We took turns in her vicinity, gathering impressions more than information. She grew more tense as England drew near, picking at her fingernails and pulling at her lips with her sharp yellow teeth—but I noticed that unlike many tense mothers I had seen, she did not take her vexation out on her boy. With him she was patient and attentive, occasionally reaching out to brush back a wayward lock of hair or to pat his arm for their mutual reassurance.
I was unreasonably pleased that she was not the one who had kissed the driver.
In London, I stayed close behind her while Holmes collected our bags. She gave the taxi driver the name of the hotel that had been arranged for her; I gave my driver the same, and rode on her heels to the door. There I took my time counting out the fare, lest she notice that the woman who’d been behind her at the station had also climbed out of a taxi behind her. When she was safely inside, I disembarked, then took up a position behind a potted palm until she had received her key and was being escorted to the lift.
In varying guises, alone and as a pair, Holmes and I kept the woman in view, from the moment when, rested and bathed, mother and son emerged to explore the park across from the hotel, until they took an early dinner at a café and then returned to their rooms. At ten o’clock, Holmes donned a uniform lent him by the management (between his name and that of Hughenfort, all things were made possible) and knocked on her door with “a small welcome from her husband’s family,” namely, an enormous box of chocolates in gaudy wrapping. He found her with her hair down, preparing for bed, and speaking in a low whisper so as not to disturb her sleeping son.
Satisfied that Mme Hughenfort was not about to leave for a night amongst London’s wilder clubs, we took ourselves to bed on the floor below hers. It was silent, all the night.
In the morning, Madame took breakfast in her room. By late morning, she could remain still no longer. At a quarter to eleven, Holmes, seated behind the Times in the lobby, spotted the pair coming out of the lift. He folded his paper and sauntered after them, hissing briefly to catch my attention as he passed. We followed them for the next two hours, alternating positions, changing hat-bands and scarfs and turning around our double-sided overcoats, exchanging parcels and carry-bags, slumping or striding out as the pace demanded. I was generally the one to follow her into shops, where I changed my hat brim and tilted the hat, or straightened to appear tall and aloof, before in the next shop becoming uncertain and dowdy.
They never spotted us, not even the boy, who had a bright eye. We stayed with them up to the door of the restaurant where they would take luncheon with their unknown in-laws. The door shut. As we stood on the other side of the street, watching Terèse Hughenfort hand her parcels over and straighten her son’s collar and hair, Holmes asked me, “Well?”
“He’s not a Hughenfort. Wrong chin, wrong eyebrows, the eyes—everything.”
“The hair dye she used isn’t even very good,” he agreed.
We took a quick lunch of our own, returned to the grand entrance well before five Hughenforts came out and then parted, and followed her back to the hotel.
Mme Hughenfort did not look terribly happy.
And she had not reappeared before Alistair and Iris came to compare notes, having seen Phillida safely back onto the train to Arley Holt. Alistair’s hand was free of its gauze wrapping, although the arm seemed tender to movement. I assembled four chairs in front of the fire, and while Holmes perused the drinks tray, I telephoned down for tea. When I had finished with the instrument, Iris took it up and asked for a trunk call to Justice, in order to check on Marsh’s condition.
“How was your luncheon?” I asked Alistair.
“The woman drank three gin fizzes,” he said with a shudder.
“Poor thing,” Iris said, modifying the condemnation. “She was terrified.”
“She had a right to be,” Alistair growled, as ferocious a noise as ever Ali had come out with. “She was trying to commit a fraud.”
“So you would agree?” Holmes asked. “The boy was not fathered by Lionel Hughenfort?”
“Never,” Alistair declared.
“Lionel was built like Marsh,” Iris explained. “Shorter even, dark, a muscular build even though he never took exercise and had a sickly childhood. Were it not for his hair, the child would look almost Scandinavian—his eyes are even blue.”
“The hair is dyed,” Holmes and Alistair said simultaneously. Iris looked at them, and frowned.
“You mean to say the child is in on the deception as well?”
I for one was not willing to go quite that far. “He may regard it as a game. And I will say that he seems a keen enough lad, bright and well mannered, genuinely fond of his mother—and she of him.”
“So,” Alistair said, his voice dry. “You are suggesting that the boy would make a suitable heir, were Marsh willing to overlook the small problem of the boy’s paternity.”
Put like that, it was an unlikely scenario. Still, I registered a mild complaint. “It really is a bit ridiculous, this whole business of preserving the male line, don’t you think? And I’m sure that if you studied family portraits closely enough, you’d find anomalies in the noblest of families. Marsh needs an heir in order to feel that he can leave Justice: He could do worse than that child.”
I did not expect to convince them; I couldn’t even convince myself, since I knew that Marsh’s determination to have the truth was all that counted.
“What did Lady Phillida make of them?” Holmes asked.
“That was interesting, didn’t you think, Ali?” Iris answered. “She seemed quite willing to clasp the child, if not his mother, to her breast. Started to talk about having them up to Justice until Ali cut her off.”
“Was she predisposed to accept the lad, would you say? Or did it only come about gradually?”
