Justice Hall (7 page)

One clear indicator of an establishment’s degree of affluence, in 1923 as in 1723, was the number of unnecessary individuals it maintained. Messengers and footmen, rendered all but superfluous by modern methods of communication and transport, were nonetheless kept on by the grandest houses, for show more than any actual convenience they might provide. So I was curious to see how many persons would be required to recognise our arrival.

Two, it seemed (in addition to young Tom at the entrance gates). Before I could make a move towards the car door, it opened, held for me by a rigid-spined young man who stared off with proper fixity at the distant hillside. On the other side of the car an older man in a formal cutaway coat was aiding Alistair and Holmes. Alistair greeted him as Ogilby; this would be the butler.

When I was safely freed from the motorcar, I half expected the discreet young man to climb into the motor and direct Algernon in an entire circuit of the house in order to off-load our bags at the service entrance, but instead Algernon merely handed them over, and the footman disappeared promptly in the direction of the house.

While Alistair was telling Algernon that he’d ring to Badger Old Place when he wanted to go home, I looked over the top of the motorcar at the ornate fountain that formed the centre of the circle. It had not yet been drained for the winter, and the low sun collected in a million diamonds, the water playing and dripping off the bronze figures. Pelicans, I saw, and nearly laughed aloud at the unlikely frieze of beaks and outstretched wings that intertwined and emitted jets of water into the bronze sea-cliffs at their base. I did not think I had ever seen such an ornate fountain incorporating such whimsy. Certainly it did not have much in common with the immense dignity of the house itself.

A throat cleared, and I tore my eyes away from the Baroque splendour to join Holmes. We made our scrupulously escorted way up the seven wide steps of a brief but psychologically distancing terrace. A vestigial portico sheltered us; an ornate door swung wide of its carven stone surrounds; Justice Hall permitted us entrance.

Just inside the door, some surprisingly indulgent past master had built a small vestibule for the guardian of the door. The butler even had some heat source, the brush of warmth on my face informed me, and I could see a chair and foot-stool accompanying the more usual front-door implements of waiting umbrellas, a house telephone, and the all-essential silver salver for accepting the cards of callers. Once past this private oasis of comfort, the interior hall was freezing cold, but as unremittingly impressive as any duke could have asked—or many kings, for that matter. A hundred visitors might collect beneath that frescoed dome, under those arched colonnades, among those acres of echoing marble both real and faux; the grandeur would still dwarf them all. Three guests, a butler, and the house-maid receiving our outer garments made for a human element that was insignificant indeed.

I told the maid that I would keep my coat, thank you. She bobbed her response and went away with the garments of Alistair and Holmes over her arm. The butler admitted he would have to enquire as to His Grace’s whereabouts, and suggested that we follow him into the drawing room, but Alistair said we would wait in the Great Hall. Ogilby too slipped away, leaving Alistair to pick up a copy of
Country Life
from the top of an exquisite scagliola sideboard while Holmes and I craned our necks and gawked like a pair of museum patrons.

I had seen grander entrance halls—huge halls, halls whose every inch was encrusted with gilt and mirrors, halls dizzying with the sheer accumulation of beauty—but I had never known a room with a stronger sense of what I can only term
personality
. The room was a cube of marble and alabaster, the black-and-white tiles of its floor giving birth to a pale stairway slightly narrower at the top than the bottom. Near the foot of the stairway stood a larger-than-life statue of a Greek athlete, the outstretched right arm that had once held a javelin now empty; at first glance, he seemed to be preparing to stab any unwary passer-by. Fluted columns of a heavily veined alabaster tapered up to support first an upper gallery and then the side-lit dome above. The veins of chocolate and cream in the columns were peculiarly symmetrical, with a heavy streak in one leading the eye to a similar stain in the next column twelve feet away. As one studied them, the sensation grew that they had actually been cut from a single contiguous piece, the remnants of an original alabaster monolith left when the rest of the room was carved away, as if Justice Hall had been whittled from a huge block of living stone. The image was disorientating, and I tore my eyes from the fluted columns to look up.

