“A spot of burglary? But of course.” He looked over to catch the eye of the attentive waiter, and smiled. “L’addition, s’il vous plaît.”
We made a detour to our rooms so I might assume a more practical outfit for the role of burglar. When eleven o’clock had rung, we slipped out of the service entrance into the dark streets. A light rain had begun, all the better for our purposes since it sent passers-by scurrying for shelter with their heads tucked down. I led Holmes up to my friendly brasserie, and nodded down the street at the house.
“The door between the florist’s and the ironmonger’s,” I told him. “Their appartement is on the top floor, facing the street.” It was a three-storey building, flush to a taller building on one side and with a narrow alley on the other. “I don’t know if their flat goes all the way to the alley, or if the corner room is attached to the neighbour.” The entire floor was uniformly dark.
“I propose we find out,” Holmes said, and launched himself out across the street. Rather wishing that we’d remained disguised by the priests’ robes, which might stay the gendarmes from actual assault, I followed.
I had been inside the building earlier that day, so I already knew which flats were inhabited by nervous dogs and which by deaf old ladies. The central vestibule was not locked, and we encountered no-one on the stairs, although twice dogs began to yap frantically inside their doors and caused us to quicken our steps. Outside the Hughenfort door, Holmes took out his pick-locks and bent to work.
The lock was old and simple, a matter of a few moments’ nudging before we were inside. The curtains were shut tight, which made matters easier yet, and we divided up our attention, beginning at opposite ends of the flat.
This is what we learnt about Mme Hughenfort: She was an untidy housekeeper, although the rooms were clean beneath a layer of dust and clutter, and she had a frugal taste in foodstuffs and alcohol. Her furniture and clothing were serviceable but cheap, with the exception of a few items that might easily have been gifts. The boy’s room reflected more care than hers, his coats and shoes newer, his bedclothes thicker than hers.
We found no picture of Justice Hall among his things, although there was a dust-free gap on a shelf that might have held the sort of treasure-box valued even by boys who are not required to move house every few months: He might well have seized it to take into exile. The walls held awards from school, a letter of commendation from a teacher, and some drawings he had made, spare and surprisingly sophisticated. I spotted an essay the boy had been writing, glanced through it, and found that it too demonstrated an unexpected maturity in its language and its grasp of history. I put it back, thoughtful.
In her room we found nothing incriminating, until we reached the upper shelf of a built-in cupboard and saw an ornate enamelled music box, about four inches by nine, with a scene of some Bavarian village in the snow. The box was locked.
Holmes drew out his pick-locks again.
She did not keep her legal papers in the box, but for our purposes something far better. Holmes slid his fingernail over the catch to keep the box from playing, and with his other hand took out the contents.
Love letters from three different men over a twenty-year period, none of which was signed “Lionel” or written in an English hand. Snapshots of a younger, slimmer Terèse, mostly with friends, including one showing her dressed in a heavy winter coat, arm in arm with a tall Nordic-looking blond man. The dates had been pencilled onto the back of each in French schoolgirl writing; the one with the blond said, “Pieter, novembre 1913.”
One of the letters was signed with that name, the one that contained, along with a number of romantic lines I had just as soon not have read, the following admission (in French):
I will never cease loving you, my darling Terèse, but I cannot leave my wife. A divorce, with her in the state she is, would be the act of a scoundrel. So although I would give my life to be with you, I cannot in good conscience sacrifice hers. Farewell, my sweet girl. Think of me well.
The letter bore the date of early December 1913. A month before Terèse had married Lionel Hughenfort.
Did she snag him, or was she simply an old friend who needed a great favour? I thought the latter, that she was desperate, pregnant and abandoned; he was ill, in need of a housekeeper, generous with his family’s money, and not unwilling to do his judgemental family in the eye by dragging in this unsuitable match.
