Touchstone (37 page)

Twenty minutes later he dropped down over the ridge, adjusting his angle towards the parked motorcar. The back door opened and Aldous Carstairs got out, tugging at his gloves as he walked to meet him.

“You wanted to see me, Mr. Stuyvesant?”

Stuyvesant held out a lumpy, oversized manila envelope.

“Don’t worry, I wore gloves,” he told Carstairs. The man’s own black gloves hesitated, then reached out for the object. He had an odd expression on his face.

“My way in’s going to be through Bunsen’s driver,” Stuyvesant told him. “You’ll find some Automobile Club papers and the little identity doodad from the front of Bunsen’s car—I don’t want to destroy them, but I wouldn’t want them found in my suitcase, either. I fiddled the car so it’ll break down, probably somewhere between here and Oxford. He’s not going to fly off the road and burst into flames or anything, the car will just die. I don’t think the driver will be able to fix it, he doesn’t seem to be much of a mechanic, so they’ll flag down an Automobile Club man to help them, only they won’t have any proof that they’re members, because it seems as though the clumsy driver’s misplaced his papers. Plus that, he hasn’t noticed the car’s badge is missing. As I say, nothing dramatic. Just a series of irritations for a man aiming to get back to London for a meeting.

“The driver’s name is in there, too. See what information you can get on him—if I’m going to replace him, it’d help to know his weak spots.”

“You…propose to take the place of Bunsen’s driver.” It was said flatly; the quizzical expression had become faintly ironic.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Would you like him, hmm, removed?” His tone of voice made his meaning clear.

“What are you talking about, ‘removed’? Is this England, or Russia? Of course I don’t want him ‘removed,’ I just want to find something that’ll persuade him to quit, or get him fired. ‘Removed.’ Jesus.”

“Very well. Anything else?”

“Yeah. There’s a bunch of names and dates in there I got from Bunsen’s diary, which only goes back to January. Nothing about the name you told me to look for, Lionel Waller. Most of the names don’t mean a thing to me, but I thought you might know them. And I didn’t have time to make a copy of all this for you, but I want it back. Okay?”

“Is that all?”

“Bunsen met with the Duke this morning, I don’t know about what. And there’s nothing in the diary about his trip to the States in January other than he made it. He may have another diary in his actual office.”

“I will see what I can do about this,” Carstairs said, holding up the envelope.

“You’ll give it back when I see you?” The man hadn’t actually agreed to it.

“Yes, Mr. Stuyvesant, I will return it to you, every scrap and wrinkle. Telephone me in the morning, I should have some information by then. And might I suggest that you make an early night of it this evening? The house-party week-end can be strenuous for those, shall we say, not accustomed to it.”

In other words, these aristos are drinking you under the table and you look like hell. Which wasn’t surprising, considering he’d had maybe eight hours’ sleep over the last seventy-two. “I’ll phone you tomorrow,” Stuyvesant said, and began to turn away.

“Mr. Stuyvesant?”

“Yeah?”

“How is Captain Grey holding up?”

“Oh, he’s just hunky-dory, thanks. Hey, Carstairs, tell me something. Did you guys find anything when you searched my hotel room?”

The faintest reaction flitted through those black eyes, so controlled Stuyvesant wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t been watching. He winked, and sauntered away.

When he reached the top of the ridge, he hadn’t heard the car start or its door shut. He shot a look over his shoulder, and saw Carstairs reaching for the handle.

Points to the U.S. of A., he thought.

Still, all in all, he’d rather work alongside a Red.

When Stuyvesant reached the path again, the breeze carried a sound of distant voices, raised in song. He peeled back his cuff to check his wrist-watch: He’d been gone from the house a scant twenty minutes. Church services were still under way. He could go back to his room, or sit in the garden, but in either case, he was afraid he’d fall asleep.

He went uphill instead of down, up to the Peak and a smoke.

The blue sky of the early morning was withdrawing behind a high gray haze, so he left his jacket on, pulling his knees to his chest. No dog-fox this morning, and the Roman ruins Grey had claimed to see were nothing but a rock on a hillside. But even without the bright sunshine, very, very calm and pretty.

A far cry from the outside world, with its university hooligans knocking around pretty girls on trains and its manipulative Truth Projects and its O.M.S. strike-breakers and the frank despotism of the Emergency Powers Act. Maybe he should go home and turn his mind to fighting nice honest criminals. Or take his hat in his hand and ask the Duke for a job right here, keeping all the Hurleigh engines running, making friends with the foxes, and never reading another newspaper in his whole damn life.

