Justice Hall

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The time had come; the inevitable could be delayed no longer; I had to join the party.

Life has ill prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers. My parents had entertained a certain amount in my childhood, but those were quiet affairs, with intelligent conversation the main interest. Conversation in the Great Hall was far from intellectual; the level of hilarity was already such that a stentorian bellow was required to make polite response of one’s name. A band had started up in one corner of the gallery, jazz music loud enough to be appreciated in New Orleans and punctuated by the cries of the distraught parrots. Painted Cleopatras danced with laurel-leafed Caesars (never mind that they were thirteen hundred years too late for Tutankhamen), archaeologists with belly-dancers; women with elaborately outlined eyes linked arms with men wearing masks of various creatures that obscured vision as well as visage and had already begun to be pushed onto the tops of heads. Six men with eyes like Rudolph Valentino’s and wearing little more than loin-cloths (their eyes, unfortunately, bore the only resemblance to the actor) were clustered together, attempting to invent an Egyptian dance-step, eliciting gales of mad laughter from a dozen equally heavily painted young women in gauze drapes. Drinks of many unlikely hues rested (briefly) in glasses of various shapes, and I could only anticipate that the place would be reduced to sprawled heaps of comatose human beings in masks long before that eggs-and-champagne breakfast to which Iris had referred. I settled my abayya on my shoulders and resolutely pushed my way out into the pulsing mass of humanity.

If I regarded the exercise as an investigation into the social dynamics of crowds, I found, I could keep from being overwhelmed. If I smiled vacantly and nodded at the shouted attempts at conversation of my neighbours, if I kept an untasted drink in one hand so as to forestall a dozen others being pressed on me, if I kept my elbows clamped against my sides so as to protect my ribs, and most of all if I kept moving along the edges of the room, the sheer hysterical energy of the place did not come crashing in upon me and send me gibbering for the open air.

The band added a weirdly humming stringed instrument—to simulate Egyptian harmonies, I supposed—and fifty people joined the six Valentinos in their dance. With a splash and a chorus of whoops, a nearby thicket of papyrus began to leap about violently as a dripping Caesar rose from his lily-pond: jumped, pushed, or fallen? It hardly mattered, to him least of all. A young woman danced by me with one of the artificial jungle-vines wrapped around and around her diaphanous costume, which she may have intended as an exotic belt but which made her look as if she had just escaped from being tied to a post. A red-headed boy went past, doing a brisk fox-trot with one of the stuffed crocodiles that had reared up at the front doors, and I was nearly flattened by a pair of women in brilliant coral-hued gauze jumping on pogo-sticks, more or less in time to the music. A six-foot-tall scarab beetle (what an uncomfortable costume!) was deep in conversation with two blonde belly-dancers; three men in golden masks argued over the proper technique for taking a fox’s brush; and an ibis-god on stilts gazed down in solitary splendour at the activity going on around his knees.

And all this before dinner.

With that thought, perhaps forty minutes into my circumnavigation of the floor, a subtle shudder seemed to move through the mass, and it began to thin. At first it seemed the result of a distant earth-quake followed by the instinctive search for open space, but then I realised it was the rumour of food in the adjoining rooms. We were to dine buffet style, with a hundred tables set up for people to occupy with their filled plates, and there seemed little point in being among the first rush. I leant against a marble column that was dressed as a palm tree, and took a swallow of the warm liquid in my glass.

“Drinking heavily, are we, Russell?” said a voice in my ear. If I hadn’t been so fatigued, I might have thrown my arms around him; as it was, I gave him a tired smile.

“Hello, Holmes. Where have you been?”

“Here, for much of the time. I saw you a few times across the room, but by the time I reached your place, you were gone.”

“You look remarkably fresh. And terribly Bedouin.”

“Better than being dressed as a Caesar.”

“Or Rudolph Valentino, although you have applied the kohl, I see.”

“Marsh told you the plan?”

“I’m not certain if it was Marsh or Mahmoud, but yes. Did he tell you—”

“—about the papers?” he interrupted, speaking in a voice so low I could barely hear it myself. “He did. He’s got them squirrelled away now, and wrapped some newspaper inside the piece of oil-cloth to put back in the chest.”

“Any number of people could have hid those papers in the chest,” I noted.

“Anyone who knows Justice Hall,” he agreed.

“Ali will take up his position in the Armoury after Marsh has spoken?”