There may even, I reflected, have been a degree of affection between them. The photograph of the pregnant Terèse and the worn-looking Lionel that occupied a place among the débris of her dressing-table was an obligatory presence, since the man was her son’s declared father, but it might also have a sentimental value to her. The pose, while hardly that of two newlyweds expecting a first child, nonetheless seemed to indicate friendship rather than a mere business transaction. They were leaning into one another, their faces at ease, as if each were taking a pause from the world’s tumult with a similarly beset companion-at-arms. Neither seemed to place much trust in the other’s strength, but at the same time, neither seemed to think it likely that the other was an active threat. And in the sort of life their faces testified to their having led, being safe from attack was nearly as good as being protected.
Holmes laid aside the photo of Terèse with Pieter and his last letter to her, put the rest back into the music box, then eased the lid down and locked it.
“She’ll notice them missing,” I remarked, not meaning it as an objection. Holmes did not take it as such, either.
“That may be for the best,” he replied as he carried the box back to the cupboard.
I could see what he meant: that Terèse Hughenfort would take the missing objects as a declaration that the family was on to her scheme. However, when the monies continued to come (as I assumed they would, knowing Marsh), their arrival would send the further message that support would continue, so long as she did not attempt to foist her cuckoo’s child into the family nest.
Out on the street again, doors locked behind us and dogs safely passed, I brought out the only real disappointment of the evening’s excursion.
“It would have been nice to have some hard evidence of Sidney Darling’s involvement in the attempt to place the boy in Justice.”
Holmes was shaking his head before I had finished. “I believe you’d find that one of those occasions when the truth does more damage than a convenient lie, Russell. We still can’t be certain if Darling was planning actual fraud, or if he was simply aiming at the easiest path for everyone: giving the duke an acceptable heir, a boy with the potential of being shaped to make a master for Justice when his time comes. Darling no doubt believes that such a situation would set Marsh’s mind at rest, allowing a return to the status quo: Marsh and Alistair back to wherever they’ve been for the last twenty years, the Darlings back in charge of Justice. Nothing criminal there.”
He was right. The peculiar thing was, Darling’s goal and ours were proving to be more or less the same thing. And as I’d said before, if I had to choose a commoner to train up as a duke, Thomas Hughenfort would be an ideal candidate: a supple mind, good manners, and an unspoilt upbringing by a caring mother.
Alistair’s response to that, unfortunately, would dominate: The boy’s blood was simply not that of the Hughenforts.
There was little more to be done in Lyons, short of confronting Mme Hughenfort, which was most definitely not in our brief. We spent an hour in the morning uncovering the owner of the flat to which the mother and son had fled, finding to our utter lack of surprise that the name was that of her long-time accountant to whom cheques were sent.
We were on the next train to Paris, where we spent the night, and arrived in London to the sound of church bells.
Holmes went into the first telegraph office we could find that was open on a Sunday, to dispatch a brief message to Justice Hall saying that we were back in the country and would report soon. Then we took ourselves to a small and inordinately luxurious hotel, where we were fed and pampered and c
ould talk the whole matter through without being overheard.
In most investigations, Holmes aimed for the truth—no less, no more. In this case, we sought the truth, but perhaps not too much of it, and preferably truth of the right sort. Marsh was both client and brother, and his fate was in our hands.
Put simply, if we loved Mahmoud, we would lie to him. A simple declaration that, yes, the boy is your brother’s son, and the huge weight of Justice would be lifted from Marsh’s shoulders, allowing him and Ali to slip out from under that estate, those walls, that role of self-mutilating service, and resume the light existence of nomads. Marsh wished to trade stone walls for those of goat’s hair as badly as his cousin did—of that we were both certain. All it would take was one word, a simple, unadorned “yes,” and our brothers would be free.
“I have, on occasion, lied to a client,” Holmes mused, addressing rather owlishly his several-times-emptied glass. “It goes against my grain, rather, but particularly in my youth I hesitated not to play God.”
“But—with Marsh?”
