“Did you find these in here?” I asked them, keeping my voice casual.
“They were under the corner of those dirty cloths,” Lenore informed me, anxious that I should accept the inevitability of their find. “We just climbed in to hide—or rather, I did, and when Walter couldn’t find me he started to blub—”
“Did not!” the boy exclaimed in outrage.
“—and so I let him in with me, and then we could only get the top open a little way and we found these when the cloths got messed up, so we thought we’d sit and read them while we waited for Miss Paul to come looking for us, and then we heard you and got frightened that we might be in trouble and—”
“Oh, I shouldn’t worry about it,” I reassured them easily, folding the papers away into an inner pocket. “I won’t tell. Although if I were you, I shouldn’t say anything to anyone about having been inside the chest. Parents worry, don’t you know, about children getting trapped and being unable to get out. They might decide to keep you in the nursery for your own safety. Too, that way, by the time someone notices the great gash you put into the side of it, you’ll be safely back in London.”
I felt remarkably guilty at the manifold threats I was holding over their heads, but I couldn’t take the chance of their chattering to their parents or any adult in earshot about being inside the chest where Gabriel’s papers had been hidden away. The apprehension on both faces told me they would keep silent, at least long enough for the matter to be resolved.
“How long has it been since you reported in to your governess?”
“We probably ought to go now,” Lenore admitted.
“Dust yourselves off first,” I suggested.
“We’re allowed to dress up tonight, too,” Walter informed me.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if he planned to come as a character from Mr Barrie’s hated play, but I hadn’t the heart. “Good,” I said. “Have fun.”
They left, the clamour from the Hall rising and cutting off abruptly with the closing of the stout door. I felt the packet of papers through the layers of fabric I wore. My immediate impulse was to shut myself into the nice heated lavatory and read every word on every page, but I had to let go that impulse almost as quickly. The papers belonged to Marsh; it was his decision if any other eyes saw them. Irritated at my sense of fair play, I settled the papers more firmly in the inner pocket, and went to find Marsh.
There had to be two hundred people already in the jungly Great Hall, spilling among the papyrus and shouting at each other beneath the suspended ibises. Bare arms on the women, bare torsos on some of the men (including a number who really oughtn’t have), colours and face paint and an impressive effect overall.
And daunting. How was I to find Marsh in this crush?
I spotted a vaguely familiar face, smiled, and then turned back so hastily my head spun: Ogilby, wearing what appeared to be the contents of a washing-line. In fact, all the servants in sight were in similar raiment, Phillida’s decorous version of an ancient Egyptian servant’s uniform. I looked closely at the two figures standing beneath an arching silken palm tree, and recognised the hair-dressing Emma talking flirtatiously with a similarly draped individual who was not, I thought, one of the Justice staff. One of the strong young men borrowed from the neighbouring houses, no doubt. I settled my head-wrapping and went over to the house-maid.
“Emma, have you any idea where I might find Lord—I mean, His Grace?”
She did not notice the familiar face under the costume, even though I had retained my own spectacles, and responded as to a stranger’s enquiry. “I don’t believe he’s come down yet, sir. I mean, effendi.”
“Er, thank you.” The strange servant—whom I now recognised from the day of the shoot, his crooked nose being unmistakable even if the rest of him was hidden by costume—had faded away into the fronds with his drinks tray as soon as he saw me approach. He moved with a slight limp, which spoke eloquently of toes crushed by the guests; I was grateful Holmes had not inflicted sandals on me. Emma, too, took up her tray again and pushed into the throng. I, however, turned towards the peace of the old wing and made my way up the 1612 stairway to Marsh’s door.
“Who is that?” he called in answer to my knock.
“Mary,” I answered. Iris opened the door to me, with a drink in her hand; neither she nor Marsh were in costume, unless she proposed to join the party in lounge pyjamas. She looked at me uncertainly, then her face cleared with delight.
“Oh, that is very good, Mary,” she exclaimed. “You look like a boy.”
