Touchstone (25 page)

In the end, cold and cramped, she knew she needed to consult Richard on the matter. His sense of what was needed was occasionally startlingly acute, and he would not be distracted by any previous affections or romantic dreams. Let him meet Bennett and the American, let him get the feel of both.

Yes, she decided; she’d like to hear what Richard thought.

And if the road is made easy, then it is the right one.

With that thought, finally, she went to bed, and to sleep.

Chapter Thirty-Two

A
HUNDRED MILES AWAY,
in the northern reaches of London, Aldous Carstairs, like Laura Hurleigh, was taking late to his bed. All week he’d been tugged to and fro by the furies and frustrations of his work on the one hand and the intoxicating possibilities opened by Grey’s return (
Grey’s possible return,
he corrected himself) on the other. A memo would arrive from Downing Street regarding the arrest procedures for the Strike and he would think,
If only I had Grey to hand.
A conversation with Kell at MI5 would circle around the nagging problem of closing in on the ringleaders of the growing unrest, and he would bite his tongue to keep from saying,
Round them up and let my men question them.

About the time Bennett Grey was arriving at Paddington that morning, Carstairs had realized that if he didn’t make time for a visit to Monica’s establishment—which he’d planned on his return from Cornwall and had to put off—he was going to murder someone. So he had picked up the telephone and placed a call to the woman’s private number, and told her when to expect him.

The rest of Friday had passed in a delicious blend of intolerable frustration and impending relief, like some ten-hour version of the moments before climax. He’d gone about his work, aware every moment of the tantalizing proximity of Bennett Grey, on whom so much rested yet who was as volatile as a room full of petrol, as uncontrollable as a falcon tossed into the air. Several times Carstairs had found himself fingering the scar on his face, each time loosing a small thrill of memory: the intense pleasure of breaking that stupid nurse; the even greater pleasure of forcing Grey to assist at her breaking; and then the icy shock of Grey coming at him, the flash of terror and the easy slide of glass into skin followed by the building fire of the cut itself. And worst of all, the devastation two days later when he came around in hospital to find that not only had Grey been released, but that Aldous Carstairs, the Project’s director, had insufficient authority to demand his return.

It was a bad time—these same damned coal miners, then and now—and he’d had to fight with everything he had to keep the Project from folding entirely: debts called in, a score of personal visits to deliver the ever-distasteful blackmail threats. In the end, he’d managed, but without Grey the Project was like a summer house, receiving just enough attention through the cold times to keep it intact. Carstairs walked quietly, turned his energies to other—lesser—projects, but he had never allowed the moribund Project to shut down entirely, just in case.

For years, the scar’s tingle and itch had been a physical manifestation of the unscratchable itch that was Bennett Grey, whom his hands could never decide if they wanted to beat or to caress.

And now, thanks to an oafish American and a young woman infected with the feminist disease, the waiting was over.

Admittedly, Grey had only ventured a glance at the outside world; admittedly, too, Carstairs had no idea how he was going to use it, but it was a beginning.

Carstairs, looking through the taxicab’s windows at the sleeping city, felt cradled in the languor of physical release. (God, Monica’s new little flaxen-haired bitch was something—cropped hair, no breasts to speak of, no more hips than an adolescent boy, but luscious, welcoming buttocks: perfect. He glanced down at his gloves, new a week ago, now torn and scarred by her panicking finger-nails. He had frightened her badly, albeit deliberately, when she’d been unable to draw air. Granted, he allowed it to go on just a bit too long, so he supposed the gloves were understandable. He made a mental note to send her a little something extra, to sweeten her for next time.)

The marvelous thing was, the ache of hunger was still there. His body’s present warm satiation did not in the least lessen the sharp restlessness that Grey evoked. If anything, it made the eventual satisfaction of breaking Grey to his purposes all the more real, like the first
hors d’oeuvres
of a great feast.

And most delicious of all was knowing that in this case, pleasure and duty nestled right into each other.

Carstairs stepped out of the taxi in front of his house at a quarter after five in the morning. He was aware that on some level, as always after one of these episodes, he detested himself. But as Machiavelli would have reminded him, virtue in a ruler was a very different thing from the virtue of an ordinary man: A ruler must be prepared to commit evil on the way to building a greater good.

And Aldous Carstairs was born to be a ruler. Not out in public, not like that puffing idiot in the black shirt who had taken over the great Niccolò’s homeland, or that other one assembling a private army in Germany, but the man who moved the forces behind the unchanging façade of government.

Still, what did a little self loathing matter? One might argue that a visit to Monica’s was for his own individual sake, as indeed it had been in the past, but tonight had been another matter. Put simply, it was dangerous to allow pressures to build unchecked. Apart from any pleasure it brought him, this episode at Monica’s had cleared his mind effectively for the delicate, highly demanding work of the coming days.

