“You once said to me,” I told him, “after we were ambushed on the road to Jericho and Holmes taken captive, that trouble came because you neglected your rightful state. That you were a man who went about on foot, and permitting yourself to ride in a ruler’s motorcar was a foolish thing. You do not belong here, with your mouth at the ear of power. You are a scribe, and belong in Palestine, with your ear to the mouths of others. That is where you are happy.”
“Happiness is nothing. And another man said those words” was his implacable reply.
Holmes tried again. “Mahmoud—”
Before any of us could react, Holmes was sprawled on the ground with a furious English duke standing over him, right arm drawn back for a second blow. “You will not use that name!” he roared.
“Then tell me why!” Holmes bellowed back. He clambered to his feet and stuck his face into Marsh’s. “Explain to me why . . . that man has ceased to exist!”
Marsh teetered on the edge of his fury, and I made ready to leap on his shoulders and pull him off Holmes. Then, in the blink of an eye, the shutters slammed down, the homicidal rage was folded back into its cage; control was regained. In that brief instant of transition, Mahmoud looked out from those dark eyes, but he was gone in a flash, and a middle-aged Englishman was studying the reddening jaw of the man before him. His own flush faded, and he nodded.
“It is true, I owe you that much. The man you speak of is not here, but his debts remain. I will explain, and then you and Mary can pack your bags and be safely home in Sussex before my sister’s friends begin to arrive.”
The two dogs that had skittered away in a panic at his outburst were now back, shrinking at his knees and grinning nervously until he thumped their ribs and sent them off in search of throwing sticks. We drifted after the dogs, and Marsh began to explain.
“One cannot begin to speak of the seventh Duke of Beauville and the state of his affairs without looking first at how the family’s history has shaped him. That, after all, is the entire point of the English aristocracy: continuity, and responsibility. If you wish to understand the current duke, you will have to permit a lesson in history.
“The family presence in this country begins with Hastings in 1066. When William came to claim the crown of England, among his nobles was a man barely twenty named Richard de Hughfort. The younger son of a minor landholder, he had nothing but the sword in his hands, the horse between his knees, and the head on his shoulders. He acquitted himself well on the field of battle, won the eye of the Conqueror, and was given responsibilities.
“Some months later, with the Conqueror’s forces well established in the south, young Richard happened upon three armed knights entertaining themselves with a farmer’s wife. The farmer lay dead, the twelve-year-old boy who had tried to defend his parents lay in a heap, the other children fled, and the wife . . . Well.
“Unfortunately, the three knights were William’s men. And not just any men, but knights who had brought with them men-at-arms and full purses. Richard, as I said, had no name and had joined with little more than his sword. Which he raised without hesitation to come to the defence of a peasant woman and her family.
“He killed two of the knights and drove the other off—three experienced, armed fighting men. Richard received a wound in his breast, from the point of a sword that slipped under his armour. He helped the woman bury her husband, accepted a drink of water—the family records are quite meticulous about noting that, for some reason—and left her to nurse her injured boy.
“He rode into William’s camp leading two horses with knights slung over their backs, and knelt in front of the Conqueror, sword offered, to receive his punishment. They were important men, after all, and William could not afford to let their deaths—over a mere peasant—go unavenged.
“But he did. He looked down at Hugh’s bare neck, bent before him, but instead of using the edge of the sword, he used the flat, and knighted Richard. You’ve never heard this story?”
“In its outline alone,” Holmes told him.
“What William said then became the family motto, drilled into successive generations of impressionable minds:
“I will not force on you the next eight and a half centuries of family history; if you’re interested, look for it yourself in the green library. Richard was not given a high degree of authority—William was no fool; he well knew that any man who would place righteousness over common sense was no person to command an army—but he gave him a degree of trust, and more to the point, some land.
“Which is where my family has stood ever since, both on the land and in the attitude. We are loyal unto death to our monarch—except for those odd occasions when a strain of fanatic comes to the surface, and makes us see the king’s cause as unjust. This, as you might expect, has led the family into trouble once or twice. For the most part it has been hothead younger brothers who chose righteousness over loyalty, but once or twice it was the earl, or later the duke, who made his stand, and then the foundations shook. The second earl wavered onto Mary’s side, and Elizabeth took his head for it, stripped the family of its lands, and declared the title attainted. By great good fortune, however, the earl’s son had already proved himself to be a queen’s man, and the title was soon restored. Then in Monmouth’s Rebellion the seventh earl took his men and marched on London. He, too, lost his head; and again, had his younger brother not already proved himself a trustworthy friend to James II, we should not be standing here today.
“My father, Gerald Richard Adam Hughenfort, was the fifth Duke. I was his second surviving son. My elder brother, Henry, was seventeen years older than I, with two stillbirths in between us. Our brother Lionel was born when I was six. Mother died a few weeks after his birth, and five years later Father remarried. Phillida was born the year I went to university.
“My elder brother married when he was thirty. Henry was the perfect heir—did an adequate degree, took a responsible and interested view of the land, wasn’t too wild in his trips into London and the Continent. He didn’t even gamble much, which is the thing that usually brings down houses like Justice.
“What’s that fool dog into?” he asked, and interrupted his narrative to investigate. When the putrid rabbit had been removed from its adoring finder and buried, we turned back to the path, and to Marsh’s tale.
“So it did not matter all that much to Father that his second son, Maurice, found Justice dull, detested farming, and was interested only in the study of history and language and foreign peoples. I was, as they say, ‘the spare,’ but since the heir himself was healthy, strong, and sensible, there was no cause for concern.
“I made the grand tour as most young men did after university. However, when I reached Venice, my eyes went east, not south to Rome. I crossed the Adriatic, worked my way through Yugo-Slavia and Turkey, then sailed from Rhodes to Alexandria and Cairo. I saw the pyramids, the Nile, the beginnings of the African continent, but the only thing that truly called out to me was the desert to the east.
“I joined up with a group of ragged and corrupt nomads crossing the Sinai—not Bedu, just traders. When I laid eyes on the Judean hills, I was home.
“I lived there for ten months that first time, before my cousin was sent to fetch me back to England. I stayed here, the obedient son, for over a year. At the end of it, Henry’s son Gabriel was born and thriving, my younger brother, Lionel, was seventeen and by all appearances on a straight course, and I was both superfluous and smothering.” Alistair glanced at Marsh and then swiftly away again, and walked on with his eyes glued to the countryside ahead; I wondered what Marsh had left out, or lied about.
“You may have an idea how terribly tight-knit a stratum of the social order we are even now—and the higher, the tighter. We’re an entire society of in-laws and cousins: Our sisters go to balls on the arms of the brothers of boys we went to school with; members of our fathers’ clubs command our Guards regiments. Holidays would be at an uncle’s hunting lodge, our Saturdays-to-Mondays spent at the country house of a mother’s childhood friend who was also a second cousin; our chaperones—”
He caught himself. “You see the picture. After the desert, the stultifying drawing-room air was killing me. It was certainly driving me mad; I used to dream about the desert, about dry warm sand trickling down across my face and burying me, and would wake happy at the thought.”
This self-revelation was more than he had intended; he veered away, to look over a herd of the spotted deer that had caught his attention, and it was a while before he resumed.
“After a year here, my parents eventually had to admit that I was a lost cause, and permitted me to return to my life in Palestine. My cousin spent his long vacations with me for the years of his university, which made them think that they were keeping track of me. When my cousin finished his degree, he joined me permanently.
“And all was well. Until my brother’s son Gabriel died.”
The control in his voice held, but with the last word, we could hear the effort. Not, I thought, because of any
