Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [96]
“It probably would. Oh dear, poor Marsh.” She fell silent for a moment, then gave a curt laugh. “And to think, two weeks ago, Dan and I were sitting in a lovely noisy bar, getting pleasantly drunk with Djuna Barnes and Sinclair Lewis.”
“Two weeks ago Holmes and I were tramping in the rain across Dartmoor, getting horribly wet with the sheep and the ponies.”
She laughed again, her voice ringing out across the invisible terraces and cultivated shrubs, then shivered, as much from the relief of confession as from the cold. “In that case, you deserve some warmth and a drink before dinner. And you will want to tell your Holmes about this conversation. Come.”
We stumbled back along the dark terraces to the house, its windows glowing and the noises of unsubdued merriment spilling from its long gallery upstairs. From the sound of it, the guests were practicing nine-pin bowling along the length of the floorboards, to the accompaniment of shrieks of hysterical laughter. The duke might be tossing in his fevered bed, but the guests would play, regardless. As we climbed the decorated staircase, Iris shot an irritated glance at the trompe l’oeil pelican from whose place on the wall the rumbles seemed to emanate, but she said nothing. At Marsh’s door she said politely that she’d see me at dinner, and then slipped inside, but before I had my own door shut, she was back in the hallway, making grimly for the source of the sporadic rumble that vibrated through the bones of the house. I was not surprised when it ceased within minutes, not to resume.
I found Holmes before the fire in his room, the third of Gabriel Hughenfort’s diaries in his hands and a scowl on his face.
“Now, Holmes,” I said. “It isn’t all that bad.”
“Sophomoric,” he muttered.
I glanced over his shoulder at the pages he was reading, and chuckled. “Hardly surprising—he was seventeen. Every-one that age is consumed by earthshaking matters and philosophical speculations.” Holmes grunted and turned a page. “You have to admit that his observations on the natural history and farming of Justice are quite perceptive.”
“One might wish he’d stuck with badgers and squirrels and left the French philosophers in their place,” he grumbled, tossing the volume onto the chair-side table.
“He’d have grown out of it. He’d have made Justice a fine master. What do you think of the letters?”
“The official notification is not that used for an honourable discharge, but that is hardly conclusive, as whoever was filling out the form could so easily have taken up the wrong one. The one from the Reverend F. A. Hastings is considerably more suggestive.”
“I wondered if I was imagining that air of ‘I don’t care what anyone else says’ in his praise for the boy.”
“You were not. I should say Hastings knows a great deal more than he was willing to set onto paper. We need to speak with him.”
“And the letter from Gabriel?”
“Undated, much travelled, long carried, thrice wet,” he judged succinctly. “Written weeks in advance, then placed in his pack and either forgotten or else left there against the chance that he was caught without warning. Some soldiers had two or three such, lest one be lost in an attack.”
“Too ashamed, or too terrified, to write later?”
“There is no knowing. Yet,” he added, and reached for the journal again.
“Wait, Holmes. Put that down for a moment; I have something to tell you.”
He was surprised when I told him what I had discovered about Gabriel Hughenfort’s true parentage, but by no means astonished, and I felt again that he’d have put it together as soon as he knew Iris better. He tapped his teeth with his pipe. “An ideal solution, I agree, and not even much of a circumvention of the line of inheritance, since without a son Henry would have handed it over to Marsh in any case, and thence to Gabriel. Of course, had Henry had a son of his own after Gabriel, an ethical problem might have reared up. But he did not, and snipping Marsh out of the succession