Justice Hall

by Laurie R. King

  I said something of the sort to Alistair. He snorted.

  “Oh yes. Darling has many plans for Justice. He stands about wringing his hands, fearing his agreements with Henry will be as dust.”

  “A place like this wants working industries, if it’s to survive. Agricultural revenues won’t support it, not with capital taxation.”

  Those last two words would have sparked a tirade in most gentlemen of his generation, men who saw a way of life being sucked dry by the viciously ruinous taxes imposed in recent years, men faced with the impossible choice of selling off the land that kept the house going, or tearing down the house itself. Alistair, however, merely shrugged.

  “It should be worked, yes.” But he was not about to admit that the man to do so was Sidney Darling.

  This wing of the block was now ended, and we had the option of either turning up our collars and sprinting across the wide cobbles to the end of the other arm, or retracing our steps. I waited to see what Alistair would do. In Palestine, he would not have hesitated in walking out into the downpour—or rather, he would have done so with all deliberation, hoping this irritating female would wilt, or melt. But we were in England, and Ali was Alistair. He shot a quick glance at my footwear (which was nearly as sturdy as his own) and chivalrously turned back.

  Marsh was there, one elbow on the half door of a pony box. Alistair’s head went up and he strode forward vigorously; I went more slowly, to study their greeting and to better look at Marsh Hughenfort.

  Alistair’s Englishness I had grown more comfortable with, as enough of Ali remained there to see the man I had known behind the unlikely disguise, but Marsh was proving more difficult. My mind continued to search for similarities between him and Mahmoud, struggling to meld the two faces into one. It was like doing a jig-saw puzzle without the picture, with scraps of pattern from which the eyes could decipher no image. His dignity and authority remained the same in tweed or robe—he could no more shed his aristocratic origins than he could stop his lungs from drawing air. And the stealth of his movements, that too seemed as much a part of him as the shape of his bones. Perhaps the slight droop of his eyelids, the sense that they veiled a great deal from the outside world, perhaps that remained, exaggerated by the effects of what he’d consumed the night before.

  It would be easiest, I reflected, if I were to tell myself this was my old friend Mahmoud’s brother, a new character in my life. But to do so, I was certain, would be a disservice to us all.

  I was suddenly hit by one of those memories, so vivid that for a moment I was there: Holmes addressing Ali across a cook-fire in the desert, commanding with razor-sharp scorn, “Think of Russell as Amir, picture ‘him’ as a beardless youth, and you just might succeed in not giving us away.”

  I blinked, and there were two Englishmen with greying hair, gazing with affection at a fat pony. One of them, the older one, turned a pair of impenetrable eyes on me.

  “Has my cousin showed you the house?”

  “It’s an amazing place,” I answered him.

  Marsh looked at me sideways, causing a brief stir of familiarity. “You liked the library?”

  “It was all I could do to keep her from bolting herself inside,” Alistair told him.

  With mock indignation, I protested, “I never even touched a book. I walked through and walked out.”

  “Her eyes were filled with an unnatural light,” Alistair confided in his cousin. “I feared for my safety.”

  “No violence can ever take place in that room,” Marsh said seriously. “Mr Greene would not permit it.”

  Was this one of the house staff responsible for quelling riots? I wondered. Marsh saw the question on my face.

  “You noticed the portrait over the fire?”

  “Thin man with large ears? Yes.”

  “Mr Obediah Greene, hired by the second Duke to assemble a library suitable for a gentleman. I doubt that particular ancestor ever picked up a book himself, but Mr Greene laid the foundations, and furthermore bullied his employer to set aside a permanent portion of the estate budget for acquisition and maintenance. As children, we were convinced that to dog-ear a page would bring down the wrath of Mr Greene’s ghost.”

  “I shall offer him obeisance when next I am there.”

  “He is said to savour the odour of rosemary,” Marsh replied. “If you are moved to take an offering.”

  He gave the pony a final pat and moved away, leaving me to wonder if he had just made a joke.

