Our guest sat up sharply, scarcely wincing as the urgency of his mission overrode his ailments. “He needs us. I need your help.”
This extraordinary confession passed straight over Holmes’ head. “I understood that to be so. My question was, what is Mahmoud’s name?”
The wounded ex-Arab braced himself, took a soft breath, then answered in an even voice. “The man you know as Mahmoud Hazr was born William Maurice Hughenfort.” He waited, his eyes on Holmes, to see what we would make of the statement.
It meant nothing to me, but Holmes’ eyes assumed the faraway look that indicated a rapid search through his prodigiously stocked mental box rooms. “Maurice Hughenfort. Known as Lord Marsh. Younger son of the Duke of Beauville. Good Lord. I should have suspected that family immediately I saw where your ticket was issued last night.”
“I’m sorry?” I asked. Was this something from his accumulation of newspapers, a recent event we had missed while slogging through the depths of Dartmoor?
But Holmes waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the laboratory. “Ancient history, Russell. He’ll be in Debrett’s. Unless . . . ?” He turned an eye to the man in the chair.
“The entry is still there,” Ali—Alistair?—confirmed. “Incomplete, but there.”
Curious, I went down to Holmes’ laboratory and took his Debrett’s from its resting-place on a shelf between an assortment of labelled coal samples and a massive and outdated treatise on Bertillonism. I went back down the corridor, flipping over the pages until I came to the name Beauville. It began with a crest of typically unlikely looking creatures and a snarl of heraldic devices above a motto of equally unlikely Latin,
The Duke of Beauville, the list began, with the name of the (then-present) Duke, Henry Thomas Michael. I skimmed over the long paragraph of fine print that followed, packed with descending titles, education, and honours:
I turned the page to find the Family of Hughenfort entry, where the dates began in the eleventh century, although details of the early barons were both few and heavily mythologised. Words jumped out:
Finally I saw the name Maurice, and I slowed to read the entry of his father’s generation:
1.
2.
3.
1.
I had to travel back up the lists to find Ali, but there he was, under a cousin of the fourth Duke’s:
The two Hughenfort cousins had slipped beneath the ken of Debrett’s all-knowing eyes, into the king’s service in the Middle East. Quite an accomplishment for a pair of Hons. So why had they come back?
Further queries were interrupted by Mrs Hudson and another tray, and although the man I was trying to think of as Alistair was reluctant to break off his quest even to take on nourishment, Mrs Hudson stood over him until she was satisfied that he was not about to let the buttery eggs go untended. Holmes, seeing that our guest’s mouth was unavoidably occupied, stepped into the gap.
“Before your time, Russell. There was a mild sensation in the newspapers concerning a vanished baronet. Somehow a rumour got around that he had boarded a ship for New York and never arrived. 1896 or ’7, as I recall.”
“Seven,” mumbled Alistair around his toast.
“The family denied the rumours, claimed their second son was merely travelling in Russia, but when Debrett’s came out the following year it gave his address as ‘unknown,’ and Burke’s followed. But—correct me if I am wrong—the son came home a few years later. For his father’s funeral?” The bandage nodded. “When he disappeared again after that, no one could work up much interest.”
Ali washed the toast down with the last of his tea; he had eaten all the eggs and the tomato, but left the bacon and sausage untouched. “When I joined him in Palestine in 1902, my own family had learnt their lesson, and gave it out that we had mounted an expedition into the Himalayas and were not expected to return for years. I had my club forward letters, first to my home, and then later, when we became . . . associated with your brother Mycroft’s organisation, to his office. It disarmed suspicion.”
The idea of Ali Hazr, Arab cut-throat and clandestine agent for His Majesty’s government, as a clubman with noble blood in his veins made for an interesting picture. Holmes, however, returned to the question that had brooded over the house since the previous night.
“In what trouble is Mahmoud?”
Our guest looked down at his hands with a faint smile. “It is good to hear my brother’s name spoken. It gives me hope.” For one startling instant, Ali Hazr passed through the room, his hand creeping to the hilt of his wicked knife, ebony eyes flaring, the rhythm of a foreign tongue riding the English words. And then the ghost of a dramatic moustache faded, the swarthy skin became merely that of an outdoorsman, and we were looking again at Alistair Hughenfort.
“Four months ago, we received news that his brother was dying. Henry. His older brother. The funeral was in September.”
A picture began to take form out of the fog of ignorance.
“His older brother, the duke,” Holmes said. Ali nodded; Holmes settled his back against the end of the bench and allowed his eyelids to droop shut, the better to listen. He suggested to Ali, “And the duke had no son.”
However, Ali shook his head. “Henry—the sixth Duke—did have a son. Gabriel. The boy enlisted on the day of his eighteenth birthday, in August 1917. He was killed fifty-one weeks later. Gabriel was engaged, but not married. Henry had no other children.”
“Were there no other brothers?”
“Lionel, six years younger than Mah—than Marsh, but he died before the War. And there is a sister, Phillida, from the old duke’s second wife. She is seventeen years younger than Marsh.”
Somehow, it was difficult to conceive of Mahmoud Hazr as one of a family of siblings going through the common lot of birth, teething pains, skinned knees, and all the other stages of human growth. I began to get an inkling of how absolute his own reinvention had been—more profound even than that of his relative Alistair. It was then the full picture hit me: Mahmoud Hazr, itinerant scribe for the illiterate Palestinian countryside, eyes and ears for General Edmund Allenby, the inadequately washed Bedouin who scratched his ribs and cursed his mules and roasted his coffee over a dried-dung fire in the dark confines of a goat’s-hair tent, was also the seventh Duke of Beauville: his embroidered robes replaced by ermine, that dark, knife-scarred face topped not by
It was a lot to absorb.
Holmes, as usual, kept to the essentials. “I fail to see what I might be expected to do in this situation. If Mahmoud—if your cousin—Maurice—confound it! If Maurice Hughenfort feels it necessary to assume the duties that accompany his title, there is little I, or Russell, can do to dissuade him. If he does not so choose, he could always let the dukedom be in abeyance for his lifetime. Surely there must be another heir in the woodwork. Did the other brother, Lionel, have no heir?”
“There are . . . complications. You will understand when you see him. Will you come?”
I had known it would come down to this. With the mud from the last outing still damp on my boots, we were about to set out again. I must have sighed, because Ali pulled himself up, his face going dark in a way I