It took a while for me to decide what the fresco on the dome depicted. Normally such paintings are either of battles—the ceiling at Blenheim, for example, created for the Duke of Marlborough to commemorate his victory at the battle of that name—or allegorical, with classical gods and illustrated stories. This one showed robed figures reclining at a feast, with dancers playing tambourines and musicians with harps and a variety of unlikely-looking woodwinds in the background. A cluster of remarkably serious greybeards stood to one side, looking for all the world like barristers discussing their briefs. Farther around the dome’s circle, a wood sprang up, with birds and wild animals decorating the dark and gnarled trees, and a single man, running from a tawny creature that I thought might represent a lion. The man was making for a small hut, looking back over his shoulder at the lion and thus not noticing the bear (this animal quite realistic) standing at the corner of the hut, nor the snake dangling from the eaves.

The combination of animals was unexpected in this setting, but as soon as I saw them I knew what the painter was illustrating—and indeed, in the remaining space of the dome’s bowl, in what I knew would be the eastern quarter, the sun was rising over an idealised English landscape of green fields and tidy hedgerows. Its rays illuminated the lower sides of a great and gathering darkness, crimson and black and awesome across the innocent land.

“Good Lord,” I said involuntarily.

Alistair glanced up from a
Country Life
article on improving one’s backhand in tennis. “Cheerful, is it not?”

“Do you see it, Holmes?” I asked. He shook his head, admitting ignorance. “From the Book of Amos. A description of Armageddon—the end of the world. ‘The Day of the Lord,’ the prophet calls it, which some desire as the time when the Lord comes to set human affairs straight, but which, Amos says, we ought to dread for just that reason. ‘Why would you want the Day of the Lord?’?” I recited. “‘It is darkness, and not light. As if a man ran from a lion’?”—here I pointed up at the unlikely beast—“‘and a bear met him; or went into a house to lean against the wall, and a serpent bit him.’ The Lord goes on, ‘I hate, I despise your feasts, I take no joy in your solemn conclaves.’ He accepts neither burnt offerings nor sacrifices, will not listen to the singing and music given Him. ‘But,’ He says, ‘let justice roll down like waters, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’ You see? It’s even written along the bottom, over and over again in Latin.” This alternated, I saw, with another phrase:
Justitia fortitudo mea est,
the Mediaeval Latin quaintly corrupt. “Righteousness is my strength.”

We stared at the scene overhead, at the huge black clouds flecked with crimson, at the unheeding feast-goers and the single doomed man, and at the rich blue splash in the centre of the dome, which depicted the very instant in which the dammed-up waters of justice were loosed, to roll down across the feasts and the solemn assemblies and flood the world in a torrent, that when it had passed, the stream of righteousness might flow undisturbed.

Then, between one breath and another, the master of Justice Hall was there, standing in the centre of the gallery at the top of that great staircase, framed perfectly by the arch of the doorway behind him, hands in his pockets, looking as if he’d been occupying the spot for an hour. Alistair threw the magazine down and trotted up the stairway; something about the way he swept upwards evoked the swirl of robes about his person.

Mahmoud—Marsh—remained where he was, so immobile he might have been unaware of his companion’s approach, might have believed that the objects of his gaze—Holmes and I—did not know he was there, although we were looking straight at him. He might have thought himself all alone in the hall, but for his reaction when his cousin gained the top step and reached out to embrace him in the Arab fashion: The duke pulled back. Very slightly, a mere fraction of an inch, but it cut off the embrace more effectively than a fist. Alistair stuttered awkwardly to a halt; only when he had taken his hand from the ducal arm did Maurice Hughenfort come to life. He took his hands from his pockets, turned to look into his cousin’s face, said a few words in a voice too low to hear, and reached out to grasp the younger man’s shoulder briefly. He then started down the long staircase.

Watching him descend, my first impression was that five years had turned Mahmoud into an old man, deliberate in his every movement, going grey (had I even seen his hair before?). As he drew nearer, it seemed more that he was in some deep and chronic pain, the kind that only iron control can keep at bay. But then he came off the stairs and was crossing the marble floor towards us, and the knowledge came stark into my mind:
This man is dying.

