Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  Once upon a time, she had thought she loved Bennett—

  No: Be honest. She had loved him. She’d been primed to love him before she met him, come to that, having overheard the adults talking about this poor lad with a sick mother and a drunk of a father. Then he came and he was fun, and the age difference was too slight to matter, because he understood her the way no one else did. And then came the War, and the hospital, and that bloody clinic run by that dark-eyed snake who had done something to change Bennett, what she’d never known. Until his letter had arrived, out of the blue, she’d believed that she could put him together again, bring him out of the state the War left him in, make him whole.

  Her life had turned completely upside-down, five years ago—almost exactly five years, come to think of it. She’d been traveling along, secure in her path, and then the path had fallen out from under her: Bennett’s letter and the frantic telegrams and telephone calls to his mother, followed three days later by the Margolin child’s death and the uproar and self recriminations and a vision of dead children pouring unheeded through an hour-glass. A handful of days that had ripped away all of Laura’s illusions, made her see once and for all that her world was built not of stone, but of the loosest, most flammable straw. She’d crept home to Hurleigh after that devastation, too, and sat here smoking and staring out of the window.

  Then a few days later, shaky and without hope but back in London—which had been torn by strikes then, too—she had looked up to see Richard Bunsen standing before her, and the previous ten days, even the previous ten years, might have been arranged to aim her at that moment. She’d seen Richard, and known him instantly as someone she could use—no, not use, he was much more than a tool—someone she could influence and shape and work with, to stop up that endless stream of dying poor. Richard, who had clasped her hand and given her that crooked grin, and shown her the way to rebuild.

  (She paused to wonder how things had gone during the day, Richard’s meeting with Matthew Ruddle, a man she didn’t much like, not least because following a meeting with his Union mentor, Richard always seemed to take on a degree of coarseness she found…unnecessary. Like those trips he took with his other friends to places like Paris and Monte Carlo, that always turned him into a seventeen-year-old again. Infuriating.)

  What if she’d managed to cling to Bennett? What if the door to marriage and children had not been slammed in her face? She might have been happy, but would she have moved into the world she inhabited now? Would she have found purpose and meaning, have been in a position to change so many lives, if not for Richard? She had been born for what she would do in these next few weeks, as if her role had been scripted before her conception by some all-seeing Playwright: This is what we need, this is when we need her, precisely this and no other.

  It was strange, but sometimes she felt very close to her mad, trouble-making old grandmother. In her final years, Grandmamma had adopted a fervent and probably heretical Christian doctrine based on the unshakable belief that All Things Were Ordained To Be. The belief had covered anything from Connie’s broken engagement (“He’d have proved a bad ’un in the end, you mark my words.”) to the teapot one of the dogs had knocked onto the small Turkey carpet (“I’m so glad we have to take that up for cleaning, I felt the other day that it was going to trip me.”).

  Laura’s own convictions had little of the Christian about them, but time and again she had seen events slip into place, watched minor acts coalesce into something important, until eventually she could deny the pattern no longer: Since being driven away from Bennett, she had grown into her own.

  But that did not keep the affair from feeling dreadfully…unfinished.

  And he felt the same. His face had been an open one even before the War, but afterwards he’d been incapable of hiding anything, especially from her. One glance at him in the solar last night and she’d known he was as much in love with her as ever he had been. She’d also known that he would do nothing about it: If there was a first step to be taken, it was up to her.

  As things, large or small, always seemed to be up to her.

  And why not? Wasn’t that what Hurleighs did? Wasn’t that what her father meant when he harped on the blood of England? The aristocracy as a whole might have degenerated into a class of economic parasites, but over the centuries, Hurleighs had given (as those early Americans put it) their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor for their country. Hurleigh ancestors had stood up to kings at Runnymede, generations of Hurleigh sons had given their lives on fields of battle, Hurleighs had beggared their families for a cause.

  And now a Hurleigh daughter spent her time in first class compartments, sweet-talked corrupt politicians and newspaper barons, and dutifully kept squabbles from her parents’ drawing rooms.

  Irritable, cold despite the fire, she crushed the stub end of the cigarette into the laden ash-tray and went to wipe her make-up, wash her face, brush her teeth, all the comforting rituals. At the end, she sat at her childhood dressing-table and took up her hair-brush.

  In the looking-glass was Lady Laura Hurleigh, eldest child of an ancient and powerful family, her name and face instantly recognizable to half the nation, moneyed, respected, and not even hard to look on. Variations of the face before her had appeared in newspapers two or three times a year since the week of her birth: Little Lady Laura riding her pony; Lady Laura and mother with the hunt; the Lady Laura Hurleigh presented at court. Lady Laura, haughty before the Prime Minister.

  In the looking-glass was also Laura Hurleigh, lover and partner to Labour’s up-and-coming fair-haired boy, Richard Bunsen. This was the Laura Richard himself would have seen, had he been standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders: helpmeet, bed-mate, sounding-board, as useful at charming Britain’s upper classes as she was with wowing the Americans.

