Justice Hall

after him with a bone-saw. Capital tax will be the death of us. Still, it makes for a change, to have the government take it back systematically—traditionally they’ve had to wait for the families to throw up a wastrel duke who would lose it all at the card-table. When I was a child, we had sixty horses in this wing—and God knows how many servants worked here. The economy of this entire corner of Berkshire rested squarely on Justice. Now it’s a narrow step from becoming a tourist attraction or a girls’ school. You’re fortunate to have seen the place in its glory, Mary, even if at its twilight.”

He sounded more matter-of-fact than wistful, and I had to remind myself that to a man whose chosen way of life was that of a scribe, and beneath that a spy, who lived in a tent with neither dependent nor permanent fixtures, Justice Hall might not be an object of adoration.

“We did not get to the chapel,” Alistair told him.

“Oh, we must show Mary the chapel. People come from Scandinavia and the Balkans just to see the chapel. And—what’s the time?”

Alistair made a show of pulling a watch from his pocket and popping it open. “It’s just gone eleven.”

“Dare we risk the kitchen? Oh, I think we must.”

“We could go by way of the Armoury, put on a bit of chain mail first. Mary might fit into Long Tim’s suit of armour.”

They were joking, by God, like a pair of idiot schoolboys. Marsh’s frivolity was somewhat forced, either from disinclination or hangover, but he was trying hard to act the mischief-maker—and making not a bad go of it. It was the first sign of life I’d seen in him, and I did not know if I should rejoice, or fear that the summoning of good cheer was just one more kind of sacrificial blood-letting.

“It would take too long,” Marsh told Alistair. “We’ll have to chance it. Have you been shriven, Mary—or whatever Jewish girls do to meet their Maker?”

“This sounds quite alarming,” I told him.

“Mrs Butter in a rage is a sight to behold.”

“The War would have been over in months if Mrs Butter had been willing to cross the Channel,” Alistair assured me. “As it was, the government held her in reserve as their secret weapon, should the Kaiser reach Dover.”

We passed the offices, where a man (Mr Ringle) was shouting down the telephone about a disputed bill, then entered the Hall, heading for the old, western wing. Marsh paused, and asked me, “Are you acquainted with Vetruvius?”

I gazed blankly for a moment at the nearest object, the marble bust of a handsome young rake with a plaque attributing it to Christopher Hewetson. “Vetruvius. Classical writer? Architecture?”

“‘Aedium compositio constat ex symmetria, cuius rationem diligentissime architecti tenere debent,’?” Marsh intoned. “‘The composition of temples is based upon symmetry, the principles of which architects must most diligently master.’ The first Duke seems to have picked the idea up on his travels—he himself was probably as illiterate as his son later was—and instructed his builder to emulate it.” Among other things I tended to forget—that Marsh Hughenfort had absorbed a Cambridge undergraduate degree.

As we strode through the gorgeous marble cavern, Marsh’s voice playing among the upper gallery and rising to join the figures inhabiting the dome, our private world was suddenly shattered by the sounds of scurrying feet and urgent conversation.

Startled and unable at first to tell where the reverberations originated, I swivelled my head around, searching for the source of the noises, until the footsteps cleared the end of the upper gallery and became localised: Phillida and Sidney Darling, flying down the stairs in a confusion of garments and snatched phrases. I had thought them long gone—they had not come to breakfast and Alistair had said they were in London for the day—but clearly I was mistaken. Words tumbled down the staircase and we held ourselves back so as not to be flattened.

Sidney was clutching a telegram flimsy; Phillida was trying to settle her hat as she descended, half-listening to Sidney.

“—don’t know why they think the march is still necessary, the police will be waiting for them and they won’t hesitate to shoot, not with the way things are.”

“Perhaps Ludendorff will talk him out of it.”

“Not bloody likely, not if I know—Marsh!” he broke off to exclaim as his gaze lifted from the marble steps and he saw us gathered there. “I, er . . .”

“Trouble?” Marsh enquired.

“Nothing, no, just a friend—or not a friend, actually, a business acquaintance I—Yes, Ogilby?”

The butler had glided up with his silver tray, on which lay another telegram. Sidney stuffed the one he held into his pocket and snatched at the fresh one.

“Shall I go ahead?” Phillida asked her husband.

“Yes, my dear, I’ll be there in a moment. Is the car here, Ogilby?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“I’ll just . . .” Sidney tossed the shredded envelope in the direction of the silver tray and frowned down at the telegraphist’s words, which he had sheltered automatically from our view. He read it through twice, then shoved it unceremoniously into the pocket after the first one; without another word, he scurried out of the door, moving too fast for the attentive footman to get it fully open in front of him.

“Well,” Marsh said.

“What do you suppose that was about?” Alistair asked.

I turned to Ogilby for enlightenment. “Mr Darling seemed to think there was to be a march that might turn violent. I hope not in London?”

“I believe the news originated in Germany, madam.”

“The national socialists are about to stage a putsch,” Marsh explained. “General Ludendorff is one of the leaders, he and a young firebrand by the name of Hitler. Sidney is trying to decide if a change in the government would bode well or ill for British interests. He gave me some pamphlets to read; I found them dangerous nonsense.”

I let my gaze climb to the scene on the dome. Who would wish the Day of the Lord? And although Sidney might be depending on the Justice coffers to lay the foundations of an international manufacturing project, Marsh did not sound overeager to become involved in the country’s considerable problems.

With a last thoughtful look upwards at the man about to lay his hand on a serpent, I joined Marsh and Alistair, as we continued our tour.

Quitting the Hall for the western wing, we turned to the right, away from the decorated staircase at the back of the house. Marsh pushed open a door; I looked, then stepped in: the Armoury.

This would have been the banqueting hall of the original house, massive stone walls topped by a fourteenth- century timber roof and inset with ancient warped windows illustrating the family’s history. A sixteenth-century painted screen lay across one end of the hall, a huge fireplace dominated the other, and the arms of ages occupied the walls and corners. Four full suits of armour—one of which had been for a man standing nearly seven feet high, no doubt Long Tim—guarded the fireplace and the door opposite, pikes in their sheathed hands. A sunburst of broadswords and a wider one of pikestaffs faced each other across the southern end of the room. Plumed helmets, faded banners hanging free and behind glass, knives, longbows, and half the armament known to man. There was even a long row of matched blunderbusses, whose recoil would knock an unwary man down.

“A person could mount a small war out of this room,” I commented.

“When the eighth earl, who was to be the first Duke, built the new block beginning in 1710, he couldn’t quite bring himself to tear this out. It vexed his architect no end. But truly, it had to stay; it’s the heart of the place. Before the second earl got his hands on it and raised the roof a few yards, this was the abbey’s hall.”

The room had changed since brown-clad monks gathered here for soup and Scripture, but it took little imagination to conjure up a long feasting board filled with loud, heavily scarred fighting men, women carrying trenchers across a rush-strewn floor, huge pale dogs gnawing bones underfoot. Henry VIII, or either of his daughters, would have felt right at home in this room. It carried the history of this house as the Great Hall and the long gallery did not, and I circumnavigated its lumpy whitewashed walls with respect, taking in the window (Justitia fortitudo mea est, at the top of each branch of the tree with its names: Henry the Unwary, fourth earl; Robert the Unwashed, seventh earl), the captured banners of defeated enemies, and the