I glanced at Alistair, seated with his knees crossed and his hands clasped together on his lap. It struck me then, how unusual it was to see those hands empty and unoccupied. In Palestine, Ali always had some project to hand: patching the tent, mending a buckle, working oil into the mules’ leather traces, or—first, last, and at all moments in between—whittling. He had whittled endlessly, using the deadly blade he wore at his belt to carve unexpectedly delicate and whimsical figures of donkeys and lizards and long-haired goats. Whittling, it would seem, was not an occupation for the drawing room.
The man at the fireplace did not look at his cousin, but turned instead to us, and remarked, “You two are looking well.”
The sheer conventionality of the opening took my breath away: It had been astonishing enough to see the man hold a drink to his lips, but Mahmoud Hazr, making polite conversation? The changes in Ali ought to have warned me, but the Englishness of Alistair was nothing to that of his cousin.
There was no trace of Mahmoud’s heavy accent, no accent at all apart from that of his class and education. His movements evoked no swirl of ghostly robes; nothing in his demeanour indicated that this duke had ever held something as crass as a handgun, far less a killing blade; his eyes betrayed no hint of the watchful authority that had been the very essence of the man. His voice was lighter, his eyes seemed a lesser shade of brown, his stance was that of an amiable if distracted English nobleman. Had it not been for his scar, and for that brief flash of command when I was about to speak his Arab name, I should have thought him a different man. He even held his cigarette differently.
“And you, sir,” Holmes replied, always ready to turn conventionality to his own purposes. “You are looking somewhat . . . changed.”
“They say change is inevitable.” The duke raised his gaze to face Holmes squarely.
“I find folk wisdom to be a somewhat overrated commodity,” Holmes retorted. “It generally fails to take into account the workings of cause and effect.”
Rather than bristle, or retreat, at this confrontation, Marsh Hughenfort seemed to relax, just a fraction, and opened his mouth, but before he could respond some distant sound reached him. He paused in an attitude of listening; Alistair too cocked his head; then, as one, the two men slumped into gloom. Alistair even muttered a mild oath. Marsh retreated until his back was to the fireplace, and waited.
Children’s voices, of all things. Two high-pitched excited chatterers, growing and then fading as they turned into another part of the house, giving way to the sound of a woman in monologue. The library door opened; Holmes and Alistair rose automatically to their feet.
“—just pop my head in to see if he’s in here, p’raps you’d better inform Mrs Butter that we’ll be here for luncheon after all, just too terribly tiresome of them, truly it is. Oh, hello. I didn’t know you had company, Marsh. Good morning, Alistair.”
She was a small, elegant, expensive woman in her early thirties, plucked, pencilled, and pampered, working a pair of silver-grey gloves from her thin hands as she came through the door. In her case, the ebony Hughenfort curls had been tamed, by nature or art, into a sleek shingle, but the chin and eyebrow were instantly recognisable. She radiated a natural superiority; her clothing was too perfect to be anything but Paris; I felt instantly a frump.
“My sister,” said Marsh. “Phillida Darling.”
For a startling moment, I thought he was using a term of endearment in detached irony, but I realised it had to be the surname of the teeth-on-edge Sidney. “Phillida, this is Mr Holmes and his wife, Miss Russell. They are friends.”
Her eyes lit up. She glided across the room, dropping the gloves and her cloche hat on an exquisite marquetry end-table in passing, and held out her hand to Holmes. “What a splendid surprise, to encounter not just one, but two of my brother’s friends in a single day. Any relation to the Duke of Bedford, Miss Russell? No? Well, to think one might have missed you, if the Garritsons’ two brats hadn’t broke out in horrid spots this morning. We thought we’d lunch with them,” she explained, settling onto the divan beside me and taking out a cigarette case and ivory holder, “and we’d already set out before their nanny came down to tell them about the spots, stupid girl, and although usually I’d just have let my two in—children have to get these things some time, don’t they?—it’s really not a terribly convenient time. Thank you,” she told Holmes, who had applied a light to her cigarette. “I mean, one has a party here this week-end, and a ball in a month’s time, wouldn’t it be tiresome if half the house-maids came down in spots, too? It happened to a dear friend of mine, had to cancel the evening, the food all delivered and all. So tell me,” she said, having softened us up with the flow of trivia, “where did you two meet my brother?”
