Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [14]
At that question, however, Holmes could only shake his head.
CHAPTER FOUR
Most unusually, I was awake the next morning before both Holmes and the sun. Before anyone, I thought as I padded down the time-worn steps with my boots in my hand—but no; once in the panelled vestibule beneath the minstrels’ gallery, kitchen noises of clatter and conversation came from behind the doors on the other side of the dining room. I hesitated, mulling over the appeal of a cup of tea, but decided my thirst for solitude was greater.
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