Justice Hall

“And you, sir,” Holmes replied, always ready to turn conventionality to his own purposes. “You are looking somewhat . . . changed.”

“They say change is inevitable.” The duke raised his gaze to face Holmes squarely.

“I find folk wisdom to be a somewhat overrated commodity,” Holmes retorted. “It generally fails to take into account the workings of cause and effect.”

Rather than bristle, or retreat, at this confrontation, Marsh Hughenfort seemed to relax, just a fraction, and opened his mouth, but before he could respond some distant sound reached him. He paused in an attitude of listening; Alistair too cocked his head; then, as one, the two men slumped into gloom. Alistair even muttered a mild oath. Marsh retreated until his back was to the fireplace, and waited.

Children’s voices, of all things. Two high-pitched excited chatterers, growing and then fading as they turned into another part of the house, giving way to the sound of a woman in monologue. The library door opened; Holmes and Alistair rose automatically to their feet.

“—just pop my head in to see if he’s in here, p’raps you’d better inform Mrs Butter that we’ll be here for luncheon after all, just too terribly tiresome of them, truly it is. Oh, hello. I didn’t know you had company, Marsh. Good morning, Alistair.”

She was a small, elegant, expensive woman in her early thirties, plucked, pencilled, and pampered, working a pair of silver-grey gloves from her thin hands as she came through the door. In her case, the ebony Hughenfort curls had been tamed, by nature or art, into a sleek shingle, but the chin and eyebrow were instantly recognisable. She radiated a natural superiority; her clothing was too perfect to be anything but Paris; I felt instantly a frump.

“My sister,” said Marsh. “Phillida Darling.”

For a startling moment, I thought he was using a term of endearment in detached irony, but I realised it had to be the surname of the teeth-on-edge Sidney. “Phillida, this is Mr Holmes and his wife, Miss Russell. They are friends.”

Her eyes lit up. She glided across the room, dropping the gloves and her cloche hat on an exquisite marquetry end-table in passing, and held out her hand to Holmes. “What a splendid surprise, to encounter not just one, but two of my brother’s friends in a single day. Any relation to the Duke of Bedford, Miss Russell? No? Well, to think one might have missed you, if the Garritsons’ two brats hadn’t broke out in horrid spots this morning. We thought we’d lunch with them,” she explained, settling onto the divan beside me and taking out a cigarette case and ivory holder, “and we’d already set out before their nanny came down to tell them about the spots, stupid girl, and although usually I’d just have let my two in—children have to get these things some time, don’t they?—it’s really not a terribly convenient time. Thank you,” she told Holmes, who had applied a light to her cigarette. “I mean, one has a party here this week-end, and a ball in a month’s time, wouldn’t it be tiresome if half the house-maids came down in spots, too? It happened to a dear friend of mine, had to cancel the evening, the food all delivered and all. So tell me,” she said, having softened us up with the flow of trivia, “where did you two meet my brother?”

Here in your entrance hall, I nearly said. I caught back the impulse, presented her with a cheerful smile, and answered, “Aleppo, wasn’t it, Marsh?” I swivelled my head around as if to consult with him, and read not so much relief as approval, and that quiet humour in the back of his gaze that made my heart leap with pleasure: Mahmoud was there, somewhere. “That tawdry little cafe that your friend Joshua dragged everyone to, plying us with muffins toasted over a paraffin stove? Or was that Greece, the year before? One of those grubby but romantic spots,” I told her.

“But what was he doing there?” She could see I was going to be useless as a source of information, so she turned to confide in Holmes, arching her pencilled eyebrows in appeal. “He vanishes utterly for years and years, sends us a letter every six or eight months—postmarked in London, although one knows he can’t be in London, one’s friends would have seen him—and then back he comes, positively bristling with mysteries and secrets. A person might think he’d been in prison or something—I mean, just look at his poor face. He didn’t have that when he left.” Referring to the scar, of course.

