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Adriatic, worked my way through Yugo-Slavia and Turkey, then sailed from
Rhodes to Alexandria and Cairo. I saw the pyramids, the Nile, the beginnings
of the African continent, but the only thing that truly called out to me was
the desert to the east.
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 I joined up with a group of ragged and corrupt nomads crossing the Sinai not
Bedu, just traders. When I laid eyes on the Judean hills, I was home.
 I lived there for ten months that first time, before my cousin was sent to
fetch me back to England. I stayed here, the obedient son, for over a year. At
the end of it, Henry s son Gabriel was born and thriving, my younger brother,
Lionel, was seventeen and by all appearances on a straight course, and I was
both superfluous and smothering. Alistair glanced at Marsh and then swiftly
away again, and walked on with his eyes glued to the countryside ahead; I
wondered what Marsh had left out, or lied about.
 You may have an idea how terribly tight-knit a stratum of the social order
we are even now and the higher, the tighter. We re an entire society of
in-laws and cousins: Our sisters go to balls on the arms of the brothers of
boys we went to school with; members of our fathers clubs command our Guards
regiments. Holidays would be at an uncle s hunting lodge, our
Saturdays-to-Mondays spent at the country house of a mother s childhood friend
who was also a second cousin; our chaperones 
He caught himself.  You see the picture. After the desert, the stultifying
drawing-room air was killing me. It was certainly driving me mad; I used to
dream about the desert, about dry warm sand trickling down across my face and
burying me, and would wake happy at the thought.
This self-revelation was more than he had intended; he veered away, to look
over a herd of the spotted deer that had caught his attention, and it was a
while before he resumed.
 After a year here, my parents eventually had to admit that I was a lost
cause, and permitted me to return to my life in Palestine. My cousin spent his
long vacations with me for the years of his university, which made them think
that they were keeping track of me. When my cousin finished his degree, he
joined me permanently.
 And all was well. Until my brother s son Gabriel died.
The control in his voice held, but with the last word, we could hear the
effort. Not, I thought, because of any particular affection he felt for the
boy as a person how old had the child been when his uncle left the country? A
few months? but because his nephew Gabriel had been the foundation stone on
which the entire weight of a noble family rested. With the heir snatched away,
unmarried and with no son of his own, the order of succession took a very
different track. But Marsh was going on with the story.
 My other brother, Lionel, was as I said six years younger than I. Lionel was
sickly as a child. Every nursery ailment laid him low, every cold threatened
pneumonia. When I entered Cambridge, just after his twelfth birthday, he had
some foul illness the doctors thought might well carry him away. Instead, it
seemed to burn him clean, and when I came home for Christmas I found him
outside, building a snowman in the freezing cold, with Ogilby fretting nearby.
 He grew stronger physically, went off to school, did sports, even. All
seemed well, until he entered Cambridge.
 There he did what is called  falling in with a bad lot. That is the other
side of an incestuously tight society: Once a young man falls in with a group
of young men interested only in gambling and drink, there is no escape.
 He was sent down, of course. Rather than coming here, he went to London.
Shortly before my cousin came out to Palestine for good, Lionel was involved
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in some huge scandal, and had to leave the country. He spent the next twelve
years in Europe, moving from place to place with his friends, wintering in the
south of France. He only came back to England once during the following years,
when Father died in 1903. Lionel himself died in the spring before the War his
lungs, apparently, weakened by drugs and drink and an accumulation of careless
living.
Marsh took a deep breath.  However. Just after the new year of 1914 Lionel
wrote our brother the head of the family, of course to say that he had married
and his wife was expecting a child. He asked Henry told him, actually, in no
uncertain terms; I ve seen the letter to increase his monthly stipend to
account for his wife and the child. Henry went immediately to see this for
himself, and found Lionel living in Montmartre with an older woman who looked
little more than an amateur whore. But they had a marriage licence, and the
woman s condition was obvious, so he came away. What could he do?
 Henry and his wife Sarah wrote to me, of course. I might have tried to do
something about it, but by the time the letter caught up with me, it was
accompanied by a telegram informing me of Lionel s death.
 The child was born three months after the marriage, six weeks before Lionel
died. A boy; Thomas is his name. He is now nine and a half, has lived his
whole life in France, and none of us has ever set eyes on him. None of us has
any idea what kind of person he will be.
He took another careful breath.  Which is why he and his mother are coming to
London on Tuesday. Phillida and I will go down to meet them the following day.
I need to look at the child. It s not that I mind in the least supporting the
two of them Lionel wished it, after all but since Thomas is next in the line
of succession after me, I must at least find out if he bears any resemblance
to my brother.
Marsh had been studying his boots as he talked, but now he looked up, first
at me, then at Holmes, one dark eyebrow raised quizzically.
 I for one should be rather surprised if he does. You see, by all accounts,
from the time he left Justice to take up his place at Cambridge, Lionel was
what you might call flamboyantly disinterested when it came to women.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Marsh s ambulatory tale had taken a fair time in the telling, interrupted as
it was by the antics of the dogs, the side-trip to inspect the herd of deer,
another diversion to see the state of the sheep, and occasional stretches when
Marsh had simply pulled away to gather his thoughts, or his strength. We had
trudged more or less continuously cross-country for a good two hours, although
we had only travelled three or four miles in a straight line from where we had
begun. The sun was not far from the horizon, Alistair looked ready to drop,
and I really thought it time to turn back. Even the dogs had ceased to bounce.
Marsh, however, had other plans. We had for some time been coming up at an
oblique angle on the high wall that surrounded Justice; as we entered into its
very shadow, the duke dug into his pocket and brought out a key the length of
his hand.
 I need a drink, he stated, and made for a stout iron gate set into the
stones.
I could only stare at his back, hunched over the lock. Holmes was every bit
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as bemused as I.
 Not a statement I d have expected to hear coming from that man, he
murmured. Then he added,  However, I can agree with the sentiment.
The iron gate debouched on a narrow, overgrown path leading through some
decidedly unmanicured woods. Sunlight glinted sporadically through the trees, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]