Here in your entrance hall, I nearly said. I caught back the impulse, presented her with a cheerful smile, and answered, “Aleppo, wasn’t it, Marsh?” I swivelled my head around as if to consult with him, and read not so much relief as approval, and that quiet humour in the back of his gaze that made my heart leap with pleasure: Mahmoud was there, somewhere. “That tawdry little café that your friend Joshua dragged everyone to, plying us with muffins toasted over a paraffin stove? Or was that Greece, the year before? One of those grubby but romantic spots,” I told her.
“But what was he doing there?” She could see I was going to be useless as a source of information, so she turned to confide in Holmes, arching her pencilled eyebrows in appeal. “He vanishes utterly for years and years, sends us a letter every six or eight months—postmarked in London, although one knows he can’t be in London, one’s friends would have seen him—and then back he comes, positively bristling with mysteries and secrets. A person might think he’d been in prison or something—I mean, just look at his poor face. He didn’t have that when he left.” Referring to the scar, of course.
“Those Heidelberg duelling academies could be quite rough, nicht war, Marsh?” This was from Holmes, contributing his own obfuscation.
“Of course,” I added, “the Carpathian shepherds who took him in couldn’t have helped the healing any. Health care in the mountains is still quite rudimentary.”
I was interested to see a flash of real irritation beneath Lady Phillida’s sisterly exasperation. Understandable, I supposed—if nothing else, the family would want to know if the heir had a string of warrants, a pile of debts, or a wife and six sons trailing behind from some foreign land. However, if Marsh had not told her where and how he had spent the last twenty years, it was not up to me to fill the gaps.
She pouted prettily, stubbed out her cigarette, and lounged upright. “You two are as bad as my brother. Shall we see you at luncheon?”
“They may be stopping here for a day or two. Perhaps more,” Marsh told her.
Her eyes went wide in dismay. “What, over the week-end? Oh, Marsh, why didn’t you tell me earlier we were having additional guests?”
“It was just now decided.”
“Well, next time you must let Mrs Butter know in advance.” It was a gentle scold, for the sake of keeping face before guests, but she must have heard the edge to it because she turned to me with a little laugh. “Men—they just don’t understand the servant problem, do they? We have to coddle Mrs Butter—where would we be if she up and left? Anyway, lovely to know you won’t be leaving right away, do feel free to stay on until Monday—we’ll have to get together for a nice long girlish chat. And at least we won’t have to worry about thirteen at table Saturday night.”
She stepped over and kissed the air near her brother’s cheek, which gesture he accepted without a flinch, and then she swept from the room. Alistair slowly let out a gusty breath, and reached for his cigarettes. All four of us twitched, like a group of hens settling their ruffled feathers, and I reflected that my own visceral response to the accents of power and privilege had at least become more controllable over the years. I was still intimidated by women like Phillida Darling, but I did not show it outwardly.
“We
were, I believe,” Holmes said, recalling us to our state before Lady Phillida had entered, “speaking of the nature of change.”
Alistair shook out his match and cut into any response his cousin might have made. “Not here. Not with that woman and her husband listening in at the windows. I even caught the daughter with her eye to a key-hole last week.”
“This afternoon,” Marsh said, sounding resigned. “After lunch we will put on our boots and remove ourselves from windows and key-holes.”
The lack of hope or even interest in his voice stung me into speech. “We did come here to help,” I told the duke sharply.
As if I had not spoken, he flicked his cigarette into the fire and left the room.
