“You even managed to slip it past Debrett’s,” I commented.
“I know. That was very clever of Marsh, wasn’t it? And then as luck would have it, Henry’s wife got pregnant. Personally, I think having the family’s intense scrutiny off of Sarah’s reproductive cycle for a while was what did it, although Sarah claimed it was the warmer climate agreeing with her. Marsh and I moved to Paris—well away from my family, and an easy trip for Marsh to Cairo and Jerusalem. Gradually his trips lengthened, and I met Dan—Danella is her name; I’m still with her—and things settled down into what they have remained for twenty years now. I’ve seen Marsh half a dozen times over the years, I like him, he likes Dan, and there you have it. The portrait of a marriage.”
It explained a lot, including the brother/sister sort of affection between the two conspirators. I’d be happy to see someone, too, if my freedom had been won through her.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Marsh thought you should know. You and your husband.”
“You know who my husband is?”
“Marsh explained. He also tried to explain what you were doing in Palestine, five years ago.”
“That would have taken some doing, since we were none too sure ourselves, at the time.”
She laughed. “But you stumbled into something important, which seems to be what Marsh does there generally—poke his nose into things until something bites back.”
She did indeed know everything of importance about her husband, this sham wife.
Seldom have I enjoyed myself more with another person than on that long day’s hike across the hills with the lesbian wife of the seventh Duke of Beauville. We would talk for a while—about Oxford, academics, and the life of an Oxford scholar-cum-detective, Paris, the art world, and the life of a frustrated pianist—and then we would drift into an easy silence, listening only to the day, each of us deep in our own thoughts. I felt the restless exhaustion that had come on me in Sussex, which Alistair’s arrival had interrupted but not displaced, shrink and fade, to be replaced by a degree of serenity rare in me.
Two hours later we were standing in front of a small forest of jagged, lichen-encrusted granite chunks thrusting up from the pasture land, and I couldn’t think at first why we had stopped. Then I remembered: The Circles. The reason for our excursion.
Prehistoric monuments are invariably lonely, if for no other reason than a group of standing stones near habitations will not last long before being hauled away and incorporated in someone’s wall. Their solitude, and their combination of crude workmanship with clear deliberation, make objects such as The Circles puzzling and evocative; they seem to occupy a portion of the universe apart from daily life, and appear to have been fashioned by hands other than ordinary human ones. The breath of God—or perhaps of the gods—has brushed these sites, and changed the very ground from which they rise.
“Extraordinary place, isn’t it?” Iris was circumnavigating the outer stones, her right hand tapping each one as she passed.
“I was just thinking how other-worldly these sites are. Have you seen Stonehenge?”
“Once, briefly.”
“I spent the night there, one winter solstice.”
“The cold must have been excruciating.”
“It was that,” I agreed, with feeling. “But the sunrise on the stones was glorious.”
“The three of us came out here to see the summer solstice one year. Marsh had some theory that this was orientated towards the sun, too. Either it isn’t, or else too many of the stones are worn away. It was a nice sunrise, though—warmer than yours, I don’t doubt. He caught hell for keeping Alistair out all night. We were, oh, thirteen maybe. Ali would have been seven or eight.”
Ali, his childhood nick-name—it took me aback to hear Iris use what I thought of as Alistair’s real name. I watched Iris complete her circuit of the outer circle, then step inside to perform the same touching ritual with the inner stones. These were in better condition—either that, or had started out taller—because she did not have to stoop as often to reach them. When the second round was fulfilled, she walked straight up-hill from the monument, then stopped, turned, and sat down on a low boulder overgrown with grass and dead nettles.
There were three stones in a row—placed there, I thought, not buried in the ground by ancient Britons. I envisioned these three childhood friends, of disparate ages and peculiarly entwined futures, laboriously hauling the river-smoothed boulders here for viewing. I sat on the end rock, then looked at the one between us.
“Who generally sat in the middle?” I asked her.