“When first she wore that clothing,” Marsh remarked, “looking like a boy was the idea.”
“It certainly succeeded. And that knife looks fierce.”
“I borrowed it from the Armoury,” I said to Marsh. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.”
“Which is where I found this.” I fished the packet from inside my robes.
He unfolded the top page, saw the writing, and sat down abruptly. I poured myself a large dry sherry and took a chair while I waited for him to read it. When he looked back at me, his eyes took some time to come into focus.
“Have you . . . ?” he asked.
“No, just enough to see what it was.”
“Where did you find this?”
“Straight out of The Purloined Letter—one hides a thing too close for the person seeking it to find. In this case, it was inside that enormous studded chest in the Armoury. There are some old hangings or curtains or something inside—it doesn’t look as if it’s been opened for half a century, other than to deposit those.”
He looked at the papers in his hand without seeing them. “We used to hide things in the Armoury,” he mused, not really thinking about what he was saying. “In Long Tim’s helmet, inside the chest. All the time. When we were boys.”
Iris could take no more. “Marsh?” she asked. “What is it?”
Mutely, he handed the papers to her. She took them, looked curiously at the ribbon-bound packet, and then opened Gabriel’s letter. “Oh my God,” she murmured, seeing the greeting. She read the remainder in silence. Tears were quivering unshed in her eyes before she came to the end. When she had finished, she handed the letter to me, and I read it.
3 August 1918
Dearest Pater,
I know not how to write this, my last letter to you, but write I must. My uncle waits for me to put it into his hand, and from his hand it will reach yours. He is patient, but he is due back.
The verdict arrived just 12 hours ago. My first reaction was . . . nothingness. The world retreated, and my ears seemed not to hear the sounds of the men passing outside or the constant guns up the line. And then the world rushed back in on me, a tumult of memories and voices, long-forgotten tastes and smells fresh on my tongue and in my nose, as if the mind wished to gather together all the disparate moments in my life and heap them into my arms, to savour at once.
It is given to few men along this bullet-ridden strip of land to know the hour of their death. Most of us have lived so long with the possibility, it has become almost unimportant. One of the first things one learns here is that if one hears a bullet, there is no point in ducking, since if it was going to hit you, it would have. It is given only to the lawfully condemned to hear the bullet coming, to be given a time in which to look over one’s life, to hear the voices of friends and tutors, to feel the comfort of parents’ hands, to feel one’s life narrowing down to a small, quiet centre.
One of those voices has been that of old Pyeminster. Remember the summer we did Henry VI? He and I acted all the sailors in various dialects. And I was Suffolk, emerging from his disguising rags to declare defiantly that true nobility is exempt from fear. Two or three months ago, I’d have laughed hysterically at such a conceit, knowing it unlikely that I, for one, could bear more than the Huns dared to hand out.
Now, however, I stand with Suffolk. I rage at the stupidity, the smallness, of the men who condemned me. I give you free perm
ission, after the War ends, to pursue the injustice of my case, in the hopes that in the future, no man refusing an insane order must pay for it with his life.
I die knowing that my action saved the lives of ten good men. I die in the sureness of my righteousness, and knowing, in the words of St Paul, that being judged by a human court is a very small thing.
The padre no doubt waits, his finger lodged in that fourth chapter of Corinthians. I ask that you look him up, later, for he has been good to me. I ask that you similarly embrace my uncle, who has helped me through these final hours.
But most of all I ask that you welcome your daughter Helen. If any regrets are left me, it is this, that I will have no life with her. As you will see from the enclosed, she is truly your daughter. I have no means of explaining her sudden presence in your lives, but to say that she was a gift from God, and that she saved not only my life, but my soul. The details of our meeting, our wooing, and our brief marriage you shall have to hear from her lips. I leave it to you, to choose whether or not to show her this letter. In the unreal fog in which I have moved this past twelvemonth, Helen was the only clear place. Love her, because I ask it. Love her because she brought your son laughter at a time when laughter was in short supply. Love her because I do, now and forever.
