But we chose to wait in the open air for the pilot of the red fighter, and he manoeuvred his chair back through the doorway and left us in the cold.
The aeroplane taxied slowly on the slick surface, neared the barn, and then the engine coughed into silence. In a moment, the plane’s pilot climbed out of the cockpit and jumped easily to the ground.
She was a tall woman, as tall as I but broader in the shoulders, and I could well imagine her slinging a wounded Tommy across her back. Then she began to remove the layers of clothing that kept her from freezing. Thick scarf unwrapped from her neck and face, the helmet and goggles. Yes, there were those famous emerald eyes, that ebony hair, but something else as well, a small fact that Gabriel had failed to record.
She was what the boy’s parents would no doubt have termed a half breed. Ireland lay in her eyes and her surname, but those Irish ancestors had intermarried with folk who knew neither freckles nor red hair. She was perhaps a quarter American Indian, maybe an eighth, but plenty to mark her as an odd choice for the heir to one of the oldest dukedoms in England.
She was also extraordinarily beautiful.
She shook her short hair loose of the helmet’s marks and shot us a grin of pure high spirits, a grin I recognised instantly from a blurred photograph of overall-clad drivers in France. “You two ladies looking to learn to fly?” she asked. “Or you just wanting a quick pass over town? I’m happy to take you, but I hope you’ll want to try it for yourselves. There’s nothing in the world like it.”
“I can see that,” I told her, speaking only the truth. “But actually, we’ve come to talk about another matter.”
“I’m happy to teach your husbands. I’m good with men.”
“It concerns a young soldier you once knew, by the name of Gabriel Hughenfort.”
It was as if I’d kicked her in the stomach. All her high spirits vanished into instant wariness; she even took a step back. In a moment, I thought, she’d break into a run—or reach for a weapon.
“Damn,” she said. “Damnation. Well, I knew you’d come eventually.”
The man in the chair, wondering perhaps where we had got to, had rolled outside again and now called out, “Are you ladies going to stand there and freeze to death, or can I shut this door?”
Raising her head, but not taking her eyes off us, the pilot shouted, “We’ll be right there, Ben.” She waited until the door closed, then she leant forward and spoke in a low, forceful voice. “If you hurt him, if you so much as make him uncomfortable, I swear to God you’ll never lay eyes on him again.”
Then she stalked off to the office. Iris stared after her, with an expression that asked about the pilot’s sanity, and said, “But why on earth would we want to hurt that poor man?”
I shook my head, but not, as she thought, from an equal incomprehension. Instead, I was asking Iris to wait, as I propelled her forward by the elbow, trying to keep down my excitement. I could be wrong—those small hints, the odd coincidences; the ring she didn’t wear, her willingness to leave France during the last, victorious weeks of the War. I could be mistaken. But the green-eyed woman’s attitude made no sense, unless—
I could be wrong.
But I was not.
Iris saw him a split second after I did, standing at the side of the pilot. It took her a moment longer to understand what she was seeing.
A child, about five years of age, with his mother’s green eyes.
Everything else about him was pure Hughenfort, from the lift of his chin and his stocky grace to Marsh’s raised eyebrow.
Gabriel’s son.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Iris swayed, when her mind finally comprehended what her eyes were telling her, and I seized a beat-up wooden chair and jammed it behind her knees.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Oh my God.”
This reaction quite clearly was not what the boy’s mother had anticipated. The child had retreated from the peculiar behaviour of these two strangers, and now stood half hidden behind his mother, her hand resting on his shoulder by way of protection.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Her brother took it further. “What the hell is going on here?”
“My name—,” Iris began, but I cut in on her.
“Before we get into the details, may I suggest that the boy be excused? That way you can choose how best to talk to him about what we are going to tell you.”
The green eyes thought about it for a while, then flickered over to Ben. “Would you and Gabe mind going up to the house and starting lunch? The boys will be here before long and they’ll be hungry. This may take a while.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m not sure of anything, but I think it’d be a good idea. You go with Ben, okay, Gabe? You can start the sandwiches.”
Iris’s rapt gaze followed the boy until the door had shut behind him. Immediately the door closed, the still angry but now confused pilot dragged up another chair and dropped into it.
“Lady, you better start talking.”
“May I ask one question first, Mrs—” I stopped, then apologised. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure of your name.”
“Hewetson,” she said, then corrected herself. “I call myself Hewetson.”
“Mrs Hewetson, I don’t know how to put this so it isn’t offensive, so I won’t even try. Before we go any further, we have to know: Were you and Gabriel Hughenfort, who was known at the time as Hewetson, legally married?”
She eyed me, thinking about the question’s implications—but not, going by her expression, just those that were offensive.
“Why don’t you know that already? And if you don’t know that, how did you find me?”
By way of answer, Iris reached into her handbag and pulled out the worn red journal. She laid it with care onto the desk between her and Hélène, who had obviously never seen it before. It was equally obvious, blindingly so, that when she opened it, she knew the handwriting as well as she knew her own. She reached out and ran a tentative pair of fingers down one page, as if to touch the hand of the man holding the pen. She then turned to the last page of writing, read for perhaps five seconds, and closed the book.
