Touchstone (22 page)

It was a breathtaking performance: In forty seconds, Laura Hurleigh had mollified her father, conquered her mother, captured the attention of every person there, and shifted the entire ambiance of the gathering as surely as a change in wind direction. Before her entrance, the solar had contained several unrelated groups and a current of incipient contention; now, the dinner gathering was of one mind, from the undergraduate putting away his cocktail shaker to the Duke pushing himself out of his chair.

The groups and individuals fell into place behind the host, filing in good cheer out to the dining room. Rather to Stuyvesant’s surprise, Sarah Grey appeared at his elbow and hooked her arm into his. “Would you care to take me through to dinner?” she asked.

No: not in the least like Helen. He pressed her arm warmly into his body. “I’d be honored.”

She chortled at the fervency of his response.

They moved towards the door, following various Hurleighs and guests. Just inside the long gallery, Stuyvesant realized that Grey had not yet emerged; he slipped free of Sarah’s arm to glance back at the room behind them.

He had a clear view of the fireplace, and the figures before it. Grey and Lady Laura stood on either side of the Duke’s empty chair, their bodies outlined by the glow. She was taller than he, would be even without the inch of heels she wore, but neither of them seemed aware of it. Neither of them seemed aware of anything, outside themselves. As Stuyvesant watched, she reached out her left fingers, very tentatively, to touch the back of her companion’s hand.

Neither spoke and their postures gave nothing away, but in a flash of perception worthy of Grey himself, Stuyvesant was in no doubt: Touchstone and the terrorist’s mistress had been lovers.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

S
TUYVESANT WAS NOT SURE
how he got through dinner, after that revelation. He wouldn’t have been certain afterwards that he’d had dinner except he retained an impression of hours spent over white linen and a multiplicity of forks, and later, when he finally got Grey alone, he had that bloated and half-drunk feeling that came with a large and leisurely meal followed by too much alcohol.

He’d stood there in the gallery, feeling his case crumbling around him, undermined by old loyalties and resentments and swept away by complexity. He berated himself for not following his own command, to beware his own reactions to Bennett Grey, and his immediate impulse was to wrap his mitt through Grey’s collar and haul him out of there, gong or no gong. Only the thought of the Duke’s irritation stayed his hand. Afterwards, when the Duchess rose and the males were released to their entertainments, the impulse returned, but despite his earlier discomfort, Grey stuck to his dinner companions like a barnacle to its hull. Grimly, Stuyvesant stayed, too.

The evening went on, and on: dinner, then port and cigars with the suddenly dull young men until the women and life returned, followed by billiards and cards and dancing to the gramophone. The talk danced, too, from doings at Oxford to the politics in London, but even with the amount of alcohol he put away, Stuyvesant noticed that every time matters began to turn serious and talk of the revolution on the doorstep raised its head, Laura deftly turned it away with an amusing story, or a passage read aloud from a book she just happened to have at hand, and lightness returned. He also couldn’t help noticing that Grey spent the evening torn between the pleasure of Laura and Sarah and the pain some of the others inflicted on him. But he would not leave, and neither did Stuyvesant.

It was well after midnight when people began to drift away to their beds. Sarah left after a series of stifled yawns, but Laura waited until most of the others had gone before she excused herself; with the dousing of her light, the moths were freed to flutter off. Stuyvesant simmered along behind Grey until they had climbed the barn stairway, at which unobserved point he seized the Englishman’s arm and yanked him inside the tree-house bedroom.

“Okay, what kind of damned stupid game are we playing here?” he hissed, trying to keep his voice low while wanting to dig his Colt out of the wardrobe and jam it against the man’s temple.

Grey jerked his arm free. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“You and Laura Hurleigh is what I’m talking about. I saw how you two made cow eyes at each other. Don’t you think that’s something you might have mentioned?”

“‘Cow eyes’? What an absolutely repulsive phrase. I’m fond of Laura, I told you that. Or I was, when we were young.”

“The look you two were giving each other didn’t say ‘fond,’ it said ‘
fuck,’”
Stuyvesant snapped, deliberately crude in an attempt to knock Grey into a confession. Instead, he nearly succeeded in knocking Grey into violence.

