Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  “Today’s Monday, so it’s the twelfth. Are you talking about a week-end party?”

  “Yes. Although I shouldn’t use the word week-end in the Duchess’s hearing: She may be unconventional, but she’s a tyrant when it comes to language. Are you sure that today is Monday?”

  “Unless Cornwall operates on a different calendar from London.”

  “If you say so. I heard the church-bells two days ago, so I thought…well, it must have been a Saturday wedding. Doesn’t matter—the point is, Sarah ended her letter as she usually does, by saying that she’d love to see me, if ever I got the urge to come out of my hermitage.”

  “Does this roundabout tale have anything to do with me?”

  Grey’s face was transformed when he grinned, an expression that clutched Stuyvesant’s heart with its familiar mix of insouciance and dread, the devil-take-all look his kid brother Tim’s face had worn on the edge of battle. “Mr. Stuyvesant, how would you like to be my companion to a week-end with the mad Hurleighs?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE RAIN WAS FALLING STEADILY as Harris Stuyvesant followed Aldous Carstairs onto the train, huffing its readiness in the Penzance station. The carriage closed in around them as the attendant led the way down the corridor, pointing out the common sitting compartment, two of its six chairs occupied by men with glasses in their hands, as he took them to their private sleeping compartments. Carstairs permitted Stuyvesant the first one, and said, “If you join me next door, we can speak in private.”

  Reluctantly, retaining his hat and coat to make it clear he wasn’t staying, Stuyvesant followed Carstairs into the second cubicle, which would have been simply snug without three men inside. Even when the attendant had left, having satisfied Carstairs’ demands for greater heat and a wooden coat-hanger for his overcoat, the space was crowded, its air oppressive after a day spent in the out of doors.

  Stuyvesant slouched into the compartment’s tiny seat, hands stuffed into the pockets of his mud-smeared overcoat, for which the garage’s clothes-brush had proved inadequate. The rain that had begun shortly after he and Grey returned to the cottage was now pouring down the dark window, twisting the figures moving across the platform’s lights. As Carstairs fussed with his own coat, damp but unsullied, whistles sounded, doors slammed, and the train shuddered, reluctantly letting go of the platform and turning its face towards London. Five minutes longer over the flat tire, and they’d have been stuck here overnight.

  Which, Stuyvesant reflected, wouldn’t have been altogether bad, to be parked in this quiet fishing village instead of being thrust back into the furious hive of workers and oppressors that was London. It made his teeth grind in anticipation. However, staying here would also mean prolonging his acquaintance with Carstairs, and the sooner he was rid of “the Major,” the better.

  The two men had spoken little since Carstairs trudged back up the lane to Grey’s cottage, rain dripping from his hat brim, Robbie dogging his heels. Pressing time and the deteriorating weather had Carstairs hunched over the steering wheel all the way to Penzance, his attention focused on the slick road. Their only exchange, other than trading curses over the car’s inadequate tire-repair kit, had been while they were barely out of Grey’s yard: Carstairs asked whether Stuyvesant had any success, and Stuyvesant could only manage a brusque reply, that he’d been asked to accompany Grey and his sister to Hurleigh House in four days. Carstairs had grunted, then addressed himself to the treacherous lane.

  The grunt had sounded more like satisfaction than surprise, Stuyvesant thought: Had he honestly not been surprised? Was it possible the man knew Grey so well he could second-guess him? Then again, if Carstairs’ people were indeed keeping an eye on Grey, as Grey claimed, they could also be opening his mail. In which case Carstairs had known of Sarah Grey’s invitation, there for the taking.

  All in all, he thought it more likely that it had just been an involuntary reaction, instantly quashed, to the way Stuyvesant had managed to get Grey’s cooperation where Carstairs could not. Either way, Stuyvesant was happy enough for the ensuing silence. Now, if he could only prolong it until they reached Paddington. He let his hat come to rest against the window, narrowing his eyes, feigning the approach of sleep.