“How—” she started, but her voice failed her.
“It’s a very long story,” Iris answered. “One that I’ve come from England to tell you. But first, please, would you answer my friend’s question?”
On the one hand, it mattered not in the least if they had somehow managed to wed on the field of battle. The boy was Gabriel’s, and happy; neither of those facts, I thought, would change. On the other, everything depended on it: An illegitimate child could not inherit, no more than a female child could. Marsh’s freedom lay in a piece of paper.
Philippa Hewetson raised her head, and I could see the answer before she said it.
“Yes,” she said. Iris covered her mouth with both her gloved hands and made a sound like laughter, with tears in her eyes. I closed my own eyes and found myself saying under my breath, in something remarkably like prayer, Thank you, God, oh thank you, thank you.
When I opened my eyes again, the hard, protective look was back on her face, and I made haste to explain our rather extreme reaction. I was not certain just where she perceived a threat, but I knew this was one of those situations where honesty, while not necessarily the best policy, might be the only one possible.
“A legal marriage certificate means that your son is heir to a very large estate and a very important title in England. Gabriel was the only son of the sixth Duke of Beauville. He didn’t tell you this?”
“He said his family took its inheritances very seriously. Those were his words. He told me that when I said we didn’t need to marry, that I would—Anyway, he wouldn’t hear of it, so I asked this priest in one of the villages, an old man I’d gotten to know pretty well. I’m a Catholic, by the way. I thought it was a joke—about the inheritances, that is. Gabriel laughed, that’s for sure. I figured his father was the kind of self-made man out to
found a dynasty, who’d throw a fit if his son brought home a brown-skinned Canadian Catholic like me.”
“And yet they’d want the boy, eventually,” I concluded. This was the source of her animosity.
“And here you are,” she pointed out.
“It’s not quite the same,” Iris objected.
“Isn’t it?”
I thought this a good time to throw a couple of facts into the burgeoning argument. “Iris is Gabriel’s mother,” I told her. “And the reason we—”
The woman’s face closed to us as if shutters had been thrown across it. “No she isn’t. She’s the aunt Gabriel went to see in Paris. I remember the name. Look here, I don’t know what kind of scheme you’re trying to pull on me, but it’s not going to work. I want you to leave. Now.”
“I am his mother,” Iris told her. “He didn’t know it himself; only six or eight people ever did. And now you. That’s part of the long story.”
The green eyes flickered down to the war journal, then back to me. “You were saying something.”
“I was about to say, the reason we got involved with the string of events that led us here is that someone we both . . . care about needs to know that the succession is secure before he can free himself.”
She was unmoved. “What if he doesn’t? What if I ‘lose’ the marriage certificate, say that Gabe’s illegitimate, say we want nothing to do with you?”
“Then your son would be robbed of a heritage that has been a part of England for eight hundred years,” Iris told her. “You’ve really never heard of the name Hughenfort?”
The green-eyed pilot shrugged. Shrugged! I pictured the reaction of the Darlings to that shrug, and stifled a laugh.
“I’ve heard of York and Windsor, too, but that doesn’t make Jack York down at the garage into a prince. I don’t know. We’re happy here. Gabe’s got a good life. Why would I want to spoil him by showing him a castle, having people bow and scrape and call him—what would they call him, anyway?”
“Your Grace,” I told her helpfully. “But they’ll call him what you ask. In any case, I’m afraid it’s too late. You may choose to have nothing to do with Justice Hall—which is certainly what the current duke would like to do—but we know about you now, and there will be church records.” (If they weren’t bombed, lost, or stolen, I added mentally.) “Like it or no, your son is the sixth Duke’s heir.” The irony of forcing Justice Hall, with all its wealth and beauty, onto not just one unwilling duke, but two, did not escape me. Iris, however, was too close to it to see the humour. She leant forward and stretched out one hand.
“Come back with us,” she burst out. “Not permanently, just to see it, to meet the family—your family.”
“What, now? Don’t be ridiculous. I have a business to run.”
“Surely this is your slow time of year,” Iris said diplomatically.
“Christmas!” I said suddenly. “A Christmas holiday in an English country house. Your son would adore it.” I had to work to get some enthusiasm into that suggestion—personally, I’d rather have been condemned to a week in the trenches. “And anyway, I’ll bet it’s been a while since you had a holiday.”
“I couldn’t leave Ben here alone.” She was weakening, definitely weakening.
“Bring him, too,” Iris urged, scenting capitulation, but the final unscrupulous blow was mine to deliver.
“Your husband loved Justice Hall,” I told the woman. “There are pictures of him and his ancestors on the walls, the journals he kept as a boy, servants who watched him grow up. And although I never knew him, I feel confident that the thought of his son there, even on a brief visit, would have made Gabriel very happy.”
Five days later, we all boarded the boat for England.
The voyage back across the ocean, though in truth slowed by weather, seemed to fly, sped on the running feet of an active five-year-old, made smooth by the intelligence and innate grace of his mother. Helen—for so we were to call her—did not let go her apprehension so much as put it to one side, until she had seen and judged all with her own eyes, and made her decision. Before we had left New York Harbour, she and Iris were forever tied, joined by the two Gabriels but also by mutual respect and a very similar way of looking at the world. Both had known hardship, both retained their humour; within days, they began to look like mother and daughter.