  Why were men who publicly espoused the rights of women so willing to overlook the women close to them? Richard had started out seeing her as a person in her own right, she was sure he had; he’d listened to her ideas, supported her proposals, respected her as a colleague. But in a few short years, the brilliant, wild man she’d tumbled into bed and into partnership with had evolved into a different sort of creature, one that ordered his suits from a tailor, knew what kind of wine to drink, and saw her as a highly useful, but necessarily secondary, adjunct to his male ambitions.

  Oh, why hadn’t she just been born a man? As far back as she could remember, she’d known that she was Not-a-Boy. When she was five and four-year-old Thomas nearly died of pneumonia, it was little Daniel everyone had turned their increased vigilance on, not Laura. Then Thomas did die, in the second year of the War, and she had seen them pat and coddle his new-born son Theodore with that same hunger for reassurance. And in the winter of 1919, when the epidemic took Teddy, yet again they passed over Laura to settle their hopes back on her brothers. Boys mattered: girls were there to bear them.

  And unmarried at thirty-three, she hadn’t even managed that.

  Was this where her sense of incompleteness came from, the fact that she had no child of her own?

  No, she decided; she’d felt that way long before she qualified for the withered identity of Spinster. She’d always felt it. Maybe that was why she always had to outrun her brothers, why she fought harder for what she wanted, why she always made things more difficult for herself than any man she knew. Women were always adjuncts to some man’s ambitions; she should be old enough not to expect anything else from Richard, women’s rights or no.

  Things would be better if they could just get away for a while, to crawl into bed for a week and boff themselves limp. They said it was bad for a person accustomed to regular sex to stop suddenly—and God knew, under the current strain she ached for the release—but he’d been so touchy of late, with so much resting on the next days and weeks, that although they had sex, it seemed as mechanical for him as it was unsatisfying for her. No doubt he was just as happy to spend some days away from her, although that left a dangerous doo
r open for other affections. Still, he’d had to deal with Lord Malcolm on his own today, with no one but Matthew Ruddle to smooth the old reprobate’s tongue: Perhaps that would make him appreciate her, just a little.

  Another decision she could feel looming above her: marriage. Even with passion’s waning, she suspected that, before too long, Richard would ask her to marry him. It would have been unthinkable to the young radical she had first met, but Free Love had been buried under the trappings of success and adulation, and a rejection of the political and economic bonds of marriage had turned into an excuse for philandering.

  (Why the word philander, she mused? Brotherly love of men, the word meant, but really it meant erotic lover of many women. Perhaps men who partner a string of women feel a strong bond with other men? And why, when a woman chose to give herself to a man outside the bonds of marriage, did she become not a philanderess, but a whore?)

  What of Bennett? Which looking-glass Laura would Bennett see if he were the man standing behind her, his light head over her dark one, his hands resting on her shoulders? (Her body stirred inside its heavy silk negligeé, at the image of those hands descending, that mouth meeting her neck, to leisurely explore places where Richard’s fingers ventured only to see if she was ready for him.)

  She tore her mind away from the thought of Bennett’s sure mouth and stared at the reflection. The Lady Laura Victoria Anne Christine Hurleigh gazed back at her, slightly flushed, pupils dark, but with all her thoughts and ambitions hidden, those thoughts and ambitions of the other Laura Hurleigh, the true one, the only one who mattered.

  She had to remind herself of that fact, often: Only the inner person matters.

  Everything but the inner person—everything, everyone—is sacrifice to the Cause.

  Her mind had been denied a boy’s formal education? That was no sacrifice at all, when she considered how much easier it made it to speak with the millions who had been offered no such luxury.

  She’d been born Not-a-Boy? What did that childhood resentment matter, when she’d come to maturity at a time when men were going to soldier and women were needed to run the machinery of the nation?

  Bennett had abandoned her? Yes, she had loved him, loved and pitied and been in awe of his strength, but within days of that devastation, she’d been given Richard Bunsen, a powerful man who both needed her and taught her everything he knew—certainly everything she needed to know, to invent herself anew.

  She felt burdened by the unfair privileges of her birth? Yet she had recently begun to see how those very privileges could be a weapon, precisely what was needed to turn the system on its head.

  Grandmamma’s belief that All Things Were Ordained To Be had proved true time and again, to an extent that was almost eerie in its perfection.

  Of course, she never talked about the idea of pre-ordination—she didn’t want to sound like her sister Connie with her bare feet and her Doctrine of the Nude. Not even with Richard, since he would have thought she meant the will of God, and divine approval did not enter into his vision of their work.

  But privately, half ashamedly, she clung to the belief. It was not entirely irrational, for the coincidences of her life were too many to explain as mere luck of the draw: God—whether God was a person or simply a name one gave to the machinery of the Universe—surely must have taken an interest in the life of Laura Hurleigh, to have given her all those nudges? She had even tested her theory once or twice, deliberately trying to perform some wrong act, only to have circumstances turn against her. The theory had come up shining, and left her even more serenely confident in the rightness of her path: If the road is made easy, it is the right one.

