On entering Palestine in the closing days of 1918, Holmes and I had been pushed into the vehemently unwilling arms of two apparently Arab agents for the British government intelligence service—that is, Holmes’ elder brother, Mycroft. We had begun on a note—an entire chorus—of mistrust, resentment, and dislike, and only slowly had those abrasive feelings softened beneath the continuous rub of shared tribulation and danger. When I had proved that I would, if pushed to the extremity, kill to protect our band of four, Ali’s eyes had finally held a degree of respect. When later we demonstrated our willingness to die for each other, we were forever bound, like it or not.
Five years or fifty, when people have sweated, suffered, and shed blood together, there can be no hesitation: If one calls, the other responds. We had shared salt and bread, those staples of Bedu life; now it appeared that we were about to share our combined strength. My blood family had been dead for nine years; however, in the interim I had acquired a most singular pair of brothers.
Darkness fell outside the windows long before we reached the tiny village of Arley Holt. We were the only passengers to disembark—as far as I could see, we had been the last passengers on the entire train.
Nonetheless, a figure trotted out from the warmth of the station to meet us, bowling along on legs too small for his stocky body and talking a streak from out of his bristling ginger whiskers, his gravelly voice comprising a delicious admixture of highland Scots, East End London, and Berkshire.
“There you are, Master Alistair, I was just going to spread my car rug out on a bench and stop the night here, meet the first train in the morning. Had a good trip did you—I see you found your friends—no, miss, I’ll carry those, the good Lord blessed me with strong shoulders and I’m happy to use them—watch your step here, should’ve brought a torch I should’ve, daft of me—oi, stop a mo’,” he cautioned sharply, realising in the darkness that one of us was moving very slowly indeed. “What’ve you done to yourself, young master? You’re hurt!”
I expected Alistair to dismiss the servant’s concern with a curt phrase—as Ali, he certainly would have—but he surprised me. “It’s nothing, Algy. I got bashed in Town yesterday and I’ve gone all stiff on the train. I’ll be fine after a night’s sleep.”
“Blimey,” Algy muttered. “Let you out of me sight and you get yoursel’ bashed, what will the Missus say, I can’t think. Here now, you pack yourselves good and snug in the back, that’ll warm you.” He wrestled from the boot an enormous bear-skin rug that swallowed Alistair, with plenty left to cover the passengers on either side of him.
Holmes, without asking, went around to the front of the old motor and yanked the starter handle for the driver. When the engine had coughed and sputtered its way to life and Holmes was back inside (where “snug” was indeed the word, as well as being redolent of large carnivores), the driver turned in his seat.
“Much obliged, sir, I’d’ve had a time getting ’er going in the cold. Name’s Algernon, Edmund Algernon.” Ali roused himself enough to give the driver our names; Algernon touched his cap in response, then turned to shift the motorcar into motion.
The village died away in less than a minute; the night closed in. The tunnel of our head-lamps revealed a well-kept track with hedgerows high on either side, so close that if I’d dropped the window I could have touched them without stretching, although our vehicle was narrow. Algernon kept up a running commentary, directed at his employer but with the occasional aside of explanation to us, concerning a flock of sheep, a neighbour’s rick fire, another neighbour’s newborn son, the relief when a villager’s illness was deemed not after all to be the dread influenza, and half a dozen other topics, all of them rural and thus commonplace to me—although again, not the sort of thing I would have associated with the silent figure at my side.
After what seemed a long time, our head-lamps illuminated a crossroads. Algernon prepared to go to the left. Alistair spoke up.
“Justice Hall, if you would, Algy.”
“Ah,” said our driver, allowing the motor to drift to a halt. “Well, you see, sir, Lady Phillida arrived today.”
The normally effusive Algy let the flat statement stand with no further embroidery; indeed, from his master’s reaction, none was needed.
“Damn. She wasn’t due until Thursday. All right, home then.”
