Justice Hall (40 page)

“I shall write to her immediately,” I concluded. “Or, as soon as I can compose a letter. How exactly does one ask a complete stranger, ‘Were you once in love with a young soldier, and did he leave you any letters that might incriminate those who arranged his death?’ It is not going to be an easy letter to write.”

I stared into the fire for a minute or so, turning over phrases in my mind, before I slowly became aware that I was seated within a fairly ringing silence. I looked up, and found the two Holmes brothers engaged in a wordless conversation over my head. My husband broke it off first, to lower his gaze to mine.

“Russell,” he said. At the first touch of that gentle, affectionate voice, I nearly leapt to my feet and planted my back against the nearest wall: When Holmes stoops to wheedle, God help us all. “My dear Russell, how right you are. As always. This is precisely the sort of sensitive query that demands a more personal touch.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, bristling with suspicion while trying to see from which direction the threat was coming.

“Why, Russell, I am merely agreeing with you. It would indeed be an excellent idea to confront this O’Meary woman to her face when you ask for the return of Gabriel’s letters.”

Now I really was on my feet. “Oh, no. Cross the Atlantic and half of America to ask some woman if a British soldier had once confided in her? In November? Are you mad? No. Absolutely not.”

“There’s a boat for New York that sails tomorrow afternoon,” Mycroft noted, studying his fingernails.

“Don’t be absurd. I’m not going anywhere. Except perhaps Oxford. Yes,” I declared, warming to my theme, “I think I’ll take the train up to Oxford and get back to work on my paper. You two can continue to hunt down your red-tab major if you like, but as far as I’m concerned, Marsh Hughenfort can accept that nice boy Thomas as his heir and hie off back to Palestine. You identify who set Gabriel up, the child will be safe, Marsh and Alistair can go back to their tents, I can go back to my books and Holmes to his beehives. How happy we all will be.”

“You can write your paper on the boat,” Holmes told me. “You’re always complaining that you never have the leisure to work properly. You’ll be in New York by the middle of the week, take the train to Toronto Thursday or Friday, and be back on board by the Monday sailing. Two weeks, total, to solve our case. Maybe three.”

“You go.” I felt like a rat cornered by two determined terriers; I was not going down without a fight.

And I did not. Go without a fight, that is, although in the end, go I did, and on the Friday boat as Mycroft had said. With hastily packed trunks holding clothes scavenged from my flat and Mycroft’s guest-room cupboards, and bearing only the most rudimentary books to keep this fool’s journey from being an utter waste of time, I was flung onto the ship as by a tornado, the gang-way pulling back almost as soon as I had cleared it. I stood on the vibrating deck to watch England retreat into the fog, knowing that I should be very lucky if this exercise in futility were to cost me only three weeks. I put together a complicated Arabic curse worthy of Ali and gave it to the wind; feeling somewhat better, I went below to find my rooms.

As I was shaking my head at the peculiar selection of out-of-date and unseasonable clothing I had at my disposal, and wondering if I might slip beneath the ship’s social eye by keeping to my cabin at meal-times, a rapid-fire knock sounded at my door. If that was a purser bearing propitiatory flowers from Holmes, I swore under my breath, he’d be fortunate to escape with his head on his shoulders. I went back through the rooms, yanked open the door, and felt as if I’d walked into a solid wall.

It was not a purser, flowers or no. Nor a maid, nor a first officer welcoming me on board, nor a boy with a telegram, nor any of the dozen other likely candidates for disturbing me. It was not even Holmes, whose capacity for appearing where he could not possibly be was unparalleled in human experience.

Standing in the corridor was Iris Sutherland.

“Hallo, Mary. I see by your face that the news I was coming along did not reach you.”

“It most certainly did not.”

“Hardly surprising—I didn’t know myself until about six hours ago, and there was some question I’d actually make it. You going to invite me in?”

“Of course, please. Sorry—it just surprised me so. But it’s an absolute joy to see you.”

And it was. Suddenly this voyage, and the arduous land journey at the end of it, did not seem so much of a burden on my soul.