Grey clenched both fists, and Stuyvesant was suddenly aware that here was a man eight years younger, muscles hardened with labor, half-drunk, and about to smash him to the floor. He felt his usual hard upsurge of glee that accompanied a fistfight, then caught himself before things could become ridiculous, and held up a hand.

“Sorry, sorry. But Christ, man, if the two of you have that kind of history, it’s going to throw all kinds of hammers in the works.”

“Spanners.”

“What?”

“Throw a spanner in the works, not a hammer.”

“What the hell does it matter? We can’t go on with this.”

“Why not? Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stuyvesant, what difference does it make? So you didn’t know at the beginning I’d had an affair with Laura.
I
knew, and I was willing to go on with this…intrigue of the Major’s. What, are you afraid that I’ll take her side? That I’ll warn her that the Major is on to her?”

“No,” Stuyvesant protested, meaning
yes.
Grey, inevitably, heard the lie, and shook his head.

“Of course you’re concerned about what I might do, but truth to tell, you have no recourse here. I suppose you could shoot me—you have a gun, I know you do, it’s a part of your smell. But even if you put a bullet in me, you couldn’t be certain I hadn’t already told her what you have in mind, could you?” He stood in the unlikely room just looking at the American, wearing an expression in which mild interest battled alcoholic let-down.

Stuyvesant made a little gesture of frustration, and Grey gave him a tired smile. “Despite everything, and most particularly despite its continued employ of one Major Aldous Carstairs, I love my country. I have been doing my best to serve my King since the day I enlisted. I will continue to serve him until I die. The Major no doubt thinks he’s bullied me into helping you by threatening my sister, but in fact, if anyone else had asked me, I might have done so willingly. Not whole-heartedly, I will admit: Laura is an old friend, and you are asking me to betray her trust. But I will do so, if necessary, and beyond that will devote any strength left in my body to my King and my country.”

As if suddenly reminded of the question of strength, Grey’s legs gave way and he sat down on Stuyvesant’s bed, running a hand down his haggard face. “Look. Clearly, the Major believes that Richard Bunsen is up to something, and that Laura is either involved, or at least knows what he is planning. However, I don’t believe she does. I get no sense of her hiding a thing, from me or anyone else. And in any event, I rather doubt she would do anything extreme: Laura has always been a remarkably sensible person. Scarcely a Hurleigh at all, you might say,” he added, with an attempt at humor.

“Still,” Stuyvesant said, then stopped. Grey was right: What choice did he have? He needed an entrée into Bunsen’s movement: Grey was the one at hand. It would be very awkward to invent another excuse now.

But damn it, the instant he felt the momentum of the connection take over, he’d shove Grey on the train to Cornwall.

Grey saw the capitulation on the other’s face, and nodded. “As you say: Still. Let me be clear. I am not in love with Laura Hurleigh. I may have been at one time, but I am not the man I was. The man who loved her died long ago. I doubt that Laura is the person she was then, either. I am, I repeat, fond of her. Full stop.”

Grey stood, walking over to the door. But before it closed, he put his head back inside the room, his green eyes miraculously restored to life.

“But, Harris? Whilst we’re on the topic of infatuation, I saw the way Dubuque was looking at you. If you don’t want company tonight, I should suggest you put the chair under the knob.”

The door slammed one instant before Stuyvesant’s shoe hit the place where Grey’s head had been.

And sure enough, an hour later, the frustrated working of the door-knob took him from a sound sleep. He raised his bleary head from the pillow and roared,
“Shove off!”

No more was heard that night.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

S
OMETHING WOKE
Stuyvesant early, some shift of the beams or whisper of movement. He lifted his head free of the pillow and held it up for a long time, but there was no repeat.

The gray smudge at the base of the curtains told him that dawn was not far off, although he’d been up late, then lain awake for a good hour while his thoughts darted between drunken undergraduates on a train and the gentle touch of fingers on a hand.

