Touchstone (32 page)

“
My
shoulders?” she said in surprise. “It’s mostly Richard’s work. He’s the brilliant one, I just go along with him.”

When he bothers to show up, he thought, then found himself wondering, What does Richard Bunsen do when
he
needs to blow off steam? Or should the question be, Who does he take it out on? Again, questions he would not address to Bunsen’s lover.

“So what does Bunsen have in mind to keep that from happening?” he asked. “If you’re allowed to talk about it, that is.”

“He’s been working on it for months. And without going into the details, I can tell you he’s negotiating a very high-level meeting between the government and the Unions, which should have some positive results.”

“From what I read, meetings haven’t proved very productive yet.”

“The government feel themselves in a strong position, since they’ve been preparing to undermine the workers since, well, one could say since the Railway Strike in 1911. We need to show them that their self confidence is without basis, that—”

She broke off. He looked up, and found her staring past him at the open doorway. Following her gaze, he saw the twin head-lamps cutting through the dusk on the other side of the valley. “Richard,” she said to herself. Suddenly she was in motion. “I must look a sight! Oh Lord, he mustn’t see me like this, I must go freshen up. Bless you, Mr. Stuyvesant, for allowing me to weep on your manly shoulder, I must keep an American to hand for that express purpose. I’ll see you at dinner—and don’t worry, I’m really much restored to myself, thank you for everything.”

“I think you should call me Harris,” he said to her fleeing back. He looked down at the sodden handkerchief she had pressed into his hand, stained with powder and kohl, and folded it thoughtfully into a pocket. He shut the doors of the Morris, twisted the switch for the overhead light, and moved over to the doorway.

Up the hill to the right, he could hear Laura Hurleigh’s fast-retreating footsteps and a muffled chorus of voices from the house. From the left came the sound of a motorcar gearing down as it approached the ford.

Suddenly, he was hit by the need to see Richard Bunsen up close, before Bunsen had a chance to look at him. He hauled the stables door shut and sprinted up the drive in Laura’s wake, dashing up the grassy verge and around the back of the lodge-house, hunched down to avoid notice from the servants’ quarters beyond. He heard an exchange from the shade garden—Laura going into the house as Gallagher was coming out—just as he eased into the giant rhododendron at the front of the lodge. Thirty feet away, the butler stepped out of the iron gate and took up a position near the street-lamp.

As the car hit the drive’s circle, the powerful head-lamps flared over Stuyvesant’s hiding place before sweeping across the shaded north garden, the corner of the house, the waiting figure of Gallagher the butler, and the gate-way to the formal front garden. The harsh illumination finally came to rest on the long wall and its massive rose, then winked out. The hiding American pulled aside the leaves.

The street-lamp cast its beam across the car, revealing glimpses of the man in the back. It was a closed car; the man was in shadow. Gallagher stepped forward to open the door, and the man emerged.

Richard Bunsen was taller and slimmer than he’d appeared on the stage. He had changed into evening dress on the way, and wore the black garment as if born to the class for which it was designed. His dark hair, which on Thursday had been slightly rumpled, now lay in perfect obedience, and his spine was held straighter. Like then, however, even in profile his face inspired confidence.

Bunsen greeted Gallagher by name and told him he’d need the top bag in the front. A servant Stuyvesant had not seen before walked around the car to retrieve a bag from the seat beside the driver’s. From where Stuyvesant stood, he could hear the butler telling him to take Mr. Bunsen’s valise into the house, followed by Bunsen’s response that he wasn’t staying the night, he’d just need his shaving kit.

The house, not the barn: The daughter’s lover was being given a room among the family.

Bunsen and Gallagher exchanged a few more words, their voices conversationally low and unintelligible. Then Bunsen seemed to stir himself into action, drawing upright in a gesture of dismissal. Gallagher gave him a short dip of the head and stepped back, and Bunsen addressed the burly man who had climbed out from the driver’s door.

“Jimmy, Gallagher here will show you where you can have a snooze, if you like. Don’t get to drinking, I need to leave around midnight.”

The driver merely nodded, cast an eye over the house as if to say he’d seen better, and followed the butler. Bunsen, left alone, stretched luxuriously, showing the lines of his lean body, and spent a moment kneading the small of his back while his eyes (what color were they, anyway?) followed the two men, a slight frown on his face.