“Marsh. Marsh was always in the centre.”
“He still is.”
“Do you know how he came by that scar?” she asked abruptly. “He fingers it, when he’s troubled—I’m sure you’ve noticed. I don’t know why.”
To feel his shame, I thought, but bit my tongue hard against the words. When Mahmoud’s finger-tips traced that shiny brown welt, they had been recalling the shame of capture and torture, the abject humiliation of a proud spirit at the hands of a Turkish madman. Marsh’s fingers, I thought, were reminding him that he was a Hughenfort for whom righteousness had not been strength enough.
“War injury,” I merely told her.
“It changed him,” she said. “When first he came to France with it, he was not the same man.” She sighed. “Poor, poor man. He’s going to be so unhappy if he stays.”
“Will it affect you?”
“I’ll not move here, if that’s what you’re asking. But I should think it will require regular visits from Paris, in order to keep up appearances.”
It was peaceful in that lonely place populated only by a stand of gnarled stones and abandoned trees. I thought perhaps the reason Marsh had excused himself from the outing was not the pressure of work, but his unwillingness to encounter these mute reminders of uncomplicated youth and its long, free days beneath the summer sun.
“You haven’t met this boy Thomas who’s coming over on Wednesday? Lionel’s son?”
“I haven’t. The mother lives in France—Lyons, isn’t it? During the War, I could never see a reason to go out of my way and introduce myself, and since then, no-one seems to know where she lives.”
“Did you ever meet the other nephew, Gabriel?”
“Him I did meet, yes.”
“When was that?”
“When he was an infant, the first time; then when Marsh’s father died and we all came here for the funeral. He must have been about four. And a few times when Henry and Sarah were passing through France. But the last time was just a few months before he died, when he came to see me for two days.”
I looked at her, startled by the raw grief in her voice. Her face gave nothing away, but I had not mistaken the depth of emotion. “You liked him?”
“Gabriel was a lovely, lovely boy. Intelligent, beautifully mannered—the sort of manners that come from within, from being thoughtful. Not tall but well made, with a grace that made me think he would be a good dancer. Quiet. Passionate. Deeply loyal. Gabriel reminded me of his father at that age.”
“Henry must have been devastated.”
She blinked, as if she’d been suddenly pulled back from a place far away and infinitely kinder. “Henry. You never met him, did you? No, of course not. Poor man. He was so proud of Gabriel. Marsh thinks he suspected that his son had been executed. I hope not. I pray that Henry went to his grave believing that Gabriel died honourably. It would have mattered terribly to him.”
“Marsh seems fairly sure of Gabriel’s fate,” I commented.
“You’ve seen the letters?”
“Alistair gave them me, yesterday” was all I would say. She took it as agreement.
“Then you’ll have seen. Once the thought occurs, it is hard to read the Hastings letter in any other way.” She sounded bleak; the boy had made quite an impression on her in a short time. A lovely boy who, I had come privately to agree, would end his life with a blindfold over his
eyes, lest his cowardice prove infectious. “When Marsh showed them to me, all I could think was, Why didn’t Gabriel write to me when he was first charged? Surely he must have had some time before—If I had known, I’d have had your brother-in-law step in. It must have been some tragic, God-awful piece of military blunder.”
“My brother-in-law,” I repeated in astonishment. Did she mean Mycroft? Could Marsh Hughenfort possibly have told his estranged wife about Mycroft Holmes?
“Mr Holmes,” she said. “Ah—I see. You are concerned that Marsh spoke too freely. I myself have had dealings with Mr Holmes’ organisation too, Mary, although in a minor role. Many of us were in a position to pass on information about the Kaiser’s army; I did so three or four times. Nothing more. And I do not speak of it where there are ears to hear.”
“Mycroft would be relieved to know that,” I told her, and allowed my mind to return to the incongruity of the impressive young soldier and his catastrophic end.
“Tell me, did Gabriel seem disturbed when you met him in Paris? Shell-shocked, perhaps?”
