It would appear, however, that part of the evening’s sequence involved a telephone call from village to Hall, because before we reached the metalled main road, a set of powerful head-lamps approached from the direction of the Justice gates. They turned into our track, caught our figures, and halted. The driver’s door opened; Holmes and I piled into the back, followed by the dogs.
Marsh came last, Alistair’s surreptitious hand on his elbow. He dropped hard into the seat, but before the hand could retreat, he seized it and gripped it hard for a moment before letting go. “Good night, my brother,” he said, and Alistair shut the door.
Marsh closed his eyes, smiled to himself, and muttered something under his breath. I realised with surprise that it had been in Arabic: “Eyes like a cat,” he had murmured. A phrase I had once heard him apply to Ali when we were crossing the desert by night.
With this phrase two things became clear. One, that despite his recent injuries, Alistair would be walking alone to Badger Old Place through the moonless night. And two, that Marsh was very drunk indeed.
He sobered during the drive back to Justice Hall, and went up the steps with straight back and steady pace.
“Have you rung the gong yet, Ogilby?” he asked that gentleman.
“Not yet, Your Grace. Lady Phillida suggested they might wait a while longer.”
“I can’t be bothered changing, Ogilby. And I’m sure my guests are famished. Give us five minutes, and ring.”
I scurried up to my room to rid myself of overcoat and muddy shoes, and was straightening the pins in my hair when a hollow reverberation began to rise through the house. We reached the drawing room before the Darlings, and were thus witness to the astonishment followed by vexed disapproval with which Lady Phillida greeted the sight of her brother, still dressed in mud-spattered tweeds and holding what was clearly not his first drink of the evening. She then glanced at us, saw that we were similarly under-dressed, and her face went polite again.
“We’d have been happy to wait—but it does not matter in the least. In fact, it’s rather fun to be Bohemian; the business of changing is so stuffy, don’t you think?”
Bohemian or not, Sidney Darling stepped forward to present his properly clad black arm for me to go into the dining room upon, leaving the rest to sort themselves out as best they would. He deposited me at Marsh’s right hand.
We were seated at one end of a table that could have accommodated thirty with ease. As it was, a great deal of empty wood stretched out to one side, and only two of the room’s forest of candelabra had been lit for us, a pair of Baroque silver objects that reminded me of the fountain outside, although I could not make out any pelicans in the tangle of figures. A display of plate glinted on a side-table, and the walls glimmered here and there with gilt. Three footmen and Ogilby were on hand to ensure we did not starve, die of thirst, or pull a muscle in reaching for the salt.
I wondered if the family dined in such lonely splendour every night, and on the whole imagined not. There would be a smaller family parlour, or the breakfast room put to dual purpose. I was honoured, if uncomfortable, not only because my two-year-old walking skirt was so severely below the standards of the room, and our dinner companions so out of sorts: The room was also physically chill, without a few dozen warm companions to supplement the fires, and it was probably just as well that I was wearing wool and not silk.
After several false starts, and eschewing both beekeeping and theology as unpromising, we embarked on a conversation concerning Opera. Darling with relief seized on the stage as a point of communication with the guests—or half of them, at any rate, since my passion for warbling sopranos is fairly cool. Holmes, however, admitted to an interest, and so the two men kept the conversational ball in motion, aided by the occasional remark from Lady Phillida or myself.
Marsh drank steadily.
Tenors and librettos, set design and the acoustics of various halls kept the silence at bay, although after ninety minutes of it, Darling was beginning to repeat himself and any real interest was long since exhausted. Lady Phillida and I had a chatty moment over the meat course about fashion, when she asked where my skirt had come from. I was tempted to tell her that Gordon Selfridge’s had a good selection of them on the rack, but instead gave her the truth, and the name of the married couple who made most of my clothes. She raised an eyebrow, but not, it transpired, a disapproving one.
“They’re quite well known,” she told me, as if I might be unaware of this fact.
“Yes, they do beautiful work. And she has an extraordinary eye for fabric.”
“It’s rather surprising,” she said, then hastened to explain. “That they would take you on, I mean. I understand they have quite a long waiting list of clients.”
And I, clearly, was not quite up to snuff. The extraordinary thing was, I reflected, she had not intended an insult. “They were my mother’s tailors,” I told her. “And relatives of hers. Cousins or something.”
I could feel Lady Phillida’s shock from across the table, although she was too well bred to allow it onto her face. That one would admit to blood ties with tailors was perhaps forgivable, but—
Oh, this was going to be a long week-end.
I
Unless he simply passed out on the hearth.
However, he continued to hold his various liquors well, simply becoming ever more taciturn as the meal wound to its close. With such a small gathering, I hoped we might overlook the ritualistic segregation of women and the subsequent reassembly in the drawing room, and to my relief it was so. In fact, Lady Phillida excused herself with a head-ache, and although her husband hesitated, in the end he came down on the side of joining her and leaving us three to finish the evening.
The library was cosy. A pair of decanters stood on a tray with the appropriate glasses for port and brandy. Marsh picked up the nearest decanter, which happened to be the port, splashed some in three of the glasses, and handed us each one without asking if we wanted it. He sank into an armchair and stared into the flames; I thought he had forgotten we were there until he spoke.
“I’ve never been shot, myself,” he informed us, sounding reflective. “Stabbed, yes; cut by a broken bottle, run down by a lorry, beaten, burnt, even trampled by an enraged camel once, but never shot. I wonder how it feels.”
“It doesn’t feel,” I responded. “The body ceases to communicate with the mind; all the person registers is a profound sense of shock. That was my experience, at any rate.”
He took his eyes from the fire. “You? You’ve been shot?”
“With a pistol. A few weeks after we left you—the same case we came to you to avoid, in fact.”
“Where? Where did he shoot you?”
“It was a she. In my shoulder.” I rested my hand on the fabric over the puckered scar, and was startled when Marsh laughed merrily.
“Never had I met a woman such as you. Do you remember when Ali—”
He froze over the name, and at the intrusion of a life that was over. Then he set about retracing the thread of his thoughts.
“So, being shot resembles a deep stab wound. Not the surface cuts—at those the body screams from violation. The mortal wounds are too terrible for the mind to acknowledge, so it retreats. Interesting. That is encouraging. You see, I find myself wondering sometimes what young Gabriel felt. Knowing it was coming, having to stand upright and proud despite the state of his nerves, waiting for his men—his own men—to raise their rifles and take aim at his chest. What a death, for a boy of eighteen. Poor bloody little bastard.” The picture in his mind had gone far beyond suspicion: He clearly had no doubts concerning his nephew’s fate.
He downed the wine in his glass and went to the tray again. This time his hand fell on the other decanter,
