Justice Hall mr-6

by Laurie R. King

  To my surprise, however, Holmes made no move to follow them. Instead, he went to the tray and dashed into a glass a smaller dose of Marsh’s anaesthetic. He then paced to the end of the room and back, took a cigarette from the box on the table and lit it with sharp, tight movements, then sucked in only two or three deep draughts before flicking it irritably into the fire. He returned to his glass, topped it up with a harsh clatter of crystal, and stalked off into the adjoining billiards room.

  I found him outside the French doors, glaring across the gardens at the darkness with a fresh cigarette between his fingers. There was no moon and the terrace lights had been shut down, but the distant patter of the Pond’s fountain reached our ears, and a faint breeze stirred the nearby leaves. I was conscious, however, only of the waves of emotion pouring out of the silent man beside me.

  Holmes was in a rage.

  I knew Holmes as a man of great passions, but they tended to be volatile—or at least, swiftly brought to rein by force of will. I had only occasionally felt in him the deep, burning pulses of an uncontrolled fury; the sensation inevitably made me wish to creep silently away, far away.

  Instead, I waited in the open doorway, listening to the falling water and the sharp whistle of breath through his taut nostrils, until he had smoked his cigarette to the end. Only then did I speak.

  “What is troubling you, Holmes?”

  He flung the near-flat butt to the ground and ground it beneath a vicious boot-heel, then went back into the house.

  “Fools and butchers, all of them,” he stormed. “Sitting in their offices and deciding that an example must be made, that the men won’t fight without a threat hanging over their heads. The Romans practised decimation—line up one in ten and stab them to death to encourage the others. Pah! Idiocy.” He became aware that I was staring at him as he paced, and made an effort to pull himself together. When yet another cigarette was going, his voice came, taut with control.

  “I was once asked by a family to investigate the death of their son. This was in the first year of fighting, when the War Offices just flatly told the families that their son, husband, whatever had been executed. In this case, for cowardice. Can you picture what news like that does to a family, already grieving? The father committed suicide. The mother wanted to know.

  “Russell, he’d been scarcely more than an infant! A schoolboy, who’d lied about his age. Barely seventeen and at his third relentless rolling barrage his nerve broke. He dropped his rifle and ran, straight through deadly fire, over the tops of trenches, anything to get away from the ungodly noise. Desertion, cowardice—shell shock, for which the official cure was a hail of bullets. He couldn’t even stand upright, his nerves were so bad; they had to bring out a kitchen chair—”

  He broke off, unable to continue the sentence. The old house waited in silence; when he resumed, his voice was deceptively quiet and reasonable. “Do you know, Russell, when I asked to see the boy’s file, I was told that only the individual involved had the right to see closed records. When I pointed out that the ‘individual involved’ was dead, I was informed that the records were therefore closed, full stop. The logic of the bureaucrat. I had to have Mycroft steal the file for me. That trial was a farce: no defence, no medical testimony as to the state he was in, two of the four witnesses had only hearsay evidence, a third was a personal enemy. And his wasn’t the only such; there have been outraged questions asked in Parliament. One October, in 1917 I believe it was, only one of the twenty-five soldiers executed that month had anything resembling a defence. There was effectively no right of appeal, no sending or receiving of letters, no mechanism for bringing in witnesses who weren’t immediately to hand. The entire system was a travesty, and ripe for abuse.”

  Abuse, I thought: murder. After a while I said, “And you think . . .”

  “Come, Russell; can you honestly believe that a son of this house could act the coward without reason? Justitia fortitudo mea est; it’s all but tattooed on their foreheads at birth.”

  Abruptly, the rage loosed its hold on him, leaving him looking ill. He gazed at the dregs in his glass, then dashed them into the dying flames. A convulsion of blue-tinged fire reached up the chimney, and subsided. Without another word we followed in the direction that Marsh had been carried a short time earlier.