“There’s the rub,” he agreed. “If it were merely a matter of backing Marsh up, I should happily lie to the prime minister himself, perhaps even the king. But to keep the facts from him, to make his decision for him? That is a far different matter.”
My initial objection had been founded more on the impossibility of deceiving the man than on the immorality of doing so, but I had to agree with this argument as well.
“What do you suggest?” I asked him.
“I propose to return to the scent I was working before Mme Hughenfort led us astray.”
“Interviewing soldiers?”
“One in particular, although not a soldier. The chaplain who wrote that letter of condolence to Gabriel’s father. Hastings said he’d known Gabriel, and may well have sat with Gabriel his last night. I wrote to him before we left for France, and hope to collect his answer in the morning. Considering the bureaucratic tangle the boy appears to have been caught up in, the companion of his last hours may know more than the commanding officer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In the morning, however, there was no letter waiting at the small tobacconist’s shop that Holmes used for a convenience address. He scowled absently at the woman who ran the shop, then turned on his heel and left the cramped, fragrant little place. I threw a couple of soothing phrases at her and scurried after him; when I caught him up, he was deep in thought and I decided that he had been unaware both of his scowl and its effect.
“We may as well go to Sussex,” he declared. “I left at least three vital letters unanswered, a week and a half ago.”
So we went to Sussex, to tidy up the many things left dangling by Alistair’s arrival and precipitate demands. We spent the night under Mrs Hudson’s care and returned to London, and the tobacconist, in the morning. She still had no letters, and she bristled and protested in florid Cockney that she couldn’t be expected to produce a letter that never came. Holmes seemed not to think it an unreasonable expectation, and on that note we left the shop.
“I shall go to Dorking,” he declared.
“Even though the Reverend Mr Hastings may be absent?”
“The letter will have dropped through his letter-box more than a week ago. If he were away, a housekeeper would have sent it on to him. Of course, he may be ill, or out of the county; on the other hand, he may have had other, more subtle reasons for failing to respond.”
Such as being long dead, I thought, but did not say.
“Dorking is not so remote as to constitute an unreasonable waste of time,” he decided. “Come, Russell,” and so saying, he threw up his hand to summon a passing taxi cab.
The Reverend Mr Hastings’ cottage was at the end of a lane that ran from the high street towards open downland. With a ruthless hand at the pruning shears the cottage might have presented a more friendly face, but between the untrimmed ivy and the overgrown bushes in the garden, the house windows looked dully out like the eyes of a long-unshaven prisoner of war. There appeared to be no-one at home, but I thought it would look the same way even if the entire Women’s Institute had been gathered inside. We picked our way up the weedy gravel path and rang the bell.
No sound followed the clamour, but the house seemed to grow watchful, and the image of a wary prisoner returned more strongly.
Holmes pulled the bell-knob again, and the sound died away a second time, but now there was something else: a scuffling noise, coming slowly down an uncarpeted hallway. The door opened, and we looked into the face of the prisoner himself.
Tall, so gaunt as to make Holmes seem fleshy, clean-shaven to reveal the furrows and hollows of his seven decades and more, he was dressed in an ordinary, old-fashioned suit gone shiny at the knees, but there was something about his stoop and his gaze that caused me to glance involuntarily at his ankles. He wore no shackles—at least, no tangible ones—but he stood nonetheless with the posture of an old lag at hard labour.
“The Reverend Mr Hastings?” Holmes asked. He took the man’s silence for an answer. “My name is Holmes. I wrote to you concerning—”
“I feared you would come,” the man interrupted. His voice was hoarse, either from injury or disuse. “You should not have done so.”
“There are questions to which I must have answers,” Holmes replied, his tone gentle.
“Questions that ought to remain unasked.”
“Nonetheless, I must insist.”
Hastings neither denied Holmes’ right to insist nor asserted his own right to refuse. Instead, the recognition that Holmes was not going to walk away settled over him like a weight, the latest of many, and his face aged another half decade. He turned away abruptly, leaving us to close the door and follow him down the dark hallway to the kitchen, where he filled the kettle from the tap and set it to heat.
