Justice Hall (14 page)

One of the primary reasons for country houses of this sort, I reflected, has always been intimidation. Less a family home than an assertion of power, the country house was the focus of the estate’s energies: The more powerful the landholder, the grander the house. Badger Old Place might be an organic extension of the countryside—its roots old as the hills themselves—but where it was an essentially domestic piece of architecture, Justice Hall was military history in stone and mortar, a weapon from battlement to Great Hall, intended to keep the peasants and all potential enemies in their place. Well, it was certainly working on me: I was well and truly intimidated, and feeling more and more like a country cousin with cow dung on her boots. Since the invention of Culture in the sixteenth century, these people had been skimming the cream off European art and artistry, bringing it here for the pleasure of the few, perfecting the art of being first and foremost. Lady Phillida drew to herself an aura of privilege in the same way the long gallery drew light; I crept along its edge, feeling every inch the mongrel parvenue.

Holmes came from country squires—minor squires, true, but at least he spoke the same language. I, on the other hand, was the result of a cross between Jewish merchants and American tycoons: half outsider, half nouveau riche, completely beyond redemption.

I escaped the beautiful room wondering how many more priceless works of art and exquisite vistas were going to sear themselves onto my soul before the tour was over. We entered a state bedroom hung with silk hand-painted chinoiserie wall covering and the matching silk bed hangings; from the door came the brief sound of footsteps crossing the bare boards at the side of the carpet down the centre of the long gallery. Alistair came to a halt and raised his voice.

“Were a person to wish to follow another without being noticed, he might do well to remove his shoes.”

Utter silence radiated from the long gallery. Then a small voice called back, “We’re not allowed to remove our shoes. It makes Miss Paul quite cross.”

“Life is full of decisions,” Alistair commented. Having delivered himself of this philosophical dictum, he went cheerfully on into the next room.

The sound of footsteps ceased to dog our heels.

   The skirmish with the two children had restored Alistair to something approaching good humour. As we wended our way through the state bedrooms of the central block he would pause for a moment, then continue with a look of amused satisfaction. It came back to me that one of the man’s quirks had been the occasional pleasure he took at being bested, especially in the areas of his own expertise. He had once laughed aloud when my thrown knife had nearly taken him in the throat—a reaction I attributed at the time to astonishment, but which was now looking like a sort of generosity of spirit that I had not suspected.

At the turn of the corridor that led into the east wing, he stopped. “These are the family’s rooms. Nothing of interest.”

I could hardly insist on poking my nose into private bedrooms, although I should have been interested to look at Lady Phillida’s dressing room. One can learn a great deal by studying a woman’s cosmetics and medicine cabinet.

Instead, we doubled back (causing a short flurry of panicked whispers and hasty movement) to retrace our steps through the gallery (ostentatiously ignoring the unnatural bulge of the curtains in one room) and past the genial ancestors to a door at the other end. This opened into the room Marsh had referred to as the “green library,” although there was nothing particularly green about it.

But it was certainly a library, rather than a room with decorative books and well-used sofas. Shelves lined the walls, unbroken but for five windows, two doors, and a fireplace with a portrait above it. Free-standing bookshelves of a subtly newer appearance extended into one end of the room, creating three bays that filled a third of the library’s floor space. On the other end, under the windows, were two long mahogany worktables and a trio of leather armchairs, all of which were equipped with reading lamps.

I felt instantly at home, and wanted only to dismiss Alistair, along with the rest of Justice Hall, that I might have a closer look at the shelves. I had to content myself instead with a strolling perusal, my hands locked together behind my back to keep them from reaching out for
Le Morte d’Arthur, Caxton 1485
or the delicious little red-and-gilt
Bestiary, MS Circa 1250
or… If I took one down, I should be lost. So I looked, like a hungry child in a sweet shop, and trailed out on my guide’s heels with one longing backward glance.

A boudoir, a school-room with battered ink-stained tables and a lot of out-of-date equipment, a similarly disused nursery (explaining the children’s lack of enthusiasm), then the suite of rooms Holmes and I had been given, followed by a smaller, unoccupied suite. Marsh’s rooms were at the end of the wing, overlooking the terraces and the end of the long, curving Justice Pond; then we were at the carved stairway again, with Alistair leading the way down.

Back on the ground floor we passed through the strung-together salons and dining rooms behind the Great Hall, working our way through the central block to its northeastern corner, where it connected with the stable wing. The estate offices were located here. Marsh was still occupied—not with Hendricks the cow-man, but with an authoritative voice connected to a ruddy face, whose lack of deference placed him as the estate steward. The voice—something about a low pasture wanting drainage—broke off when Alistair put his head in.

“Give us twenty minutes,” said Marsh’s voice, and Alistair withdrew, to continue into the block of stables. This was little more than a hollow square, with a quarter acre of cobbled courtyard flanked on three and a half sides by the enclosed stables. Most of the boxes were scrubbed and empty, but the rich odours of straw, ammonia, and dubbin pulled us down the row to the remainder of Justice Hall’s equine populace, to the hunters and hacks and the huge, placid draught horse with the leather boots for lawn-mowing hanging over its stall, and a pair of fat ponies so venerable they might have carried Lady Phillida as a child.

We had lost our pair of spies, I was glad to see. Probably they had decided that the current surface was not suited for stockinged feet, and been unwilling to risk the wrath of Miss Paul. In any case, the back of my neck ceased to itch, and we could relax our tongues a fraction as we made our way down the spacious, old-fashioned horse boxes.

“I should like to see the effects left by Marsh’s nephew,” I told my companion, although I kept my voice low.

“Why?”

A reasonable enough question, to which I had no ready answer. “Holmes asked me to look at them,” I replied, which seemed to satisfy Alistair. More than it did me.

The last box was filled by a great gorgeous stallion, his bay coat as polished as one of the tables in the Hall, haughty and unwilling to give us mere humans more than a glance. He filled the eye, the epitome of
Horse,
and he well knew it. I wondered uneasily if this was a recent acquisition; horse-breeding is a long-term occupation.

“Does it belong to Marsh?” I asked Alistair.

“No. Darling intends to build up a stud here. Or he did; things are somewhat uncertain now.” The thwarting of “Spinach” Darling was clearly cause for satisfaction. I had to admit, however, that as gentlemen’s occupations went, this at least was well timed. The wholesale slaughter of innocents in the trenches had extended to England’s requisitioned horseflesh as well; four years of loss had still not been overcome. Any offspring of this gleaming animal would bring a good price at auction.

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.”