Luncheon was every bit as difficult as we had been led to anticipate, with Marsh silent, Alistair monosyllabic, and Lady Phillida making constant gay forays in her quest for information. Sidney Darling appeared after the rest of us had settled to our first course, full of apologies (“Trunk call to London; business couldn’t wait”), bonhomie (“Alistair old man, been a while”), and charm (“Perfectly splendid to meet friends of my brother-in-law; what a perfectly lovely frock on you, Miss Russell. I say, any relation to Bedford?”). Sidney Darling was a tall, thin, languid, inbred aristocrat with protruding blue eyes and the pencil-thin moustache and sleek light hair of a film star, dressed in a height-of-fashion dove-grey lounge suit with Prince of Wales turn-ups. His topics of conversation ran the narrow gamut from horse racing and shotgun makers to the best spots to winter along the Riviera. His response to our lack of interest in those accepted passions of the leisured class was mild surprise followed by a pitying smile. Sidney Darling did indeed set one’s teeth on edge.
Despite their traditional interests, however, I could see that the Darlings were not cut to the peer’s age-old pattern. Certainly, they were the very definition of old money—at least, the wife was; nonetheless, the Darlings moved in a social milieu that included film directors, the sons and daughters of American tycoons, progressive European novelists, and the sorts of artists more often seen in newspaper columns than on museum walls. This was, I thought, the new generation of the entitled, whose traditional studied lack of interest in the getting of money, the dictates of fashion, or human beings outside their circle was being modified to include the people and places, music and talk of the West End, Europe, and even brazen America. Indeed, Lady Phillida’s own speech reflected this, wavering as it did between the lady’s compulsory “one” and the blunt and egalitarian “I”; she had even used the vulgar term “week-end” without a hint of coyness.
Eventually, at the conclusion of one long recitation of the personal history of a prized shotgun, it registered on Darling that the rest of the table was not participating in the narrative with any degree of enthusiasm. He dabbed at his thin moustache and turned dutifully to Holmes.
“Tell me, Mr Holmes, what do you do?”
“I raise bees.”
The slightly pop blue eyes blinked. “Ah. How int’resting.”
“Very.”
Seeing her husband foundering on the rock of Holmes’ avocation, Lady Phillida decided to give me a try.
“And you, Miss Russell. Do you also keep bees?”
“I read theology. At Oxford.”
“Oh. Well. That’s rather . . . interesting as well,” she replied dubiously, her mind, no doubt, filled with furious speculation concerning the private dinner conversations that took place between the spectacularly mismatched married couple which her brother had inflicted on her for the week-end.
Alistair gave a small choking sound and reached to retrieve a hastily dropped table napkin. For the rest of the meal, we spoke about gardens.
CHAPTER SIX
Six people escaped with gratitude from the lunch table, scattering in all directions to marshal thoughts, and energies, before the dinner hour would bring us inexorably back together. Holmes and I went up to the rooms we had been given, which were in the oldest, western wing of the house but which had been made comfortable by efficient fires and an actual modern bath-room between them. My own room was a festivity of blue and gold, with a froth of silken drapes on its four posters, a counterpane of delicately embroidered silk, and terrifyingly pale carpets on the floor. Mahmoud would have given it me as a joke; of Marsh, or his sister, I could not be sure. Holmes was given the King’s room, all heavy red velvet and massive carved bed; the king had been George I, whose visit had no doubt precipitated a large part of the grand rebuilding and propelled the Hughenforts to the brink of penury.
Marsh’s suite was down the corridor in the same wing, we had been informed by Ogilby, although I thought it had pained him to admit that the new duke was sleeping down here rather than taking up rooms in the grander central block. I thought Marsh had probably kept rooms he’d occupied as a schoolboy, and decided to interpret that as an encouraging sign: Making a large space over to his taste would have been a declaration of permanence.
When we had boots on our feet and coats over our arms, we descended the noble stairway into the Great Hall, beneath the dome where the waters of Justice were poised to spill. A young house-maid broke off polishing a spotless display cabinet to accompany us to the so-called library. It was empty, but we followed the crack of billiards to the next room.
