and brought back a glass with enough brandy in it to stupefy an elephant. He drank half of it straight down as if it had been water, fingered the scar on his face, and then noticed what he was doing and shifted the glass to his right hand.
“When Alistair and I were boys,” he said, his voice just beginning to slur, “we would meet at a hut old man Bloom the gamekeeper kept in the woods, and listen to his stories. There was one day . . .” Tales of boyhood foolishness carried him along until he had reached his goal of insensibility, until his voice faded and he sat as if he’d been clubbed, far beyond speech, veritable or otherwise. Holmes stubbed out his half-smoked cigar, removed the glass from Marsh’s senseless fingers, and went to fetch Ogilby.
They came back with a muscular young man who looked enough like the morning’s footman to be a brother. Between them, the footman and Ogilby got Marsh upright and supported him out of the library. Holmes and I stood and listened to the muttering, bumping progress of the men.
To my surprise, however, Holmes made no move to follow them. Instead, he went to the tray and dashed into a glass a smaller dose of Marsh’s anaesthetic. He then paced to the end of the room and back, took a cigarette from the box on the table and lit it with sharp, tight movements, then sucked in only two or three deep draughts before flicking it irritably into the fire. He returned to his glass, topped it up with a harsh clatter of crystal, and stalked off into the adjoining billiards room.
I found him outside the French doors, glaring across the gardens at the darkness with a fresh cigarette between his fingers. There was no moon and the terrace lights had been shut down, but the distant patter of the Pond’s fountain reached our ears, and a faint breeze stirred the nearby leaves. I was conscious, however, only of the waves of emotion pouring out of the silent man beside me.
Holmes was in a rage.
I knew Holmes as a man of great passions, but they tended to be volatile—or at least, swiftly brought to rein by force of will. I had only occasionally felt in him the deep, burning pulses of an uncontrolled fury; the sensation inevitably made me wish to creep silently away, far away.
Instead, I waited in the open doorway, listening to the falling water and the sharp whistle of breath through his taut nostrils, until he had smoked his cigarette to the end. Only then did I speak.
“What is troubling you, Holmes?”
He flung the near-flat butt to the ground and ground it beneath a vicious boot-heel, then went back into the house.
“Fools and butchers, all of them,” he stormed. “Sitting in their offices and deciding that an example must be made, that the men won’t fight without a threat hanging over their heads. The Romans practised decimation—line up one in ten and stab them to death to encourage the others. Pah! Idiocy.” He became aware that I was staring at him as he paced, and made an effort to pull himself together. When yet another cigarette was going, his voice came, taut with control.
“I was once asked by a family to investigate the death of their son. This was in the first year of fighting, when the War Offices just flatly told the families that their son, husband, whatever had been executed. In this case, for cowardice. Can you picture what news like that does to a family, already grieving? The father committed suicide. The mother wanted to know.
“Russell, he’d been scarcely more than an infant! A schoolboy, who’d lied about his age. Barely seventeen and at his third relentless rolling barrage his nerve broke. He dropped his rifle and ran, straight through deadly fire, over the tops of trenches, anything to get away from the ungodly noise. Desertion, cowardice—shell shock, for which the official cure was a hail of bullets. He couldn’t even stand upright, his nerves were so bad; they had to bring out a kitchen chair—”
He broke off, unable to continue the sentence. The old house waited in silence; when he resumed, his voice was deceptively quiet and reasonable. “Do you know, Russell, when I asked to see the boy’s file, I was told that only the individual involved had the right to see closed records. When I pointed out that the ‘individual involved’ was dead, I was informed that the records were therefore closed, full stop. The logic of the bureaucrat. I had to have Mycroft steal the file for me. That trial was a farce: no defence, no medical testimony as to the state he was in, two of the four witnesses had only hearsay evidence, a third was a personal enemy. And his wasn’t the only such; there have been outraged questions asked in Parliament. One October, in 1917 I believe it was, only one of the twenty- five soldiers executed that month had anything resembling a defence. There was effectively no right of appeal, no sending or receiving of letters, no mechanism for bringing in witnesses who weren’t immediately to hand. The entire system was a travesty, and ripe for abuse.”
“Come, Russell; can you honestly believe that a son of this house could act the coward without reason?
Abruptly, the rage loosed its hold on him, leaving him looking ill. He gazed at the dregs in his glass, then dashed them into the dying flames. A convulsion of blue-tinged fire reached up the chimney, and subsided. Without another word we followed in the direction that Marsh had been carried a short time earlier.
Holmes and I went to the end of the corridor, and there found the most ornate set of servants’ stairs I’d ever seen—except that they were doubtless the original central stairway of the house before its eighteenth-century transformation. The stairs were lit by a pair of electric bulbs, weak but sufficient for safety, and enough to give us an impression of dark colours and rich textures. It was a tapestry of a room, far more than just a means of changing levels in the house, from a time when the social life of the great families had begun to move up, away from the servant-populated Hall.
Pelicans had alighted here, too, I saw: carved atop the newel posts, painted into the walls, even incorporated into the plasterwork ceiling. I stopped to study the unlikely, ungainly, big-beaked creature brooding over the newel post; when it occurred to me that the nearly amorphous granite shapes guarding the main gates had originally been pelicans as well, my mind suddenly made the connexion.
“Sacrifice!” I said aloud. “Of course.”
“Sorry?” Holmes asked.
“The pelican. It’s an odd choice as the heraldic beast of a great house—I mean, they’re positively comical except when they’re actually in the air. But the pelican is a symbol of ultimate self-sacrifice—piercing its breast to feed its young. Zoologically inaccurate, of course, but it goes very deep in Christian mythology. The symbol was applied to the Christ, and later used in Mediaeval alchemy. See, you can even make out the painted blood on this one.”
Holmes stopped to peer with me at the red stream flowing down the breast beside the carved beak. Mutely, we both glanced upwards in the direction of Marsh’s rooms.
Self-sacrifice could take many forms; the only common characteristic was the high cost to the giver.
No wonder Marsh Hughenfort looked like a dying man, ripping out his own heart for the sake of his family.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I woke during the night with the feeling that I had heard voices raised, but when I came fully awake and identified my surroundings, all I heard was silence, and after a time a clock striking four. I settled back into my feather pillows and pulled the thick bedclothes back over my ears, grateful that I was not a house-maid whose job it was to lay fires before dawn.
(Although my ears persisted in thinking it had not sounded much like a house-maid; that it had in fact sounded like Ali. An invention from the recesses of memory, no doubt, summoning the rise and fall of long conversations overheard through walls of canvas and goat’s hair.)
In the morning, I was alone in the tapestried bed. The sky was an expanse of grey, although it was not yet raining. I washed (calling down blessings on whichever duke it had been whose sense of luxury extended to hot water taps in the guest bath-rooms) and dressed, taking myself down the back stairway so that I might have another look at it. This time, with the electric light supplemented by that seeping through the mullioned windows, I