Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [29]
“My elder brother married when he was thirty. Henry was the perfect heir—did an adequate degree, took a responsible and interested view of the land, wasn’t too wild in his trips into London and the Continent. He didn’t even gamble much, which is the thing that usually brings down houses like Justice.
“What’s that fool dog into?” he asked, and interrupted his narrative to investigate. When the putrid rabbit had been removed from its adoring finder and buried, we turned back to the path, and to Marsh’s tale.
“So it did not matter all that much to Father that his second son, Maurice, found Justice dull, detested farming, and was interested only in the study of history and language and foreign peoples. I was, as they say, ‘the spare,’ but since the heir himself was healthy, strong, and sensible, there was no cause for concern.
“I made the grand tour as most young men did after university. However, when I reached Venice, my eyes went east, not south to Rome. I crossed the Adriatic, worked my way through Yugo-Slavia and Turkey, then sailed from Rhodes to Alexandria and Cairo. I saw the pyramids, the Nile, the beginnings of the African continent, but the only thing that truly called out to me was the desert to the east.
“I joined up with a group of ragged and corrupt nomads crossing the Sinai—not Bedu, just traders. When I laid eyes on the Judean hills, I was home.
“I lived there for ten months that first time, before my cousin was sent to fetch me back to England. I stayed here, the obedient son, for over a year. At the end of it, Henry’s son Gabriel was born and thriving, my younger brother, Lionel, was seventeen and by all appearances on a straight course, and I was both superfluous and smothering.” Alistair glanced at Marsh and then swiftly away again, and walked on with his eyes glued to the countryside ahead; I wondered what Marsh had left out, or lied about.
“You may have an idea how terribly tight-knit a stratum of the social order we are even now—and the higher, the tighter. We’re an entire society of in-laws and cousins: Our sisters go to balls on the arms of the brothers of boys we went to school with; members of our fathers’ clubs command our Guards regiments. Holidays would be at an uncle’s hunting lodge, our Saturdays-to-Mondays spent at the country house of a mother’s childhood friend who was also a second cousin; our chaperones—”
He caught himself. “You see the picture. After the desert, the stultifying drawing-room air was killing me. It was certainly driving me mad; I used to dream about the desert, about dry warm sand trickling down across my face and burying me, and would wake happy at the thought.”
This self-revelation was more than he had intended; he veered away, to look over a herd of the spotted deer that had caught his attention, and it was a while before he resumed.
“After a year here, my parents eventually had to admit that I was a lost cause, and permitted me to return to my life in Palestine. My cousin spent his long vacations with me for the years of his university, which made them think that they were keeping track of me. When my cousin finished his degree, he joined me permanently.
“And all was well. Until my brother’s son Gabriel died.”
The control in his voice held, but with the last word, we could hear the effort. Not, I thought, because of any particular affection he felt for the boy as a person—how old had the child been when his uncle left the country? A few months?—but because his nephew Gabriel had been the foundation stone on which the entire weight of a noble family rested. With the heir snatched away, unmarried and with no son of his own, the order of succession took a very different track. But Marsh was going on with the story.
“My other brother, Lionel, was as I said six years younger than I. Lionel was sickly as a child. Every nursery ailment laid him low, every cold threatened pneumonia. When I entered Cambridge, just after his twelfth birthday, he had some foul illness the doctors thought might well carry him away. Instead, it seemed to burn him