  We strolled around to the other end of the stable wing, trading the aromas of hay and horses for those of oil and petrol. Gleaming generating engines were joined by rank after rank of the batteries that lit the great house at night, and were followed by the Justice motorcar collection, eight vehicles, including a Model T with leather seats the same crimson as the Egyptian boots that Ali had worn, a Hispano Suiza that would be blinding on a sunny day, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost touring car, an electrical cart with a handle in place of a wheel for steering, and several others I did not recognise but which were all as thoroughly polished as the Hispano.

  “My brother’s,” Marsh noted, without much interest. “Ringle can’t bear to part with them—Ringle is the estate manager,” he explained. “It tortures him that we don’t have the staff we did when he came in 1890. I brought up the possibility of selling two of the smaller farms to pay the taxes; he looked at me as if I were coming after him with a bone-saw. Capital tax will be the death of us. Still, it makes for a change, to have the government take it back systematically—traditionally they’ve had to wait for the families to throw up a wastrel duke who would lose it all at the card-table. When I was a child, we had sixty horses in this wing—and God knows how many servants worked here. The economy of this entire corner of Berkshire rested squarely on Justice. Now it’s a narrow step from becoming a tourist attraction or a girls’ school. You’re fortunate to have seen the place in its glory, Mary, even if at its twilight.”

  He sounded more matter-of-fact than wistful, and I had to remind myself that to a man whose chosen way of life was that of a scribe, and beneath that a spy, who lived in a tent with neither dependent nor permanent fixtures, Justice Hall might not be an object of adoration.

  “We did not get to the chapel,” Alistair told him.

  “Oh, we must show Mary the chapel. People come from Scandinavia and the Balkans just to see the chapel. And—what’s the time?”

  Alistair made a show of pulling a watch from his pocket and popping it open. “It’s just gone eleven.”

  “Dare we risk the kitchen? Oh, I think we must.”

  “We could go by way of the Armoury, put on a bit of chain mail first. Mary might fit into Long Tim’s suit of armour.”

  They were joking, by God, like a pair of idiot schoolboys. Marsh’s frivolity was somewhat forced, either from disinclination or hangover, but he was trying hard to act the mischief-maker—and making not a bad go of it. It was the first sign of life I’d seen in him, and I did not know if I should rejoice, or fear that the summoning of good cheer was just one more kind of sacrificial blood-letting.

  “It would take too long,” Marsh told Alistair. “We’ll have to chance it. Have you been shriven, Mary—or whatever Jewish girls do to meet their Maker?”

  “This sounds quite alarming,” I told him.

  “Mrs Butter in a rage is a sight to behold.”

  “The War would have been over in months if Mrs Butter had been willing to cross the Channel,” Alistair assured me. “As it was, the government held her in reserve as their secret weapon, should the Kaiser reach Dover.”

  We passed the offices, where a man (Mr Ringle) was shouting down the telephone about a disputed bill, then entered the Hall, heading for the old, western wing. Marsh paused, and asked me, “Are you acquainted with Vetruvius?”

  I gazed blankly for a moment at the nearest object, the marble bust of a handsome young rake with a plaque attributing it to Christopher Hewetson. “Vetruvius. Classical writer? Architecture?
”

  “‘Aedium compositio constat ex symmetria, cuius rationem diligentissime architecti tenere debent,’ ” Marsh intoned. “‘The composition of temples is based upon symmetry, the principles of which architects must most diligently master.’ The first Duke seems to have picked the idea up on his travels—he himself was probably as illiterate as his son later was—and instructed his builder to emulate it.” Among other things I tended to forget—that Marsh Hughenfort had absorbed a Cambridge undergraduate degree.

  As we strode through the gorgeous marble cavern, Marsh’s voice playing among the upper gallery and rising to join the figures inhabiting the dome, our private world was suddenly shattered by the sounds of scurrying feet and urgent conversation.

  Startled and unable at first to tell where the reverberations originated, I swivelled my head around, searching for the source of the noises, until the footsteps cleared the end of the upper gallery and became localised: Phillida and Sidney Darling, flying down the stairs in a confusion of garments and snatched phrases. I had thought them long gone—they had not come to breakfast and Alistair had said they were in London for the day—but clearly I was mistaken. Words tumbled down the staircase and we held ourselves back so as not to be flattened.