Yeah, and be so bored, he’d put his Colt to his head inside of a week.

What the devil was Carstairs playing at, anyway? He was up to something, Stuyvesant could smell it, and although it might have nothing whatsoever to do with Richard Bunsen or Harris Stuyvesant, not knowing what the man was up to made him twitchy. Like stepping into a dark room, knowing there was a rattlesnake in there somewhere: The snake wasn’t after you, but that didn’t make your leg any better if it bit.

Like the Bible said, subtler than the other creatures, that was Aldous Carstairs to a T. Whatever he was up to, it would have more layers to it than a snake’s skin.

As he stretched to slip the cold cigarette stub into his pocket, it suddenly occurred to him that, at some point in the past twenty-four hours, he’d made a decision about Bennett Grey.

Simply put, he wasn’t going to let Carstairs have him. Not for his entertainment, and not for his damned Project, not if Harris Stuyvesant had anything to say in the matter. And if it meant this pretty country got just a little more overrun with Bolshies, well, maybe a country that gave an Aldous Carstairs free rein deserved a little boot up its ass.

He’d cooperate just so far as he had to, to get a rope around Richard Bunsen, but he’d draw the line at snaring Grey.

And in the meantime, he thought, he’d take advantage of his final free time at Hurleigh to go look at some mighty fine paintings, down there in the long gallery.

Chapter Fifty

S
TUYVESANT HAD THE
H
URLEIGH ART COLLECTION
to himself for nearly an hour before he heard the first house guests come into the breakfast room downstairs, where the aroma of coffee had been rising for a while. He tore himself away from the Constable and went down, finding the others glowing with righteousness but happily changed from their church clothes into casual dress. Grey came in with Laura and Sarah. He looked as tired as Stuyvesant felt, and took a swallow of the coffee from his cup before he had sat down at the table.

Stuyvesant went to join them.

“I’m glad to see that left-wing politics doesn’t interfere with Morning Prayer.”

“Not even with Communion,” Sarah told him.

“The Church may make some bad decisions,” Laura added, “but the beauty of the ritual makes it difficult to condemn it outright.”

“Does Bunsen feel the same way?”

“Fortunately, Richard had to return to London, so he wasn’t faced with that decision. He has a meeting at Downing Street this afternoon.”

Which he may not make, Stuyvesant thought with satisfaction, picturing a red-faced Ivor Novello standing by the roadside shouting at his driver while trying to flag down an Automobile Club man.

“I had a very satisfactory Communion myself, with Nature and with Art. I took a walk,” he explained, “then spent some time in the long gallery. Boy, your family has some beautiful pieces there.”

“Generations of aristocratic privilege will turn out to have some benefit for the people,” Laura replied.

“Any time you want to park one of the paintings on a commoner’s wall for a while, you’re welcome to use mine. But look, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to get back to London myself this afternoon. I’ve got a meeting tomorrow, and I don’t think I should risk the drive in the morning.”

“Will you stay for lunch, at least?”

“I can do that, sure. But, Grey, you want me to drop you at the station in Oxford as I go by, or you want someone to drive you later?”

“Actually,” he said, “I believe I’ll go with you. I could use a day in Town, if nothing else than for the bookstores.”

Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to tell him in front of the two women, after all.

“I thought you wanted to get back to Cornwall?” Stuyvesant said, fixing Grey with a compelling gaze.

The green eyes met his, not in the least compelled. “Maybe after a day or two.”

“Lovely!” exclaimed Sarah, all but clapping her hands with pleasure. “Perhaps we could meet for a meal, or coffee. Or I could show you the free clinic, Bennett, you’ve never seen our new building.”

Stuyvesant wanted to stand up and slam his cup on the table.
I can’t protect you in London, you fool. Go home, pull up your drawbridges, leave Carstairs to me.

But he could only glower his disapproval at Grey, and agree that they didn’t need to leave until after luncheon.

Grey put down his cup and said that he would go and pack his bag. Sarah stood, too, and said she’d keep him company. Which left Stuyvesant talking about art with Laura, not at all a bad way to spend a half-hour.

Family and friends continued to drift in for refreshment and out in search of entertainment. Lord Daniel came in with a young woman whom he introduced with a touching degree of pride as his fiancée.

Stuyvesant was talking to the fiancée, who seemed to him awfully young and naïve for a woman on whose womb an ancient house might rest, when he felt a touch on his arm. Without thinking, he not only knew who it was, but he reached across to lay his hand on hers until the girl came to a pausing place.

