Justice Hall

so, but also figuratively.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Your Grace, but I was out the—oh.” His gaze had fallen from Marsh to the empty glass before him; his face fell as well. “Missed me chance, have I? Sorry to bother you, Your Grace. Another time.”

“Tomorrow morning, Hendricks? When you’ve finished the milking, come and see me.”

The man’s face brightened. He pulled on his cap, rubbed his palm against his trousers (which improved the state of neither), thought the better of shaking any aristocratic palms, and tugged his hat instead, wishing us all a happy evening as he retreated.

Holmes, for once, was sidetracked. “What was the significance of the glass?” he enquired.

Marsh very nearly smiled. “When I first started coming in, once they grew accustomed to me, they began to bring me their problems and disputes. Not that I mind—it’s part of what you might call the job—but it looked to dominate my visits here. So I let it be known that if they could catch me before I’d finished my first drink, I’d help them; otherwise they’d have to wait until my mind was clear. It’s become a sort of game between us. They’re considerably more scrupulous about following the rules than I am—I would have gone ahead with whatever is troubling Hendricks, but he’d have been uncomfortable.”

In his life as an itinerant scribe, Mahmoud had observed the Arab rules of hospitality with his clients, although in that land the rituals had centred around coffee rather than alcohol: When coffee ceased to be offered, or accepted, business was concluded. The unlikely parallel amused me; Holmes, however, was back on the scent.

“Does that rule apply to any guests you might bring here? Is our conversation now limited to record bags of grouse and the breeding lines of retrievers?”

Marsh shrugged—and even that was an English shrug, not the eloquent, full-shouldered gesture of Palestine. “I’ve not brought a guest here before. Other than my cousin,” he added, making it clear that Alistair was not guest, but family.

“In that case,” said Holmes, “I should like to ask how your nephew Gabriel was killed.”

The question took me by surprise. I had thought the cause behind Marsh’s tension when he pronounced the words Until my brother’s son Gabriel died was the upheaval that death had inflicted on the family, particularly on Marsh’s own future. Holmes, on the other hand, had traced the tension further back, to the boy’s death itself, and indeed, he seemed to have hit it on the head: The bleak, dying-man look settled back onto Marsh’s face; his right hand crept up to finger the scar on his face, which the sudden clamp of tension had drawn into a sunken gash. He drained his glass, looked around to catch the landlord’s attention, and waited until the next round was on the table. He ignored the beer, picking up the smaller glass and looking into it.

“They said, ‘died in service,’?” he told us at last, but he had to throw the fiery contents of the small glass down his throat before he could get the rest of it out. “I think he was killed by a firing squad.”

I do not know which of his companions let out the sound, something between pain and disbelief, but it could have been any of the three of us—even Alistair, who must have heard the story before. Alistair squirmed in his chair and dug a pen-knife out of his pocket, eyeing the pile of logs on the hearth, but after a minute, he folded the knife away. Holmes slumped down into the hard chair and prepared to listen, fingers steepled over his waistcoat, eyes half closed and glittering in the firelight like those of an observant snake.

“I only began to suspect it a few weeks ago,” Marsh resumed. “My brother Henry had been ill for a long time before he died, so that I found his affairs in chaos. I have to say, Sidney did his best, but Henry tended to take back certain responsibilities, and then not carry through. There were unpaid feed bills from three years ago, notifications from the builders concerning urgent roof repairs set aside. Last month, among a collection of papers concerning the local hunt, I happened across an envelope with some things belonging to Gabriel. An identity disc, half a dozen field post-cards, a couple of letters addressed to Henry. And the death notifications.”

His fingers started to go back to the scar, then he caught the movement and changed it to run the hand over his face, rasping the stubble with his callused palm. “Have you ever seen an official notification? Of course you have; who hasn’t? Well, in the first years of the war the notifications of executions were apparently blunt to the point of being brutal. And to top matters off, they stopped the family’s pension payments. But after an awful lot of these came through the War Offices, and local councils started having to provide support for the survivors, and questions began to be asked in Parliament, the powers that be began to think it might be considered punishing the innocent, that it might prove more politic to act humanely towards the families left behind. So they disguised the truth and reinstated the war pensions.

