I then took up his third envelope. This was thinner, and contained but a single sheet of paper. It had also had a much harder journey to reach Justice than the other two: a worn crease across the middle, one edge crushed in, the back of it looking as if it had ridden about in a filthy pocket for days, if not weeks. The glass showed me several thumbprint-sized smudges and the remains of no fewer than three crushed body lice. Sub-Lieutenant Hughenfort had carried this letter a long time before it had been posted.
The sheet inside was undated. It read:
Dearest Pater, Beloved Mama,
I write from a nice dry dug-out left behind by Jerry, who shall, with any luck, not be needing it again. I trust that you are well and safe within Justice Hall. I think often of the peace inside the Park walls, of how sweet the air smells after a mowing, the dash of swallows in the spring and the loud geese that ride the autumn winds. We have received orders for the morning, and although this has been a quiet section of Front recently, there is always the chance that a German bullet will find your son. If that were to happen, please know that I love you, that I would happily give my life ten times over if it served to keep the enemy from Justice Hall. My men feel the same, willing to give their all for their little patch of England, and I am proud of every one of them.
For your sakes, I shall try to keep my head down on the morrow, but if I fail, please know that death found me strong and happy to serve my King and country. You formed me well, and I will do my best to remain brave, that I might live up to my name. Righteousness is my strength.
Your loving son,
Gabriel
Lies, I thought, all of it pretty lies to comfort the mother and bereft father, just as families were told of clean bullets and instant death even if their boy had hung for agonised hours on the barbed wire of No-Man’s-Land. I only hoped it brought his parents some scrap of comfort, when it reached their hands.
The last letter was addressed by a different hand. It read:
7 August 1918
Dear Sir and Madame,
By the time this letter reaches you, you will have received the foulest news any parent could have, the death of your beloved son. I did not know Gabriel well, but over the few months of our acquaintance, he impressed me profoundly, as a soldier and as a man. The men under his command, too, had come to respect him far more deeply than they did many officers of longer experience and greater years. I do not claim to understand the forces that conspired to bring your son to his end, but I am convinced that as an officer, your son inspired nothing but loyalty and courage in those under his command, and that at the end, all that he did was for their sakes.
Joining you in your sorrow, I am
Very truly yours,
Rev. F. A. Hastings
This last letter I read several times. Taken in conjunction with the alternate wording of the official death notification, I began to see what had led Marsh to the conviction that Gabriel had been executed. “I do not claim to understand the forces that conspired” sounded awfully like a lament for a loved deserter. I could only wish that the Reverend Mr Hastings had gone into a bit more detail concerning “all that he did.”
With relief, I slid the letters back into the large envelope and turned to the youthful journals with a lighter heart. They had all been written before Gabriel Hughenfort went to soldier; their sorrow and bloodshed would be limited to anguish for a dead pet and the slaughter of game birds.
I read long, grasping for the essence of the boy and finding a degree of sweetness and nobility that was hard for my cynical mind to comprehend. Afternoon tea inserted itself on my awareness as nothing more than a cup at my elbow and a sudden brightness as the maid turned on the light. The next thing I knew, it was a quarter past seven and a woman’s ringing voice startled me from my page: The Darlings had returned.
I looked down at my tweed-covered lap and dusty hands, and knew it was unlikely that we should be excused from changing two nights running. I closed my books and shut down the lamps. After returning the envelope into Marsh’s hands, without comment from either of us, I went to don the hair-shirt of civilisation.
My perusal of the two dinner frocks in the wardrobe was interrupted by a knock at the door. I tightened the belt of my dressing gown and went to see who it was, opening the door to find Emma, the house-maid whom I had nearly sent flying on the 1612 staircase.
“Beg pardon, mum, but Mrs Butter sent me to see if you’d like a hand with your hair. I was a ladies’ maid at my last position,” she added, as if Mrs Butter might sent a scullery maid for the purpose. I stepped back to let her in.
She chose my dress, rejected the wrap I had chosen in favour of the other, picked a necklace and combs, wrapped my hair into a slick chignon, and finally produced a powder compact and lip gloss. The ugly duckling thus transformed into a higher species, the gong sounded as if she had made some signal giving permission.
“I thank you, Emma, you’re an artist. Before you go, tell me, how formal is Saturday dinner?”
“Oh, it’ll be black tie, mum. There’s one or two might wear white tie, but that’ll be only the older guests.”
“In either case, I’ll need to send for a dress. If I put a letter near the door, will it go in the morning?”
“Certainly, or you could ring, and someone will come for it.”
I had discovered writing materials and stamps in the table under the window. Mrs Hudson would not receive the letter until Saturday morning, but I felt sure she would rise to the challenge of getting evening apparel here to Justice by the afternoon.
And if it did not arrive, I should have a good excuse to plead a head-ache.
I very nearly used that excuse to avoid that evening’s demands on sociability. Following my afternoon’s reading, aware that the tragedy of Gabriel Hughenfort would be moving restlessly through the back of my mind, the thought of spending two or three hours making light conversation was a torment.