Stuyvesant took in his every move: the man of his witness drawings, the shipboard photograph, the grainy newspaper images, and the Battersea stage, brought here to life. The man he’d hunted for half a year, the man whose box of groceries had killed a woman, burned two city blocks and reduced a beloved younger brother and husband to a vegetable, whose china doll had nearly incinerated a judge, whose bottle of Bourbon had come within a hair’s-breadth of crippling and killing a roomful of senators and officials. The man who was sleeping with the glorious woman whose tears were damp on Stuyvesant’s handkerchief, a woman with whom his new friend with the peculiar gifts seemed still in love, a woman whose fire, intelligence, and heart suited her for the best in the land.

A man easy to hate.

Bunsen’s hand came up to smooth the back of his head, as if he had felt a faint touch there; after a moment, he turned on his heels and passed through the gate to the house.

If Stuyvesant hadn’t known better, he’d have thought this was the son and heir, returning to his ancestral home.

Chapter Forty-Two

S
TUYVESANT REACHED HIS ROOM
without being seen. Behind its closed door, he sat on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at the wardrobe.

Okay: He’d seen the enemy, and The Bastard was even more formidable than he’d thought, every bit as handsome and confident and sharp as you’d expect of someone who’d re-invented himself, fooled two nations, and convinced Laura Hurleigh that his was the superior mind.

But what if he had? Harris Stuyvesant was good at what he did, too—no, damn it, he was the best when it came to pulling on another skin and going undercover. Better than this upstart Red, this sapper-turned-politician.

Time for the curtains-rising sensation for this performance he would put on for one man alone, its aim—nothing more, nothing less—than to bring him close to his quarry.

But what form would that act take? Stuyvesant had to be wearing a white collar, but feeling its pinch—a continuation of what he’d been giving out already to Bunsen’s two women. Stuyvesant’s teeth gnashed at the idea of Sarah Grey as one of that slick figure’s women—and then he caught himself. What about that—not Sarah, of course, but Laura herself?

Most of the radicals he knew—the men, certainly—thought the idea of free love was just fine. Opposing the possessive claims of the marriage rites was noble, and meant the man never had to step up and marry. And funny thing: Such noble belief never seemed to have much effect on the possessive claims of the radicals themselves, who were generally as high-handed with their women-folk as a potentate with his harem.

Of course, to make everyone feel good about themselves, from time to time a woman was allowed to give a speech or perform an
attentat,
but the men didn’t like to see too much of that. Not only did it take away from their own importance, but having too many of their women standing trial at once interfered with meal-times. In all the radical households he’d been in, he could count on one hand the number of men he’d seen scrubbing pans.

What about Richard Bunsen? Just how closely did he fit the mold, when it came to being possessive about that splendid Hurleigh woman? And if he was, how could Stuyvesant use that?

After a while, he got to his feet and went over to the wardrobe. The loose board came up readily under the point of his knife, and he withdrew the small gun. It wasn’t that he wanted it tonight, not enough to risk having someone notice it, but when he needed a reminder of who he was and what he was after, there was nothing like a revolver to do the job. Cold, efficient, deadly, patient. Absolutely safe until a part of it snapped down on the tiny vulnerable spot of the bullet and burst its powder into flame, sending its deadly scrap of lead in the direction required.

He was Harris John Stuyvesant. He had killed men—not with this particular weapon, not yet—and he had trapped men, and there were men whose vulnerable spots he had snapped down upon, sending them in the direction required. Yes, he generally worked among men whose clothes stank of sweat and age, whose drink foamed into large glasses, whose faces and hands bore evidence of the work they did each day. Generally, he even looked like one of those men.

Here, he would wear spotless black and white, and his finger-nails would be clean, if not exactly manicured. He would go over to the house and make conversation about New York society and London art galleries, he would present a likable and believable persona to the assembled members of a class that was foreign to him, and in the end he would find the vulnerable spot of Richard Bunsen and send him where he wanted him.

But where might his vulnerable spot be? Possibly Laura. But he must not forget: That handsome face belonged to a man with nerve enough to carry an explosive device through a tight, lonely, dangerous tunnel, with the enemy poised above, and still have rock-steady hands when he reached the tunnel’s end. This was also a man who made much of his working-class origins while wearing a suit that cost more than Stuyvesant earned in months. A man comfortable in two worlds—

Stuyvesant caught himself: a man
apparently
comfortable in two worlds.

For the first time, it occurred to him that he and Bunsen were not dissimilar. He had more siblings, but their parents were dead, and both carried the knowledge of status and money a generation or two gone. Neither he nor Bunsen was purely working class, nor were they impoverished aristocracy.

