And most delicious of all was knowing that in this case, pleasure and duty nestled right into each other.
Carstairs stepped out of the taxi in front of his house at a quarter after five in the morning. He was aware that on some level, as always after one of these episodes, he detested himself. But as Machiavelli would have reminded him, virtue in a ruler was a very different thing from the virtue of an ordinary man: A ruler must be prepared to commit evil on the way to building a greater good.
And Aldous Carstairs was born to be a ruler. Not out in public, not like that puffing idiot in the black shirt who had taken over the great Niccolò’s homeland, or that other one assembling a private army in Germany, but the man who moved the forces behind the unchanging façade of government.
Still, what did a little self loathing matter? One might argue that a visit to Monica’s was for his own individual sake, as indeed it had been in the past, but tonight had been another matter. Put simply, it was dangerous to allow pressures to build unchecked. Apart from any pleasure it brought him, this episode at Monica’s had cleared his mind effectively for the delicate, highly demanding work of the coming days.
He was no longer on edge—
On edge…
Carstairs went absolutely still, the key frozen in the lock of his front door as the phrase reverberated in his mind, causing the machinery that had been turning there to sing in response. On edge. On the edge. Director Hoover, saying how close to the edge his agent was, his straying agent (“Blames this guy Bunsen for his turning his brother into a vegetable”) who had walked in from the rain and become a catalyst for the reaction now taking place in Aldous Carstairs’ mind.
The glimmering suggestion of a plan that had moved at the edge of his vision for the past week blossomed into life, a plot within a plot unfolding, glorious and perfect.
“This guy Bunsen” a rogue agent; a sapper-turned–Labour politician; the Strike building to a head. Even—my God, could it be any more perfect?—even Hurleigh House, the stage for his play to be acted upon. Hurleigh House, the Duke, Stanley Baldwin, and the key players in the Miners’ Union drama.
The changes would be minimal, the benefits enormous: A clear and immediate threat was infinitely more effective than an inchoate sense of danger. The personal won over the anonymous, every time.
And the American? He was disposable, along with the others.
But, Grey. Could he put Bennett Grey in the path of danger? Might be best to remove him, first.
Yes, with one deft move, the Carstairs Proposal would be clasped to the breast of England’s governing body in its time of need, and the Truth Project would become the jewel in its crown of achievement. And as part of the agreement, when Carstairs himself stepped modestly away from the spotlight and reclaimed the Project that was his own, Grey would be his, to have and to hold.
Britain would be safe from the saboteur within.
The only thing he might ask for was a Lorenzo to his Machiavelli, a third P, the Principe he could mold and direct. Not Baldwin, by any means, nor Churchill—the man was too set in his ways. Someone young, malleable. What about that promising boy Mosley? He came from the right background, and surely no man who married a daughter of Lord Curzon could possibly be serious about Socialism?
All of that—realization, confirmation, and a direction for the future—came in the space of one held breath. He let it out slowly, hesitantly, but the vision remained. He smiled, and finished turning the key. Upstairs, he stripped off his ravaged gloves and dropped them into the waste-paper basket, sitting in hat and overcoat to write a full coded page in his journal.
At the end, he laid the pen down on the desk and looked at what he had written.
The great Niccolò would shake his head in appreciation.
Pity about the American, he rather liked the fellow. Well, perhaps liked was too strong a word, but he found him amusing. But the end was all.
Carstairs stretched and got undressed, putting everything but his hat into the clothes hamper to be cleaned. He drew a bath almost too hot to bear, scrubbing himself clean of the smell of Monica’s. He shaved his face smooth, glanced again at his diary, and with a sigh, folded himself between the crisp sheets of his bed.
