Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  The explosion had scoured him clean in other ways, as well. He stopped talking about it when he realized how nervous he was making the padre, who clearly didn’t care to be informed that one of his flock had been cleansed of sin, but that was what it felt like to Bennett. He was like a new-born, with no toughness yet to protect him from harm.

  A year after the war ended, Bennett was walking again, albeit with a cane. When they wheeled him outside to the hospital’s covered verandah, he could hear the caretaker’s canary down at the lodge-house and the breathing of the man upstairs, in spite of the ringing in his ears. The headaches came less often, the last shrapnel fragments had been picked from his scalp, and maybe one night a week he would go as much as four hours without waking to the sensation of rotten flesh squelching through his fingers.

  But the normal filtering mechanism on his mind had been stripped away. The tiniest of sights, sounds, smells competed with the big ones for his attention. It felt like looking at ten million blades of grass and being unable to see a lawn. And in reaction to this endless bombardment of impressions, his skin only grew worse. It crawled, it itched, it trembled, it went into spasms of horror. Mostly it did this around other people, and the more abrasive the person, the worse it was. Other acts and relationships were intense, even earth-shattering (and why did he think that fellow Stuyvesant had known, how sex for Grey was like being struck by God’s own lightning?) but everyday social intercourse could be unbearable, the daily lies and misdemeanors people committed without thought grating against him like a hasp.

  Then Aldous Carstairs found him, and brought him to the clinic, and there he lived through nineteen months of growing hell, a nightmare he could not wake from—and oh, the bitter irony of that name, the Truth Project, that sent a hard twinge of toothache through his jaw every time he heard it. Only a fluke—when the Major couldn’t speak to countermand Grey’s departure orders—had made escape possible.

  He fled home for a few days, desperately attempting normality, but his mother’s glances tore at him, the presence of others filled him with dread. He’d got as far as setting up an interview with a prospective employer, but riding the trolley to the appointment found him sweating and grinding his teeth, so overwhelmed he ended up hunched over with his hands clamped to his ears: The other passengers had edged away in concern, and he had been taken off before he reached his appointment.

  Normal life was clearly not an option.

  And so one morning, when Sarah went to see why Bennett had not come down for breakfast, the family found him gone. He left notes, asking that no one try to find him. Bennett Grey put his rucksack on his back and disappeared, permitting the earth to swallow him up at last.

  They had either respected his wishes, or else his disappearing act was remarkably efficient, because he had heard from no one until he wrote his bank to arrange for the purchase of the Cornwall land half a year later. Within the week, his sister appeared at the cottage door, but to his relief, she turned out to be one person whose presence he could bear. To his mixed relief and disappointment, Sarah was the only one who came.

  He saw her once or twice a year. To the rest of the family he wrote dutiful letters. He gradually ventured into the nearby villages and towns. And every so often, he was driven into a hard corner like a baby seeking a demon’s womb.

  He lay in the comforting cold hardness with the flavor of brass on his lips, until eventually he slept. He woke with the dawn, abominably stiff and thinking about his sister, and about Laura Hurleigh, but mostly about the American, strangely hard and soft at the same time.

  Snap judgments were in Grey’s very nature, now: no more second thoughts. Every relationship established since the War had its character set hard in the first few seconds. The Major: terror and loathing; Robbie Trevalian: relaxed amusement; Robbie’s mother: interest with a generous dose of reserve. The American: fear and absolute trust. The moment Harris Stuyvesant emerged from the Major’s car, Grey had felt as if he was meeting the man assigned to guide him through hell.

  Stuyvesant had lied to him. He’d tried to manipulate him, would try again in the future, but Grey couldn’t help it: He was drawn to this stranger like a magnet to its mate.

  Attraction was dangerous: Stuyvesant was dangerous. He arrived with the Major, a bad enough beginning, then followed it up with lies and manipulations and a flat refusal to talk about some key event in his past. And despite these warnings, the man’s pull had drawn from Grey revelations that he’d given to few, not even to Sarah.

