Justice Hall mr-6

by Laurie R. King

  “And nearly took mine,” Alistair added, which was not, and impressed them even more.

  “You probably deserved it,” she retorted, and slapped an inch of buttery brown bread into his hand. “Pleased to meet you, miss.” My bread came on a plate, as did Marsh’s. She stood over us until the bread was no more than oil on our lips, then she took back the plates.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Your Grace, luncheon isn’t going to cook itself,” although to my eyes the work had gone on unabated. She, however, whirled around and started snapping out commands. Obediently, we faded away.

  “There can’t be too many kitchens like that left in England,” I said, referring as much to the organisation as to the facility itself. Marsh chose to apply my remark to the latter.

  “My stepmother tried to renovate the kitchen in the nineties. It is, after all, essentially a Mediaeval room—the only thing that’s changed is the motor running the spit, which I clearly remember in my childhood being harnessed to a dog.”

  After the steam room of the kitchen, the cold November house bit at us. We’d walked back past the chapel and turned into the hall, with an eye to going upstairs for a proper introduction to Mr Greene’s library, when Marsh glanced out the window overlooking the drive and fountain. Whatever he saw there first rooted him to the spot, then sent him running—running—along the bust-filled corridor to the Great Hall and out of the front door, passing the sedate Ogilby in a couple of bounds. Alistair and I reached the door in time to see Marsh slow, then halt on the step above the drive. The approaching car circled the fountain and came to a halt in front of him. The driver’s door opened, and a woman unfolded herself.

  Ogilby hastened to lift his umbrella over the newcomer, but she seemed not to notice. She had eyes only for Marsh, and he, it seemed, for her. He descended the last step, opened his arms wide, and wrapped them around the woman.

  I couldn’t help an involuntary glance sideways to see Alistair’s reaction; astonishingly enough, the man so jealous of his cousin’s energies and attentions had a smile on his face, and strode forward into the rain to greet her as well.

  She looked remarkably ordinary for this extreme response, I thought as I watched them come up the steps (Ogilby fretting at the impossibility of keeping all three of his charges dry at once, despite the large umbrella and the closeness of the three walkers). Tall and slim, her hair cut short but not in the fashionable shingle style, wearing a skirt and coat the colour of milky coffee, with a common wool overcoat across her shoulders (not even fur trim). She looked a bit like me, in fact, had my hair been cropped short and dark—with, I saw as she entered the porch, threads of white here and there. Mahmoud’s age, more or less, in her mid-forties. No powder or lipstick, her only jewelry a gold wrist-watch and a silver band on the ring finger of her left hand; she had cornflower-blue eyes with laugh-lines around them, the vigorous step of a tennis-player and, I found in a moment, a strong and callused grip.

  Marsh gave her my name, which she seemed to recognise. Then Marsh withdrew very slightly from me, to put his hand on the woman’s shoulder.

  “This is Iris Sutherland,” he told me. “My . . .” He paused to glance at her, and they exchanged an expression of mischief, as at a private joke shared. He turned back to me and completed his sentence.

  “My wife.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’m afraid I gaped at the woman. For a couple of seconds before my jaw snapped shut and my hand went out, I must have resembled a stunned fish.

  “How do you do?” I managed.

  “Quite well, thank you. Despite the foul weather. It wasn’t raining in Paris; it began halfway across the Channel, like walking through a curtain. Alistair, you look marvelous.”

  She was English, but had lived long enough in France to have a fairly pronounced accent, and she presented her cheek for Alistair to salute as a European would have done. She then noticed a damp but formal presence lingering in the background.

  “Ogilby, that is you, isn’t it? Good heavens, you haven’t changed a whit since I was in pig-tails! What is your secret? I’ll sell it and make us a fortune.”

  Torn between pleasure and professional dignity, Ogilby allowed himself a personal response, inadvertently revealing a great deal about Iris Sutherland’s one-time popularity in the house. “No secret, Your Grace, just clean living.”

  She shook her head sadly. “Oh, dear, that will never catch on, not in Paris. But, you want to know what to do with my machine, yes? I wonder, Marsh, if you might put me up for a couple of days?”