“My, my,” she was saying. “This is posh. They’ve stuck me into a broom closet seventeen levels below the water-line, said they’d try for something with air when they got sorted out.”

My own arrival was nearly as hastily arranged, but either Mycroft’s strings or my own cheque-book had kicked me upstairs.

“I’ll have a word with the captain,” I told her.

“Don’t bother, I already have. Using Marsh’s name,” Iris added, with a look of mischief. Yes: The knowledge that they had placed a Hughenfort in steerage would set the feathers flying, all right.

I laughed. “The next knock on the door will be some gentleman with a lot of gold braid telling me ever so apologetically that a mistake’s been made, that my room is a nice cosy broom closet, seventeen levels below the water-line.”

“That’s all right, then,” she said, gesturing towards the adjoining room. “We’ll make you up a bed on the sofa.”

“How is Marsh?”

“Spitting mad that the doctor and Ali won’t let him out of his bed.”

“I didn’t even know until yesterday that he’d taken a turn for the worse.”

“He nearly lost his arm.”

“Iris!”

“They couldn’t get the infection down. The doctor wanted to amputate—blood-thirsty idiot—but Ali wouldn’t let him. Threatened to amputate the
doctor’s
arm, in fact. That shut him up.”

“I can imagine.” Particularly if the threat had been accompanied by a blade and one of Ali’s patent glares.

“All it wanted was round-the-clock compresses. Ali and I took turns; the infection centralised and could be lanced after a couple of days. Marsh is weak, but he’ll be fine.”

“Holmes said he was going down to see them today or tomorrow. I suppose—” I caught myself: We were still standing, as we had been since I let her in. “Do you want some tea or coffee or something?”

“I’d like a drink, actually. A good old English gin and tonic. Do you have such a thing, or need we call for it?”

“There should be a drinks cabinet somewhere.”

There was, and although I would have preferred hot tea, I joined her in a g-and-t. She swallowed, and exhaled in appreciation.

“Yes,” she said, picking up on my last statement. “Justice Hall is a house divided. Phillida is going berserk. She’s got this elaborate ball planned for the fifteenth, absolutely refuses to shift it to the London house; I can see her point—she’d be better to cancel it. At the same time, Alistair won’t let anyone but Ogilby into the part of the house where Marsh is, which means the entire wing is effectively cut off from the main block. Sidney is irate, because that means the billiards room and the library are in No-Man’s-Land, and they had planned to have a few friends up for the week-end. Alistair won’t budge, swears he’ll empty a load of bird shot into the billiards room if he hears any movement down there. They believe him.”

As would I, I thought, but only commented, “Sounds like a fine game of Happy Families.”

“An interesting family, no doubt of that. But, Ali told me your husband was attacked on Tuesday. Was it serious? Was it connected with everything else that’s going on?”

“Who knows?” Who knew, in fact, what
was
going on? “He was fortunate—a constable happened on them before it got past the bruises-and-cracked-ribs stage.”

She pulled a face. “Still, at his age, even that’s no small matter.”

I paused, taken somewhat aback. I rarely thought of Holmes as being of any particular age, much less a great one, but it was true: A beating at twenty is not the same as one at sixty. I wondered if I should have insisted he see a doctor, then dismissed the idea immediately. If he’d needed medical attention, he’d have sought it.

We applied ourselves to our glasses and chatted of nothing in particular—flying lessons, as I recall, with Iris asserting that in a few years we’d be criss-crossing the world’s oceans in passenger aeroplanes, g-and-t in hand, and think nothing of it—and I waited for her to ask me for the information Holmes and I had collected since we had last seen each other a week earlier. She did not ask. Once she started me off, of course, the painful flow of facts and images would wash over her in a flood. She knew that, knew there was no comfortable way to ease into the past, and so she hesitated to ask.

In the end, I simply gave her Gabriel’s journal. I had brought it with me to search it more closely with an eye to the tall Canadian Hélène whom I would soon be confronting, but it appeared to me more important that Iris read it first. I took it from my locked case, and placed it in her hands.

“This is Gabriel’s diary,” I told her. “Your son’s war journal. When you’ve read it, I’ll tell you how we found it.”

