Justice Hall

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In the morning, however, Marsh’s rooms were silent, and I for one was reluctant to break into his rest. We continued downstairs to join those house guests who were upright at this hour, a pair of unshaven young men still in dinner jackets, who seemed to have not bothered about going to bed at all, and who were in no condition to intrude on our peaceful enjoyment of eggs and toast. After breakfast, I gave Holmes a brief tour of the house (passing by the ancient stairway into the cellar-chapel, as I had no key) and ended up in the riches of the Greene Library. That was where Iris found us.

She was wearing a remarkably conventional wool dress and carried in her gloved hand a small, maroon-covered Book of Common Prayer. It took no great effort to discern her intent, although I was rather surprised at her willingness to attend the Sunday services; why, I do not know.

“Marsh is awake, having some breakfast; the doctor’s coming in an hour, so we thought we might resume after that. You’re welcome to join me in the chapel, if you like. Or not to join me—it is by no means compulsory.”

“Thank you,” I told her, “but I think we’ll commune with The Divine among the stacks.”

“I’m sure God dwells here as much as in the chapel. More, perhaps, since it’s considerably warmer. Shall we meet in Marsh’s rooms at noon?”

We agreed, and she left us to our reading.

Today was November the eleventh. At 10:58 the house gong sounded a brief warning. It went off again precisely at 11:00, somehow conjuring up a sombre sound, rather than the energetic crescendo it produced at mealtimes. We rose to our feet for the nation’s two minutes’ silence, and then returned to our books.

Holmes, appropriately if uncharacteristically enough, was poring over an immense and ancient family Bible. Not the printed section, but rather the generations of Hughenfort names, beginning with the eighteenth century.

“Write this down, Russell,” he ordered; I uncapped my pen. “Ralph William Hughenfort, born 1690, eighth Earl of Calminster, made first Duke of Beauville in 1721. Probably lent some sage advice to the Crown and saved George I from losing his breeches over the South Sea Bubble. At any rate, duke he was. Sons William Thomas, born 1724, second Duke, died without issue, and Charles John, born 1732, third Duke. Charles’ son Ralph Charles, born 1761, had three sons and two daughters, then died before his father. Those sons were Lionel Thomas Philip, born 1792; Charles Thomas, born 1798; and Gervase Thomas Richard, born 1802. Lionel became the fourth Duke in 1807 at the tender age of fifteen. His children were Gerald Richard, born 1830; Anne, in 1834; and Philip Peter, born in 1837, with four others who did not live to reach their majority. Anne died before she married; Philip Peter died in South Africa with no known issue. Gerald Richard was made fifth Duke in 1865, and had four living children: Henry Thomas, born 1859, with his son Gabriel born in 1899” (My pen paused briefly; I had been thinking of Gabriel as a dead boy, but in truth, he was a few months older than I); “William Maurice—our Marsh—born 1876; Lionel Gerald, 1882; and Phillida Anne, 1893. Henry was made the sixth Duke in 1903, and Marsh the seventh.”

Long-lived and late to breed, I noted. Fairly typical for aristocrats.

“But to go back to the fourth Duke’s generation. Lionel’s brother Charles died without issue. The third brother, Gervase, had two sons, William, born 1842, and Louis, in 1847. William is the father of Alistair, his sister Rose, and his brother Ralph; Louis had one son, Ivo Michael—your shooting companion of yesterday.”

“All right,” I said. I scribbled and crossed out names, finally arranging the relevant generations (that is, minus most of the women) into a family tree. That gave me the following:

After Marsh, the seventh Duke, the future line of succession would be: Lionel’s son Thomas; Alistair; Ralph; and Ivo. If Philip Peter had sons somewhere in South Africa, they would come after young Thomas and before Alistair; if Ralph had sons, they would come before Ivo. That no sons for Ralph were noted in the Bible meant little, since the latest date I could see recorded the death of a distant relative in 1910. Thomas’s birth in 1914 was missing, as well as those of Lenore and Walter Darling.

“We can do nothing about the boy Thomas until Wednesday,” Holmes noted. “I should like to have seen Gabriel Hughenfort’s last effects, had you not dragged me away with such haste. We must also enquire about the fifth Duke’s brother, Philip Peter, as well as Alistair’s brother Ralph.”

