Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [94]
She was looking up at the memorial to Gabriel with that very expression—naked loss and grief. In a burst of revelation that shook me to my bones, I comprehended why: The boy’s foreign birth and its date; the regular letters Iris sent to a young soldier she scarcely knew; Marsh’s near-tears and Iris’s compulsive church-going at the effigy’s feet; the devastation wrought on the family. And I understood why Marsh was not able to leave this place.
“My God!” I exclaimed, then caught myself and glanced over my shoulder to be sure we were alone before I continued in a lower voice. “Henry wasn’t Gabriel’s father, was he? You and Marsh—Iris, you weren’t the boy’s aunt. You were his mother!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The woman on the bench beside me went as white as the marble boy above. I nearly seized her shoulders to keep her from collapsing to the floor, but then the blood swept back into her face with a flush. She turned to face the altar, showing me her ear and jaw-line.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Iris, please.” She stared at the altar, unresponsive. “I won’t tell a soul. Not even Holmes, if you insist, although I suspect he’ll figure it out on his own in another day or two. Just tell me the truth.”
I thought she would remain silent; after a few moments, however, her eyes were drawn to those of the alabaster boy, and she moaned. “Oh, Lord. I was afraid this might happen. Well, I suppose you’ll have to hear it—but not here, not with the children back and servants going past outside the door. Come, the garden.”
It was not a great deal colder out of doors than it had been in the chapel, although it was by now fully dark. I did not see that standing in the darkness for the conversation would offer any more security than would a warm room of the house—the dark hides listeners as well as walls do—but I had not reckoned with Iris’s intimate knowledge of Justice. She strode down the paths as if she possessed a cat’s vision, warning me of steps and turns. After a minute we crossed an expanse of crunchy gravel, took two steps up onto a wooden platform, and patted our way to seats on the bench that ran along the sides. We were in the Palladian music house I had noticed in the garden, set in a sea of pale gravel. If we kept our voices low, no-one could approach close enough to hear us without warning, and there was no space in which two children might be hiding.
Besides, I thought: Some conversations are best held in the dark.
“Yes,” she began. “You’re right. Gabriel was my son, although I don’t see how you could have known.”
“Your voice, when you speak of him as much as I’ve made you the last couple of days. It’s not the voice of an aunt.”
“And yet I was. Scrupulously so. I sent him no more gifts than I sent any of the other children in my family, for Christmas and birthdays. I never gave him the faintest reason to think Henry and Sarah were not his parents; I’m positive of that.”
“I’m sure you’re right that he never suspected. He’d never have written that last letter had he not thought of them as his true—and, I have to say, much loved—parents.”
“He was a loving boy. He deserved the home they gave him.”
“How . . . ?” I asked.
“How did it come about?” I was more interested in how they had got away with it, but this would do as a beginning. “It was more or less as I told you—there weren’t many lies in that story. Marsh’s parents looked at Henry—approaching forty, married for ten years with no sign of a child—and they turned the pressure on Marsh. He and I had been friends since childhood, most of our friends and families thought we’d marry sooner or later, so why not do the thing now? Marsh and I had a long talk—at The Circles, in fact, not Hampstead Heath, although for once without Alistair—and we decided that if we both had to