“It might even appear like ‘Hughenfort’ on an envelope at the Front,” Holmes said, and added, “You’d have saved me half a night of pawing through filing cabinets, had you known. Still, it can’t be helped.
“There is a clerk in the Records Offices for whom I once performed a discreet service, and who in return is happy to expedite any enquiries I might have concerning those who have worn a uniform. That Gabriel Hughenfort’s was not a public record was apparent immediately I heard that members of the man’s own family were unaware of his fate. A shameful end for a prominent name—records are sealed for much less than that. However, I had not expected that they might be removed entirely.
“All started well enough. I arrived in London, I found my man, arrangements were made for an after-hours rendez-vous when we might read our files undisturbed, and I passed the intervening time in an afternoon concert. I am pleased to report that the cultural life of the great city is quite recovered from the losses during the War. However, you are not interested in my pleasures.
“I presented myself at the appointed hour, allowed myself to be escorted surreptitiously through a side-door, and gave my clerk the information I required. It was not with the general records, which was no surprise, but we pressed on.
“Eventually, we found a file with the name we sought, but as a soldier’s service record, it left a great deal to be desired. His family history consisted of
“So his records from the Front were either lost or separated?” I suggested.
“So I’d have thought,” he said, “except that his file also contained the standard typed notification of Gabriel Hughenfort’s death.”
That, we all had to agree, was difficult to explain.
“My clerk was well and truly stymied. He’d never seen anything like it, he said—and then he corrected himself. He had, perhaps, once or twice, when he’d chanced upon the ill-concealed record of government agents. Spies, if you will.”
Holmes puffed his pipe and watched our reactions. Alistair and Iris sat up sharply; Marsh tried to, and grunted. Even I was startled—and here I’d thought I was joking when I speculated about the future Phillida’s two children might find in the family espionage business.
Holmes was nodding. “My ears pricked, as you can imagine. And then I noticed, written in faint pencil on the inside cover of the file, the name Hewetson.
“Under that name, however, there was little more, only the record of where he’d trained before being sent to France. No service record, no medical papers, not even a death notice.
“Of course, the Records Offices are in deplorable condition, and even the most straight-forward of records go astray all the time. Assuming that this specific case of loss was due to malice would be leaping to conclusions—an exercise at which, as Russell could tell you, I have much practice, although I try to kerb the impulse.
“Still, I now had the unit with which he’d been sent to France. Assuming, that is, that he stayed with the original regiment.”
“Which he didn’t,” Iris broke in. “When I saw him in Paris in March, he was en route to a new posting.”
“My dear lady, I might as easily have remained here and had most of my work done for me by your arrival. However, in the end, rather than pursuing the boy through several million dusty bits of paper, we let ourselves out of the building and I caught a cab straight-away for my brother Mycroft’s.”
He paused to choose his words. “My brother is a mine of information when it comes to the inner workings of the machinery of government.” This was a delicate way of explaining Mycroft’s all-pervasive and enormously powerful role in, as Mycroft whimsically called it, “accounting.”
“I know your brother,” Iris said. “I did some work for him during the War.”
“You don’t say? Well. In any case, after I’d turned Mycroft from his bed and confronted him with the name, he was no more forthcoming than the clerk’s file had been. He’d never directed a man by that name. He did agree, however, that for a second lieutenant to have virtually no records was an unexplained irregularity, and it is my brother’s function, certainly in his own mind, to explain the inexplicable, to account for the unaccountable. It took him the entire morning—which is an exceedingly long time for Mycroft—but he did follow young Gabriel’s elusive tracks far enough to uncover the second regiment to which he was posted, following his release from hospital in March.
“Once I possessed that piece of information, the rest was foot-work. The names of the demobbed from that regiment and their addresses allowed me to winnow out those men from London, as I could see no advantage to be had in seeking out names from far-flung villages. Time enough for that, if it proves necessary.
“From the score of names that immediately presented themselves, I chose half a dozen to begin with, all of them old enough to suggest that their survival was due to a degree of low cunning, rather than sheer luck. One captain, one sergeant, the rest privates.
“The four I located before the hour became too late for calling told me a story that interested me deeply. I began by showing them the photograph I had borrowed from the library downstairs, and although they were all uncertain about the name Hughenfort, they did know the face, and knew that ‘Angel’—their nick-name for the lad— had been shot.
“Two things concerning the testimony of these soldiers interested me greatly. First and most obvious, that they knew the face and the first name, but none recognised the family name. This confirmed that your nephew used his
“The other thing that interested me was not so much what the men knew, as how they felt about their ‘Angel’ Gabriel. When I first brought up the subject, each was loth to speak of the lad at all. When they did, it was with an uncomfortable mixture of deep resentment and sorrow that quite obviously pained them. All felt considerable distress at what happened to the lad, and a kind of hurt bafflement, as if a friend had badly let them down, for reasons they could not comprehend.
“It was not shame. Nor was it the disappointment in a too-soft sprig of the aristocracy, a lad who had no business in the trenches and ran afoul of his own inadequacies. It was more a case of, There but for the grace of God might I have gone. They accepted Gabriel as one of their own, a fledgling soldier with a weakness none had foreseen, but none could condemn.”
“They mourned him,” Iris said in a soft voice.
“Precisely. And at a stage of the War when few souls had any capacity for mourning left in them.”
I looked at my companions, and found that the soldiers were not the only people to mourn this “sprig of the aristocracy.” Iris was staring unseeing at the flames, her eyes dry but tragedy on her face—she’d been fond of the boy, this representative of a lost generation of golden youth. Alistair was scowling and kicking with his heel at the basket of logs. And Marsh—
One glance at Marsh, and I shot to my feet in confusion, exclaiming, “Look at the time—after mid-night already; I’ll tumble into the fire with exhaustion. Holmes, surely we can continue this in the morning?”
I practically hauled at his ear-lobe to get him out of the room; fortunately, he caught my urgency, if not its reason, and we made our hasty farewells.
But I knew that the image of Marsh Hughenfort, his face half covered by one hand and actual tears trembling in those black eyes, was one that would stay with me for a long, long time. The man looked decades older than Holmes, and far from any source of vitality or hope. We had no business inflicting the vivid reminder of an innocent’s death on the man when he was in his current condition.
Let Iris drug him to sleep with the tale of Ratty and Toad.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the morning, however, Marsh’s rooms were silent, and I for one was reluctant to break into his rest. We continued downstairs to join those house guests who were upright at this hour, a pair of unshaven young men still in dinner jackets, who seemed to have not bothered about going to bed at all, and who were in no condition to