He moved with the ease of health and shook Holmes’ hand with no sign of discomfort, but the look on his face was one I had seen too often during the War, when one of the wounded soldiers I was nursing gave up his fight, and let go. Such was the expression on the man now taking my hand, bending over it with old-fashioned formality, calling me Mary, a name he had never used: The man was one of the walking dead, a person who had made the decision to die, who in complete peace and bemused detachment watched the antics of his neighbours and his would-be saviours, awaiting only the day when he would be permitted to leave them behind. The wounds of some of those dying soldiers had been relatively mild, just as, other than the old scar down the side of his face, this man seemed whole and psychologically undamaged. And yet, the look was unmistakable.

“Mahmoud!” I cried out—or began to. I had only let out the first pain-filled syllable when he shot me a glare that shrivelled the name on my tongue. Dying he might be, but he could definitely summon the old air of command when he needed to.

“We are such old friends, Mary,” he pronounced, his dark eyes boring into me. “Despite the change in circumstances, I insist that you continue to call me Marsh.”

The moment he saw that he had achieved my obedience, he withdrew—like that; in an instant he was once more bland and polite, his real self back inside that distant waiting room where he alone dwelt. He told Ogilby that we would be in the library, then ushered us out of the echoing hall and down chilly corridors crowded with marble busts, Regency cartoons, display cabinets bursting with priceless knick-knacks, and paintings of ancestors stamped from the Hughenfort mold—dark hair, dark eyes, proud lift to the chin. We turned into an older wing of the house, and two doors down entered a sort of masculine sitting room next to a billiards room that reeked of cigars.

It was a library with few books, and most of those dealing with the breeding lines of horses, but it was deliciously warm. As I removed my coat, hat, and gloves, I studied my surroundings. It was a big room made intimate by the placement of furniture and the apparently haphazard arrangement of objects, as if some family member had deposited his Greek souvenir in a corner as he came in the door in 1829 and nobody had bothered to move the ancient statue ever since. The walls were a combination of warm beech linen-fold panelling and faded red silk wall-paper, half hidden behind a variety of landscape paintings and a plethora of glass-fronted cabinets containing stuffed wildlife and casual archaeological discoveries, the sorts of things dug up by boys and turned over by ploughs: coins and spear-heads, scraps of Samian ware from third-century Romans and blue-figured porcelain from nineteenth-century Victorians, a pair of dusty kingfishers perching on a twist of rusty metal that might once have been a blade, and a filthy-looking object that could have been a shoe or someone’s scalp—I did not care to look too closely. The objects appeared to have been placed on the shelves willy-nilly and the doors then locked behind them, and I was quite certain the house residents never actually saw them when they were in the room. The family photographs on the mantel and desk looked similarly abandoned to become a sort of three-dimensional wall-paper, with the exception of a group of three silver frames towards the right end of the mantel. These included a handsome young lad in the uniform of a second lieutenant of the recent war, whose eyes and chin declared him a Hughenfort, a slimmer, younger Marsh.

I became aware that the butler had materialised silently, in that manner of excellent manservants, waiting for his orders.

“Tea?” the scarred duke asked us. “Coffee? Something cold? No? That will be all, Ogilby.”

Ogilby faded away. The door was shut, and Marsh Hughenfort stood before the fire, concentrating on removing a cigarette from a silver case and lighting it with a spill taken from a Chinese bowl on the mantelpiece. When the cigarette was going, he flicked the half-burnt paper fan into the flames and walked over to splash whisky and a shot from a soda-siphon into a glass. He held it out as an offer—which Holmes accepted and Alistair and I refused—and then to my astonishment he made one for himself and took it back to the fire.

I glanced at Alistair, seated with his knees crossed and his hands clasped together on his lap. It struck me then, how unusual it was to see those hands empty and unoccupied. In Palestine, Ali always had some project to hand: patching the tent, mending a buckle, working oil into the mules’ leather traces, or—first, last, and at all moments in between—whittling. He had whittled endlessly, using the deadly blade he wore at his belt to carve unexpectedly delicate and whimsical figures of donkeys and lizards and long-haired goats. Whittling, it would seem, was not an occupation for the drawing room.