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his family. Not if he lived for this house. Well, it hadn t been much of a
thought, anyway.
He was engaged, before he enlisted, wasn t he?
Not formally, she said. The girl was too young, I think.
What happened to her?
I heard she married, after the War. Susan, her name was. Susan Bridges, now
Edgerton. But even if Gabriel hadn t died, they would not have wed. When he
came to see me in Paris, one of the things he talked about was how to break it
off without hurting her. So even then he realised that they d grown too far
apart.
What else did he talk about?
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Do you mind telling me why you re so interested in the boy?
I hesitated. To anyone else, I would have given some song-and-dance about
innocence destroyed, or constructed an imaginary brother whom Gabriel
resembled, but I did not wish to do that to her. You know that the reason
Holmes and I came here was because Alistair thought we might help free Marsh
from Justice Hall?
So Ali told me, although not in such direct terms. What s Gabriel have to do
with that?
Frankly, I don t know. But then neither Holmes nor I have the faintest idea
where to begin with Marsh. The threads that tie Marsh to Justice Hall are so
numerous. Indeed, the man was like the giant Gulliver, bound into immobility
by the countless tiny threads of the Lilliputians. I shook off my fancy. If
we can snip through a few of them, it might free him to make decisions
unencumbered, instead of allowing himself to be bound. He may not, in the end,
choose to go back to Palestine, but we owe it to him as a friend (as a
brother, my mind added) to give him that choice. Gabriel s death, which seems
to trouble him deeply, was simply the first loose end to present itself. I
felt I ought to apologise for such a feeble explanation, but I had none
better. Any action, even completely peripheral, is better than feeling
useless.
I know what you mean, she surprised me by saying. I suppose it s why I ve
come back, to help him look at this French son of Lionel s, even though
there s not much I can do except offer support.
Which is a thing he would never ask for himself.
Which is why Ali brought you in, I suppose, because Marsh himself never
would.
Did Gabriel keep a war diary, do you know? I asked.
He always used to keep one, when he was a boy. I sent him a very grown-up
journal from Venice once, for his twelfth birthday; you will have seen that
among his things. But a lot of things change in a boy, especially when he puts
on a uniform. He may have grown out of diaries.
What about his possessions? Did his father keep any of his books, or those
treasures boys tend to keep? I don t even know where his room was.
She looked at me oddly. He had the room where Marsh is now. It used to be
Marsh s when he was a boy, but as he had no intention of returning here, he
had no objections to Gabriel taking it over. You know, you sound as if you and
your husband are actually investigating this death. As if there was something
criminal about it.
Strictly speaking, there must have been: He must have had a court martial to
convict him of a crime, even if we haven t found the trial records yet. But
yes, Holmes seems to feel that there may be something odd about the death.
Please, though, don t say anything to Marsh about it.
She turned away to look down at the lovely, ghost-ridden house, chewing at
her lip with a strong white incisor. All right, she said finally. I won t
say anything yet. And in fact, I am glad someone is looking more closely. I
find it hard to believe in the picture of Gabriel as a coward.
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She cast a last glance at the house and then concentrated on the slippery
ground. But this time, I thought, she had looked at Justice Hall with
loathing.
The proud beauty basking in the glow of the sun hid a number of secrets
behind her ancient façade, it would seem. The strength of the sun faltered;
with that sudden reminder that we had brought no torches, we did not pause
again.
Before we had taken more than a couple of dozen strides, however, a vehicle
appeared on the other side of the valley: the house Daimler, returning from
the station, laden with week-end merrymakers. There would be no peaceful cup
of tea before the fire for us.
I have an idea, Iris said. If it s still open. This way. I followed
willingly, since she clearly had a plan that did not include inserting our
wind-blown and mud-bespattered selves into London Society.
We kept to the backs of the hedges and the far reaches of the formal garden,
coming past stone gladiators and goddesses to the oldest part of the house.
Iris led the way to a door, which she opened cautiously; deciding the voices
were at a safe distance, we slipped inside. I thought we should be making a
break for the carved stairway a third of the way down the corridor, but
instead she turned immediately left, to dive into a sort of mud-room filled
with old boots and waterproofs. Not the sort of place I might have chosen to
inhabit until the coast was clear, I thought, but Iris pressed farther back,
pawing aside coats that might have hung there since the fourth Duke s day, if
not the third. All I could see of my companion was the back of her
herring-bone trousers, and I was beginning to wonder how on earth we would
explain ourselves if one of the servants happened upon us when I heard a
click, followed by a low exclamation of relief.
In here, she whispered.
I picked my way into the musty clothing, rendered half blind by the combined
darkness and steaming-up of spectacles. Iris seized my outstretched hand and
pulled me in; then to my consternation she shut the door, cutting off what
light there had been and loosing the first tendrils of claustrophobia.
Hold on, she murmured. I could hear her shuffling about, her hand patting
across some part of our tiny enclosure. I shifted away from the unexpected
intimacy of her leg against mine, and then she spoke again: Here we are.
The rattle of a match-box warned me what to expect; on the third try, the
head ignited and was held under the wick of a candle stub. There were several
such, I saw, arranged on top of the doorsill, all of them furry with dust. She
took a second one down, blew it clean, lit it from the one already going, then
handed it to me.
I had thought the stairs down to the crypt were snug. This was more like a
spiralling ladder. I had to take care not to set Iris s coat-tails on fire, so
nearly directly above me did she climb; my free hand rested on the steps in
front of me for support, in the absence of anything resembling a rail.
We climbed a full circuit, then stopped at a narrow landing; the stairs
continued their spiral up into the darkness. Iris s candle illuminated a tiny
door, its frame topped by another collection of candles and match-boxes. The
latch seemed to be little more than a stiff wire jabbed into a tiny hole, but
it gave Iris some difficulty. She poked and prodded away, experimenting with
marginally different angles and degrees of force, until one finally worked.
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With a click like that of the first door, the wall gave. She pushed, leant out
to survey the room beyond, hopped down, and turned to help me climb out.
It was a jib door, I saw when it was shut again, its seams rendered invisible
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