And the night before, Thursday, first he’d walked across half of London, then similarly stared at the ceiling, thinking about a half-inch long, eye-lash-thin sliver of matchstick against a wall. Two interrupted nights in a row, with a demanding day ahead of him. However, the light outside and the whirl of thoughts in his head told him that he was not going back to sleep. He turned over and scratched the hair on his chest, wondering if he could possibly ring and ask for coffee. Reluctantly, he decided against it: Fresh air would have to do instead.

Moving on stockinged feet, he splashed his face with cold water and eased his way to the downstairs door, where he laced on his boots. He pulled on his coat, then let himself out into the cool, silent morning, a morning of luminous potential such as he’d only ever seen in this country. It was like standing inside a pearl: not flashy, just glowing with perfection, an ultimate expression of natural beauty.

A light shone at the back of the main house, accompanied by the clatter and voices of an active kitchen, but again he hesitated. Presenting himself there would involve him in the ritual of being parked somewhere while breakfast was hurriedly cooked. And this might be his last chance today for a quiet time to think.

He turned his back on the Siren call of the coffee pot, and in twenty minutes was climbing the side of Hurleigh Peak, grateful for his boots on the dew-covered grass. The sunlight reached the Peak before he did, but only by minutes. He made his way to the top of the knob, and sat down where Grey had sat the day before.

The valley was in shadow. A faint rumor of moving water rose from below; a drift of wood-smoke followed the stream, buoyed on motionless air.

The Peak here, in the heart of England; the Beacon near the end of the world down in Cornwall: Bennett Grey did like his high places for contemplation.

He could imagine Bennett Grey as a boy, escaping what sounded like an uncomfortable home situation to spend weeks of his summer holidays here, surrounded by the Hurleigh estate, caught up in the rough-and-tumble of a large family. He was between Thomas and Daniel in age, a year and a half younger than Laura. Playmates in childhood, lovers as adults, yet Grey claimed he would be willing to convert all that familiarity into a weapon against her pledged cause. A weapon against
her
.

Stuyvesant wasn’t sure he could bet on it.

Maybe the key lay not in Grey and Lady Laura, but in the missing figure at the center of their tableau, Richard Bunsen.

Damn it, thought Stuyvesant—is that why Grey had come, to appraise Bunsen for himself? Looking back at their conversation on the Beacon rock, Stuyvesant could see that when he’d told Grey about Laura’s affair, Grey had reacted not just as a childhood friend, but as a former lover. Which made his presence extremely suspect, and highly dangerous.

To say nothing of the fact that Aldous Carstairs almost certainly knew about it, and used Laura Hurleigh to tease Grey out of Cornwall. Making Harris Stuyvesant his patsy in the maneuver.

Not that Stuyvesant was certain Laura Hurleigh really was Bunsen’s mistress—Carstairs could be wrong about that, or lying—but either way, the problem remained: Why had Grey come?

Jesus. You’d think a Bureau agent would be used to the complications of the job, but honestly, this one took the cake. He’d started out with a straightforward investigation—across an ocean and without backup, yes, but still. And here he was in a country house party with dukes and the rest of it, not knowing if he was the least bit closer to Bunsen than he had been two weeks ago. If Bunsen didn’t appear, how long was it going to take him to get to him? His hands itched with the urge to pull the man close, to get around his neck and to rip his goddamn head off. Nothing more complicated than that, really.

He shook his head ruefully, and lit a cigarette.

The sun cleared the hill-top, and Stuyvesant undid the buttons on his coat, his hands going about the motions without his conscious awareness. Instead, he was remembering the naked look on Grey’s face when Laura Hurleigh’s hand made contact with his, and the echo of his regret:
I am not the man I was.

Yearning had been there, no doubt about that, but also a discomfort that bordered on pain (and he’d seen enough pain on that man’s face this past week to recognize it when he saw it). Grey had been startled when her fingers made contact, but after a brief twitch, he’d held his hand motionless. Thinking it over, Stuyvesant couldn’t decide if Grey had been controlling an impulse to seize Laura’s hand in response, or stilling a desire to snatch his hand away.

Odd, that Stuyvesant couldn’t tell which it was.

