Except for Laura, of course: Laura the healer, Laura the bringer of joy, Laura the focus point that overcome the clamoring.
There were two similar interviews during the months that followed: both with twitchy soldiers, both conducted by the same doctor, both with fine wires attached to the men’s fingers and wrists.
The next interview, Grey’s fourth, was different in a number of ways: A doctor he’d never seen before conducted it; Grey saw no sign of war wounds on the man being interviewed; and Major Carstairs was there.
The Major’s presence was at first distracting, then painful, and by the end of it, a torment. He wanted something, craved it so badly he was sweating desire from his pores, but the object of his desire fluctuated between the man in the chair and Grey. It was not mere physical lust: He wanted them—wanted them both—to do something, to respond in some way that Grey might have been able to figure out if the driving confusion hadn’t brought on one of his blinding headaches.
The session left him cowering in a darkened room for days, unable to bear the presence of anyone but the orderly who brought his meals. For two weeks, he refused Laura entrance. There was no sign of the Major, no reference to the last interview; slowly he regained his equilibrium. A month later he was well enough to see his family on a brief Christmas visit home.
In the middle of January, the Major found him in the clinic’s conservatory and asked if he would be willing to assist on another interview.
Grey had not yet learned to trust his perceptions. He still thought that if he fought the sensations, if he refused to be dominated by this bizarre variety of shell shock, he could get back on his feet and live some kind of normal life. So he denied the repulsion he felt for the Major and all his works, and let himself be talked into it.
And that one went well. This one was clearly a victim of the War: Three years after his last battle, the spasms and stammers still racked him. Grey talked to him, watched him, and afterwards told the doctor where the man’s truths lay and what calming pathways might reach beyond the nerves.
It was a relief, being able to help. It made Grey feel not so utterly useless. He even began to wonder if perhaps, with care, this damnable sensitivity that afflicted him might not be turned into a gift.
It was the last time he’d held that thought.
The Major reappeared in early February with a young man whose bruises and easy winces made it clear that he’d been beaten. The Major demanded that Grey sit in on a conversation that in no time at all became an interrogation. The Major wanted to know which of the man’s circle were responsible—for what crime, Grey never learned, just: responsible. The headache came instantly, but this time the Major would not accept Grey’s dismissal, not until the Major had his answers. And in desperation, Grey told him which name had caused the man to tense, just a fraction, to hold his breath, for just an instant.
The next day, the Major had come to explain, something about disruption and violence and the threat of mob rule; later, asking around, Grey learned that the outside world was in turmoil because of the coal industry, and he realized that the young man with the bruised face had been a Bolshevik.
The world was indeed in turmoil, and the Major appeared with two more of these sort of men in March, bullying and cajoling Grey into cooperation. Grey was trapped: He couldn’t bear to pry into these men’s minds; the Major’s presence made him want to scream; on the other hand, the thought of leaving the clinic and trying to live outside frankly terrified him.
And everyone swore he was helping his country, keeping it safe against a threat every bit as real as the Kaiser’s army.
He might still be there, eating himself away inside, if the Major hadn’t allowed himself to be distracted by the troubles, and pushed Grey just a fraction too far. The nurse had no business being brought under that kind of scrutiny: Two minutes into the session Grey knew that, and what was more, he knew that the Major knew it. When the poor young woman broke, when she began sobbing out her shame at what her brother had done, Grey looked at the Major, and caught the Major watching, not the nurse, but Grey himself.
In that instant, Grey saw what awaited him if he stayed. Even if outright insanity seized him outside the clinic doors, it was preferable to this monstrosity.
He hit out against the Major and, inadvertently, won his release.
He tried, on the outside. He went home, summoned the self control to walk through the town, desperately clung to the fantasy of job, wife, home.
In less than a week, he knew his failure. He wrote Laura a letter, put some warm clothes into a rucksack, and walked out of his family’s house on foot, in search of peace.
He had thought he would find it beneath the wheels of a train, or at the bottom of a cliff. Instead, he had tramped without aim through lanes and over fields, sleeping rough under trees and in barns, until with the end of summer he found himself circling Dartmoor and entering Cornwall. There he found his end of the world.
So no, he was still not completely certain what the Truth Project was all about. He thought it had begun, as he’d told Stuyvesant, as research into interrogation techniques, looking to measure when a person spoke the truth, and when he lied. Using Bennett’s hypersensitivity to calibrate their machines, the Project’s researchers thought they might duplicate his sure knowledge.
In theory, leaving the Major out of the equation, he could see their point: He’d never actually participated in interrogations during the War, but he’d been outside a farmhouse during the questioning of a captured German, and just thinking of the sounds that spilled out made him queasy. As far as Grey was concerned, anything that meant you didn’t have to torture information from another human being was a good thing.
However, the Project’s frustrations had mounted when they found that using a machine to measure human truth was far, far more complicated than they had originally suspected. And because this was not mere scientific pursuit, but a project with not only the Major, but the military itself looking on, the option of failure was unacceptable.
That was when the underlying question had changed from, How do we create a machine with the abilities of Bennett Grey? to, How can we use Bennett Grey? His role changed from paradigm to participant.