“Home” lay to the left. After a few minutes the hedgerows fell away, replaced by a brief stretch of wire fence, then stone walls, and finally a gate—not a grand ceremonial entrance, just something to keep out livestock. This was followed by half a mile of freshly laid gravel with centuries-old trees on either side, then another stone wall, with farm buildings, a heavily mulched herbaceous border, and a passage tunnelled through the ground floor of a long stone building. When we emerged, the head-lamps played across a clear expanse of tidy, weed-free gravel as Algy pulled up to a stone building with high windows of ancient shape and numerous small panes. We came to a halt facing a wooden porch that was buried beneath a tangle of nearly bare rose vine.
The door at the back of the porch opened almost as soon as the hand-brake was set, and out hurried Algernon’s female twin. Her voice was high and lacked the influence of Scotland and London, but it was every bit as free-flowing as our driver’s. I prayed that this was “the Missus” Algernon had mentioned—a married Ali would be the final straw.
“Oh, Mr Alistair, you must be fair frozen, it’s come so bitter out; let’s have you in by the fire now—why, whatever’s happened?”
These two had all the earmarks of old family retainers, riding a comfortable line between familiarity and servitude. In fact, for a moment I played with the idea that Algy and the Missus might be two more of Mycroft’s peculiarly talented agents, placed here with Ali in a meticulously choreographed act—down to the very name Algernon, which meant “The Whiskered One”—but no, I decided reluctantly; they were both too idiosyncratically perfect for artifice. The Missus bossed and fussed Ali (who cursed his infirmity beneath his breath, in Arabic and English) through the porch and into the low, oak-panelled entrance vestibule, while Algernon, reassuring us that he’d bring our suit-cases from the motor, pushed us in after them and closed the heavy, time-blackened door at our backs.
With her hand under Alistair’s arm (no mean feat, considering the ten-inch disparity in their height), the housekeeper led him into the adjoining room. A wave of warmth billowed out through the draught-excluding leather curtain, through which we gladly followed.
And there I stopped dead.
Had I been asked to place this man Alistair Hughenfort into an English setting, I might, after considerable thought, have described one of two extremes: It would either be the stark, bare surroundings of a man long accustomed to living within the limits of what a couple of mules can carry, or else ornate to the point of glut, both as overcompensation for the desert’s forced austerity and as a means of evoking the richly coloured clothing, drapes, and carpets of the Arabic palette.
Instead, Ali Hazr was at home in the most perfect Elizabethan great hall I’d ever seen. Not a nobleman’s hall—not huge, nor ornate, nor built to impress, just a room which for three hundred years had sheltered its family and dependents from the outside world’s storm and strife.
The room was perhaps fifty feet long, half that in width and height. The walls were of beautifully fitted limestone blocks, aged to dark honey near the roof beams and above the fireplace, paler near the floor and in the corners. The beams arched black high overhead, all but invisible in the dim light, and the high, many-paned windows above our heads were black and uncurtained. Electric lamps shed an oasis of light before the crackling fire, illuminating the lower edges of the tapestries that covered the stonework, hangings so dim with the patina of generations, they might well have disintegrated with cleaning.
On the hall’s end wall, opposite the wooden gallery under which I stood amazed, hung what after a moment’s study I decided was the head of a boar, bristling furiously over the room. The huge and weirdly distorted shadow it cast up the wall made the head look like some enormous prehistoric creature brought forward in time. Perhaps it actually was as large as it appeared: The tusks, their ivory darkened along with the stones, looked longer than my outstretched hand.
“Shall I take your coat, ma’am?” enquired a voice at my elbow. The Missus had settled Ali to her satisfaction, stripping him down to Holmes’ borrowed suit and propping his feet onto a cushioned rest, and she was now turning to his guests. Obediently, I took off my heavy coat and draped it over the one Holmes had lent Ali. The cold bit my shoulders, so I hastened down the room to join the men in front of the fire. Once there, I rather wished I’d kept my coat; warming one’s self before a head-high fireplace in a large room involves one roasted side and one chilled, and the impulse to revolve slowly in compensation.
