“Your duke’s nephew came to my attention in the late spring of 1918. Not that anyone knew he was a duke’s nephew—more than that, son and heir to one of the great dukedoms of the realm. Had I but known, oh, had he but told me! If he’d given me the name, I could have stopped it in a moment. But I knew him as Hewetson, and only found out the other name later, long after he had died.”
“Why do you suppose he did not tell you?” Holmes asked, the first interruption to the narrative either of us had made.
“God!” Hastings cried out. “I’ve asked myself that a thousand—ten thousand—times in the past five and a half years. Had I prodded him to tell me his story, had I performed my sworn duty as God’s servant wholeheartedly instead of taking relief in the boy’s lack of distress, he might have told me before it was too late. Instead of which I was a craven coward, pathetically grateful that he was not screaming and wetting himself with terror as my first executed prisoner had been.
“But I am getting ahead of myself.
“He joined the regiment in, oh, it must have been late March, a quiet boy with dark eyes and a limp. I was only too glad to see a bit of wear and tear on his uniform, since it meant I wouldn’t have to wince in anticipation every time I heard a sniper’s gun across the line. He knew enough to keep his head down, he wasn’t burdened with all kinds of unnecessary equipment, he was oblivious to the stench and the rattle of guns beyond our range. He had the makings of a soldier, in other words, and the men responded in kind.
“He’d been wounded, that was clear, not only from the limp and the bits of rock embedded under the skin of his face and hands, but from the dark look that came into his eyes during a bombardment. The men were hunkered down in the trenches one long night, and I was working my way along the lines when I came upon him, tense as a humming wire but working hard to keep it from his men. I stopped to talk to him for a quarter-hour or so, which was when I learnt that he’d been raised in Berkshire, and that he’d already been buried once in a mud-soaked trench that took a direct hit. He dismissed it with a couple of brief but chilling phrases—‘drowning in cream-of-man soup’ is the one I still hear in the night—and said he thought it statistically unlikely that he’d take another direct hit, which was why his men were sticking so close to him.
“In truth, his men were near him because despite his youth, despite his apprehension, there was a core of steely authority in him that drew them like so many magnets. They clung to him, both protecting him and drawing strength from him. Hewetson and I talked for a short time—of birds’ nests and fox hunting, I think it was—while the men pretended not to hear; when I moved on, the boy’s tautness had eased a fraction and there was a greater degree of calm and unity of purpose in that one small section of trench. I could, you see,” Hastings added, “perform the task that I had been placed there for.”
I thought that any chaplain who had volunteered for the trenches, at his age, to spend the entire four years in the mud with the common soldiers, had done a greater service than Hastings gave himself credit for. Some toes lost to trench foot or frostbite seemed to me the least of this man’s wounds.
“I made it a point to seek him out from time to time over the next weeks. He never wanted my counsel— indeed, he seemed to cherish most our little talks about matters with no connexion to our current circumstances— but he had much to say about the land, and our responsibility to it. One morning, marching back up the lines towards the Front, I happened upon him, standing at the side of the road to watch two old women trying to nurture a scrap of garden among the shelled fields. When he felt me beside him, he turned, nodded to me, and then gestured at the two bent figures in black. ‘If this war ever ends,’ he said, ‘anyone setting a plough to the entire north end of France is going to risk hitting a live shell. On the other hand, we’ve certainly enriched the soil for them.’ And then he settled his pack and walked on.”
“Dark humour for a young lad,” Holmes commented.
“The only sane response to the continuous, grinding brutality of living for weeks in that hell hole.”
“You would say, then, that Gabriel Hughenfort—or Gabriel Hewetson, as you knew him—was sane?”
“None of us was sane, not after we’d been there for more than a few weeks. But Gabriel was as balanced as any man I knew. He escaped into his memories of rural Berkshire, he read and he wrote for hours, then he returned to duty, strengthened.”
“He wrote, you say. What was he writing?”
“Letters, for the most part. And . . . a diary.”
Holmes and I looked at him, both of us thinking that the family’s collection of letters could not have taken up a great deal of the young officer’s time, and that diary had they none. Before we could ask, Reverend Mr Hastings was explaining, and his next words were even more of a revelation.
“He also had a young woman, I believe.”
“His fiancee in Berkshire, yes. Do we know her name, Russell?”
“Susan, Susan Bridges,” I told him. But Hastings shook his head.
“Not the same, not unless Gabriel’s pet name for her was Helene. Did this fiancee do VAD work in France?”
“I have no idea,” Holmes admitted.
“His young lady was an ambulance driver. She was taller than Gabriel and had bright green eyes, and that’s all I know about her—that and the name. I assumed she was French, by her name, but fluent in English.”
“You met her?”
To my astonishment, Hastings turned red with what looked to be embarrassment.
“I—no, I never met her.”
“Then how—?”
“His letters—I never saw him write in anything but English. Perhaps he feared that the censors would have blacked out phrases in a foreign language.”
His skin returned to its former pallor, but the open manner in which he was meeting Holmes’ eye had an element of defiance in it. For the first time, the old priest was hiding something.
Holmes saw it too, of course, and after a moment’s reflection, decided on an oblique approach instead of direct assault.
“You say he wrote a great deal, to this Helene person and in a diary. To anyone else that you noticed?”
“Someone in the government, a judge of some—Wait. If his name was Hughenfort, then . . . Not a judge. He was writing to the house. Justice Hall is the family seat, is it not?”
“It is. They received very few letters, however.”
“For some reason, I assumed they were dutiful missives to an aged judicial uncle who had retired to the country,” Hastings mused. “The few I noticed—the men occasionally gave me their letters, to post behind the lines—were thin. I recall wondering once why it was this unnamed occupant of a judicial hall who received his letters and not his nearer family. I’d have thought him an orphan, but for one reference he made to his parents’ difficulties in keeping the house warm. Had I known the size of the house,” he added with a glimmer of amusement, “I might have been less sympathetic.”
“No-one else that you noticed? Any letters he received from sources other than Helene and Justice Hall?”
“None that I noticed, but then I was only occasionally present for mail call.”
“Do you know what happened to those letters?”
“He may have given them to the officer who visited him the night before he . . .”
“Lieutenant Hughenfort had a visitor?” Holmes asked sharply, then caught himself. “Perhaps, Mr Hastings, you had best tell us what you know about Gabriel’s final days.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Reverend Mr Hastings settled back into his chair with an air of summoning his energies for the final push. He spread his hands out on the arms, where the upholstery was brown and shiny with wear.
“Gabriel joined us, as I said, in the middle of March, just in time to meet the full German assault. How he
