Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [7]
The idea of Ali Hazr, Arab cut-throat and clandestine agent for His Majesty’s government, as a clubman with noble blood in his veins made for an interesting picture. Holmes, however, returned to the question that had brooded over the house since the previous night.
“In what trouble is Mahmoud?”
Our guest looked down at his hands with a faint smile. “It is good to hear my brother’s name spoken. It gives me hope.” For one startling instant, Ali Hazr passed through the room, his hand creeping to the hilt of his wicked knife, ebony eyes flaring, the rhythm of a foreign tongue riding the English words. And then the ghost of a dramatic moustache faded, the swarthy skin became merely that of an outdoorsman, and we were looking again at Alistair Hughenfort.
“Four months ago, we received news that his brother was dying. Henry. His older brother. The funeral was in September.”
A picture began to take form out of the fog of ignorance.
“His older brother, the duke,” Holmes said. Ali nodded; Holmes settled his back against the end of the bench and allowed his eyelids to droop shut, the better to listen. He suggested to Ali, “And the duke had no son.”
However, Ali shook his head. “Henry—the sixth Duke—did have a son. Gabriel. The boy enlisted on the day of his eighteenth birthday, in August 1917. He was killed fifty-one weeks later. Gabriel was engaged, but not married. Henry had no other children.”
“Were there no other brothers?”
“Lionel, six years younger than Mah—than Marsh, but he died before the War. And there is a sister, Phillida, from the old duke’s second wife. She is seventeen years younger than Marsh.”
Somehow, it was difficult to conceive of Mahmoud Hazr as one of a family of siblings going through the common lot of birth, teething pains, skinned knees, and all the other stages of human growth. I began to get an inkling of how absolute his own reinvention had been—more profound even than that of his relative Alistair. It was then the full picture hit me: Mahmoud Hazr, itinerant scribe for the illiterate Palestinian countryside, eyes and ears for General Edmund Allenby, the inadequately washed Bedouin who scratched his ribs and cursed his mules and roasted his coffee over a dried-dung fire in the dark confines of a goat’s-hair tent, was also the seventh Duke of Beauville: his embroidered robes replaced by ermine, that dark, knife-scarred face topped not by khufiyyah, but by coronet.
It was a lot to absorb.
Holmes, as usual, kept to the essentials. “I fail to see what I might be expected to do in this situation. If Mahmoud—if your cousin—Maurice—confound it! If Maurice Hughenfort feels it necessary to assume the duties that accompany his title, there is little I, or Russell, can do to dissuade him. If he does not so choose, he could always let the dukedom be in abeyance for his lifetime. Surely there must be another heir in the woodwork. Did the other brother, Lionel, have no heir?”
“There are . . . complications. You will understand when you see him. Will you come?”
I had known it would come down to this. With the mud from the last outing still damp on my boots, we were about to set out again. I must have sighed, because Ali pulled himself up, his face going dark in a way I remembered well.
“I ask you this—,” he began, but Holmes put up one hand, saving a proud man from having to plead.
“We will of course come with you,” he said. Then he opened an eye, and added, in Arabic, a phrase translating roughly, “One man’s hunger makes his brother weak.” At the word “brother,” our guest froze; then he nodded, once, both as thanks and as acknowledgment of our right to claim that relationship.
Even I: I had, after all, been to all appearances