Touchstone (21 page)

Stuyvesant was hard put to keep his mouth straight.

“Oh, Bennett,” the young woman was gushing, “how
shame-making
of me to forget. But, sweet boy, it’s utterly
divine
to see you, I couldn’t
believe
it when I heard you were coming. How are you? Perhaps I shouldn’t ask.”

“Hello, Constance, you’re looking as lovely as ever. This is my friend Harris Stuyvesant, come to inspect the behavior of the natives. Stuyvesant, the Lady Constance Hurleigh.”

“Pleased to meet you, Lady Constance,” he said, drawing back again from the swing of the feather.

“Ah, yes, the American! Where are you from, Mr. Stuyvesant?”

“I was born in New York, although recent—”

“Oh, I
adore
New York, it just gives me a shiver down my spine every time Lady Liberty comes into view. The last time I was in New York, a friend took me in a circle around the statue in his aeroplane. Such a
thrill
—have you ridden in an aeroplane, Mr. Stuyvesant?”

“Once or tw—”

“I’ll never fly again. My naturopath swears that flying is just
ruinous
on the body’s internal timing mechanism and that one’s skin never recovers from the upset. And of course the skin is the largest organ in the body, did you know that?”

“I’ve heard that, yes.” By speaking firmly and quickly, he managed to slip in an entire four-syllable sentence. Lady Constance clearly took after her mother in the realm of conversation.

“This nation
so
neglects its skin. It’s shameful, we never allow the sun to fall on us without hats and clothing, which robs us of precious vitamins and causes the underlying muscles to tighten and twist.”

The repetition of the word
skin
brought enlightenment: This was the nude Hurleigh. He shot Grey a glance, found the man’s eyes laughing at him, and pulled his attention back to this voluptuous blonde armful. “You don’t say?” Perhaps if he showed enough interest, she would offer a demonstration: That should enliven the evening considerably.

But after a few minutes of increasingly technical monologue concerning gymnosophy, natural healing, and the chemical reactions of the body to the sun’s rays, Grey cut in. “Constance, dear heart, I must present Stuyvesant to your father. You’ll have all week-end to tell him everything you know about nudity.”

“It’s not nudity, you naughty man, it’s
naturism.
And I shall expect to see you again, Mr. Stuyvesant.”

Stuyvesant paused for a refill from the boy’s silver shaker, then allowed Grey to haul him off.

This time, they bypassed the others and made straight for the fire and the figure seated with his back to the rest of the room, drink in one hand and half-smoked cigar in the other. The keystone of the fireplace arch before him read:

ANNO

1577

R
DE
H

Stuyvesant wondered how it would feel, to run your fingers over a stone your ancestors had installed ten generations before.

Grey inserted himself between chair and stones and stood at attention, saying, “Your Grace, it’s very good to see you again. May I present my American friend Mr. Harris Stuyvesant?”

The man whose attention was reluctantly pulled from a contemplation of the flames—eleventh Duke of Hurleigh, descendant of Magna Carta signers, consulting tactician to generals, collector of porcelain animals, scourge of Oxford pranksters, Boer War hero, son and begetter of heroes, the man on whose shoulders one of the noblest families in the Empire was entering the modern age—resembled an aging bloodhound. He fixed Grey with a look, grunted by way of greeting, then tipped his head to survey Stuyvesant, head to foot. He did not appear impressed.

“Stuyvesant, eh? Any relation?”

“To the governor? Distant, Your Grace.”

“Money?”

“The other side got it.”

“Pity.”

“Sometimes. Other times it’s a burden I’m just as happy not to have.”

The dark eyes came to a focus with that remark. Stuyvesant stood easily under the scrutiny, his thoughts entirely hidden. He’d been looked at by harder men than this in his time. Not a whole lot of them, true, but a few.

“So what d’you do?”

“Sell cars. Fix them, too. You’ve got a problem with your Morris, by the way. Probably just the magneto timing off a bit. I thought I might look at it, if you don’t mind?”

The jowls went still, the cigar and drink dangled, forgotten. “Got a man for that.”

“It’s a tricky job, he may not have had time.”

“Been out,” the Duke admitted. “Broken leg. Not going to pay.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of asking payment of a man whose liquor I’m drinking,” Stuyvesant said in a shocked voice. Grey made a stifled noise and half-turned towards the fire. “I just like to see machines run sweetly.”