He was no longer on edge—

On edge…

Carstairs went absolutely still, the key frozen in the lock of his front door as the phrase reverberated in his mind, causing the machinery that had been turning there to sing in response. On edge. On the edge. Director Hoover, saying how close to the edge his agent was, his straying agent (
“Blames this guy Bunsen for his turning his brother into a vegetable”
) who had walked in from the rain and become a catalyst for the reaction now taking place in Aldous Carstairs’ mind.

The glimmering suggestion of a plan that had moved at the edge of his vision for the past week blossomed into life, a plot within a plot unfolding, glorious and perfect.

“This guy Bunsen” a rogue agent; a sapper-turned–Labour politician; the Strike building to a head. Even—my God, could it be any more perfect?—even Hurleigh House, the stage for his play to be acted upon. Hurleigh House, the Duke, Stanley Baldwin, and the key players in the Miners’ Union drama.

The changes would be minimal, the benefits enormous: A clear and immediate threat was infinitely more effective than an inchoate sense of danger. The personal won over the anonymous, every time.

And the American? He was disposable, along with the others.

But, Grey. Could he put Bennett Grey in the path of danger? Might be best to remove him, first.

Yes, with one deft move, the Carstairs Proposal would be clasped to the breast of England’s governing body in its time of need, and the Truth Project would become the jewel in its crown of achievement. And as part of the agreement, when Carstairs himself stepped modestly away from the spotlight and reclaimed the Project that was his own, Grey would be his, to have and to hold.

Britain would be safe from the saboteur within.

The only thing he might ask for was a Lorenzo to his Machiavelli, a third P, the
Principe
he could mold and direct. Not Baldwin, by any means, nor Churchill—the man was too set in his ways. Someone young, malleable. What about that promising boy Mosley? He came from the right background, and surely no man who married a daughter of Lord Curzon could possibly be serious about Socialism?

All of that—realization, confirmation, and a direction for the future—came in the space of one held breath. He let it out slowly, hesitantly, but the vision remained. He smiled, and finished turning the key. Upstairs, he stripped off his ravaged gloves and dropped them into the waste-paper basket, sitting in hat and overcoat to write a full coded page in his journal.

At the end, he laid the pen down on the desk and looked at what he had written.

The great Niccolò would shake his head in appreciation.

Pity about the American, he rather liked the fellow. Well, perhaps
liked
was too strong a word, but he found him amusing. But the end was all.

Carstairs stretched and got undressed, putting everything but his hat into the clothes hamper to be cleaned. He drew a bath almost too hot to bear, scrubbing himself clean of the smell of Monica’s. He shaved his face smooth, glanced again at his diary, and with a sigh, folded himself between the crisp sheets of his bed.

Chapter Thirty-Three

A
T NEARLY THE SAME TIME,
and a mere seven miles away from Aldous Carstairs, another man waited impatiently for sleep. Richard Bunsen slept little at the best of times, so filled with energies that a few hours sufficed, but lately, his mind seemed incapable even of that brief respite. A thousand and ten things to do, so many possibilities to consider, such a burden of decisions that he alone could make. Yesterday he’d given two speeches, spent much of the evening in meetings, returned to his flat at midnight, worked on an article until the words wavered in front of his face, and finally took to his bed, cold to his bones, just before four.

Only to lie, staring at the ceiling, irritably wishing that Laura were with him instead of with that bloody family of hers in Gloucestershire: Laura could always make him sleep. But she had her role to play, and one of the elements of that role was maintaining the family connection.

A dozen times a day, he was aware—with emotions ranging from furious resentment to abject gratitude—of how much he owed to Laura. And to think at first he had nearly dismissed her out of hand as yet another titled dilettante. He’d gone to the effort of attracting her mostly through pique, setting himself a challenge, that
he
would be the one to turn
her
down, this latest in a string of frigid females who teased and flirted and belatedly discovered her morals when her blouse was half off.

Instead, he had found a woman who’d determinedly abandoned her class’s professional virginity some years earlier, and held her head high about it, as if daring him to criticize. He’d never learned who her first was, or even if there had been more than one. In the end, he’d decided that she’d been one of the many who had given herself to a young officer during the War, a junior officer who died before he could make good his promise of marriage. London was full of them: not quite a virgin, hungry for comfort, like that secretary today, a little long in the tooth but her eyes promising entertainment, if he’d had more than three minutes to spare.

Laura was more than a bed-mate, however. She’d quickly become the partner he hadn’t known he needed, one whose identity opened doors to him with an ease he’d never dreamed about. How utterly unlikely she was, how completely she had transformed his work, how much her presence had placed within grasp for the first time—her connections, her money, her passion.

