Touchstone (9 page)

Chapter Twelve

S
TUYVESANT TRAILED
Grey at a distance, letting the man work off the alcohol-fueled anger, watching the small figure stump through the lumpy pasture that he had called a Phoenician village. It was the knee that caused Grey’s uneven gait, Stuyvesant saw—that and the drink: He used his right leg to climb, drawing the left up behind it. Probably the same war injury that had blown him to pieces and—if Carstairs wasn’t just feeding him a line of crap, if Grey’s business with the cigarette case hadn’t been some kind of stunt—had left the officer some pretty strange talents.

Grey wove a path among the hummocks and walls that lay half hidden beneath centuries of grass and ivy, ferns and bramble, hawthorn and gorse. Twice he clambered over waist-high remains of walls, where the grass showed evidence of regular passage; once he nearly fell; another time he paused to shed his jacket. The buried village ended, but Grey kept on, over a rickety stile and along a sheep-worn path to the top of the hill, where an enormous stone slab protruded from the turf. He climbed onto it and turned his back to Cornwall while he rolled up his shirt-sleeves, then abruptly vanished; Stuyvesant hoped that merely meant that he had sat down.

Stuyvesant took his time, pausing to examine the exposed stonework, turning occasionally to admire the view. Twice he found himself kneading the back of his neck, as if the hairs there felt some distant marksman settling his sights on an out-of-place Bureau agent, but he could see nothing, and told himself that it was just a memory spilling over from that earlier trench sensation. Much as he had disliked having Carstairs so close, he was finding it equally uncomfortable not knowing where the man was.

But he told himself not to be childish: If Carstairs wanted him dead, he wouldn’t have had to travel to Cornwall to do it.

Still, the back of his neck was not much interested in logic, and subsided only when he cleared the ridge and the countryside was temporarily out of sight.

The stone slab was on the very crest of the hill, surrounded by a nest of brambles and gorse. Between the thickness of the thing and the rise it sat on, he could not see Grey at all. It had to have been put here, Stuyvesant supposed—one of those massive and mystifying prehistoric structures, Stonehenge’s little cousins, that he’d seen standing, singly or in groups, across the face of Cornwall. Tombs or temples or something. Sacrificial altars for the local druids.

In any case, this was not just a piece of bedrock from which the soil had eroded; its presence was artificial, although it must have weighed tons: There was room for three or four men to stretch out on top.

As Grey was stretched out, sprawled with the abandon of a sleeping boy, head resting on his folded jacket, face raised to the sun. Feeling oddly middle-aged, forced to use the rough footholds as a ladder where Grey had gone up them as a stairway, Stuyvesant scrambled onto the high surface. Once there, he brushed off his hands and stepped to the end of the rock—only to shy suddenly back, startled by the precipitous drop at his feet. The brambles had hidden how close the rock was to the cliff’s edge: One kick from Grey’s boot and he’d have been airborne.

He glanced involuntarily down at the small man. Despite his shut eyes, Grey’s mouth now had a distinct curve, as if he’d felt his companion’s abrupt movement, known the reason, and found it amusing. Disconcerted, Stuyvesant retreated to the far side of the deliciously warm stone and settled with his feet pointing towards the mainland: No Bureau agent worth his salt would sit with his back exposed, but the nerve-endings along his spine reassured him that the drop to the sea was as good as a wall. He laid his coat to one side and thumbed open the buttons to his waistcoat, leaning back on braced arms and crossing his outstretched legs at the ankles. His upper foot beat a rhythm in the air until he noticed it, and stopped.

At first, his mind circled furiously around the problem of Bennett Grey: Who was he, why had Stuyvesant been brought to him, how could he use the man to get at The Bastard? But after a few minutes, a bird passing high overhead distracted him from purposeful thoughts, and he couldn’t help noticing how sweet the air was, and how the sky was an endless arc of blue with a smatter of decorative clouds out to the west. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw that the outstretched water, far from being huge and empty, supported a surprising number of boats, both near the shore and out to the horizon.

Harris Stuyvesant filled his lungs, and eased the breath out. No offices here, no bureaucrats shoving cups of tea at him, no muscular toughs in cloth caps jamming their leaflets in his face, demanding that he admit the iniquities of mine owners. No knots of tension, no sudden wariness on seeing a handful of men coming down the sidewalk at him. No sidewalks, for that matter. No parcels or carts that could hide a bomb—that sudden flash: shattering glass, torn bodies.

He took another slow breath, and felt peace slip over him like a glove. He wanted to lie down next to Grey and take a nap.