She received the battered object with the attitude of a believer accepting the communion host. She bent over it for a moment, then left the cabin without a word.

I did not see her for two days.

(SELECTED ENTRIES FROM THE JOURNAL
OF GABRIEL HUGHENFORT)
10 August, 1917
   
I begin this fresh journal on the train back to Arley Holt, where I shall disembark a different man from the one who climbed on board early this morning. Today I turned eighteen, and my first act as a man was to enlist. I am now a soldier, returning home to break the news.
I have decided to take this slim volume with me to war, an ornate object that will cheer my drab quarters with its gaudy colour and its reminder of exotic places. My uncle Marsh sent it me, some weeks ago, and I decided immediately I set eyes on it that it would take its place in my soldier’s pack.
For to war I shall be going, and to ensure honest service I have used a false name. I am proud of my true name, but there is no doubt that its syllables make it difficult for people to see the person behind it. Some will need to know, I suppose, but with luck I can keep the
numbers down. Henceforth I am Gabriel Hewetson, second lieutenant in His Majesty’s Forces.
Pater will storm and Mama will weep, but I can no other. Will Susan weep, I wonder? Or will she be proud of me? I believe I made the right decision when I told her there would be no ring until I return in safety. If I came back horribly wounded, she would feel it shameful not to go through with it. We have an understanding; that shall suffice.
27 August
I dreamt last night that I was walking through the Fox Woods above Justice. It was spring-time and the blue-bells were out, so the woods resembled a lake with trees growing up from the brilliant blue water. Mama was there with me, and she was crying and crying, saying we’d never pick blue-bells together again. Good thing I don’t believe in dreams telling the future. I’ll have to think on the symbolism of the dream.
Funny, because I haven’t been dreaming much since coming to training camp. Probably it’s just that I’m so tired at the end of the day, I have no energy for dreaming. I don’t even think very often about Susan before dropping off to sleep, even though she let me kiss her and the feel of her kisses stayed with me for days. The dream was probably my mind telling me that when I get back I’ll marry Susan and we’ll be too busy for me to go blue-belling with Mama, that I’ll have grown out of such childish outings.
The first draught of men set off for the Front today, looking eager and deadly. I suppose by the time we go, there’ll still be some Jerries left for us. Still, I hope we can hurry up this endless drilling.
30 October
Word today that they’ll move up our ship date to France, that it might be before Christmas even. The men are keen but I can see why the higher ranks worry. Without a really solid training, most of these boys won’t have a chance. And I say boys because most of them are ’way younger than me. A couple of them can’t be sixteen, no matter what they told the recruiting officer. Of course, there’s the old duffers too, conscripts forty and more. How are they expected to carry a full pack through the mud and still be fit to shoot? Children and old men. They’ll be issuing rifles to women before much longer.
5 December
Two days’ home leave before shipping out. I’m halfway tempted to stay in camp, or go up to London with some of the others for a last fling. But I can’t; it wouldn’t be fair to the parents. Even though right now I’d just as soon face a German gunner than Mama’s tears for her baby boy. Don’t I wish they’d had another child, a daughter, to take the pressure off. I wonder how Ogilby would react if I asked him to tie a blindfold on me before I went in through the door. Knowing him, he’d just ask if I wished to use my own, or if I wanted him to fetch one, My Lord.
Christmas Day
Behind the lines, but not far. We can smell it now, and my men are acting the way I feel, like a horse at the scent of smoke, jumpy and white-eyed. Lots of jokes, most of them dirty. They’re shelling up the line, our guns or theirs, making the earth quiver like a fractious horse. A few days here, then up to the Front. I pray God I not disgrace my family.
Epiphany 1918
