Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [140]
The boy had been so alone. That was, I knew, what would hit her the hardest, at first anyway. Transferred from his original unit into another that was then in the heat of battle, and subsequently moved, then overrun, and finally split up and moved again, Gabriel had as much chance of forging friendships as someone attempting to thread a needle in an earthquake. His superior officers did not know him, the padre was sympathetic but ineffectual, and his girl was so rushed, she most likely did not even know of his plight until it was too late. Had he known that his true mother was in Paris, had he ever been told that his true father worked for one of the most powerful men in the British government, he might have sent word, and in an instant the waters of justice would have rolled down into that small and lonely cell and carried him away.
But—and the implications of this would come more slowly to the woman reading her son’s words—Gabriel Hughenfort was given one faint ray of hope, one man who was in a position to stop the juggernaut. Or so the boy believed. He put his hopes in “the Major,” trusted the man to be his advocate among the powerful, even gave that man his most precious letters, to be returned to the family. And the man had gone away, said nothing, kept or destroyed the letters, and finally—the cruellest twist of all—turned Gabriel’s own finely honed sense of responsibility and nobility against him, using the boy’s bred-in-the-bone consciousness of what it was to be a Hughenfort to keep him from crying the name aloud, using it as a shield to stay the bullets. Use your name, “the Maj.” had drilled into him that last bitter night, and you might save your life, but the cost? Disgrace for the family name forever. Stay silent, offer your life up to Honour, and no one need know. He had held before Gabriel the opportunity to emulate all those Hughenforts who had made the ultimate sacrifice, for one cause or another, to stand with pride beside those demanding ancestors on the walls. And Gabriel fell for it.
With the ashes of that betrayal in my mouth, it was no hardship to avoid the social whirl around the captain’s table during our crossing. I probably ate little more than Iris did, and the work I did during those two days, the paper on biblical deductions for the American journal, turned out considerably more caustic than I had originally intended. Their minds were perverted, I translated the story of Susanna and the elders; Their thoughts strayed from the path of God, and they attended not to the demands of Justice.
For the first leisure hours I’d had since August, these days were proving grimly unsatisfactory.
On the third morning there came a rap at the door. I put down my cup of tea and went to answer it. Iris stood there, wearing the same clothes she’d had on when I last saw her, her face haggard, with dark swathes under her eyes. I pulled her in, took the red journal that she was holding, made her sit on the sofa, and pressed a cup of sweet tea into her hands. I rang for another pot, and some toast, then stood over her until she’d eaten two slices. When she shook her head at more, I drew her a long, hot bath, made her swallow a small whisky, dressed her in a pair of my sleeping pyjamas, and put her to bed.
All without a word between us.
She woke at dinner-time. I was reading, as I had been all that day, when I heard her moving around in the bedroom. When she came out, one of my kimonos belted around her waist, she looked old still, but the dark bruises under her eyes had faded.
“Was Gabriel’s major Sidney Darling?” she asked without preliminary.
I put down my book. “I don’t know,” I answered her. “Would you like tea, or a drink?”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Iris, I know how you feel. Not about this—how could I know?—but in general I have stood in your shoes, and I am well acquainted with the all-consuming urge to get my hands around