Touchstone (51 page)

“Actually,” he said, “I thought I might come to the chapel this morning, for services.”

She sat back sharply. “Please don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Please, Bennett, promise me you won’t. I couldn’t bear saying good-bye twice.”

He studied her face, frowning slightly, listening to unspoken messages. But in the end he nodded, and she kissed him again.

“Besides, it would be too much of a shock to see a pagan like you with a prayer book in his hand two Sundays in a row. And who knows?” she said as she stood up. “You may look up one of these days in Cornwall and see me.”

“And what if you find that I already have a wife raising her own pig and ten children?”

“Then I suppose we’ll just have to talk about converting into Mormons or Moslems or something polygamous.”

“Take care of yourself, Laura,” he said. “Don’t let Bunsen push you around.”

“Never,” she said with a grin.

And she was gone.

He blew out the candle and settled back against the pillows, smelling her, feeling the air against his face that had so recently lain against hers. The world was filled with her again, and paradoxically, her means of saying good-bye had guaranteed that she would be with him forever. He lay with his eyes on the ceiling and his inner vision on Laura’s face, and wondered what it was that so alarmed her about seeing him in church. Before he could solve the problem, sleep claimed him.

He slept so deeply, he did not consciously hear the sound of the motorcar pulling up in front. Did not hear the pounding on the innkeeper’s door or the raised voices from the far end of the building. It wasn’t until the feet were outside and the fist was at his very door that Grey startled awake from a dream, paralyzed with horror and the sure knowledge that he had overlooked something: something frightening and immediate and terribly, terribly urgent.

Chapter Sixty-Five

T
HE CLOCK HAD JUST CHIMED
seven on Sunday morning when Laura Hurleigh climbed the stairs in the family house, greeting the man who had spent the night napping lightly in the hallway.

“Good morning, Mr. Stuyvesant.”

“Good morning, Miss Hurleigh,” he replied.

“I fear you are not very rested,” she said.

“Not very, no.”

“Nor I,” she said, “although I think for rather different reasons.” She showed him an unexpected and demure dimple, then let herself into her room.

He stared at her closed door, and gave a startled bark of amusement.

When everyone was tucked into their breakfast ninety minutes later, Stuyvesant went to his quarters. He bathed and shaved and eyed his bed with longing, then looked at his watch: 8:55. If he hustled, he could just make it to the Dog and Pony and back to the chapel to meet the 10:00 service. He put on his coat again and climbed the hill past the chapel to the ridge path.

The morning, when Stuyvesant turned his mind to it, was perfectly glorious, with all the requisite birds, flowers and fluffy white gamboling lambs. His mind, however, was bouncing around rather like one of those lambs between that delicious and suggestive dimple, and the thought that although breaking into Bunsen’s office was a priority, perhaps he didn’t need to address the job tonight, ending up wondering if Sarah would find stage plays too bourgeois an entertainment.

Distracted by both the thoughts and his surroundings, Stuyvesant didn’t register the car parked at an odd angle in front of the Dog and Pony until he was climbing the penultimate stile and the sun, reflecting off its wind-screen, momentarily blinded him.

He looked, and looked more closely, and then he was pounding across the field and hurdling the last stone wall in one leap. He diverted only to slap his hand on the car’s hood—still hot—then swung around the permanent fixture of the leaning bicycle and through the door of the inn, bounding up the stairs, not needing to follow the sound of raised voices to know where he was going.

Grey’s door was shut but fortunately not locked, or he’d have smashed it from its hinges when he went through it; as it was, the door crashed open so hard it bounced off the wall and slammed shut again.

Aldous Carstairs whirled at the interruption, cutting short his harangue and taking a step back from the object of his wrath. Grey was huddled on the edge of the bed, bent over his knees in a futile attempt to find shelter from Carstairs’ words.

“Stuyvesant!” Carstairs snarled. “My God, you’d better hope nothing comes of this or you’ll spend the rest of your life in a British prison, I’ll see to it personally.”

Stuyvesant shoved himself between the two men, then stepped forward onto Carstairs’ toes, forcing him to retreat.

“Let’s you and me go outside and you can tell me what the problem is,” he said firmly, but before he could get Carstairs out the door, the man dumped everything across Grey’s head.

“They found Bunsen’s work-room, where he made the bombs, that’s the problem. And Captain Grey here spent all last week-end in the company of your Mr. Bunsen, but didn’t think to mention that the man made him the least bit suspicious.”

“Did they find any sign of the missing explosive?”

“The missing—? No, nothing, just the equipment.”

“Bomb?”
said a voice. The big man glared furiously at Carstairs, then turned to see Grey, squinting as though into a bright light, his face screwed up with the pain.