“The instant she laid eyes on him, she exclaimed how like Lionel he was. But here—Phillida brought these to show them, and Ali snagged them back for you.” Iris took an oversized envelope from her handbag, handing it to Holmes.
It held photographs of the family, in groups and alone. My eyes were drawn to one that showed most of the major players in our family saga, arranged on the steps before Justice Hall: Marsh as a man in his early twenties, standing between an undergraduate Alistair and a vibrant young Iris, the three friends looking as if they were repressing laughter at a shared joke; a taller, older version of the Hughenfort line had his arm dutifully around a thin, tense woman a few years his junior—the fifth Duke, Gerald, I knew from a portrait in the Hall—and between them a child of four or five who had the black curls and proud chin of Phillida. Then Iris pointed to the last figure in the group.
“That’s Lionel, aged sixteen.” He resembled a washed-out Marsh. His eyes were too dark to be blue.
She sorted through the snapshots and studio portraits to show us a clearer picture of the man, slightly older and showing ominous signs of world-weary dissipation.
He looked nothing like the child we’d spent the last two days watching.
The other photos, of a grown Phillida at her wedding; of Marsh and Alistair at that same wedding, wearing English formal dress but with the beards of their Arab personas, neatly trimmed; of Marsh, Alistair, Iris, and two other young women seated at the base of the pelican fountain with champagne glasses in their hands; of Phillida and Sidney on a beach somewhere in France.
We were looking through the photographs when the telephone rang. I happened to be sitting closest the instrument, but on hearing that it was the trunk call come through, I held the receiver out in a direction halfway between Iris and Alistair.
“It’s Justice,” I said.
Alistair allowed Iris to take it, which I thought showed remarkable restraint: He looked more likely to curse and rage than to listen to whatever servant or nurse had been dispatched to give news of the duke’s state. Nonetheless, he hunched over Iris, their faces so close he must have heard every word that came over the line. I could tell by his darkening face that the n
ews was not happy.
Iris hung the earpiece onto its rest, and gave us a small shake of the head. “He’s roaring at the nurses and throwing objects at the doctor. Ogilby asks when we are coming back. We’d best take the earlier train.”
Holmes, thoughtful, replaced the photographs in the envelope.
“Lady Phillida seems as eager as her husband that you all accept the boy,” he said. “I believe we ought to know why. Or rather,” he corrected himself, “what lies behind the ‘why.’ The ‘why’ itself is fairly obvious: The Darlings being by English law unable to assert claim or control over Justice Hall, they see Thomas as their, shall we say, proxy duke. They know that Marsh longs to leave; they long for him to leave as well, to allow them to carry on as the de facto masters of Justice. Thomas is the means by which that goal might be attained, an heir, conveniently under-aged, thus requiring regents to care properly for the house and farms. To say nothing of German industrial investments. What we do not know is if there is any criminal intent or deed behind the Darling sponsorship of Thomas. What was that you said, Russell?”
“Nothing, Holmes. It’s just that I don’t know that my simply continuing to change my hat-bands and overcoat is going to keep the woman from noticing that the same woman has been following her from Paris to London and back again. It’s all very well for a man—you all dress alike—but I can hear from your voice that we’re headed back to France, and so I think I ought to replenish my wardrobe first.”
“You’re right.”
“I should be back in a couple of hours,” I began, but he overrode me.
“I have a bolt-hole not far from this hotel,” he said. “We’ll find what we need there.”
I gave in. For one thing, he would have more makeup in one of his secret apartments than at my own London pied-à-terre, and with the right makeup, one person can be several.
We arranged with Iris and Alistair to stay behind in case Terèse and her son left the hotel. The manager would telephone to the room if the Hughenforts passed through the lobby, and Alistair would pursue them.
“Come, Russell,” my husband ordered.
I came.
To return two hours later, one of a pair of French priests.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In London we would be noticeable; in France, invisible. We carried with us the odds and ends that would transform us into more ordinary citizens, since I had no intention of inhabiting the itchy cassock longer than necessary, but it was as priests that we left the hotel the next morning, as priests we boarded the train. We occupied our hard third-class benches as far as the French shore, when the newly boarded French conductor spotted us and led us up the train to first class and told us to be welcome. Properly speaking, we ought to have crouched with all humility in our luxurious seats. Holmes, however, had other ideas, and before I knew it he had found the Hughenforts, manoeuvred a change of seats, and was greeting Mme Terèse, bending forward to squint at her son through the thick glasses he wore, making admiring noises.
Thus we spent the last portion of the trip, with the rich French countryside passing our windows, in conversation with our quarry herself.
Holmes, at least, was in conversation with her, his fluent French with the accents of the south tumbling out like that of a priest on holiday, far from his parishioners and made free by the knowledge. I sat to one side, glumly reading my Testament and wafting a general air of disapproving youth over my elders.