  “Of course—there’s always a place for you at Justice, you know that. But I should warn you that Phillida and Sidney are here, and there’s to be a week-end party.”

  “Oh how very jolly,” she said, not sounding jolly in the least. “Birds, drink, dancing to the gramophone, and a lot of terribly British conversation. If I’m very lucky, we’ll even have charades. Ah well, if I’d wished for civilisation, I’d have stayed in France. So yes, Ogilby, if you’d be so good as to store my machine under cover. My bags are in the boot, keys are in the ignition. It’s a self-starter,” she added. “You shouldn’t need the handle.”

  Ogilby headed off to summon motorcar-movers and luggage-carriers. The woman’s blue gaze watched his retreat, and she leant close to murmur, “Marsh, that man is ancient—he was old when I knew him; he must be a hundred by now. Why haven’t you let the poor thing retire?”

  “I offered, he refused. And he’s not even seventy. Give me your coat.” He transferred the garment to the arms of a handy house-maid, added gloves and hat, and offered the newcomer his arm for the stroll to the so-called library. “What will it be?” he asked her. “Something hot or something strong, or both?”

  “Oh, both would be a life-saver. One can either drive a motor or be warm in it, not the two at once.” Inside the warmth, she went straight to the fire, standing practically in it and moving not at all as Marsh bent to throw more logs onto the low-burning flames.

  He had to brush past her silk-stockinged legs to do so; it came to me that I had never seen him as comfortable with a woman, not even his sister. It also came to me, more or less simultaneously, that the framed pictures on the right end of the mantelpiece had been rearranged, that the handsome young second lieutenant was missing, and that a younger version of this woman was in the family group that remained.

  Marsh told the maid—Emma, the young woman I had encountered on the stairway—to bring hot coffee made strong in the French manner. Iris gave her hands a last brisk rub over the flames and said she’d be back in a moment, then marched out of the warm library. No-one had to tell her where the cloak-room was, I noticed.

  Marsh dropped into a chair and lit a thoughtful cigarette. His first reaction to her appearance on the Justice front steps had been surprise and the pleasure of greeting an old friend. Now that reaction was retreating, to be replaced by a sort of concern over what her arrival meant.

  It was nothing to the speculation that was racing through my own mind. His wife, clearly long estranged, yet welcomed back as a comfortable, long-time companion? Alistair, as ferocious in his protection of Marsh as he had been of Mahmoud, without a trace of jealousy? (And I was watching for it, you can be sure.) And Ogilby—in my experience, a man’s servants were often more vigorous in their efforts to safeguard their master than even the man’s friends, and yet Ogilby, too, reacted to her as a long-absent member of the family, not as a wife living shamefully, even scandalously apart from her husband.

  I cursed my own absent husband: This was no time to be away in London.

  “You know why she’s here?” Alistair asked Marsh in a low voice.

  “I suppose so. She has the right, certainly. She might even have something to contribute.”

  “Your sister will not be pleased.”

  “Then Phillida can remain behind.”

  The door opened and Iris Sutherland came back in. “My God, Marsh, what mad and profligate genius thought to place a radiator in the lava
tory?”

  “Henry put them all over the house, when he and Sarah came back to England after Father died. He said it was an attempt to keep Sarah from freezing, after all the winters she’d spent in Italy. Actually, I think it was make-work to keep the estate builders employed over the winter. I don’t believe he ever expected the things to work.”

  “It’s glorious in there; I’m surprised you don’t lose guests regularly, find them camping between the fixtures. Is it possible I may escape England without a case of chilblains?”

  “That,” replied Marsh carefully, “will depend on how long you stay.”

  “Well,” said his wife, with equal care, “I rather thought I might go to Town with you on Wednesday. To meet the boy.”

  It made sense, that Iris Sutherland would wish to lay eyes on young Thomas Hughenfort, her husband’s nine-year-old nephew and heir, the boy who might keep her from inhabiting Justice Hall as its duchess. And if, as it seemed, she had been close to the family before Marsh and his cousin decamped to Palestine and left her to her life in Paris, she might indeed have something to contribute to the discussion. If nothing else—and despite any irregularities in this marriage—the lady had a good head on her shoulders.