He apologized to the earnest young woman for not knowing if the Macy’s linen department was superior to that of Gordon Selfridge’s London department store, then looked down into Sarah’s green eyes.

“Bennett said to tell you that when you’re finished here, he’d like to show you the chapel. He’ll meet you over there.” She made no move to pull her fingers out from under his; on the contrary, she parted them slightly, to let his fingers settle in between them. He thought this a gesture of charming innocence until he looked more closely at her eyes, and saw the spark of mischief, deep within.

“You little minx!” he said, as startled as he was pleased; the fiancée looked more than a little confused, but Sarah gave him her lovely laugh and withdrew her touch.

“Go talk to my brother, Harris,” she told him.

“I hear, and obey, my lady,” he replied, and abandoned the long gallery for the chapel.

It had begun to rain. Stuyvesant accepted an umbrella from Gallagher and reversed his steps along the path he and Sarah had followed the day before, returning from their lunch at the Dog and Pony: across the rose garden, through a gap in the hedge, and up a winding path that climbed the hill behind the lodge-house and the servants’ quarters. The path was of white gravel gone green at the sides, firm even where it was sliced into a patch of steep hillside behind the kitchen garden.

When all the roof-tops but that of the chapel were below, the path widened into a level viewing platform, with a wrought iron bench and a railing that kept the viewer from tumbling face-first into the back of the servants’ hall. Stuyvesant looked down over the drive’s circle, then out over the valley for a minute, finally turning his back on the view to follow the smaller foot-path.

The white gravel led to three rustic steps through a lych gate, with a little cemetery of tilting headstones, many of them illegible with age. The chapel had a small wooden porch attached to it, with an iron loop in one corner for dripping umbrellas. He left his there, removed his hat, and turned the latch on the heavy wooden door.

It was warm inside from the morning services, the air fragrant with incense. The smell reminded him of the churches of his childhood, but this building looked more like the miniature cathedral of some exotic Eastern sect, ornate and brilliant. Every inch of the lower walls was decorated with tile or carvings, and the tiles on the floor had a random scatter of white spots, like petals blown from some flowering tree. Where the walls had neither tile nor wood, the glass was stained. Gold and lapis-blue, maroon and touches of bright green dominated. He turned on his heels and whistled, only afterwards thinking that a whistle perhaps wasn’t an appropriate expression within a church.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” Grey was half hidden by one of the church’s four pillars, standing before a ten-foot-long carving on the wall, made of a wood so black it rendered the figures invisible. Black with age, Stuyvesant decided—even the metal strips used to mend a long crack near the bottom looked ancient.

“Feels like standing inside a tapestry,” Stuyvesant said. “Down to the flowers underfoot.”

Grey did not answer, just stood gazing into the carving. He looked bone-tired, with stains beneath his eyes; one day in London and he’d be ready to go back to Cornwall for sure, Stuyvesant thought, then wandered off to look at the church.

At the back, a high window faced west, in order to pick up the afternoon sun and splash it around inside. This afternoon the sun was nowhere in sight, but the window was still a swirl of blues and oranges surrounding a descending dove.

The altar at the front of the church, the east end, was covered with a golden cloth and had another dove on the wall behind it, this one carved of wood and intertwined with some flowering vine. The tall candles on the cloth of gold added the odor of honey to the underlying incense. Along the east wall he found a long Coptic-style painting of the flight into Egypt. When he had reached its end, he was back to where Bennett Grey still stood.

Grey had stretched up both hands and laid them on the carved wooden panel. His eyes were open but fixed on the black wood; his fingers, infinitely slow and light of touch, explored the surface; his lips moved as if puzzling out half-known words.

Stuyvesant went still.

Touchstone,
Aldous Carstairs had called him. From what Stuyvesant had seen, this awful gift Grey had been given seemed less a matter of being drawn to gold than it was being repelled by dross, often with a violence that shook the man to his core. But for the moment, he could glimpse the coin’s other face. As Grey’s fingertips caressed the ancient shapes, his entire body seemed to rise up and yearn for the surface, as if a blind man were exploring the face of God. Stuyvesant found himself wondering what would happen if he were to touch Grey: Would an electric current smash Stuyvesant to the floor? Would Grey faint dead away? Would they both burst into flame?

Fanciful thoughts, dispersed when Grey spoke.

“You can talk,” he said. “I’m not going to break.”

“Glad to hear that. What’s the carving?”

“In a strong light, you can see it’s a composite story of various events in the life of Christ that involve water. In the left corner is the story of the loaves and fishes. This here”—he traced a finger across an oval shape—“is Christ walking on the water. And down there is the baptism.”