Chapter Thirty-Three
AT NEARLY THE SAME TIME, and a mere seven miles away from Aldous Carstairs, another man waited impatiently for sleep. Richard Bunsen slept little at the best of times, so filled with energies that a few hours sufficed, but lately, his mind seemed incapable even of that brief respite. A thousand and ten things to do, so many possibilities to consider, such a burden of decisions that he alone could make. Yesterday he’d given two speeches, spent much of the evening in meetings, returned to his flat at midnight, worked on an article until the words wavered in front of his face, and finally took to his bed, cold to his bones, just before four.
Only to lie, staring at the ceiling, irritably wishing that Laura were with him instead of with that bloody family of hers in Gloucestershire: Laura could always make him sleep. But she had her role to play, and one of the elements of that role was maintaining the family connection.
A dozen times a day, he was aware—with emotions ranging from furious resentment to abject gratitude—of how much he owed to Laura. And to think at first he had nearly dismissed her out of hand as yet another titled dilettante. He’d gone to the effort of attracting her mostly through pique, setting himself a challenge, that he would be the one to turn her down, this latest in a string of frigid females who teased and flirted and belatedly discovered her morals when her blouse was half off.
Instead, he had found a woman who’d determinedly abandoned her class’s professional virginity some years earlier, and held her head high about it, as if daring him to criticize. He’d never learned who her first was, or even if there had been more than one. In the end, he’d decided that she’d been one of the many who had given herself to a young officer during the War, a junior officer who died before he could make good his promise of marriage. London was full of them: not quite a virgin, hungry for comfort, like that secretary today, a little long in the tooth but her eyes promising entertainment, if he’d had more than three minutes to spare.
Laura was more than a bed-mate, however. She’d quickly become the partner he hadn’t known he needed, one whose identity opened doors to him with an ease he’d never dreamed about. How utterly unlikely she was, how completely she had transformed his work, how much her presence had placed within grasp for the first time—her connections, her money, her passion.
And he had to admit, her brains. His thinking became clearer, discussing his ideas with her. With Laura as audience, his ideas became firmer, more practical, their focus more precise. She also had a woman’s instinct for vulnerability and manipulation, and several of her suggestions had brought forth unexpected fruit.
He’d had to consider the alliance long and hard, knowing how it would look: Richard Bunsen, little better than middle class, attaching himself to the Hurleigh coattails. With any other family, he’d never have dared to raise his head in public. But the Hurleighs were not like other families: heroes, yes, established authority in the country, certainly, but iconoclasts as well, outside the normal requirements of titled families. The Hurleighs wrote their own script, and the country trusted them, and followed.
In the end, he had to admit, it was his hunger for the shortcut that decided him. This was three years after Armistice, and he was restless, feeling less sure every day of the wisdom in allying himself with rabble-rousing misfits. Their hearts were right, of that he was convinced, but the way they were going, he could see no victory. He wished he’d had the sense to make a clean break at the time, instead of letting himself be talked into helping the Americans; the weeks that followed his last trip there had been tense ones, as he waited for the knock at the door, waited to have his connections there laid out for the world to see.
What he really wanted, today as much as he had five years ago, was to feel how he’d felt during t
he War. Hours with your heart in your throat, cradling a packet of hellfire through the wormholes the men had so silently carved, hiding your fear as you rode their apprehension and respect—their awe—into the hole. And when you came out, everyone—everyone who mattered—knew who’d been responsible for driving the point of the wedge that tipped the battle. Bunsen and his men knew just who was important on the Front, and it wasn’t the generals, and it wasn’t the men up there in the fresh air.
When he’d emerged from the hellhole of France, when he was finally convinced that he’d never again be called upon to swallow sour terror and creep through the earth to lay a charge under Jerry, it was like the sun slowly breaking through after a long winter. It took years before he began to notice just how good life could be, and to realize that he never wanted to waste so much as a moment of his precious, too-short life. What he did with his life had to matter. Richard Bunsen had to make an impact on the world. And now, the time was nearly at hand.
(That part of his mind that was always at work played with the phrase strike while the iron is hot for a bit, and made mental note of using the word play in his next speech. Audiences liked a spot of cleverness.)
