Justice Hall (27 page)

“They mourned him,” Iris said in a soft voice.

“Precisely. And at a stage of the War when few souls had any capacity for mourning left in them.”

I looked at my companions, and found that the soldiers were not the only people to mourn this “sprig of the aristocracy.” Iris was staring unseeing at the flames, her eyes dry but tragedy on her face—she’d been fond of the boy, this representative of a lost generation of golden youth. Alistair was scowling and kicking with his heel at the basket of logs. And Marsh—

One glance at Marsh, and I shot to my feet in confusion, exclaiming, “Look at the time—after mid-night already; I’ll tumble into the fire with exhaustion. Holmes, surely we can continue this in the morning?”

I practically hauled at his ear-lobe to get him out of the room; fortunately, he caught my urgency, if not its reason, and we made our hasty farewells.

But I knew that the image of Marsh Hughenfort, his face half covered by one hand and actual tears trembling in those black eyes, was one that would stay with me for a long, long time. The man looked decades older than Holmes, and far from any source of vitality or hope. We had no business inflicting the vivid reminder of an innocent’s death on the man when he was in his current condition.

Let Iris drug him to sleep with the tale of Ratty and Toad.

   In the morning, however, Marsh’s rooms were silent, and I for one was reluctant to break into his rest. We continued downstairs to join those house guests who were upright at this hour, a pair of unshaven young men still in dinner jackets, who seemed to have not bothered about going to bed at all, and who were in no condition to intrude on our peaceful enjoyment of eggs and toast. After breakfast, I gave Holmes a brief tour of the house (passing by the ancient stairway into the cellar-chapel, as I had no key) and ended up in the riches of the Greene Library. That was where Iris found us.

She was wearing a remarkably conventional wool dress and carried in her gloved hand a small, maroon-covered Book of Common Prayer. It took no great effort to discern her intent, although I was rather surprised at her willingness to attend the Sunday services; why, I do not know.

“Marsh is awake, having some breakfast; the doctor’s coming in an hour, so we thought we might resume after that. You’re welcome to join me in the chapel, if you like. Or not to join me—it is by no means compulsory.”

“Thank you,” I told her, “but I think we’ll commune with The Divine among the stacks.”

“I’m sure God dwells here as much as in the chapel. More, perhaps, since it’s considerably warmer. Shall we meet in Marsh’s rooms at noon?”

We agreed, and she left us to our reading.

Today was November the eleventh. At 10:58 the house gong sounded a brief warning. It went off again precisely at 11:00, somehow conjuring up a sombre sound, rather than the energetic crescendo it produced at mealtimes. We rose to our feet for the nation’s two minutes’ silence, and then returned to our books.

Holmes, appropriately if uncharacteristically enough, was poring over an immense and ancient family Bible. Not the printed section, but rather the generations of Hughenfort names, beginning with the eighteenth century.

“Write this down, Russell,” he ordered; I uncapped my pen. “Ralph William Hughenfort, born 1690, eighth Earl of Calminster, made first Duke of Beauville in 1721. Probably lent some sage advice to the Crown and saved George I from losing his breeches over the South Sea Bubble. At any rate, duke he was. Sons William Thomas, born 1724, second Duke, died without issue, and Charles John, born 1732, third Duke. Charles’ son Ralph Charles, born 1761, had three sons and two daughters, then died before his father. Those sons were Lionel Thomas Philip, born 1792; Charles Thomas, born 1798; and Gervase Thomas Richard, born 1802. Lionel became the fourth Duke in 1807 at the tender age of fifteen. His children were Gerald Richard, born 1830; Anne, in 1834; and Philip Peter, born in 1837, with four others who did not live to reach their majority. Anne died before she married; Philip Peter died in South Africa with no known issue. Gerald Richard was made fifth Duke in 1865, and had four living children: Henry Thomas, born 1859, with his son Gabriel born in 1899” (My pen paused briefly; I had been thinking of Gabriel as a dead boy, but in truth, he was a few months older than I); “William Maurice—our Marsh—born 1876; Lionel Gerald, 1882; and Phillida Anne, 1893. Henry was made the sixth Duke in 1903, and Marsh the seventh.”

Long-lived and late to breed, I noted. Fairly typical for aristocrats.

“But to go back to the fourth Duke’s generation. Lionel’s brother Charles died without issue. The third brother, Gervase, had two sons, William, born 1842, and Louis, in 1847. William is the father of Alistair, his sister Rose, and his brother Ralph; Louis had one son, Ivo Michael—your shooting companion of yesterday.”

“All right,” I said. I scribbled and crossed out names, finally arranging the relevant generations (that is, minus most of the women) into a family tree. That gave me the following:

After Marsh, the seventh Duke, the future line of succession would be: Lionel’s son Thomas; Alistair; Ralph; and Ivo. If Philip Peter had sons somewhere in South Africa, they would come after young Thomas and before Alistair; if Ralph had sons, they would come before Ivo. That no sons for Ralph were noted in the Bible meant little, since the latest date I could see recorded the death of a distant relative in 1910. Thomas’s birth in 1914 was missing, as well as those of Lenore and Walter Darling.

“We can do nothing about the boy Thomas until Wednesday,” Holmes noted. “I should like to have seen Gabriel Hughenfort’s last effects, had you not dragged me away with such haste. We must also enquire about the fifth Duke’s brother, Philip Peter, as well as Alistair’s brother Ralph.”

“Are you going under the hypothesis that yesterday’s shooting was an attempt to clear the succession?”

