Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [55]
For your sakes, I shall try to keep my head down on the morrow, but if I fail, please know that death found me strong and happy to serve my King and country. You formed me well, and I will do my best to remain brave, that I might live up to my name. Righteousness is my strength.
Your loving son,
Gabriel
Lies, I thought, all of it pretty lies to comfort the mother and bereft father, just as families were told of clean bullets and instant death even if their boy had hung for agonised hours on the barbed wire of No-Man’s-Land. I only hoped it brought his parents some scrap of comfort, when it reached their hands.
The last letter was addressed by a different hand. It read:
7 August 1918
Dear Sir and Madame,
By the time this letter reaches you, you will have received the foulest news any parent could have, the death of your beloved son. I did not know Gabriel well, but over the few months of our acquaintance, he impressed me profoundly, as a soldier and as a man. The men under his command, too, had come to respect him far more deeply than they did many officers of longer experience and greater years. I do not claim to understand the forces that conspired to bring your son to his end, but I am convinced that as an officer, your son inspired nothing but loyalty and courage in those under his command, and that at the end, all that he did was for their sakes.
Joining you in your sorrow, I am
Very truly yours,
Rev. F. A. Hastings
This last letter I read several times. Taken in conjunction with the alternate wording of the official death notification, I began to see what had led Marsh to the conviction that Gabriel had been executed. “I do not claim to understand the forces that conspired” sounded awfully like a lament for a loved deserter. I could only wish that the Reverend Mr Hastings had gone into a bit more detail concerning “all that he did.”
With relief, I slid the letters back into the large envelope and turned to the youthful journals with a lighter heart. They had all been written before Gabriel Hughenfort went to soldier; their sorrow and bloodshed would be limited to anguish for a dead pet and the slaughter of game birds.
I read long, grasping for the essence of the boy and finding a degree of sweetness and nobility that was hard for my cynical mind to comprehend. Afternoon tea inserted itself on my awareness as nothing more than a cup at my elbow and a sudden brightness as the maid turned on the light. The next thing I knew, it was a quarter past seven and a woman’s ringing voice startled me from my page: The Darlings had returned.
I looked down at my tweed-covered lap and dusty hands, and knew it was unlikely that we should be excused from changing two nights running. I closed my books and shut down the lamps. After returning the envelope into Marsh’s hands, without comment from either of us, I went to don the hair-shirt of civilisation.
My perusal of the two dinner frocks in the wardrobe was interrupted by a knock at the door. I tightened the belt of my dressing gown and went to see who it was, opening the door to find Emma, the house-maid whom I had nearly sent flying on the 1612 staircase.
“Beg pardon, mum, but Mrs Butter sent me to see if you’d like a hand with your hair. I was a ladies’ maid at my last position,” she added, as if Mrs Butter might sent a scullery maid for the purpose. I stepped back to let her in.
She chose my dress, rejected the wrap I had chosen in favour of the other, picked a necklace and combs, wrapped my hair into a slick chignon, and finally produced a