Instead, he sat upright and patted his pockets for the cigarette case, keeping his eyes on the countryside. He could now see that the ruined foundations of the field below formed three clusters of rough joined circles, marks from a prehistoric giant’s bubble pipe.

“Nice view.”

“The Beacon, they call it.”

Stuyvesant glanced over his shoulder at the cliff’s edge, but could see no indication of a structure. “An early light-house that fell into the water?”

“More like an enormous pile of firewood. In 1588.”

“Fifteen…? Ah, the Armada.”

“Possibly the first beacon lit, on July 19. And very probably by an inhabitant of my cottage.”

“You’d think they’d at least have carved the date over the door. I mean, there’s history and there’s
History.
”

“Just another day, fending off the Spanish threat.”

“And is that really a Phoenician village?”

“The men from the land of purple,” Grey said, his voice going dreamy. “A nation of sailors who plied the seas from Alexandria to the gates of Gibraltar and beyond, their ships mighty with sail and oar, who traveled at night by the pole star. A trading people, the Phoenicians, peace-loving for the most part, who nonetheless held off a siege of Nebuchadnezzar for thirteen years. All in all, not a bad paradigm for a sea-going people.

“However, no,” he added, his voice coming down to earth. “I shouldn’t think that is a Phoenician village. Although it was no doubt some kind of settlement, round houses with a wide rampart either to keep in cattle or for defense, take your pick. This is the land of the Celt, Mr. Stuyvesant, who brought their Trevethy and their Tregonning, their Penwith and Penhallam, their stone circles and standing rows, their barrows and cairns.

“But I enjoy the idea of Phoenicians trading along the English coastline, carrying alluvial tin from Cornwall to far-off Tyre and Sidon and Rome. Certainly their ships traveled the coasts of Spain and France, and the Channel is narrow; what would be more natural than to venture across on a summer’s day and find the Celts of Brittany here, too, raising their standing stones, worshipping their mid-winter gods, speaking their melodious tongue that survived Rome and the Anglo Saxons and is only now dying out? When I sit up here on the Beacon in the moonlight, out of the corner of my eye I can see their sails rising through the mist, hear the creak and splash of their ranked oars, watch their swarthy faces greeting Robbie’s forefathers, smell the cook-fires as they set up on the shore.”

It was hypnotic, Grey’s vision unfolding behind Stuyvesant’s eyes, until he, too, could picture the sails that had rotted into dust twenty centuries before, hear the voices speaking a tongue dead nearly as long. “There was an archaeologist from Cambridge,” Grey went on, “two or three summers ago, who was digging up a site a bit like it on the other side of St. Just. He showed up here one day and wanted to poke about—you can see, if you look carefully, the lines of a hill fort atop that last rise. But the Celts were an odd people, at home with the Other World, and it does not seem right to throw the cold light of science onto their magical constructions. So I told him he could argue with the next owner about it after I was dead.”

Silence fell, natural as breath. Stuyvesant blinked, and realized that he still had the silver case in his hand, his thumb traveling back and forth over the engraving on the front, his fingers aware of the shrapnel gouge on the back. He clicked it open and allowed his fingers to meditate over the cigarettes, automatically bypassing the solitary American citizen; then he caught himself, and pulled that one out and placed it between his lips. He turned to extend the case to Grey, and was struck by the man’s face: skin gone rosy with warmth, with a faint sheen of sweat, head back and mouth half open to suck in the sea air. The man’s every pore was slack with pleasure as he reveled in the sensation of lying on a warm rock in the sun on a cool spring day.

Then Stuyvesant’s perception shifted, and he realized it was not just pleasure he was seeing, but something close to ecstasy. Grey looked like a man having sex.

Startled, the American turned away sharply to dig around for his lighter. As the breeze cleared the smoke from his face, he noticed a spot of red far below: Robbie, perched like a gargoyle atop the wall, guarding the way to his hero’s abode.

He glanced sideways again at the rapturous expression of his companion, and said, “You must feel like God, up here on a day like this.”

“There aren’t all that many days like this,” Grey murmured.

“Is the view the reason you moved to Cornwall? Your voice doesn’t sound like you were born and raised here.”

“Cornwall is a refuge for me, not a birthplace. I came here because I started walking, and here was where I ran out of ground. I stayed because I can see the enemy coming, with enough warning for me to take a running leap into the sea if I want.” Grey’s voice was light, but Stuyvesant did not think he was altogether joking. Then again, Grey had seen Carstairs coming: Did he have other enemies? Or had he simply not wanted to take his running leap?

“Tell me, Captain Grey, if you sometimes find people physically unbearable, do you find Nature as powerful a sensation in the opposite direction?”

