Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [156]
“By ‘dealt with’ you mean . . . ?”
He met my gaze evenly. “I mean that I am no longer a duke. I am a commoner, with different rules of behaviour. I mean that I may be required to take brutal action in order to protect my duke. My five-year-old liege lord. I believe you take my meaning.”
“And the service you require?”
“Not to stand in my way.”
The eyes opposite me were dark with warning and with purpose. I had seen those eyes before, and I did not really want to know precisely what he had in mind to wrest the truth of the matter out of its participants. I knew him well enough to be certain that if atrocity could be avoided, he would do so; but I also knew that if brutality was the only way to protect the boy, he would not hesitate for an instant. I nearly opened my mouth to say, I won’t help you, and I don’t want to see it, but caught back the words. He knew that I wanted no part in torturing information out of a man; he would not force me to help, or to witness it.
Unless it proved necessary.
I felt that in the brief minutes I’d been in the library, we had carried on a lengthy discussion. Holmes and I often communicated in such a manner, to all intents and purposes reading the other’s mind, but it happened rarely with anyone else. I could only nod, to show that the discussion was over and that we were, however unhappily, in agreement.
“So when do you propose to tell Lady Phillida that she is giving a party for the wrong person?” I asked.
“Not until the last minute. However, strictly speaking, the invitations say merely that we are to honour Justice Hall’s seventh Duke. That is precisely what we shall be doing.”
“Even though the menu would more appropriately be fizzy lemonade and sausage rolls, followed by an eight o’clock bed-time. You’ll bring him to the dance?”
“My brother Ali will do so, when the evening is under way. In the meantime, the boy is safe with him.”
“And afterwards?”
“I will make the announcement. I will tell the entire room that this boy appears to be the legal heir, even though the actual marriage papers have yet to be found. I will say that on Monday morning a delegation from Justice Hall will leave for France, to seek out the village where Gabriel and Helen were married, and there they will make enquiries from the priest as to the ceremony. That will cause one of two things to happen. If our culprit has already destroyed the copy of the marriage certificate he took from Gabriel—which any sensible person would have done in those circumstances—then he will depart for France with all due haste, there to remove any register in which the priest might have entered the ceremony. And possibly to remove the priest himself. If, however, he is stupid enough to have kept the stolen paper—or overly confident, which amounts to the same thing—then he will make haste to retrieve his copy, either to destroy it or to be absolutely certain that it remains where he hid it. In either case, we shall be at his heels, to see which way our man breaks from cover.”
“This sounds like one of Holmes’ plans,” I said uneasily.
“We collaborated.”
“I thought so. He’s used it before, this idea that when threatened with destruction, a person retrieves what is most valuable first, be it baby or the instrument of blackmail. I have to say, however, that isn’t always the case. A person in a panic is as likely to grab a toothbrush as a diamond necklace, just as a cold-blooded person will control the immediate reaction to fly to the object of desire. The cases Holmes has tried this on haven’t invariably turned out quite as he would have wished.”
“I see. Well, failure lurks outside every gate. If this does not succeed, we shall be forced to try . . . harsher methods. In any case, if we do not have our man by Monday night, the boy and his mother will leave the country. Our friend Mycroft Holmes has some plan for them. It involves an air field, so they