“The thread I chose, to fill the time until Wednesday’s meeting in London with the heir apparent, was that of Gabriel Hughenfort.” Holmes paused to set a match to his pipe, then settled back into his chair.
“I began my search for your nephew’s war record, logically enough, at the War Records Offices.”
“Under what name?” Iris asked.
The question rather confused me—how would she know that Holmes had been in disguise?—but Holmes shot her a sharp glance.
“Ah,” he said. “You knew.”
“That Gabriel had enlisted under a pseudonym? He told me, yes.”
Holmes looked at Marsh. “But you did not know this?”
“I had no idea. Why would he use a false name?”
“Because he wanted to be a soldier,” Iris told him simply. “Not a Hughenfort.”
Marsh nodded, understanding. “When I wrote him, I sent the letters through my brother,” he explained. “My knowledge of his whereabouts was likely to be out of date. They never mentioned it. What name did he use, then?”
“Gabriel Hewetson,” Holmes answered.
“Hewetson?” I repeated. “As in Christopher? Irish sculptor, eighteenth century?”
“You saw the Hewetson bust of the third Duke in the Hall?” Iris asked. “It was one of Gabriel’s favourites, looked a bit like him. He may have chosen the name because it hits the ear rather like ‘Hughenfort.’ ”
“It might even appear like ‘Hughenfort’ on an envelope at the Front,” Holmes said, and added, “You’d have saved me half a night of pawing through filing cabinets, had you known. Still, it can’t be helped.
“There is a clerk in the Records Offices for whom I once performed a discreet service, and who in return is happy to expedite any enquiries I might have concerning those who have worn a uniform. That Gabriel Hughenfort’s was not a public record was apparent immediately I heard that members of the man’s own family were unaware of his fate. A shameful end for a prominent name—records are sealed for much less than that. However, I had not expected that they might be removed entirely.
“All started well enough. I arrived in London, I found my man, arrangements were made for an after-hours rendez-vous when we might read our files undisturbed, and I passed the intervening time in an afternoon concert. I am pleased to report that the cultural life of the great city is quite recovered from the losses during the War. However, you are not interested in my pleasures.
“I presented myself at the appointed hour, allowed myself to be escorted surreptitiously through a side-door, and gave my clerk the information I required. It was not with the general records, which was no surprise, but we pressed on.
“Eventually, we found a file with the name we sought, but as a soldier’s service record, it left a great deal to be desired. His family history consisted of Justice Hall, Berks, full stop. There were medical records from his enlistment, height, weight, and childhood illnesses, but those contained nothing after October. The service record itself covered training and made note of where he was being sent, then that too stopped.”
“So his records from the Front were either lost or separated?” I suggested.
“So I’d have thought,” he said, “except that his file also contained the standard typed notification of Gabriel Hughenfort’s death.”
That, we all had to agree, was difficult to explain.
“My clerk was well and truly stymied. He’d never seen anything like it, he said—and then he corrected himself. He had, perhaps, once or twice, when he’d chanced upon the ill-concealed record of government agents. Spies, if you will.”
Holmes puffed his pipe and watched our reactions. Alistair and Iris sat up sharply; Marsh tried to, and grunted. Even I was startled—and here I’d thought I was joking when I speculated about the future Phillida’s two children might find in the family espionage business.
Holmes was nodding. “My ears pricked, as you can imagine. And then I noticed, written in faint pencil on the inside cover of the file, the name Hewetson.
“Under that name, however, there was little more, only the record of where he’d trained before being sent to France. No service record, no medical papers, not even a death notice.
“Of course, the Records Offices are in deplorable condition, and even the most straight-forward of records go astray all the time. Assuming that this specific case of loss was due to malice would be leaping to conclusions—an exercise at which, as Russell could tell you, I have much practice, although I try to kerb the impulse.
“Still, I now had the unit with which he’d been sent to France. Assuming, that is, that he stayed with the original regiment.”
