an Oxford scholar-cum-detective, Paris, the art world, and the life of a frustrated pianist—and then we would drift into an easy silence, listening only to the day, each of us deep in our own thoughts. I felt the restless exhaustion that had come on me in Sussex, which Alistair’s arrival had interrupted but not displaced, shrink and fade, to be replaced by a degree of serenity rare in me.
Two hours later we were standing in front of a small forest of jagged, lichen-encrusted granite chunks thrusting up from the pasture land, and I couldn’t think at first why we had stopped. Then I remembered: The Circles. The reason for our excursion.
Prehistoric monuments are invariably lonely, if for no other reason than a group of standing stones near habitations will not last long before being hauled away and incorporated in someone’s wall. Their solitude, and their combination of crude workmanship with clear deliberation, make objects such as The Circles puzzling and evocative; they seem to occupy a portion of the universe apart from daily life, and appear to have been fashioned by hands other than ordinary human ones. The breath of God—or perhaps of the gods—has brushed these sites, and changed the very ground from which they rise.
“Extraordinary place, isn’t it?” Iris was circumnavigating the outer stones, her right hand tapping each one as she passed.
“I was just thinking how other-worldly these sites are. Have you seen Stonehenge?”
“Once, briefly.”
“I spent the night there, one winter solstice.”
“The cold must have been excruciating.”
“It was that,” I agreed, with feeling. “But the sunrise on the stones was glorious.”
“The three of us came out here to see the summer solstice one year. Marsh had some theory that this was orientated towards the sun, too. Either it isn’t, or else too many of the stones are worn away. It was a nice sunrise, though—warmer than yours, I don’t doubt. He caught hell for keeping Alistair out all night. We were, oh, thirteen maybe. Ali would have been seven or eight.”
Ali, his childhood nick-name—it took me aback to hear Iris use what I thought of as Alistair’s real name. I watched Iris complete her circuit of the outer circle, then step inside to perform the same touching ritual with the inner stones. These were in better condition—either that, or had started out taller—because she did not have to stoop as often to reach them. When the second round was fulfilled, she walked straight up-hill from the monument, then stopped, turned, and sat down on a low boulder overgrown with grass and dead nettles.
There were three stones in a row—placed there, I thought, not buried in the ground by ancient Britons. I envisioned these three childhood friends, of disparate ages and peculiarly entwined futures, laboriously hauling the river-smoothed boulders here for viewing. I sat on the end rock, then looked at the one between us.
“Who generally sat in the middle?” I asked her.
“Marsh. Marsh was always in the centre.”
“He still is.”
“Do you know how he came by that scar?” she asked abruptly. “He fingers it, when he’s troubled—I’m sure you’ve noticed. I don’t know why.”
“War injury,” I merely told her.
“It changed him,” she said. “When first he came to France with it, he was not the same man.” She sighed. “Poor, poor man. He’s going to be so unhappy if he stays.”
“Will it affect you?”
“I’ll not move here, if that’s what you’re asking. But I should think it will require regular visits from Paris, in order to keep up appearances.”
It was peaceful in that lonely place populated only by a stand of gnarled stones and abandoned trees. I thought perhaps the reason Marsh had excused himself from the outing was not the pressure of work, but his unwillingness to encounter these mute reminders of uncomplicated youth and its long, free days beneath the summer sun.
“You haven’t met this boy Thomas who’s coming over on Wednesday? Lionel’s son?”
“I haven’t. The mother lives in France—Lyons, isn’t it? During the War, I could never see a reason to go out of my way and introduce myself, and since then, no-one seems to know where she lives.”
“Did you ever meet the other nephew, Gabriel?”
“Him I did meet, yes.”
“When was that?”
“When he was an infant, the first time; then when Marsh’s father died and we all came here for the funeral. He must have been about four. And a few times when Henry and Sarah were passing through France. But the last time was just a few months before he died, when he came to see me for two days.”
I looked at her, startled by the raw grief in her voice. Her face gave nothing away, but I had not mistaken the depth of emotion. “You liked him?”
“Gabriel was a lovely, lovely boy. Intelligent, beautifully mannered—the sort of manners that come from within, from being thoughtful. Not tall but well made, with a grace that made me think he would be a good dancer. Quiet. Passionate. Deeply loyal. Gabriel reminded me of his father at that age.”
“Henry must have been devastated.”
She blinked, as if she’d been suddenly pulled back from a place far away and infinitely kinder. “Henry. You never met him, did you? No, of course not. Poor man. He was so proud of Gabriel. Marsh thinks he suspected that his son had been executed. I hope not. I pray that Henry went to his grave believing that Gabriel died honourably. It would have mattered terribly to him.”
“Marsh seems fairly sure of Gabriel’s fate,” I commented.
“You’ve seen the letters?”
“Alistair gave them me, yesterday” was all I would say. She took it as agreement.
“Then you’ll have seen. Once the thought occurs, it is hard to read the Hastings letter in any other way.” She sounded bleak; the boy had made quite an impression on her in a short time. A lovely boy who, I had come privately to agree, would end his life with a blindfold over his eyes, lest his cowardice prove infectious. “When Marsh showed them to me, all I could think was, Why didn’t Gabriel write to me when he was first charged? Surely he must have had some time before—If I had known, I’d have had your brother-in-law step in. It must have been some tragic, God-awful piece of military blunder.”
“My brother-in-law,” I repeated in astonishment. Did she mean Mycroft? Could Marsh Hughenfort possibly have told his estranged wife about Mycroft Holmes?
“Mr Holmes,” she said. “Ah—I see. You are concerned that Marsh spoke too freely. I myself have had dealings with Mr Holmes’ organisation too, Mary, although in a minor role. Many of us were in a position to pass on information about the Kaiser’s army; I did so three or four times. Nothing more. And I do not speak of it where there are ears to hear.”
“Mycroft would be relieved to know that,” I told her, and allowed my mind to return to the incongruity of the impressive young soldier and his catastrophic end.
“Tell me, did Gabriel seem disturbed when you met him in Paris? Shell-shocked, perhaps?”
“It was just two days’ leave between getting out of hospital and returning to the Front, and he was a rather quiet young man meeting an aunt for the first time since he’d put on long trousers. He was hardly going to pour his heart out. Too, the Hughenforts all excel at self-control. I will say that I saw that kind of quiet in other soldiers, men who’d spent too long a time at the Front and were not far from the breaking point. Gabriel had only been in the trenches for a couple of months, but they’d been hellish months.”
Like the men with minor wounds who gave themselves over to death, I thought; strong men were shattered, weak men survived, with no knowing the why of either.
“What would you say to a meat pie down at the Green Man?” Iris asked me.
“I’d say that was a fine idea,” I answered.
The pie was mostly pheasant, the beer kept by a true craftsman, and we were well content when we left the small public house with the mythic name. We followed a hilltop path back that was every bit as ancient as stone
