CHAPTER THREE
It was not strictly accurate, of course, that I had nothing to wear. True, most of the garments hanging in my wardrobe were not exactly the thing for a country house Saturday-to-Monday, but I could pull together a sufficient number of quality garments (if in somewhat out-of-date styles and hem lengths) to remain presentable. I doubted that Mahmoud, even as the Duke of Beauville, would gather to his bosom the frothy cream of society.
Ten years earlier, my cry might have been more serious: Before wartime shortages had changed both fashion and social mores, even a three-day country house visit would have required a dozen changes of clothing, and more if one intended to venture out for a day’s shooting or to sit a horse. With the relaxed standards of 1923, however, I thought I might be allowed to appear in the same skirt from breakfast until it was time to dress for dinner. Thus, two or three suit-cases instead of that same number of trunks.
I piled a selection of clothing on my bed and, since I knew she would repack them anyway as soon as my back was turned, left Mrs Hudson to it. I found Holmes just closing up his single case, which I knew would contain everything from evening wear to heavy boots.
“You don’t imagine dinner will be white tie, do you, Holmes?”
“If the possibility presents itself, we can have Mrs Hudson send a gown and your mother’s emeralds.”
“I cannot imagine Mahmoud in white tie. But then, I can’t imagine Mahmoud in anything but Arab skirts and khufiyyah.”
“The revelations have been thought-provoking,” he agreed, surveying the contents of his travelling-razor case and then slipping it into the bag’s outer pocket. “Although you may remember, I said at the time they were not native Arabs.”
“True, but I believe you identified their diphthongs as originating in Clapham.”
He raised his eyes from the trio of books he had taken up, and cocked one eyebrow at me. “Surely you understood that to be a jest.”
“Oh, surely.”
He discarded two of the volumes and pushed the survivor in after the razors. “By the way, Russell, our guest seemed anxious that we wipe those names from our tongues. Our Arab guides are now, I take it, Alistair and Maurice. Or possibly ‘Marsh.’ ”
“Not Mr Hughenfort and the Duke of Beauville—or would it be Lord Maurice? Or, not Maurice, what was his first given name? William? What is the proper form of address for a duke who is refusing his title, anyway?”
“I believe the matter will be simplified when we are presented as old acquaintances.”
“Well, if he’s changed as much in appearance as Ali has, it won’t be difficult to call him by another name. You do realise, by the way, what his name means?”
“A pleasant irony, is it not?”
Maurice, which one might translate as “The Dark-Skinned One,” has its origins in the word “Moor.” Maurice: The Arab.
Patrick brought the motor to our door in time for the afternoon train. We loaded our cases in the boot and settled an ill-looking Alistair into the back, well swathed in furs and with two heated bricks at his feet. At the station, we had to help him up into the train carriage—his bruises had now stiffened, and the blood loss he had sustained made him quite vulnerable to the cold November air. We retained the heaviest travelling rug and wrapped him in it against the inadequate heat of the compartment; he was asleep before the train pulled out of Eastbourne.
I nestled down into my own fur-lined coat and, while I watched Alistair Hughenfort sleep, meditated on that peculiar human drive, loyalty.
On entering Palestine in the closing days of 1918, Holmes and I had been pushed into the vehemently unwilling arms of two apparently Arab agents for the British government intelligence service—that is, Holmes’ elder brother, Mycroft. We had begun on a note—an entire chorus—of mistrust, resentment, and dislike, and only slowly had those abrasive feelings softened beneath the continuous rub of shared tribulation and danger. When I had proved that I would, if pushed to the extremity, kill to protect our band of four, Ali’s eyes had finally held a degree of respect. When later we demonstrated our willingness to die for each other, we were forever bound, like it or not.
Five years or fifty, when people have sweated, suffered, and shed blood together, there can be no hesitation: If one calls, the other responds. We had shared salt and bread, those staples of Bedu life; now it appeared that we were about to share our combined strength. My blood family had been dead for nine years; however, in the interim I had acquired a most singular pair of brothers.
Darkness fell outside the windows long before we reached the tiny village of Arley Holt. We were the only passengers to disembark—as far as I could see, we had been the last passengers on the entire train.