“Yeah,” Stuyvesant said. “Mr. Carstairs here got rumor that some of the Army’s bomb-making materials walked off. Looks like more than a rumor.” He looked back at Carstairs. “When did you come across this? Have they had a chance to look for fingerprints?”

“No, they haven’t had a chance to look for fingerprints, bloody hell, man, Bunsen’s made a bomb and I want to know why you didn’t bother to ask Grey about—”

“For Christ sake, Grey spent maybe five minutes in conversation with Bunsen, all week-end.”

“Then you should have arranged for them to talk further!” Carstairs shouted. On the heels of his shout, small sounds came from two directions: Outside the door, Sarah tentatively called her brother’s name; from the bed, a thin sound of protest, obscuring a word.

“You’re not helping matters any,” Stuyvesant snapped at Carstairs, and squatted beside the small man. “Bennett, I’m sorry. Did you say something?”

“She…” Grey said, and gasped, pressing the heels of his hands into his temples. “Ah, God. Something.”

The door creaked open, but Stuyvesant didn’t look around.

“She? You mean Sarah? Or Laura? Laura was here, wasn’t she?” One pained eyelid crept open, looking a question at him; Stuyvesant gave a shrug. “Somebody had to get her past the guards.”

“You let Lady Laura out of the house? And you call yourself a bodyguard!” Carstairs sneered. “Sounds to me like you’ve got them wandering all over the bloody countryside. Do you even know where Bunsen is now?”

“Shut up!” Stuyvesant ordered over his shoulder, then calmly went on to Grey. “What did Laura tell you?”

Carstairs was bending over Stuyvesant, snarling at the back of Grey’s neck. “Have you been up to something with the Hurleigh woman? Christ, Grey, maybe you’re in on it, as well.”

“Carstairs, back the fuck off!” Stuyvesant said warningly. “Bennett, please, if you have something to say, now would be a really good time.”

“Hard to think. There was…church.”

“There’s a church service about to begin, yes.”

Carstairs’ arm snaked past Stuyvesant and locked on Grey’s hunched shoulder. “Is something going to happen at the service?”

Grey cried out at Carstairs’ touch, and Stuyvesant snapped upright. In a convulsive twist of muscle and sinew, his left hand drove upwards with the strength of his entire body behind it, connecting with the point of Carstairs’ chin. The Englishman’s head cracked back and he fell, limp before he hit the floor. Sarah peered wide-eyed at the dark rag-doll at Stuyvesant’s feet.

“Sorry,” Stuyvesant told her, and stepped over Carstairs’ legs to feel his throat for a pulse: alive. Sarah’s voice came, asking what was happening, if that was—but he turned his back on her and returned to Grey, holding his hand over the hunched shoulder, not quite touching him.

“Bennett, tell me.”

Grey tentatively raised one eye from his fetal crouch. “Did you kill him?” he croaked.

“Not yet. What is it about Laura?”

“She said. She was here, all night. I thought…It felt like the parting we never had, those years ago. Not unfaithfulness, you understand?”

“Bennett, for Christ sake.
What did she tell you?
”

“Sorry. There’s something, I can feel it there, the Major got in the way.” Stuyvesant forced a lid on his impatience, seeing at last that the man was trying to retrieve some stray piece of knowledge driven into hiding by Carstairs’ arrival.

“It was deliberate,” Grey said suddenly. “She did everything she could to keep me from paying attention to what she was thinking. Like that time in the crowded pub, with you. There was something you were hiding, I just couldn’t hear it behind the noise. Was that about the bomb? And you didn’t want me to know?”

“Yeah.”

“You should have told me.”

“Bennett—” Stuyvesant began, but the man waved his reminder away.

“She came here while I was asleep. Two minutes after she came in, her hand was on my cock, and two seconds after she left this morning, I fell sound asleep. She knew I would. Deliberately not giving me a chance to stand back and listen to her.”

Stuyvesant made an impatient gesture. “You told me that, what’s that got to do with—”

“I mean, good-bye. Final. She said she might see me again, but she made certain that I would not come to the church service, and the way she was holding herself—it was halfway to good-bye.”

“Shit,” Stuyvesant said as his mind opened to the knowledge.

Not Bunsen: certainly not Bunsen alone.

Laura. Lady Laura Hurleigh, the natural-born strategist.

The chapel, God damn it. He looked at his wrist-watch—quarter to ten, and no telephone in miles. Was that a church-bell?

He turned to the door, then stopped, and knelt to dig into Carstairs’ pockets—keys in one pocket, gun in another.

“Get your brother out of here,” he told Sarah. “Take him to London, take him to Cornwall, I don’t care, just get him out of here.”

Without waiting to answer her protests, he dove into the hallway and down the stairs, taking them three at a time, to explode out of the front door of the hotel. He dropped behind the wheel of the car, and shoved in the key.