  Holmes and I went to the end of the corridor, and there found the most ornate set of servants’ stairs I’d ever seen—except that they were doubtless the original central stairway of the house before its eighteenth-century transformation. The stairs were lit by a pair of electric bulbs, weak but sufficient for safety, and enough to give us an impression of dark colours and rich textures. It was a tapestry of a room, far more than just a means of changing levels in the house, from a time when the social life of the great families had begun to move up, away from the servant-populated Hall.

  Pelicans had alighted here, too, I saw: carved atop the newel posts, painted into the walls, even incorporated into the plasterwork ceiling. I stopped to study the unlikely, ungainly, big-beaked creature brooding over the newel post; when it occurred to me that the nearly amorphous granite shapes guarding the main gates had originally been pelicans as well, my mind suddenly made the connexion.

  “Sacrifice!” I said aloud. “Of course.”

  “Sorry?” Holmes asked.

  “The pelican. It’s an odd choice as the heraldic beast of a great house—I mean, they’re positively comical except when they’re actually in the air. But the pelican is a symbol of ultimate self-sacrifice—piercing its breast to feed its young. Zoologically inaccurate, of course, but it goes very deep in Christian mythology. The symbol was applied to the Christ, and later used in Mediaeval alchemy. See, you can even make out the painted blood on this one.”

  Holmes stopped to peer with me at the red stream flowing down the breast beside the carved beak. Mutely, we both glanced upwards in the direction of Marsh’s rooms.

  Self-sacrifice could take many forms; the only common characteristic was the high cost to the giver.

  No wonder Marsh Hughenfort looked like a dying man, ripping out his own heart for the sake of his family.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I woke during the night with the feeling that I had heard voices raised, but when I came fully awake and identified my surroundings, all I heard was silence, and after a time a clock striking four. I settled back into my feather pillows and pulled the thick bedclothes back over my ears, grateful that I was not a house-maid whose job it was to lay fires before dawn.

  (Although my ears persisted in thinking it had not sounded much like a house-maid; that it had in fact sounded like Ali. An invention from the recesses of memory, no doubt, summoning the rise and fall of long conversations overheard through walls of canvas and goat’s hair.)

  In the morning, I was alone in the tapestried bed. The sky was an expanse of grey, although it was not yet raining. I washed (calling down blessings on whichever duke it had been whose sense of luxury extended to hot water taps in the guest bath-rooms) and dressed, taking myself down the back stairway so that I might have another look at it. This time, with the electric light supplemented by that seeping through the mullioned windows, I noticed that one of the carved pelicans was standing on a knob set with the date 1612. Its builder had either been to Knole or had been responsible for that stairway as well, I thought as I continued slowly down the stairs, studying the chipped, faded, glorious walls, until I was nearly flattened by an oncoming maid intent on her burden. I dived to one side, so surprising her with my sudden movement that the tea tray nearly came to grief despite her concentration.

  “Ooh!” she squeaked. “Oh, you didn’t half give me a turn. That is to say, begging your pardon, mum, I didn’t see you there. Was there something I could do for you?”

  “The breakfast room,” I said. “I forgot to ask directions last night—no, no; just tell me which way it is. If you take me there, that tea will get cold. But first, tell me your name?”

  “It’s Emma, mum. A
nd you’re sure you don’t want me to take you? Well, when you get to the foot of these stairs you go through that door there, and straight down the corridor for just a little way and then to your right. Then—”

  Her instructions seemed to send me in a circle and the tea was probably cold anyway when she had finished, but I thanked her and went on. How hard could it be?

  Had I depended on her verbal map, I might have found the breakfast room in time for luncheon, but by following the odours instead of her directions I had no great trouble.

  The room was, as I had expected, a more intimate chamber than the formal dining room of the night before, although no less ornate in its way. It was on a more human scale, for one thing, so that one could crackle toast without being intimidated by echoes, and although the ceiling was thick with gilded grape-vines from which swung an exuberance of frescoed putti, and the walls were more than half mirror, the fat cherubs seemed happy enough to oversee the meals taking place below, and the silver in the mirrors had tarnished to a comfortable dimness.

