Justice Hall (43 page)

“There was something in the diary about an aviator’s jacket,” I recalled. “And Dorothea Cobb told me that Hélène’s brother was a Canadian fighter pilot. That must be he.”

The pilot, having scared us out of our wits, had circled and was lining up his plane with the runway.

“How does one land on the snow?” Iris wondered aloud.

“With care,” came a new voice. We looked at the small door to the barn, over which hung the sign OFFICE, and then lowered our eyes to the figure in the wheeled chair. The hand with which he was shielding his face was slick with old scar tissue, although he grinned as he watched the red machine drop lower and slow in the sky.

As one, Iris and I looked at each other, then at the aeroplane.

“Yep,” said the man. “You’re looking at my sister. Hi, Jimmy,” he added.

Young Mr Rhoades tore his eyes from the flying daredevil and shook his hand. “Morning, Ben. This here’s Miss Russell and Miss Sutherland. They’ve come looking for your sister. You mind taking care of returning them to town when they’re finished? I’ve got a pile of work.”

“Happy to. Good day, ladies. The name’s Ben O’Meary.”

O’Meary’s right hand was less disastrously scarred; close up, his face showed signs of a less comprehensive brush with the flames.

“Crashed in the War,” he told us, a phrase so matter-of-fact, he must have begun a thousand conversations with that same blunt explanation. “They scraped me out and sent me home, to teach my sister to fly. I run the business, she teaches the classes and does the stunt shows. Exactly the opposite of what we’d planned, but ain’t that life? You want to come in? She’ll be a minute.”

But we chose to wait in the open air for the pilot of the red fighter, and he manoeuvred his chair back through the doorway and left us in the cold.

The aeroplane taxied slowly on the slick surface, neared the barn, and then the engine coughed into silence. In a moment, the plane’s pilot climbed out of the cockpit and jumped easily to the ground.

She was a tall woman, as tall as I but broader in the shoulders, and I could well imagine her slinging a wounded Tommy across her back. Then she began to remove the layers of clothing that kept her from freezing. Thick scarf unwrapped from her neck and face, the helmet and goggles. Yes, there were those famous emerald eyes, that ebony hair, but something else as well, a small fact that Gabriel had failed to record.

She was what the boy’s parents would no doubt have termed a half breed. Ireland lay in her eyes and her surname, but those Irish ancestors had intermarried with folk who knew neither freckles nor red hair. She was perhaps a quarter American Indian, maybe an eighth, but plenty to mark her as an odd choice for the heir to one of the oldest dukedoms in England.

She was also extraordinarily beautiful.

She shook her short hair loose of the helmet’s marks and shot us a grin of pure high spirits, a grin I recognised instantly from a blurred photograph of overall-clad drivers in France. “You two ladies looking to learn to fly?” she asked. “Or you just wanting a quick pass over town? I’m happy to take you, but I hope you’ll want to try it for yourselves. There’s nothing in the world like it.”

“I can see that,” I told her, speaking only the truth. “But actually, we’ve come to talk about another matter.”

“I’m happy to teach your husbands. I’m good with men.”

“It concerns a young soldier you once knew, by the name of Gabriel Hughenfort.”

It was as if I’d kicked her in the stomach. All her high spirits vanished into instant wariness; she even took a step back. In a moment, I thought, she’d break into a run—or reach for a weapon.

“Damn,” she said. “Damnation. Well, I knew you’d come eventually.”

The man in the chair, wondering perhaps where we had got to, had rolled outside again and now called out, “Are you ladies going to stand there and freeze to death, or can I shut this door?”

Raising her head, but not taking her eyes off us, the pilot shouted, “We’ll be right there, Ben.” She waited until the door closed, then she leant forward and spoke in a low, forceful voice. “If you hurt him, if you so much as make him uncomfortable, I swear to God you’ll never lay eyes on him again.”

Then she stalked off to the office. Iris stared after her, with an expression that asked about the pilot’s sanity, and said, “But why on earth would we want to hurt that poor man?”

I shook my head, but not, as she thought, from an equal incomprehension. Instead, I was asking Iris to wait, as I propelled her forward by the elbow, trying to keep down my excitement. I could be wrong—those small hints, the odd coincidences; the ring she didn’t wear, her willingness to leave France during the last, victorious weeks of the War. I could be mistaken. But the green-eyed woman’s attitude made no sense, unless—

I could be wrong.

But I was not.

Iris saw him a split second after I did, standing at the side of the pilot. It took her a moment longer to understand what she was seeing.

A child, about five years of age, with his mother’s green eyes.

Everything else about him was pure Hughenfort, from the lift of his chin and his stocky grace to Marsh’s raised eyebrow.

Gabriel’s son.

   Iris swayed, when her mind finally comprehended what her eyes were telling her, and I seized a beat-up wooden chair and jammed it behind her knees.

“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Oh my God.”

This reaction quite clearly was not what the boy’s mother had anticipated. The child had retreated from the peculiar behaviour of these two strangers, and now stood half hidden behind his mother, her hand resting on his shoulder by way of protection.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

Her brother took it further. “What the hell is going on here?”

“My name—,” Iris began, but I cut in on her.

“Before we get into the details, may I suggest that the boy be excused? That way you can choose how best to talk to him about what we are going to tell you.”

The green eyes thought about it for a while, then flickered over to Ben. “Would you and Gabe mind going up to the house and starting lunch? The boys will be here before long and they’ll be hungry. This may take a while.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything, but I think it’d be a good idea. You go with Ben, okay, Gabe? You can start the sandwiches.”

Iris’s rapt gaze followed the boy until the door had shut behind him. Immediately the door closed, the still angry but now confused pilot dragged up another chair and dropped into it.