“Once he’s introduced Marsh, he’ll slip away. While Marsh is talking to the guests.”

“Ought we to keep an eye on the two men anyway?”

“You know my methods, Russell.”

By this time in my life, his methods were mine.

Dinner was an odd assortment of the familiar and the conscientiously foreign, crab puffs next to bits of bright yellow lamb on skewers, tiny marinated aubergines nestled amongst the iced oysters. This time, there was sufficient quantity to satisfy the mob, even though by the time I surveyed the table of offerings, the most popular items (those of recognisably English heritage) were rather sparsely represented. Holmes had gone off again, and I settled into a corner table. Halfway through my pomegranate-stuffed pigeon, I glanced up, and confronted a vision.

Mahmoud and Ali Hazr stood in the doorway. Mahmoud entered first, dressed in dramatic black and gold, on his face the customary all-seeing expression I had once known. Ali stood at his shoulder, glowering and clothed in all the colours of the rainbow. His hand was resting on a close facsimile of the knife he had used to such lethal purpose, and when he spoke briefly in Mahmoud’s ear, I could see that his front teeth were again missing. I choked on my mouthful and stood up; Mahmoud’s eyes caught the movement, and he gazed at me across the crowded dining room. His mouth quirked, briefly, at my reaction, and then something behind him called for his attention: I saw, as I pushed my way to them, that that something was five-year-old Gabe Hughenfort, his pale face slightly dubious and his hand clinging tightly to his mother’s, but his green eyes glowing with wonder at the sights and sounds of Justice Hall in its festivities. He was dressed—how else?—as the young son of a sheikh, with gold agahl holding his snowy abayya over those dark Hughenfort curls, his white robes gleaming against the pool of Mahmoud’s black. Yes, by God he was a Hughenfort; it was a wonder the entire room of revellers did not rise as one and proclaim it.

And he was more than just a Hughenfort, I decided as he moved into the room: The title had already begun to settle down onto the child, the awareness of responsibility and eight centuries of tradition—unconscious still, but felt in the glances and the voices of the adults closest to him. The responsibility of the title had nearly smothered Marsh, but on this boy it seemed to be having the opposite effect, giving him stature, adding authority to his open good nature and obvious intelligence. In reflecting back the respect others had for the name and the title, this five-year-old had already begun to take into himself those qualities which justified the respect. On this Hughenfort, the weight of the title looked as if it might ride in his bones, not on his back.

Helen leant down and said something to her son; at his nod, they went forward to the buffet, where she helped him choose the only familiar item in sight, a crustless sandwich. I glanced at Mahmoud and Ali: Mahmoud was watching the boy, Ali the crowd. Then Ali’s crimson-gold-and-lapis-embroidered elbow jabbed into the black arm beside it, and both dark gazes were drilling the room opposite. I moved, and saw Sidney Darling, his long, slim figure evoking a Hollywood sheikh, his turban nonchalantly tilted on his blond hair. I looked back, Mahmoud caught my eye and jerked his head minutely towards the Hall, and then the Hughenforts were gone, child and all.

I hastened to follow them, looking around for Holmes, who materialised at my side as soon as I came through the doorway. “I have Ivo Hughenfort,” he murmured in my ear.

“I’ll take Darling,” I responded. Holmes faded off into the gathering crowd.

It took some time for the guests to realise that it was time to toast their new duke, but gradually, in groups of two or twelve, they trickled back into the Great Hall, drinks in hand at the ready, not silent but prepared to fall so. I could see Ivo Hughenfort towards the bottom of the stairway, which would be the front of the crowd when Mahmoud began to speak. Holmes was behind him, but with his height, he had no trouble watching Ivo. One of the imported servants—he of the crooked nose—came up to speak into Hughenfort’s ear; he listened, nodded, spoke for a moment in response, and the servant went away.

Then Marsh was mounting the stairs, a swirl of midnight black against the pale stone, his right hand holding that of the white-garbed child. Alistair, Helen, Ben, and Iris stayed at the opposite side of the stairs from Ivo Hughenfort, along with a middle-aged woman who would, I thought, meet the description of Mycroft’s kindly, deceptive, and competent attendant. I looked again for Darling’s insouciant turban, found it unmoved a dozen feet away, and looked back at Marsh. At Mahmoud.

Halfway up the stairs, the black figure turned and stood, waiting for silence. The voices fell to a murmur, and still he waited, until all was silence, and every ear could hear his words.