  The other man took no notice. He brushed off the spotless bed, laid a newspaper down to protect it from his shoes, and perched atop the bed-clothes, easing the gloves from his hands. He took out one of the thin brown cigars he affected, and when he had found an ash-tray for the spent match, said “Tell me, what did you think of our Captain Grey?”

  At the sardonic voice, coupled with the insinuations behind the “our,” a mighty urge welled up in Harris Stuyvesant, an almost overwhelming impulse to rise up and smash the man’s face in, cigarillo and all. You don’t own me, you bastard, and I’m not going to do your shit work for you.

  He stifled the impulse instantly, unclenching his fists in his pockets and wondering why the hell Carstairs got his goat like this ( …a considerable pleasure out of causing pain… ). Of course, that dirty stunt Carstairs had pulled as they were leaving Grey’s compound made it hard to look the man in the face—but wasn’t that part of the job, working with people you’d travel across town to avoid? Stuyvesant would use him, then move on. Like he did in any job, even those where he had to do things that made him feel like a scab and a toady and the lowest of the low-lifes. God knew he’d had enough experience with that, over the years.

  Honestly, Bennett Grey wasn’t his problem. Was. Not. His. Problem. Grey was a step along the way—a small step, little more than the promise of an introduction, but that was better than anything he’d got in London.

  Even if Grey had been Stuyvesant’s concern, didn’t it all boil down to a straightforward question? The man had a skill; his country needed it; why not allow Carstairs to haul him in by the scruff of his neck and make him help out?

  And if he’d fallen into antipathy with Carstairs, it was the same in reverse with Grey. A few hours in the man’s company, and he felt more for him than he’d felt for some of the women he’d slept with over the years. The—what else to call it?—intimacy of the conversation on that rock above the sea had just turned him all to mush, affected him like all the leggy redheads and blonde kitten-women of the world rolled into one. Without the sex, he hastened to add—whatever it was he felt about Bennett Grey, it had nothing to do with sex. But the fact was, if the rain-clouds hadn’t interrupted their little tête-à-tête and sent them down to the cottage, he’d probably still be there, perched with Robbie atop the wall, mismatched gargoyles guarding the good captain from intruders.

  It was enough to make you believe in chemistry. Or the stars.

  But whatever the reason—chemistry, astrology, or just that Carstairs reminded him of all the parts of his job that he didn’t like—having to sit in a compartment with Major Aldous Carstairs and his hmms and his impenetrable eyes and his fucking brown cigar made him want to slug the bastard unconscious.

  Maybe Grey’s raw nerves were contagious.

  Yeah, and maybe he ought to pull himself together and act like a professional.

  Which was a laugh, considering that he didn’t know if he’d have a job when he got home. Ah, the hell with it.

  “I don’t really know what to make of him,” he replied. “I’ll have to think about it. Right now, I need a drink. I’ll be in the seating compartment.” He slammed out before Carstairs could offer to join him.

  Eyes half shut, legs outstretched, Aldous Carstairs mouthed the slim cigar, drawing a comforting lungful of the fragrant smoke. He opened his lips to let the smoke spill slowly out, and reached into his breast pocket for the slim leather note-book he carried always. He did not open it right away, just laid it on his knee and sat, smoking and looking in the glass at his face superimposed on the last of the town’s lights, contemplating how his will might be superimposed on the life of Captain Bennett Grey.

  Rain on a dead land. The brush of an old lover’s perfume on the nostrils. Th
e rebirth of opportunity to a man who’d all but given up.

  Wheels turning.

  Grey—Grey!—after all this time: threat in one hand, temptation in the other had done the job. And surely the weight of Grey’s presence, even if only in the back of Carstairs’ own mind, would be enough to tip the balance of coming events?

  Since the previous summer, Carstairs had spent every waking moment working to convince those that mattered that a General Strike would be, not a catastrophe, but an unparalleled opportunity. At this very hour, a brief document—future generations would know it as the Carstairs Proposal, although for the present, it went nameless—was circulating among certain chosen individuals. A small document, philosophical in tone, with implications that could reach into all aspects of British life.