And then the question changed again, when the Major brought the nurse before him, and Grey saw the speculation in those black eyes: How can we create more Bennett Greys?
For years afterwards, his nights had been haunted by a dream that jerked him upright and sent him out into the Cornish night: He was walking down a cold, bright corridor, straight and endless, with doors on either side. The corridor was empty, but he became aware of a murmur of voices, and so he stopped and looked through the small window in the door to his right.
The room contained three people. One had his back to the door. The other two looked up at him: Major Carstairs, and a blond man with green eyes.
Sometimes, this was enough to startle him awake. Other nights he would go on to the next door, and then the next, and the next, and in every room, the faces looking back at him belonged to Major Carstairs and Bennett Grey, and he would wake not with surprise, but with horror.
Once he’d discovered the safety of Cornwall and burrowed into his hillside, Grey tried to convince himself that, without him, the Project had withered and died. In the early months he had been unable to think about it at all; later, time and distance had reassured him that his absence had robbed the Major of any authority, and if the man had turned to some other dark form of governmental manipulation, well, that was hardly Grey’s responsibility.
Now it looked as if it wasn’t that simple. The Major wanted him back, that much was clear. Which could only mean that the Project had survived. In fact, the Major’s aura of confidence and hidden authority had grown even stronger, suggesting that the Project not only survived, but was thriving. Perhaps he’d convinced his masters—military or civilian—that another war was coming, for which they would need the machinery of truth-telling.
And if
that war were to be on Britain’s own soil, against Britain’s own citizens? Wasn’t a domestic enemy still an enemy?
In fact, if the enemy were one of Britain’s own, so much the better. The Major and his Project did not exist, so what could be easier than to drop a troublemaker in and have him disappear for a while?
And with Bennett Grey to help identify precisely where a man’s weaknesses lay, the Major would have the troublemaker in pieces in no time at all.
In Cornwall, Grey had been far enough away, the Major would have needed to mount a campaign to extract him. Now, thanks to Sarah’s dangerous closeness to Richard Bunsen, he could feel the Major’s gloved fingers insinuating themselves down the back of his collar.
Lying there in the still dawn, the thud of his heartbeat grew faster and harder, until he could feel the throb of pulse within his ears. Then the raw taste of brass crept onto his tongue, and he really couldn’t bear to start the day with that.
So Bennett Grey, too, threw off his bed-clothes, dressed, and left the barn, although he walked in the opposite direction from Stuyvesant and the Duke, down the road to the ford. As Stuyvesant, up on the Peak, was being startled by the unheralded approach of the older man, Grey was leaning over the side of the foot-bridge, mesmerized by the water that teased and smoothed the mossy paving-stones of the ford, feeling it smooth his mind.
Bennett, he addressed himself, why the hell did you come here?
He could have written his sister a letter warning her away from Bunsen and gone back to his potatoes, doing his best to dismiss Harris Stuyvesant from his mind. He could have sent a telegram, even ridden his bicycle into Penzance and used the telephone. Instead, he’d returned to the one truly happy place of his childhood, knowing that he would come face to face with the woman he had loved and treated abominably. Knowing that the scent of her would make his skin rouse from its long slumber, that one gesture of her fingers would send a shudder down his spine, that the sound of her voice would make him want to seize her hair and cover her supple body and velvet skin with kisses. He wanted to drown in her, wanted to walk across to the house and climb into her bed and never come out, wanted to admit that he could not possibly continue to live without her.
He came here knowing that he would not do that, that he could not do that to her, not again.
He came knowing that laying eyes on her might make it impossible to resume his life in Cornwall, a satisfying life that had, overnight and with not a word of warning, become stifling.
He’d come up from Cornwall because Major Carstairs had stepped out of the car into his yard with the force of a howitzer, and blown him into the realization that he was sick unto death of being a slave to his nerves. He’d come with Harris Stuyvesant because the man’s honest strength shamed him, made him decide that, like an amputee sweating every prosthetic step, it was time to pretend normality. Even if he had to use the crutch of drink to get over the worst of it, he would learn to face the world. His world.
He came here because it was unfair to his sister, to be burdened with the constant ache of a mentally crippled brother down at the far reaches of the land. He’d come because he was abruptly homesick, tired of the primitive starkness of Cornwall, longing for the rich midlands of his country, its summer smells and the embrace of its history. He came, he supposed, on a whim as impulsive as anything Sarah would do, when the American’s request slid so neatly into the possibilities. He’d come—
Oh, Christ, Bennett: Stop lying to yourself.
You came in a moment’s impulse worthy of Sarah, because you wanted to lay eyes on this new man of Laura’s, the man who had taken your place in her life.
Underneath that, you came because you wanted to see Laura.
And what, now that you’ve seen her?
Only now does it occur to you that Laura might not wish to see you.
Chapter Thirty
IN THE ROOM BELOW Bennett Grey’s empty bed, his sister’s dreaming mind had been weaving together a convoluted tale of responsibility and friendship. There was a man in the dream, although when she half woke, Sarah could not be certain if it had been her brother or Richard Bunsen. The uncertainty troubled her, and brought her closer to wakefulness. The two were nothing alike, in looks or nature, so why confuse them? They said that dreams Meant Something. Perhaps this one was simply about a person who did not interest her as a man, and both Bennett and Richard fit that description.
