Read Online Justice Hall by Laurie R. King - Free Book Online

impression was that five years had turned Mahmoud into an old man, deliberate in his every movement, going grey (had I even seen his hair before?). As he drew nearer, it seemed more that he was in some deep and chronic pain, the kind that only iron control can keep at bay. But then he came off the stairs and was crossing the marble floor towards us, and the knowledge came stark into my mind:
This man is dying.
    He moved with the ease of health and shook Holmes’ hand with no sign of discomfort, but the look on his face was one I had seen too often during the War, when one of the wounded soldiers I was nursing gave up his fight, and let go. Such was the expression on the man now taking my hand, bending over it with old-fashioned formality, calling me Mary, a name he had never used: The man was one of the walking dead, a person who had made the decision to die, who in complete peace and bemused detachment watched the antics of his neighbours and his would-be saviours, awaiting only the day when he would be permitted to leave them behind. The wounds of some of those dying soldiers had been relatively mild, just as, other than the old scar down the side of his face, this man seemed whole and psychologically undamaged. And yet, the look was unmistakable.
    “Mahmoud!” I cried out—or began to. I had only let out the first pain-filled syllable when he shot me a glare that shrivelled the name on my tongue. Dying he might be, but he could definitely summon the old air of command when he needed to.
    “We are such old friends, Mary,” he pronounced, his dark eyes boring into me. “Despite the change in circumstances, I insist that you continue to call me Marsh.”
    The moment he saw that he had achieved my obedience, he withdrew—like that; in an instant he was once more bland and polite, his real self back inside that distant waiting room where he alone dwelt. He told Ogilby that we would be in the library, then ushered us out of the echoing hall and down chilly corridors crowded with marble busts, Regency cartoons, display cabinets bursting with priceless knick-knacks, and paintings of ancestors stamped from the Hughenfort mold—dark hair, dark eyes, proud lift to the chin. We turned into an older wing of the house, and two doors down entered a sort of masculine sitting room next to a billiards room that reeked of cigars.
    It was a library with few books, and most of those dealing with the breeding lines of horses, but it was deliciously warm. As I removed my coat, hat, and gloves, I studied my surroundings. It was a big room made intimate by the placement of furniture and the apparently haphazard arrangement of objects, as if some family member had deposited his Greek souvenir in a corner as he came in the door in 1829 and nobody had bothered to move the ancient statue ever since. The walls were a combination of warm beech linen-fold panelling and faded red silk wall-paper, half hidden behind a variety of landscape paintings and a plethora of glass-fronted cabinets containing stuffed wildlife and casual archaeological discoveries, the sorts of things dug up by boys and turned over by ploughs: coins and spear-heads, scraps of Samian ware from third-century Romans and blue-figured porcelain from nineteenth-century Victorians, a pair of dusty kingfishers perching on a twist of rusty metal that might once have been a blade, and a filthy-looking object that could have been a shoe or someone’s scalp—I did not care to look too closely. The objects appeared to have been placed on the shelves willy-nilly and the doors then locked behind them, and I was quite certain the house residents never actually saw them when they were in the room. The family photographs on the mantel and desk looked similarly abandoned to become a sort of three-dimensional wall-paper, with the exception of a group of three silver frames towards the right end of the mantel. These included a handsome young lad in the uniform of a second lieutenant of the