  The coffee came, steaming hot and the consistency of India ink. Marsh pawed through a cabinet, brought out a bottle of Calvados brandy, and held it up for approval.

  “Oh Marsh, you remembered! Yes, that would be absolutely perfect. Do you know, I believe that’s the very bottle we drank from after your father’s funeral. Could that have been—Good Lord, twenty years ago?”

  “I’m afraid so. And it probably is the same bottle. Does it taste poisonous?”

  “It tastes heavenly.”

  I expected him to add a dollop to his own cup, as a hair-of-the-dog, but instead he added from the jug of hot milk. Alistair took his black; I had milk in mine. With a cup in my hand, it was difficult to fade quickly and politely away, but I was very interested to see more of this new Marsh—yet another unsuspected side to the man.

  When we were settled again, Marsh took out his cigarette case and offered one to his wife and me, then to Alistair. When they were all three lit, he resumed his cup and said to her, “How’s Dan?”

  I seized on the name. Aha!—Iris has a man in Paris, and this marriage, as I thought, was of convenience only. No wonder they were friends; no wonder Alistair wasn’t worried.

  But: “She’s fine. Sends her greetings, says I should scold you for passing through Paris and not stopping with us.”

  “We were in a hurry.”

  “Yes. I was sorry to hear about your brother—but I wrote to you already about that. Henry was a good man, in his stolid British way. Would that he had lived a long time.”

  If he had (all four of us no doubt were thinking), we should not be gathered here. Had Henry, Lord Beauville, lived long, or even had he remarried and fathered a son or two, Marsh could have returned to Palestine following the funeral. I put down my half-empty cup and stood to go; these people had many things to communicate, and I was definitely superfluous to requirement.

  “If you don’t mind too much, I’d like to sneak a look at the Greene Library,” I said.

  “You needn’t go,” Marsh told me (“No, do stay,” urged Iris), but I assured them I would see them at luncheon, and I went.

  Half an hour later, comfortably set in the intoxicating Greene Library with a stack of books and an armchair near the window, I glanced up to see three figures draped in voluminous waterproofs and rubber galoshes, walking in a line off into the park, the dogs gambolling ahead. Half an hour after that, a single figure, the tallest of the three, came back down the hill with two sopping dogs at his heel. Another forty minutes, and Marsh and Iris reappeared, arm in arm and heads bent together against the noise of the rain on their waterproof hats. After a while, the gong went, and I folded up my books to see what Mrs Butter had caused to be made for us.

  Alistair was downstairs already. Marsh and Iris came in together, their colour high from the onslaught of fresh air, their good cheer somewhat modulated from the earlier high spirits, but with an element now of unity of purpose.

  And still Alistair was not troubled.

  When we were served and drinking our soup, Marsh said to his cousin, “Iris agrees that we need to know more about Lionel’s wife and the boy.”

  “Of course she does.”

  “Perhaps you ought to come down with us on Wednesday, and tail the woman back to her house in Lyons? It would be nice to know where she and the boy live, if they live alone, or . . . you know.”

  “Marsh,” I interrupted, but he took no notice.

  “It’s a vulnerable age,” he continued, “nine, and if she’s living as she shouldn’t, it could give us a clear—”

  “Marsh,” I said again, sharply. He turned his eyes to mine.

  “Let me follow her. Alistair would stick out, and there’s a hundred places he couldn’t go.” And it would make me feel as if I were doing something, I did not say aloud.

  “My cousin will manage. He is very good at it.”

  “He’s very good in . . . other places, but in London, following a woman and a child? Marsh, I am trained to this. There are few better.” No time for false modesty.

  He looked surprised, Iris puzzled, Alistair relieved. The two men consulted without words—the first time I’d seen them do that, here—then Marsh nodded. “Very well; you and Alistair. You can act the happy pair, and follow her into crowds or the cloak-room.”

  Not what I had in mind, but the compromise was acceptable, and we finished the meal in peace.

  Afterwards, Marsh announced that he and Iris were going for another walk (I refrained from glancing at the streaming window) and Alistair said that he was due to meet his nephew for a discussion of the Badger farms. This left me either to interview children and servants, or to take to the Greene Library.