  Alistair was there, bent over a plate with a folded newspaper beside it; Holmes presented a similar figure across the table from him. Both men looked up at my arrival, and Alistair rose to pour me a coffee from the steaming samovar-style pot.

  “Are ladies permitted in this club, gentlemen?” I asked.

  “Difficult to keep them out, I should think,” Holmes answered, holding my chair for me. He was his usual self again, last night’s rage well concealed.

  “What excitement is occupying the world today?”

  “One Lady Diana Hamilton was sent to prison for stealing two rings and three brooches from friends who had rescued her from an ‘unfortunate and distressing situation’ in a Paddington hotel. And the Chancellor of the Exchequer acknowledges the receipt of two pounds sixteen shillings’ conscience money from ‘X.Y.Z.’ The world of crime is, I fear, not only singularly dull, but not even terribly remunerative.”

  The usual complaint. “Is Marsh down yet?” I expected to be told he was still abed, nursing a pounding head, but apparently not.

  “Here and gone,” his cousin replied. “I believe he is interviewing the cow-man Hendricks in the estate offices.” I could not but wonder if a hung-over Marsh Hughenfort would be an ill-tempered creature or an exquisitely silent and sensitive one, but I did not see that I could enquire. I should, no doubt, see for myself before the day was through. Alistair went on. “Phillida and Sidney are in London for the day. Marsh asked me to show you the house this morning. If you wish.”

  “I should love to see Justice Hall,” I said with pleasure.

  He looked taken aback at the enthusiasm in my voice, and retreated into his newspaper, leaving me to ladle out a bowl of porridge and reflect on, as Holmes had put it, the workings of cause and effect. In Palestine, Ali had kept me—Holmes, too, but particularly me—at arm’s length, if not at actual knife’s point. He resented my presence, grumbled at the extra work we created, refused to grudge me an iota more responsibility than was absolutely necessary. He would happily have abandoned us in the desert, had it not been that Mahmoud developed an inexplicable interest in us.

  Now, the basis of our relationship was turned upside-down. He had actively sought us out to ask for help; his present identity, though to all appearances a comfortable fit, left him stranded on unfamiliar territory when it came to action. In Palestine, he had deferred only to Mahmoud; in England, his bone-deep yeoman nature demanded a banner to follow. He was not exactly lost, but with Mahmoud so vehemently refusing to lead anyone anywhere, Alistair was definitely casting around for familiar landmarks. To put himself into a friendly footing with “Amir” was jarring, but if it helped move Marsh a few inches more in the direction of Palestine, he was willing to try. In Palestine, he had willingly walked thousands of miles on foot in the service of king and country; he had baked and frozen and scratched at flea bites; killed, spied, defused bombs, and even committed torture when it proved necessary; in England, it would seem, he was willing to bring me a cup of pallid coffee and offer us a tour of Justice Hall.

  Holmes, however, demurred. With Alistair’s warning about the eye-to-the-key-hole propensities of the Darling clan, to say nothing of servants, clearly in mind, he folded his newspaper onto the table and said, “I too shall venture into London for the day. A matter regarding the young man of whom we were speaking yesterday afternoon. Solid information concerning his actions has become a priority.”

  “Do you want—,” I began, but he was already dismissing my offer.

  “I shouldn’t dream of cutting short your week-end, Russell. You enjoy yourself while I expend shoe-leather on the dirty cobblestones.”

  “Thank you, Holmes,” I said dryly.

  I made haste to finish my toast, then followed him up the stairs and helped him pack a few things in a rucksack. He still maintained his secret bolt-holes across London, and would no doubt retrieve from them anything else he needed, from false moustaches to armament.

  “I should really rather come with you, Holmes,” I told him in a voice too low to be heard beyond the door.

  “Of course you would. But I believe the cause will be better served by dividing our forces.”

  “And inevitably I must be the one to remain behind and make tedious conversation over the dinner table.”

