Justice Hall

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In January 1914, Marsh’s brother Lionel Hughenfort had married a woman named Terèse, who was at least five years older than he, and six months pregnant when they married. She gave birth in early April, and christened the boy Thomas. Lionel died of pneumonia in late May. For the past nine and a half years, the family bank in London had issued cheques twice each month to an accountant in Lyons. He in turn dealt with the distribution of funds to Mme Hughenfort, who moved house a great deal. Once a year, representatives of the London bank travelled to Paris to meet with Terèse and Thomas, in order to reassure themselves—and the family—that the boy and his mother were still alive and receiving their monies.

That was, according to what Alistair and Iris told us Sunday evening and Monday morning, the only contact the boy’s mother would permit. No living Hughenfort had ever seen either member of this truncated branch of the family. This vacuum, inevitably, had been filled over the years by rumour and speculation, with the result that Terèse Hughenfort had become, in the collective mind of the English side, a raddled, aged harlot with bad teeth, hennaed hair, the wrong kind of lace on her garments, and a death-grip on her source of income, young Thomas. While the sixth Duke was alive, nothing further had been done about the boy, apart from an increase in the monies sent to cover the cost of schooling a duke’s nephew. I had the impression that the boy, and Lionel before him, had been sore spots in Henry’s mind, the less prodded the better.

When the title had passed to Marsh during the summer, locating the boy was one of his first tasks. Messages accompanied the next two cheques, and then a stern letter with the third. All three fell into the hole in Lyons. Finally, a bank employee was dispatched with the fourth cheque in hand, and an ultimatum to the Lyons accountant: There would be no further monies if the family did not hear from Mme Hughenfort herself with a suggestion for when and where the family might meet the boy.

She managed to drag the affair out several weeks, claiming a minor ailment, and the boy’s schooling, until the threat was made good, and no cheque was sent on the first of October. She capitulated, but declared that she and the boy would come to London. The Hughenforts would foot the bill, naturally—and (her letter ended, on a spirited note) she expected both tickets and hotel to be first-class; the heir deserved no less.

Phillida was piqued at the effrontery, and would have dumped mother and son in some second-rate establishment near Charing Cross, but Sidney, continuing his amiable support for the boy, had professed himself amused by Mme Hughenfort’s transparent desire for a luxurious holiday, and suggested they grant it. In the end Marsh agreed. He would not, however, place them in one of the very top establishments: That would be a cruelty, to turn the raised eyebrows of staff on a woman with pretensions and a budget. The bank was directed to locate an hotel with ornate decorations and a heavy trade in foreigners who did not know any better, and to reserve a suite for the visitors there.

Terèse and Thomas Hughenfort were to arrive Tuesday, and meet their family for luncheon on Wednesday. Train tickets were sent, a letter of introduction for the hotel—and a supplemental cheque, for “incidental expenses” such as a warm coat for the boy, or (more likely) a new dress for the mother.

We intended to be there when they arrived; in fact, we would be with them long before they arrived: Holmes and I planned to join their small party at the earliest possible moment, namely, when mother and son arrived at the Gare de Lyons in Paris to board the train for London.

The amount of organisation such an operation would require was not going to be possible within the well-populated walls of Justice Hall. Thus, early on Monday morning, Holmes, Iris (who was looking her age today, having ordered Alistair home and spent the night nursing her husband unaided), and I took our leave of Marsh, the Darlings, the remaining house guests, and the servants in the person of their representative, Ogilby.

We rode in demure silence to the station, allowed our bags to be carried inside, and watched the Justice Hall car slide away. Three minutes later, Algernon drove up; we loaded our bags into the car, and set off for Badger. This minor ruse merely saved explanation; the Darlings might hear that we had failed to board the train, but it hardly mattered. Why should we not choose to visit Alistair’s home?

Badger Old Place welcomed us with all its run-down, shaggy magnificence, like an old friend shifting to make room on a bench. Iris was as at home here as she had been at Justice, and greeted Mrs Algernon with cries of delight. When Alistair had extricated his cousin’s wife from the conversational clutches of his housekeeper, he issued us upstairs to the solar, the Mediaeval sitting room located above the Great Hall for warmth, light, and privacy.