As I love you and Mother.
Your son,
Gabriel
P.S. Another text I studied with Pyeminster, one of the odes of old Horace, keeps running through my mind. It is not the rich man one should call happy, he says, peiusque leto flagitium timet, but the man who fears dishonour more than death, and who is not afraid to die pro caris amici aut patrias—for beloved friends or country. By his definition, I am a happy man indeed.
With love and gratitude to you, my beloved friend, and my country,
Your faithful
Gabriel
When I had reached the end, I felt as if his patient and dignified words had been seared onto my brain. I gave the boy’s letter back to Iris, the mother he had not known. She folded it reverently back into its envelope, and handed it to Marsh, along with the handkerchief she had borrowed. She then picked up the other documents from her lap, looking at the packet of letters wrapped in ribbon. “Isn’t that Helen’s handwriting?”
“I should think it would have to be,” Marsh replied.
“And this . . . their marriage certificate? Oh, that utter bastard.”
Marsh, however, was already looking at the means of turning his anger into action. “This will simplify things somewhat,” he said grimly.
“I agree,” I said, with feeling. Instead of having to watch the crowd of nearly 350 guests and servants to see which of our suspects made for the exit, then track him unnoticed through house and countryside, by motorcar and train, until he led us to his hiding place, we could now simply wait in the Armoury for him to show. Ali might shadow a nervous hare across a barren hillside unseen, needs be, and would have no problems in the corridors of Justice Hall, but with the hiding place known, the potentially disastrous complexities of Holmes’ plan were sliced through like the Gordian knot. It was a tremendous relief.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The time had come; the inevitable could be delayed no longer; I had to join the party.
Life has ill prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers. My parents had entertained a certain amount in my childhood, but those were quiet affairs, with intelligent conversation the main interest. Conversation in the Great Hall was far from intellectual; the level of hilarity was already such that a stentorian bellow was required to make polite response of one’s name. A band had started up in one corner of the gallery, jazz music loud enough to be appreciated in New Orleans and punctuated by the cries of the distraught parrots. Painted Cleopatras danced with laurel-leafed Caesars (never mind that they were thirteen hundred years too late for Tutankhamen), archaeologists with belly-dancers; women with elaborately outlined eyes linked arms with men wearing masks of various creatures that obscured vision as well as visage and had already begun to be pushed onto the tops of heads. Six men with eyes like Rudolph Valentino’s and wearing little more than loin-cloths (their eyes, unfortunately, bore the only resemblance to the actor) were clustered together, attempting to invent an Egyptian dance-step, eliciting gales of mad laughter from a dozen equally heavily painted young women in gauze drapes. Drinks of many unlikely hues rested (briefly) in glasses of various shapes, and I could only anticipate that the place would be reduced to sprawled heaps of comatose human beings in masks long before that eggs-and-champagne breakfast to which Iris had referred. I settled my abayya on my shoulders and resolutely pushed my way out into the pulsing mass of humanity.
If I regarded the exercise as an investigation into the social dynamics of crowds, I found, I could keep from being overwhelmed. If I smiled vacantly and nodded at the shouted attempts at conversation of my neighbours, if I kept an untasted drink in one hand so as to forestall a dozen others being pressed on me, if I kept my elbows clamped against my sides so as to protect my ribs, and most of all if I kept moving along the edges of the room, the sheer hysterical energy of the place did not come crashing in upon me and send me gibbering for the open air.
