Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [28]
“The family presence in this country begins with Hastings in 1066. When William came to claim the crown of England, among his nobles was a man barely twenty named Richard de Hughfort. The younger son of a minor landholder, he had nothing but the sword in his hands, the horse between his knees, and the head on his shoulders. He acquitted himself well on the field of battle, won the eye of the Conqueror, and was given responsibilities.
“Some months later, with the Conqueror’s forces well established in the south, young Richard happened upon three armed knights entertaining themselves with a farmer’s wife. The farmer lay dead, the twelve-year-old boy who had tried to defend his parents lay in a heap, the other children fled, and the wife . . . Well.
“Unfortunately, the three knights were William’s men. And not just any men, but knights who had brought with them men-at-arms and full purses. Richard, as I said, had no name and had joined with little more than his sword. Which he raised without hesitation to come to the defence of a peasant woman and her family.
“He killed two of the knights and drove the other off—three experienced, armed fighting men. Richard received a wound in his breast, from the point of a sword that slipped under his armour. He helped the woman bury her husband, accepted a drink of water—the family records are quite meticulous about noting that, for some reason—and left her to nurse her injured boy.
“He rode into William’s camp leading two horses with knights slung over their backs, and knelt in front of the Conqueror, sword offered, to receive his punishment. They were important men, after all, and William could not afford to let their deaths—over a mere peasant—go unavenged.
“But he did. He looked down at Hugh’s bare neck, bent before him, but instead of using the edge of the sword, he used the flat, and knighted Richard. You’ve never heard this story?”
“In its outline alone,” Holmes told him.
“What William said then became the family motto, drilled into successive generations of impressionable minds: Justitia fortitudo mea est. ‘Righteousness is my strength.’
“I will not force on you the next eight and a half centuries of family history; if you’re interested, look for it yourself in the green library. Richard was not given a high degree of authority—William was no fool; he well knew that any man who would place righteousness over common sense was no person to command an army—but he gave him a degree of trust, and more to the point, some land.
“Which is where my family has stood ever since, both on the land and in the attitude. We are loyal unto death to our monarch—except for those odd occasions when a strain of fanatic comes to the surface, and makes us see the king’s cause as unjust. This, as you might expect, has led the family into trouble once or twice. For the most part it has been hothead younger brothers who chose righteousness over loyalty, but once or twice it was the earl, or later the duke, who made his stand, and then the foundations shook. The second earl wavered onto Mary’s side, and Elizabeth took his head for it, stripped the family of its lands, and declared the title attainted. By great good fortune, however, the earl’s son had already proved himself to be a queen’s man, and the title was soon restored. Then in Monmouth’s Rebellion the seventh earl took his men and marched on London. He, too, lost his head; and again, had his younger brother not already proved himself a trustworthy friend to James II, we should not be standing here today.
“My father, Gerald Richard Adam Hughenfort, was the fifth Duke. I was his second surviving son. My elder brother, Henry, was seventeen years older than I, with two stillbirths in between us. Our brother Lionel was born when I was six. Mother died a few weeks after his birth, and five years later Father remarried. Phillida was born the year