The solar was still, after three hundred years, a warm, light, private chamber. The furniture reflected the fashions of generations—spindly legs and thick, decorated and utilitarian, silk and linen and leather. All looked comfortable, the colours and shapes grown together in an unlikely but successful marriage of the ages. Alistair himself fit in nicely, dressed in another frumpy suit that had been the height of undergraduate fashion in 1900, decorated by a flamboyant crimson-and-emerald waistcoat. We settled into the circle of chairs and sofas clustered around the stone fireplace, with a tray of coffee and biscuits provided by Mrs Algernon.

“How are we going to work this?” Iris asked, when she had her coffee. “Do I get to dress up in disguise and follow Terèse across London?”

Holmes and I did not comment on the difficulties in changing the face and posture of a woman such as she. He merely replied, “I think it best if you and Alistair, in Marsh’s absence, meet Mme Hughenfort and her son face to face. Along with Lady Phillida, of course. This means that most of the actual tailing exercise will fall to Russell and myself.”

Neither of them liked this division of labour, but both knew that if they were to dine with Mme Hughenfort, they could not be following her through the streets.

“We can take the night hours,” Alistair decreed.

Watching and, if necessary, following a person at night was a riskier proposition than loitering about a busy daytime street, since people in general are more wary in the dark. However, Holmes and I would have to sleep some time, and even if Madame were to encounter one of them, she would not as easily recognise her relatives when they later met by daylight. Holmes nodded his agreement.

And so it went through the morning, offers and counter-offers, criticism and suggestions, the four of us working out a plan by which we could keep a tight watch on the woman without being seen. If she had a confederate or a gentleman, we wanted to see any contact between the two.

We took an early luncheon beneath the solar’s oriel window, then Holmes, Iris, and I caught the noon train to London, while Alistair returned to Justice Hall to sit with his feverish cousin.

The adventure of the duke’s nephew—or purported nephew—looked to be one of those parts of an investigation that are necessary, but tedious. It was not entirely fair that Holmes and I were saddled with it, but still, it had to be done, and one cannot always choose for one’s self the interesting, or even the comfortable, parts of a case. Or of life itself, for that matter. Thus in London we abandoned some of our bags to the left-luggage office and boarded the boat-train to Paris.

Mme Hughenfort had been sent tickets for a train that departed Paris just after nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. We bumped and splashed and rattled our way down to intercept her path, taking an hotel room late Monday night. We dined too well, slept ill, and returned to the Gare de Lyons to take up positions overlooking the entrance.

The family possessed no photograph of mother or son, and only the most general of physical descriptions of Lionel’s widow. Still, we thought, surely there would not be an overabundance of women in their late forties travelling with nine-year-old boys. All we needed do was make note of the motor that left any such pair at the gare, and track down car and driver at our leisure.

Our optimism was unjustified: The taxi-stand seemed filled with women of that description, as if Paris were about to hold a huge conference of mothers and sons. Here a blonde, there a redhead, there one brunette after another, following on the heels of a third.

I spied three who might be she, each with a black-haired boy at her side. I noted the numbers on each taxi, that the drivers might be interviewed later if need be, and waited until the last moment to climb onto the train. Holmes was even later than I, tumbling aboard as the doors were being shut. We went to our own first-class compartment to compare notes. He had seen four possible candidates, two arriving on foot, two in private motors. One of those had kissed her driver a passionate farewell.

When the train was under way, Holmes and I strolled in opposite directions to work our way through the first-class cars. I saw only one of my possibilities; he saw two of his, one of those the woman of the ardent good-bye. We kept all the women under sporadic watch, but none that we saw was approached by any person other than the ticket collector or other women with children.

It was on the boat that our vigilance paid off. We had narrowed our candidates down to two: a thin, sharp-eyed woman with a Parisian accent and a worn collar, or a short, round, brown-haired woman in a new, expensive, but subtly unfashionable frock. Both wore wedding rings and nervous expressions, but only the plump woman addressed her child as “Thomas.”

We took turns in her vicinity, gathering impressions more than information. She grew more tense as England drew near, picking at her fingernails and pulling at her lips with her sharp yellow teeth—but I noticed that unlike many tense mothers I had seen, she did not take her vexation out on her boy. With him she was patient and attentive, occasionally reaching out to brush back a wayward lock of hair or to pat his arm for their mutual reassurance.

