swallows in the spring and the loud geese that ride the autumn winds. We have received orders for the morning, and although this has been a quiet section of Front recently, there is always the chance that a German bullet will find your son. If that were to happen, please know that I love you, that I would happily give my life ten times over if it served to keep the enemy from Justice Hall. My men feel the same, willing to give their all for their little patch of England, and I am proud of every one of them.

For your sakes, I shall try to keep my head down on the morrow, but if I fail, please know that death found me strong and happy to serve my King and country. You formed me well, and I will do my best to remain brave, that I might live up to my name. Righteousness is my strength.

Your loving son,

Gabriel

Lies, I thought, all of it pretty lies to comfort the mother and bereft father, just as families were told of clean bullets and instant death even if their boy had hung for agonised hours on the barbed wire of No-Man’s-Land. I only hoped it brought his parents some scrap of comfort, when it reached their hands.

The last letter was addressed by a different hand. It read:

7 August 1918

Dear Sir and Madame,

By the time this letter reaches you, you will have received the foulest news any parent could have, the death of your beloved son. I did not know Gabriel well, but over the few months of our acquaintance, he impressed me profoundly, as a soldier and as a man. The men under his command, too, had come to respect him far more deeply than they did many officers of longer experience and greater years. I do not claim to understand the forces that conspired to bring your son to his end, but I am convinced that as an officer, your son inspired nothing but loyalty and courage in those under his command, and that at the end, all that he did was for their sakes.

Joining you in your sorrow, I am

Very truly yours,

Rev. F. A. Hastings

This last letter I read several times. Taken in conjunction with the alternate wording of the official death notification, I began to see what had led Marsh to the conviction that Gabriel had been executed. “I do not claim to understand the forces that conspired” sounded awfully like a lament for a loved deserter. I could only wish that the Reverend Mr Hastings had gone into a bit more detail concerning “all that he did.”

With relief, I slid the letters back into the large envelope and turned to the youthful journals with a lighter heart. They had all been written before Gabriel Hughenfort went to soldier; their sorrow and bloodshed would be limited to anguish for a dead pet and the slaughter of game birds.

I read long, grasping for the essence of the boy and finding a degree of sweetness and nobility that was hard for my cynical mind to comprehend. Afternoon tea inserted itself on my awareness as nothing more than a cup at my elbow and a sudden brightness as the maid turned on the light. The next thing I knew, it was a quarter past seven and a woman’s ringing voice startled me from my page: The Darlings had returned.

I looked down at my tweed-covered lap and dusty hands, and knew it was unlikely that we should be excused from changing two nights running. I closed my books and shut down the lamps. After returning the envelope into Marsh’s hands, without comment from either of us, I went to don the hair-shirt of civilisation.

My perusal of the two dinner frocks in the wardrobe was interrupted by a knock at the door. I tightened the belt of my dressing gown and went to see who it was, opening the door to find Emma, the house-maid whom I had nearly sent flying on the 1612 staircase.

“Beg pardon, mum, but Mrs Butter sent me to see if you’d like a hand with your hair. I was a ladies’ maid at my last position,” she added, as if Mrs Butter might sent a scullery maid for the purpose. I stepped back to let her in.

She chose my dress, rejected the wrap I had chosen in favour of the other, picked a necklace and combs, wrapped my hair into a slick chignon, and finally produced a powder compact and lip gloss. The ugly duckling thus transformed into a higher species, the gong sounded as if she had made some signal giving permission.

“I thank you, Emma, you’re an artist. Before you go, tell me, how formal is Saturday dinner?”

“Oh, it’ll be black tie, mum. There’s one or two might wear white tie, but that’ll be only the older guests.”

“In either case, I’ll need to send for a dress. If I put a letter near the door, will it go in the morning?”

“Certainly, or you could ring, and someone will come for it.”

I had discovered writing materials and stamps in the table under the window. Mrs Hudson would not receive the letter until Saturday morning, but I felt sure she would rise to the challenge of getting evening apparel here to Justice by the afternoon.

And if it did not arrive, I should have a good excuse to plead a head-ache.

I very nearly used that excuse to avoid that evening’s demands on sociability. Following my afternoon’s reading, aware that the tragedy of Gabriel Hughenfort would be moving restlessly through the back of my mind, the thought of spending two or three hours making light conversation was a torment.

But when the gong sounded, I went.

Dinner was in the parlour where we had taken breakfast, and more comfortable it was than the formal dining room. Sidney Darling had spent the day at his club with friends; Lady Phillida had spent the day at a lecture and the shops with friends. He began the evening superciliously amiable, she determinedly cheerful; both of them detested Iris Sutherland.