“Are you going under the hypothesis that yesterday’s shooting was an attempt to clear the succession?”

“The possibility cannot be ignored. See here: In January 1914, the sixth Duke—Henry—was alive and well, and could have made up the better part of a cricket team out of his heirs, with his brother Lionel’s wife expecting a child in the spring-time. By the end of 1918, heirs were getting a bit thin on the ground. The seventh Duke’s heir is this boy Thomas, who has some doubts attached to him. At the beginning of the War Alistair, to take one possible candidate, was seventh from the strawberry leaves; yesterday there appears to have been only that one doubtful boy between Alistair and Marsh’s title. When the seventh Duke and his immediate heir presented themselves in the close vicinity of a barrage of shotguns, well, temptation may have reared.”

“How ironic,” I mused, “that after all the hazards those two have weathered over the years, they would very nearly die on their own doorstep in peaceable England.”

“Tell me your impressions of Sidney Darling,” Holmes said, not interested in irony at the moment.

“Languid gentleman on the surface, modern-day robber baron underneath.”

“Even twenty years ago he’d have had to conceal the latter, if he wanted to move in the levels of society his wife’s name would open to him. Now, a little greed is looked upon as an amusing foible. O, saint-seducing gold!” he growled. “That for which all virtue is sold, and almost every vice.”

“War seldom enters but where wealth allures,” I retorted, figuring that Dryden was at least as apposite a misquotation as Shakespeare or Jonson. “And I don’t know that you could in the least call Darling a saint. His greed lies deep, and I think he’s sunk a fair bit of his own money into the stud, for one thing, and is worried about being suddenly left without a home.”

“Who came up with this boy, Thomas?” Holmes asked abruptly.

“According to what I’ve picked up, the mother herself wrote. She’d somehow heard of Henry’s death in the summer and sent her condolences—and, rather pointedly, those of the new duke’s nephew, Thomas. I don’t know if it was Marsh’s idea to bring them to London for inspection, or Lady Phillida’s. In either case, both are going to Town in order to meet the boy. Or, they were both going to London. I don’t know if Marsh will be fit enough.”

“I should think that man would have one boot firmly planted in the grave and still do what he deemed necessary.”

“I don’t know, Holmes. If Alistair and Iris unite to keep him here, I’d not care to wager on the winning side.”

He smiled to himself. “It is a rather interesting variation on a marriage, is it not?”

“Do you mean Marsh and Iris, or all three of them?”

But his smile only deepened.

Iris reappeared shortly thereafter, the odour of sanctity strong about her, but wearing an expression of worry.

“The doctor’s seen Marsh,” she told us. “Some of the wounds are festering, and he’s running a fever. I think perhaps we should delay our meeting.”

“But of course,” Holmes said, hiding his irritation nobly. He scowled after her departing form, and turned to me. “Let us use this opportunity to examine the ground where Marsh was shot. There may be some tiny piece of evidence not yet trampled or washed away.”

A change of clothing, a pair of walking-sticks, and we were away.

Yesterday’s mist had cleared, leaving the air frosty and dry. Setting a pace brisk enough to warm us, I led Holmes on a reenactment of the shoot, from the first stand at the upper lawns to the lakeside where I had stoned a duck in full flight. There were men at the earlier sites, quartering the ground for unclaimed birds, as well as stray discarded cartridges, which not only looked untidy but did the stomachs of grazing animals no good.

Then to the final stand.

I walked the line of guns, pointing out roughly where each shooter had stood waiting. Holmes burrowed into the thick shrubs from which the bird, and possibly the murderous shot, had come, but it appeared that others had been in there since the shooting as well. He emerged, his clothing somewhat the worse for wear, after ten minutes of grubbing about.

“I’m very sorry, Holmes, I should have kept everyone out, but there was just too great a press. Bloom must have had fifty or sixty beaters, and they were all over.”

“I doubt there’d have been much evidence to begin with. The fallen leaves are too thick to show footprints, there is nothing that would take a fingerprint, and the only threads I could see are rough white cotton. I take it the beaters wore some kind of smock?” he asked, holding up the thread in question.

“Most of them.”

“Very well. You say the boy Peter and his father were here?”

