Touchstone (50 page)

“Evening, Miss Hurleigh.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mention to anyone that I’m not in my room,” she said, meeting his gaze evenly.

“You’re far too tired to be disturbed,” he agreed.

“Either that or I couldn’t sleep and went for a breath of fresh air.”

“One or the other.”

“Good night, Harris. Thank you for everything.” She reached out and touched his arm, and turned to go.

But to his astonishment, instead of heading down the hallway to Bunsen’s room, she turned towards the stairs. Make-up; walking shoes; overcoat: Good Lord.

“Miss—Lady—er, Laura?”

She stopped to look over her shoulder at him.

“Would you like me to distract the guard?” She smiled at him, and Harris Stuyvesant would have happily sliced open an artery and bled onto the guard’s foot to distract him, if she’d asked.

They went through the silent house and past the kitchen to the back door. He touched her shoulder and breathed, “Wait here until he’s gone. And I should warn you, there may be another guard up past the chapel.”

“It won’t be a problem,” she said.

He slipped out, and nearly stepped on top of Gwilhem Jones, who cursed in surprise and asked what the hell he was up to. Stuyvesant said, “I thought I saw someone making off down the road out in front, and wondered if it might be one of the guards. But it’s not you.”

“Let’s go see.”

They went to see, and found what Stuyvesant expected, which was nothing. But when they got back to the door, there was no noble-woman standing behind it.

Chapter Sixty-Four

L
AURA
H
URLEIGH CLIMBED THE HILL
her feet had been climbing since she could walk. She stopped for a minute when she came to the viewing place above the servants’ hall to sit on the wrought iron bench, looking across the roof-tops of her home by the light of the almost-full moon.

Two or three windows glowed with light, but the outside lamps had been shut down. Without their interference, she could see the white mass of Grandmamma’s Madame Alfred Carriere roses along the wall, and behind them the faint sparkle of moon off moving water in the valley below.

She’d wandered these hills in moonlight since she was a child, letting herself out of the ancestral house and into the pale blue countryside, whose every lump and hollow she knew as well as the lumps and hollows of her own body. She had developed a reputation for dreaminess in those years of early adolescence; she thought it curious, then and now, how no one noticed that young Laura’s dreaminess corresponded to times of full moons and clement weather.

But people didn’t notice, generally speaking. They just created an image, and only if something happened to shatter the image completely did they see what lay behind it.

Even Richard. She was his helpmeet, a bright and dedicated combination of secretary and mistress who had brought with her a dowry comprising immense respectability and familial authority. She had felt his eyes on her this week-end, first approving, then increasingly astonished, and had no doubt that tonight he was lying in his bed picking over his grievances. By the time they assembled for church tomorrow morning, he would be cold and resentful.

Had she wanted to disarm the process, she would have had Harris Stuyvesant look away for a moment while she went to Richard’s room.

Men were such simple creatures, easily handled.

But instead, here she was, taking her leave of Hurleigh, about to set out across Gloucestershire in the middle of the night.

She should turn around and go back to Richard.

She did not.

With a final look at the other-worldly view, she took a torch from her pocket and switched it on, pointing it at the ground. She did not need it, and it made the world vanish in its dazzle, but it served to warn the guard of her approach.

“Who goes there?” a startled voice demanded.

“Hullo!” she called. “Sorry to surprise you like this, I just wanted a few minutes alone to say my prayers. Oh, it’s Laura Hurleigh,” she added, turning the light on her face for his benefit.

“Yes, my Lady. I thought everyone at the house was asleep for the night.”

She pointed the light back at the ground and continued moving towards the chapel. “The rest of them are, but it’s been a long day, and I couldn’t sleep. Do you mind awfully, if I just go in for a few minutes? You can come and watch, if you like. To make sure I don’t plant a bomb or anything.”

He chuckled along with her, and said, “I’m sure it will be all right.”

No doubt he was thinking how charming it was, that even a Red like her had prayers to say. He let her in, lit one of the paraffin lamps mounted on the walls, and went to the door. Seeing her kneel onto the cushion in one of the front pews and bow her head over her hands, he went outside, letting the door swing shut.

The tossing flame settled; more slowly, Laura’s thoughts did the same. She recited aloud the declarations of belief and her own pleas for help and guidance, ritual phrases that had not changed since childhood, words that ran through her lips with the familiarity of prayer beads through fingers. Empty, perhaps, but there were times when emptiness was to be desired.