A few years back, he’d spent three very solid months guarding a personal friend of Calvin Coolidge, shortly after Coolidge inherited the presidency. The friend was a businessman who happened to be in the wrong place in what, for the state of New York, was the right time, since he’d been witness to some serious wrong-doing. In the weeks running up to the trial at which Coolidge’s friend was a key witness, Stuyvesant had glued himself to the man like a shadow, eating at his table, sleeping in his house sometimes, learning his habits so thoroughly they began to feel like his own. He’d gone into the assignment with a clear lack of enthusiasm, knowing how much of his life this guard duty was going to eat up, but he had come to regard it as one of his more important acts in a life of crime-fighting. The man’s innate dignity, his determination to go ahead with his testimony in the face of some serious threat, had quieted Stuyvesant’s protests at the baby-sitting. On the final morning, before the car came to take them to the courthouse, he’d helped the man on with his overcoat, feeling oddly like the valet dressing a knight in armor. He’d stood at the back of the room and listened to the man’s even voice, proud as a parent.

(Stuyvesant noticed something moving on the hillside opposite, something small and gray against the shadowed stand of trees. A dog, maybe? No, it was a fox, picking its way down a fallen log.)

And he’d been deeply grateful that nobody had driven past the man on the street in the weeks that followed and filled him with lead: Stuyvesant would have felt obligated to go after the murderer—personal revenge, not as an officer of the law—and that would have been the end of everything.

But here he was again, playing valet to another knight, this one already badly wounded by life. But equally straight of spine and determined of purpose, and—

Motion seen at the corner of his eye jolted Stuyvesant from his reverie, a looming figure so close that he jerked around and off his perch, cigarette flying as his hands sought a weapon, any weapon.

“Jumpy, ain’tcha?” the Duke said. He peered down at him curiously, his eyebrows arched in that lugubrious face.

Stuyvesant, standing now, remembered the cigarette and slapped belatedly at the front of his coat. A black-edged hole lay over his right thigh; fortunately it had not burned through to the trousers below.

“I didn’t hear you coming, sir,” he said. He should, at least, have noticed the two dogs, who now left off their happy snuffling at the side of the path and came bounding over to see this new person. They looked like small, rough-haired greyhounds, with intelligent faces and the kind of walk that was more of a bounce.

“Obviously. Got a smoke?”

Obediently, Stuyvesant retrieved his hand from the dogs and offered his host the silver case, followed by the burning lighter. The Duke drew deep and sighed with pleasure, then lowered his aristocratic rump onto a nearby rock. His shoes and tweed coat looked older than the century, his plus fours had been mended more than once, his cap might have belonged to one of his tenant farmers, and he hadn’t shaved that morning; from his bearing, he might have been clothed in ermine.

The Duke said nothing. Stuyvesant wasn’t sure of the conventions here, but he vaguely thought that a commoner spoke only when spoken to. Or was that only with the royal family? Should he remain passive and standing until the Duke presented him with a topic of conversation? The scion of warriors, friend of kings seemed happy just to sit and smoke, paying Stuyvesant no more attention than he would a cigar-store Indian. Stuyvesant cleared his throat.

“What kind of dogs are those?”

“Deerhounds. From Scotland,” he added, then went silent again. However, it was an amiable silence, and from a man quite capable of dismissing unwanted Americans with a glance—which indicated that he was satisfied for Stuyvesant to remain at his side. But if this was the case, what could the man want from him? To talk about car repair?

Stuyvesant decided that, whatever the Duke wanted, it might not require his standing at attention. He moved over to a lesser and slightly removed rock, paused before he sat in case this was not acceptable, then allowed his own common backside to come to rest. He sat, his back stiff with the knowledge that he was seated at the left hand of Uncle God.

“Don’t tell my wife,” the Duke said eventually.

He couldn’t have been talking about the dogs. “About the cigarette?”

“No. The dog-fox opposite.”

Stuyvesant glanced over at the fallen tree; sure enough, the animal was still there, its attention riveted by something in the bark, halfway along the trunk.