  What its thesis boiled down to was that in the next month, Britain would have the chance to silence, once and for all, those who would turn the country on its end, those who would make the country a place where the able served the ignorant, the experienced waited upon the raw and untutored. Britain would have the opportunity, under the impetus of the Strike, to reshape itself and redefine what its very constitution intended. Nothing extreme, nothing radical, merely a shift in attitudes.

  He had chosen the time to circulate the Proposal with care. During the next three weeks, Britannia would be rudely awakened to the extremity of its danger. She would feel rough hands around her throat, and would scrabble wildly for a weapon with which to defend herself.

  And Aldous Carstairs would be there to provide it.

  Then when the Strike was smashed and rule of law returned to the land? With the danger fresh in their minds, their hearts still pounding with how close it had been, Britain’s leaders—from Baldwin and Churchill all the way down to the most infant M.P.—would listen to reason, and consider the Proposal, and in the end, acknowledge that a law was worth nothing without the means of enforcing it.

  Again, Aldous Carstairs would be there with the answer.

  Not that the great British public would see his hand in the matter, not in this generation, at any rate. But the men of importance, they would know, and they would finally give Carstairs what he needed to do his job.

  It might surprise some of them to find that he did not want power, certainly not beyond his own interests. Once the Proposal was implemented, he would step down, and return to his long-time pet, the Project.

  Five years ago, Carstairs had been shocked to find that he simply lacked the authority to demand the continuance of the Project. Five years ago, truth to tell, he’d had to play every card in his hand just to keep it from being shut down entirely—a hard lesson, Intra le alter cagioni che ti areca de male, lo essere disarmato ti fa contennendo: Among the other evils which being disarmed brings is that you are despised. Since then, he had kept his head down, made a policy out of being useful to each generation of officials, and kept the Project alive by hiding it beneath larger concerns.

  But now he had Grey.

  He corrected himself: He did not have the man yet. But he would.

  The authority he needed had not yet solidified. But it would.

  He blew smoke at the window, watching how it rolled along the cold glass without seeming to touch it. That was where Aldous Carstairs lay, he thought: as the invisible barrier between two forces.

  He had no wish to be noticed by the masses. Niccolò Machiavelli—a cliché to those who had never read the man’s work—was a brilliant analyst whose primary mistake had been to accept visible authority, which both compromised his decisions and gave his enemies a target. Carstairs preferred the shadows, not because they were safe, but because it meant others were overly exposed by comparison.

  It made them nervous.

  It made them afraid.

  His work often involved making people afraid of him, and he was good at it because it didn’t bother him. If ever he made a family crest, its motto would be È molto più sicuro essere temuto che amato: It is safer to be feared than to be loved. In fact, sometimes fear in the eyes of others brought him not just the satisfaction of a job well done, but a truer, more visceral gratification. Something near to happiness.

  Such as today. He really shouldn’t tease the boy so, but a cat is designed to toy with its mouse, and Aldous Carstairs was designed to play with the likes of Bennett Grey: earnest, upstanding, passionate, readily wounded. It was a serious game—a bit like chess, in its way—but it was also an amusement.

  Every so often, a move in one of these chess-like games took him by surprise. Five years ago, he had been in a state of distraction, caught up in the last paroxysm of the Miners’ Union, and hadn’t anticipated Grey’s sudden and violent rebellion. Grey had squirted from his grasp like a wet melon seed, triggering calamity in all directions. Not only had it brought Carstairs’ professional life to the edge of an abyss, but half an inch farther and that drinking glass would have sliced his artery. At the memory, his bare fingers caressed the ridge along his jaw and neck, and he shivered at the sensation: Thought of the blood and the choking, the shouting and pain, still had the power to make him queasy.

  Yes, the lesson concerning the dangers of over-eagerness had been hard won. He had made a firm policy out of double-checking himself at every turn, at pausing before decisions, at analyzing all possible effects of a move. And it had paid off.