Nonetheless, a figure trotted out from the warmth of the station to meet us, bowling along on legs too small for his stocky body and talking a streak from out of his bristling ginger whiskers, his gravelly voice comprising a delicious admixture of highland Scots, East End London, and Berkshire.
“There you are, Master Alistair, I was just going to spread my car rug out on a bench and stop the night here, meet the first train in the morning. Had a good trip did you—I see you found your friends—no, miss, I’ll carry those, the good Lord blessed me with strong shoulders and I’m happy to use them—watch your step here, should’ve brought a torch I should’ve, daft of me—oi, stop a mo’,” he cautioned sharply, realising in the darkness that one of us was moving very slowly indeed. “What’ve you done to yourself, young master? You’re hurt!”
I expected Alistair to dismiss the servant’s concern with a curt phrase—as Ali, he certainly would have—but he surprised me. “It’s nothing, Algy. I got bashed in Town yesterday and I’ve gone all stiff on the train. I’ll be fine after a night’s sleep.”
“Blimey,” Algy muttered. “Let you out of me sight and you get yoursel’ bashed, what will the Missus say, I can’t think. Here now, you pack yourselves good and snug in the back, that’ll warm you.” He wrestled from the boot an enormous bear-skin rug that swallowed Alistair, with plenty left to cover the passengers on either side of him.
Holmes, without asking, went around to the front of the old motor and yanked the starter handle for the driver. When the engine had coughed and sputtered its way to life and Holmes was back inside (where “snug” was indeed the word, as well as being redolent of large carnivores), the driver turned in his seat.
“Much obliged, sir, I’d’ve had a time getting ’er going in the cold. Name’s Algernon, Edmund Algernon.” Ali roused himself enough to give the driver our names; Algernon touched his cap in response, then turned to shift the motorcar into motion.
The village died away in less than a minute; the night closed in. The tunnel of our head-lamps revealed a well-kept track with hedgerows high on either side, so close that if I’d dropped the window I could have touched them without stretching, although our vehicle was narrow. Algernon kept up a running commentary, directed at his employer but with the occasional aside of explanation to us, concerning a flock of sheep, a neighbour’s rick fire, another neighbour’s newborn son, the relief when a villager’s illness was deemed not after all to be the dread influenza, and half a dozen other topics, all of them rural and thus commonplace to me—although again, not the sort of thing I would have associated with the silent figure at my side.
After what seemed a long time, our head-lamps illuminated a crossroads. Algernon prepared to go to the left. Alistair spoke up.
“Justice Hall, if you would, Algy.”
“Ah,” said our driver, allowing the motor to drift to a halt. “Well, you see, sir, Lady Phillida arrived today.”
The normally effusive Algy let the flat statement stand with no further embroidery; indeed, from his master’s reaction, none was needed.
“Damn. She wasn’t due until Thursday. All right, home then.”
“Home” lay to the left. After a few minutes the hedgerows fell away, replaced by a brief stretch of wire fence, then stone walls
, and finally a gate—not a grand ceremonial entrance, just something to keep out livestock. This was followed by half a mile of freshly laid gravel with centuries-old trees on either side, then another stone wall, with farm buildings, a heavily mulched herbaceous border, and a passage tunnelled through the ground floor of a long stone building. When we emerged, the head-lamps played across a clear expanse of tidy, weed-free gravel as Algy pulled up to a stone building with high windows of ancient shape and numerous small panes. We came to a halt facing a wooden porch that was buried beneath a tangle of nearly bare rose vine.
The door at the back of the porch opened almost as soon as the hand-brake was set, and out hurried Algernon’s female twin. Her voice was high and lacked the influence of Scotland and London, but it was every bit as free-flowing as our driver’s. I prayed that this was “the Missus” Algernon had mentioned—a married Ali would be the final straw.
“Oh, Mr Alistair, you must be fair frozen, it’s come so bitter out; let’s have you in by the fire now—why, whatever’s happened?”