Grey let his head flop sideways towards his interrogator; one eyelid opened to reveal a slit of green. “Now, there is one question that would never even occur to the Major. Or, I venture to say, to most of the agents in your Bureau of Investigation. Which I suppose is why I agreed to talk to you.” It also appeared to be a question Grey did not intend to answer. He spotted the silver case and the lighter sitting on top of the American’s folded tweed coat, and to Stuyvesant’s relief, half raised himself out of his sprawl to reach for the case.

“Do you know—” Stuyvesant stopped, then gave a brief, embarrassed laugh and continued. “This is going to sound pretty stupid, but do
you
know just who Aldous Carstairs is? In the government, I mean. I came across him in a sort of roundabout way and like I said, I never got around to asking his position.”

“I doubt that he’d have told you if you asked. The Major I knew envisioned himself as a secular
éminence grise.
He taught himself to read Italian so he could quote Machiavelli, with an atrocious accent I might add. I shouldn’t be surprised if his position doesn’t actually exist. I should think all governments have people like him—the man behind the scenes, the man who takes care of things when prominent people can’t afford to dirty their hands. The man no one acknowledges, and everyone uses. If you’re fortunate, he’s happy to live in his dark hole, like a cockroach beneath the floorboards. If you’re not, he takes you over.”

“He’s not with Intelligence, then?”

“He was, but by now he could be anything. You’d probably find the Major is his own show, no matter what the paperwork says.” Grey got his cigarette going and lay back, one ankle propped across the other upraised knee.

“He called it the Truth Project,” he told Stuyvesant without preface. “A civilian project intended to explore quick, humane alternatives to traditional slow, ineffective, and often brutal interrogation techniques, although I always got the impression that the Project itself was just one part of some larger intent.” Before Stuyvesant could decide how to respond, Grey went on. “You may as well tell me about my sister.”

“I don’t know your sister.”

“You will, if the Major has anything to say in the matter. You’ll like her.”

“Why, is she blonde and needing protection?”

Grey laughed, a surprisingly free and unencumbered sound. “Blonde, yes, although she’s grown out of her kitten phase. Come to think of it, you’re probably finding kittens a bit tiresome yourself. Ten years ago, you’d have groveled at Sarah’s feet. What is she involved in, that she’s attracted the Major’s attention?”

Stuyvesant squinted at the crazy quilt of fields below, trying to rein in his irritation. Back at the house, Grey had called him tough, and he was—but he knew his toughness was also a mask, in daily life as much as in working undercover. Not many would have guessed that Harris Stuyvesant, big, hard, humorless Fed, could easily lose half a day in an art museum, or that about one time in ten, a night at the opera brought tears to his eyes. It was extremely disconcerting to think that this man could so readily trace the softness in him.

“Yeah, well,” he said, “I’ll do my best not to ravage the girl. I don’t know exactly what she’s involved with—like I said, Aldous Carstairs isn’t the most generous font of information. But when I gave him the name of the man I’m after, Carstairs happened to know that your sister has been seen in his company recently. And before Big Brother Grey asks: no, it doesn’t look like your sister and my man are linked directly. It’s more that they have a friend in common, a young woman by the name of Laura Hurleigh.”

Chapter Thirteen

G
REY’S RIGHT HAND,
carrying the cigarette to his mouth, hesitated for an instant before completing its arc. “Laura Hurleigh. Yes, I know that my sister works with her. I knew the Hurleighs myself, a long time ago.”

“The whole world knows the Hurleighs.” Even in the States it was a rare month that didn’t see some exploit of one Hurleigh or another written up for the amusement of the masses. After Carstairs told him the young woman’s name on Saturday, Stuyvesant had gone to the reading room to bone up on
Debrett’s
and
Burke’s
guides to the peers, and to leaf through back issues of the
Times
and the
Illustrated London News.
But even before that research, he’d known of the Hurleighs: blood bluer than that of the current residents of Buckingham Palace; a history stretching back to the Magna Carta; related to half the titles in the realm; with a country house in Gloucestershire, a much-photographed house in London, a Scottish hunting lodge, and an innate knack for quirky and occasionally bizarre behavior.

Debrett’s
history of the family began with 1215, when a Hurleigh ancestor had been among the barons forcing concessions from a king at Runnymede, and went on to recount a story concerning a seventeenth-century Hurleigh, a chicken, and the Queen.
Burke’s
more laconically recited battles won by Hurleighs over three centuries—Stuyvesant got the impression that the Hurleigh decorations would fill the back of a good-sized delivery van—culminating with the heroic death in France of this generation’s eldest son, Thomas, and a minor
coup de guerre
in the 1916 Palestine campaign by the current Hurleigh heir, Daniel, shortly after his twenty-second birthday.