“So the boy said. The other twin, Roger, was a little closer to me.”

Holmes squatted to examine the ground, tracing boot-marks with his long gloved fingers. He shifted, lowered his head to gain a more extreme angle, and then stood up.

“And Marsh—if you would take up his position, Russell?”

I went to the holly clump where the two cousins had fallen, and faced Holmes. He settled his walking-stick into his shoulder and sighted down it to the first stand of mixed evergreen shrubs.

“The bird breaks,” he said. “One. Two. Bang.”

As my rough sketch the night before had suggested, he was now facing a point about halfway between the two evergreens. He repeated his motion, only this time faster, continuing until he was aiming at me. “One-two-three-four-five-bang,” he got out, and nearly fell over as his feet corkscrewed around themselves.

“Unfortunately, Holmes, the bird was over there. In fact,” I said in surprise, “the bird is still over there.”

We converged on the spot and looked at the twice-shot fowl.

“Why do you suppose they left this here?” I wondered.

“Overlooked in the dusk, or perhaps squeamishness. The bird was nearly the death of their duke, after all. However, I think it worth performing a cursory necropsy on the creature. Just to confirm a theory. How are you at plucking birds?”

I put my hands together behind my back. “It takes me an hour and rips my fingers to bits,” I told him.

To my surprise, he sat down on a nearby log, removed his gloves, and proceeded to strip the bird of its feathers, with a practiced jerk of the wrist such as I had seen Mrs Hudson perform. In a brief time a cloud of feathers spilt across his boots. I sat down—clear of the feathers—to observe. “Birds in their little nest agree,” he startled me by chanting in a sing-song voice as he tugged at the feathers, “it is a shameful sight, when children of one family, fall out and chide and fight. So, Russell, what see you?”

Two distinct patches of shot were embedded in the rubbery skin. One followed the upper edge and tip of the right wing; the other, the shot that actually killed it, formed a cluster along the left side of the head and body.

“The bird could conceivably have got those two injuries at the same time,” I suggested, “if the right wing was up in flight.”

“Russell, Russell,” he scolded, plopping the disgusting object into my lap and tugging at the half-frozen body until its wings were outstretched. “Which way is the shot on the left side buried?”

I poked at the clammy skin, and hazarded an opinion that was half guess. “As the bird flew, almost immediately below.”

“And the right wing?”

“Harder to tell.” Plucking a bird leaves it looking comprehensively raw.

“What about this?” His naked finger traced a half-inch welt along the wing that ended at a tiny hole in the body.

“That came from in front of the bird, level, and at a forty-five-degree angle.”

“I agree. Two shots, then.” Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a folding knife and two wadded-up sheets of writing paper. He dug half a dozen small, rough pellets from the bird’s wing, folding them into one sheet, then did the same with those in the body. I looked at the resulting large, smooth shot, and was glad: Peter Gerard had brought down a bird, not a duke. Holmes cleaned his knife on some moss and folded it away, then rose and looked down dubiously at the mutilated pheasant.

“We can’t very well carry it back with us, Holmes.”

“Pity. I’ve grown rather fond of it. Without that bird’s testimony, a degree of uncertainty would remain.”

“Leave it here for the foxes, Holmes.”

“I suppose so.”

We arrived back at Justice in time for tea, to find the house guests still in residence and embarked on various pursuits of childhood, the two children returned from their week-end banishment looking on in adult disdain, and Marsh ill but demanding that we continue our consultation.

He was ensconced on an elaborately ornate brocade divan with fringes along its lower edge, propped into a great number of pillows in a room of tropical heat. Holmes and I stripped off as many layers as we could without impropriety, and fell on the tray of tea and sandwiches with enthusiasm.

Marsh waited with growing impatience, his face flushed with heat both internal and external, his eyes feverish but focussed. Alistair did not look much better; between Monday’s head injury and the scatter of shot in his own arm, I thought he wanted nursing himself. Holmes drank his tea, but when he reached for the pot, Marsh spoke up impatiently.

“You must have found out more, about Gabriel. What else did your four soldiers say?”

“Those four, and three more Saturday morning. Do you object to a composite—the statements of the men and what there is of an official record?”

“By all means,” Marsh growled. Holmes claimed an armchair with a nearby perch for his cup, and drew out his pipe.