  Which made Bennett’s sudden re-appearance a puzzle. Why had he come back into her life, just at this crucial point? Clearly, it might simply be coincidence—she wasn’t such a fanatic on the idea of pre-ordination that she would deny random chance outright. But because the structure of her life was such a living thing to her, because the last few years had given her a powerful sense of all the loose threads of her existence weaving together in purpose, she had at least to think about Bennett’s re-appearance, and wonder if it might mean something.

  If she’d been a heaven-and-hell Christian—if she’d even been much of a Christian at all—she might have considered his re-appearance some kind of a test, of her faith, her resolve, her understanding. But Laura’s awareness of the Divine was closer to a pagan, bone-deep sense of Purpose than it was to any Christian doctrine, and so she looked for a personal significance in the event, not merely a challenge set by an authority figure: Did Bennett have something to offer the Movement? And if so, was it through her, or through Richard?

  Bennett might even be a mere tool of the Fates. Designed perhaps to bring that tall and mysterious American into the mix? It was true, she and Richard had been talking only the week before about the need for another, broader form of contact with the Americans, one that wasn’t limited to the radical minority. Would a man who sold motorcars be sufficiently working class for their needs? Stuyvesant’s leisure for international travel suggested that he would side with owners, yet he acted like a man who had spent years with dirty hands. And his clothes the night before had been what one might expect of a working man who, though he had moved up a notch in the hierarchy, nonetheless retained a certain disdain for the trappings of wealth.

  In the end, cold and cramped, she knew she needed to consult Richard on the matter. His sense of what was needed was occasionally startlingly acute, and he would not be distracted by any previous affections or romantic dreams. Let him meet Bennett and the American, let him get the feel of both.

  Yes, she decided; she’d like to hear what Richard thought.

  And if the road is made easy, then it is the right one.

  With that thought, finally, she went to bed, and to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  A HUNDRED MILES AWAY, in the northern reaches of London, Aldous Carstairs, like Laura Hurleigh, was taking late to his bed. All week he’d been tugged to and fro by the furies and frustrations of his work on the one hand and the intoxicating possibilities opened by Grey’s return (Grey’s possible return, he corrected himself) on the other. A memo would arrive from Downing Street regarding the arrest procedures for the Strike and he would think, If only I had Grey to hand. A conversation with Kell at MI5 would circle around the nagging problem of closing in on the ringleaders of the growing unrest, and he would bite his tongue to keep from saying, Round them up and let my men question them.

  About the time Bennett Grey was arriving at Paddington that morning, Carstairs had realized that if he didn’t make time for a visit to Monica’s establishment—which he’d planned on his return from Cornwall and had to put off—he was going to murder someone. So he had picked up the telephone and placed a call to the woman’s private number, and told her when to expect him.

  The rest of Friday had passed in a delicious blend of intolerable frustration and impending relief, like some ten-hour version of the moments before climax. He’d gone about his work, aware every moment of the tantalizing proximity of Bennett Grey, on whom so much rested yet who was as volatile as a room full of petrol, as uncontrollable as a falcon tossed into the air. Several times Carstairs had found himself fingering the scar on his face, each time loosing a small thrill of memory: the intense pleasure of breaking that stupid nurse; the even greater pleasure of forcing Grey to assist at her breaking; and then the icy shock of Grey coming at him, the flash of terror and the easy slide of glass into skin followed by the building fire of the cut itself. And worst of all, the devastation two days later when he came around in hospital to find that not only had Grey been released, but that Aldous Carstairs, the Project’s director, had insufficient authority to demand his return.

  It was a bad time—these same damned coal miners, then and now—and he’d had to fight with everything he had to keep the Project from folding entirely: debts called in, a score of personal visits to deliver the ever-distasteful
blackmail threats. In the end, he’d managed, but without Grey the Project was like a summer house, receiving just enough attention through the cold times to keep it intact. Carstairs walked quietly, turned his energies to other—lesser—projects, but he had never allowed the moribund Project to shut down entirely, just in case.

  For years, the scar’s tingle and itch had been a physical manifestation of the unscratchable itch that was Bennett Grey, whom his hands could never decide if they wanted to beat or to caress.

  And now, thanks to an oafish American and a young woman infected with the feminist disease, the waiting was over.

  Admittedly, Grey had only ventured a glance at the outside world; admittedly, too, Carstairs had no idea how he was going to use it, but it was a beginning.

  Carstairs, looking through the taxicab’s windows at the sleeping city, felt cradled in the languor of physical release. (God, Monica’s new little flaxen-haired bitch was something—cropped hair, no breasts to speak of, no more hips than an adolescent boy, but luscious, welcoming buttocks: perfect. He glanced down at his gloves, new a week ago, now torn and scarred by her panicking finger-nails. He had frightened her badly, albeit deliberately, when she’d been unable to draw air. Granted, he allowed it to go on just a bit too long, so he supposed the gloves were understandable. He made a mental note to send her a little something extra, to sweeten her for next time.)

  The marvelous thing was, the ache of hunger was still there. His body’s present warm satiation did not in the least lessen the sharp restlessness that Grey evoked. If anything, it made the eventual satisfaction of breaking Grey to his purposes all the more real, like the first hors d’oeuvres of a great feast.