“Thank you for coming to Justice Hall this evening. You honour my family with your presence.” There was a mild murmur of amusement at that un-English sentiment, and he paused for a moment until the hush returned.

“My sister Phillida made this festivity for the express purpose of welcoming the seventh Duke of Beauville. At the time, she, along with everyone else, assumed that man to be myself.” He held up his left hand to cut off any reaction. “You may be aware that my brother Henry, the sixth Duke, had a son. His name was Gabriel, and he was killed in the War as so many others were. Only in recent weeks have we begun to suspect that before his death, Gabriel provided himself with an heir. A legal heir, contingent only on locating the certificate, either through a close search of the house, or by means of the church records of the village in France where Gabriel and his bride were secretly wed. A delegation will set out on Monday to locate that legal record, but I thought it best to anticipate their success by allowing my sister’s festivities to go on, albeit with the minor change of its honoree. I should like to introduce to you Gabriel Michael Maurice Hughenfort, seventh Duke of Beauville, fourteenth Earl of Calminster, seventh Earl of Darlescote, formerly of Toronto, Canada.”

He picked the boy up and held him, less to reveal him to the people than to comfort him against the applause that would ensue. And after a long, shocked moment, it did: a huge wave of clapping and a Babel of voices, amazed, gratified, and well aware of the social coup each one had garnered by being present at such an event. All of London—half the world!—would be talking about this in the coming days, the voices were exclaiming to themselves, and we were there, with those two dramatic Arab costumes on the formal staircase of Justice Hall.

I looked for the white Darling turban, as I had approximately every five seconds since it had come into the Great Hall, and found it moved slightly to one side. I started to push towards it, but it came to a halt again, so I contented myself with watching it with one eye and looking up at the stairs with the other. The boy had been startled at the sudden volume of noise, but Mahmoud spoke quietly to him, and whatever he said had the desired effect. Little Gabe allowed himself to be held there for a minute, and then his mother came up the stairs and gathered him into her arms. Iris was there too, and the deceptive matron, and all three ascended the stairs to escape the acclaim.

At the top, however, Iris stopped and said something to the boy and his mother. He shifted in Helen’s arms to look out at the sea of people below, then waved to them. A cheer of “Hip, hip, hoorah!” shook the frescoed dome, and the women and the child slipped away.

As had Sidney Darling. Oh, the turban was still there, but the hand that came up to push it back into place was paler of hue and blunter of finger: Darling had transferred his turban to another head, and escaped me.

I set my shoulders against the crowd and shoved forward to where I had last seen him before the turban changed places; no Sidney.

I dashed into the dining room, where servants were clearing the remnants of the meal. “Have any of you seen Mr Darling?” I asked, cursing the invisibility of known figures at a costume ball.

“No, sir,” three of them said; “No, ma’am,” said the fourth, so I turned to him as the most observant of the lot.

“A tall man in white, bare-headed, in the last few minutes?”

“Through there,” he replied, pointing to the western door.

I went through it at a fast trot, scanning the still-empty rooms as I passed—salon, breakfast room, music room—and then I was entering the corridor of the western wing. I swung right, and at the far end there he was, disappearing through a doorway. The Armoury, if I wasn’t mistaken.

I was not.

I found him standing all alone in the middle of the ancient hall of the Hughenforts, surrounded by scores of lethal instruments. He turned at my entrance.

“Miss Russell?” he asked, sounding a bit uncertain.

Damnation, I thought; I’d hoped to catch him with his head in the chest.

“Mr Darling.”

“Was it your message?”

“Which message was that?”

“One of the servants brought me a message that someone wished me to come to the Armoury, but she didn’t know who that someone was. Silly sort of a trick.”

“Which servant was that?”

“One of the house-maids. Don’t remember her name. Did my wife’s hair once,” he added, sounding as if he did not fully approve of this aberration of a mere house-maid’s arranging Lady Phillida’s hair.

“Emma,” I suggested, and a small alarm began to ring in the back of my mind.

“That it? You may be right, though I don’t know that it matters. Dashed annoying; now I have to hunt the silly thing down in that press and ask her who—”

“I know who it was,” I blurted out, and before he could ask me I raised my voice to shout aimlessly into the room, “Ali! He’s a diversion—it’s your cousin!”

