“Whatever the trouble, it would be best if you were to permit us to help.”
“Trouble? What trouble can I possibly have? I own more land than a man can walk in a day, possess more works of timeless art than many museums, occupy a position at the right ear of the nation’s power. I have men to cook my food and polish my shoes, women to lay my fire and starch my collars. Nine hundred years of British authority is in my bones, and I have returned to the land of my family. How could that possibly be construed as ‘trouble’?”
I tried to hear a bitterness in his voice that would match the worn expression on his face, but I heard only a mild, inescapable litany of fact. I could not bear it.
“You once said to me,” I told him, “after we were ambushed on the road to Jericho and Holmes taken captive, that trouble came because you neglected your rightful state. That you were a man who went about on foot, and permitting yourself to ride in a ruler’s motorcar was a foolish thing. You do not belong here, with your mouth at the ear of power. You are a scribe, and belong in Palestine, with your ear to the mouths of others. That is where you are happy.”
“Happiness is nothing. And another man said those words” was his implacable reply.
Holmes tried again. “Mahmoud—”
Before any of us could react, Holmes was sprawled on the ground with a furious English duke standing over him, right arm drawn back for a second blow. “You will not use that name!” he roared.
“Then tell me why!” Holmes bellowed back. He clambered to his feet and stuck his face into Marsh’s. “Explain to me why . . . that man has ceased to exist!”
Marsh teetered on the edge of his fury, and I made ready to leap on his shoulders and pull him off Holmes. Then, in the blink of an eye, the shutters slammed down, the homicidal rage was folded back into its cage; control was regained. In that brief instant of transition, Mahmoud looked out from those dark eyes, but he was gone in a flash, and a middle-aged Englishman was studying the reddening jaw of the man before him. His own flush faded, and he nodded.
“It is true, I owe you that much. The man you speak of is not here, but his debts remain. I will explain, and then you and Mary can pack your bags and be safely home in Sussex before my sister’s friends begin to arrive.”
The two dogs that had skittered away in a panic at his outburst were now back, shrinking at his knees and grinning nervously until he thumped their ribs and sent them off in search of throwing sticks. We drifted after the dogs, and Marsh began to explain.
“One cannot begin to speak of the seventh Duke of Beauville and the state of his affairs without looking first at how the family’s history has shaped him. That, after all, is the entire point of the English aristocracy: continuity, and responsibility. If you wish to understand the current duke, you will have to permit a lesson in history.
“The family presence in this country begins with Hastings in 1066. When William came to claim the crown of England, among his nobles was a man barely twenty named Richard de Hughfort. The younger son of a minor landholder, he had nothing but the sword in his hands, the horse between his knees, and the head on his shoulders. He acquitted himself well on the field of battle, won the eye of the Conqueror, and was given responsibilities.
“Some months later, with the Conqueror’s forces well established in the south, young Richard happened upon three armed knights entertaining themselves with a farmer’s wife. The farmer lay dead, the twelve-year-old boy who had tried to defend his parents lay in a heap, the other children fled, and the wife . . . Well.
“Unfortunately, the three knights were William’s men. And not just any men, but knights who had brought with them men-at-arms and full purses. Richard, as I said, had no name and had joined with little more than his sword. Which he raised without hesitation to come to the defence of a peasant woman and her family.
“He killed two of the knights and drove the other off—three experienced, armed fighting men. Richard received a wound in his breast, from the point of a sword that slipped under his armour. He helped the woman bury her husband, accepted a drink of water—the family records are quite meticulous about noting that, for some reason—and left her to nurse her injured boy.
“He rode into William’s camp leading two horses with knights slung over their backs, and knelt in front of the Conqueror, sword offered, to receive his punishment. They were important men, after all, and William could not afford to let their deaths—over a mere peasant—go unavenged.
“But he did. He looked down at Hugh’s bare neck, bent before him, but instead of using the edge of the sword, he used the flat, and knighted Richard. You’ve never heard this story?”