These two had all the earmarks of old family retainers, riding a comfortable line between familiarity and servitude. In fact, for a moment I played with the idea that Algy and the Missus might be two more of Mycroft’s peculiarly talented agents, placed here with Ali in a meticulously choreographed act—down to the very name Algernon, which meant “The Whiskered One”—but no, I decided reluctantly; they were both too idiosyncratically perfect for artifice. The Missus bossed and fussed Ali (who cursed his infirmity beneath his breath, in Arabic and English) through the porch and into the low, oak-panelled entrance vestibule, while Algernon, reassuring us that he’d bring our suit-cases from the motor, pushed us in after them and closed the heavy, time-blackened door at our backs.
With her hand under Alistair’s arm (no mean feat, considering the ten-inch disparity in their height), the housekeeper led him into the adjoining room. A wave of warmth billowed out through the draught-excluding leather curtain, through which we gladly followed.
And there I stopped dead.
Had I been asked to place this man Alistair Hughenfort into an English setting, I might, after considerable thought, have described one of two extremes: It would either be the stark, bare surroundings of a man long accustomed to living within the limits of what a couple of mules can carry, or else ornate to the point of glut, both as overcompensation for the desert’s forced austerity and as a means of evoking the richly coloured clothing, drapes, and carpets of the Arabic palette.
Instead, Ali Hazr was at home in the most perfect Elizabethan great hall I’d ever seen. Not a nobleman’s hall—not huge, nor ornate, nor built to impress, just a room which for three hundred years had sheltered its family and dependents from the outside world’s storm and strife.
The room was perhaps fifty feet long, half that in width and height. The walls were of beautifully fitted limestone blocks, aged to dark honey near the roof beams and above the fireplace, paler near the floor and in the corners. The beams arched black high overhead, all but invisible in the dim light, and the high, many-paned windows above our heads were black and uncurtained. Electric lamps shed an oasis of light before the crackling fire, illuminating the lower edges of the tapestries that covered the stonework, hangings so dim with the patina of generations, they might well have disintegrated with cleaning.
On the hall’s end wall, opposite the wooden gallery under which I stood amazed, hung what after a moment’s study I decided was the head of a boar, bristling furiously over the room. The huge and weirdly distorted shadow it cast up the wall made the head look like some enormous prehistoric creature brought forward in time. Perhaps it actually was as large as it appeared: The tusks, their ivory darkened along with the stones, looked longer than my outstretched hand.
“Shall I take your coat, ma’am?” enquired a voice at my elbow. The Missus had settled Ali to her satisfaction, stripping him down to Holmes’ borrowed suit and propping his feet onto a cushioned rest, and she was now turning to his guests. Obediently, I took off my heavy coat and draped it over the one Holmes had lent Ali. The cold bit my shoulders, so I hastened down the room to join the men in front of the fire. Once there, I rather wished I’d kept my coat; warming one’s self before a head-high fireplace in a large room involves one roasted side and one chilled, and the impulse to revolve slowly in compensation.
“Mrs Algernon,” Alistair called. “Our guests might like a drink to keep out the cold.”
Mrs Algernon, having deposited our outer garments out of sight, had come back into the hall with her attention fixed on the bandage around her charge’s head. His request was intended, I thought, to deflect her interest more than to provide us refreshment; if so, it had the desired effect. After a brief hesitation, she turned and left the room again. Alistair—I could almost think of him by that name, given the setting—closed his eyes for a moment, then removed his feet from the settee.
“Mrs Algernon will give us dinner shortly. Not as artful a meal as you would have got at Justice Hall, I grant you, but then again, the company won’t sour your digestion.”
Holmes sat down on one end of the sofa and took out his tobacco pouch. “You do not wish to encounter Lady Phillida?”
“Marsh’s sister is not the problem, or not entirely. It’s Phillida’s husband, Sidney—known as ‘Spinach’ and just as likely to set your teeth on edge. They’ve been in Berlin, and weren’t due to return until the end of the week. Having them back . . . makes matters more difficult. No matter,” he added, and gave a dismissive wave of the hand.
With that small gesture, Ali and Alistair came together before me for the first time. Had he been speaking Arabic, that final phrase would have been ma’alesh, the all-purpose verbal shrug that acknowledges how little control any of us have over our fates. Ma’alesh; no matter; never mind; what can one do but accept things as they are? Ma’alesh, your pot overturned in the fire; ma’alesh, your prize mare died; ma’alesh, you lost all your possessions and half your family. The word was the everyday essence of Islam—which itself, after all, means “submission.”