But when the gong sounded, I went.
Dinner was in the parlour where we had taken breakfast, and more comfortable it was than the formal dining room. Sidney Darling had spent the day at his club with friends; Lady Phillida had spent the day at a lecture and the shops with friends. He began the evening superciliously amiable, she determinedly cheerful; both of them detested Iris Sutherland.
I could not tell if their palpable dislike was due to the potential for rivalry she represented, or to Iris herself. Phillida kept glancing irritably at Iris’s dress, a subtle construction of heavy chocolate-brown crepe with flame-coloured kid trim that fit Iris like an old shirt and made her sister-in-law’s ornate velvet-and-beads look like dressing-up. Sidney seemed particularly irked by Iris’s arrival; he found the soup cold, the bird tough, the fish going off, and the wine inadequate.
Marsh watched these undercurrents with lidded eyes, and then over the meat course rolled his little bomb into the room. “Iris will be coming with us to London on Wednesday, Phillida.”
Lady Phillida’s upbringing held, and she managed to confine her reaction to a blink of the eyes and a brief contraction of the lips before saying merely, “How pleasant.”
Sidney, however, betrayed a less stringent upbringing. His fork clattered to his plate in protest, although he managed to contain his words to a strangled, “You feel that necessary?”
“Not necessary,” Marsh replied equably, “but she offered, and I accepted. Do you disapprove?”
Sidney was in no position to disapprove of any of the duke’s actions, but he could not quite rein in his vexation. He burst out, “I truly cannot see why you chose to handle this situation in such a formal manner. Surely we could have made them welcome at Justice. The poor old girl’ll feel as if she’s on show, like some . . . agricultural creature on the auction block.” That being a fairly accurate representation of the position in which Mme Hughenfort and her son were being placed, none of us tried to argue with Sidney. He went on, stabbing and sawing at his succulent roast. “I do not know why we couldn’t have h
ad them here. I’m sure the child is house-broken. And I’m sure his mother is charming; most French women are. It is hardly a welcoming attitude. I need more gravy,” he ended petulantly. The footman leapt to attention, and we continued our meal with close concentration.
I glanced at Iris to see how she had taken this blatant lack of welcome; she shot me a look of quiet amusement, and went on placidly with her vegetables. I found myself liking Marsh’s wife more and more. She was intelligent, clear-spoken, interested in everything, and possessed of a sufficient degree of self-confidence to regard the waves of disapproval coming down the table at her with equanimity, even humour.
It was she who pushed away the increasingly heavy blanket of silence. “How was London today, Phillida?”
The lady of the house had clearly felt the blanket more than the rest of us, for she seized the question with relief. When we had ridden out the blow-by-blow account of the lecture Lady Phillida had attended on auto-suggestion rendered by a disciple of Coué, and before we could get to her shopping triumphs, Iris turned to me and asked how I’d spent my afternoon.
“I’ve been exploring the library—the proper library, upstairs.”
“You spend a great part of your life in libraries, I am led to believe.”
“Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.”
“Why afraid?”
“Oh, it’s just that most people haven’t much use for academics. I freely admit it’s a fairly strange way to spend one’s life, burrowing through dusty tomes.”
“What are you working on at the moment?”
Phrased in that manner, the question had to be taken seriously. I thought, however, that I might give the room a general answer rather than what I had actually been doing in the Greene Library that very afternoon. “I’m putting together an article for an American journal. I met the editor last spring at a function in Oxford, and he asked me to write something for it.”
“What is the subject?” she pressed.
“‘The Science of Deduction in the Bible,’ ” I told her. It was the sort of title that tended to cause conversation to grind somewhat until people had chewed their way through it, and indeed the two Darlings had that familiar How-does-one-approach-this? look on their faces. Iris, however, looked only interested.
“‘The Science of Deduction’—do you mean, when people in the Bible work things out? Like Susannah and the Elders?”
Full points for Iris Sutherland, I thought. “Exactly. Or psychological deduction such as Joseph used in interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams.”
We turned this topic over for a while, with Marsh listening and the Darlings frowning, until I thought that we had inflicted the room with enough theology, and I asked Iris what she found of interest in Paris. (In other words: And what do you do?)
“The immense wealth of its artistic life. Writers and painters are coming back, now that the worst of the damage is patched up, and musicians. Music somehow sounds better in Paris, don’t you think?”
This was no rhetorical question; she expected an answer. I had to disappoint her.
“My husband would no doubt have an opinion, but I’m afraid that I have what could only be called a tin ear.”
“Ah.” She looked down at her plate, a smile tugging at her lips. “I, on the other hand, teach music.”
Our eyes met in shared recognition of a brick wall. I could only spread both hands in a rueful admission of inadequacy; she laughed aloud, a rich, deep sound that seemed to startle the painted figures on the walls.
“Well,” she said. “That puts paid to any discussion of modern composers.”