“In its outline alone,” Holmes told him.
“What William said then became the family motto, drilled into successive generations of impressionable minds: Justitia fortitudo mea est. ‘Righteousness is my strength.’
“I will not force on you the next eight and a half centuries of family history; if you’re interested, look for it yourself in the green library. Richard was not given a high degree of authority—William was no fool; he well knew that any man who would place righteousness over common sense was no person to command an army—but he gave him a degree of trust, and more to the point, some land.
“Which is where my family has stood ever since, both on the land and in the attitude. We are loyal unto death to our monarch—except for those odd occasions when a strain of fanatic comes to the surface, and makes us see the king’s cause as unjust. This, as you might expect, has led the family into trouble once or twice. For the most part it has been hothead younger brothers who chose righteousness over loyalty, but once or twice it was the earl, or later the duke, who made his stand, and then the foundations shook. The second earl wavered onto Mary’s side, and Elizabeth took his head for it, stripped the family of its lands, and declared the title attainted. By great good fortune, however, the earl’s son had already proved himself to be a queen’s man, and the title was soon restored. Then in Monmouth’s Rebellion the seventh earl took his men and marched on London. He, too, lost his head; and again, had his younger brother not already proved himself a trustworthy friend to James II, we should not be standing here today.
“My father, Gerald Richard Adam Hughenfort, was the fifth Duke. I was his second surviving son. My elder brother, Henry, was seventeen years older than I, with two stillbirths in between us. Our brother Lionel was born when I was six. Mother died a few weeks after his birth, and five years later Father remarried. Phillida was born the year I went to university.
“My elder brother married when he was thirty. Henry was the perfect heir—did an adequate degree, took a responsible and interested view of the land, wasn’t too wild in his trips into London and the Continent. He didn’t even gamble much, which is the thing that usually brings down houses like Justice.
“What’s that fool dog into?” he asked, and interrupted his narrative to investigate. When the putrid rabbit had been removed from its adoring finder and buried, we turned back to the path, and to Marsh’s tale.
“So it did not matter all that much to Father that his second son, Maurice, found Justice dull, detested farming, and was interested only in the study of history and language and foreign peoples. I was, as they say, ‘the spare,’ but since the heir himself was healthy, strong, and sensible, there was no cause for concern.
“I made the grand tour as most young men did after university. However, when I reached Venice, my eyes went east, not south to Rome. I crossed the Adriatic, worked my way through Yugo-Slavia and Turkey, then sailed from Rhodes to Alexandria and Cairo. I saw the pyramids, the Nile, the beginnings of the African continent, but the only thing that truly called out to me was the desert to the east.
“I joined up with a group of ragged and corrupt nomads crossing the Sinai—not Bedu, just traders. When I laid eyes on the Judean hills, I was home.
“I lived there for ten months that first time, before my cousin was sent to fetch me back to England. I stayed
here, the obedient son, for over a year. At the end of it, Henry’s son Gabriel was born and thriving, my younger brother, Lionel, was seventeen and by all appearances on a straight course, and I was both superfluous and smothering.” Alistair glanced at Marsh and then swiftly away again, and walked on with his eyes glued to the countryside ahead; I wondered what Marsh had left out, or lied about.
“You may have an idea how terribly tight-knit a stratum of the social order we are even now—and the higher, the tighter. We’re an entire society of in-laws and cousins: Our sisters go to balls on the arms of the brothers of boys we went to school with; members of our fathers’ clubs command our Guards regiments. Holidays would be at an uncle’s hunting lodge, our Saturdays-to-Mondays spent at the country house of a mother’s childhood friend who was also a second cousin; our chaperones—”
He caught himself. “You see the picture. After the desert, the stultifying drawing-room air was killing me. It was certainly driving me mad; I used to dream about the desert, about dry warm sand trickling down across my face and burying me, and would wake happy at the thought.”
