Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [46]
Alistair’s Englishness I had grown more comfortable with, as enough of Ali remained there to see the man I had known behind the unlikely disguise, but Marsh was proving more difficult. My mind continued to search for similarities between him and Mahmoud, struggling to meld the two faces into one. It was like doing a jig-saw puzzle without the picture, with scraps of pattern from which the eyes could decipher no image. His dignity and authority remained the same in tweed or robe—he could no more shed his aristocratic origins than he could stop his lungs from drawing air. And the stealth of his movements, that too seemed as much a part of him as the shape of his bones. Perhaps the slight droop of his eyelids, the sense that they veiled a great deal from the outside world, perhaps that remained, exaggerated by the effects of what he’d consumed the night before.
It would be easiest, I reflected, if I were to tell myself this was my old friend Mahmoud’s brother, a new character in my life. But to do so, I was certain, would be a disservice to us all.
I was suddenly hit by one of those memories, so vivid that for a moment I was there: Holmes addressing Ali across a cook-fire in the desert, commanding with razor-sharp scorn, “Think of Russell as Amir, picture ‘him’ as a beardless youth, and you just might succeed in not giving us away.”
I blinked, and there were two Englishmen with greying hair, gazing with affection at a fat pony. One of them, the older one, turned a pair of impenetrable eyes on me.
“Has my cousin showed you the house?”
“It’s an amazing place,” I answered him.
Marsh looked at me sideways, causing a brief stir of familiarity. “You liked the library?”
“It was all I could do to keep her from bolting herself inside,” Alistair told him.
With mock indignation, I protested, “I never even touched a book. I walked through and walked out.”
“Her eyes were filled with an unnatural light,” Alistair confided in his cousin. “I feared for my safety.”
“No violence can ever take place in that room,” Marsh said seriously. “Mr Greene would not permit it.”
Was this one of the house staff responsible for quelling riots? I wondered. Marsh saw the question on my face.
“You noticed the portrait over the fire?”
“Thin man with large ears? Yes.”
“Mr Obediah Greene, hired by the second Duke to assemble a library suitable for a gentleman. I doubt that particular ancestor ever picked up a book himself, but Mr Greene laid the foundations, and furthermore bullied his employer to set aside a permanent portion of the estate budget for acquisition and maintenance. As children, we were convinced that to dog-ear a page would bring down the wrath of Mr Greene’s ghost.”
“I shall offer him obeisance when next I am there.”
“He is said to savour the odour of rosemary,” Marsh replied. “If you are moved to take an offering.”
He gave the pony a final pat and moved away, leaving me to wonder if he had just made a joke.
We strolled around to the other end of the stable wing, trading the aromas of hay and horses for those of oil and petrol. Gleaming generating engines were joined by rank after rank of the batteries that lit the great house at night, and were followed by the Justice motorcar collection, eight vehicles, including a Model T with leather seats the same crimson as the Egyptian boots that Ali had worn, a Hispano Suiza that would be blinding on a sunny day, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost touring car, an electrical cart with a handle in place of a wheel for steering, and several others I did not recognise but which were all as thoroughly polished as the Hispano.
“My brother’s,” Marsh noted, without much interest. “Ringle can’t bear to part with them—Ringle is the estate manager,” he explained. “It tortures him that we don’t have the staff we did when he came in 1890. I brought up the possibility of selling two of the smaller farms to pay the taxes; he looked at me as if I were coming after him with a bone-saw. Capital tax will be the death of us. Still, it makes for a change, to have the government take it back systematically—traditionally