“Gabriel Hughenfort sailed to France in December 1917, following a scant five months’ training, and joined his regiment on the twentieth. They were occupying a supporting position, behind the lines, and moved back up to the Front in early January. By the time he first stood in the trenches, the young man had picked up enough common-sense knowledge to keep his head down. He acquitted himself honourably, and without mishap, during that period on the Front, then through the cycle behind the lines.

“His second front-line duty, he was not as lucky. His section of trench took a direct mortar hit, and he was buried—in, as one of my informants picturesquely described it, ‘a blast of mud that was thinner than some soups I’ve et, and a lot richer in meat.’

“His fellows waded in and dug him out, scraped out his mouth and pummelled the breath back into him, then sent him to the rear—unconscious—with the next stretcher party. He spent three weeks in hospital, took a brief leave in Paris, then was sent to a new regiment farther up the line. Just in time to catch the March push.

“After that, the lad’s story becomes more vague. The official records of his second regiment from that period are extremely spotty—some of them went down in the Channel, according to Mycroft’s informant—and the evidence of his companions not much better. There was general agreement that the boy stood with them throughout March, including a period when they were fifteen straight days under fire in their waterlogged pits, unbathed, under-fed, and rotting inside their boots, but holding their ground as they’d been ordered. You’ll recall General Haig’s ‘back against the wall’ speech: ‘Every position must be held to the last man; each of us must fight on to the end.’ His fellows remembered Gabriel’s presence during that time.”

The details of the boy’s last weeks were not helping his uncle’s state of mind. Iris, keeping an eye on Marsh’s face, finally had to interrupt.

“Why does this matter?” she demanded. “Of what earthly importance could it be where he was transferred and what the men knew about him?”

Holmes did not react to this heresy against the supremacy of knowledge; at least, he did not reveal a reaction. He also did not reveal in so many words the original assignment: to find a means of freeing the seventh Duke from his obligations. Instead, his answer walked a line between caution and clarity.

“We were asked to come here and assist Marsh in the decisions he has to make. One of those decisions, concerning the paternity of the boy Thomas, will come into our ken on Wednesday. But, it appeared to me that there were other areas of uncertainty that cried out for clarification. The death of the sixth Duke’s heir was one of those. The business practices of Sidney Darling may prove to be another. This shooting, particularly in view of Alistair’s injury earlier in the week, may prove to be a third. I would not go so far as Schiller in asserting that there is no such thing as chance, but I would agree that what seems mere accident often springs from the deepest sources of cupidity.”

Alistair puffed up and began to protest that his had been a stupid accident, but Holmes merely put up a hand to stop him, and went on.

“The chaos of battle can hide many things. Rivalries explode; guns may find a mark short of the enemy. Without knowing Gabriel, I cannot know the likelihood that he was caught up in such a rivalry or resentment, but even before I began to investigate his life, I knew one thing: Had he survived, the boy would have become an extremely wealthy and influential man.”

“And if you didn’t know Marsh as well as you do, you might be investigating him,” Iris interjected. By her expression, the thought worried her not in the least; seemed to amuse her, almost. And Holmes smiled as he nodded.

“If I did not know him, then yes, I would be looking closely at his whereabouts during July 1918.

“However, I do not think that will be necessary. On the other hand, I should very much like to know if the fifth Duke’s brother, Philip Peter, had a son, and similarly Ralph Hughenfort.”

“Uncle Philip?” Marsh said, simultaneously with Alistair’s “My brother Ralph, do you mean?”

“Yes,” Holmes said. “To both.”

“Philip died a few years ago, in South Africa. He was a monk of some sort—not Catholic, but I’ve never heard of a marriage.”

“I can’t imagine anyone marrying Ralph,” Alistair told us, pronouncing the name “Rafe.” He went on, “My brother had a fever when he was small; it left him uncontrollable. He ran away when he was nineteen, first to India and then Australia. Rose, our sister, used to get long, sorrowful letters from him, with requests for money, but they stopped during the War. His last one said he was thinking of joining the Anzacs. He probably lies in Gallipoli with all the others.”

“A degree of certainty in any of this would be a pleasant surprise,” Holmes complained, as if the Hughenfort family had conspired against the solution of his case. If, indeed, it could be considered a case.