Stuyvesant approached to peer closely at the panel, and now that they were pointed out to him, he could make out the figures. On a bright enough day, he might even be able to distinguish Jesus from a fish. “Looks old,” he commented.

“Extremely. A seventeenth-century Hurleigh brought it back from the Holy Land, but it’s a lot older than that. When this was carved, England was in the dark times after Rome withdrew. The man who carved this put his soul into it. There was something exquisitely personal to him about these stories. The marks his tool made in the wood pulsate with age and life and truth.”

He made no move to pull away from the panel. Stuyvesant chose a pew and pulled his damp coat around him, wishing a man could smoke in church. It was restful, to sit in that quiet stone and wood tapestry with a man caught up in worship of the artistic spirit. Being denied tobacco, he pulled one of the substantial, much-used volumes from the pocket in front of him:
Book of Common Prayer.

“I always thought prayer books were little things you could slip in your pocket,” he commented.

“The old Duchess refused to wear reading glasses, but she couldn’t read without them. So she had a special edition printed for the chapel, with large print.”

Stuyvesant could sympathize with the old lady: He often squinted furiously rather than put his on. But the larger print in this one made it easy to read the words. Not that he could make much sense of the confusion of services and texts. He grew weary of incomprehension and slid the book back into its pocket, propping his elbows on the back of the pew and letting his eyes roam along the mingled birds and flowers behind the altar.

“St. Columbine’s chapel,” Grey remarked. “
Columba
is dove, for the Holy Spirit. The columbine flower is supposed to look like a flock of doves.”

Stuyvesant couldn’t see it himself, but they were pretty. He looked around, and found several more doves on airy flowers.

After a while, the Catholic in him began to feel the urge for confession—wasn’t that what churches were for? First, he looked to see that the door was still closed, and even then, he spoke in a low voice.

“I may have found a way to get myself close to Bunsen.”

“Mmm?”

“Don’t know if you noticed, but he has a driver.”

“He would. Sarah says he spends his life traveling across the country giving speeches. Having a driver would be the only way he’d get any sleep.”

“Or keep from killing himself behind the wheel.”

Grey took his hands off the panel. “You don’t have to sound so regretful.”

Stuyvesant gave a rueful laugh. “Yeah, that would solve a number of our problems.” He gave a half-guilty glance at the altar, and wondered if that might be taken for a prayer. “But the driver’s not much of a mechanic, and he doesn’t look like a bodyguard. It seemed to me like Bunsen could use both.”

“So, what, you’re going to put in for the driver’s job?”

“I might have to encourage things a little.”

Grey had left the black panel at last, moving to a small framed painting of a dark-skinned mother and infant sitting on a donkey. He turned and frowned at Stuyvesant.

“By kidnapping the driver? Cornering him in a dark alley?”

“I won’t go anywhere near him.”

Grey picked up on the faint stress on Stuyvesant’s first word. “The Major,” he said in a flat voice.

“He has resources I don’t.”

“You’d be party to that?”

“I’m not a party to anything, just asking for information. He’s not going to put the driver in the hospital or anything. If nothing else, it would be stupid—Bunsen’s a clever boy, he might get suspicious.”

“You don’t think Bunsen has a whole platoon of drivers to choose from?”

“He may. In which case it’ll be back to the drawing board.”

Grey studied him, but whatever he saw in Stuyvesant’s face satisfied him, and he removed his reproving gaze, continuing his drift towards the front of the church. Once there, he tried to kneel on a cushion before the railing, but his left leg rebelled, leaving him to prop himself up sideways, arms stretched out across the altar rail for balance.

“Laura and Bunsen sure make a handsome pair,” Stuyvesant sent in the direction of Grey’s back.

After a time, long enough to recite a quick Hail Mary, Grey answered. “I am all right, Stuyvesant. Honestly. She was the love of my life, but that life, as I told you, is over. Laura has moved on, I have moved away, and I will never approach her as anything other than a friend; never. Please don’t worry. And you’re right; they are an extraordinarily handsome couple. Extraordinarily gifted as well.”

“So, what did you think of Bunsen?”

Grey struggled out of his uncomfortable perch to sit facing the church. “Are you asking as Harris Stuyvesant the man, or the Bureau of Investigation agent?”

“I’m not asking you to do my work for me, Grey. If he’s not the man I’m after, I’ll deal with it.”

“Well, in either case, I can’t tell you if he’s your terrorist or not. I will say, he’s every bit as magnetic as I’d expected. Bunsen’s the kind of man one would either shoot at sight, or follow off a cliff.”