(
Why was Carstairs so shit scared?
his mind nagged.
The idea of a bomb a week ago didn’t make him turn a hair, but this morning it scared the hell out of him.
)

The city car bounced up the rutted lane to the wooden gate at its end. Stuyvesant drove straight through it, sending pieces of wood flying, one of them coming down hard on the wind-screen ahead of him. Past the spider-web of cracks he could see a stretch of bumps and stones and terrified sheep, and the car cracked and screamed as he forced it cruelly over the rough pasture, his mind chewing at the question.

(Carstairs didn’t believe in the bomb, until his men found the evidence.)

(But he went ahead as if he did. Why?)

(Because it kept me happy while he worked on Grey?)

Another gate fell to the fenders, then another—

(He thinks the bomb is Bunsen’s. Grey thinks it’s Laura’s. Are the two doing it together?)

—the last of which bent metal back into the tire, making steering almost impossible—

(But why the chapel this morning and not the dinner last night?)

—and sending a scream that put his teeth on edge until the rubber shredded and the car tried to dig itself into the field—

(The Duke wasn’t at the dinner last night.)

—but there was the gate to the Hurleigh woods—

(two ounces could level a room)

—so he abandoned the crippled car—

(propaganda by act)

—at the top of the path and ran.

(The assassination of a Prime Minister? Or the murder of a Duke?)

(A human Zinoviev letter, a last-minute blow to swing the weight of public opinion.)

A martyr for the cause.

Stuyvesant ran.

Down the winding path he flew, crashing through the trees to cut past loops and nearly coming to grief a dozen times, until ahead he caught the gleam of the white gravel path.

Only when the chapel bell tower came into view did his steps falter.

He wouldn’t trust Aldous Carstairs’ claim that the sun was rising in the east, yet here he was, about to draw his gun on some of the most important people in England, based on Carstairs’ evidence.

But if there was a bomb—he had no choice, did he? Christ, he wished Grey really was a mind-reader, it would make life a hell of a lot easier.

As he came near, he heard singing, a hymn accompanied by an organ. A man stood outside of the chapel’s porch; he saw Stuyvesant coming and moved down the white path towards him: Gwilhem Jones, he was glad to see, rather than Exeter or one of the other government men—long discussions would not be necessary.

When Jones was close enough to hear, Stuyvesant started to talk, but kept trotting towards the chapel. Jones fell in beside him.

“There may be a bomb, no details but with everyone gathered together like this, I think we need to clear the church. I need you to back me up, and be ready to shoot anyone who makes any sudden move. Can you do that?”

“The Prime Minister’s in there. And the Duke and Duchess.”

“I know. Try not to hit one of them.”

The Welshman looked queasy, but he reached under his coat-tails to loosen his gun, which Stuyvesant took as answer enough.

He paused for an instant in the porch, hand on the latch, and looked at Jones. (
If Carstairs is shitting me around on this, I’ll murder him.
) “We’re particularly concerned about Bunsen’s party. And Lady Laura.”

Jones’s eyebrows shot up, and he opened his mouth, but then he gave a sideways shrug as if to say,
It’s your neck, Yank.
Stuyvesant opened the door.

Inside the chapel lay a Sunday image of men in suits punctuated by a very few ladies’ hats. Candles burned, the windows glowed, and a boy in a white robe was settling a cross into a holder up near the altar. This hymn was the processional, and the service had not yet begun. The priest, who had been watching the boy for mistakes, turned away in satisfaction to face the congregation, only to have his gaze outraged by a wind-blown, red-faced individual dressed in rough, mud-spattered tweed, crashing down the center aisle. When his eyes traveled down to the revolver in the intruder’s hand, he took a step back and his jaw dropped open.

The congregation did not notice at first, since the hymn had just ended and they were fussing to trade their hymnals for prayer books, but the priest gaped at Stuyvesant, clearly expecting to be shot dead by a madman.

Stuyvesant rounded the pews and came to a halt with his back to the priest and altar, directly in front of the family. The Hurleighs were in the front row, behind a solid wooden divider that held prayer books and needlework cushions for kneeling. Laura Hurleigh sat between her father and the Prime Minister. Richard Bunsen sat in the pew behind them, next to Herbert Smith; the Duchess was on the Duke’s other side.

“What is the meaning of this?” The outraged voice belonged to the Duchess.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Stuyvesant said. “We’ve got a bit of a problem. I need you, the Duke, and Mr. Baldwin to leave immediately. Everyone else keep very, very still, and by that I mean do not move except to breathe. We don’t want any accidents here.”

Jones was at the front of the other row of pews, his gun out and pointing over the heads of the congregation. Faces went slack with shock, but as far as Stuyvesant could tell, no faces showed more nervousness than others. Baldwin stood up, his only sign of uncertainty the prayer book he still clasped in his hand. Julian Exeter, seated in the back, rose, as well.