A guttural curse echoed across the Armoury stones and the wooden screen-wall gave a violent shift an instant before the multicoloured Ali rose up in the gallery above. He vaulted to the floor, startling Darling into a fruity curse of his own, and stalked across the uneven stones towards us, hand on knife and his eyes threatening all sorts of damage if my premature springing of the trap should have lost us our prey; but I had no concern for threats, merely grabbed his arm and hurried him out of the room.

“It has to be your cousin Ivo. He was speaking with a servant just before Mah—before Marsh’s speech, both of them using a very familiar manner, such as indicates a long-time relationship.” I was stumbling over my words as it all came together in my mind—the servant’s limp and his fighter’s nose; the fact that he and Ivo had left before Holmes returned to dinner on the Saturday of the shoot, so that Holmes had recognised neither of his assailants; the number of telephones in the house and the ease of overhearing conversations—I went on. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen the house-maid Emma flirting with the man—who was limping, which could have been from Holmes’ defence of himself last month. And it was Emma who sent Darling to the Armoury just now, and it must have been she, through the servant, who gave your cousin inside information about the Justice comings and goings. Emma could even have overheard the conversation Holmes had with you on the telephone the afternoon he was attacked, and told her friend where you were.”

While I was offering this logical explanation, which had distressingly little effect on my companion’s grim expression, we had cleared the western corridor and reentered the Hall. Ali, thrusting aside guests left and right, made straight for the stairway, from which height we peered down on the confusing crowd, searching for the figure of Marsh, Holmes, or Ivo Hughenfort.

Ali grunted and started down the stairs towards Mahmoud, who had just appeared from the direction of the dining room, but before I could join him there was a commotion behind me on the stairs. I looked past yet another Caesar and Cleopatra and saw Helen, searching the Hall. I called to her, and she hurried down to me.

“What is it?”

“Is Gabe with Marsh?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “He’s just there . . .”

We both followed my pointing finger: Marsh, but no small snowy figure at his side. I flailed my arm in a wide circle. He caught the motion in the corner of his eye, saw instantly that something was wrong, and ploughed through the crowd with a speed that made Ali look like a polite old man.

“Tell me,” he commanded.

“Helen doesn’t have the boy.”

“The children wanted to play,” she gabbled. “I said they could, but Lenore went one way and Walter the other, and Gabe must have been with Walter, because he vanished in the blink of an eye. You don’t think—?”

What I thought was that the younger Darlings’ desire to initiate their new duke into the hide-and-seek potentials of Justice might just have killed the boy. But Mahmoud did not answer; he wheeled to bound up the stairs, his black robes boiling up around him, Ali at his shoulder and me at their heels.

The solitary figure of Holmes, coming out from the long gallery, told me all I needed to know.

“Hughenfort went into the lavatory and was out of the window before I could get around the house. The boy?”

“Gone.”

“We must split up and search. From which room did he disappear?”

“Walter and he were last seen going in the direction of the Chinese bedroom, at the far end of the long gallery.”

So much for the grey-haired competent matron, I thought darkly. Mycroft would be mortified at her failure.

There were any number of guests in the rooms we swept through, all startled at the sudden interruption of their private moments, but we found no small figure in the white robes of a sheikh’s son. In the Chinese room, however, angry cries and furious kicks shook a seemingly delicate wardrobe. Ali did not pause to look for the key, merely drew his knife from its jewelled scabbard and drove it into the exquisite centuries-old wood, jerking the haft sideways. The door splintered open; Walter Darling blinked at the sudden light, tears streaking his face.

“Which way did they go?” Ali demanded.

“I didn’t see!” the boy answered furiously. “I was locked in here.”

“You have ears. Which way did they go?”

The flat assumption in Ali’s voice steadied young Darling. He frowned, dashed his fist against his teary eyes, and decided, “Not through the gallery.”

“The window?” We were up on the main block’s first floor, but a brief roof line lay not far beneath the windowsill, the portico over a side entrance.

“No, I’d have heard that. They just went. I think the man was carrying Gabe.”

“Good lad,” Ali said, and left the room at a run. Even so, Mahmoud was before him.

But they were not in the next room, nor in the corridor that led back into the long gallery. We were now nearing the old part of the house again.