In the States, except for a few small pockets of high society, this wasn’t much of a problem—in New York, a cat could look at a king. Hell, a cat could get himself elected king. But in England, where people had windows reminding them of ancestors whose bones had long since gone to dust? In England, the country that had perfected the art of the devastating remark? In England, where the servants’ entrance waited, where all ears were tuned for the tiniest wrong accent, where the exquisitely subtle vocabulary of Us and Them held ten thousand complicated traps, unspoken and unarguable?

Somewhere inside that self-assured figure in the pretty suit had to be a scared little boy, waiting for one of those nuanced traps to swing shut on him, condemning him forever to the cold outer reaches of eternal disdain. You’d have to be awfully cold-blooded not to hold some degree of uncertainty.

So how to tap Bunsen’s pocket of uncertainty? And how to do it so Bunsen didn’t simply pull away? Stuyvesant could hold the threat of shame over him, making it clear that if Bunsen ran, Laura would see it, but if he wanted Bunsen to allow him near, he couldn’t be too open with it.

Much better to ride the line between harmless and puzzling—like the bumptious American act he’d pulled on Carstairs, but with thorns, to whet a sapper’s appetite for danger.

He wanted Bunsen to be so interested in him, he couldn’t bear to let him go.

A distant clamor rose up, which grew into the reverberation of the gong. He glanced at his wrist-watch, startled at how long he’d sat here staring into space: Time to get going. He turned the gun over between his palms, feeling its reassuring authority, lifting it to his face to breathe in the odor of the oil. Then he stood up from the bed and put the weapon back into its hiding place: He wouldn’t be needing it any more tonight.

He washed his hands, studied his reflection in the mirror, and went to join the others for dinner.

Chapter Forty-Three

I
T MIGHT HAVE BEEN EASIER
if Bunsen didn’t look like a Mediterranean Ivor Novello, smooth and handsome and oozing charm and good humor from every polished pore. He wasn’t tall, no taller than Laura (ha! thought Stuyvesant—that’s why she’s in flat shoes tonight. And immediately pushed away the thought as petty.) and his eyes looked somehow amber, caught between light brown and hazel. His hair was perfect, and his moustache might have been painted on, its lines were so flawless. He made even Patrick Hurleigh look like a “before” picture in the advertisement pages, and Sarah’s friend Simon Fforde-Morrison was sulking in the corner, shooting the newcomer dark glances.

The music man, however, seemed to be the only stand-out among the thirty or so people in the long gallery when Stuyvesant arrived. The group around Bunsen was laughing at some nicety, and even those in the other groups glanced over from time to time with amusement or interest.

Without knowing his history, Stuyvesant would have sworn that Bunsen was born to the life of cleverness and ease. Certainly he was the most vivid creature in the room, and it was extraordinary, and somewhat disturbing, to watch Laura Hurleigh pull into herself, deliberately dropping a basket over her own light so that Bunsen might shine the brighter.

Not that she needed to: As Stuyvesant had anticipated, the man possessed in large measure the knack of the successful politician—or the successful scam-artist—to make the person he was talking to feel the most important, most fascinating individual on the planet. Holding eye contact, Bunsen might as well have been saying aloud,
My entire attention is on you and you alone.
And when the eye contact was broken, that impression stayed on: Stuyvesant would bet that, after tonight, each person here would feel that he or she had been in close, prolonged conversation with the man.

That kind of animal magnetism was a gift, not a thing one could learn, and Bunsen had it in spades. Even the Duchess of Hurleigh was not immune: She had melted in the palm of Bunsen’s long-fingered hand, and was responding to his overt act of flirtatious courtier with a similarly self-aware act of near-coquettishness: a game, and they were both agreeing to play it.

Stuyvesant circled around to where Sarah and Bennett Grey stood, and bent forward to say in her deliciously scented ear, “Your friend seems to have made a conquest of the resident dragon.”

Sarah turned and said something to him in response, but Stuyvesant did not hear her words, for Bunsen’s attention had been attracted, either by Stuyvesant’s entrance or by the big man’s proximity to Sarah Grey, and he turned his gaze on the American.

The jolt of that gaze was so tangible, the room’s voices seemed to fade. But the crackle of energy between them was personal; he and Bunsen alone had gone still, and Stuyvesant stood with his head canted towards Sarah’s voice, unhearing, his full attention locked on the light, oddly colored eyes of the man he had crossed an ocean to find.

The only one taking notice of the meeting was Bennett Grey, at Stuyvesant’s elbow. Grey’s hand had closed onto his arm, to convey some wordless comment. Encouragement? Protest? Stuyvesant could not tell without looking at him, and he did not wish to break away from Bunsen for another few seconds—but too late. Bunsen pulled away first, to make another comment to the Duchess and raise his nearly empty glass to his lips. Stuyvesant waited. Sure enough, on the count of seven, Bunsen glanced back at him. His eyes, Stuyvesant decided, were hazel-yellow with a green overtone. This time, Stuyvesant was the one to withdraw first. He turned back to Sarah.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “What was that?”