“The possibility cannot be ignored. See here: In January 1914, the sixth Duke—Henry—was alive and well, and could have made up the better part of a cricket team out of his heirs, with his brother Lionel’s wife expecting a child in the spring-time. By the end of 1918, heirs were getting a bit thin on the ground. The seventh Duke’s heir is this boy Thomas, who has some doubts attached to him. At the beginning of the War Alistair, to take one possible candidate, was seventh from the strawberry leaves; yesterday there appears to have been only that one doubtful boy between Alistair and Marsh’s title. When the seventh Duke and his immediate heir presented themselves in the close vicinity of a barrage of shotguns, well, temptation may have reared.”

“How ironic,” I mused, “that after all the hazards those two have weathered over the years, they would very nearly die on their own doorstep in peaceable England.”

“Tell me your impressions of Sidney Darling,” Holmes said, not interested in irony at the moment.

“Languid gentleman on the surface, modern-day robber baron underneath.”

“Even twenty years ago he’d have had to conceal the latter, if he wanted to move in the levels of society his wife’s name would open to him. Now, a little greed is looked upon as an amusing foible. O, saint-seducing gold!” he growled. “That for which all virtue is sold, and almost every vice.”

“War seldom enters but where wealth allures,” I retorted, figuring that Dryden was at least as apposite a misquotation as Shakespeare or Jonson. “And I don’t know that you could in the least call Darling a saint. His greed lies deep, and I think he’s sunk a fair bit of his own money into the stud, for one thing, and is worried about being suddenly left without a home.”

“Who came up with this boy, Thomas?” Holmes asked abruptly.

“According to what I’ve picked up, the mother herself wrote. She’d somehow heard of Henry’s death in the summer and sent her condolences—and, rather pointedly, those of the new duke’s nephew, Thomas. I don’t know if it was Marsh’s idea to bring them to London for inspection, or Lady Phillida’s. In either case, both are going to Town in order to meet the boy. Or, they were both going to London. I don’t know if Marsh will be fit enough.”

“I should think that man would have one boot firmly planted in the grave and still do what he deemed necessary.”

“I don’t know, Holmes. If Alistair and Iris unite to keep him here, I’d not care to wager on the winning side.”

He smiled to himself. “It is a rather interesting variation on a marriage, is it not?”

“Do you mean Marsh and Iris, or all three of them?”

But his smile only deepened.

Iris reappeared shortly thereafter, the odour of sanctity strong about her, but wearing an expression of worry.

“The doctor’s seen Marsh,” she told us. “Some of the wounds are festering, and he’s running a fever. I think perhaps we should delay our meeting.”

“But of course,” Holmes said, hiding his irritation nobly. He scowled after her departing form, and turned to me. “Let us use this opportunity to examine the ground where Marsh was shot. There may be some tiny piece of evidence not yet trampled or washed away.”

A change of clothing, a pair of walking-sticks, and we were away.

Yesterday’s mist had cleared, leaving the air frosty and dry. Setting a pace brisk enough to warm us, I led Holmes on a reenactment of the shoot, from the first stand at the upper lawns to the lakeside where I had stoned a duck in full flight. There were men at the earlier sites, quartering the ground for unclaimed birds, as well as stray discarded cartridges, which not only looked untidy but did the stomachs of grazing animals no good.

Then to the final stand.

I walked the line of guns, pointing out roughly where each shooter had stood waiting. Holmes burrowed into the thick shrubs from which the bird, and possibly the murderous shot, had come, but it appeared that others had been in there since the shooting as well. He emerged, his clothing somewhat the worse for wear, after ten minutes of grubbing about.

“I’m very sorry, Holmes, I should have kept everyone out, but there was just too great a press. Bloom must have had fifty or sixty beaters, and they were all over.”

“I doubt there’d have been much evidence to begin with. The fallen leaves are too thick to show footprints, there is nothing that would take a fingerprint, and the only threads I could see are rough white cotton. I take it the beaters wore some kind of smock?” he asked, holding up the thread in question.

“Most of them.”

“Very well. You say the boy Peter and his father were here?”

“So the boy said. The other twin, Roger, was a little closer to me.”

Holmes squatted to examine the ground, tracing boot-marks with his long gloved fingers. He shifted, lowered his head to gain a more extreme angle, and then stood up.

“And Marsh—if you would take up his position, Russell?”

I went to the holly clump where the two cousins had fallen, and faced Holmes. He settled his walking-stick into his shoulder and sighted down it to the first stand of mixed evergreen shrubs.

“The bird breaks,” he said. “One. Two. Bang.”

As my rough sketch the night before had suggested, he was now facing a point about halfway between the two evergreens. He repeated his motion, only this time faster, continuing until he was aiming at me. “One-two-three-four-five-bang,” he got out, and nearly fell over as his feet corkscrewed around themselves.

“Unfortunately, Holmes, the bird was over there. In fact,” I said in surprise, “the bird is still over there.”

We converged on the spot and looked at the twice-shot fowl.

“Why do you suppose they left this here?” I wondered.

“Overlooked in the dusk, or perhaps squeamishness. The bird was nearly the death of their duke, after all. However, I think it worth performing a cursory necropsy on the creature. Just to confirm a theory. How are you at plucking birds?”

I put my hands together behind my back. “It takes me an hour and rips my fingers to bits,” I told him.

To my surprise, he sat down on a nearby log, removed his gloves, and proceeded to strip the bird of its feathers, with a practiced jerk of the wrist such as I had seen Mrs Hudson perform. In a brief time a cloud of feathers spilt across his boots. I sat down—clear of the feathers—to observe.
“Birds in their little nest agree,”
he startled me by chanting in a sing-song voice as he tugged at the feathers, “
it is a shameful sight, when children of one family, fall out and chide and fight
. So, Russell, what see you?”