I had my doubts about this name lark, wondered if it wasn’t going to be more trouble than it was worth, being always on the alert for an old friend or one of the men spotting the occasional “Hughenfort” letter and catching on. Still, I’ve only had a couple of sticky moments, and all in all, I think it’s been a good idea. Growing up, close as I was to some of the people on the estate, I knew that “My Lord” was always in the back of their minds, if not actually on their tongues. The men here know my class—how could they not?—but to most of them I’m just another public school boy who doesn’t know the first thing about war, whose job it is to survive long enough to get slapped into shape, and to transmit orders received, and to take the heat from above when necessary. When I came, I was lucky enough not to put my foot wrong too disastrously, and it must have been obvious that I was pathetically grateful for any instruction they could give me. When they saw that, and began to feel that they could trust me a little, they relaxed, and have adopted me as a sort of pet. Not in the articles of Army discipline, I’m sure, but I feel I’m coming to know my countrymen in a way I’d never have in normal times. And I
am
grateful, to them all.
28 January
Never have I imagined cold such as this. Even the frost-rimed dugout the officers share seems an oasis of warmth. Heaven is dry stockings, even if they are caked with dirt. Paradise would be a bed with clean sheets—but that is more than my mind can grasp. The earth no longer holds such things; all the world is half-frozen slime and ear-shattering noise.
A shell hit the neighbouring section of trench today; I went to help a wounded soldier to his feet only to discover he had no legs below the thigh. I shall never lose the sensation of lifting up a legless man. Thank God he was already dead.
And my first thought after the original shock was, I wonder if his feet are dry now. And then I started to laugh. I managed to reach the privacy of the dugout before my nerves gave way and the laughter turned to tears. The first time in days my nerves have gone like that, and not yet in front of the men. The mind toughens slowly.
4 February
Jerry’s shelling kept us pinned in our mud-holes four days after we were supposed to go back. There was finally a lull, and we could shift the wounded and trade places with the poor bas souls coming up to take our places. Baths and louse-free shirts and beds that don’t jump and twitch under us, hot food and a chance for the ears to cease their endless ringing. But we’ve pulled a short one this time for some reason—we’re headed back into it in three more days. Just in time for the lice to find us again.
Why don’t lice get trench foot, or freeze to death? God’s mysteries.
7 February
I’ve found myself, in recent days, thinking about the dome over the Hall in Justice, with its frescoes of what the prophet Amos calls the Day of the Lord. I have been reflecting that since I was a child, certainly at least a year or two before the archduke’s assassination set the spark to the Balkans, I have been aware that there would be a war, and that the war would be a good thing, however painful. I have been remembering those early days, when the older boys and the young men of the estate put on their proud uniforms and clasped to their breasts the opportunity to “trounce the Kaiser” and “show the Hun what for.” The nobility of their faces, their shared cause, made my boyish self burn with envy. I raged that they would do the job before I had a chance to join in.
“Why would you want the Day of the Lord?” Amos cries out in horror. Having come here, to the trenches, I understand exactly what Amos means: Why in heaven’s name would anyone want Armageddon, if they knew what it really meant, the innocent and the sinner alike crushed underfoot? As if a man fled from a lion to meet a bear, or took refuge in a house to be bitten by a serpent. We lusted after war, and by God, we were given the trenches. The Day of the Lord.
I myself thirst after those waters at the centre of the fresco, for the justice that will flow down like waters, the righteousness like an everflowing stream poised above us, ready to sweep through northern France and wash us all away, cleanse the land of howitzers and tanks, half-rotted corpses and gas canisters, filth and blood and terror and desperation. The land will be empty when the flood has passed through, but it will be clean.
Fancy, I know, but that is what I have been thinking, in recent days.
11 February
Writing this by the Very lights that Jerry’s been shooting up over our heads for a week now, one generation of which scarcely fades before the next comes up. I never want to see another display of fireworks as long as I live.
Our howitzers are going now, pounding our bones as we trade death with the men 150 feet away, in their holes, behind their wire. Did I say men? The last group of prisoners I saw might have been thirteen or fourteen. Two of them were crying for their mothers. One of them fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth, for Christ’s sake. I saw him. His boots had holes worn through the soles.
The shells are getting closer. Time to choose whether to stay in the open trenches and risk shell fragments, or to get into the dugout and chance being buried.