At the end, she eased herself onto the smooth wood and pulled the oversized Hurleigh prayer book from its slot in the pew ahead. She let the pages fall open, let her eyes skip over the words she had recited a thousand times. Those words had not been empty to the men who shaped them: The words had burst like flame from their pens and their minds, shaping the hearts and souls of generations of Englishmen. On the other side of the globe, where the sun had already brought the Lord’s Day, men and women were opening their copies of the
Book of Common Prayer,
fingering those worn gilt letters on the cover, and listening to the day’s lessons and Gospel reading. Men in Nairobi and Delhi, women in Hong Kong and Sydney, reciting the liturgy of their grandparents, unaware as yet that the very heartbeat of their empire was about to falter and change irrevocably.

She’d heard that a heart could stop beating and then, under the impetus of a hard shock, start again. She’d also heard that, when a person dipped into the edges of death and was brought back to life, he was never the same.

Like Bennett.

That was what England was about to undergo, a transformative shock to its heart: shattering, heart-stopping, all-changing.

She closed the covers of the book and ran both thumbs across it, looking at the lettering.

St. Paul called it bearing witness; Emma Goldman called it propaganda by deed. In one week the miners’ agreement would run out and, she had no doubt, despite their efforts here, a strike would be called that would place the worker at the fore in Britain. The parasitic owners’ class, the class into which she had been born, was in its final days.

Testimony by deed.

The weight on her shoulders made her want to lie down before the altar and weep. She felt flattened by the consequence of all she had done that day; the fates of those sleeping men in the house below; the future of the sea of her countrymen with work-hardened hands and coal-blackened skins. She could not breathe for the awareness of what she owed family alone: her father the Duke, her mother the Duchess, her brothers and sisters, all the generations of a noble line. And that wasn’t even thinking of the burden of friendship and loyalty, all those women and men who had devoted their time to build Look Forward and Women’s Help.

And all the while, underlying it all, was the continual awareness of a blond man with emerald eyes, the only man she had truly loved, all her life: her responsibilities towards him were enormous.

As this endless day had worn on, she had felt more and more translucent, worn down by the effort of keeping the exquisite balance of forces. And she had done a good job—no, she had done the perfect job. For once, she was content with herself: No person on earth could have made more of this event than she had.

One more thing, yet to do.

Or rather, two: one for the world and the future, and one for herself alone.

Laura Hurleigh, in whose veins ran the blood of heroes, whose bones were the bones of warriors, sat in the quiet stone chapel amidst the looted artworks, feeling the prayers on her lips and thinking about tonight. It would be, she supposed, a betrayal of loyalty, but it could also be seen as a restoration of an earlier loyalty, set aright.

She sat in the Hurleigh chapel and searched her heart, and one by one, the objections fell away. When the last doubt had gone, she bowed her head, grateful for peace at last.

She put the prayer book into its slot, her thumb brushing a last time on the shiny lettering, and rose, holding to herself a comforting absence of thought. She let herself out of the chapel, thanked her father’s man politely, and walked back to the pathway.

At the viewing place where the paths converged, Laura raised her face to the stars. Then, instead of turning downhill to the house, she went up to the ridge, away from Hurleigh House and Richard Bunsen, and towards an earlier loyalty.

Bennett Grey came instantly awake at the first brush of finger-tips on the door-handle. His room was lit only by moonlight through the wide-drawn curtains: the rich odor of the Gloucestershire countryside wafted through the open window. The handle was slightly loose, and shifted a fraction of an inch in its housing before the mechanism engaged; it was that faint rattle that had snatched him out of sleep; movement in the strip of dim light at the door’s lower edge confirmed that someone stood there. The knob turned but the latch held. He heard a faint scratching sound at the wood.

His first thought was that Sarah needed something, and he started to call to her but it occurred to him that it could as easily be Stuyvesant. He lit the candle on the bedside table and walked softly over to the door, putting his mouth to the wood to say, “Who is that?”

The answer was a whisper. “Bennett?”

“Laura?”
He shoved back the latch and opened the door.

“Shh!” she hissed, and stepped inside. He eased the door shut behind her, and stepped around so the candlelight shone on her face.

Whatever brought her here, it planted no turmoil in her. She radiated calm, and looked as sure as a Madonna, her eyes smiling as she reached for the buttons of her coat.

“Will your neighbors hear us?” she whispered.