“I met Debussy once,” I offered. “When I was a child.”
“I said ‘modern.’ ”
“Under what circumstances did you meet Debussy?” This from Darling, who either suspected me of prevarication or simply did not wish to be left out of the conversation. I gave the room a version of the encounter which seemed to satisfy him, particularly because at the end of my narrative the door stood open to his own tale of an episode involving Jean Sibelius.
Marsh was silent and watchful; he drank but a single glass of wine with his meal.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the morning when I came into the breakfast room, I thought for a moment the first of the week-end guests had arrived: A slim young man in an attractive herring-bone suit sat with his back to me, chatting amiably with Marsh and Alistair. Then “he” turned at my entrance, and I was looking at Iris Sutherland, yesterday’s skirt exchanged for trousers.
“Good morning, Mary,” she said. “May I call you Mary, by the way? I feel as if I’ve known you for years.”
“Do, please.” This morning I helped myself to coffee, and settled into a chair without assistance.
“I’m trying to talk these two males into a walk to The Circles, but they’d rather sit by the fire and do needlework.”
“It is six miles away and I have a morning full of appointments,” Marsh answered.
“What are The Circles?” I asked.
“Prehistoric stone circles, concentric, and one simply cannot cheat and motor over there. Part of the experience is the effort.”
“If you’re looking for a companion, I’d be willing,” I told her. The sky was grey but not actually raining, and it was cold enough that perhaps it would stay dry.
“Lovely! And,” she added, “if one walks, one is justified in indulging in a nice, stodgy luncheon in the village. To strengthen one for the return trip.”
“Sounds excellent,” I agreed, helping myself to a second breakfast—to strengthen me for the trip out. Fortunately, among the clothing I had brought were some old but comfortable woollen trousers, which looked to be the uniform of the day. Before I had finished, Phillida bustled in, a sheaf of notes in one hand.
“Marsh,” she said without preamble, “I need to go over the day’s schedule with you. I’ve sent Lenore and Walter off to the Cowleys’; no spots there and they owe me a favour. They’ll stop there until Sunday, let Miss Paul have a rest. Now, about the rooms. I need to see if—”
I escaped before she could put me to work. As I went upstairs to change into my trousers, I was aware that the house was humming with energy, the final, manic spurt of preparation before the London trains began to pull into Arley Holt. Not even Marsh would dare venture into Mrs Butter’s realm today. With luck, Iris and I would be gone until tea-time.
Thoroughly bundled from hat to boots, I presented myself at the library door, received Iris’s critical but approving glance, and followed her out into the cold air.
I half wondered if Marsh and Alistair had chosen to occupy themselves elsewhere in order to give Iris and me a chance to speak, at length and undisturbed, and so it proved. After the first mile we no longer felt the house looking over our shoulders, we had each other’s pace for walking, and we could settle into the morning.
“You must be curious,” Iris opened. “About me and Marsh.”
“It is not the usual situation,” I agreed, deliberately vague—although by this time there was not much left to speculate about, other than the degree of amity in the so-called marriage.
“I’m a lesbian,” she said bluntly. After a few steps she looked out of the corner of her eye at me; when she saw that I was not shrinking away in horror or even particularly surprised, she went on. “I’ve always known it, from the time I was a girl, and I dreaded marriage. Not the physical side necessarily, but the sense of bondage, a thing that ate at my mother until—no, let’s not go into that. Suffice to say that I was left with something of what we might now term a ‘phobia’ about marriage. And because I was my parents’ only child, it was going to be very difficult not to marry. These days, it might be easier; then, and especially with my parents, a spinster daughter would have been cause for a family war.
“I’d known Marsh since we were both eight or ten—our mothers were second cousins. I always liked him, always recognised in him a kindred streak of unconventionality. When he went off to the Middl
e East after university, we kept in touch, exchanged letters every few weeks. I used him as a sounding-board—you know how it is, it’s easier sometimes to speak of things on paper than in person, so Marsh knew all about my situation.
“His parents dragged him back home after a few months off of the leash. This would have been in the autumn of ’98, because I’d just turned twenty-one. I’d gone to live in London; he came down to see me, took me for a long walk on Hampstead Heath, and he proposed.
“It was, quite simply, a business proposition. He, too, was being pressured to marry, particularly because after ten years of marriage, the heir’s wife—Henry and Sarah were living in Italy—showed no signs of a successful pregnancy, and the old duke was getting nervous. Marriage with Marsh would be a sham, of course, but it would take away a lot of pressure, and make both our parents happier. It would also give us considerably more independence, being married people. And, I had an inheritance riding on getting married.
“So we married, in a very quiet ceremony in the Justice chapel. It was so quiet, in fact, that nobody knew about it. Marsh couldn’t bear the thought of engagement announcements and photographs in The Times and the long, drawn-out accounts in the society pages—all the nonsense. And since his mother was dead, and his stepmother didn’t give a fig, and I was a legal adult, I just told my own parents after it was done.”