And he had to admit, her brains. His thinking became clearer, discussing his ideas with her. With Laura as audience, his ideas became firmer, more practical, their focus more precise. She also had a woman’s instinct for vulnerability and manipulation, and several of her suggestions had brought forth unexpected fruit.

He’d had to consider the alliance long and hard, knowing how it would look: Richard Bunsen, little better than middle class, attaching himself to the Hurleigh coattails. With any other family, he’d never have dared to raise his head in public. But the Hurleighs were not like other families: heroes, yes, established authority in the country, certainly, but iconoclasts as well, outside the normal requirements of titled families. The Hurleighs wrote their own script, and the country trusted them, and followed.

In the end, he had to admit, it was his hunger for the shortcut that decided him. This was three years after Armistice, and he was restless, feeling less sure every day of the wisdom in allying himself with rabble-rousing misfits. Their hearts were right, of that he was convinced, but the way they were going, he could see no victory. He wished he’d had the sense to make a clean break at the time, instead of letting himself be talked into helping the Americans; the weeks that followed his last trip there had been tense ones, as he waited for the knock at the door, waited to have his connections there laid out for the world to see.

What he really wanted, today as much as he had five years ago, was to feel how he’d felt during the War. Hours with your heart in your throat, cradling a packet of hellfire through the wormholes the men had so silently carved, hiding your fear as you rode their apprehension and respect—their
awe
—into the hole. And when you came out, everyone—everyone who mattered—knew who’d been responsible for driving the point of the wedge that tipped the battle. Bunsen and his men knew just who was important on the Front, and it wasn’t the generals, and it wasn’t the men up there in the fresh air.

When he’d emerged from the hellhole of France, when he was finally convinced that he’d never again be called upon to swallow sour terror and creep through the earth to lay a charge under Jerry, it was like the sun slowly breaking through after a long winter. It took years before he began to notice just how good life could be, and to realize that he never wanted to waste so much as a moment of his precious, too-short life. What he did with his life had to matter. Richard Bunsen had to make an impact on the world. And now, the time was nearly at hand.

(That part of his mind that was always at work played with the phrase
strike while the iron is hot
for a bit, and made mental note of using the word play in his next speech. Audiences liked a spot of cleverness.)

Part of the trouble had been those years it took to find his way. Out of uniform, he’d felt moved by currents he could neither predict nor begin to influence: Speeches to summon indignation in soldiers had slid into speeches to rouse the workers those soldiers had become, until three years later, in the coal strike of 1921, he’d been making speeches to miners. And although his speeches drew a gratifying response, and his public face had been serenely confident, secretly Richard had wondered what on earth he was doing.

Then he’d met Laura, and everything came into bright, sharp focus. With the force of her personality, backed by her family connections, he saw his purpose at last: Look Forward was born, lines of communication and cooperation laid with men in Britain and abroad, men who shared his vision and his frustration.

It was, at times, just a trifle humiliating to reflect on how a few short years with Laura had advanced the cause by decades, but Bunsen was scrupulous about all his emotions: Everything was placed beneath the needs of the Movement, be it love, pride, or humiliation—life itself, even. True, it was his sense of humiliation that escaped his control the most; and true, when it did, he took it out on Laura, but in the end, he always re-gained his perspective, and then he would relish the delicious irony of it, that her family’s lofty position would contribute to the abolition of hierarchy.

Perfect. Pre-ordained, you might say, if you believed in such things.

Not that life with Laura was all beer and skittles. She was a stubborn woman, who had beaten her parents into submission when she was a girl and imagined that she could do the same with him. They’d gone through a rough patch during the past year, as she’d begun to resent the interest paid him by Labour and started to harp about the wrongness of, as she put it, joining his wagon to the political machine.

What she didn’t see was that he wasn’t joining his wagon to Labour any more than he’d joined it to the Americans—or to the Hurleigh name, for that matter: Very soon, within the next month if even half his efforts fell into place, the dust of revolution would settle and reveal: Richard Bunsen’s wagon, standing alone in the rubble. Any politician who had thought him a malleable lad grateful for the attention was going to be badly taken aback.

Fortunately, Laura seemed to be calming down. Last year, after that pair of rows that had her going off on her own, he’d half expected her to pack her bags and go home to Mummy.

The possibility had him on the horns of a dilemma: He would be glad enough for the freedom, for not having to argue each minute part of the Movement, but at the same time, he’d bitterly miss the benefits of having her at his side. In the end, he’d agreed to curtail his affairs (although even Laura couldn’t expect him to stop from responding to women entirely—a man had his needs, after all) in exchange for which she’d scale down her criticism of his plans. A degree of coolness entered their relationship, but he’d had to do it, had to let her know that he wasn’t her rough-handed puppet.

Still, on a night like this, he missed her body, warm and willing, in his bed.