The band added a weirdly humming stringed instrument—to simulate Egyptian harmonies, I supposed—and fifty people joined the six Valentinos in their dance. With a splash and a chorus of whoops, a nearby thicket of papyrus began to leap about violently as a dripping Caesar rose from his lily-pond: jumped, pushed, or fallen? It hardly mattered, to him least of all. A young woman danced by me with one of the artificial jungle-vines wrapped around and around her diaphanous costume, which she may have intended as an exotic belt but which made her look as if she had just escaped from being tied to a post. A red-headed boy went past, doing a brisk fox-trot with one of the stuffed crocodiles that had reared up at the front doors, and I was nearly flattened by a pair of women in brilliant coral-hued gauze jumping on pogo-sticks, more or less in time to the music. A six-foot-tall scarab beetle (what an uncomfortable costume!) was deep in conversation with two blonde belly-dancers; three men in golden masks argued over the proper technique for taking a fox’s brush; and an ibis-god on stilts gazed down in solitary splendour at the activity going on around his knees.
And all this before dinner.
With that thought, perhaps forty minutes into my circumnavigation of the floor, a subtle shudder seemed to move through the mass, and it began to thin. At first it seemed the result of a distant earth-quake followed by the instinctive search for open space, but then I realised it was the rumour of food in the adjoining rooms. We were to dine buffet style, with a hundred tables set up for people to occupy with their filled plates, and there seemed little point in being among the first rush. I leant against a marble column that was dressed as a palm tree, and took a swallow of the warm liquid in my glass.
“Drinking heavily, are we, Russell?” said a voice in my ear. If I hadn’t been so fatigued, I might have thrown my arms around him; as it was, I gave him a tired smile.
“Hello, Holmes. Where have you been?”
“Here, for much of the time. I saw you a few times across the room, but by the time I reached your place, you were gone.”
“You look remarkably fresh. And terribly Bedouin.”
“Better than being dressed as a Caesar.”
“Or Rudolph Valentino, although you have applied the kohl, I see.”
“Marsh told you the plan?”
“I’m not certain if it was Marsh or Mahmoud, but yes. Did he tell you—”
“—about the papers?” he interrupted, speaking in a voice so low I could barely hear it myself. “He did. He’s got them squirrelled away now, and wrapped some newspaper inside the piece of oil-cloth to put back in the chest.”
“Any number of people could have hid those papers in the chest,” I noted.
“Anyone who knows Justice Hall,” he agreed.
“Ali will take up his position in the Armoury after Marsh ha
s spoken?”
“Once he’s introduced Marsh, he’ll slip away. While Marsh is talking to the guests.”
“Ought we to keep an eye on the two men anyway?”
“You know my methods, Russell.”
By this time in my life, his methods were mine.
Dinner was an odd assortment of the familiar and the conscientiously foreign, crab puffs next to bits of bright yellow lamb on skewers, tiny marinated aubergines nestled amongst the iced oysters. This time, there was sufficient quantity to satisfy the mob, even though by the time I surveyed the table of offerings, the most popular items (those of recognisably English heritage) were rather sparsely represented. Holmes had gone off again, and I settled into a corner table. Halfway through my pomegranate-stuffed pigeon, I glanced up, and confronted a vision.
Mahmoud and Ali Hazr stood in the doorway. Mahmoud entered first, dressed in dramatic black and gold, on his face the customary all-seeing expression I had once known. Ali stood at his shoulder, glowering and clothed in all the colours of the rainbow. His hand was resting on a close facsimile of the knife he had used to such lethal purpose, and when he spoke briefly in Mahmoud’s ear, I could see that his front teeth were again missing. I choked on my mouthful and stood up; Mahmoud’s eyes caught the movement, and he gazed at me across the crowded dining room. His mouth quirked, briefly, at my reaction, and then something behind him called for his attention: I saw, as I pushed my way to them, that that something was five-year-old Gabe Hughenfort, his pale face slightly dubious and his hand clinging tightly to his mother’s, but his green eyes glowing with wonder at the sights and sounds of Justice Hall in its festivities. He was dressed—how else?—as the young son of a sheikh, with gold agahl holding his snowy abayya over those dark Hughenfort curls, his white robes gleaming against the pool of Mahmoud’s black. Yes, by God he was a Hughenfort; it was a wonder the entire room of revellers did not rise as one and proclaim it.
Justice Hall Page 37