Part of the trouble had been those years it took to find his way. Out of uniform, he’d felt moved by currents he could neither predict nor begin to influence: Speeches to summon indignation in soldiers had slid into speeches to rouse the workers those soldiers had become, until three years later, in the coal strike of 1921, he’d been making speeches to miners. And although his speeches drew a gratifying response, and his public face had been serenely confident, secretly Richard had wondered what on earth he was doing.
Then he’d met Laura, and everything came into bright, sharp focus. With the force of her personality, backed by her family connections, he saw his purpose at last: Look Forward was born, lines of communication and cooperation laid with men in Britain and abroad, men who shared his vision and his frustration.
It was, at times, just a trifle humiliating to reflect on how a few short years with Laura had advanced the cause by decades, but Bunsen was scrupulous about all his emotions: Everything was placed beneath the needs of the Movement, be it love, pride, or humiliation—life itself, even. True, it was his sense of humiliation that escaped his control the most; and true, when it did, he took it out on Laura, but in the end, he always re-gained his perspective, and then he would relish the delicious irony of it, that her family’s lofty position would contribute to the abolition of hierarchy.
Perfect. Pre-ordained, you might say, if you believed in such things.
Not that life with Laura was all beer and skittles. She was a stubborn woman, who had beaten her parents into submission when she was a girl and imagined that she could do the same with him. They’d gone through a rough patch during the past year, as she’d begun to resent the interest paid him by Labour and started to harp about the wrongness of, as she put it, joining his wagon to the political machine.
What she didn’t see was that he wasn’t joining his wagon to Labour any more than he’d joined it to the Americans—or to the Hurleigh name, for that matter: Very soon, within the next month if even half his efforts fell into place, the dust of revolution would settle and reveal: Richard Bunsen’s wagon, standing alone in the rubble. Any politician who had thought him a malleable lad grateful for the attention was going to be badly taken aback.
Fortunately, Laura seemed to be calming down. Last year, after that pair of rows that had her going off on her own, he’d half expected her to pack her bags and go home to Mummy.
The possibility had him on the horns of a dilemma: He would be glad enough for the freedom, for not having to argue each minute part of the Movement, but at the same time, he’d bitterly miss the benefits of having her at his side. In the end, he’d agreed to curtail his affairs (although even Laura couldn’t expect him to stop from responding to women entirely—a man had his needs, after all) in exchange for which she’d scale down her criticism of his plans. A degree of coolness entered their relationship, but he’d had to do it, had to let her know that he wasn’t her rough-handed puppet.
Still, on a night like this, he missed her body, warm and willing, in his bed.
Chapter Thirty-Four
SATURDAY MORNING BREAKFAST at Hurleigh House was laid out on twelve feet of crisp white linen covered with hissing chafing-dishes filled with hearty foods, many of them foreign to the American sensibilities of Harris Stuyvesant. He worked his way down the row of lids, eyeing the contents, before he decided that morning was not the time to investigate unidentifiable lumps of spicy-smelling meat. He helped himself to eggs and sausages.
The only person in the breakfast room was the Duke, seated with his back to the room and his shoulders hunched over the morning newspaper. Stuyvesant took his host’s posture as a disinvitation to companionship, so he picked up a paper of his own and carried his plate to a seat between the window and the crackling fireplace.
Twenty minutes passed. A gray-haired woman came in to check the buffet table and left again, clearing his empty plate; the Duke grumbled at something in the paper, stood up, and stalked out, the two deerhounds bouncing at his heels. Stuyvesant skimmed the newspapers: Mussolini was in Tripoli; the House had stayed up all night debating the Economy Bill under Churchill; a boy fishing in the Thames had caught what he thought was a “big ’un” that turned out to be a badly battered corpse; some schoolchildren presented an iron-faced Duchess with flowers; and the Times was at last showing some apprehension about the looming strike—their regular “Coal Crisis” piece had moved smack into the center of its page. The less sedate papers verged on hysteria, calling for “volunteers” for the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, which sounded more and more like a tool for recruiting scabs.