The kitchen was pure Victorian, a gloomy servant’s quarter without the servant. The shelves and cupboards had been painted a peculiar and unappetising shade of green long before Victoria died—perhaps even while Albert was still alive. The fluttering gas lamps reflected off that paint made our host look like a corpse, moving between hob and cupboards.
“Will you take coffee?” he asked over his shoulder, sounding as if he hoped the answer would be negative so he could drink in peace.
“Thank you,” Holmes answered for us both. Hastings had yet to acknowledge my presence; however, three cups appeared on the tray. In silence, he spooned and stirred and filtered the fragrant beverage into a dented silver pot gone black with tarnish, and carried the tray out of the room as if we were not there. Obediently, we trailed after.
The sitting room needed the gas up even in the middle of the morning. The coals in the grate smoked in a sullen fashion, as if they’d been put on wet, and the lamp on the wall behind me flickered badly. Hastings laid the tray on a low table, took what was obviously his customary chair beside a taller table piled high with books, and bent forward to pour into the three cups. He took his black, and left us to add sugar or milk as we wished. The milk in the jug looked dubious, so I satisfied myself with three sugars. I stirred, sipped, and coughed in astonishment.
For the first time, Hastings noted my presence enough to glance at me. “Is there something wrong with it?”
“No, no—not at all,” I assured him. “It’s delicious.”
Actually, it was, but also powerful. The dim light and lack of cream had not prepared me for a brew nearly the equivalent of the thick Arabic stuff Mahmoud had made. It was not what I would have expected from such a frail creature.
“I drink it strong,” he told us. “It keeps me from sleep.”
Holmes glanced up sharply, as the dread permeating the word “sleep” slapped into the room. Hastings might as well have substituted the word “nightmares.”
Holmes set down his cup and got the ordeal under way.
“Reverend Mr Hastings, as I told you in my letter, I am making enquiries for the Duke of Beauville into the death of his nephew
, Gabriel Hughenfort. I was given your name as chaplain to the regiment in which Hughenfort was serving at the time of his execution.”
Hastings jerked so sharply at the last word that some of the coffee splashed out of the cup onto his knee. He did not notice.
“You can’t—,” he said. “I can’t—oh my dear Lord, he was only a child, nothing more than a child!”
And then he was weeping. An aged man carrying a burden of pain raw enough to reduce him to hard sobs is a terrifying thing to behold, and Holmes and I exchanged a horrified glance before he shot out one hand to rescue the cup. I reached for the throw on the back of my seat and draped it across Hastings’ shoulders, a pointless gesture but the only sort of comfort I could come up with at the moment.
“Perhaps some tea, Russell?” Holmes murmured. “If you can find some fresher milk?”
I slid away gratefully to the kitchen, located some more promising milk in the cooler portion of the pantry, and found that he had left the kettle simmering away. In bare minutes I was back, and Holmes thrust the hot, sweet tea into the man’s hands.
The gentler stimulant did its work. When the cup held only a sludge of sugar at the bottom, Hastings drew a shaky breath and handed it over to be refilled. When that cup was halfway down, he summoned the strength to begin his tale.
“They were such children, by that point in the War—red-cheeked and frightened, trying so hard to keep a brave face, for themselves and the others. In the early days, of course, that wasn’t the case. I offered my services as soon as war was declared, so I saw the first days of the Expeditionary Force. Those men, they were hard as rocks, with no more imagination than the mules that pulled the guns. Tommy Atkins at his best—Kipling would have known them in an instant.
“And then over the winter the new generation of Tommies began to arrive, in a trickle at first, then in numbers. Strong young men from factories and farms, undergraduates and lower clerks, idealistic and patriotic and oh, how they died. The government trained them for their fathers’ wars, taught them how to handle themselves in honest battle, and then shipped them off to hell in the trenches.”