  Harder to learn had been the lesson of when to suspend careful thought.

  Take this afternoon’s action. Carstairs’ act as they were leaving could be interpreted as the petulant impulse of a hard-pressed man, petty revenge for having been forced to wander around in the rain, ruining a pair of shoes he’d rather liked, and taking refuge in the reeking kitchen of some nearby peasants: a statement amounting to, You piss on me, I’ll piss back at you. Certainly the outraged American took it that way.

  On the other hand, if one began with the assumption that Aldous Carstairs was never impetuous, that he took no unconsidered action, then his act became, not personal spitefulness, but the smooth, seemingly automatic move of a highly experienced operative. He had appeared to submit instantly to Grey’s commands at every turn, acquiescing to the man’s every whim; but just as Grey was thinking he’d got away with it, by his act, Carstairs had shown him who was actually in control.

  Yes, he thought with satisfaction; it had, in fact, been the act of a born interrogator. Never let them settle; never let them know what you were really after.

  And never, never let them go, even when they thought you had done so.

  Especially when they thought you had done so.

  Slow; inexorable: That was the way to win.

  He opened his small note-book then, settling the cigar in the inadequate ash container while he recorded his thoughts concerning the day’s events: He could still feel the wheels turning, and was beginning to catch a glimpse of how. As always, the dangerous act of committing his ideas to paper helped make them clear.

  Not that he worried that his plans would ever be uncovered, not really—his enemies might break the language code, but the key references were known only to him. And he needed the note-books. Some day, when his labors in the public interest were ended, he would retire to a sun-drenched villa and write his book on political life—preferably, sans his predecessor Niccolò’s preliminary arrest and torture.

  No, it would not do at all, to open his note-books’ secrets to other eyes—even Machiavelli set prudence alongside force in governing men. Still, some notes would be necessary when it came time to set down his memoirs, to illustrate the great arc of ambition he had laid out for himself.

  Take, for example, the three brief notations on the previous page. The first concerned a memorandum to the Prime Minister that he and Kell of Section Five had discussed, with suggestions for the deployment of the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. Baldwin was, as always, hesitant about using the authority he had been given, but together, Kell and Carstairs had taken a firm hand, with satisfactory results. The second note concerned last week�
��s meeting with Steel-Maitland, the outcome of which was not yet certain. And the third, in the precise writing his secretary would have recognized with dismay as a sign of anger, the words read, in their code, Why was I not informed of the American’s presence?

  He had done nothing yet to follow that up, since after writing it he had found a memorandum concerning the man and his questions, buried deep in his in-box. He couldn’t decide yet if heads were to roll. However, he should have known about the American’s interests before the man walked into his office.

  Three notes, two illustrating authority, the other a reminder of the hazards of distraction. Now, on the next page, he wrote six lines concerning his day: three of summary, three of future action. He capped his pen and slipped the small book away.

  He did not yet write about the changes set in motion by the restoration of Grey to consideration, because those changes were still but a tantalizing glimmer in his mind. He must make time to think at leisure, during the upcoming days, to let his mind work out a stratagem.

  It would make a gem of a chapter in his memoirs, beginning with that fatuous ninny, that gift from the heavens, Mr. Harris Stuyvesant, heaving his bulk through the office door and dropping it into Carstairs’ guest chair, genial as a dog and ignorant as a brick.

  It took an experienced man to spot a gem in a muck. When the American had opened his mouth to bray the name of his quarry, not one man in fifty would have seen that the man Bunsen—himself not worth a fart in the wind—had connections with the most enormous potential. And not one man in a thousand would have known that the American was exactly what Captain Bennett Grey would respond to: Grey was a born leader of men, the role assigned him by his person and his class, and after all these years with no one but pigs and peasants for social intercourse, he had to be positively lusting for someone to command. Carstairs had seen it happen: nurses, patients, even doctors with an intractable problem would find themselves gravitating in the direction of Bennett Grey; in response, Grey’s spine would straighten and he would summon the reserves to provide the leadership they craved.