Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [59]
“You even managed to slip it past Debrett’s,” I commented.
“I know. That was very clever of Marsh, wasn’t it? And then as luck would have it, Henry’s wife got pregnant. Personally, I think having the family’s intense scrutiny off of Sarah’s reproductive cycle for a while was what did it, although Sarah claimed it was the warmer climate agreeing with her. Marsh and I moved to Paris—well away from my family, and an easy trip for Marsh to Cairo and Jerusalem. Gradually his trips lengthened, and I met Dan—Danella is her name; I’m still with her—and things settled down into what they have remained for twenty years now. I’ve seen Marsh half a dozen times over the years, I like him, he likes Dan, and there you have it. The portrait of a marriage.”
It explained a lot, including the brother/sister sort of affection between the two conspirators. I’d be happy to see someone, too, if my freedom had been won through her.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Marsh thought you should know. You and your husband.”
“You know who my husband is?”
“Marsh explained. He also tried to explain what you were doing in Palestine, five years ago.”
“That would have taken some doing, since we were none too sure ourselves, at the time.”
She laughed. “But you stumbled into something important, which seems to be what Marsh does there generally—poke his nose into things until something bites back.”
She did indeed know everything of importance about her husband, this sham wife.
Seldom have I enjoyed myself more with another person than on that long day’s hike across the hills with the lesbian wife of the seventh Duke of Beauville. We would talk for a while—about Oxford, academics, and the life of an Oxford scholar-cum-detective, Paris, the art world, and the life of a frustrated pianist—and then we would drift into an easy silence, listening only to the day, each of us deep in our own thoughts. I felt the restless exhaustion that had come on me in Sussex, which Alistair’s arrival had interrupted but not displaced, shrink and fade, to be replaced by a degree of serenity rare in me.
Two hours later we were standing in front of a small forest of jagged, lichen-encrusted granite chunks thrusting up from the pasture land, and I couldn’t think at first why we had stopped. Then I remembered: The Circles. The reason for our excursion.
Prehistoric monuments are invariably lonely, if for no other reason than a group of standing stones near habitations will not last long before being hauled away and incorporated in someone’s wall. Their solitude, and their combination of crude workmanship with clear deliberation, make objects such as The Circles puzzling and evocative; they seem to occupy a portion of the universe apart from daily life, and appear to have been fashioned by hands other than ordinary human ones. The breath of God—or perhaps of the gods—has brushed these sites, and changed the very ground from which they rise.
“Extraordinary place, isn’t it?” Iris was circumnavigating the outer stones, her right hand tapping each one as she passed.
“I was just thinking how other-worldly these sites are. Have you seen Stonehenge?”
“Once, briefly.”
“I spent the night there, one winter solstice.”
“The cold must have been excruciating.”
“It was that,” I agreed, with feeling. “But the sunrise on the stones was glorious.”
“The three of us came out here to see the summer solstice one year. Marsh had some theory that this was orientated towards the sun, too. Either it isn’t, or else too many of the stones are worn away. It was a nice sunrise, though—warmer than yours, I don’t doubt. He caught hell for keeping Alistair out all night. We were, oh, thirteen maybe. Ali would