Frustration had awakened me, had in fact been my restless companion all the night, an impatience to act, or even to know what it was that we were being called upon to do. I had, I realised, been working for ten weeks straight at this profession I still thought of as Holmes’; like a turning flywheel, the momentum of activity was hard to slow.
The massive bolt on the front door slid easily back, and a wash of frost-tinged air poured in. As near as I could see in the half light, the porch and yard beyond were free of people and slumbering dogs. I slipped out, eased the door shut behind me, sat on the porch bench to lace on my boots, and set out into the fresh, pre-dawn twilight.
Traces of mist hung over the land, but it was high enough that it did not obscure my half-seen surroundings. My boots crunched over tightly packed gravel to a break in the walls between the corner of the house and a small building I took to be a church. Once I was through the gap, the surface changed from gravel to grass, and my footsteps ceased to jar the air.
I wandered among the half-bare trees of a walled orchard, enjoying the ancient, sleeping garden, my feet raising the scent of fermenting apples from the slick, black blanket of fallen leaves. I crossed into a large kitchen garden, also walled, of which less than half seemed to be actively under cultivation, and saw a wooden door on the far wall. This opened onto a water meadow, the stream at its bottom bridged by a small structure that shuddered, but did not collapse, beneath my weight. The air lay so still on the land, it was like walking out into a painting.
I made my way through the soft pearl of gathering light, heading in the direction of a tree-capped rise glimpsed in outline perhaps half a mile away. The air smelt of grass and sheep and earth: no sea breath here, as at Sussex, no peat tang as in Devon. This was the growing heart of England, deep black soil that had been nourishing crops and cattle for thousand upon thousand of years, before Normans, or Romans, or even Saxon horde. As the sun’s rays began to touch the high mist overhead, I noticed what appeared to be a bench at the top of the hill, just under the edge of the cow-cropped branches. I clambered over a stile and trotted up the side of the hill, brushed a layer of fallen leaves from the rustic bench, and settled onto the damp wood to watch the sun come into the fold of earth that held Alistair Hughenfort’s quintessentially English house.
The cool streaks of mist shied away at the merest hint of sun; soon my hilltop was fully lit. After a minute, the first rays lighted on the tips of three Tudor chimneys, easing like cool honey down the lumpy brick-work to the neatly thatched peaks. The many-paned windows set into the half-timbered upper level of the house flared now into a mosaic of light; when the line of the sun made a neat division between the house’s two storeys, an upstairs window flew unexpectedly open. The depths of the walls kept the light from falling on the figure inside, but I felt that someone stood for a few moments in whatever room lay behind the window, looking out, and then went away.
The house was stirring, but I did not. The sun felt delicious on the side of my face, bright with promise and the illusion of warmth. The vista before me, this intimate and timeless marriage of stone and wood, plaster and thatch, was too near perfection for me to wish to break away. The balance of golden buildings and green field, tree and rock, water and sky made the impatience retreat and my heart begin to sing. I wanted it, all of it: not just the house—I could have bought half a dozen sixteenth-century houses if I wished—but everything the house was, had been, would be. My mother’s family had migrated to England in the last century; my father’s people were rootless Californians; everything I owned that had been in my family for longer than two generations could be packed into a small travelling case.
Of course, for all I knew, Alistair’s people (those who were not Hughenforts) could have come here as recently as my own. But I thought not. The way he had moved in the house, his manner of speech to the two servants, evoked a sense of bone-deep kin with house and land. In Palestine, the man had been edgy and aggressive; here his testiness was gentled by the landscape.
Movement caught my eye in the formal garden behind the house: a black-and-white cat, picking its way through the wet grass, heading to the stables to hunt its breakfast. Down the valley, a cow complained; in the yard, a cock crew; on my hill, I sat, spellbound.
Had the house been more deliberately planned, if there had been the faintest air of artifice about the view, the perfection would have been cloying. As it was, the house and its out-buildings were uneven enough, the materials sufficiently varied to make it apparent that the man-made objects had grown up as organically as the trees. Badger Old Place, the Debrett’s listing had called it—and indeed, it even resembled the animal: low to the earth, shaggy and somewhat unkempt, its exterior giving little hint of the power and potential ferocity sheltering within.
I envied Alistair Hughenfort his home. I badly wanted to know what force had wrenched him away from it. I wished I could reconcile the two sides of the man. But above all, I wished that I had paused before coming out here to take a cup of tea.
Then, as if the universe had heard my string of desires and chosen to grant me at least one, a figure emerged from the house, and near-perfection shimmered into absolute: The figure carried a tray, and what is more, the tray was coming in my direction.
The bearer, I realised, was neither servant nor husband, but host. Alistair negotiated the stream via a series of rocks I had not noticed, scorning the shaky bridge, and strolled easily up the rise, the silver tray balanced on the fingers of one hand as if he were a waiter in a crowded cafe, a waiter dressed in a knit jumper of shades which would make a peacock proud.
He nodded as he drew near, but placed the tray on the bench beside me without a word. He then stepped back and turned to face the house, looking wan, but rested.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Mrs Algernon was about to send a tray up. I told her I would take it. I did not tell her you were not in the house, so it will be cold.”
It was cool, but welcome. I poured and sipped; he stood and looked over his home, then pulled off his cloth cap and slapped it against his knee. I remembered clearly that of the two, Mahmoud had been the dour, rocklike one, Ali the volatile, always itching for action.
“The last time you brought me a cup of tea,” I told him, “was the morning before we reached Acre.”
“That was Mahmoud,” he responded automatically, without stopping to think. I had known it was Mahmoud; I merely wanted to hear him say his cousin’s name. “Marsh,” he corrected himself.
“It was Palestine, so I should say that ‘Mahmoud’ is correct.” I sipped my drink, wondering what had brought him up here.
“You and Holmes,” he began abruptly, “you were good at what you did. Mah—my cousin was impressed. He is not impressed by many. He may listen to you.”
“What are we to tell him?”
“He must leave this place. He no longer belongs here. It is laying its golden ropes around him, and choking him to death.” He glanced down to judge my reaction to this flight of fancy. When the side of my face told him nothing, he went on. “He thinks it a task required of him by his ancestors. A noble service. A sacrifice. It is not, I tell him, but his ears are deaf.” Stress had, I was interested to hear, brought the Arabic rhythm back into his speech.
“If your cousin has decided that family responsibilities require him to remain in this country, I can’t imagine that anything Holmes or I have to say will dissuade him.”
“Not say—but no, it is no good for me to tell you. You must see for yourselves, listen to him, draw your own conclusions.”
“Very well,” I told him. Then, since clearly he was not about to explain himself further, I changed the subject. “Where does the house name come from?”
“Not its appearance, if that is your question. You saw the boar’s head in the Hall? My ancestor who laid the foundations was hunting boar one afternoon in the year 1243 when the animal turned on him, and caught him unprepared. The tusks you saw on the head are real,” he added, “although the fur has been patched over the years. The animal would have gutted him in seconds, but for a badger’s den that gave way beneath the weight of the boar as it pivoted. That moment’s delay allowed Sir Guy de Hasard to set his spear and catch the charge. The boar died, Sir Guy lived, and the house he’d planned to build was moved half a mile up the valley to leave the badger in peace. There’s still a den there, in that copse you can just see over the hill.”
“Your people have lived here since 1243?”
“The first Badger Place was built shortly after that, although I should say the family had been here more or