“Those Heidelberg duelling academies could be quite rough, nicht war, Marsh?” This was from Holmes, contributing his own obfuscation.

“Of course,” I added, “the Carpathian shepherds who took him in couldn’t have helped the healing any. Health care in the mountains is still quite rudimentary.”

I was interested to see a flash of real irritation beneath Lady Phillida’s sisterly exasperation. Understandable, I supposed—if nothing else, the family would want to know if the heir had a string of warrants, a pile of debts, or a wife and six sons trailing behind from some foreign land. However, if Marsh had not told her where and how he had spent the last twenty years, it was not up to me to fill the gaps.

She pouted prettily, stubbed out her cigarette, and lounged upright. “You two are as bad as my brother. Shall we see you at luncheon?”

“They may be stopping here for a day or two. Perhaps more,” Marsh told her.

Her eyes went wide in dismay. “What, over the week-end? Oh, Marsh, why didn’t you tell me earlier we were having additional guests?”

“It was just now decided.”

“Well, next time you must let Mrs Butter know in advance.” It was a gentle scold, for the sake of keeping face before guests, but she must have heard the edge to it because she turned to me with a little laugh. “Men—they just don’t understand the servant problem, do they? We have to coddle Mrs Butter—where would we be if she up and left? Anyway, lovely to know you won’t be leaving right away, do feel free to stay on until Monday—we’ll have to get together for a nice long girlish chat. And at least we won’t have to worry about thirteen at table Saturday night.”

She stepped over and kissed the air near her brother’s cheek, which gesture he accepted without a flinch, and then she swept from the room. Alistair slowly let out a gusty breath, and reached for his cigarettes. All four of us twitched, like a group of hens settling their ruffled feathers, and I reflected that my own visceral response to the accents of power and privilege had at least become more controllable over the years. I was still intimidated by women like Phillida Darling, but I did not show it outwardly.

“We were, I believe,” Holmes said, recalling us to our state before Lady Phillida had entered, “speaking of the nature of change.”

Alistair shook out his match and cut into any response his cousin might have made. “Not here. Not with that woman and her husband listening in at the windows. I even caught the daughter with her eye to a key-hole last week.”

“This afternoon,” Marsh said, sounding resigned. “After lunch we will put on our boots and remove ourselves from windows and key-holes.”

The lack of hope or even interest in his voice stung me into speech. “We did come here to help,” I told the duke sharply.

As if I had not spoken, he flicked his cigarette into the fire and left the room.

Luncheon was every bit as difficult as we had been led to anticipate, with Marsh silent, Alistair monosyllabic, and Lady Phillida making constant gay forays in her quest for information. Sidney Darling appeared after the rest of us had settled to our first course, full of apologies (“Trunk call to London; business couldn’t wait”), bonhomie (“Alistair old man, been a while”), and charm (“Perfectly splendid to meet friends of my brother-in-law; what a perfectly lovely frock on you, Miss Russell. I say, any relation to Bedford?”). Sidney Darling was a tall, thin, languid, inbred aristocrat with protruding blue eyes and the pencil-thin moustache and sleek light hair of a film star, dressed in a height-of-fashion dove-grey lounge suit with Prince of Wales turn-ups. His topics of conversation ran the narrow gamut from horse racing and shotgun makers to the best spots to winter along the Riviera. His response to our lack of interest in those accepted passions of the leisured class was mild surprise followed by a pitying smile. Sidney Darling did indeed set one’s teeth on edge.

Despite their traditional interests, however, I could see that the Darlings were not cut to the peer’s age-old pattern. Certainly, they were the very definition of old money—at least, the wife was; nonetheless, the Darlings moved in a social milieu that included film directors, the sons and daughters of American tycoons, progressive European novelists, and the sorts of artists more often seen in newspaper columns than on museum walls. This was, I thought, the new generation of the entitled, whose traditional studied lack of interest in the getting of money, the dictates of fashion, or human beings outside their circle was being modified to include the people and