  Sidney was clutching a telegram flimsy; Phillida was trying to settle her hat as she descended, half-listening to Sidney.

  “—don’t know why they think the march is still necessary, the police will be waiting for them and they won’t hesitate to shoot, not with the way things are.”

  “Perhaps Ludendorff will talk him out of it.”

  “Not bloody likely, not if I know—Marsh!” he broke off to exclaim as his gaze lifted from the marble steps and he saw us gathered there. “I, er . . .”

  “Trouble?” Marsh enquired.

  “Nothing, no, just a friend—or not a friend, actually, a business acquaintance I—Yes, Ogilby?”

  The butler had glided up with his silver tray, on which lay another telegram. Sidney stuffed the one he held into his pocket and snatched at the fresh one.

  “Shall I go ahead?” Phillida asked her husband.

  “Yes, my dear, I’ll be there in a moment. Is the car here, Ogilby?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “I’ll just . . .” Sidney tossed the shredded envelope in the direction of the silver tray and frowned down at the telegraphist’s words, which he had sheltered automatically from our view. He read it through twice, then shoved it unceremoniously into the pocket after the first one; without another word, he scurried out of the door, moving too fast for the attentive footman to get it fully open in front of him.

  “Well,” Marsh said.

  “What do you suppose that was about?” Alistair asked.

  I turned to Ogilby for enlightenment. “Mr Darling seemed to think there was to be a march that might turn violent. I hope not in London?”

  “I believe the news originated in Germany, madam.”

  “The national socialists are about to stage a putsch,” Marsh explained. “General Ludendorff is one of the leaders, he and a young firebrand by the name of Hitler. Sidney is trying to decide if a change in the government would bode well or ill for British interests. He gave me some pamphlets to read; I found them dangerous nonsense.”

  I let my gaze climb to the scene on the dome. Who would wish the Day of the Lord? And although Sidney might be depending on the Justice coffers to lay the foundations of an international manufacturing project, Marsh did not sound overeager to become involved in the country’s considerable problems.

  With a last thoughtful look upwards at the man about to lay his hand on a serpent, I joined Marsh and Alistair, as we continued our tour.

  Quitting the Hall for the western wing, we turned to the right, away from the decorated staircase at the back of the house. Marsh pushed open a door; I looked, then stepped in: the Armoury.

  This would have been the banqueting hall of the original house, massive stone walls topped by a fourteenth-century timber roof and inset with ancient warped windows illustrating the family’s history. A sixteenth-century painted screen lay across one end of the hall, a huge fireplace dominated the other, and the arms of ages occupied the walls and corners. Four full suits of armour—one of which had been for a man standing nearly seven feet high, no doubt Long Tim—guarded the fireplace and the door opposite, pikes in their sheathed hands. A sunburst of broadswords and a wider one of pikestaffs faced each other across the southern end of the room. Plumed helmets, faded banners hanging free and behind glass, knives, longbows, and half the armament known to man. There was even a long row of matched blunderbusses, whose recoil would knock an unwary man down.

  “A person could mount a small war out of this room,” I commented.

  “When the eighth earl, who was to be the first Duke, built the new block beginning in 1710, he couldn’t quite bring himself to tear this out. It vexed his architect no end. But truly, it had to stay; it’s the heart of the place. Before the second earl got his hands on it and raised the roof a few yards, this was the abbey’s hall.”

  The room had changed since brown-clad monks gathered here for soup and Scripture, but it took little imagination to conjure up a long feasting board filled with loud, heavily scarred fighting men, women carrying trenchers across a rush-strewn floor, huge pale dogs gnawing bones underfoot. Henry VIII, or either of his daughters, would have felt right at home in this room. It carried the history of this house as the Great Hall and the long gallery did not, and I circumnavigated its lumpy whitewashed walls with respect, taking in the window (Justitia fortitudo mea est, at the top of each branch of the tree with its names: Henry the Unwary, fourth earl; Robert the Unwashed, seventh earl), the captured banners of defeated enemies, and the gargoyle at the corner of the fireplace, which bore a startling resemblance to a be-wigged Marsh.

