places, music and talk of the West End, Europe, and even brazen America. Indeed, Lady Phillida’s own speech reflected this, wavering as it did between the lady’s compulsory “one” and the blunt and egalitarian “I”; she had even used the vulgar term “week-end” without a hint of coyness.
Eventually, at the conclusion of one long recitation of the personal history of a prized shotgun, it registered on Darling that the rest of the table was not participating in the narrative with any degree of enthusiasm. He dabbed at his thin moustache and turned dutifully to Holmes.
“Tell me, Mr Holmes, what do you do?”
“I raise bees.”
The slightly pop blue eyes blinked. “Ah. How int’resting.”
“Very.”
Seeing her husband foundering on the rock of Holmes’ avocation, Lady Phillida decided to give me a try.
“And you, Miss Russell. Do you also keep bees?”
“I read theology. At Oxford.”
“Oh. Well. That’s rather . . . interesting as well,” she replied dubiously, her mind, no doubt, filled with furious speculation concerning the private dinner conversations that took place between the spectacularly mismatched married couple which her brother had inflicted on her for the week-end.
Alistair gave a small choking sound and reached to retrieve a hastily dropped table napkin. For the rest of the meal, we spoke about gardens.
CHAPTER SIX
Six people escaped with gratitude from the lunch table, scattering in all directions to marshal thoughts, and energies, before the dinner hour would bring us inexorably back together. Holmes and I went up to the rooms we had been given, which were in the oldest, western wing of the house but which had been made comfortable by efficient fires and an actual modern bath-room between them. My own room was a festivity of blue and gold, with a froth of silken drapes on its four posters, a counterpane of delicately embroidered silk, and terrifyingly pale carpets on the floor. Mahmoud would have given it me as a joke; of Marsh, or his sister, I could not be sure. Holmes was given the King’s room, all heavy red velvet and massive carved bed; the king had been George I, whose visit had no doubt precipitated a large part of the grand rebuilding and propelled the Hughenforts to the brink of penury.
Marsh’s suite was down the corridor in the same wing, we had been informed by Ogilby, although I thought it had pained him to admit that the new duke was sleeping down here rather than taking up rooms in the grander central block. I thought Marsh had probably kept rooms he’d occupied as a schoolboy, and decided to interpret that as an encouraging sign: Making a large space over to his taste would have been a declaration of permanence.
When we had boots on our feet and coats over our arms, we descended the noble stairway into the Great Hall, beneath the dome where the waters of Justice were poised to spill. A young house-maid broke off polishing a spotless display cabinet to accompany us to the so-called library. It was empty, but we followed the crack of billiards to the next room.
The library might be neutral ground for the family, but this was a male enclave, heavily masculine with dim Victorian colours, a smattering of animal heads, and the patina of ten thousand cigars over the velvet drapes and leather sofas. And dark: Other than the lamp-lit table itself, the brightest spots in the room were the areas of pink female flesh in the paintings decorating the walls and the unusually luminous ceiling, where light seemed to shift and play. Over the elephantine fringed table I glimpsed the waters of Justice Pond, the low, wintry sunlight sparkling off its fountain-stirred surface onto the plaster and beams above us.
How, I wondered, could I ever have mistaken Alistair for an Englishman? Dressed in plus-fours and boots he might be, with a Norwich jacket belted around his stocky frame and a soft cap on the sofa waiting to go onto his head; nonetheless, everything about him shouted “foreigner.” His stance, his scowl, the way his fingers tugged at his lower lip in the absence of moustaches—he looked like Feisal in fancy-dress.
His cousin, on the other hand, presented the very essence of English Lord. He was bent over the green table, studying the lay of the balls, and ignored our entrance as assiduously as he was ignoring his fidgeting companion. The birch-and-ivory cue rocked three times over the prop of his fingers, then with a sharp crack his ball flew over the green felt and into its pocket. Two more followed, one of those a complicated ricochet shot, and then the table was clear. He replaced the cue in its rack, picked up a smouldering cigar from its rest on a small table and took a last draw before circling the burning end off in the bowl, then picked up a squat glass with half an inch of amber liquid in it and swallowed it down. He caught up a heavy tweed jacket tossed over the back of a leather armchair and strode towards the French doors, giving a short whistle between his teeth. A pair of retrievers scrambled out from under the billiards table and shot out in front of us. Marsh held the door for us; as I went past him, I smelt whisky.
He set a brisk pace through the formal terraces and around the western wing. The perfect lawns stretched away in all directions, nestling around the Pond and gardens, speckled with deer and broken by enormous oaks and beeches, set here and there with buildings—a Gothic-style boat-house on the lake, a Palladian music house surrounded by trim gravel nearby, and a picturesque ruin atop a distant hilltop. As we marched up the grassy slopes, I kept an eye on Alistair, but he was not about to admit to weakness by being left behind. Past the layered centuries of stonework we went, along the path that followed the northern bank of the stream, and up the parkland until the house and lake had disappeared and we were in the park proper.
There, Marsh’s pace slowed. He glanced over his shoulder at the lagging Alistair, and for the first time noticed his cousin’s infirmity. However, he did not then exclaim, as the Algernons had, “What happened to you?” Instead, he watched Alistair approach, then stepped forward to tug the injured man’s shoulder down and squint at the plaster. One brief look, and he stood away.
Alistair met his eyes, and shrugged. “An accident. In London.”
Marsh’s gaze lingered on the other man’s; emotion moved not so much across the duke’s face as in the muscle beneath it, an emotion composed of apology and bewilderment, that he’d spent hours in his cousin’s company without taking notice. I saw Marsh’s hand come up to trace the scar on his face, a thing Mahmoud had done when deeply troubled. Marsh was no more aware of his gesture than Mahmoud had been, and I clasped to myself this sign of Mahmoud’s presence beneath the unknown exterior. Then Marsh turned away, and we were walking again across the manicured landscape as if nothing had happened—although this time at a slow stroll.
“You two have been busy?” Marsh asked us.
“Reasonably so,” Holmes replied. “We have just returned from Dartmoor, a somewhat interesting case involving land fraud and family inheritance. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. You look tired, is all.”
“Nonsense. You, on the other hand, look distinctly unwell.”
“I have put on nearly a stone and taught myself to sleep in a feather bed again. How could I be unwell?”
“Mahmoud, we—”
“Do not use that name here.”
Holmes caught his arm and forced him to stand still. Deliberately, he said again, “Mahmoud,” and followed it with an Arabic quotation: “A man feels shame at the mistreatment of his brother.”
He might have been speaking Mandarin Chinese; Marsh reacted not at all to the guttural syllables. He merely said, “In Palestine, you may have known a man of that name. You may even have considered yourself to be his brother. Here, there is no such man.”
“Whatever the trouble, it would be best if you were to permit us to help.”
“Trouble? What trouble can I possibly have? I own more land than a man can walk in a day, possess more works of timeless art than many museums, occupy a position at the right ear of the nation’s power. I have men to cook my food and polish my shoes, women to lay my fire and starch my collars. Nine hundred years of British authority is in my bones, and I have returned to the land of my family. How could that possibly be construed as ‘trouble’?”
I tried to hear a bitterness in his voice that would match the worn expression on his face, but I heard only a mild, inescapable litany of fact. I could not bear it.