  “My dear Russell, had you spent the last few years nurturing informants and contacts in the less salubrious portions of London instead of frittering away your time in lecture halls and libraries . . .”

  “I know, I know. When will you return?”

  “Saturday, or perhaps the following morning.”

  Which only indicated that he planned to be away for less than a week. Unless, that is, something came up. Which it generally did. I handed him his shaving case.

  “I’ll let Marsh know. Will you go as yourself?”

  “I think not,” he replied. “This investigation needs to remain sub-rosa. The combined drawing power of the names Hughenfort and Holmes would start a fox before the hounds. We wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves think, for the ‘view halloo’ of the tabloid journalists.” He did up the buckles on the rucksack, then paused. “See what you can turn up about the boy yourself. Ask to see the letters he wrote his father, particularly that last one. Look closely at any belongings he may have left. I should be particularly interested if he left a diary, papers, whatever. You know the drill.”

  I did indeed.

  “And over the week-end, particularly when the house guests arrive, listen and watch closely. Map out currents, as it were. And before you protest that you do not know what we are looking for, I am aware of that minor problem, and can only trust that you have sufficient mental flexibility to work a case that is not yet a case.” He swung the rucksack over his shoulder, and then, with his hand on the door-knob, paused. “But, Russell? Watch yourself. I believe that as the investigation develops, we will find that these placid waters have been concealing any number of powerful tides.”

  He closed the door on my “good-bye,” leaving me alone with Justice and her populace.

  When Holmes had driven off for the day—or the week—Alistair and I descended the decorated stairway and passed through a door set into the wall opposite the foot of the stairs, nearly at the end of the old, western wing. It led to a tiny room, little more than three doors and a scrap of wall. Alistair closed the first door behind us, then sidled past me to that on our right, which was tiny, off-square, and locked. He had the key, an object no more than a century old.

  The door opened onto another set of stairs, although these were of stone, narrow and steep and treacherously uneven, spiralling down into the depths beneath the house. Electric light bulbs had been strung from metal staples along the wall.

  The wall against my right shoulder was worn smooth by ten thousand passing shoulders before me. The stairs ended at a corridor with an arched roof and a floor so worn, the dip in the centre nearly duplicated the ceiling in reverse. The walls brushed our should
ers as we passed, single file, then turned to the right, and the narrow passage opened into a room.

  In the recent past, it had been used as a cool storage room for barrels of wine and kegs of beer, but it had not been built for that purpose, and no doubt the servants were relieved to have given it up. It had been a chapel, I thought; its groined arches still bore traces of a plaster finish, and beyond it the dark maw of a tunnel, suitable for the passage of individuals less than five and a half feet tall.

  Alistair stood and allowed me to explore the space without comment. I stepped behind one of the dusty barrels; when I spoke, my voice rang hollowly against the stones.

  “This part of the foundation is old,” I observed in surprise. “Those arches have to be Norman.”

  “This part of Justice is built on the foundations of a Mediaeval abbey,” my guide told me. “The family owned the land adjoining the abbey; after Dissolution, the second earl, who was a friend of the king, arranged to have the abbey grounds added to his. Seems the abbot had spoken treason against Henry, so they hung him from one of the trees in the park. He was actually a relation of the family—nice irony. The monks would have had a mill on Justice stream, and taken fish from the Pond. Marsh thinks this was the crypt. Within a few years, it was in use again as a chapel, only this time in secret, for the earl’s wife remained a Roman Catholic. But before it was an abbey—”

  “—it was Roman,” I exclaimed.

  Alistair came around the corner into the adjoining room and joined me in staring down at the scrap of mosaic flooring revealed when a small patch of the cracked Mediaeval tiles had been rucked up.

  “Before that, Roman,” Alistair confirmed.

  “How on earth did this just stay here?” I couldn’t believe some renovator or antiquarian had not got his hands on it—heavens, if my fingers itched to see what lay beneath those tiles, why hadn’t some duke along the way decided to have a look?