On the non-military fields of battle, the current generation looked to live up to the iconoclastic strain in the family line: One Hurleigh sister wrote a wildly successful gossip column for one of the afternoon newspapers, breathless and daring and regularly skirting the edge of actionable; another was an outspoken advocate of nudism, with a preference for conducting interviews in her chosen state. The current, eleventh, Duke, whose given names were Godlake Reginald Gryffin Herbert Noah, held a string of titles (some of which were so obscure their origins had cobwebs, such as Holder of the Pen to the Prince of Wales). He had been a close personal friend and informal advisor to three monarchs and seven of the last ten prime ministers, and was known for his extensive collection of Staffordshire porcelain dogs, his expertise in Roman Britain, and his picturesque habit of running intruders off his land with a pack of hounds—rumor had it there was an annual cup for pranksters from nearby Oxford, given to the first team to plant their college flag on the Hurleigh doorstep during something called Eights Week. The family did have a few quiet and hardworking members, some of whom went so far as to generate income, but those dull and responsible Hurleighs were for the most part overlooked by the press.

“That is true. But I mean to say, I knew them to stay with—they’re distant cousins through our mothers—our grandmothers used to ride with the same hunts. I used to meet Thomas and Laura at children’s parties and such, and I spent two or three long vacs at Hurleigh House, beginning when I was maybe twelve. I was between Thomas and Daniel in age.”

That Bennett Grey had grown up alongside the Hurleighs confirmed Stuyvesant’s suspicions of the man’s class. Even in the relatively egalitarian U.S. of A., the rich tended to live in each other’s pockets; in England, he thought, it was unlikely that children of the aristocracy would be permitted to mingle with those too far below them in rank. Grey might be chopping his own firewood now, but Stuyvesant would lay money that he’d started out in a house considerably grander than the stone cottage below.

“What is Laura doing with your agitator?” Grey asked.

“Didn’t you know? All the best upper-class girls have to collect a few revolutionaries before they settle down to a good marriage and good works.”

Grey sat up, tucking his heels under him. “Is this confirmed, or a tabloid rumor?”

“Twice in the past year, Lady Laura traveled to the States on the same ship as my agitator.”

There was a moment of silence, as Grey thought about this. “A commoner?”

“One grandfather was knighted, the other was a stone mason, son of a coal miner.”

“I can imagine what the Duchess had to say about the liaison.”

“I don’t suppose Lady Laura’s parents care for it any more than an untitled family would. But apparently she has an independent income from a granny who died, which gives her a fair bit of leeway when it comes to thumbing her nose at Daddy.” This tidbit of gossip was thanks to one of the scandal sheets, disapproving of Lady Laura’s unseemly dedication to the great unwashed of the East End through her free medical clinics.

“The Laura I knew would never thumb her nose at her father unless there was a purpose for doing so. Laura has always been a brilliant natural strategist—she’d be far more likely to pat the Duke’s graying head, sit down with him, and in five minutes flat have him believing the whole thing was his idea. And I’ve seen Laura get around the Duchess, as well, a claim few can make. So, which of Laura’s crazes had got my sister into trouble? The clinics or the politics?”

“I’d say the politics.” It would seem that Grey kept up with his sister’s interests, despite Carstairs’ claim that the siblings saw each other sporadically. “Although I don’t know that she’s in any trouble, exactly.”

“The Major thinks she is. How do you tie in?”

“Okay, it’s like this. Because the man I’m after has been very good at covering his trail, as far as my bosses are concerned he’s no more than a suspect. I came here for two reasons: One, to see if he’s been doing the same things here that nobody’s been talking about, and two, to find out about him. He doesn’t have a record here, other than small stuff, so I plan to work my way into his circle and take a look from the inside. It’s what I do best—in my job, we call it going undercover. Basically I follow my nose and see what I can unearth.”

“And in the course of your information-gathering, you met the Major, and he suggested you might use me to make contact with Sarah, and from her to your man?”

This was no turnip-head farmer, that was for sure. “In my experience, the only sure way into any radical group is by personal introduction. If I were just to walk in off the street, it would take me months to earn as much trust as I could get if someone on the inside vouched for me.”

“My sister being the one you want to vouch for you.” Grey’s voice had gone cool.

“I’d be undercover—he’ll probably never know who I am,” Stuyvesant protested, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.

“Unless you arrest him in America, and have to testify in court.”

“Well, I wouldn’t—”

“Stuyvesant, for God’s sake!”