“It was just two days’ leave between getting out of hospital and returning to the Front, and he was a rather quiet young man meeting an aunt for the first time since he’d put on long trousers. He was hardly going to pour his heart out. Too, the Hughenforts all excel at self-control. I will say that I saw that kind of quiet in other soldiers, men who’d spent too long a time at the Front and were not far from the breaking point. Gabriel had only been in the trenches for a couple of months, but they’d been hellish months.”
Like the men with minor wounds who gave themselves over to death, I thought; strong men were shattered, weak men survived, with no knowing the why of either.
“What would you say to a meat pie down at the Green Man?” Iris asked me.
“I’d say that was a fine idea,” I answered.
The pie was mostly pheasant, the beer kept by a true craftsman, and we were well content when we left the small public house with the mythic name. We followed a hilltop path back that was every bit as ancient as stone circles and the Green Man, a prehistoric highway worn deep by the feet of folk with none of the foreign Roman passion for straight lines.
The grey cloud layer thinned as the sun neared the horizon. We dropped away from the ancient ridgeway to branch off in the direction of Justice Hall. A dip and a rise, a dip with the early stages of a stream and another rise, and just as we crested this last hill, the sun broke beneath the clouds. The wide valley was transformed into a place of vibrant colours and deep, perfect shadows; Justice Hall basked therein, like a cat on a warm ledge. The long curve of the Pond sparkled; a trio of black swans floated on the surface. It was not possible to pass on without stopping to admire.
After a minute, Iris said, “I wish I could simply hate the place and have done with it.”
“One cannot help equating beauty with goodness, and feeling the impulse to serve, can one?”
“The impulse takes a lot of killing,” she agreed, sounding grim. “Marsh told me once he’d documented forty-three violent deaths within these walls.”
“Forty-three? That seems a lot, even considering its age.”
“More than half of those were a massacre during the Civil War. The Armoury must have run ankle-deep with blood.”
“How did Gabriel feel about Justice Hall?” I wondered.
“He adored it. Funny, that, considering that he was born in Italy and spent his first years there. Every rock and blade of grass; he lived and breathed the place. Walked every inch of every farm, knew every tenant and his children by name.”
So much for the faint thought that I had played with, an agreeable fantasy of Gabriel’s faking his death and deserting, waiting in France to be restored to his family. Not if he lived for this house. Well, it hadn’t been much of a thought, anyway.
“He was engaged, before he enlisted, wasn’t he?”
“Not formally,” she said. “The girl was too young, I think.”
“What happened to her?”
“I heard she married, after the War. Susan, her name was. Susan Bridges, now Edgerton. But even if Gabriel hadn’t died, they would not have wed. When he came to see me in Paris, one of the things he talked about was how to break it off without hurting her. So even then he realised that they’d grown too far apart.”
“What else did he talk about?”
“Do you mind telling me why you’re so interested in the boy?”
I hesitated. To anyone else, I would have given some song-and-dance about innocence destroyed, or constructed an imaginary brother whom Gabriel resembled, but I did not wish to do that to her. “You know that the reason Holmes and I came here was because Alistair thought we might help free Marsh from Justice Hall?”
“So Ali told me, although not in such direct terms. What’s Gabriel have to do with that?”
“Frankly, I don’t know. But then neither Holmes nor I have the faintest idea where to begin with Marsh. The threads that tie Marsh to Justice Hall are so numerous.” Indeed, the man was like the giant Gulliver, bound into immobility by the countless tiny threads of the Lilliputians. I shook off my fancy. “If we can snip through a few of them, it might free him to make decisions unencumbered, instead of allowing himself to be bound. He may not, in the end, choose to go back to Palestine, but we owe it to him as a friend” (as a brother, my mind added) “to give him that choice. Gabriel’s death, which seems to trouble him deeply, was simply the first loose end to present itself.” I felt I ought to apologise for such a feeble explanation, but I had none better. “Any action, even completely peripheral, is better than feeling useless.”
