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to the muttering, bumping progress of the men.
To my surprise, however, Holmes made no move to follow them. Instead, he went
to the tray and dashed into a glass a smaller dose of Marsh s anaesthetic. He
then paced to the end of the room and back, took a cigarette from the box on
the table and lit it with sharp, tight movements, then sucked in only two or
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three deep draughts before flicking it irritably into the fire. He returned to
his glass, topped it up with a harsh clatter of crystal, and stalked off into
the adjoining billiards room.
I found him outside the French doors, glaring across the gardens at the
darkness with a fresh cigarette between his fingers. There was no moon and the
terrace lights had been shut down, but the distant patter of the Pond s
fountain reached our ears, and a faint breeze stirred the nearby leaves. I was
conscious, however, only of the waves of emotion pouring out of the silent man
beside me.
Holmes was in a rage.
I knew Holmes as a man of great passions, but they tended to be volatile or
at least, swiftly brought to rein by force of will. I had only occasionally
felt in him the deep, burning pulses of an uncontrolled fury; the sensation
inevitably made me wish to creep silently away, far away.
Instead, I waited in the open doorway, listening to the falling water and the
sharp whistle of breath through his taut nostrils, until he had smoked his
cigarette to the end. Only then did I speak.
What is troubling you, Holmes?
He flung the near-flat butt to the ground and ground it beneath a vicious
boot-heel, then went back into the house.
Fools and butchers, all of them, he stormed. Sitting in their offices and
deciding that an example must be made, that the men won t fight without a
threat hanging over their heads. The Romans practised decimation line up one
in ten and stab them to death to encourage the others. Pah! Idiocy. He became
aware that I was staring at him as he paced, and made an effort to pull
himself together. When yet another cigarette was going, his voice came, taut
with control.
I was once asked by a family to investigate the death of their son. This was
in the first year of fighting, when the War Offices just flatly told the
families that their son, husband, whatever had been executed. In this case,
for cowardice. Can you picture what news like that does to a family, already
grieving? The father committed suicide. The mother wanted to know.
Russell, he d been scarcely more than an infant! A schoolboy, who d lied
about his age. Barely seventeen and at his third relentless rolling barrage
his nerve broke. He dropped his rifle and ran, straight through deadly fire,
over the tops of trenches, anything to get away from the ungodly noise.
Desertion, cowardice shell shock, for which the official cure was a hail of
bullets. He couldn t even stand upright, his nerves were so bad; they had to
bring out a kitchen chair
He broke off, unable to continue the sentence. The old house waited in
silence; when he resumed, his voice was deceptively quiet and reasonable. Do
you know, Russell, when I asked to see the boy s file, I was told that only
the individual involved had the right to see closed records. When I pointed
out that the individual involved was dead, I was informed that the records
were therefore closed, full stop. The logic of the bureaucrat. I had to have
Mycroft steal the file for me. That trial was a farce: no defence, no medical
testimony as to the state he was in, two of the four witnesses had only
hearsay evidence, a third was a personal enemy. And his wasn t the only such;
there have been outraged questions asked in Parliament. One October, in 1917 I
believe it was, only one of the twenty-five soldiers executed that month had
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anything resembling a defence. There was effectively no right of appeal, no
sending or receiving of letters, no mechanism for bringing in witnesses who
weren t immediately to hand. The entire system was a travesty, and ripe for
abuse.
Abuse, I thought:murder . After a while I said, And you think&
Come, Russell; can you honestly believe that a son of this house could act
the coward without reason?Justitia fortitudo mea est; it s all but tattooed on
their foreheads at birth.
Abruptly, the rage loosed its hold on him, leaving him looking ill. He gazed
at the dregs in his glass, then dashed them into the dying flames. A
convulsion of blue-tinged fire reached up the chimney, and subsided. Without
another word we followed in the direction that Marsh had been carried a short
time earlier.
Holmes and I went to the end of the corridor, and there found the most ornate
set of servants stairs I d ever seen except that they were doubtless the
original central stairway of the house before its eighteenth-century
transformation. The stairs were lit by a pair of electric bulbs, weak but
sufficient for safety, and enough to give us an impression of dark colours and
rich textures. It was a tapestry of a room, far more than just a means of
changing levels in the house, from a time when the social life of the great
families had begun to move up, away from the servant-populated Hall.
Pelicans had alighted here, too, I saw: carved atop the newel posts, painted
into the walls, even incorporated into the plasterwork ceiling. I stopped to
study the unlikely, ungainly, big-beaked creature brooding over the newel
post; when it occurred to me that the nearly amorphous granite shapes guarding
the main gates had originally been pelicans as well, my mind suddenly made the
connexion.
Sacrifice! I said aloud. Of course.
Sorry? Holmes asked.
The pelican. It s an odd choice as the heraldic beast of a great house I
mean, they re positively comical except when they re actually in the air. But
the pelican is a symbol of ultimate self-sacrifice piercing its breast to feed
its young. Zoologically inaccurate, of course, but it goes very deep in
Christian mythology. The symbol was applied to the Christ, and later used in
Mediaeval alchemy. See, you can even make out the painted blood on this one.
Holmes stopped to peer with me at the red stream flowing down the breast
beside the carved beak. Mutely, we both glanced upwards in the direction of
Marsh s rooms.
Self-sacrifice could take many forms; the only common characteristic was the
high cost to the giver.
No wonder Marsh Hughenfort looked like a dying man, ripping out his own heart
for the sake of his family.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I woke during the night with the feeling that I had heard voices raised, but
when I came fully awake and identified my surroundings, all I heard was
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silence, and after a time a clock striking four. I settled back into my
feather pillows and pulled the thick bedclothes back over my ears, grateful
that I was not a house-maid whose job it was to lay fires before dawn.
(Although my ears persisted in thinking it had not sounded much like a
house-maid; that it had in fact sounded like Ali. An invention from the
recesses of memory, no doubt, summoning the rise and fall of long
conversations overheard through walls of canvas and goat s hair.)
In the morning, I was alone in the tapestried bed. The sky was an expanse of
grey, although it was not yet raining. I washed (calling down blessings on
whichever duke it had been whose sense of luxury extended to hot water taps in
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