“Which he didn’t,” Iris broke in. “When I saw him in Paris in March, he was en route to a new posting.”
“My dear lady, I might as easily have remained here and had most of my work done for me by your arrival. However, in the end, rather than pursuing the boy through several million dusty bits of paper, we let ourselves out of the building and I caught a cab straight-away for my brother Mycroft’s.”
He paused to choose his words. “My brother is a mine of information when it comes to the inner workings of the machinery of government.” This was a delicate way of explaining Mycroft’s all-pervasive and enormously powerful role in, as Mycroft whimsically called it, “accounting.”
“I know your brother,” Iris said. “I did some work for him during the War.”
“You don’t say? Well. In any case, after I’d turned Mycroft from his bed and confronted him with the name, he was no more forthcoming than the clerk’s file had been. He’d never directed a man by that name. He did agree, however, that for a second lieutenant to have virtually no records was an unexplained irregularity, and it is my brother’s function, certainly in his own mind, to explain the inexplicable, to account for the unaccountable. It took him the entire morning—which is an exceedingly long time for Mycroft—but he did follow young Gabriel’s elusive tracks far enough to uncover the second regiment to which he was posted, following his release from hospital in March.
“Once I possessed that piece of information, the rest was foot-work. The names of the demobbed from that regiment and their addresses allowed me to winnow out those men from London, as I could see no advantage to be had in seeking out names from far-flung villages. Time enough for that, if it proves necessary.
“From the score of names that immediately presented themselves, I chose half a dozen to begin with, all of them old enough to suggest that their survival was due to a degree of low cunning, rather than sheer luck. One captain, one sergeant, the rest privates.
“The four I located before the hour became too late for calling told me a story that interested me deeply. I began by showing them the photograph I had borrowed from the library downstairs, and although they were all uncertain about the name Hughenfort, they did know the face, and knew that ‘Angel’—their nick-name for the lad—had been shot.
“Two things concerning the testimony of these soldiers interested me greatly. First and most obvious, that they knew the face and the first name, but none recognised the family name. This confirmed that your nephew used his nom de guerre exclusively, not just for the authorities.
“The other thing that interested me was not so much what the men knew, as how they felt about their ‘Angel’ Gabriel. When I first brought up the subject, each was loth to speak of the lad at all. When they did, it was with an uncomfortable mixture of deep resentment and sorrow that quite obviously pained them. All felt considerable distress at what happened to the lad, and a kind of hurt bafflement, as if a friend had badly let them down, for reasons they could not comprehend.
“It was not shame. Nor was it the disappointment in a too-soft sprig of the aristocracy, a lad who had no business in the trenches and ran afoul of his own inadequacies. It was more a case of, There but for the grace of God might I have gone. They accepted Gabriel as one of their own, a fledgling soldier with a weakness none had foreseen, but none co
uld condemn.”
“They mourned him,” Iris said in a soft voice.
“Precisely. And at a stage of the War when few souls had any capacity for mourning left in them.”
I looked at my companions, and found that the soldiers were not the only people to mourn this “sprig of the aristocracy.” Iris was staring unseeing at the flames, her eyes dry but tragedy on her face—she’d been fond of the boy, this representative of a lost generation of golden youth. Alistair was scowling and kicking with his heel at the basket of logs. And Marsh—
One glance at Marsh, and I shot to my feet in confusion, exclaiming, “Look at the time—after mid-night already; I’ll tumble into the fire with exhaustion. Holmes, surely we can continue this in the morning?”
I practically hauled at his ear-lobe to get him out of the room; fortunately, he caught my urgency, if not its reason, and we made our hasty farewells.
But I knew that the image of Marsh Hughenfort, his face half covered by one hand and actual tears trembling in those black eyes, was one that would stay with me for a long, long time. The man looked decades older than Holmes, and far from any source of vitality or hope. We had no business inflicting the vivid reminder of an innocent’s death on the man when he was in his current condition.
Let Iris drug him to sleep with the tale of Ratty and Toad.
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.