The sergeant’s brewing tea on the fire step, a nonchalant Woodbine hanging off his lip. He reminds me of old man Bloom, who kept a hut in the woods to keep an eye for poachers. The gamekeeper had a cough, too, like the sergeant has, though I suppose his came from the cigarettes and wood smoke instead of mustard gas like Sergeant West’s. What I’d give for a nice lungful of wood smoke now, clean and honest. I’d not even mind if
4 March
Three weeks ago, the shells suddenly got near enough to make me close this journal and button it into my pocket, and at that very instant, before I could even get to my feet, the world erupted and buried me alive. I woke on the stretcher a different man.
It makes me smile, to think that at the first sight of Hélène I thought she was a man. Her back was to me, of course—no-one looking into her eyes would ever make that mistake, no matter how scrambled his brains!—and she was wearing a heavy leather jacket with sheepskin at the collar. Then she turned to me, checking that I wasn’t going to be thrown to the floor when we hit a pothole, and thus undo all the work the bearers had gone to. I’ve never seen eyes like that, green as the hills she was raised in. Heaven only knows what she saw. I could’ve been a Chinaman for all she could tell, or old as her father or ugly as sin. I was clotted with France, hair to boot-lace, and stinking of battle.
18 March
A brief flurry of changes, and back I am, in the trenches again. Different trenches, same war.
Two days’ quick leave, after hospital and before reporting to my new regiment, and I used it to pay a visit to an aunt who had extended the invitation long ago. I had not seen Aunt Iris since I was in short pants, and her marriage to my uncle Marsh seems to exist in name only, so I had expected a certain amount of discomfort all around. Instead, I came away feeling that I had gained a blood relation, so easy was she to talk to. There were areas into which we did not go—I have my secrets and she very obviously has hers (if indeed one can have an obvious secret; still, I should say her friend Dan is one of those), and I have found it impossible to speak openly about what the War is actually like. No-one who has been through the trenches speaks freely with a person who has not done so. When the War is over, a great divide will cut through England.
Nonetheless, Iris seemed to read between my words, and to understand much that was unsaid. She fed me—how, with the restricted civilian rations, I neither knew nor asked—and clothed me and made me feel as if I had another home.
Whole, dry stockings! And two nights cradled by lavender-scented linen! Her flat gleams in my mind as an island of plenty, and of peace, and of all that is good in the world.
So, after a few brief hours behind the lines with my new regiment we came forward, and here I sit again, writing on the pages of my Egypt-leather journal while the shells fall in the distance.
But oh! What a difference from one month ago, for now I need but close my eyes and green eyes gaze back at me. And, is it not fate that my new posting is even closer to hers than the old?
24 April
Terrible news—the entire unit is to shift down the Line, near Reims. Good for the men, of course, since it’s a quiet sector for soldiers stretched near to breaking by the continual onslaught of the months past. But that’s miles away, miles beyond reach of my fair Hélène. I will find a reason to visit the aid post tomorrow (reasons are always so plentiful—shall it be my feet, or the festering cut on my arm, or the cough?) and wait for her to come in. I must see her once before I go,
2 May
The deed is done. We leave tomorrow at dawn.
2 June
Three weeks of quiet, broken only by the stray shell and the ever-present snipers, and then it all came down on us, hell breaking out anew just after mid-night on Monday last. It had been such a lovely holiday, too, with actual fields instead of pitted mud as far as the eyes could see. The trees had branches and delicate spring leaves, there were birds nesting in the church’s steeple, the people were still capable of smiling. Birdsong—nightingales—animals other than rats! And one night I heard what I’d have sworn was a dog fox. Then at one in the morning the earth heaved and the sky turned to flame with their guns, and it was back to Hades for us.
Except that this time they’ve got us out of our trenches and running for our lives. God knows how much equipment we’ve shed between here and where the front line was 72 hours ago. I managed to hang on to my pack, running through fields with the bullets going
zip, zip
over my head, although some Jerry’s got himself two pair of nice new French stockings that I’d left drying in the dugout along with my mess kit and entrenching tool. I gave one old pair of stockings to a man who’d run five miles in bare feet, which leaves me with one of Aunt Iris’s pairs on my feet and another in my kit that’s more holes than yarn. I know what the next letter home’s going to ask for!