“I said, ‘Do you want to meet Richard?’”

“Oh, he’s busy just now. We’ll have plenty of time after dinner to get to know each other.”

Five minutes later, just before the second and final sounding of the gong, the Duke came in to claim his wife’s arm. Out of the corner of his eye, Stuyvesant saw Bunsen come to attention and greet his host with a great deal more formality than he had demonstrated towards the man’s wife. He then moved over to pick up something from a table in the corner and, with a formal little half bow and a deprecating gesture of his other hand, presented it to the Duke.

It was a small paperboard box held together with a twine tie. The Duke listened, and with a degree of reluctance pulled the twine and lifted the box top.

Whatever the contents, they caused his bushy eyebrows to rise. He tucked the top under the box and pulled aside the packing material. Bunsen continued to speak, shrugging to let his host know how relatively unimportant the gift was, but the older man was clearly captivated by the object, and Stuyvesant did not think him a man easily impressed by the efforts of his lessers.

The Duchess said something to her husband, causing him to push the contents down in the excelsior and replace the top. He appeared intent on carrying it in to dinner, but the Duchess took it, handed it to a nearby servant, and firmly put her arm through his. The Duke pointed at the packet and told the man something, and the servant immediately left the room, holding the crude box as if it were a diamond tiara. As the man went past, Stuyvesant looked to see what was in the box: a small, rather dull china dog, something that might sit in the garden of a child’s doll-house.

Right: the Duke collected the things. Clever Bunsen.

Arms were linked into elbows and the guests and family began to move towards the stairway. Stuyvesant was pleased to be given Sarah’s for the purpose, but he waited for her indication that it was time for them to move—the order and priority of guests at a country house Saturday dinner was a mystery too deep for a mere Bureau of Investigation agent to crack.

He followed the parade down the stairs, and found that tonight, dinner was to be in the Great Hall. He was seated across the table and down from Bunsen and—to his chagrin—down from Sarah Grey, who was at Bunsen’s left. When the Duchess turned to the other side, Sarah leaned forward to speak to Bunsen. His gaze came down the table to touch on Stuyvesant—Sarah must have been introducing him in absentia, because Bunsen nodded—before returning to her.

To Bunsen’s right was the Duchess herself. Stuyvesant watched the arrangement surreptitiously, wondering what it meant. Twenty years ago, he knew, the rigidity of society meant that every person at a dinner party had their seating clearly laid out for them—and if there were any doubts, priority was given in
Debrett’s,
lest incompetent servants or an inexperienced hostess commit a career-shattering
faux pas.
But then the War had run its cart and horses through every level of society, and Stuyvesant did not know how far-reaching were its effects. Yes, there were thirty people here for a formal meal, but they were mostly either family or their young friends, and presumably rank was allowed to loosen its tie a notch. Hell, twenty years ago, a ducal family like the Hurleighs would not have shared a table with half the people here, including himself—the question of seating would never have arisen.

Was there even a salt any more, to sit below?

In any case, he was just an American, and a purveyor of motorcars at that, who shouldn’t be expected to possess any awareness of subtle social hierarchies. So he would not.

He introduced himself to his neighbor, settling in for a demonstration that even American car salesmen were capable of civilized behavior.

As the meal wore on, civilized behavior became increasingly difficult. To his astonishment, Richard Bunsen had responded to their little staring contest by taking the lead, and was playing precisely the game Stuyvesant had considered playing with Laura Hurleigh. How he’d known Stuyvesant was at all interested in Sarah Grey, he didn’t know, but Bunsen was clearly paying a closer attention to the young woman than she was accustomed to. She went from surprised over soup to flustered over fish, and by the time the beef was laid before them, she was pink with pleasure.

Despite his exasperation, Stuyvesant had to admire Bunsen’s technique: The man managed to engage Sarah fully without giving the Duchess the least cause for complaint. If anything, he was more openly flirtatious with the older woman; it was only in Sarah’s reaction that Stuyvesant saw anything out of the ordinary. The Bastard possessed the skills of a polygamist, he thought, giving a vicious stab to the meat on his plate: two-handed seduction, conducted right out in the open.

One time only, as the final course was being set on the linen, did Bunsen betray any awareness of the American down the table. He leaned over to murmur something to Sarah, and at her resultant laugh, his eyes flickered in Stuyvesant’s direction.