“As you wish,” Hurleigh said. But as Grey was bowing them away from his presence, he grumbled, “Come talk to me sometime, before you go. Like to meet an American with a bit of sense.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Stuyvesant said, and followed Grey away, leaving the Duke to his contemplation of the flames.

“How on earth did you know that approach?” Grey demanded.

“What, to offer a rich man something for nothing? Or to make him think one of his guests might be paying for his keep? You told me yourself he hates spongers.”

The man and two young women standing in earshot listened to the exchange in frank interest. “What have you been doing to Daddy, Bennett?” asked the girl whose coloring proclaimed her a Hurleigh.

“Hello, Evie, good to see you.” Introductions were made: Lady Evelyn Hurleigh, fourth and youngest daughter, polished and perfect and just turned nineteen, who was giving up a week-end in London’s prime husband-hunting season to report in to the country. She’d brought with her a girlfriend from London who might have been a twin: bare, sun-tanned arms, shingle-bobbed hair whose lower edges could etch glass, and expensive silk frocks that left no doubt concerning the girls’ matching boyish figures. Both wore face-paint—eyebrows plucked to an arch of astonishment, kohl exaggerating the eyes, and a red bow of mouth—atop bored expressions borrowed from a fifty-year-old roué. With them was the elder of the two surviving Hurleigh brothers, thirty-one-year-old Daniel, Marquess of Pontforth.

At first glance, the Hurleigh heir gave off the same nonchalant, too-young-for-the-War air as the chinless wonder who had mixed the martini. But this man was past thirty, and the childhood freedom of growing up the spare (as the saying went) to his brother’s heir had long worn away: The Marquess’s spine was ramrod-straight, his mouth wary, and his eyes twitched in continuous surveillance of the room. Stuyvesant had seen enough wounded officers to know this was one whose injuries went deeper than the physical; he would have bet that the glass the man gripped so hard was not his first of the evening.

Introductions were made; Stuyvesant shook hands, but Bennett saluted them with his drink. The thought occurred to Stuyvesant that he’d yet to see Grey shake hands with anyone.

“Honestly, Bennett, what
did
you say?” Evie persisted. “I’ve never seen Daddy meet someone and not end up roaring at them at least once.”

Grey explained what had happened; halfway through, Evie’s eyes started to sparkle and Daniel seemed to relax a bit.

“Well done, old man,” Daniel told Stuyvesant. “The Pater’s a tightwad until you get to know him, but you bowled right down his pitch.”

“He’s a tightwad even when you do know him,” his sister protested, and said to the others, “When Daddy heard about someone putting a pay telephone booth in his house, nothing would do but that we had one installed as well.”

“Oh, Evie, come now, the Pa’s not just tight. When it suits him, he’ll shell out like there’s no tomorrow. Remember the elephant? That must have cost him a packet.”

His sister laughed gaily, showing off an excellent set of very white teeth. “Oh, the elephant! I couldn’t have been more than three or four.”

Daniel explained. “One day—it was in August, so I was home for the long vac—we were sitting down to breakfast when the most ungodly row broke out from outside. When we went down the drive to see, there was a circus elephant and its handler marching across the ford.”

Evie broke in, unable to preserve her air of professional boredom in the face of the tale. “You see, Patrick and Pamma had been arguing about that story of the blind men and the elephant, and Daddy overheard them. So when he happened to find out the circus was coming to Oxford, he decided to give us all an illustration, and arranged to have the elephant brought here ’specially, just for us.”

“Mama had a fit because the dogs went bananas and her favorite hunter spooked and pulled a tendon, but it was one of the high points of our childhood, owning an elephant for an entire day.”

“It was absolute magic,” his sister agreed, her eyes wide at the memory.

Stuyvesant found himself rather looking forward to conversing with this patriarch of the Hurleighs.

The final leg of their circumnavigation of the room brought them to a quartet who might have been chosen as an illustration of Young Society. Grey’s sister was there, Sarah’s fair waves a perfect counterpoint to the glossy dark cap of her female companion and the darkly Brillantined heads of two men. All were laughing at a story the pudgy younger man was telling, and Sarah hooked her arm through her brother’s without breaking into the tale—one touch Grey seemed willing to tolerate.

“—just too divine,” the boy finished up. “It might have been Zuleika Dobson’s admirers tumbling into the Isis!”

Stuyvesant wondered if the laughter wasn’t just a little forced; certainly, Sarah wasted no time in turning to her brother and making introductions. The remarkably handsome man with the aristocratic nose was the younger Hurleigh son, Patrick; he ran an unimpressed eye down Stuyvesant’s evening dress and offered a limp hand.