Even Ben, who had to be cajoled into making the arduous journey and who could easily have felt even more useless an appendage than his legs were, soon caught the spirit. His laughter as three strong porters hauled him up the gang-way was somewhat forced, but once settled into a deck-level cabin his independence and good cheer reasserted themselves, and one night I spotted him on the dance floor, jogging his Bath chair back and forth in time to the music with a giggling young flapper on his lap, clinging for dear life. He caught my eye and winked.
Then we were in Southampton, with ice-slick decks and a low, grey dawn that drizzled sleet and threatened snow before the day was through. We had come without fanfare, with no family to greet us, nothing but a pair of anonymous hired cars arranged by Mycroft. I listened to the complaint of gulls, and asked myself for the hundredth time if I had been right to permit this.
Iris’s impulsive invitation, blurted out in the twofold excitement of finding a grandson and freeing a husband at one blow, had caught me unawares. Christmas at Justice Hall for young Gabe and his mother? With its current duke barely healed from a murderous attack and the shadows full of unidentified threat? Surely this was hardly the time to bring a new duke home? That thought had not occurred to Iris until late that same evening, back at the Webster Inn; when it did, when she realised what she had done, she was horrified, and had nearly rung up the O’Meary household then and there. Instead, we had gone out and talked with the two Canadians by clear light of day, and in the end, the four of us had decided to go ahead. It had caused us all a great deal of soul-searching. I could only pray we had made the right decision.
Helen, standing by my side as we were nudged towards the dim outlines of the harbour, had clearly been thinking along the same lines. “You are sure my son will be safe?”
“This from a woman who takes the child barn-storming?” I replied with a smile.
“One barrel roll, that’s all he’s ever done with me, and that on his birthday.”
“Yes,” I said more seriously. “We need to take precautions, but I’d wager Marsh and Alistair against a regiment of guards. The boy’ll be safe in that house.”
Watched by hawklike eyes every instant, no doubt, but he was too young to chafe over restrictions. And we would give it out that the Canadians would be at Justice until Easter, whereas in fact they would return to Canada in early January, weather permitting.
“What is Lord Maurice like?” Helen asked me.
“I met him in Palestine. He’s a different man there.”
“A better man?”
“More at home—a part of the landscape, even. The desert burns away extraneous parts of a person. Among the desert peoples, true wealth is measured by what a man carries inside him—his skills, his history, his family. Justice Hall suffocates Marsh. Which is why he will be the first to understand if it has the same effect on you. Keep in mind that the estate can run itself if it has to. Marsh is trapped there at the moment, but not for reasons that affect you and Gabe. Remember that. It’s not going to eat you.”
I had been saying the same thing in various ways all the way across the Atlantic. Her wait-and-see attitude prevailed, which was all a person could expect, or ask.
“Oh yes,” I added, “the rest of the family doesn’t know that Marsh and Alistair have been in Palestine. Let them keep guessing.”
“The sister sounds . . . daunting. And the name, so close to mine. Strange.”
“She’ll be uncomfortable and protective, but if you let her know that Justice will always be her home, she’ll settle down. After all, you and Gabe are no real threat. Her children would never inherit anyway.”
&
nbsp; “That really is wrong. Don’t you think? Women should be able to inherit. It’s archaic.”
“I know. I suppose it’ll change, some day.”
Gulls screamed in the cold air, horns sounded, stevedores shouted. The docks were nearly under our feet now, and we joined the passengers streaming back to their staterooms to collect bags and companions.
“Iris is sure great, isn’t she?” Helen commented from behind my shoulder. “Have you met her . . . friend? Dan?”
“I haven’t, no. And yes, I like Iris a great deal.”
“I’m glad you talked me into this,” she said suddenly. “I’m looking forward to meeting Marsh and the others, seeing the house. Gabriel’s house.”
“I did mean what I told you, that he would have loved to see you and the boy there. He revelled in every inch of the place.”
“I know,” she replied. “You can feel that in the journal.”
Following the mention of the diary, we jostled along the corridor in silence for a time. At her door, she stopped with her hand on the knob. “I want the man caught, who did that to Gabriel,” she said. “That staff major.” I want him torn to pieces, her eyes said.
“We will catch him,” I told her, meeting her gaze, allowing no doubt to surface.
We had to; any other course was unthinkable.
Disembarking was a laborious business, with three men struggling to keep Ben O’Meary’s chair from shooting down the steep gang-way. Mycroft had sent two cars, both to give space to carry our trunks and bags and to provide two sturdy drivers to shift them. Ben could actually stand, with assistance, since his legs were burnt, not paralysed, but we were nonetheless grateful for the help. And being Mycroft’s men, they would no doubt double as bodyguards, should the need arise.
The roads were an icy slush, and I quickly regretted that we had not tackled the trains instead. Helen seemed oblivious to the skids and slips; the boy duke spent the first part of the journey bouncing from one window to another and the last part asleep; Iris was withdrawn into her own thoughts; and Ben became visibly more and more uncomfortable.