And elder she was. Lionel Hughenfort had been born in 1882, and married when he was thirty-two. This woman must have been pushing forty then, if not actually past it—I could not help wondering how many other children she’d had before Thomas. She was now a buxom, comfortable fifty-year-old woman, well preserved but showing signs that her life had not been one of contemplation and ease. In her relief at escaping the judgmental English relations, she rattled on in garrulous abandon, proving not at all difficult to steer. She was unread but with a shrewd native intelligence, and hugely proud of her clever schoolboy of a son—although she made an effort not to gush, so as to save the child from embarrassment. She proved darkly suspicious of all things English, and revealed once a brief flash of Gallic pride at some unnamed but recent triumph over the citizens of that country, who were all of them—most of them, she corrected herself—sly behind their beefy grins. Had not her own husband been forced to flee to Paris, to escape his own family? And had not that same husband’s brother come screaming and scheming to pull asunder what God Himself had joined? Oh, some Englishmen were true gentlemen, she would give us that, generous and fair—her poor dead husband’s relation, for example, who had come to see her during the War to give her money for a new suit of clothes for the boy and sent gifts from time to time, now he was a true gentleman—but even they had their plans, and it would not do to put one’s self too firmly into their hands, would it, Father?
And as for a mother’s responsibility to her son, the sooner half of France lay between Those People and the boy, the better.
No, she would have nothing to do with British soil, not until her boy was old enough to view glitter and pomp with a certain detachment. Although their pounds, when translated into good clean francs, those were acceptable, wouldn’t you agree, Father?
At this point, the child Thomas moved over from his mother’s side to mine, either because he’d heard her opinions on the subject before, or because he had just got up his nerve to approach me. In either case, he decided to try for a conversation with the younger priest.
His “Bonjour” was friendly and not in the least tentative. I returned it, and then he asked what I was reading. I told him. He said it did not look like French, and I agreed that it was Latin. The ice being broken, it then appeared that he had a question.
“Father, someone told me that Jesus was not a Christian. Can this be true?”
Concealing my amusement, I explained to him that “Christian” meant a follower of Jesus Christ, and that therefore the man himself could not, strictly speaking, have been one. “In fact,” I added, “Jesus himself was born into a Jewish family, worshipped in the Jewish temple, thought of himself as a Jew. It was only later that his followers decided that what he represented was a new thing.”
The boy’s mind was supple and inquisitive, which I thought a remarkable paedagogic achievement for the son of a woman with no great intellect, and we talked for a time about the Old and New Testaments, about the kinds of stories each contained, about the differences between God and Jesus Christ. I could see him floundering at this last morass—no surprise, since many adult minds did the same—and turned him away with a question about his preferences in school.
I had to wonder who his actual father might have been.
On the outskirts of Paris it transpired—oh how astounding and blessed a coincidence!—that we, too, were heading to Lyons, and we, too, not until tomorrow, in the afternoon! It was unlikely, of course, that we would again be moved up into first class by a devout conductor, but perhaps we would see Mme and the young scholar while boarding our respective cars? And perhaps, Holmes ventured piously, as we were to pass several days in that city, we might one afternoon call upon her? When the boy was home from his studies, say, and free to join us for a visit to the seller of ices?
Mme Hughenfort was a woman easily reached through an appreciation of her son. With no whisper of hesitation, she gave Holmes the address that no Hughenfort had been able to discover. He noted it down in a fussy hand, closed and tucked away his miniature note-book, and thanked her.
At the station, we retained our small, battered valises but assisted Madame in transferring her bags to the hands of a porter, and we stayed with our new friends, chatting amiably, until both were safely within a taxi. There we paused, ever polite, until she had given the driver her destination.
Her voice reached us clearly through the glass.
Holmes kept no bolt-hole in Paris, but he knew the city well enough to give our own taxi driver the name of a large, busy hotel frequented by co
mmercial travellers, across the street from Mme Hughenfort’s chosen accommodation. Our hotel occupied nearly half of a city block, and had entrances on three streets; no-one would notice a couple of suddenly defrocked priests passing through the lobby, and no maid would unpack the younger priest’s highly irregular female garments from the larger valise.
We took adjoining rooms, shed our identifying black garments, changed into more usual attire, and passed through the lobby separately to meet in a nearby brasserie, whose front windows just happened to overlook the front door of Mme Hughenfort’s hotel.
We did not expect to see her. Digging up information on the woman’s personal life was the purpose of accompanying her to Lyons, where there would be neighbours and shopkeepers to be questioned. However, less than twenty minutes later I glanced up from my soupe à l’oignon and nearly tipped the rising spoonful onto my shirt-front.
“Holmes—look!”
Strolling in our direction, looking the very essence of a French provincial family in the big city, came Mme and Thomas Hughenfort, accompanied by a swarthy man not much taller than she and equally stout. She did not look coquettish enough for it to be a recent friendship, and for a moment I thought the man might be a brother, come to fetch his sister and nephew home safely from the capital city. Certainly the boy seemed, if not overjoyed to see him, at least accepting of his presence, and even responded to one jovial folly with a grudging smile. But then the fingers of the two adults intertwined surreptitiously, in an exploration that was more foreplay than greeting, and I knew this was no brother.
“Russell,” Holmes said with an urgent note in his voice, “I believe they are coming this way. The two of us might trigger a memory; I suggest one of us leave quickly.”
I was already on my feet and dropping my table napkin on my chair. “I’ll meet you back at the hotel,” I told him, and slipped out of the door while the trio was still crossing the street.
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