“Shall I make another breakfast, then?” she asked.
“Either that or send for the undertaker,” I answered, but then a rattle of movement came from the bedstead over our heads, followed by the thump of feet hitting the floorboards. They stopped there, either through dizziness or because Ali noticed that he was more or less naked. Holmes folded his newspaper (he’d worked his way up to the previous week) and rose.
“If you would like to make a pot of tea, Mrs Hudson, Russell will bring it up. I’ll find our guest a dressing gown. Give him a minute, Russell, to get his bearings.”
I was not certain whether Holmes was referring to the inevitable confusion following a head injury, or to the specific discomfort this man might feel after having tumbled into the arms of a woman he’d spent the better part of six weeks insulting, ignoring, and mistrusting. Our relationship had become considerably more jovial after I had come close to killing him a couple of times (accidents both, I hasten to say), but I might still not be the person Ali Hazr would have chosen to pick him up following a moment of vulnerability.
To be fair, I had to permit him to resume his mask of omni-competence. Whatever had driven him to the extremity of seeking aid, it would only further complicate matters to begin with inequality. So I allowed Holmes to trot off upstairs without me. I did not even snatch the tray from Mrs Hudson’s hands, but meekly waited for her to rearrange the biscuits into an aesthetic design before I took up the refreshment and carried it upstairs.
Holmes had built up the fire in the guest room and was seated on the low bench at the foot of the bed. The room’s armchair held Ali, clad in a warm dressing gown and a pair of Holmes’ pyjama trousers that extended past his toes. He looked up at my entrance and watched me set the tray down on the small table by his side. I poured him a cup. He added milk (rather to my surprise, as Arab tea is taken black) and two sugars, then drank thirstily. I refilled his cup and pulled the foot-stool up to the other side of the fireplace. A quick glance at the pillow confirmed that he’d bled, but not profusely, and none of the stains looked fresh.
The second cup followed the first down his throat, and he set it onto the saucer with the barest tap. Ali glanced at me briefly, and away.
“The English beverage,” he commented, which might have sounded like disparagement had he not drunk it so greedily. I decided this was his version of Thank You. His hand went to his scalp, exploring the surface of the bandage. “Someone has put in stitches.”
“Six,” Holmes told him. “One of our neighbours is a retired surgeon. And in case you are concerned, he knows well how to keep a confidence.”
“Good. I . . . apologise for my state yesterday night. I do not remember too clearly, but I have the impression that my arrival was somewhat more . . . dramatic than I had intended.”
The drama of his arrival the previous evening, however, had been nowhere near as startling as the words he had just pronounced. And not only the words themselves (Ali Hazr, apologising?) but their delivery.
My first clear impression of Ali all those years before, seen by the light of a tiny oil lamp in a mud-brick hut near Jaffa, had been: Arab cut-throat. Glaring eyes and garish embroidery, knife as well as revolver decorating his belt, his very moustaches looking ferocious—from his flowered head-dress to his red leather boots, Ali Hazr had been in that first moment what he remained the entire time: a Bedouin male, proud member of a haughty race, fiercely indisposed to tolerate anyone but Mahmoud, his brother in the deepest sense of the word. Touchy and arrogant, his hand reaching for his knife at the slightest provocation, in his attitude towards us Ali had veered between mortal threat and withering contempt. Passing the tests he and Mahmoud had set us, becoming a companion worthy of their trust, had been a profound source of pride that I had never acknowledged, even to Holmes. I had, in truth, been a different person when Ali and Mahmoud Hazr finished with me.
I looked at the man in the chair, and other than the colours of the tie draped over the bedstead, I could perceive little of that vivid personality now. His erect spine, and perhaps the darkness in his eyes, but the flash was missing from their depths, the aura of simmering violence well and truly damped down. With the gap in his front teeth bridged, even his oddly ominous lisp was gone, his once-heavy accent no more than a faint thickening of gutturals and a subtly non-English placement of the words on the tongue. Had Holmes not trained my ear, I might have thought our intruder merely an ordinary, tame English gentleman. Ali Hazr had shaved away far more than facial hair in transforming himself into this.
As I studied him, those black eyes glanced up at me again, and in that brief moment of contact I felt a spark in them, and read in his half-familiar mouth a distinct grimace. He knew what I was seeing—or rather, not seeing—and it was a face he was not happy about showing. His current appearance was no mere disguise.