The library might be neutral ground for the family, but this was a male enclave, heavily masculine with dim Victorian colours, a smattering of animal heads, and the patina of ten thousand cigars over the velvet drapes and leather sofas. And dark: Other than the lamp-lit table itself, the brightest spots in the room were the areas of pink female flesh in the paintings decorating the walls and the unusually luminous ceiling, where light seemed to shift and play. Over the elephantine fringed table I glimpsed the waters of Justice Pond, the low, wintry sunlight sparkling off its fountain-stirred surface onto the plaster and beams above us.
How, I wondered, could I ever have mistaken Alistair for an Englishman? Dressed in plus-fours and boots he might be, with a Norwich jacket belted around his stocky frame and a soft cap on the sofa waiting to go onto his head; nonetheless, everything about him shouted “foreigner.” His stance, his scowl, the way his fingers tugged at his lower lip in the absence of moustaches—he looked like Feisal in fancy-dress.
His cousin, on the other hand, presented the very essence of English Lord. He was bent over the green table, studying the lay of the balls, and ignored our entrance as assiduously as he was ignoring his fidgeting companion. The birch-and-ivory cue rocked three times over the prop of his fingers, then with a sharp crack his ball flew over the green felt and into its pocket. Two more followed, one of those a complicated ricochet shot, and then the table was clear. He replaced the cue in its rack, picked up a smouldering cigar from its rest on a small table and took a last draw before circling the burning end off in the bowl, then picked up a squat glass with half an inch of amber liquid in it and swallowed it down. He caught up a heavy tweed jacket tossed over the back of a leather armchair and strode towards the French doors, giving a short whistle between his teeth. A pair of retrievers scrambled out from under the billiards table and shot out in front of us. Marsh held the door for us; as I went past him, I smelt whisky.
He set a brisk pace through the formal terraces and around the western wing. The perfect lawns stretched away in all directions, nestling around the Pond and gardens, speckled with deer and broken by enormous oaks and beeches, set here and there with buildings—a Gothic-style boat-house on the lake, a Palladian music house surrounded by trim gravel nearby, and a picturesque ruin atop a distant hilltop. As we marched up the grassy slopes, I kept an eye on Alistair, but he was not about to admit to weakness by being left behind. Past the layered centuries of stonework we went, along the path that followed the northern bank of the stream, and up the parkland until the house and lake had disappeared and we were in the park proper.
There, Marsh’s pace slowed. He glanced over his shoulder at the lagging Alistair, and for the first time noticed his
cousin’s infirmity. However, he did not then exclaim, as the Algernons had, “What happened to you?” Instead, he watched Alistair approach, then stepped forward to tug the injured man’s shoulder down and squint at the plaster. One brief look, and he stood away.
Alistair met his eyes, and shrugged. “An accident. In London.”
Marsh’s gaze lingered on the other man’s; emotion moved not so much across the duke’s face as in the muscle beneath it, an emotion composed of apology and bewilderment, that he’d spent hours in his cousin’s company without taking notice. I saw Marsh’s hand come up to trace the scar on his face, a thing Mahmoud had done when deeply troubled. Marsh was no more aware of his gesture than Mahmoud had been, and I clasped to myself this sign of Mahmoud’s presence beneath the unknown exterior. Then Marsh turned away, and we were walking again across the manicured landscape as if nothing had happened—although this time at a slow stroll.
“You two have been busy?” Marsh asked us.
“Reasonably so,” Holmes replied. “We have just returned from Dartmoor, a somewhat interesting case involving land fraud and family inheritance. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. You look tired, is all.”
“Nonsense. You, on the other hand, look distinctly unwell.”
“I have put on nearly a stone and taught myself to sleep in a feather bed again. How could I be unwell?”
“Mahmoud, we—”
“Do not use that name here.”
Holmes caught his arm and forced him to stand still. Deliberately, he said again, “Mahmoud,” and followed it with an Arabic quotation: “A man feels shame at the mistreatment of his brother.”
He might have been speaking Mandarin Chinese; Marsh reacted not at all to the guttural syllables. He merely said, “In Palestine, you may have known a man of that name. You may even have considered yourself to be his brother. Here, there is no such man.”