This last letter I read several times. Taken in conjunction with the alternate wording of the official death notification, I began to see what had led Marsh to the conviction that Gabriel had been executed. “I do not claim to understand the forces that conspired” sounded awfully like a lament for a loved deserter. I could only wish that the Reverend Mr Hastings had gone into a bit more detail concerning “all that he did.”
With relief, I slid the letters back into the large envelope and turned to the youthful journals with a lighter heart. They had all been written before Gabriel Hughenfort went to soldier; their sorrow and bloodshed would be limited to anguish for a dead pet and the slaughter of game birds.
I read long, grasping for the essence of the boy and finding a degree of sweetness and nobility that was hard for my cynical mind to comprehend. Afternoon tea inserted itself on my awareness as nothing more than a cup at my elbow and a sudden brightness as the maid turned on the light. The next thing I knew, it was a quarter past seven and a woman’s ringing voice startled me from my page: The Darlings had returned.
I looked down at my tweed-covered lap and dusty hands, and knew it was unlikely that we should be excused from changing two nights running. I closed my books and shut down the lamps. After returning the envelope into Marsh’s hands, without comment from either of us, I went to don the hair-shirt of civilisation.
My perusal of the two dinner frocks in the wardrobe was interrupted by a knock at the door. I tightened the belt of my dressing gown and went to see who it was, opening the door to find Emma, the house-maid whom I had nearly sent flying on the 1612 staircase.
“Beg pardon, mum, but Mrs Butter sent me to see if you’d like a hand with your hair. I was a ladies’ maid at my last position,” she added, as if Mrs Butter might sent a scullery maid for the purpose. I stepped back to let her in.
She chose my dress, rejected the wrap I had chosen in favour of the other, picked a necklace and combs, wrapped my hair into a slick chignon, and finally produced a powder compact and lip gloss. The ugly duckling thus transformed into a higher species, the gong sounded as if she had made some signal giving permission.
“I thank you, Emma, you’re an artist. Before you go, tell me, how formal is Saturday dinner?”
“Oh, it’ll be black tie, mum. There’s one or two might wear white tie, but that’ll be only the older guests.”
“In either case, I’ll need to send for a dress. If I put a letter near the door, will it go in the morning?”
“Certainly, or you could ring, and someone will come for it.”
I had discovered writing materials and stamps in the table under the window. Mrs Hudson would not receive the letter until Saturday morning, but I felt sure she would rise to the challenge of getting evening apparel here to Justice by the afternoon.
And if it did not arrive, I should have a good excuse to plead a head-ache.
I very nearly used that excuse to avoid that evening’s demands on sociability. Following my afternoon’s reading, aware that the tragedy of Gabriel Hughenfort would be moving restlessly through the back of my mind, the thought of spending two or three hours making light conversation was a torment.
But when the gong sounded, I went.
Dinner was in the parlour where we had taken breakfast, and more comfortable it was than the formal dining room. Sidney Darling had spent the day at his club with friends; Lady Phillida had spent the day at a lecture and the shops with friends. He began the evening superciliously amiable, she determinedly cheerful; both of them detested Iris Sutherland.
I could not tell if their palpable dislike was due to the potential for rivalry she represented, or to Iris herself. Phillida kept glancing irritably at Iris’s dress, a subtle construction of heavy chocolate-brown crepe with flame- coloured kid trim that fit Iris like an old shirt and made her sister-in-law’s ornate velvet-and-beads look like dressing-up. Sidney seemed particularly irked by Iris’s arrival; he found the soup cold, the bird tough, the fish going off, and the wine inadequate.
Marsh watched these undercurrents with lidded eyes, and then over the meat course rolled his little bomb into the room. “Iris will be coming with us to London on Wednesday, Phillida.”
Lady Phillida’s upbringing held, and she managed to confine her reaction to a blink of the eyes and a brief contraction of the lips before saying merely, “How pleasant.”
Sidney, however, betrayed a less stringent upbringing. His fork clattered to his plate in protest, although he managed to contain his words to a strangled, “You feel that necessary?”
“Not necessary,” Marsh replied equably, “but she offered, and I accepted. Do you disapprove?”
Sidney was in no position to disapprove of any of the duke’s actions, but he could not quite rein in his vexation. He burst out, “I truly cannot see why you chose to handle this situation in such a formal manner. Surely we could have made them welcome at Justice. The poor old girl’ll feel as if she’s on show, like some . . . agricultural creature on the auction block.” That being a fairly accurate representation of the position in which Mme Hughenfort and her son were being placed, none of us tried to argue with Sidney. He went on, stabbing and sawing at his succulent roast. “I do not know why we couldn’t have had them here. I’m sure the child is house-broken. And I’m sure his mother is charming; most French women are. It is hardly a welcoming attitude. I need more gravy,” he ended petulantly. The footman leapt to attention, and we continued our meal with close concentration.
I glanced at Iris to see how she had taken this blatant lack of welcome; she shot me a look of quiet amusement, and went on placidly with her vegetables. I found myself liking Marsh’s wife more and more. She was intelligent, clear-spoken, interested in everything, and possessed of a sufficient degree of self-confidence to regard the waves of disapproval coming down the table at her with equanimity, even humour.
It was she who pushed away the increasingly heavy blanket of silence. “How was London today, Phillida?”
The lady of the house had clearly felt the blanket more than the rest of us, for she seized the question with relief. When we had ridden out the blow-by-blow account of the lecture Lady Phillida had attended on auto- suggestion rendered by a disciple of Coue, and before we could get to her shopping triumphs, Iris turned to me and asked how I’d spent my afternoon.
“I’ve been exploring the library—the proper library, upstairs.”
“You spend a great part of your life in libraries, I am led to believe.”
“Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.”
“Why afraid?”
“Oh, it’s just that most people haven’t much use for academics. I freely admit it’s a fairly strange way to spend one’s life, burrowing through dusty tomes.”
“What are you working on at the moment?”
Phrased in that manner, the question had to be taken seriously. I thought, however, that I might give the room a general answer rather than what I had actually been doing in the Greene Library that very afternoon. “I’m putting together an article for an American journal. I met the editor last spring at a function in Oxford, and he asked me to write something for it.”
“What is the subject?” she pressed.
“‘The Science of Deduction in the Bible,’?” I told her. It was the sort of title that tended to cause conversation to grind somewhat until people had chewed their way through it, and indeed the two Darlings had that familiar How-does-one-approach-this? look on their faces. Iris, however, looked only interested.
“‘The Science of Deduction’—do you mean, when people in the Bible work things out? Like Susannah and the Elders?”
Full points for Iris Sutherland, I thought. “Exactly. Or psychological deduction such as Joseph used in interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams.”
We turned this topic over for a while, with Marsh listening and the Darlings frowning, until I thought that we had inflicted the room with enough theology, and I asked Iris what she found of interest in Paris. (In other words: And what do
“The immense wealth of its artistic life. Writers and painters are coming back, now that the worst of the
