Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [11]
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,