“I think I should introduce myself,” he said. I had the impression he spoke through gritted teeth. “My name is Alistair Hughenfort. Alistair Gordon St John Hughenfort. Although even as a child, my family called me Ali.”
Holmes’ head jerked up and I, frankly, stared. Hughenfort? He must be joking. The Hughenfort name was a thing to conjure with, a noble name in the fullest sense of the word, one of a thin handful of the nation’s families that had actually stepped onto England’s shores at the side of William the Conqueror. Half the European wars had a Hughenfort leading some vital charge—and half the rebellions had a younger Hughenfort somewhere in there as well. But as an assumed name, it would have been like disguising himself as the Prince of Wales. It could only be the truth. Holmes shook off the historical details and went for the main issue.
“And Mahmoud?”
Our guest sat up sharply, scarcely wincing as the urgency of his mission overrode his ailments. “He needs us. I need your help.”
This extraordinary confession passed straight over Holmes’ head. “I understood that to be so. My question was, what is Mahmoud’s name?”
The wounded ex-Arab braced himself, took a soft breath, then answered in an even voice. “The man you know as Mahmoud Hazr was born William Maurice Hughenfort.” He waited, his eyes on Holmes, to see what we would make of the statement.
It meant nothing to me, but Holmes’ eyes assumed the faraway look that indicated a rapid search through his prodigiously stocked mental box rooms. “Maurice Hughenfort. Known as Lord Marsh. Younger son of the Duke of Beauville. Good Lord. I should have suspected that family immediately I saw where your ticket was issued last night.”
“I’m sorry?” I asked. Was this something from his accumulation of newspapers, a recent event we had missed while slogging through the depths of Dartmoor?
But Holmes waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the laboratory. “Ancient history, Russell. He’ll be in Debrett’s. Unless . . . ?” He turned an eye to the man in the chair.
“The entry is still there,” Ali—Alistair?—confirmed. “Incomplete, but there.”
Curious, I went down to Holmes’ laboratory and took his Debrett’s from its resting-place on a shelf between an assortment of labelled coal samples and a massive and outdated treatise on Bertillonism. I went back down the corridor, flipping over the pages until I came to the name Beauville. It began with a crest of typically unlikely looking creatures and a snarl of heraldic devices above a motto of equally unlikely Latin, Justitia fortitudo mea est.
The Duke of Beauville, the list began, with the name of the (then-present) Duke, Henry Thomas Michael. I skimmed over the long paragraph of fine print that followed, packed with descending titles, education, and honours: Earl of Calminster, Earl of Darlescote, baron of this and baron of the other, mayor of, secretary of, steward of, so on and so forth.
I turned the page to find the Family of Hughenfort entry, where the dates began in the eleventh century, although details of the early barons were both few and heavily mythologised. Words jumped out: knighted; liberal to his tenants and servants; high sheriff; chief justice; spirited debates in Parliament;
battle of various places and service to king so and so and distinguished statesman. Baron gave way to earl and eventually, in the early eighteenth century, to duke.
Finally I saw the name Maurice, and I slowed to read the entry of his father’s generation:
Gerald Richard Adam, 5th Duke of Beauville, b. 14 May 1830, then the details of two marriages, with “issue” given as:
1. Henry Thomas Michael, Earl of Calminster, b. 1859, m 1888 to his cousin Sarah, dau. Rev William Malverson, has issue: Gabriel Adrian Thomas b. 1899.
2. William Maurice, b. 1876 (whereabouts unknown since 1900)
3. Lionel Gerald b. 1882
1. Phillida Anne b. 1893
I had to travel back up the lists to find Ali, but there he was, under a cousin of the fourth Duke’s: Alistair Gordon St John, b. 1881, Eton, Trinity. Badger Old Place, Arley Holt, Berks. And again that odd notice, whereabouts unknown, although in his case it was since 1902.
The two Hughenfort cousins had slipped beneath the ken of Debrett’s all-knowing eyes, into the king’s service in the Middle East. Quite an accomplishment for a pair of Hons. So why had they come back?
Further queries were interrupted by Mrs Hudson and another tray, and although the man I was trying to think of as Alistair was reluctant to break off his quest even to take on nourishment, Mrs Hudson stood over him until she was satisfied that he was not about to let the buttery eggs go untended. Holmes, seeing that our guest’s mouth was unavoidably occupied, stepped into the gap.