This self-revelation was more than he had intended; he veered away, to look over a herd of the spotted deer that had caught his attention, and it was a while before he resumed.
“After a year here, my parents eventually had to admit that I was a lost cause, and permitted me to return to my life in Palestine. My cousin spent his long vacations with me for the years of his university, which made them think that they were keeping track of me. When my cousin finished his degree, he joined me permanently.
“And all was well. Until my brother’s son Gabriel died.”
The control in his voice held, but with the last word, we could hear the effort. Not, I thought, because of any particular affection he felt for the boy as a person—how old had the child been when his uncle left the country? A few months?—but because his nephew Gabriel had been the foundation stone on which the entire weight of a noble family rested. With the heir snatched away, unmarried and with no son of his own, the order of succession took a very different track. But Marsh was going on with the story.
“My other brother, Lionel, was as I said six years younger than I. Lionel was sickly as a child. Every nursery ailment laid him low, every cold threatened pneumonia. When I entered Cambridge, just after his twelfth birthday, he had some foul illness the doctors thought might well carry him away. Instead, it seemed to burn him clean, and when I came home for Christmas I found him outside, building a snowman in the freezing cold, with Ogilby fretting nearby.
“He grew stronger physically, went off to school, did sports, even. All seemed well, until he entered Cambridge.
“There he did what is called ‘falling in with a bad lot.’ That is the other side of an incestuously tight society: Once a young man falls in with a group of young men interested only in gambling and drink, there is no escape.
“He was sent down, of course. Rather than coming here, he went to London. Shortly before my cousin came out to Palestine for good, Lionel was involved in some huge scandal, and had to leave the country. He spent the next twelve years in Europe, moving from place to place with his friends, wintering in the south of France. He only came back to England once during the following years, when Father died in 1903. Lionel himself died in the spring before the War—his lungs, apparently, weakened by drugs and drink and an accumulation of careless living.”
Marsh took a deep breath. “However. Just after the new year of 1914 Lionel wrote our brother—the head of the family, of course—to say that he had married and his wife was expecting a child. He asked Henry—told him, actually, in no uncertain terms; I’ve seen the letter—to increase his monthly stipend to account for his wife and the child. Henry went immediately to see this for himself, and found Lionel living in Montmartre with an older woman who looked little more than an amateur whore. But they had a marriage licence, and the woman’s condition was obvious, so he came away. What could he do?
“Henry and his wife Sarah wrote to me, of course. I might have tried to do something about it, but by the time the letter caught up with me, it was accompanied by a telegram informing me of Lionel’s death.
“The child was born three months after the marriage, six weeks before Lionel died. A boy; Thomas is his name. He is now nine and a half, has lived his whole life in France, and none of us has ever set eyes on him. None of us has any idea what kind of person he will be.”
He took another careful breath. “Which is why he and his mother are coming to London on Tuesday. Phillida and I will go down to meet them the following day. I need to look at the child. It’s not that I mind in the least supporting the two of them—Lionel wished it, after all—but since Thomas is next in the line of succession after me, I must at least find out if he bears any resemblance to my brother.”
Marsh had been studying his boots as he talked, but now he looked up, first at me, then at Holmes, one dark eyebrow raised quizzically.
“I for one should be rather surprised if he does. You see, by all accounts, from the time he left Justice to take up his place at Cambridge, Lionel was what you might call flamboyantly disinterested when it came to women.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Marsh’s ambulatory tale had taken a fair time in the telling, interrupted as it was by the antics of the dogs, the side-trip to inspect the herd of deer, another diversion to see the state of the sheep, and occasional stretches when Marsh had simply pulled away to gather his thoughts, or his strength. We had trudged more or less continuously cross-country for a good two hours, although we had only travelled three or four miles in a straight line from where we had begun. The sun was not far from the horizon, Alistair looked ready to drop, and I really thought it time to turn back. Even the dogs had ceased to bounce.
