“What, from a tea-party?”
“That was no tea-party, that was a major phase of negotiations. I’ve got to hand it to you—I wouldn’t have thought anyone could keep that group of men from each other’s throats for an entire hour.”
“And the week-end is young,” she remarked, sounding a touch grim.
“It’ll get easier, now that you’ve set the tone.”
“It never ceases to amaze me, the extent to which this country will defer to my kind of people.”
“C’mon, don’t short-change yourself. It’s not what you are that pulled it off, it’s who.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say, Mr. Stuyvesant.”
“You called me ‘Harris’ in there, you’re welcome to go on with it. And I say nothing but the truth. They should elect you Queen and toss out the rest of the system.”
“Now, there is a political arrangement I’ve not heard mooted. An elected monarchy.”
“Make it an absolute monarchy, all or nothing.”
“I shall try to bring up your proposal over this week-end.”
“Seriously,” he said. “That was an impressive job of oil-pouring in there. And I think you ought to go put up your feet for a few minutes before it starts again.”
She took a last draw of tobacco and planted the butt in a bowl of sand laid there for the purpose. He held the door for her; she handed him his jacket.
“I need to know,” he said. “How close do you want me to stick to Bunsen?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I’m here as his bodyguard, although as you say, it’s mostly as decoration. Still, don’t you think I should go through the motions? Not on the level of pushing him through a crowd and watching for rotten tomatoes; just keeping a discreet eye.”
“We shall assume that here the rotten tomatoes will be strictly verbal. Just use your judgment, Harris.”
“Well, if I’m not going to be glued to his hip, maybe you should take my name off the dinner lists. I may stick my head in, but it’s better not to be nailed down to one place.”
“As you wish.”
“And, let me know if there’s anything I can help you with,” he told her. Her smile was warm as she went inside, leaving him thinking that Laura Hurleigh was one heck of a lady.
Dinner that night lacked the ease of the tea-time gathering, either because the setting was more formal, or because Laura Hurleigh was not permitted to circulate and turn matters to her satisfaction. Watching the currents in the room, Stuyvesant thought it a good thing that, for this time anyway, the three groups had been seated to themselves.
During dinner the Duke was at his most formal and the air of the Great Hall pressed down on all sides. Everyone breathed an exhalation of relief when the final course was cleared and they could adjourn to the billiards room and its neighboring library for brandy and cigars. Laura and the lady secretary disappeared for a very few minutes, the scantest of recognition to the traditional withdrawal of the ladies.
Laura came into the billiards room and re-inserted herself into the group, allowing one mine owner to get her a brandy and soda, permitting young Tom Decater to light her cigarette. To Stuyvesant’s interest, a short time later the Duke stood up and left, as if for a brief visit to the restroom. Except that he did not come back, and Laura’s presence ruled.
The next three hours passed like tea-time had, but smoothed further by alcohol, gramophone music, and the bonhomie of the billiards table. Laura kept in the background, but seemed to know the very moment when constraint would re-appear or two men would recall that they were opponents, when she would appear at their elbow with a question, a story, or some entertaining distraction. Once she told a joke that sounded perfectly innocent until one thought about it, then stood with a surprised look on her lovely face when the men around her began to snort with laughter. Later, she recited a conversation she’d overheard between Chancellor Churchill and his wife about water-colors, a duet of a woman’s voice alternating with a gruff, pompous man that had even the Prime Minister hiding his amusement. And before the evening was over, she succeeded in snaring nine assorted males for a game of charades, thus providing Harris Stuyvesant with the lifetime memory of the Prime Minister of Britain crawling on the carpet and yapping in an illustration of the phrase “barking mad.”
Weaving through it all, Lady Laura Hurleigh glowed, luminous with purpose as she moved through the roomful of implacable foes and soothed their raised hackles beneath her aristocratic hands, convincing them of their shared interests, reminding them that they were human beings, and British, before they were supporters of an unyielding position.
As the foundation for an agreement, it was unlikely, it was unhurried, and it was brilliant.
It was also a huge amount of work. By the time the party broke up at a quarter to one in the morning, Stuyvesant wondered if he’d have to carry the poor woman upstairs. But she managed to walk under her own power, charming to her last good-night wave, having planted chaste, almost motherly kisses on the late-night bristle of the two mine owners and one of the Prime Minister’s assistants.
Stuyvesant watched Bunsen’s door shut, heard the lock turn, and went to take up his place at the meeting of the corridors. To his surprise, Laura’s door came open a minute later and she leaned out.
“I just wanted to thank you, Harris, for all you’ve done.”
He walked down the corridor, so as not to have to raise his voice and disturb the other inmates. “I haven’t done much of anything except drink good booze and watch a beautiful lady work her heart out.”