“Before your time, Russell. There was a mild sensation in the newspapers concerning a vanished baronet. Somehow a rumour got around that he had boarded a ship for New York and never arrived. 1896 or ’7, as I recall.”
“Seven,” mumbled Alistair around his toast.
“The family denied the rumours, claimed their second son was merely travelling in Russia, but when Debrett’s came out the following year it gave his address as ‘unknown,’ and Burke’s followed. But—correct me if I am wrong—the son came home a few years later. For his father’s funeral?” The bandage nodded. “When he disappeared again after that, no one could work up much interest.”
Ali washed the toast down with the last of his tea; he had eaten all the eggs and the tomato, but left the bacon and sausage untouched. “When I joined him in Palestine in 1902, my own family had learnt their lesson, and gave it out that we had mounted an expedition into the Himalayas and were not expected to return for years. I had my club forward letters, first to my home, and then later, when we became . . . associated with your brother Mycroft’s organisation, to his office. It disarmed suspicion.”
The idea of Ali Hazr, Arab cut-throat and clandestine agent for His Majesty’s government, as a clubman with noble blood in his veins made for an interesting picture. Holmes, however, returned to the question that had brooded over the house since the previous night.
“In what trouble is Mahmoud?”
Our guest looked down at his hands with a faint smile. “It is good to hear my brother’s name spoken. It gives me hope.” For one startling instant, Ali Hazr passed through the room, his hand creeping to the hilt of his wicked knife, ebony eyes flaring, the rhythm of a foreign tongue riding the English words. And then the ghost of a dramatic moustache faded, the swarthy skin became merely that of an outdoorsman, and we were looking again at Alistair Hughenfort.
“Four months ago, we received news that his brother was dying. Henry. His older brother. The funeral was in September.”
A picture began to take form out of the fog of ignorance.
“His older brother, the duke,” Holmes said. Ali nodded; Holmes settled his back against the end of the bench and allowed his eyelids to droop shut, the better to listen. He suggested to Ali, “And the duke had no son.”
However, Ali shook his head. “Henry—the sixth Duke—did have a son. Gabriel. The boy enlisted on the day of his eighteenth birthday, in August 1917. He was killed fifty-one weeks later. Gabriel was engaged, but not married. Henry had no other children.”
“Were there no other brothers?”
“Lionel, six years younger than Mah—than Marsh, but he died before the War. And there is a sister, Phillida, from the old duke’s second wife. She is seventeen years younger than Marsh.”
Somehow, it was difficult to conceive of Mahmoud Hazr as one of a family of siblings going through the common lot of birth, teething pains, skinned knees, and all the other stages of human growth. I began to get an inkling of how absolute his own reinvention had been—more profound even than that of his relative Alistair. It was then the full picture hit me: Mahmoud Hazr, itinerant scribe for the illiterate Palestinian countryside, eyes and ears for General Edmund Allenby, the inadequately washed Bedouin who scratched his ribs and cursed his mules and roasted his coffee over a dried-dung fire in the dark confines of a goat’s-hair tent, was also the seventh Duke of Beauville: his embroidered robes replaced by ermine, that dark, knife-scarred face topped not by khufiyyah, but by coronet.
It was a lot to absorb.
Holmes, as usual, kept to the essentials. “I fail to see what I might be expected to do in this situation. If Mahmoud—if your cousin—Maurice—confound it! If Maurice Hughenfort feels it necessary to assume the duties that accompany his title, there is little I, or Russell, can do to dissuade him. If he does not so choose, he could always let the dukedom be in abeyance for his lifetime. Surely there must be another heir in the woodwork. Did the other brother, Lionel, have no heir?”
“There are . . . complications. You will understand when you see him. Will you come?”
I had known it would come down to this. With the mud from the last outing still damp on my boots, we were about to set out again. I must have sighed, because Ali pulled himself up, his face going dark in a way I remembered well.
“I ask you this—,” he began, but Holmes put up one hand, saving a proud man from having to plead.
“We will of course come with you,” he said. Then he opened an eye, and added, in Arabic, a phrase translating roughly, “One man’s hunger makes his brother weak.” At the word “brother,” our guest froze; then he nodded, once, both as thanks and as acknowledgment of our right to claim that relationship.
Even I: I had, after all, been to all appearances a boy during the weeks in Palestine. I, too, might claim brotherhood to the formidable Mahmoud.
“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.”
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