Clean-shaven and bare-headed, his former long, bead-flecked plaits with khufiyyah and agahl transformed into a head of cropped and thinning English hair, Ali’s ornate embroidered robes and high, crimson boots replaced by Holmes’ old suit and well-worn brogues, the ivory-handled knife and mother-of-pearl-handled Colt revolver he had invariably worn now seeming as unlikely as a feather boa on a rhinoceros, and carrying with him an odour not of cheap scent but of mothballs and damp wool—nonetheless, that powerful and exotic figure was still there, a ghostly presence beneath the ordinary English skin. Ma’alesh.
Mrs Algernon broke my reverie, bustling in with a tray laden with her idea of warming drinks. The fumes of the hot whisky reached us before she did, and although the tray also held the makings for tea, there were three full mugs of her steaming mixture. She set one mug down within arm’s reach of each of us; as soon as she had left the hall, Alistair put his back on the tray and poured himself a cup of tea. One thing that had not changed: Although the Bedu were not the most outwardly observant of Moslems, they did generally demur at pork and alcohol, and although I had once seen Ali eat bacon, I’d never seen either Ali or Mahmoud take strong drink. Alistair’s diet, it seemed, remained as it had been.
The hot whisky did the trick for two of us (although I couldn’t have sworn that the fumes did not affect the abstainer). Mrs Algernon came in before the cups were empty to say that dinner was ready when we wished, and although Holmes and I were impatient to hear more of the teeth-on-edge Sidney, Alistair obediently put down his teacup and forced himself to his feet, raising his weight more by will-power than by the strength of his muscles. His first steps were supported by the chair back, and Holmes and I exchanged a glance. The man was in no shape to be questioned.
The dining room, fortunately, was low of ceiling and therefore made positively cosy by its fire. It smelt heavenly—a heaven made not of subtle foreign spices a
nd delicate sauces, but of earthy comfort and, oddly, childhood pleasures. I sat down to my plate and allowed Mrs Algernon to ladle out my soup. At the first spoonful, Alistair’s description of the cuisine was justified: Plain-looking, it tasted of root vegetables and peasant grains, herbs rather than spices, chicken rather than the beef tea it resembled.
Under the warmth of the room (and the fumes of the drink, perhaps) our host’s social instincts were aroused, and when the housekeeper had left, he came out with an unexpectedly chatty explanation of the substance in our bowls. “This is Mrs Algernon’s patented cure-all. For all the years I’ve known her, she’s kept a pot on the back of the cookstove and tosses in whatever she has at hand. It never goes cold, never goes empty. Somewhere in here are atomic particles of the beef from my twenty-first birthday, and the carrot I brought my mother in a bouquet when I was four, and for all I know, the duck served at my parents’ wedding breakfast.”
“My grandmother did the same thing,” I told him with a smile. “Her pot was always bubbling away—she’d give a bowl to tramps who came to the door, to workmen, to us when we were hungry.” Which explained why the room’s odour had reminded me of childhood comforts.
“I could never figure out why it doesn’t taste like the bottom of a dust bin,” he remarked, sipping from his spoon. “Mrs Algernon says it’s because she seasons it with love. I suspect her of using brandy. It is, I have no doubt, massively unhygienic. If we all die in our beds tonight, you will know who is to blame.”
Holmes and I glanced at each other over our unhygienic but satisfying soup, and I could see the same thought in his mind: In removing himself from Palestine, our host had discovered not only a streak of garrulousness, but a sense of mild social humour as well; Ali’s Bedouin humour had tended to involve either bloodshed or heavy burlesque.
Mrs Algernon’s dinner was, as Alistair had said, simple but substantial, if showing signs of a hasty preparation. By the time the pudding course had been cleared, however, the remarkably genial man at the end of the table was fading fast, exhausted by his efforts at sociability. When he attempted to rise, intending to lead the way back into the hall for coffee, he leant hard on the table, then sat down again abruptly. Holmes leapt to his aid while I hurried to fetch Mrs Algernon; we caught up with the two men on the curving stone staircase, Holmes half carrying the younger man upwards. I took Alistair’s other arm, expecting him to throw off, but he did not.
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