In a flash, Grey’s enigmatic remark back in the car came back to Stuyvesant: that before the War, three sons would have been sufficient to preserve the Hurleigh name. He’d overlooked the remark at the time, because there were, after all, two sons left, but if one was so badly shaken by the War that eight years later his eyes were still jumpy, and the other, by all indications, lacked an interest in procreation, what of the Hurleigh heritage now?

He showed none of this, merely shaking the boy’s hand and going on to the others. The girl was Hurleigh sister number three, Pamela, the society gossip columnist, a more mature version of débutante Evelyn—Pamela’s face held no trace of baby fat, and the eyes beneath the kohl had a glint of hardness. She gave Grey a brief twitch of the lips, but studied this big American with a gleam of speculation that he feared had nothing to do with newspaper columns. Without taking her eyes off him, she introduced the rotund young storyteller as Gilbert Dubuque, owner of what Pamela called a “darling” antiques shop in Henley-on-Thames, a phrase that made Dubuque preen with pleasure. Dubuque’s evening shirt had ruffles down the front; he, too, studied Stuyvesant with a gleam in his eyes. Stuyvesant wasn’t surprised when the man found an excuse to reach out a manicured hand and give him a playful slap on the arm.

Stuyvesant gave him a bland smile, retreated a fraction, and glanced at Grey, anticipating a twinkle of mischief. Instead, he saw a face taut with the onset of pain; Grey’s free hand came up to massage his temple. The American waited until Grey looked his way, then gave the Englishman a brief jerk of his head. Relief flared in Grey’s eyes, and in a minute he found excuse to move away—unfortunately, taking Sarah with him. Doubly unfortunately, Gilbert Dubuque had seen Stuyvesant’s gesture of dismissal and read into it a very different meaning: He looked delighted, and sidled closer to Stuyvesant’s elbow.

Stuyvesant gritted his teeth and submitted to the flirtations of two people in whom he had less than no interest, making shallow and dutiful conversation, doing his best to appear both broke (for the shopkeeper’s sake) and dull (he really didn’t want his name in Lady Pamela’s widely read gossip column). It was hard going, and he wondered when the hell the dinner gong would sound.

At two minutes after eight, the Duke pulled out his pocket-watch and turned to glare at the door. Precisely thirty seconds later, Gallagher came through it as if responding to a telepathic summons, making straight for his master’s chair. He put his head down and murmured to the Duke, who listened, then waved the servant away in irritation. Gallagher gave his little bow and left; no gong sounded.

Five minutes later, the Duke repeated his act with the watch. He shook his head, jammed the device back into its pocket (Stuyvesant was aware of the room going quiet) and snapped: “Ging the ruddy wrong!”

Dubuque frowned; Patrick winced; the boy at the bar tittered; those who knew the Duke eased away, and Gallagher braced himself like a man set to go over the top. The Duke’s mouth came open again, ready to issue a loud command to servants, family, and guests alike, but at that very instant a swirl of movement at the door and a couple of brief exclamations of relief doused the flame of anger before it ignited the cord.

The woman who swept in the door had to be the missing Hurleigh, Lady Laura, doer of good works and close friend of that subject of official suspicions, Richard Bunsen. Tall for a woman, slim as a boy, thirty-three years old, the eldest Hurleigh of her generation, she seemed oddly familiar—and after a beat he realized why: Given long hair and archaic dress, she could pass for that Spanish ancestress of hers overlooking the stairway. She had the same dark coloring, same almond eyes, that authoritative nose over a Renaissance mouth that looked as if it had a sweet, or a secret, tucked into its corner. Beyond the surface resemblance, her head possessed the same tilt of inner amusement, and she moved with an air of regal certainty, sure beyond a doubt of her place in the world.

She was the most magnificent woman Harris Stuyvesant had ever laid eyes upon.

Lady Laura swept into the room, kissing her mother with affection and tossing remarks along the way as she moved towards her father. The Duke’s rage subsided beneath the oil of her presence, and he greeted his daughter with a mild snap about her tardiness. She kissed his cheek, gave him a graceful and apparently sincere apology, accepted a glass of champagne from Deedee, and took a sip. On the count of three, as if her sip had been the signal the butler had been waiting for, the sound of the gong rose up from below, echoing throughout the ancient rooms and setting the crowd into motion.