In the Oxford Bugle, interviews were given with a local housewife (who denied that her purchase of six tins of salmon, three of corned beef, and twenty pounds of flour amounted to hoarding food); a city fireman (who gave a stern lecture on the inadvisability of storing quantities of petrol in the home); and two university undergraduates (hearty lads who eagerly anticipated the chance to man a London bus in defiance of the Strikers, and rather hoped to be given the opportunity to use their boxing skills, as well).
With relief, Stuyvesant heard someone else come into the room; with pleasure, he saw it was Sarah Grey.
“Good morning,” she greeted him, making for the coffee samovar. “None of the others up yet?”
“Just the Duke.”
“The Duchess will have been up and away long ago; there’s a horse she’s looking at near Cheltenham.”
“Your brother warned me that I might be pressed into horseman-ship, but nobody’s said anything.”
“A month ago we’d all be mounted and off by now, but the season’s just ended. Which is probably why this gathering didn’t take place a month ago.” She dimpled.
“I had an aunt once who was mad for German opera, used to dragoon anyone within arm’s reach to go with her. It got so the rest of the family would check the theater listings before we accepted a lunch invitation, because it could easily stretch on to midnight.”
“Then you know the hazards. As it is, I shouldn’t expect the others until much later—I heard them at one, going strong in the billiards room.”
“It was well after two when they came through.”
Her eyes sparkled at him over the rim of her cup. “And did they all end up in separate rooms?”
“I did my best to ignore the openings and closings of doors,” he replied primly.
She chuckled. “Gilly’s incorrigible. The Duchess only invites him because she and his mother were ladies-in-waiting together. The Duke goes wild.”
“He’s going to get himself arrested, if he’s not a little more circumspect.”
“Oh, Mr. Stuyvesant, we’ve loosened up a bit since the days of Oscar Wilde’s arrest.”
“I wouldn’t count on that if I were Dubuque. And please, call me Harris.”
“If you call me Sarah.”
“With pleasure.”
A short time later, Stuyvesant was surprised to see the two men themselves. Gilbert Dubuque and his chinless friend, last night’s bartender, both in startling Fair Isle pull-overs, both looking somewhat the worse for wear. Dubuque shot Stuyvesant a bloodshot glance, taking in the American’s proximity to Sarah and the unwelcoming glare on his face, and veered off for the shiny samovar.
“Morning, boys,” Sarah chirped merrily. “Hope you slept well?”
Dubuque muttered a response, whose only recognizable word was “train,” and walked to a table set up at the far end of the room; his friend flipped a hand in their direction but did not try to speak. Sarah’s eyes sparkled with mischief, and she called, “Mrs. Bleaks made some of her famous curried kidneys, you must try them.”
The sound Dubuque emitted was halfway to a retch; the other spilled his coffee. The two young men crept into a couple of chairs, huddling over their cups, and Stuyvesant leaned forward to murmur, “Sarah Grey, you are an evil woman.”
Again came the laugh, sexy as hell emerging from a cute little blonde thing like Sarah Grey. Damn it, her brother had been right: She was just his type.
Which wasn’t going to make using her any easier.
As if summoned by the thought, or the laugh, Laura Hurleigh appeared in the doorway. She checked briefly, taking in the tête-à-tête between Sarah and Stuyvesant, and her eyebrows rose.
But not, as Stuyvesant feared, from disapproval, because her expression was warm as she came over to their table.
He stood and pulled out a chair for her, offered to bring her coffee, then subsided when the gray-haired woman appeared with a tray carrying a setting of tea and an envelope.
“This came for you, my Lady.”
“Thank you Mrs. Bleaks,” Laura said, snatching the flimsy and ripping it open. She ran her eyes down the telegram, and went pink with pleasure before folding it into a pocket and telling Sarah, “Richard thinks he’ll be able to make it, after all.”
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