  As I turned to go, my eye travelled up from a massive wooden chest big enough to act as coffin for half a dozen Long Tims to a third sunburst, this of curving Saracen sabres alternating with smaller knives. Ironic, I thought—and then I noticed the smaller blade that marked the centre of the radiating steel. I looked more closely, then glanced at Marsh and Alistair. Their faces were just a bit too expressionless, which instantly confirmed my suspicion: I had last seen that particular knife decorating the belt of Mahmoud Hazr.

  I wondered if the children’s dressing-up costume box held the remainder of the costume.

  The chapel was located in a quiet niche of the kitchen block. Perhaps if I were a Christian, I might have found the small, melancholy little church more compelling. Since I am not, it just seemed to me unnecessarily crowded, as if the builder had laboured to distract the worshipper from the chill solitude of the ornate memorials set into the walls and standing out in the floor. Certainly between the angels, the saints, and the flocks of pelicans inserting their ungainly beaks into everything, one would think the afterlife a busy time indeed. Prominently displayed was the effigy of a young boy, its alabaster purity gleaming with innocence, the naked feet beneath its stone drapes pathetic in their vulnerability. However, I had no opportunity to peruse it or any of the myriad statues, busts, plaques, or inscriptions at leisure; the cousins had other things on their minds.

  We passed the butler’s pantry, its outer door standing open to reveal a comfortable chair before a fireplace, a locked safe door the height of a man, and a desk with neatly folded newspapers on one corner and a telephone in its precise centre. The long row of old-fashioned bells stretched along the wall outside Ogilby’s sanctum, and then a wide door whose much-bashed sides testified to long years of fast-moving food trolleys.

  I will admit that I dragged my feet somewhat as we approached the clatter and tumult of a kitchen coming around to luncheon. The sound of chopping and a billow of steam, a crash of pans and the crackle of an open fire, a strange, rhythmic clanking sound that called to mind a Mediaeval instrument of torture, and above it all a woman’s loud voice raised, in command and chastisement and question.
I put my head cautiously around the door.

  The tiny woman with her back to us could only have been the Justice housekeeper, Mrs Butter. There was a cook as well, a cowed-looking Frenchman in a white toque, who might normally have expected to reign supreme in this his rightful kingdom; but here the woman ruled. One of the under-cooks saw us and straightened abruptly. Mrs Butter whirled about to see what had so distracted her assistant, a terrible fury gathering in her pink face until she saw who the intruders were. Pleasure flashed briefly across her face before the scowl descended again, but although she struggled to maintain her disapproval of any invasion of her realm, it was a losing battle. Marsh and Alistair stood meekly studying their toes, two schoolboys acknowledging their wrongdoing without a word being said; the sight was so ridiculous, after a moment her mouth twitched, and the rigid, apprehensive workers who filled the kitchen relaxed as one and returned to their sauces, their roasting spit, and their scullery duties.

  Mrs Butter folded her arms. “I suppose you’ve come down to tell me nobody served you breakfast and you’d like some bread and dripping, please Mrs Butter.”

  “No, mum,” said Lord Marsh the schoolboy. “My cousin wanted to pay his respects.”

  She eyed Alistair, a foot taller than she and a generation younger. “Good day to you, young man. By the looks of you, you’ve been feeding better now that you’ve left those foreign parts.”

  Alistair stepped forward and kissed her firmly on the cheek, which astonished her almost as much as it did me. She became flustered, which I thought was probably why he had done it, a part of the ritual of their kitchen visit. Alistair grinned at her, she scolded and bustled off, but only as far as the morning’s baking cooling fragrantly on a scrubbed wooden shelf. She brought back a loaf, along with butter and a knife, and set about sawing off generous slices.

  “Mrs Butter,” Marsh told her, “this is Miss Russell, visiting from Sussex for a few days. You must be nice to her, and let her have a slice of bread. She saved my life once.” Which was an exaggeration, although it impressed the servants.