Bunsen was already turning to the other object of his affections, the Duchess, so their eyes met only for the briefest moment. But that brief flash washed like a soothing balm across Stuyvesant’s growing ill humor, and he picked up his fruit knife (was this the fourth knife?) feeling cool and purposeful once again. He did not so much as glance in Sarah’s direction during the remainder of the meal, but entertained his table-mates with an embroidered tale of how he’d sold a fleet of very pricey Ford motorcars to an infamous New York crime lord, ending his story with, “And, I even managed to get his check to clear before the police raided his headquarters!”

As if he’d timed it, the laughter was still ringing when the Duchess rose, followed by the other ladies. Under the different timbre of male voices and masculine laughter, half the party moved upstairs, to take port and cigars before the fire in the solar and in the adjoining billiards room. Stuyvesant excused himself for a minute, and when he returned, positions had been taken up: Bunsen with the Duke at the center of things, the two Hurleigh sons to one side with a coterie of friends, ostensibly on their own but in fact more than half listening in. Bunsen had the voice of an experienced public speaker, capable of a carrying volume with no apparent effort. In this setting, his voice cut through cross-noise in a seemingly natural manner, as if he just happened to have that manner of speech. It was difficult not to listen to him, as he casually recounted to his host how he’d come across the china dog, in the grasp of a small child in a pram in Kensington Gardens.

Stuyvesant took a glass (brandy, not port—he’d experienced that alcoholic syrup before) and circled around to where Bennett Grey stood, in the cool air near the window. His face was pinched and the knuckles wrapped around his empty glass were white.

“You okay?” Stuyvesant asked.

“Do I look ‘okay’?” Grey snapped. Stuyvesant exchanged glasses with him and watched him shoot the contents down in one swallow. He looked, if anything, worse after that. With a shock, Stuyvesant realized that the man was actually drunk.

“Is it one person in particular, or all of them?”

“All of them,” Bennett said, then immediately, “Bunsen’s the worst, but the accumulation…Are you going to get me another drink?”

“No, I’m going to take you out of here.”

“I can’t go yet.”

“Why the hell not? You’re a goddamn blown-up war hero, you’re allowed to feel ill any time you like. Come on.”

“I must at least take my leave of Uncle God.”

“Uncle—oh, right, the Duke.” Godlake Reginald Gryffin and so on. “Okay: ten seconds and then I’m dragging you away.”

Grey walked up to the group around Bunsen as if approaching a firing squad: straight-backed, slightly unsteady on foot but unwavering of purpose. Keeping his eyes on the old man, he made his formal apologies, nodded to the others, and returned to Stuyvesant, definitely weaving.

While Grey was speaking with the Duke, Stuyvesant had been covertly watching Bunsen, who studied his glass, his face neutral. Did he know of the connection between Grey and Laura Hurleigh? Stuyvesant couldn’t begin to tell.

He got Grey down the stairs without quite having to carry him, and had one of the servants show him the short way to the barn, a door beside the kitchen. Outside, the rain was gurgling in the down-spouts and sheeting off the far end of the roof where a gutter was blocked, but when Stuyvesant would have laid a hand between Grey’s shoulders and hurried him in the direction of the barn, Grey stopped dead and lifted his face to the sky. There he stood, showing no sign of moving, so Stuyvesant took a step back under the eaves, lit a cigarette, and gave himself a thorough kicking for not managing to keep an eye on Grey’s intake. Sarah would not be pleased.

The rain fell; the smoke swirled; the man got soaked through. At last he scrubbed his face with his hands and ran his fingers through his dripping hair, then looked around.

“Harris,” he said. “Why din’ you go back inside?”

“It’s nice out here,” he said, and crushed his stub under his heel. “C’mon, my old friend, let’s put you to bed.”

Grey leaned on him as they went up the stairs, then stood on the rug like a child as Stuyvesant peeled off the sodden garments. “See if you can get those buttons,” he suggested as he knelt down to pick at the wet shoelaces. Grey’s fingers, clumsy with drink and cold, managed about half of them, and Stuyvesant did the rest.

In the end, he got Grey down to his under-shorts. He pulled the bed-clothes over the man’s savagely scarred leg, stuck a bath-towel under his head to protect the pillow, and went to the door.

“Thank you, Ster—Stew—Stoy—M’ol’fren’ Harris.” The man in the bed giggled, a sound that in a sober man would have been hair-raising.

“Any time, Bennett. Sleep well, old man, you’ve done a valiant job. And by the way, you’re finished for the week-end. From here on in, I’m on my own.”

The only answer was a ragged snore.