I was unreasonably pleased that she was not the one who had kissed the driver.

In London, I stayed close behind her while Holmes collected our bags. She gave the taxi driver the name of the hotel that had been arranged for her; I gave my driver the same, and rode on her heels to the door. There I took my time counting out the fare, lest she notice that the woman who’d been behind her at the station had also climbed out of a taxi behind her. When she was safely inside, I disembarked, then took up a position behind a potted palm until she had received her key and was being escorted to the lift.

In varying guises, alone and as a pair, Holmes and I kept the woman in view, from the moment when, rested and bathed, mother and son emerged to explore the park across from the hotel, until they took an early dinner at a café and then returned to their rooms. At ten o’clock, Holmes donned a uniform lent him by the management (between his name and that of Hughenfort, all things were made possible) and knocked on her door with “a small welcome from her husband’s family,” namely, an enormous box of chocolates in gaudy wrapping. He found her with her hair down, preparing for bed, and speaking in a low whisper so as not to disturb her sleeping son.

Satisfied that Mme Hughenfort was not about to leave for a night amongst London’s wilder clubs, we took ourselves to bed on the floor below hers. It was silent, all the night.

In the morning, Madame took breakfast in her room. By late morning, she could remain still no longer. At a quarter to eleven, Holmes, seated behind the Times in the lobby, spotted the pair coming out of the lift. He folded his paper and sauntered after them, hissing briefly to catch my attention as he passed. We followed them for the next two hours, alternating positions, changing hat-bands and scarfs and turning around our double-sided overcoats, exchanging parcels and carry-bags, slumping or striding out as the pace demanded. I was generally the one to follow her into shops, where I changed my hat brim and tilted the hat, or straightened to appear tall and aloof, before in the next shop becoming uncertain and dowdy.

They never spotted us, not even the boy, who had a bright eye. We stayed with them up to the door of the restaurant where they would take luncheon with their unknown in-laws. The door shut. As we stood on the other side of the street, watching Terèse Hughenfort hand her parcels over and straighten her son’s collar and hair, Holmes asked me, “Well?”

“He’s not a Hughenfort. Wrong chin, wrong eyebrows, the eyes—everything.”

“The hair dye she used isn’t even very good,” he agreed.

We took a quick lunch of our own, returned to the grand entrance well before five Hughenforts came out and then parted, and followed her back to the hotel.

Mme Hughenfort did not look terribly happy.

And she had not reappeared before Alistair and Iris came to compare notes, having seen Phillida safely back onto the train to Arley Holt. Alistair’s hand was free of its gauze wrapping, although the arm seemed tender to movement. I assembled four chairs in front of the fire, and while Holmes perused the drinks tray, I telephoned down for tea. When I had finished with the instrument, Iris took it up and asked for a trunk call to Justice, in order to check on Marsh’s condition.

“How was your luncheon?” I asked Alistair.

“The woman drank three gin fizzes,” he said with a shudder.

“Poor thing,” Iris said, modifying the condemnation. “She was terrified.”

“She had a right to be,” Alistair growled, as ferocious a noise as ever Ali had come out with. “She was trying to commit a fraud.”

“So you would agree?” Holmes asked. “The boy was not fathered by Lionel Hughenfort?”

“Never,” Alistair declared.

“Lionel was built like Marsh,” Iris explained. “Shorter even, dark, a muscular build even though he never took exercise and had a sickly childhood. Were it not for his hair, the child would look almost Scandinavian—his eyes are even blue.”

“The hair is dyed,” Holmes and Alistair said simultaneously. Iris looked at them, and frowned.

“You mean to say the child is in on the deception as well?”

I for one was not willing to go quite that far. “He may regard it as a game. And I will say that he seems a keen enough lad, bright and well mannered, genuinely fond of his mother—and she of him.”

“So,” Alistair said, his voice dry. “You are suggesting that the boy would make a suitable heir, were Marsh willing to overlook the small problem of the boy’s paternity.”

Put like that, it was an unlikely scenario. Still, I registered a mild complaint. “It really is a bit ridiculous, this whole business of preserving the male line, don’t you think? And I’m sure that if you studied family portraits closely enough, you’d find anomalies in the noblest of families. Marsh needs an heir in order to feel that he can leave Justice: He could do worse than that child.”