“The creature moved in going on two years ago, half dead. Some damned bugger’d shot him, his seg went leptic. I came across him one morning about this hour, thought he was a goner, but he somehow pulled through. He’s a good sort, keeps the pests down. Never known him take a chicken. Prefers the taste of rabbit.”

Stuyvesant wondered what comment he should make on this, but couldn’t think of anything except, “I see.”

“You ever looked into a wild creature’s eyes?”

Stuyvesant’s eyes slid sideways at this unexpected question; the old man’s profile bore a resemblance to some kind of bird of prey himself—but Stuyvesant thought he was talking about mammalian wildlife, not avian. He decided to venture a small story. “I like to fish, sometimes,” he began. “Once a few years ago I was in Oregon, following a stream about five miles from the nearest road, and I looked up to see a cougar watching me from the bank, wondering what the hell I was doing.”

“Cougar. That’s a kind of catamount.” One of the dogs came up, sniffed at Stuyvesant’s leg, and settled at his master’s feet. The Duke’s hand went out absently to knead the animal’s ears.

“Like a panther, only brown. Yellow eyes with a world of speculation in them, and a voice like ripping silk. It’s a hell of a sensation, feeling yourself being considered for dinner.”

The Duke gave a bark of surprised laughter, and Stuyvesant took a draw from his cigarette to conceal the trace of self-satisfied smile he could feel on his mouth: Teamster or duke, it didn’t matter—he could get on the good side of anyone, anywhere.

“What kind of fishing?”

“Fly, of course. Is there any other kind?” Stuyvesant said in mock surprise.

The Duke grunted in approval. “River here’s no use at all. Too many cows. But I’ve a place in Scotland with a nice little stream for trout, fill your pan in no time at all.”

The “place in Scotland” was, Stuyvesant’s research had told him, a castle with twenty bedrooms, in one of which a very young Queen Elizabeth had slept. This in addition to Hurleigh House and the requisite house in London, plus assorted French vineyards, Italian olive groves, and an island in Greece.

“Sounds idyllic.”

“Had Baldwin up there in the autumn. You know Baldwin?”

“Not, er, personally.”

“Means well,” he reflected, a damning statement on either side of the Atlantic. “Might be more likable if he wasn’t so earnest.”

“I know the type,” seemed a safe comment.

“Any rate, if you’re heading to Scotland, let us know. Even if we’re not there, the servants are always happy to open a couple of rooms for a visitor.”

“Good Lord. I mean, that’s extraordinarily generous, sir.”

“Not at all. You should meet the Scottish trout, I imagine he’s a different creature from his American cousin.”

Stuyvesant thanked him, and they went back to watching the fox for a while. The creature hopped without effort onto the tree trunk, sniffed around the snarl of roots, then jumped down on the other side and began to dig.

“So you’re a friend of the boy’s? Bennett’s?” The Duke hadn’t come up here to talk about car repair or fly-fishing, then.

“I am, sir, yes.”

“Been knocked about some.”

“So I understand, sir.”

“He was sweet on my daughter. Oldest one…Laura,” he added, the pause suggesting that he’d needed to retrieve the name from some distant store of memory. “Had hopes. Knew his family—good blood, common or not. But in the end, it fell apart. If I was to guess, I’d say it wasn’t as entirely his say-so as they give out. Laura knows her own mind, like none other, and what’s more she has a way of making others want to go along. She’s a leader, not a follower—and the most stubborn girl I’ve ever met. Makes her mother look soft, and that’s saying something. Had two sons in uniform this last war, both good, solid officers, but Laura—if she’d been a boy, she’d have made one of those colonels you send in when the odds are impossible and all you’re hoping for is a tactical delay, only about half the time he’ll manage to bring off a miracle and snatch victory from a place no one was looking. And bring his men home to boot. My father was like that—Crimean was his war, you know. Or she’d have made one of those powerful nuns of the Middle Ages, abbess who looks the Pope in the face.”

“She certainly did an efficient job last night of keeping the various factions in order.”

“Promised her mother no fights would break out while we were there. Not altogether certain the agreement covers tonight. You may have an interesting time of it.”