Justice Hall (5 page)

Mrs Algernon broke my reverie, bustling in with a tray laden with her idea of warming drinks. The fumes of the hot whisky reached us before she did, and although the tray also held the makings for tea, there were three full mugs of her steaming mixture. She set one mug down within arm’s reach of each of us; as soon as she had left the hall, Alistair put his back on the tray and poured himself a cup of tea. One thing that had not changed: Although the Bedu were not the most outwardly observant of Moslems, they did generally demur at pork and alcohol, and although I had once seen Ali eat bacon, I’d never seen either Ali or Mahmoud take strong drink. Alistair’s diet, it seemed, remained as it had been.

The hot whisky did the trick for two of us (although I couldn’t have sworn that the fumes did not affect the abstainer). Mrs Algernon came in before the cups were empty to say that dinner was ready when we wished, and although Holmes and I were impatient to hear more of the teeth-on-edge Sidney, Alistair obediently put down his teacup and forced himself to his feet, raising his weight more by will-power than by the strength of his muscles. His first steps were supported by the chair back, and Holmes and I exchanged a glance. The man was in no shape to be questioned.

The dining room, fortunately, was low of ceiling and therefore made positively cosy by its fire. It smelt heavenly—a heaven made not of subtle foreign spices and delicate sauces, but of earthy comfort and, oddly, childhood pleasures. I sat down to my plate and allowed Mrs Algernon to ladle out my soup. At the first spoonful, Alistair’s description of the cuisine was justified: Plain-looking, it tasted of root vegetables and peasant grains, herbs rather than spices, chicken rather than the beef tea it resembled.

Under the warmth of the room (and the fumes of the drink, perhaps) our host’s social instincts were aroused, and when the housekeeper had left, he came out with an unexpectedly chatty explanation of the substance in our bowls. “This is Mrs Algernon’s patented cure-all. For all the years I’ve known her, she’s kept a pot on the back of the cookstove and tosses in whatever she has at hand. It never goes cold, never goes empty. Somewhere in here are atomic particles of the beef from my twenty-first birthday, and the carrot I brought my mother in a bouquet when I was four, and for all I know, the duck served at my parents’ wedding breakfast.”

“My grandmother did the same thing,” I told him with a smile. “Her pot was always bubbling away—she’d give a bowl to tramps who came to the door, to workmen, to us when we were hungry.” Which explained why the room’s odour had reminded me of childhood comforts.

“I could never figure out why it doesn’t taste like the bottom of a dust bin,” he remarked, sipping from his spoon. “Mrs Algernon says it’s because she seasons it with love. I suspect her of using brandy. It is, I have no doubt, massively unhygienic. If we all die in our beds tonight, you will know who is to blame.”

Holmes and I glanced at each other over our unhygienic but satisfying soup, and I could see the same thought in his mind: In removing himself from Palestine, our host had discovered not only a streak of garrulousness, but a sense of mild social humour as well; Ali’s Bedouin humour had tended to involve either bloodshed or heavy burlesque.

Mrs Algernon’s dinner was, as Alistair had said, simple but substantial, if showing signs of a hasty preparation. By the time the pudding course had been cleared, however, the remarkably genial man at the end of the table was fading fast, exhausted by his efforts at sociability. When he attempted to rise, intending to lead the way back into the hall for coffee, he leant hard on the table, then sat down again abruptly. Holmes leapt to his aid while I hurried to fetch Mrs Algernon; we caught up with the two men on the curving stone staircase, Holmes half carrying the younger man upwards. I took Alistair’s other arm, expecting him to throw off, but he did not.

Mrs Algernon directed us into a wood-panelled chamber with a fire in the grate, a room lifted straight out of a Mediaeval manuscript. We deposited him on a bed not much younger than the house and left him to the scolding ministrations of his housekeeper.

Back downstairs, with fresh logs on the fire, fresh coffee warming in front of it, and a dusty bottle of far-from-fresh brandy standing to one side, I studied my surroundings again, looking for I knew not what clue.

“What are we seeing here, Holmes?” I asked. “If you’d told me that Ali’s past was… this, I’d never have believed you. How do you explain the complete shift in the man—not just his speech patterns and how he moves, but his basic personality? The Ali we knew was short-tempered and as stand-offish as a cat. He’d have been at death’s door before he allowed us to carry him up a flight of stairs—or for that matter, before he’d have come to us for help in the first place. This is a completely different man.”

Holmes nodded. “One can only assume that when he went to Palestine, Alistair Hughenfort created the image of an entirely new person, and then stepped into that image. Now he is home, his original persona has taken over again. You’ve done it yourself, Russell, when you are in disguise. It is akin to complete fluency in two languages; one moves from one to another with no pause to consider the changes.”

“Holmes, I realise that clothing makes the man, but this is a bit… extreme. To assume a disguise for days, even weeks, is one thing. He was Ali Hazr for, what? Twenty years? And it wasn’t as if he went out to Palestine as a disguised government agent in the first place—he and his cousin must have been out there for some time before Mycroft claimed them. What could drive a man to tear up what are quite obviously deep roots in order to become a foreign nomad?”

At that question, however, Holmes could only shake his head.

   Most unusually, I was awake the next morning before both Holmes and the sun. Before anyone, I thought as I padded down the time-worn steps with my boots in my hand—but no; once in the panelled vestibule beneath the minstrels’ gallery, kitchen noises of clatter and conversation came from behind the doors on the other side of the dining room. I hesitated, mulling over the appeal of a cup of tea, but decided my thirst for solitude was greater.

Frustration had awakened me, had in fact been my restless companion all the night, an impatience to act, or even to know what it was that we were being called upon to do. I had, I realised, been working for ten weeks straight at this profession I still thought of as Holmes’; like a turning flywheel, the momentum of activity was hard to slow.

