pulled away and given a cursory examination.
I was close enough to hear Marsh’s low words, and although my Arabic had gone rusty with disuse, I had no doubt that it was in that forbidden language that Marsh had spoken. The key word, my mind eventually translated, was “accident”—but the phrase in which it was embedded had not, I thought, been merely “It was an accident.” As I turned the words over in my mind, the conviction grew, underscored by the uncharacteristic and blatant relaxation of suspicion on Alistair’s part, that Marsh’s actual phrase had been, “It must appear an accident.”
I glanced up again at the audience, and noticed how many guns there were, all pointing in our general direction.
“Are those weapons unloaded?” I snapped. Most were, but the Marquis and one of the twins flushed with oddly identical embarrassment, broke their guns, and emptied them.
“Did anyone see what happened?” I asked more mildly.
My answer was in the small movement the embarrassed boy made away from his father and brother. Sir Victor’s arm was across the boy’s shoulders, and looking at them, I noticed for the first time that the lad was rigid with something more than the general horror. When he felt my eyes on him, he began to tremble; his father’s arm tightened. I stood up and went over to have a quiet word with them, but the boy spilled out words for the benefit of the entire gathering. He looked terribly young.
“I was on the end, just next to a clump of trees, and I knew this would be my last chance for a bird, and then I saw one out of the corner of my eye—I saw movement in the branches.” I must have winced in anticipation of an admission of carelessness, of firing blindly into a moving bush, because he began to protest. “I didn’t shoot—I wouldn’t want to hit one of the beaters—but I started to bring my gun around and this pheasant took off, beautiful and low. I think it must have been winged earlier, because it was clumsy and slow enough for me. I’m not a very good shot,” he confided painfully. “I came around and pulled the trigger, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw His Grace and Mr Hughenfort. Even when I saw them, I thought I was all right—that is, they were all right—because I thought my shot was well clear. I just didn’t know how wide the spread was, I suppose. And I’m sorry, I’m really awfully sorry.”
In a moment he would begin to sob, and humiliation would anneal itself to horror to make this day a burden for the rest of his life. I bent to look him in the eye, desperately trying to recall his name (Roger—or was that the brother? Damn, I thought, I’ll have to go for formality, pretend I’m a schoolmaster).
“Mr Gerard, His Grace is going to be all right. If there weren’t ladies in earshot he’d be swearing up a storm, and I can only hope the doctor who has to dig the shot out is very hard of hearing. But he’s going to be fine in a week or so, and perhaps you’ve taught him a valuable lesson concerning the stupidity of wandering about where men are shooting.”
The reference to cursing, the suggestion that the duke might have had some responsibility for his own injury, and the inclusion of this teary boy among the “men” made the tears recede and had him standing a fraction away from the comfort of his father.
“Show me where it happened,” I suggested.
He glanced at his father, but readily led me to one side to illustrate how the mishap had come about. “I was here, you see? Father and Roger were by that log.” Discarded cartridges still marked both boys’ positions.
“Which way were you standing?” I asked.
He planted his feet, then stepped a little to one side. “About here. It’s hard to tell—it’s getting so dark.”
“And you heard something from those bushes?”
“A rattle. Like a bird panicking through the undergrowth.”
“And you turned . . .”
“I took a couple of steps, and then the bird flew out.”
“From the bottom, near the ground?”
“About halfway up. Sort of where that dead branch is.”
“And you brought up your gun.”
“I counted two. It helps, to count. Steadies the gun on the bird’s path.”
“One thousand one, one thousand two, is that how you count?”
“Faster. One. Two. Bang.”
I picked my way in the direction of the holly clump, where Marsh was fighting to get to his feet (cursing all the while, in English now, ladies or no). The pheasant lay tumbled on the forest litter; I knelt beside it, trying to tell if there might indeed be blood of two different ages on the feathers, but it was impossible to tell. That on the wing might have been marginally more dried, and thus indicate, as the boy thought, an earlier injury that had made the bird both clumsy and nervous enough to flush from what was actually a safe haven. There was no telling. I left the bird there and went back to the boy.
“Did you use both barrels?”
“I just had one. I’d tried for a bird a minute before, and missed. Father was loading for Roger. We didn’t need a loader before His Grace lent me his gun.”
We both looked down at the elegant weapon the boy still carried, his face gone stark with renewed horror, mine no doubt fighting a rueful smile: Marsh had been shot with his own gun.
The beaters devised a rough pallet to carry their wounded duke off the field of battle. While dogs and men scurried to retrieve the birds before darkness rendered them invisible, one of the motorcars that had been waiting to transport us back to Justice was pressed into service as an ambulance. Alistair and Iris rode with Marsh; the women who had stayed on piled into the other vehicles; I walked a ways apart from the men trailing cross-country back to the house; they, in turn, kept their distance from the grimly limping Sir Victor and his two silent sons. There was little of the merriment that normally accompanies a returning shoot, and I for one had much to think about, as I trudged tiredly through the swirls of fog towards the glow of Justice Hall.
As we approached the house, I fell behind to allow the others to enter before me. In fact, I sat at the foot of the pelican fountain for a while, allowing my thoughts to quiet, considering what had happened that day, the effects and implications. When finally I stood up to brush off my trousers, the drive and entrance were empty. I went up the steps, and had my hand on the elaborate brass latch when the door was jerked open from within. Ogilby held the door, his professional calm worn so thin he looked almost harried. As I entered the Hall, I understood why: Our staid little party had expanded exponentially. The Hall was a tumult of colour and motion. And sound—voices shouting over what sounded like two gramophones playing different songs at full throttle.
“What on earth is this?” I asked the Justice butler.
“It would appear that some friends of Mrs Darling were in the neighbourhood and decided to drop in.” Ogilby’s face gave nothing away, but I could just imagine the state of the kitchen at the moment, with what looked to be thirty unexpected dinner guests.
I gave the butler a look of commiseration, and stepped inside. The very air seemed to push out of the doors past me, fleeing for the still terraces.
“Where did they take the duke?” I asked him.
“His Grace was taken up to his apartment, madam. The doctor is with him.” Beyond the temporary confusion of sheer numbers, I thought, the butler seemed distracted, even distraught.
“He’ll be all right,” I tried to reassure him. “Very uncomfortable, but all right.”
“Thank you, madam,” he replied, so clearly unconvinced that I had to wonder if something further had happened on the trip here. I hurried off to see for myself.
I had no intention of getting caught up in the fray, and made along the front wall of the Great Hall in the direction of the western wing, but even that backwater was pulsing with full-throated conversation. I edged around a three-sided argument involving a woman wearing a sort of Roumanian peasant gown with a multitude of scarfs over it, a tall, cadaverous man with a handful of turquoise chips hanging from his right ear-lobe, and a short, plump individual in a man’s lounge suit who might have been male or female. This last person wore a small, ill-tempered spider monkey on the left shoulder of the suit; the creature was plucking irritably at the jewelled collar and gold chain that kept it from leaping to the heights. I gave the monkey wide berth, nearly knocked into a huge betasselled sombrero someone had perched on a marble bust of the third Duke, avoided the peculiar green drink thrust in my direction by a woman dressed predominantly in beads and fringe, and escaped.
Standing outside of the heavy door to Marsh’s rooms, I could hear voices. I knocked, then turned the knob to open the door a few inches.