“Isn’t there a—,” I started to say, the diagrams of Justice clear in my mind, but Mahmoud had already darted into the other end of the corridor and leapt up a flight of six stairs to a small door that looked to be a service room, but was in fact the upper end of the ancient spiral staircase that led down to Marsh’s bedroom and into the Mediaeval chapel with the Roman tiles below. Mahmoud had the key out and the door open in an instant, and then he went still as a statue, listening with all his being for sounds, above or below. None came. Mahmoud snatched up two candle stubs and a box of vestas from the stone niche over the entrance, lit the stubs and thrust one at Ali, then started up the stairway with his hand cupped to shelter the other. I picked up the skirts of my costume and followed on his heels; Holmes plunged into the depths after Ali.

This upper level of stairs was less worn than those Alistair had shown me on our tour, but retained the shape of the others, a tight, shoulder-hugging spiral that ended at a small, sturdy door. It was not locked; Mahmoud blew out the candle and eased the door open.

Icy air rushed over us, blowing snowflakes and the stink of the roof-top torches. The heaving flames reflected off the day’s snowfall, giving a degree of substance to the roofs, and Mahmoud moved off with confidence into the shifting darkness. I went after him, trusting his childhood knowledge of the Justice leads, praying that he could see well enough to keep from stumbling into Ivo Hughenfort. As my eyes adjusted I could tell that the snow had been trampled—but that must have been by the servants, lighting those dramatic torches along the roof line. In the furious leap and ebb of the flames I glimpsed the roof as flat expanses of white cut by the sharp dark lines of chimneys and sections of pitched roof, with the dark wall of the crenellations surrounding the whole. Mahmoud’s night-dark shape moved silently before me, and then went still.

I too stopped. The flaring torches obscured as much as they illuminated, but I thought the movement across the snow fifty feet or so away was cast not by the torches, but by a moving figure. Two figures, one of them emitting muffled cries of fury and fear. They neared the wall of crenellations, and in an instant the air in front of me was empty. A shadow flew across the patches of light and dark, to merge with the other in a scuffle and exchange of shouts, and I slithered and stumbled my way across the intervening space in time to see Mahmoud sweep the boy behind his robes, the small white patch hidden by the black, and face their attacker, teeth and knife bared.

Then the pulsing light caught on the dull gleam of metal, as the figure facing Mahmoud drew a gun. I was too far away to use my throwing knife, even if I could have hit him in the uncertain light, so I did the only thing I could: I shouted. I don’t even know what the string of words that tumbled out of me were, I merely had to let him know that he had a witness, that where he might have hoped to arrange a convenient accident for one Hughenfort, or even two, the problems had expanded beyond that.

The tableau froze, the leaping flames and the rising breath clouds the only signs of movement. I began to inch forward, hoping to get close enough to hit him with my throwing knife, knowing that a cornered man is at his most dangerous when he senses the heavy hand of failure descending onto his shoulder, knowing that the frustration of seeing his long years of planning turning sour might explode into pointless destruction. Knowing that there was not a thing I could do, should he decide to shoot Mahmoud. Knowing I had to try.

Then, seeming loud against the whip of the flames, came a small metallic noise from off to my right, a noise that would have been inaudible inside the house or had a wind been blowing, but a noise that broke the stillness of the roof-top like the gunshot it preceded.

Ivo Hughenfort was enough of a soldier to react to the sound of a rifle bullet being chambered behind his back. He jerked, half turning; I darted forward, but before I had taken two steps, the rifle went off with a flash that imprinted the stark image on my retinas: one man in the instant the bullet took him, a man and a boy behind him, braced for battle. Hughenfort and his gun both landed on the snow-muffled leads, and then I was on him, tumbling him face-first onto the snow. He struggled, but in a moment the rifle’s barrel was pressed into his cheek; when I looked up, I was somehow not surprised to see Iris, murder on her face and her finger ready on the trigger.

Mahmoud had not moved from his position in front of the boy. He had been closer than I to the revolver, close enough to dive for Hughenfort’s feet and grapple for the gun. Had the child not been present, I knew, he would not have hesitated an instant; instead, he had stayed where he was, using his broad body to block the young duke from a bullet.

Seconds later, Ali and Holmes erupted from the door onto the roof. Ali was all in favour of tossing his cousin over the side, giving to Hughenfort the fate he had intended for the child; it was Mahmoud who restrained him.

Instead, we handed Ivo Hughenfort over to Mycroft’s men for safe-keeping, to bind his bleeding shoulder and spirit him away to London.

And then we went back to the ball.