Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [168]
He picked the boy up and held him, less to reveal him to the people than to comfort him against the applause that would ensue. And after a long, shocked moment, it did: a huge wave of clapping and a Babel of voices, amazed, gratified, and well aware of the social coup each one had garnered by being present at such an event. All of London—half the world!—would be talking about this in the coming days, the voices were exclaiming to themselves, and we were there, with those two dramatic Arab costumes on the formal staircase of Justice Hall.
I looked for the white Darling turban, as I had approximately every five seconds since it had come into the Great Hall, and found it moved slightly to one side. I started to push towards it, but it came to a halt again, so I contented myself with watching it with one eye and looking up at the stairs with the other. The boy had been startled at the sudden volume of noise, but Mahmoud spoke quietly to him, and whatever he said had the desired effect. Little Gabe allowed himself to be held there for a minute, and then his mother came up the stairs and gathered him into her arms. Iris was there too, and the deceptive matron, and all three ascended the stairs to escape the acclaim.
At the top, however, Iris stopped and said something to the boy and his mother. He shifted in Helen’s arms to look out at the sea of people below, then waved to them. A cheer of “Hip, hip, hoorah!” shook the frescoed dome, and the women and the child slipped away.
As had Sidney Darling. Oh, the turban was still there, but the hand that came up to push it back into place was paler of hue and blunter of finger: Darling had transferred his turban to another head, and escaped me.
I set my shoulders against the crowd and shoved forward to where I had last seen him before the turban changed places; no Sidney.
I dashed into the dining room, where servants were clearing the remnants of the meal. “Have any of you seen Mr Darling?” I asked, cursing the invisibility of known figures at a costume ball.
“No, sir,” three of them said; “No, ma’am,” said the fourth, so I turned to him as the most observant of the lot.
“A tall man in white, bare-headed, in the last few minutes?”
“Through there,” he replied, pointing to the western door.
I went through it at a fast trot, scanning the still-empty rooms as I passed—salon, breakfast room, music room—and then I was entering the corridor of the western wing. I swung right, and at the far end there he was, disappearing through a doorway. The Armoury, if I wasn’t mistaken.
I was not.
I found him standing all alone in the middle of the ancient hall of the Hughenforts, surrounded by scores of lethal instruments. He turned at my entrance.
“Miss Russell?” he asked, sounding a bit uncertain.
Damnation, I thought; I’d hoped to catch him with his head in the chest.
“Mr Darling.”
“Was it your message?”
“Which message was that?”
“One of the servants brought me a message that someone wished me to come to the Armoury, but she didn’t know who that someone was. Silly sort of a trick.”
“Which servant was that?”
“One of the house-maids. Don’t remember her name. Did my wife’s hair once,” he added, sounding as if he did not fully approve of this aberration of a mere house-maid’s arranging Lady Phillida’s hair.
“Emma,” I suggested, and a small alarm began to ring in the back of my mind.
“That it? You may be right, though I don’t know that it matters. Dashed annoying; now I have to hunt the silly thing down in that press and ask her who—”
“I know who it was,” I blurted out, and before he could ask me I raised my voice to shout aimlessly into the room, “Ali! He’s a diversion—it’s your cousin!”
A guttural curse echoed across the Armoury stones and the wooden screen-wall gave a violent shift an instant before the multicoloured