Stuyvesant scratched at the bristle on his chin, casting around for some way out of this, but in the end, he had to shake his head. “Yeah, damn it, you’re right, it’s a lousy idea.” And it was—Stuyvesant wouldn’t have put up with trying to use one of his sisters like this, either. God damn Carstairs. “And I don’t know how much good it would do, anyway—sounds to me like your sister spends most of her time at the clinics, and I don’t imagine she has a lot of time to spare for my man’s kind of politics. No, it’s a pretty thin connection altogether, I’d say.

“Tell you the truth,” he muttered in disgust, “I haven’t a clue why Carstairs bothered dragging me out here.”

“He brought you here in order to follow in your shadow—you offered him an opportunity, however thin, to approach me.” Grey saw Stuyvesant’s puzzled expression, and his mouth curled in what might have been a smile, or a grimace of pain. “The Major’s been circling around me like a jilted lover for five years, since I left his precious research project in shambles and came to Cornwall.”

“Five years?” Stuyvesant said, trying not to sound too dubious. “The man must have the patience of a tick. You have ticks in this country?”

“Waiting for the approach of warm blood. They watch me, you know—his men do; they question my neighbors. Twice they’ve broken in and gone through my possessions.”

Stuyvesant smoked for a minute, considering. On the one hand, Grey’s suspicions sounded like what the head-shrinkers would call
paranoia,
where enemies lurk in every corner. On the other hand, there’d been Carstairs’ odd jolt of reaction.

“You know,” he said finally, “when I met Carstairs on Friday and brought up Bunsen’s name, I thought at the time it was funny how fast he made the jump from Bunsen to Laura Hurleigh to your sister. Almost like he’d been waiting, like you say, for some kind of opportunity. I’m truly sorry, Captain Grey. My questions seem to have dropped you in the soup.”

Grey seemed interested neither in the declaration of guilt, nor the apology. “Bunsen?”

“Like the burner.”

“This is the Bunsen who—”

“Yeah,” Stuyvesant interrupted, “it’s
that
Richard Bunsen: decorated soldier, Labour Party golden boy, working-man’s friend. And you can just leave out the Scarlet Pimpernel remarks, I’ve heard ’em all.”

“I can imagine you have.” He sounded bemused, as if his thoughts had gone somewhere else.

“My sister has mentioned Richard Bunsen, in her letters. She says I met him when we were children, although I don’t remember doing so. I know the family remotely—there was a Bunsen a year behind me at Oxford. A brother, maybe? No, more like a cousin.” He still sounded distracted.

Stuyvesant had been right to think they were living in each other’s pockets—although Bunsen’s foothold as far up as Grey’s social class might be a little shaky. Stuyvesant wondered if Aldous Carstairs might not actually have had a point in bringing him here: If in the U.S. it made sense to work the personal contacts in getting close to someone, here in Britain the network of relationships was probably ten times as strong. And what if Carstairs did have a—what did they call it?—a fixation on Grey? It didn’t necessarily mean that all his suggestions should be rejected out of hand. Sure, only some pretty strong personal interest would explain why Carstairs was willing to spend two days coming to see Grey, but that didn’t mean that what he wanted didn’t go hand in hand with Stuyvesant’s needs.

And conversely, assuming Carstairs was being genuinely helpful, maybe Stuyvesant should in turn try to smooth Carstairs’ way with Grey a little, as he’d sort of agreed to do.

“In any case, I have to tell you, there’s a real possibility that, Scarlet Pimpernel or no, Richard Bunsen is headed for a world of trouble. And if your sister’s in the vicinity when the wall falls on him, she could end up getting caught up in it. If you don’t want to see your sister in prison—”

“Don’t,” Grey said sharply.

“It’s true, I’m afraid,” Stuyvesant told him. “That sort of arrest—up-and-coming politician, ancient family—the smaller fish like your sister will—”

“Stop it!” The American looked over at his companion, and was surprised to see his face twisted with pain. “If you cannot bring yourself to talk straight, I’m going to walk away, and my sister will just have to take her chances.”

Talk straight? After a minute, Stuyvesant shook his head. He’d been so set on selling the Bunsen connection he hadn’t realized that he was constructing a straw man around Sarah Grey for her brother to follow. Stuyvesant prided himself on his ability to manipulate, and sometimes found himself doing it even when there was no need to bully or cajole. Here, clearly, that approach would not work. “Okay. But seriously? If Richard Bunsen is who I think he is, he constitutes a grave threat, to the United States, and to Britain.”

“Fine, he’s a dangerous man. But you don’t need my assistance to line him up in your sights and kill him.”