“My brother began enquiries into his whereabouts after the War, but had not much luck,” Marsh told him.

“Another pair of assignments for my brother,” Holmes said darkly. “And now, I should like to see Gabriel’s final letter, if you don’t mind. And what diaries you may have.”

At Marsh’s nod, Alistair went over to a third-rate nineteenth-century portrait on the wall, pulled it back, manipulated the dial behind it, and handed Holmes the packet that I had returned on Thursday afternoon.

Holmes glanced at the field post-cards, then read all four letters, the three from Gabriel and the sympathy note from the Reverend Mr Hastings. When he was finished, he folded them into their envelopes and handed them back to Alistair; the leather-bound journals he retained. We watched Alistair lock the safe again as if he was performing some rite, and when he was back in his seat, Holmes asked Marsh, “Very well; what can you tell me about your brother Lionel and his wife?”

Not much, it seemed. After Lionel had fled scandal to Paris, the only news Marsh had received was the occasional curt fact from their elder brother Henry or third-hand scandal through scandalised family friends. Marsh had seen Lionel once in Paris, finding him self-consciously aesthetic and deliberately dissipated; he had a flock of beautiful young men. Marsh’s voice showed how distasteful he had found the meeting. He had not tried to see Lionel again.

Of the woman, again he knew only what Henry had written, that she appeared a middle-aged whore. I wanted to ask how the sixth Duke could have believed the child to be Lionel’s, if Lionel was known to prefer pretty young boys to aging women, but in the present company, I thought the undercurrents quite complex enough already. And considering the variations in human relations, I supposed anything was possible.

We had been in Marsh’s quarters little more than an hour and a half, but it was becoming obvious that the master of Justice was an ill man, increasingly feverish and unable to concentrate on the business at hand. There was nothing that could not wait until Marsh’s head cleared, so we left him with Alistair. At the door to her room, Iris hesitated, then asked, “I don’t suppose you’d care to join me for Evensong? The rector remembered that I loved the service, and offered to say it for me.”

“Actually,” I said, “I’d enjoy that. If he doesn’t mind having an unbeliever in the congregation.”

“That would make two,” she said cheerfully, to my confusion. “I’ll meet you in the chapel in a quarter of an hour.”

I went to my room, meditating on the oddity of a self-described nonbeliever attending church services not once, but twice in a day.

The air in the ornate little chapel was as frigid as its marble walls and smelt of incense, but the rector possessed a pleasing sensitivity for the magnificent rhythms of the Evensong liturgy, and seemed to bring the three of us together as a congregation, along with the memorial plaques and statues that cluttered the walls. Iris had taken a seat near the naked feet of the ice-white alabaster boy who, I saw by the plaque, represented young Gabriel. The sculptor had swathed the sentimental figure in Roman toga, and caused the ethereal face to gaze down at the viewer in a disturbingly Christlike manner, the calm blank eyes seeming to focus on the pew where we were seated.

The rector chanted portions of the liturgy, said others, and at the end thanked us for permitting him to do the service there. Then he quietly departed, leaving us to the family ghosts.

Silence settled over the stones, the wood, the drapes and brasses. Without a fresh dose of incense, I now caught the honey smell of the beeswax, which transported me back to the Holy Land, and Holmes the beekeeper tracking down our foe by a fragrant stub of stolen candle.

I found myself smiling at the unlikely memory, linked to this distant spot by a pair of cousins. I turned slightly to say something to Iris about it, and saw on her features the same tragic expression that I had glimpsed the previous night, when Holmes had described the sorrow of the battle-hardened soldiers.

She was looking up at the memorial to Gabriel with that very expression—naked loss and grief. In a burst of revelation that shook me to my bones, I comprehended why: The boy’s foreign birth and its date; the regular letters Iris sent to a young soldier she scarcely knew; Marsh’s near-tears and Iris’s compulsive church-going at the effigy’s feet; the devastation wrought on the family. And I understood why Marsh was not able to leave this place.

“My God!” I exclaimed, then caught myself and glanced over my shoulder to be sure we were alone before I continued in a lower voice. “Henry wasn’t Gabriel’s father, was he? You and Marsh—Iris, you weren’t the boy’s aunt. You were his mother!”