“Sarah’s at the far end,” he said, “and the innkeeper and his wife sleep underneath her room, so if we keep our voices low they—”

She let the coat slump to the ground and stepped towards him. His voice strangled in his throat as she lifted her mouth to his.

Her body against him was like a live electrical wire. The kiss went on, broken only when her fingers made contact with the bare skin of his back and shot a current up his spine, jerking back his shoulders and head, breaking the connection. He gasped and took a dizzy step away, feeling as if the top of his skull had come loose; his fingers dug into her shoulders as much to keep himself from falling as to hold her away.

“I can’t—God, Laura, you mustn’t do that. It’s, just…it’s too much.”

“No, Bennett my love, it’s not.”

His fingers tightened, pushing her, pulling her. “Laura, no, think about this. You and Bunsen—”

“Do you want me to go away?”

“Yes. No.”
God,
he swore, or pleaded.

“I need you, Bennett. Tonight, I need you. Please.”

He said nothing, as his excruciatingly sensitive nerve-endings listened to her heart beat, felt the night air uncurl from her hair, smelled the warm odor of silk from the blouse against her skin.

“Do you want me to go?” she repeated.

“I can’t…”

“You can,” she said, and the warm-honey intimacy of her tone made it hard to breathe. He knew that voice, had bathed in the sweetness of it during the weeks before he had gone away. Knowing and assured, it was the essence of the woman she had grown into, the woman he had helped to create, the woman who had matured in his arms and under his body. Now, the voice flooded into him, bringing him to a halt, the laboriously constructed machinery of his personality falling to pieces at her touch, all control ceded to her will.

All he could do was wait for her to put him back together again.

He didn’t know what she was seeing in his face, but she suddenly laughed—not a sound of triumph, but of understanding, even sympathy.

“Bennett, my sweet. I have made many choices in my life, but the only one I deeply regret was letting you walk away without saying a proper good-bye. May I do that, tonight?”

So, she was not proposing to throw over Bunsen and all his works; rather, she was proposing a coda on their long-over affair, giving it a rightful finish after all these years. He knew he should object, that she was being unfaithful to the man she had bonded herself to, but he could not summon the righteous protest: In truth, Richard Bunsen had nothing to do with this.

Some slight change in the fingers on her shoulders gave her his answer, and her eyes crinkled, a tiny shift of facial muscles that made him want to fall at her feet. Her hands came back up to rest on his ribs, and in an instant he was again connected to the electrical mains.

Her smallest gesture set him afire; there was no hope that he could control his body’s reaction to her. “I don’t think—” he started, but she silenced him with a gentle brush of her lips, warming now with the room.

Her fingers were warm, too, as they came down his belly to the waist of his pajamas, and continued inexorably on. His breath caught, and he struggled for control, but when a small sound of deep content came from her throat and her body pressed against his, he cried out.

“God,” he started to say,
I’m so sorry,
but her finger was on his lips, and she was looking at him with those dancing dark eyes. “Now,” she said, “maybe you’ll be able to keep your mind on me.”

He laughed breathlessly, and reached for the top button of her silk blouse.

Laura left in the morning when the stars began to fade. He pushed back the bed-clothes and sat up to light the candle again, but she stopped him.

“I want to remember you this way, rumpled and with your head on the pillow.”

“And unshaved.”

She bent down to salute his bristle with lips that were swollen with the night’s activities, then wrapped herself in his dressing gown and ducked next door to the bath-room. He got out of bed to retrieve the lower half of his pajamas and pulled them on, then obediently lay back and waited for her to return.

For the first time in eight years, ever since the essence of Bennett Grey had trickled into his new-born body on a battlefield in France, he felt at home.

The splashing noises ceased and after a minute she came back, rubbing her hair with his bath-towel. He watched her every move, the shift of her shoulder muscles as she bent to pull up her silk pants, the angle of her arm as she fastened the clasp on her brassiere, the smoothness of her leg stretched to receive the stockings.

Finally, she stood, brushed her skirt unnecessarily, and came to sit by him on the bed. They held each other until the dark threatened to leave from the sky, and she sat back, her hand cupping his face.

“Good-bye, my dear heart.”

“Come to Cornwall with me,” he said, although he knew what her answer would be.

“Maybe I will,” she said. “I’ll buy a pig and raise ten children with you, there at the end of the world.” She did not intend him to believe her. It was her way of telling him that their paths were going separate ways.

He knew it, anyway.

He kissed her hand, feeling her strong, supple fingers tighten on his, then loose again as her will took hold. “I won’t see you again, not for a long time.”