I could not tell if their palpable dislike was due to the potential for rivalry she represented, or to Iris herself. Phillida kept glancing irritably at Iris’s dress, a subtle construction of heavy chocolate-brown crepe with flame-coloured kid trim that fit Iris like an old shirt and made her sister-in-law’s ornate velvet-and-beads look like dressing-up. Sidney seemed particularly irked by Iris’s arrival; he found the soup cold, the bird tough, the fish going off, and the wine inadequate.

Marsh watched these undercurrents with lidded eyes, and then over the meat course rolled his little bomb into the room. “Iris will be coming with us to London on Wednesday, Phillida.”

Lady Phillida’s upbringing held, and she managed to confine her reaction to a blink of the eyes and a brief contraction of the lips before saying merely, “How pleasant.”

Sidney, however, betrayed a less stringent upbringing. His fork clattered to his plate in protest, although he managed to contain his words to a strangled, “You feel that necessary?”

“Not necessary,” Marsh replied equably, “but she offered, and I accepted. Do you disapprove?”

Sidney was in no position to disapprove of any of the duke’s actions, but he could not quite rein in his vexation. He burst out, “I truly cannot see why you chose to handle this situation in such a formal manner. Surely we could have made them welcome at Justice. The poor old girl’ll feel as if she’s on show, like some . . . agricultural creature on the auction block.” That being a fairly accurate representation of the position in which Mme Hughenfort and her son were being placed, none of us tried to argue with Sidney. He went on, stabbing and sawing at his succulent roast. “I do not know why we couldn’t have had them here. I’m sure the child is house-broken. And I’m sure his mother is charming; most French women are. It is hardly a welcoming attitude. I need more gravy,” he ended petulantly. The footman leapt to attention, and we continued our meal with close concentration.

I glanced at Iris to see how she had taken this blatant lack of welcome; she shot me a look of quiet amusement, and went on placidly with her vegetables. I found myself liking Marsh’s wife more and more. She was intelligent, clear-spoken, interested in everything, and possessed of a sufficient degree of self-confidence to regard the waves of disapproval coming down the table at her with equanimity, even humour.

It was she who pushed away the increasingly heavy blanket of silence. “How was London today, Phillida?”

The lady of the house had clearly felt the blanket more than the rest of us, for she seized the question with relief. When we had ridden out the blow-by-blow account of the lecture Lady Phillida had attended on auto-suggestion rendered by a disciple of Coué, and before we could get to her shopping triumphs, Iris turned to me and asked how I’d spent my afternoon.

“I’ve been exploring the library—the proper library, upstairs.”

“You spend a great part of your life in libraries, I am led to believe.”

“Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.”

“Why afraid?”

“Oh, it’s just that most people haven’t much use for academics. I freely admit it’s a fairly strange way to spend one’s life, burrowing through dusty tomes.”

“What are you working on at the moment?”

Phrased in that manner, the question had to be taken seriously. I thought, however, that I might give the room a general answer rather than what I had actually been doing in the Greene Library that very afternoon. “I’m putting together an article for an American journal. I met the editor last spring at a function in Oxford, and he asked me to write something for it.”

“What is the subject?” she pressed.

“‘The Science of Deduction in the Bible,’ ” I told her. It was the sort of title that tended to cause conversation to grind somewhat until people had chewed their way through it, and indeed the two Darlings had that familiar How-does-one-approach-this? look on their faces. Iris, however, looked only interested.

“‘The Science of Deduction’—do you mean, when people in the Bible work things out? Like Susannah and the Elders?”

Full points for Iris Sutherland, I thought. “Exactly. Or psychological deduction such as Joseph used in interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams.”

We turned this topic over for a while, with Marsh listening and the Darlings frowning, until I thought that we had inflicted the room with enough theology, and I asked Iris what she found of interest in Paris. (In other words: And what do you do?)

“The immense wealth of its artistic life. Writers and painters are coming back, now that the worst of the damage is patched up, and musicians. Music somehow sounds better in Paris, don’t you think?”

This was no rhetorical question; she expected an answer. I had to disappoint her.

“My husband would no doubt have an opinion, but I’m afraid that I have what could only be called a tin ear.”

“Ah.” She looked down at her plate, a smile tugging at her lips. “I, on the other hand, teach music.”

Our eyes met in shared recognition of a brick wall. I could only spread both hands in a rueful admission of inadequacy; she laughed aloud, a rich, deep sound that seemed to startle the painted figures on the walls.

“Well,” she said. “That puts paid to any discussion of modern composers.”

“I met Debussy once,” I offered. “When I was a child.”

“I said ‘modern.’ ”

“Under what circumstances did you meet Debussy?” This from Darling, who either suspected me of prevarication or simply did not wish to be left out of the conversation. I gave the room a version of the encounter which seemed to satisfy him, particularly because at the end of my narrative the door stood open to his own tale of an episode involving Jean Sibelius.

Marsh was silent and watchful; he drank but a single glass of wine with his meal.