Marsh, however, had other plans. We had for some time been coming up at an oblique angle on the high wall that surrounded Justice; as we entered into its very shadow, the duke dug into his pocket and brought out a key the length of his hand.
“I need a drink,” he stated, and made for a stout iron gate set into the stones.
I could only stare at his back, hunched over the lock. Holmes was every bit as bemused as I.
“Not a statement I’d have expected to hear coming from that man,” he murmured. Then he added, “However, I can agree with the sentiment.”
The iron gate debouched on a narrow, overgrown path leading through some decidedly unmanicured woods. Sunlight glinted sporadically through the trees, and I wondered if we were planning to negotiate the return journey by torchlight. Sunset came early, in November.
The narrow swath of woods ended at a wooden fence and its flimsy gate, both of them shaggy with lichen. The gate’s hinges, however, opened without so much as a squeak; I deduced that this was a regular escape for the seventh Duke of Beauville. The lane we found on the other side of the gate led into a village; Marsh, a man of his word, led us straight to the public house.
It was an inn, two storeys of ancient, leaning ramble with a faded sign proclaiming DUKE’S ARMS hanging over the door through which we all, even Marsh, had to duck our heads. The room inside was warm and smokey, low of ceiling and even dimmer than the dusk outside. Brass gleamed around the bar, however, and the rush-scattered stones beneath our feet had none of the reek of long-spilt beer.
Half a dozen patrons sat in two groups; judging by the nods and greetings they exchanged with our leader, this was by no means his first visit here in his four months of residence at Justice. I, the only woman in the place, created more of a stir than the entrance of the duke himself, and the only curious looks were directed at Holmes and me. The dogs made a bee-line for the enormous fireplace and collapsed into a satisfied heap on the black hearthstones, quite obviously at home there.
Marsh turned to us. “A pint? Sherry? They could probably do you a cocktail, if it wasn’t anything too complicated.”
Holmes agreed to a pint, I said I’d have a half, Alistair merely shook his head, and Ma
rsh gave our orders to the ruddy-faced man behind the bar, ending with, “And I’ll have my usual, Mr Franks.”
Marsh Hughenfort’s “usual” turned out to be a double measure of whisky, downed at a toss, followed by an only slightly more leisurely pint. A fairly committed regimen for a man who had spent twenty years a teetotaler.
For Alistair, the innkeeper’s wife came through with a pot of tea. He, too, had clearly been here before. As she approached our table in the corner of the low-ceilinged room, Marsh picked up his pint glass, cradling it to his chest as if to warm himself.
“Evening, Mrs Franks. How’s Rosie today?”
“Worlds better, Your Grace, bless you. That syrup you sent down tastes like the devil’s brew, she says, but she sleeps just fine, and the cough’s clearing up.”
“Mind you don’t give her too much.”
“I measure it out like you said, Your Grace. And I watch the clock, every four hours, no sooner. I’ll be ever so careful. Anything else for you now?”
“In ten minutes you can have your husband bring us the same, thank you.”
“Opiates for the masses, Marsh?” Holmes asked when the woman was out of earshot, referring to the soporific effects of the cough potion. None of us mentioned Mahmoud’s generous dose of pure opium paste that had nearly been the death of Holmes a few years before, but all of us had it in mind.
“The child’s cough was painful to listen to; customers were staying away. I thought a night’s sleep might make everyone feel better.”
Holmes set down his glass, and it was clear that he had dismissed the plight of little Rosie Franks from his mind. “How did your—,” he began, then stopped.
A man carrying with him the palpable aura of cow barn stood a few feet from our table, hat in hand. Literally so, but also figuratively.
“Beggin’ your pardon, Your Grace, but I was out the—oh.” His gaze had fallen from Marsh to the empty glass before him; his face fell as well. “Missed me chance, have I? Sorry to bother you, Your Grace. Another time.”