Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [38]
Holmes stopped to peer with me at the red stream flowing down the breast beside the carved beak. Mutely, we both glanced upwards in the direction of Marsh’s rooms.
Self-sacrifice could take many forms; the only common characteristic was the high cost to the giver.
No wonder Marsh Hughenfort looked like a dying man, ripping out his own heart for the sake of his family.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I woke during the night with the feeling that I had heard voices raised, but when I came fully awake and identified my surroundings, all I heard was silence, and after a time a clock striking four. I settled back into my feather pillows and pulled the thick bedclothes back over my ears, grateful that I was not a house-maid whose job it was to lay fires before dawn.
(Although my ears persisted in thinking it had not sounded much like a house-maid; that it had in fact sounded like Ali. An invention from the recesses of memory, no doubt, summoning the rise and fall of long conversations overheard through walls of canvas and goat’s hair.)
In the morning, I was alone in the tapestried bed. The sky was an expanse of grey, although it was not yet raining. I washed (calling down blessings on whichever duke it had been whose sense of luxury extended to hot water taps in the guest bath-rooms) and dressed, taking myself down the back stairway so that I might have another look at it. This time, with the electric light supplemented by that seeping through the mullioned windows, I noticed that one of the carved pelicans was standing on a knob set with the date 1612. Its builder had either been to Knole or had been responsible for that stairway as well, I thought as I continued slowly down the stairs, studying the chipped, faded, glorious walls, until I was nearly flattened by an oncoming maid intent on her burden. I dived to one side, so surprising her with my sudden movement that the tea tray nearly came to grief despite her concentration.
“Ooh!” she squeaked. “Oh, you didn’t half give me a turn. That is to say, begging your pardon, mum, I didn’t see you there. Was there something I could do for you?”
“The breakfast room,” I said. “I forgot to ask directions last night—no, no; just tell me which way it is. If you take me there, that tea will get cold. But first, tell me your name?”
“It’s Emma, mum. And you’re sure you don’t want me to take you? Well, when you get to the foot of these stairs you go through that door there, and straight down the corridor for just a little way and then to your right. Then—”
Her instructions seemed to send me in a circle and the tea was probably cold anyway when she had finished, but I thanked her and went on. How hard could it be?
Had I depended on her verbal map, I might have found the breakfast room in time for luncheon, but by following the odours instead of her directions I had no great trouble.
The room was, as I had expected, a more intimate chamber than the formal dining room of the night before, although no less ornate in its way. It was on a more human scale, for one thing, so that one could crackle toast without being intimidated by echoes, and although the ceiling was thick with gilded grape-vines from which swung an exuberance of frescoed putti, and the walls were more than half mirror, the fat cherubs seemed happy enough to oversee the meals taking place below, and the silver in the mirrors had tarnished to a comfortable dimness.
Alistair was there, bent over a plate with a folded newspaper beside it; Holmes presented a similar figure across the table from him. Both men looked up at my arrival, and Alistair rose to pour me a coffee from the steaming samovar-style pot.
“Are ladies permitted in this club, gentlemen?” I asked.
“Difficult to keep them out, I should think,” Holmes answered, holding my chair for me. He was his usual self again, last night’s rage well concealed.
“What excitement is occupying the world today?”
“One Lady Diana Hamilton was sent to prison for stealing two rings and three brooches from friends who had rescued her from an ‘unfortunate and distressing situation’ in a Paddington