“Lady, you better start talking.”

“May I ask one question first, Mrs—” I stopped, then apologised. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure of your name.”

“Hewetson,” she said, then corrected herself. “I call myself Hewetson.”

“Mrs Hewetson, I don’t know how to put this so it isn’t offensive, so I won’t even try. Before we go any further, we have to know: Were you and Gabriel Hughenfort, who was known at the time as Hewetson, legally married?”

She eyed me, thinking about the question’s implications—but not, going by her expression, just those that were offensive.

“Why don’t you know that already? And if you don’t know that, how did you find me?”

By way of answer, Iris reached into her handbag and pulled out the worn red journal. She laid it with care onto the desk between her and Hélène, who had obviously never seen it before. It was equally obvious, blindingly so, that when she opened it, she knew the handwriting as well as she knew her own. She reached out and ran a tentative pair of fingers down one page, as if to touch the hand of the man holding the pen. She then turned to the last page of writing, read for perhaps five seconds, and closed the book.

“How—” she started, but her voice failed her.

“It’s a very long story,” Iris answered. “One that I’ve come from England to tell you. But first, please, would you answer my friend’s question?”

On the one hand, it mattered not in the least if they had somehow managed to wed on the field of battle. The boy was Gabriel’s, and happy; neither of those facts, I thought, would change. On the other, everything depended on it: An illegitimate child could not inherit, no more than a female child could. Marsh’s freedom lay in a piece of paper.

Philippa Hewetson raised her head, and I could see the answer before she said it.

“Yes,” she said. Iris covered her mouth with both her gloved hands and made a sound like laughter, with tears in her eyes. I closed my own eyes and found myself saying under my breath, in something remarkably like prayer,
Thank you, God, oh thank you, thank you.

When I opened my eyes again, the hard, protective look was back on her face, and I made haste to explain our rather extreme reaction. I was not certain just where she perceived a threat, but I knew this was one of those situations where honesty, while not necessarily the best policy, might be the only one possible.

“A legal marriage certificate means that your son is heir to a very large estate and a very important title in England. Gabriel was the only son of the sixth Duke of Beauville. He didn’t tell you this?”

“He said his family took its inheritances very seriously. Those were his words. He told me that when I said we didn’t need to marry, that I would—Anyway, he wouldn’t hear of it, so I asked this priest in one of the villages, an old man I’d gotten to know pretty well. I’m a Catholic, by the way. I thought it was a joke—about the inheritances, that is. Gabriel laughed, that’s for sure. I figured his father was the kind of self-made man out to found a dynasty, who’d throw a fit if his son brought home a brown-skinned Canadian Catholic like me.”

“And yet they’d want the boy, eventually,” I concluded. This was the source of her animosity.

“And here you are,” she pointed out.

“It’s not quite the same,” Iris objected.

“Isn’t it?”

I thought this a good time to throw a couple of facts into the burgeoning argument. “Iris is Gabriel’s mother,” I told her. “And the reason we—”

The woman’s face closed to us as if shutters had been thrown across it. “No she isn’t. She’s the aunt Gabriel went to see in Paris. I remember the name. Look here, I don’t know what kind of scheme you’re trying to pull on me, but it’s not going to work. I want you to leave. Now.”

“I am his mother,” Iris told her. “He didn’t know it himself; only six or eight people ever did. And now you. That’s part of the long story.”

The green eyes flickered down to the war journal, then back to me. “You were saying something.”

“I was about to say, the reason we got involved with the string of events that led us here is that someone we both… care about needs to know that the succession is secure before he can free himself.”

She was unmoved. “What if he doesn’t? What if I ‘lose’ the marriage certificate, say that Gabe’s illegitimate, say we want nothing to do with you?”

“Then your son would be robbed of a heritage that has been a part of England for eight hundred years,” Iris told her. “You’ve really never heard of the name Hughenfort?”

The green-eyed pilot shrugged. Shrugged! I pictured the reaction of the Darlings to that shrug, and stifled a laugh.

“I’ve heard of York and Windsor, too, but that doesn’t make Jack York down at the garage into a prince. I don’t know. We’re happy here. Gabe’s got a good life. Why would I want to spoil him by showing him a castle, having people bow and scrape and call him—what would they call him, anyway?”

“Your Grace,” I told her helpfully. “But they’ll call him what you ask. In any case, I’m afraid it’s too late. You may choose to have nothing to do with Justice Hall—which is certainly what the current duke would like to do—but we know about you now, and there will be church records.” (If they weren’t bombed, lost, or stolen, I added mentally.) “Like it or no, your son is the sixth Duke’s heir.” The irony of
forcing
Justice Hall, with all its wealth and beauty, onto not just one unwilling duke, but two, did not escape me. Iris, however, was too close to it to see the humour. She leant forward and stretched out one hand.

“Come back with us,” she burst out. “Not permanently, just to see it, to meet the family—
your
family.”

“What, now? Don’t be ridiculous. I have a business to run.”

“Surely this is your slow time of year,” Iris said diplomatically.

“Christmas!” I said suddenly. “A Christmas holiday in an English country house. Your son would adore it.” I had to work to get some enthusiasm into that suggestion—personally, I’d rather have been condemned to a week in the trenches. “And anyway, I’ll bet it’s been a while since you had a holiday.”

“I couldn’t leave Ben here alone.” She was weakening, definitely weakening.

“Bring him, too,” Iris urged, scenting capitulation, but the final unscrupulous blow was mine to deliver.

“Your husband loved Justice Hall,” I told the woman. “There are pictures of him and his ancestors on the walls, the journals he kept as a boy, servants who watched him grow up. And although I never knew him, I feel confident that the thought of his son there, even on a brief visit, would have made Gabriel very happy.”