  It was no difficult decision.

  Before retreating up the stairs to the sanctuary of the library, I made a quick dash through the rain to a rosemary bush I had noticed growing outside of the billiards room. Feeling more than a little silly, I dutifully laid the wet sprig onto the mantel below the portrait of Obediah Greene, and although I cannot know if it pleased his shade, it certainly made the air sweet.

  I went to my room to fetch my pen and a block of writing-paper. When I got back to the library I found Alistair standing in the middle of the library, gazing up at Mr Greene. When he turned, I saw the large, lumpy file envelope he carried. Wordlessly, he held it out, and watched me carry it to the table I had mentally chosen for my own. I loosed the tie and poured the contents onto the pad of clean blotting-paper.

  Three fat journals filled with boyish handwriting, five letters, a pair of identity discs (one the standard fibre tag on a neck-cord, the other a brass disc on a chain bracelet), a silver pocket-watch, a much-used pen-knife, several field post-cards, and a leather-bound Testament with the salty tide-marks of sweat staining its cover.

  “When you have finished, Marsh asks that you give them back to him.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  He turned to leave, but paused in the doorway. “There is a magnifying glass in the desk below the window. Should you need one.” Then he was gone, leaving me to paw through the personal effects of Sub-Lieutenant Gabriel Hughenfort, Earl of Calminster, ducal heir, enigma of the moment.

  The identity discs might have been of value for a psychic reading, but all the necklace told me was that it had ridden on a man for longer than some I had seen, and not as long as others. The bracelet showed signs of dried mud, or possibly blood, but I did not see that laboratory attentions would tell me any more than that a man had worn it in mud, and possibly to die. The sweat-stained Testament had been given Gabriel by his mother, on his eighteenth birthday according to the inscription. The pen-knife looked to be a boy’s treasure taken to a man’s job. The letters GATH were scratched crudely into the side, and the shorter blade was bent so badly it was di
fficult to open. It also had a chip in the blade, I saw when I had finally prised it open. The longer blade was freckled with rust but was still razor-sharp.

  I folded the knife away and took up the pocket-watch. Its cover popped easily, showing me hands stopped at 3:18 (How long after its owner’s death? I wondered). On the inside of the cover was engraved Justitia fortitudo mea est—the Hughenfort motto, carried with him always. I prised open the back of the watch, saw that the works would need some attention before it would run again, and put the timepiece with the other things.

  The artefacts had taught me nothing, only that their owner had lived hard in a damp place, which was no surprise. I was left with his written legacy, and with a grimace, I picked up the more difficult first: the letters from the Front.

  The field post-cards were the usual thing, their laconic printed phrases sending the message that their soldier was alive and fit enough to wield a pencil—or at least, to direct the pencil of an aide. I am quite well, Gabriel had ticked off, along with I have received your letter dated/parcel dated, after which he had written in a strong, tidy script: 29 December. The checked spaces on one card informed his parents: I have been admitted into hospital [wounded]/and am going on well/and hope to be discharged soon/Letter follows at first opportunity.

  On that card, the signature was shaky, from nerves or injury I could not know.

  The three letters written in Gabriel’s neat hand were another matter. All had come via the Field Post Office, so their envelopes were stamped with the usual black postal circle as well as the red triangle of the censor. The earliest was dated 27 December, 1917, sent from France, and contained four pages of news that sounded very like an extended attempt to whistle in the dark—aimed at reassuring not them, but himself. The next was from early April, although it did not seem to be the Letter follows that was promised by the post-card, since it made only passing reference to his time in hospital, saying merely that he was recovered but for his twisted knee and an irritating (his word) sensitivity to falling mortars. He sounded, truth to tell, not only recovered but positively bursting with optimism and good cheer. There were jokes about lice and cold tea, stories about his fellows, a matter-of-fact report on a gas attack, and one wistful passage about the Justice parkland in April. Compared with his earlier letter, Gabriel quite clearly had his feet beneath him, and looked to be having what survivors called a “good war.” I was certain there had been other letters between these two, but taking them as the only representatives, I found the change in his attitude and self-assurance striking.