“I know what you mean,” she surprised me by saying. “I suppose it’s why I’ve come back, to help him look at this French son of Lionel’s, even though there’s not much I can do except offer support.”
“Which is a thing he would never ask for himself.”
“Which is why Ali brought you in, I suppose, because Marsh himself never would.”
“Did Gabriel keep a war diary, do you know?” I asked.
“He always used to keep one, when he was a boy. I sent him a very grown-up journal from Venice once, for his twelfth birthday; you will have seen that among his things. But a lot of things change in a boy, especially when he puts on a uniform. He may have grown out of diaries.”
“What about his possessions? Did his father keep any of his books, or those treasures boys tend to keep? I don’t even know where his room was.”
She looked at me oddly. “He had the room where Marsh is now. It used to be Marsh’s when he was a boy, but as he had no intention of returning here, he had no objections to Gabriel taking it over. You know, you sound as if you and your husband are actually investigating this death. As if there was something criminal about it.”
“Strictly speaking, there must have been: He must have had a court martial to convict him of a crime, even if we haven’t found the trial records yet. But yes, Holmes seems to feel that there may be something odd about the death. Please, though, don’t say anything to Marsh about it.”
She turned away to look down at the lovely, ghost-ridden house, chewing at her lip with a strong white incisor. “All right,” she said finally. “I won’t say anything yet. And in fact, I am glad someone is looking more closely. I find it hard to believe in the picture of Gabriel as a coward.”
She cast a last glance at the house and then concentrated on the slippery ground. But this time, I thought, she had looked at Justice Hall with loathing.
The proud beauty basking in the glow of the sun hid a number of secrets behind her ancient façade, it would seem. The strength of the sun faltered; with that sudden reminder that we had brought no torches, we did not pause again.
Before we had taken more than a couple of dozen strides, however, a vehicle appeared on the other side of the valley: the house Daimler, returning from the station, laden with week-end merrymakers. There would be no peaceful cup of tea before the fire for us.
“I have an idea,” Iris said. “If it’s still open. This way.” I followed willingly, since she clearly had a plan that did not include inserting our wind-blown and mud-bespattered selves into London Society.
We kept to the backs of the hedges and the far reaches of the formal garden, coming past stone gladiators and goddesses to the oldest part of the house. Iris led the way to a door, which she opened cautiously; deciding the voices were at a safe distance, we slipped inside. I thought we should be making a break for the carved stairway a third of the way down the corridor, but instead she turned immediately left, to dive into a sort of mud-room filled with old boots and waterproofs. Not the sort of place I might have chosen to inhabit until the coast was clear, I thought, but Iris pressed farther back, pawing aside coats that might have hung there since the fourth Duke’s day, if not the third. All I could see of my companion was the back of her herring-bone trousers, and I was beginning to wonder how on earth we would explain ourselves if one of the servants happened upon us when I heard a click, followed by a low exclamation of relief.
“In here,” she whispered.
I picked my way into the musty clothing, rendered half blind by the combined darkness and steaming-up of spectacles. Iris seized my outstretched hand and pulled me in; then to my consternation she shut the door, cutting off what light there had been and loosing the first tendrils of claustrophobia.
“Hold on,” she murmured. I could hear her shuffling about, her hand patting across some part of our tiny enclosure. I shifted away from the unexpected intimacy of her leg against mine, and then she spoke again: “Here we are.”
The rattle of a match-box warned me what to expect; on the third try, the head ignited and was held under the wick of a candle stub. There were several such, I saw, arranged on top of the doorsill, all of them furry with dust. She took a second one down, blew it clean, lit it from the one already going, then handed it to me.
I had thought the stairs down to the crypt were snug. This was more like a spiralling ladder. I had to take care not to set Iris’s coat-tails on fire, so nearly directly above me did she climb; my free hand rested on the steps in front of me for support, in the absence of anything resembling a rail.