  Yes, the American rang solid and true. Did that make him all the more of a threat?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  FOUR DAYS LATER, on a cool, damp Friday morning, Harris Stuyvesant found a parking place two streets away from Paddington Station. He maneuvered the spanking-new Model T to the curb, happy that he’d gone to the extra effort of finagling the London Ford dealer out of his newest one—hard to say if the man had been more impressed by the personal appearance of the American ambassador, or the telegram from Henry Ford himself.

  Because it was not exactly a permitted spot he pulled into, he scribbled a note saying “Police Business” and laid it on the dashboard before trotting through the drizzle to the station.

  The train from Penzance had pulled in some time before, but the letter from Grey had specified not to come until eight o’clock, when the passengers in the sleeping cars were roused and sent about their business. Stuyvesant reached the train about five minutes before the hour, and bought a paper to occupy himself with. As passengers made their way down the platform, he pawed past the notices to the news, and looked over the whistling-in-the-dark headlines—although even in the Times, the daily “Coal Report” headline had recently changed to “Coal Crisis.” He glanced up occasionally, but caught no sight of Bennett Grey; after eight, the thin stream of passengers showed signs of drying up altogether.

  At ten after, Stuyvesant began to mutter under his breath, cursing the man who hadn’t the nerve to wire or phone ahead and say he’d backed out of the plan, but before he could turn away, the door to one of the carriages filled, and Grey was there.

  He was a man transformed from the Cornish woodcutter: Travelworn and rumpled, yes, but he’d had his hair trimmed and oiled before leaving Penzance, and was wearing an ordinary if out-of-date brown suit, polished shoes, and overcoat. Not much could be done about his working-man’s hands, but the nails were clean and neat.

  Beneath the surface shine, however, Grey had the look of the haggard, front-line soldier about him, as if he hadn’t slept since Stuyvesant drove out of the farm yard on Monday afternoon. Maybe he was just hung over. However, he seemed calm enough, resigned to the noise and the press of people, and only flinched at the scream of a whistle from the next platform over.

  The enormous space beat its cacophony down at them, and Stuyvesant had to resist the impulse to push Grey back onto the train and return him to Cornwall. Instead, he reached out to shake Grey’s hand, but the hand the small man held out in return had a valise in it, so Stuyvesant took its handles instead.

  “My car’s this way,” he said. Once outside, he turned to speak and found Grey lagging far behind: The man was limping again, more than he had climbing over rough ground in Cornwall. He lurched his way up to Stuyvesant, then stopped, raising his face to the gray sky.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Stuyvesant asked. The man really didn’t look at all well.

  “Yes. I am just stiff, after all that sitting.”

  “Weren’t there any sleepers?”

  “Yes. So I sat on the bed.”

  “Yeah, me too. Well, I’m parked a couple streets away. Do you want to stop somewhere for breakfast? Or we could go by my hotel and get you a bath and a shave.”

  “I’d rather get out of the city first, if you don’t mind,” Grey said. “There used to be a little hotel in Henley that did a good breakfast.”

  “Fine,” Stuyvesant told him, and led the way more slowly. At the car, he opened the back doo
r and added Grey’s valise to his, tossed his hat and overcoat on top, and climbed in behind the wheel. Once inside, he could smell the alcohol on his passenger, and was not surprised when Grey fell asleep before they’d shaken off London, curled against the car window. Harris Stuyvesant was alone with his thoughts, thoughts that centered around Richard Bunsen and the speech the man had given the previous evening in a rented hall in Battersea.

  When Stuyvesant had arrived at the venue Thursday evening, he found it packed to the walls with Union supporters. Big as he was, dressed as he was, no one questioned his presence or his beliefs as he pushed through the doors and found a seat. He was one working man among three hundred others, and if he kept his mouth shut, no one would look at him twice.

