Justice Hall (48 page)

Perhaps, I decided, this fancy-dress ball wouldn’t be too bad after all.

Donning our costumes was a quick matter, with the arrangement of my hair beneath the turban taking the longest, as it was a skill I had forgotten. When Holmes and I met in Badger’s Hall, I laughed aloud in sheer pleasure. Helen seemed to find our costumes somewhat disappointing, given the ornate possibilities opened up by the Tut theme, but Mahmoud and Ali merely exchanged a glance of amusement.

We piled into the car, Holmes, Marsh, and I, to be driven by Algernon to Justice Hall. Algernon would bring Alistair and the Canadian contingent later, so as to keep them under wraps until the last minute. I had to feel a moment’s pity for the unsuspecting Phillida, whose elaborate party was going to be completely eclipsed by her brother’s announcement.

The special train had obviously arrived at Arley Holt: We passed a steady stream of motorcars coming away from the Hall empty, returning to the village for the next load. This time Algernon circled around to the delivery entrance of the kitchen wing, so that we might enter Justice without having to push through a hundred excited guests. Marsh took himself off upstairs to consult with Iris concerning the arrangements for Gabe’s care during the evening, Holmes disappeared in the other direction with my notes of Justice Hall’s hidden passages, and I stood alone in the corridor of the western wing, torn between the tumult of voices spilling out of the Great Hall to my left and the peace of the library above me.

First, I decided, I should like to remedy the one lack in my costume. I was, in fact, armed with a slim throwing knife that rode in the top of my left boot, but a true Bedouin male would not be caught dead without an impressive blade at his belt. Not that I had any intention of using the thing here—I would actually be happy with just a decorative hilt in an empty scabbard—but the costume cried out for it.

The Armoury was the obvious place for decorative knives. Also for pikestaffs, crossbows, claymores, and broadswords, but those weapons fit neither in the theme nor in a press of merrymakers. I walked to the Armoury door, let myself inside, closed the door behind me, and then froze.

One thing about old stone buildings: The sound of rats is generally confined to the wooden rafters, yet I could have sworn that I heard the characteristic quick scuffle of movement from against the wall. From the enormous waist-high chest, in fact, which on closer inspection seemed to have its lid slightly lifted. I fought a smile, frowned at the walls as if choosing my weapon, then went over to the chest and clambered up to reach a foot-long jewelled scabbard hanging above it. I jumped down to the floor and arranged the knife in my belt (where it proved remarkably uncomfortable), stamped noisily across the room to the door, opened it, shut it, then crept back to the chest and waited.

The heavy lid rose up, an inch, then two; I stuck my hands in my belt to face the growing gap. An inch more, then a startled gasp and it banged shut. I stepped forward, wrestled the massive lid open, and glared down at the two figures inside.

“It’s all right, sir,” Lenore Darling gabbled. “We have permission to be here, really we do, and we weren’t hurting anything, and never touched the weapons, honest.”

“Honest,” the boy echoed.

“Come on out of there, you two,” I said, and held the top for them. “How on earth did you get this lid open in the first place? It weighs a young ton.”

“We had to sort of prise at it—I think it scratched it a little, but it has a lot of scratches anyway. Are you one of the guests?” she asked, trying to distract me from my examination of the great gouge along the side where they had levered it open, which was, indeed, only the latest gash among the many time-honoured wounds of its long career. A bit of shoe polish or lamp-black and no-one would be the wiser, I thought.

“I am a guest,” I told the girl, “but we’ve met before. Mary Russell.”

They gaped at me, frankly admiring. “Zingers!” said Walter, and “Is that really you?” said his more skeptical sister. I pulled off my head-covering to give them the benefit of my hair, and both agreed it was their uncle’s guest.

I was not, however, finished with the chest. They had agreed with Iris not to touch any of the weapons in the Armoury, and although I had no wish to turn them in to the authorities, I thought it best to be sure that they had kept their part of the bargain. Every object I could see capable of prising open that lid had some kind of blade attached to it; I lifted the lid up enough to let light inside, and saw what they had been using.

It was an old tyre-lever, which was now transferring rust to a collection of moth-chewed wall hangings someone had stored in the chest and forgotten. Marsh’s mother, or grandmother even; certainly they’d been in the chest so long, I thought, that rusty metal or children’s shoes could not do them much damage. Which was more than I could say for the children’s clothes—one of Miss Paul’s chief duties was undoubtedly overseeing the changing of their clothes several times daily. I stretched to prop the heavy lid against the wall and then hitched my upper body over the side to retrieve the tyre-lever (realising that I probably ought not enquire where they had found the object, seeing that they were forbidden the stables wing as well). As my fingers touched the pitted metal, my sleeve brushed against something that was neither ancient wood nor moth-eaten wool. I handed the lever to Lenore, then went back on my toes to see what the foreign object had been.

Papers, it looked like: a packet of letters bound in a tired blue ribbon, a folded piece of heavy paper, and a single letter in its opened envelope, with a crumpled oil-cloth wrap that they had been in. I pulled them out, eased the lid down again, and glanced at the solitary envelope. It had been sealed, then opened with a sharp blade; the envelope had neither the black Post Office stamp nor the red mark of the censor. One glimpse of the handwriting, and I nearly ripped the letter out of its envelope.
Dearest Pater,
it began.

I was holding in my hands Gabriel Hughenfort’s final letter to his father, the letter written the night before his execution. A letter, I saw, containing no word of the young officer’s true fate, but which held instructions on thanks to be extended to various individuals, including the batman Jamie McFarlane and the Reverend Mr Hastings. Most important, however, and the reason it had never reached Gabriel’s parents, was the startling news of his battlefield wife, Helen, his love for her, his apologies for the haste of the marriage, and his knowledge that they would love her as their own. Gabriel’s other “final” letter, that time-stained sheet with the gentle and uplifting words intended for his mother’s eyes, had gone through; this one, from the heir to his duke and meant for the father alone, had been given to a trusted family confidant to deliver personally. I sorted quickly through the bound packet of envelopes, all of which were in a woman’s hand (Helen’s, I thought), then unfolded the heavy paper of the other loose document: a Certificate of Marriage, between Gabriel Adrian Thomas Hughenfort and Philippa Helen O’Meary. To my relief, it did not look as if Lenore and Walter had got as far as reading them.

“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 permission, 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