Justice Hall

With the ashes of that betrayal in my mouth, it was no hardship to avoid the social whirl around the captain’s table during our crossing. I probably ate little more than Iris did, and the work I did during those two days, the paper on biblical deductions for the American journal, turned out considerably more caustic than I had originally intended. Their minds were perverted, I translated the story of Susanna and the elders; Their thoughts strayed from the path of God, and they attended not to the demands of Justice.

For the first leisure hours I’d had since August, these days were proving grimly unsatisfactory.

On the third morning there came a rap at the door. I put down my cup of tea and went to answer it. Iris stood there, wearing the same clothes she’d had on when I last saw her, her face haggard, with dark swathes under her eyes. I pulled her in, took the red journal that she was holding, made her sit on the sofa, and pressed a cup of sweet tea into her hands. I rang for another pot, and some toast, then stood over her until she’d eaten two slices. When she shook her head at more, I drew her a long, hot bath, made her swallow a small whisky, dressed her in a pair of my sleeping pyjamas, and put her to bed.

All without a word between us.

She woke at dinner-time. I was reading, as I had been all that day, when I heard her moving around in the bedroom. When she came out, one of my kimonos belted around her waist, she looked old still, but the dark bruises under her eyes had faded.

“Was Gabriel’s major Sidney Darling?” she asked without preliminary.

I put down my book. “I don’t know,” I answered her. “Would you like tea, or a drink?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Iris, I know how you feel. Not about this—how could I know?—but in general I have stood in your shoes, and I am well acquainted with the all-consuming urge to get my hands around someone’s throat. I’ve felt it, I’ve seen it, and I know this: You mustn’t allow it to consume you.”

She blinked, and seemed to see me for the first time.

“Iris, you need food and rest and time for quiet reflection. In that order. It won’t do anyone any good if you stretch yourself until you break. Now: What do you want to eat?”

An omelet was what she would eat, so I joined her. Also toast, and cheese, and water biscuits, and an apple tart, with coffee at the end. I poured a measure of brandy into our cups, in the absence of calvados, and noted with satisfaction the colour in her cheeks. With the coffee, the purser had brought the information that all of Iris’ belongings had been transferred to a vacant stateroom not far from mine. Leaving her in my rooms, I followed the purser down the corridor to her new accommodations to retrieve a change of clothing, and when she had dressed I brought out my hair-brush and stood behind her to draw it through her short hair, as a means of giving her the physical contact I thought she needed, in a manner she might permit. She sat stiffly at first, and then more easily, finally allowing her head to loll with the strokes of the brush.

“Ninety-nine,” I said. “One hundred.”

“Did your mother tell you to brush your hair a hundred times each night?” she asked me.

“Oh yes. Not that I bother, you understand, but she certainly did. My father would sometimes brush it for her.” Now where did that bit of ancient history emerge from?

“Well, thank you. My hair has never been so tamed.”

“More coffee?”

“No, thanks. Mary, what are we going to do?”

I smiled as I cleaned the brush of hair. “I’m glad to hear you say ‘we.’?”

“Well, it would appear that we’re all in this together.”

“Iris, Holmes is very, very good at what he does.”

“Yes. He’d have to be, wouldn’t he? Can he prove it was Sidney who did that . . . I can’t even think of a word for such a despicable act.”

“Murder,” I said grimly. “It was murder.”

She studied my face, and saw there something that seemed to reassure her more than my assertion of Holmes’ competency.

“However,” I told her, “we can’t actually be sure that it was Darling, not yet.”

“Of course it was Sidney. Staff major, ‘my uncle,’ Gabriel called him. The boy only had two uncles, Sidney and Marsh.”

“He called Alistair ‘uncle,’?” I reminded her.

“Did he? Good Lord, so he did. But to consider Ali as ‘the Major’ is every bit as preposterous as accusing Marsh.”

“I don’t mean that Alistair is a suspect, Iris. I meant that Gabriel seems to have used the term ‘uncle’ for any male relative of his father’s generation. Marsh, Sidney, and Lionel, yes, but also Alistair, who was sort of a distant cousin.”

“He called Ali’s sister Rose ‘aunt,’?” she conceded reluctantly. “I do remember that.”

“And probably their brother Ralph was ‘uncle.’ Which means that Ivo Hughenfort, who was definitely present in that sector of the Front at that time, might conceivably also have qualified as an uncle,” I reminded her.

“Ivo? Are you saying—oh,” she said. Then, “Oh, Good Lord. Ivo was at the shoot, the day Marsh—we’ve got to—”

I broke into her growing panic. “They know. Marsh has both Ali and Holmes with him. Nothing will happen.”

She did not look too sure about this. Perhaps my voice lacked the requisite note of absolute certainty. I tried again. “Iris, Marsh and Ali have spent their whole adult lives walking in and out of lethal situations. Both he and Ali made the mistake once of thinking England was safe. Neither of them will make it a second time. Iris, I swear to you: I’ve seen those two in action. Nothing will get past their guard.”

“You’re right. I always forget about that side of them. Marsh is a good friend, and such a gentle person that thinking of him as some kind of behind-the-lines soldier is always difficult. Ali is different—him I can see as dangerous. Not Marsh.”

I did not think it my responsibility to tell her just how dangerous that husband of hers was—in the end, considerably more deadly than Ali. Let her simply settle her mind as to their safety and allow her thoughts to turn again to Gabriel. Which they quickly did.

“I wanted to tell Gabriel the truth, Mary. Those two days he spent with us in Paris. He was talking about his parents one evening, telling me how difficult he found it at times to talk freely with them, how he sometimes felt almost as if they spoke another language from his, and I ached to tell him the reason for that. I couldn’t, of course. They were both still alive, and he was Sarah’s whole life. Henry, too, but to drive a wedge between the boy and Sarah would have devastated her. And in actual fact, I was an aunt to the boy. It wasn’t I who raised him and fretted over his childhood illnesses and oversaw his schooling and shaped him into the man he was. But he was so extraordinarily beautiful as a human being, I selfishly wanted to be more in his eyes than just a distant uncle’s estranged wife. I couldn’t tell him, but I wish to God that I had! He might, just possibly, have used that knowledge in the last days. Might have reached out to ask for the help of a mother as he couldn’t do to a scarcely known aunt.”

There was no real reply to that. Nor was there for any of the other painful questions she came out with over the course of the next hours, as she unburdened herself as she had never been able to do before, to anyone. All I could say was, she gave her son a good, loving life, and she had taken the opportunity to lay the foundations of a relationship during his Paris leave. The awareness of Iris as a friend had infused Gabriel’s final weeks with a sense of future, at a time when the world was proclaiming there was no future. Faint reassurance, but gratefully received. She went to her new rooms at two in the morning. By later account, she slept better than I.

The next day we spent walking the decks and talking, about matters that often had nothing to do with Gabriel. We discovered that we had been sailing through the edges of a storm since leaving England, and although the rain was now clearing, the ship continued to heave beneath our feet. I told her about my childhood in Sussex and California, she told me about the growing community of artists and writers in Paris—easy conversation, of the sort that takes place at the beginning of any friendship, but which also allowed us to draw breath and permit our real concerns to simmer in the backs of our minds.

I did send a telegram, through Mycroft lest the village postmistress in Arley Holt prove indiscreet:

WHOM DID GABRIEL ADDRESS AS QUOTE UNCLE QUERY.