So, a friend or brother. And one for whom she felt some degree of responsibility. That, too, was both of them.
No matter how much she read about shell shock, she came no closer to understanding Bennett’s mental state than the week he’d come out of hospital. They’d always been close, as children, but after the War it seemed he could see things about her that no one else could, her doubts and worries and secret pleasures. Take today: It was almost as if he could feel the remnants of shakiness from the train incident in her body. And more than that—he’d known she didn’t want to talk about it in front of the servants, and waited until they were alone—alone with that American friend of his, which itself had somehow been all right.
Although that was another oddity, Bennett asking a perfect stranger to a Hurleigh week-end. And he called her impetuous! Ridiculous, really, how what others called her whims and her rash acts always made perfect sense to Sarah, even if they were hard to explain. Maybe that was the same with Bennett, when it just seemed right to him to bring the American along.
Certainly, Mr. Stuyvesant had fit in better than she’d feared. She should have known it would be all right. Whatever else the War had done to Bennett, it had made him enormously sensitive. He’d know in an instant if the Hurleighs were put off by his friend, and he’d have invented an instantaneous excuse and made off.
It couldn’t be easy, to be so sensitive to glances and minute raises of the eyebrow. And that was the word, sensitive—poor Bennett couldn’t even bear it when too many things were going on at once. She’d been so proud of him today, seeing the enormous effort he was making to act sociable, this man who could go for days without speaking to anyone but the cow leaning across the wall. He’d once been the life of any party, before the War—she’d been old enough back then to remember that. But if it was now so distasteful to him, why do it?
And what about him and Laura? The tension between them had positively crackled last night, the moment they laid eyes on each other, but precisely what it stemmed from she could not be sure. She’d never known exactly what happened to push them apart, although she’d put together hints both had let drop over the years. She was only seventeen when Bennett went to war, but he had told her of the secret wartime engagement; she’d known that Laura had taken rooms near his sanitarium (a place that had struck Sarah like an upscale loony bin, the two times Mother had let her go there) and that Laura bought a motorcar to take him on outings; everyone had assumed the engagement was going ahead.
And then blooey, it was raining down on their heads: Laura was back in London and Bennett gone completely, and neither of them would talk about it. She’d thought the break was temporary—the War had changed everyone, after all; it was to be expected that the nature of love would change, as well.
But before they could heal the rift, the Margolin baby died, and although his death was neither the first nor the last, that failure was personal, and had shaken everyone, badly. To distract Laura, as much as anything, Sarah had introduced her to Richard. Before the evening was over, she’d fervently wished that she’d never brought them together.
With Richard, Laura hardened. Or was it just being without Bennett? In any case, the spark of fun had gone out of Laura—and that was five years ago, long before the recent spats she’d had with Richard. Before Richard, Laura had been able to set work aside, have a good time, go to a party. Now, she was impatient with anyone unconnected with Look Forward or the clinics. She could occasionally be almost rigid, as if she’d grown a steel spine.
Not that Laura wasn’t as friendly as ever, or didn�
��t care about the families they served (if anything, she cared more than ever—although one couldn’t say the same about her own family, to whom she was polite in public and impatient when outside their hearing). And it wasn’t that she didn’t go to parties, because she did, but no matter where she was, Laura always seemed to be working. She was competent and cheerful, passionate and calm, but at odd moments, Sarah caught brief glimpses of something cold, even desolate, underneath. Something sad.
Oh, Sarah, she told herself, Laura just grew up. Go back to sleep.
But she knew it was more than just growing up.
She knew it was losing Bennett, and the life Laura thought she had. Oh, why hadn’t they managed to patch it together? There was still a powerful connection there—that crackle of tension she’d seen could almost have been the electricity of attraction. Or animosity, but that couldn’t be, because afterwards they’d been easy and affectionate, like two old friends who had just grown apart. But if it wasn’t attraction and it wasn’t remembered dislike, what could it have been? Fear?
Fear made even less sense.
Oh, sometimes psychology could be so irritating.
However, she had all week-end to figure it out. And all week-end to see more of that nice American friend of Bennett’s.
Beauty sleep might be a good idea.
Sarah turned on her side and pulled the bed-clothes up around her ears; soon, her breathing slowed.
Chapter Thirty-One
LAURA HURLEIGH DID NOT WAKE before dawn, as the others had. She had not even got into bed until nearly four A.M., having sat before the low-burning fire smoking one cigarette after another. It wasn’t so much the effort of keeping the gathering amicable, as she’d promised her mother—although she often had trouble sleeping after that sort of tense balancing act. It was the unexpected reverberations of seeing Bennett after all these years that kept her up, listening to the quiet.
Hurleigh House was good for that. She couldn’t think how many times she had retreated to this room, wounded and fighting tears, to feel soothed by the very stones around her. Her family seemed to her increasingly foreign, brittle and irrelevant, but the house itself was another matter entirely. It listened, it nurtured, it spoke to her bones.
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