Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [115]
“None of us was sane, not after we’d been there for more than a few weeks. But Gabriel was as balanced as any man I knew. He escaped into his memories of rural Berkshire, he read and he wrote for hours, then he returned to duty, strengthened.”
“He wrote, you say. What was he writing?”
“Letters, for the most part. And . . . a diary.”
Holmes and I looked at him, both of us thinking that the family’s collection of letters could not have taken up a great deal of the young officer’s time, and that diary had they none. Before we could ask, Reverend Mr Hastings was explaining, and his next words were even more of a revelation.
“He also had a young woman, I believe.”
“His fiancée in Berkshire, yes. Do we know her name, Russell?”
“Susan, Susan Bridges,” I told him. But Hastings shook his head.
“Not the same, not unless Gabriel’s pet name for her was Hélène. Did this fiancée do VAD work in France?”
“I have no idea,” Holmes admitted.
“His young lady was an ambulance driver. She was taller than Gabriel and had bright green eyes, and that’s all I know about her—that and the name. I assumed she was French, by her name, but fluent in English.”
“You met her?”
To my astonishment, Hastings turned red with what looked to be embarrassment.
“I—no, I never met her.”
“Then how—?”
“His letters—I never saw him write in anything but English. Perhaps he feared that the censors would have blacked out phrases in a foreign language.”
His skin returned to its former pallor, but the open manner in which he was meeting Holmes’ eye had an element of defiance in it. For the first time, the old priest was hiding something.
Holmes saw it too, of course, and after a moment’s reflection, decided on an oblique approach instead of direct assault.
“You say he wrote a great deal, to this Hélène person and in a diary. To anyone else that you noticed?”
“Someone in the government, a judge of some—Wait. If his name was Hughenfort, then . . . Not a judge. He was writing to the house. Justice Hall is the family seat, is it not?”
“It is. They received very few letters, however.”
“For some reason, I assumed they were dutiful missives to an aged judicial uncle who had retired to the country,” Hastings mused. “The few I noticed—the men occasionally gave me their letters, to post behind the lines—were thin. I recall wondering once why it was this unnamed occupant of a judicial hall who received his letters and not his nearer family. I’d have thought him an orphan, but for one reference he made to his parents’ difficulties in keeping the house warm. Had I known the size of the house,” he added with a glimmer of amusement, “I might have been less sympathetic.”
“No-one else that you noticed? Any letters he received from sources other than Hélène and Justice Hall?”
“None that I noticed, but then I was only occasionally present for mail call.”
“Do you know what happened to those letters?”
“He may have given them to the officer who visited him the night before he . . .”
“Lieutenant Hughenfort had a visitor?” Holmes asked sharply, then caught himself. “Perhaps, Mr Hastings, you had best tell us what you know about Gabriel’s final days.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Reverend Mr Hastings settled back into his chair with an air of summoning his energies for the final push. He spread his hands out on the arms, where the upholstery was brown and shiny with wear.
“Gabriel joined us, as I said, in the middle of March, just in time to meet the full German assault. How he even got up the lines to the trenches I don’t know, but he must have slipped in during a lull in the gas. The mortar fire was more or less continuous, but gas depends on which way the air is moving. At any rate, there he was, a fresh face—looking no less weary than the other men but a good deal less filthy. No-one took much notice of him that first week, other than to see that he could hold his own, since we were all too busy with getting out the wounded and trying to keep from being pushed all the way to the sea. The Front retreated in a fifty-mile