  And he would indeed keep his mouth shut. Not only did he have no wish to catch Richard Bunsen’s eye, but he could feel the waves of frustration rolling off those around him; he’d been in enough crowded, angry halls to know that these were men just aching for a dust-up.

  The first speaker did little to soothe their tensions. He was a Labour M.P. who must have been elected for his excellent works rather than his speaking ability, since he was dull and earnest and dropped his notes twice, ending up nearly inaudible above the rising murmur of the crowd.

  Not that Stuyvesant would have paid him much mind even if he’d been golden of tongue and leather of lung. Stuyvesant’s attention was entirely on the man sitting in one of the four chairs arranged behind the present speaker; the man listening closely, nodding occasionally, once tipping his ear to a comment from the large sweating figure beside him, smiling his response. The man waiting his turn at the podium with no more sign of nerves than if he were sitting on a train platform waiting for the 8:14. The man whose moustached face had looked out of a shipboard photograph, smiling and care-free. Stuyvesant couldn’t tell what color his eyes were, and he wasn’t wearing tinted glasses, but it was him.

  Richard Bunsen did not look like a terrorist.

  Then again, Stuyvesant hadn’t expected he would.

  But Stuyvesant had left his revolver back at the hotel, just in case his feelings got the better of him.

  After what seemed a very long time, the man at the podium stopped moving his mouth and began to gather his papers, broad hints that his speech was finished. A smatter of people began to clap, but before he could scuttle back to the empty chair a voice rang out, clear above the thin applause.

  “What’s Baldwin doing about the Samuel Report?”

  The M.P., caught halfway to his chair, looked at the man who had introduced him, then returned to the podium. He couldn’t say if the Prime Minister was re-considering an acceptance of the Samuel Commission’s report. No, he did not believe—

  “Notices have gone up in the pits!”

  The noise from the audience that followed this announcement brought the hair up on the back of Stuyvesant’s neck. It was the voice of the mob, the gut-deep sound of men backed into a corner and about to come out swinging. He’d heard the noise before, about two minutes before a mob moved from talk to action, and he gathered his coat around him and looked for the exit.

  At least one of the men on the stage had also heard that sound before. The heavyset man who had introduced the current speaker stood up fast and came forward to plant himself on the very edge of the stage, his voice battering the entire hall to silence. No one noticed the M.P. going back to his chair.

  “You want the rest of the country to think of us as dangerous louts? You want Sam and Sally Schoolmarm to agree with the government that Labour has to be put down like a mad dog? Then just go ahead with your growling and see how long before they bring out the Army—and don’t you tell me you don’t care, because it’s your families the Army will be aiming their rifles at.” The mutter that had begun to rise up at the word Army went dead still. He held their eyes, and after a minute the anger came off the boiling point, and he was talking to three hundred workers again, not a mob.

  “As I speak, the Industrial Committee is meeting with the Prime Minister. This week-end, our brothers Arthur Cook and Herbert Smith travel to Brussels to meet with the Miners’ International. Our job is to stand firm. Our job is to show we’re reasonable men and women with reasonable demands. We are in the right and they are in the wrong. Our job is to keep saying so until the rest of the country agrees.”

  He stood there, hands in his pockets, and let his audience think about it for a minute. Then he said, “Now, you want to listen to what Mr. Bunsen has to say? Or you want to go out and bust some heads?”

  The answer being, of course, that they wanted to go out and bust heads, but the deft touch of humor brought them back to earth. Three hundred backsides settled into their seats. The heavyset man nodded to Bunsen, made a brief introduction, and turned over the stage to the young politician.

  Stuyvesant had anticipated Bunsen’s charisma. He’d felt the pull of personality often enough among politicians, crooks, and radical leaders that he’d have been surprised not to find it here—especially since the man’s working-class qualifications alone were not sufficient to put him onto that stage. Bunsen could not have done the thick-set man’s task of settling the audience back into their seats after their stir of anger: too young, too educated, too slim and clean-handed.

