Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [8]
“You have neglected to tell us what happened to you on the way to Sussex,” Holmes pointed out, settling back into the bench.
“What happened—oh, you mean this.” Ali’s hand went to the gauze on his head. “Stupidity. This country makes a man soft. I imagined I was safe, and walked straight into a situation. It would never have happened in Palestine.”
Holmes abruptly abandoned his languid pose. “You were attacked? Robbed?”
I fully understood the note of incredulity in Holmes’ voice: It was hard to imagine a man with the lightning-fast responses of Ali Hazr falling victim to a common thief.
“No. Caught up in a riot.”
“In London?”
“A small riot. A Guy Fawkes celebration, I suppose—I had forgotten entirely about Guy Fawkes—that joined with a group of unemployed workers and got out of hand.” He saw our unwillingness to accept that truncated account, and reluctantly explained. “When I got into Paddington I had an hour before the Sussex train, so I walked to Victoria instead of taking a taxi or the underground. Just before the station I came up to a knot of men with a pile of wood, as if they were about to light a bonfire on the street. They objected to the police clearing them off; bricks were thrown, truncheons raised. I thought the disturbance was behind me, then something struck me—truncheon or cobblestone, who knows?—and knocked me into the street in the path of a lorry. I managed to roll out of its way, and half fell into the nearest doorway. A pawnshop, as it turned out, where a handful of others took refuge as well. They wanted to take me to a doctor’s surgery, but I could not risk missing the train.”
Riots in London? Ever since the War had ended, and especially in recent months, the unrest of common workers had steadily increased: Men who had spent four years in the trenches were ill equipped to put up with dole queues. I had not known that open battle had broken out.
“It was nothing,” he insisted. “Carelessness and a headache. We must go now.”
The man was in no condition to travel. Indeed, once on his feet he swayed dangerously, and would have fallen but for Holmes’ hand on his shoulder, both supporting and holding him back.
“If we left now,” Holmes told him, “we should merely find ourselves decorating an ill-heated waiting room for several hours. There is no service we can do for the Duke of Beauville that cannot be better done by going prepared.”
The room went abruptly cold as Ali Hazr drew himself up, no sign of weakness in him, his eyes dark with threat and his right hand fumbling at the sash of his borrowed gown as if to draw steel. “You will not call him by that name,” he commanded. Neither of us breathed, and I fought down the urge to retreat at this sudden appearance of Fury in dressing gown and bandage.
“I see,” Holmes replied mildly, although I doubted that he did, any more than I. However, he decided to let pass for the moment what was clearly a basket of snakes, and said only, “Perhaps you might allow Russell and me to pack our bags and take care of a few matters of urgent business. You rest here. I will enquire if Mrs Hudson can assemble you some clothing.”
We left him then, and although I half expected to hear the crash of his collapse onto the carpet, he must have succeeded in making his way to the bed. Only when we reached the main room, where Holmes dived into the heap of letters to extract those most pressing of reply, was I struck by the full scope of the undertaking: I was headed for the country house of a peer, no matter how unlikely a peer. We were full into the season of social week-end shoots, and Saturday loomed near. In something not far from horror, I turned to my husband.
“Holmes! Whatever shall I do? I haven’t a thing to wear.”
CHAPTER THREE
It was not strictly accurate, of course, that I had nothing to wear. True, most of the garments hanging in my wardrobe were not exactly the thing for a country house Saturday-to-Monday, but I could pull together a sufficient number of quality