“Gabriel’s notification says ‘died in service’ like all the others, but the wording is different, more ambiguous. And the sympathy of the King and Queen is pointedly omitted.”

“That is hardly conclusive,” I objected.

“I think it is. And I think my brother knew. Henry kept a diary, although it’s for the most part simply a list of where the hunt went this day or how many birds were taken on that, with the occasional farm details. But he wrote one entry, in August of the year Gabriel was killed, in which he reflects on the nature of bravery and cowardice. Only a few lines, but it’s as if he was bleeding onto the page. Add to that the fact that he wouldn’t let his wife send out memorials. Sarah wrote to me about that one; she couldn’t understand. She was a gentle thing—ill a lot, but a good mother to the boy. My brother wouldn’t have told her that Gabriel’s death was anything but honourable, for fear of her health. As it was, Sarah died the following winter in the influenza epidemic. Other than Henry, and the four of us sitting here, no-one knows. I suppose Ogilby might suspect the truth; Ogilby knows everything that goes on in the house, but he won’t have breathed a word.”

“But . . . why?” Why would a young aristocrat, so eager that he signed up the very day he turned eighteen, commit a capital offence a year later? Why would a boy of noble birth not have received a lesser sentence? Why would a Hughenfort . . . ?

“I don’t know. I do know he was blown up in February, when a shell hit his trench and buried him in the mud along with half a dozen others. He nearly died before they dug him out, and spent the better part of a month in hospital and on leave. And then as soon as he went back up the line he was in heavy action—even in the desert we knew that the Germans were on the very edge of breaking through, so all hell must have been loose in France. I should suppose the boy’s nerves must have been dicier than anyone imagined, otherwise his commanding officer would have pulled him out.”

Marsh dropped his head into his hands, both elbows on the scarred wooden table. “He wrote a last letter to Henry. ‘Dearest Pater,’ it begins, but it doesn’t say anything of substance, only some memories of summer evenings at the Hall and the hope that he can remain—” Marsh’s voice wavered, then caught. “—remain brave. Ah, sod it all, I wish I’d known the poor little bastard.” He stood up so fast he nearly upended the heavy table and hurled his half-empty glass into the fireplace. “Sorry, I need to . . . ,” he began, and waved in the direction of the public house’s back door. His stride showed little indication of the four measures of strong drink and the pint and a half of ale he’d put away in a short time. The inn went deathly still; when he had passed through the door, I felt the villagers’ resentful eyes settle on us: What had we done to their duke?

When he came back past the bar, the duke stopped to have a word with Franks before resuming his place. More drinks soon joined the collection, although a number of the glasses on the table were nearly full. Before we’d had more than a couple of swallows, however, Marsh got to his feet again, more circumspectly this time.

“We shall miss the dinner gong if we do not leave, and that will make my sister cross. Not that I mind making Phillida cross, but I prefer to choose my fields of battle instead of declaring outright warfare.” As he told us this, his pronunciation deliberate, he took up his overcoat and began to button it on with equally deliberate fingers. We followed his example, and the dogs, familiar with the sequence of events, rose, shook themselves, stretched with eager yawns, and trotted over to put their noses at the door.

When the cold air outside hit Marsh, he stumbled against Alistair, but recovered immediately. I was glad to see that we were not about to attempt the now completely invisible path through the wall and into the parkland; instead, we turned up the road, which, though equally difficult to see, was identifiable by the surface underfoot and the occasional lighted cottage along its length, and which presented no brambles at our legs.

Marsh began to recount the history of the Franks family—the arrival of the publican’s grandfather during the third Duke’s time, the family’s losses during the War, and an elder son in trade down in London, but I did not listen much, being more interested in keeping my feet on the track and wondering just how late the Hughenfort family took dinner. It would take us at least an hour and a half, even at a brisk pace, to circle the wall and follow the entrance drive, and our pace could hardly be termed brisk.