Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [150]
“Welcome to England, Mrs Hewetson,” he said evenly.
“Please, it’s Helen.”
“Helen, then. Thank you. And this is young Gabriel.”
“Gabe,” came an indistinct mutter from the cloth around her thighs.
“Can you shake hands with Lord Maurice, Gabe?” Helen asked the top of his head.
The child seemed to consider this for a minute, then began to unwrap himself from her skirts. He stepped away and looked up at Marsh, chin raised, black hair tumbled.
Marsh’s heart seemed visibly to stutter. Certainly the breath caught in his throat—I could hear it do so. His blunt fingers came up again towards his face, and then he noticed the boy’s small hand, extended towards him. Slowly, he stretched out his arm and wrapped his hand gently around that of the child, his son’s son.
“Oh, Gabe,” he said, his voice impossibly soft. “I am very, very happy to meet you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Late that night, when the Canadians had bedded down and the Algernons taken to their quarters, we gathered in the first-floor solar for a council of war. Holmes and I diverted to our rooms to trade our tight collars and high shoes for clothing more conducive to comfort and thought. When Holmes had donned a smoking jacket and I my house-slippers, we walked back down the corridor and let ourselves in.
The room was dimly lit and filled with indistinct shapes, an Aladdin’s cave of family treasures. My eyes came to rest on the figures before the pulsing flames, and my heart leapt in sudden, startled joy at the image that greeted my eyes—then my vision cleared, and the figure that I had seen as Mahmoud Hazr in Arab dress turned more fully into the light, and it was only Marsh, wearing a long, old-fashioned smoking jacket over his trousers and shirt.
However, as we settled to our places around the fire, I found I could not shake the image of Mahmoud among us. For one thing, he was brewing us coffee—true, using an elaborate glass machine over a spirit lamp rather than the graduated brass pots of the Arabs, and spooning the grounds from a Fortnum and Mason’s packet instead of pounding the beans to powder in a wooden mortar, but the scent evoked the ghosts of tents and robes. And carpets—but there, too, the room moved East, for in the weeks I’d been away Badger’s plain Turkey floor covering had been overlaid with smaller, more ornate carpets. Like the floor of a tent. The drawn curtains might well have been goat’s-hair walls, the fire in the stone hearth crackled with the same rhythm as one laid in a circle of rocks on sand, and the flickering across the gathered faces seemed to darken them, so that even Iris appeared swarthy. The odours of coffee and cigarettes teased my mind, the man squatting before the flames in a tumble of robes, the easy silence before talk began . . .
Abruptly, I stood and switched on one of the electric lamps, and the room was jerked back to Berkshire. The others blinked at the sudden glare, and reason returned. We took our coffee in porcelain cups with handles on their sides and saucers beneath; we were in chairs, not on the floor; the tobacco the others lit was Turkish, not the cheapest black stuff of the desert smoker. I breathed a sigh of relief, took a swallow of Piccadilly coffee, then glanced over at Marsh.
And saw Mahmoud in his eyes, in the hidden amusement of that private, all-seeing gaze, acknowledging what my illuminating efforts meant, why I had needed to do it. His gaze held me in my spot, and then I found myself smiling slowly back, that same warm, intimate sharing of a private joke.
I do not know that I have ever felt more at peace with the world than at the moment when Mahmoud returned.
Ali, of course, had known it before anyone else—probably before Marsh himself. His hands had sought out a scrap of firewood and his folding pen-knife, and were shaping the wood into one of the incongruously childlike figures he had used to carve around the camp-fire. This one was perhaps fated to become a giraffe, although at the moment it was little more than two lumps connected by a long neck.
Iris, who had