  But once the true worker had reminded his fellows of the larger goal (and Stuyvesant began to suspect that the whole evening had been stage-handled very cleverly indeed), he turned the meeting over to Bunsen, as if to say, This is the man we need to talk to the men in the silk hats: One of us, gone through their public school, graduated from their university.

  And Bunsen hit precisely the right note: He made no obvious pretense to be working class, for they’d have jeered him off the stage. Nor did he stand on his education and accent and speak down to them. His attitude seemed to be, You are as you are; I am as I was made; by bringing our strengths together we can make this work. The emotions he sought to rouse were not just anger and outrage, but righteousness and determination.

  It was compelling. He was compelling, even for Stuyvesant, who looked at the stage and saw demonstrated all the vitality young Tim had lost, who sat in the hall of English laborers and remembered a young woman whose life had come down to the terrible choice of paving stones over flames.

  Bunsen spoke for nearly an hour, using no notes, his voice at all times reaching the hall’s farthest corners. Phrases of inspiration and confidence flowed like warm honey, explaining his popularity among Union and Labour alike (to say nothing of certain elements among the blue blood). But again, Stuyvesant had expected eloquence.

  What he hadn’t expected was how damned reasonable the man would sound. Richard Bunsen made his ideas seem the simplest, most obvious solutions to the nation’s problems, common sense at its most common. He balanced grim figures with moments of humor, he spoke clearly but without oversimplifying, and he talked of the right to dignity alongside the right to a living wage. His criticisms of the oppressor used hard words (“The very Parliament building in which men vote to take bread from the miner’s child was built by the hands of working men; it is heated by the toil of working men; it must speak with the voice of the working man.”) but a more-in-sorrow attitude that was extremely effective for conveying conviction and determination. “Capitalism is theft,” he declared, then followed the statement not by a show of outrage, but by saying, “It cannot help itself, that is its nature. It is up to us to refuse to be victims any more. They will not steal from us, from our wives, from the mouths of our children, for one more day. They will not.”

  His gestures and the attitude of his body were wide, but natural, as if he was standing comfortably among friends. Before long, Stuyvesant found himself nodding more than his role called for.

  Bunsen ended on the same note of putting steel in the spines of his audience: “A popular movement always entails great personal sacrifice. And my friends, we have already made that sacrifice. Now it is time for our just reward.”

  By the end o
f his speech, the entire crowd, including a certain American infiltrator, were hanging on Bunsen’s every word. The applause was prolonged, and Bunsen capped the speech itself by a disarming show of surprise—from a distance, Stuyvesant could have sworn the man was blushing.

  Stuyvesant slapped his hands together, for a bravura performance.

  The audience quieted reluctantly for the third speaker, Battersea’s own Member of Parliament. He was a curious individual, a Communist whose name came with difficulty from the tongue of the stocky, working-class master of ceremonies. Shapurji Saklatvala looked and spoke like a Hindu aristocrat, but the words he uttered were inflammatory, so much so that, had he spoken earlier in the evening, the mob might well have risen and spilled out onto the streets in a bloody fury.

  But the hour was late, and here and there, a man would rise and slip away—not, Stuyvesant thought, for an act of violence, but for jobs on the night shifts, since most carried laden dinner-pails. When one rose near him, the American followed in his wake.

  Outside, it had begun to drizzle. The police constables assigned to the meeting were getting wet, he noticed, and they watched with envy as Stuyvesant paused in the hall’s dry entrance to light a cigarette. He stood there in the shelter for a minute, wondering how the hell a bomb-making terrorist could put on such a seamless act that an experienced Bureau agent couldn’t find a flaw.

  Unless Bunsen wasn’t a bomb-making terrorist. Unless Richard Bunsen was a well-meaning radical who honestly was as reasonable as he sounded.