The massive bolt on the front door slid easily back, and a wash of frost-tinged air poured in. As near as I could see in the half light, the porch and yard beyond were free of people and slumbering dogs. I slipped out, eased the door shut behind me, sat on the porch bench to lace on my boots, and set out into the fresh, pre-dawn twilight.

Traces of mist hung over the land, but it was high enough that it did not obscure my half-seen surroundings. My boots crunched over tightly packed gravel to a break in the walls between the corner of the house and a small building I took to be a church. Once I was through the gap, the surface changed from gravel to grass, and my footsteps ceased to jar the air.

I wandered among the half-bare trees of a walled orchard, enjoying the ancient, sleeping garden, my feet raising the scent of fermenting apples from the slick, black blanket of fallen leaves. I crossed into a large kitchen garden, also walled, of which less than half seemed to be actively under cultivation, and saw a wooden door on the far wall. This opened onto a water meadow, the stream at its bottom bridged by a small structure that shuddered, but did not collapse, beneath my weight. The air lay so still on the land, it was like walking out into a painting.

I made my way through the soft pearl of gathering light, heading in the direction of a tree-capped rise glimpsed in outline perhaps half a mile away. The air smelt of grass and sheep and earth: no sea breath here, as at Sussex, no peat tang as in Devon. This was the growing heart of England, deep black soil that had been nourishing crops and cattle for thousand upon thousand of years, before Normans, or Romans, or even Saxon horde. As the sun’s rays began to touch the high mist overhead, I noticed what appeared to be a bench at the top of the hill, just under the edge of the cow-cropped branches. I clambered over a stile and trotted up the side of the hill, brushed a layer of fallen leaves from the rustic bench, and settled onto the damp wood to watch the sun come into the fold of earth that held Alistair Hughenfort’s quintessentially English house.

The cool streaks of mist shied away at the merest hint of sun; soon my hilltop was fully lit. After a minute, the first rays lighted on the tips of three Tudor chimneys, easing like cool honey down the lumpy brick-work to the neatly thatched peaks. The many-paned windows set into the half-timbered upper level of the house flared now into a mosaic of light; when the line of the sun made a neat division between the house’s two storeys, an upstairs window flew unexpectedly open. The depths of the walls kept the light from falling on the figure inside, but I felt that someone stood for a few moments in whatever room lay behind the window, looking out, and then went away.

The house was stirring, but I did not. The sun felt delicious on the side of my face, bright with promise and the illusion of warmth. The vista before me, this intimate and timeless marriage of stone and wood, plaster and thatch, was too near perfection for me to wish to break away. The balance of golden buildings and green field, tree and rock, water and sky made the impatience retreat and my heart begin to sing. I wanted it, all of it: not just the house—I could have bought half a dozen sixteenth-century houses if I wished—but everything the house was, had been, would be. My mother’s family had migrated to England in the last century; my father’s people were rootless Californians; everything I owned that had been in my family for longer than two generations could be packed into a small travelling case.

Of course, for all I knew, Alistair’s people (those who were not Hughenforts) could have come here as recently as my own. But I thought not. The way he had moved in the house, his manner of speech to the two servants, evoked a sense of bone-deep kin with house and land. In Palestine, the man had been edgy and aggressive; here his testiness was gentled by the landscape.

Movement caught my eye in the formal garden behind the house: a black-and-white cat, picking its way through the wet grass, heading to the stables to hunt its breakfast. Down the valley, a cow complained; in the yard, a cock crew; on my hill, I sat, spellbound.

Had the house been more deliberately planned, if there had been the faintest air of artifice about the view, the perfection would have been cloying. As it was, the house and its out-buildings were uneven enough, the materials sufficiently varied to make it apparent that the man-made objects had grown up as organically as the trees. Badger Old Place, the Debrett’s listing had called it—and indeed, it even resembled the animal: low to the earth, shaggy and somewhat unkempt, its exterior giving little hint of the power and potential ferocity sheltering within.

I envied Alistair Hughenfort his home. I badly wanted to know what force had wrenched him away from it. I wished I could reconcile the two sides of the man. But above all, I wished that I had paused before coming out here to take a cup of tea.

Then, as if the universe had heard my string of desires and chosen to grant me at least one, a figure emerged from the house, and near-perfection shimmered into absolute: The figure carried a tray, and what is more, the tray was coming in my direction.

The bearer, I realised, was neither servant nor husband, but host. Alistair negotiated the stream via a series of rocks I had not noticed, scorning the shaky bridge, and strolled easily up the rise, the silver tray balanced on the fingers of one hand as if he were a waiter in a crowded café, a waiter dressed in a knit jumper of shades which would make a peacock proud.

He nodded as he drew near, but placed the tray on the bench beside me without a word. He then stepped back and turned to face the house, looking wan, but rested.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Mrs Algernon was about to send a tray up. I told her I would take it. I did not tell her you were not in the house, so it will be cold.”

It was cool, but welcome. I poured and sipped; he stood and looked over his home, then pulled off his cloth cap and slapped it against his knee. I remembered clearly that of the two, Mahmoud had been the dour, rocklike one, Ali the volatile, always itching for action.

“The last time you brought me a cup of tea,” I told him, “was the morning before we reached Acre.”

“That was Mahmoud,” he responded automatically, without stopping to think. I had known it was Mahmoud; I merely wanted to hear him say his cousin’s name. “Marsh,” he corrected himself.

“It was Palestine, so I should say that ‘Mahmoud’ is correct.” I sipped my drink, wondering what had brought him up here.

“You and Holmes,” he began abruptly, “you were good at what you did. Mah—my cousin was impressed. He is not impressed by many. He may listen to you.”