Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [37]
“I was once asked by a family to investigate the death of their son. This was in the first year of fighting, when the War Offices just flatly told the families that their son, husband, whatever had been executed. In this case, for cowardice. Can you picture what news like that does to a family, already grieving? The father committed suicide. The mother wanted to know.
“Russell, he’d been scarcely more than an infant! A schoolboy, who’d lied about his age. Barely seventeen and at his third relentless rolling barrage his nerve broke. He dropped his rifle and ran, straight through deadly fire, over the tops of trenches, anything to get away from the ungodly noise. Desertion, cowardice—shell shock, for which the official cure was a hail of bullets. He couldn’t even stand upright, his nerves were so bad; they had to bring out a kitchen chair—”
He broke off, unable to continue the sentence. The old house waited in silence; when he resumed, his voice was deceptively quiet and reasonable. “Do you know, Russell, when I asked to see the boy’s file, I was told that only the individual involved had the right to see closed records. When I pointed out that the ‘individual involved’ was dead, I was informed that the records were therefore closed, full stop. The logic of the bureaucrat. I had to have Mycroft steal the file for me. That trial was a farce: no defence, no medical testimony as to the state he was in, two of the four witnesses had only hearsay evidence, a third was a personal enemy. And his wasn’t the only such; there have been outraged questions asked in Parliament. One October, in 1917 I believe it was, only one of the twenty-five soldiers executed that month had anything resembling a defence. There was effectively no right of appeal, no sending or receiving of letters, no mechanism for bringing in witnesses who weren’t immediately to hand. The entire system was a travesty, and ripe for abuse.”
Abuse, I thought: murder. After a while I said, “And you think . . .”
“Come, Russell; can you honestly believe that a son of this house could act the coward without reason? Justitia fortitudo mea est; it’s all but tattooed on their foreheads at birth.”
Abruptly, the rage loosed its hold on him, leaving him looking ill. He gazed at the dregs in his glass, then dashed them into the dying flames. A convulsion of blue-tinged fire reached up the chimney, and subsided. Without another word we followed in the direction that Marsh had been carried a short time earlier.
Holmes and I went to the end of the corridor, and there found the most ornate set of servants’ stairs I’d ever seen—except that they were doubtless the original central stairway of the house before its eighteenth-century transformation. The stairs were lit by a pair of electric bulbs, weak but sufficient for safety, and enough to give us an impression of dark colours and rich textures. It was a tapestry of a room, far more than just a means of changing levels in the house, from a time when the social life of the great families had begun to move up, away from the servant-populated Hall.
Pelicans had alighted here, too, I saw: carved atop the newel posts, painted into the walls, even incorporated into the plasterwork ceiling. I stopped to study the unlikely, ungainly, big-beaked creature brooding over the newel post; when it occurred to me that the nearly amorphous granite shapes guarding the main gates had originally been pelicans as well, my mind suddenly made the connexion.
“Sacrifice!” I said aloud. “Of course.”
“Sorry?” Holmes asked.
“The pelican. It’s an odd choice as the heraldic beast of a great house—I mean, they’re positively comical except when they’re actually in the air. But the pelican is a symbol of ultimate self-sacrifice—piercing its breast to feed its young. Zoologically inaccurate, of course, but it goes very deep in Christian mythology. The symbol was applied to the Christ, and later used in Mediaeval alchemy. See, you can even make out the painted blood on this one.