Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [147]
“Your Grace,” I told her helpfully. “But they’ll call him what you ask. In any case, I’m afraid it’s too late. You may choose to have nothing to do with Justice Hall—which is certainly what the current duke would like to do—but we know about you now, and there will be church records.” (If they weren’t bombed, lost, or stolen, I added mentally.) “Like it or no, your son is the sixth Duke’s heir.” The irony of forcing Justice Hall, with all its wealth and beauty, onto not just one unwilling duke, but two, did not escape me. Iris, however, was too close to it to see the humour. She leant forward and stretched out one hand.
“Come back with us,” she burst out. “Not permanently, just to see it, to meet the family—your family.”
“What, now? Don’t be ridiculous. I have a business to run.”
“Surely this is your slow time of year,” Iris said diplomatically.
“Christmas!” I said suddenly. “A Christmas holiday in an English country house. Your son would adore it.” I had to work to get some enthusiasm into that suggestion—personally, I’d rather have been condemned to a week in the trenches. “And anyway, I’ll bet it’s been a while since you had a holiday.”
“I couldn’t leave Ben here alone.” She was weakening, definitely weakening.
“Bring him, too,” Iris urged, scenting capitulation, but the final unscrupulous blow was mine to deliver.
“Your husband loved Justice Hall,” I told the woman. “There are pictures of him and his ancestors on the walls, the journals he kept as a boy, servants who watched him grow up. And although I never knew him, I feel confident that the thought of his son there, even on a brief visit, would have made Gabriel very happy.”
Five days later, we all boarded the boat for England.
The voyage back across the ocean, though in truth slowed by weather, seemed to fly, sped on the running feet of an active five-year-old, made smooth by the intelligence and innate grace of his mother. Helen—for so we were to call her—did not let go her apprehension so much as put it to one side, until she had seen and judged all with her own eyes, and made her decision. Before we had left New York Harbour, she and Iris were forever tied, joined by the two Gabriels but also by mutual respect and a very similar way of looking at the world. Both had known hardship, both retained their humour; within days, they began to look like mother and daughter.
Even Ben, who had to be cajoled into making the arduous journey and who could easily have felt even more useless an appendage than his legs were, soon caught the spirit. His laughter as three strong porters hauled him up the gang-way was somewhat forced, but once settled into a deck-level cabin his independence and good cheer reasserted themselves, and one night I spotted him on the dance floor, jogging his Bath chair back and forth in time to the music with a giggling young flapper on his lap, clinging for dear life. He caught my eye and winked.
Then we were in Southampton, with ice-slick decks and a low, grey dawn that drizzled sleet and threatened snow before the day was through. We had come without fanfare, with no family to greet us, nothing but a pair of anonymous hired cars arranged by Mycroft. I listened to the complaint of gulls, and asked myself for the hundredth time if I had been right to permit this.
Iris’s impulsive invitation, blurted out in the twofold excitement of finding a grandson and freeing a husband at one blow, had caught me unawares. Christmas at Justice Hall for young Gabe and his mother? With its current duke barely healed from a murderous attack and the shadows full of unidentified threat? Surely this was hardly the time to bring a new duke home? That thought had not occurred to Iris until late that same evening, back at the Webster Inn; when it did, when she realised what she had done, she was horrified, and had nearly rung up the O’Meary household then and there. Instead, we had gone out and talked with the two Canadians by clear light of day, and in the end,