I did not expect to convince them; I couldn’t even convince myself, since I knew that Marsh’s determination to have the truth was all that counted.

“What did Lady Phillida make of them?” Holmes asked.

“That was interesting, didn’t you think, Ali?” Iris answered. “She seemed quite willing to clasp the child, if not his mother, to her breast. Started to talk about having them up to Justice until Ali cut her off.”

“Was she predisposed to accept the lad, would you say? Or did it only come about gradually?”

“The instant she laid eyes on him, she exclaimed how like Lionel he was. But here—Phillida brought these to show them, and Ali snagged them back for you.” Iris took an oversized envelope from her handbag, handing it to Holmes.

It held photographs of the family, in groups and alone. My eyes were drawn to one that showed most of the major players in our family saga, arranged on the steps before Justice Hall: Marsh as a man in his early twenties, standing between an undergraduate Alistair and a vibrant young Iris, the three friends looking as if they were repressing laughter at a shared joke; a taller, older version of the Hughenfort line had his arm dutifully around a thin, tense woman a few years his junior—the fifth Duke, Gerald, I knew from a portrait in the Hall—and between them a child of four or five who had the black curls and proud chin of Phillida. Then Iris pointed to the last figure in the group.

“That’s Lionel, aged sixteen.” He resembled a washed-out Marsh. His eyes were too dark to be blue.

She sorted through the snapshots and studio portraits to show us a clearer picture of the man, slightly older and showing ominous signs of world-weary dissipation.

He looked nothing like the child we’d spent the last two days watching.

The other photos, of a grown Phillida at her wedding; of Marsh and Alistair at that same wedding, wearing English formal dress but with the beards of their Arab personas, neatly trimmed; of Marsh, Alistair, Iris, and two other young women seated at the base of the pelican fountain with champagne glasses in their hands; of Phillida and Sidney on a beach somewhere in France.

We were looking through the photographs when the telephone rang. I happened to be sitting closest the instrument, but on hearing that it was the trunk call come through, I held the receiver out in a direction halfway between Iris and Alistair.

“It’s Justice,” I said.

Alistair allowed Iris to take it, which I thought showed remarkable restraint: He looked more likely to curse and rage than to listen to whatever servant or nurse had been dispatched to give news of the duke’s state. Nonetheless, he hunched over Iris, their faces so close he must have heard every word that came over the line. I could tell by his darkening face that the news was not happy.

Iris hung the earpiece onto its rest, and gave us a small shake of the head. “He’s roaring at the nurses and throwing objects at the doctor. Ogilby asks when we are coming back. We’d best take the earlier train.”

Holmes, thoughtful, replaced the photographs in the envelope.

“Lady Phillida seems as eager as her husband that you all accept the boy,” he said. “I believe we ought to know why. Or rather,” he corrected himself, “what lies behind the ‘why.’ The ‘why’ itself is fairly obvious: The Darlings being by English law unable to assert claim or control over Justice Hall, they see Thomas as their, shall we say, proxy duke. They know that Marsh longs to leave; they long for him to leave as well, to allow them to carry on as the de facto masters of Justice. Thomas is the means by which that goal might be attained, an heir, conveniently under-aged, thus requiring regents to care properly for the house and farms. To say nothing of German industrial investments. What we do not know is if there is any criminal intent or deed behind the Darling sponsorship of Thomas. What was that you said, Russell?”

“Nothing, Holmes. It’s just that I don’t know that my simply continuing to change my hat-bands and overcoat is going to keep the woman from noticing that the same woman has been following her from Paris to London and back again. It’s all very well for a man—you all dress alike—but I can hear from your voice that we’re headed back to France, and so I think I ought to replenish my wardrobe first.”

“You’re right.”

“I should be back in a couple of hours,” I began, but he overrode me.

“I have a bolt-hole not far from this hotel,” he said. “We’ll find what we need there.”

I gave in. For one thing, he would have more makeup in one of his secret apartments than at my own London pied-à-terre, and with the right makeup, one person can be several.

We arranged with Iris and Alistair to stay behind in case Terèse and her son left the hotel. The manager would telephone to the room if the Hughenforts passed through the lobby, and Alistair would pursue them.

“Come, Russell,” my husband ordered.

I came.

To return two hours later, one of a pair of French priests.