He succeeded in making her blush again. “Good night, Mr. Stuyvesant.”
“Sleep well, Miss Hurleigh.”
The night passed without event, Stuyvesant sitting in his chair until he felt sleep creeping up on him, at which point he would get up and go search one or another of the rooms. Each time he returned to his chair, the tiny scrap of carpet fiber he’d shoved between the door and the jamb was still there, assuring him that Bunsen had not left his room—even if he’d brought climbing ropes in his suitcase, going out of the window wouldn’t get him past the guards.
At three o’clock, he snapped awake at the first fall of a foot on the bottom stair. He watched as the guard who’d pointed a gun at him the previous afternoon appeared up the stairs. This time, his hands were empty.
“Mr. Jones,” he murmured in greeting.
“Mr. Stuyvesant. All quiet here?”
“Not a stir.”
“I just came to see if you’d like a spell off. I just came back on duty, and I can give you a few hours if you’d like a kip.”
Kip probably meant nap. “No, I’m fine. Maybe in the morning when they’re having breakfast and their morning session.”
“That’d be eight to eleven or thereabouts. You sure that’s enough?”
“Should be fine.”
“Can I bring you some coffee?”
To trust him or not? Normally on guard duty, Stuyvesant would have touched nothing he didn’t see poured out, but this was the Duke’s man.
Yeah, he thought, and Aldous Carstairs’ machine, whatever its purpose, is ticking away in the background.
“I don’t think so. It’ll just make me need to piss. But thanks.”
“Have it your way. I’ll be through again in an hour or so, I can bring you something then if you want.”
Stuyvesant thanked him, and Jones went away.
The night passed that way, completing a close examination of all the public rooms, punctuated by the occasional meaningless noise and by Gwilhem Jones’s hourly visits. At seven in the morning, Stuyvesant saw a light go on under Bunsen’s door. Seven minutes later, one of the maids brought up a tray. Stuyvesant took it from her, checked it perfunctorily, and tapped on Bunsen’s door.
Bunsen was up, looking like a character in a play—the romantic lead, in velvet dressing gown. He was surprised at the face behind the tray. “Stuyvesant, hello.”
“Shall I p
ut this on the desk?”
“Certainly,” Bunsen said, stepping back to let him in.
“I thought I’d tell you that once things are under way, I’ll be going off duty for a few hours. It might be good if you stay with the others until I’m there to watch your back.”
“I hardly think that’s necessary, Stuyvesant. No one here is about to come after me with a club in their hand.”
“Whatever you like,” he said, and let himself out. This time, Bunsen did not lock the door after him.
He’d known from the beginning that proper guard duty was utterly impossible under these circumstances. If anyone were wanting just to assassinate Bunsen, they could do so ten times over—poison in his breakfast tea, a sniper’s bullet as he took a walk outside, shinnying up the drain-pipe to knife him in his bed, you name it. Three men and complete control over Bunsen’s every action was the minimum; neither requirement had any chance of being met.
But after all, his guard duty was primarily an act, on two fronts. Bunsen needed a burly assistant to keep face in front of the other men with burly assistants; and Stuyvesant needed an excuse to be here and sniffing for any indication of a bomb. He’d examined every inch of the breakfast and meeting rooms during his night-time prowls, and was satisfied that the only way an explosive device could lie there would be if it had been inserted behind the wallpaper thirty years before.
Which didn’t mean that one of the participants wouldn’t bring one in with him, but brief-cases were being checked, and really, damn it, if Aldous Carstairs seriously believed a bomb might go off near his Prime Minister, he’d have done something more than hijack a stray American for the purpose of finding it.
At half past eight, the delegates were well settled into their first formal session. Stuyvesant stood outside the doors and listened for a few minutes. By now he knew most of the voices well enough to identify the speakers. Herbert Smith’s dogged Yorkshire accents came clear through the heavy wood.
“—what some of my colleagues say, we are not out to overthrow Capitalism. You say that miners have got to accept a cut in pay or risk permanent mine closures across the country, but I say to you that the miners need to feel that the owners are taking a pay cut as well.”
The Prime Minister spoke up. “Despite my respected colleague’s protestations, I have to point out that there are among the Miners’ Union those who openly profess scorn of Parliament, who wish to wield power over a rightful and constitutional government, and who threaten, in point of fact, to hold the nation to ransom with their General Strike.”
Smith retorted, “It is the owners who threaten to lock out—”
He was cut off by Richard Bunsen. “It is difficult not to sympathize with those who see Parliament as an empty façade, when we have only recently watched a single newspaper dismantle a legally elected government.”
Voices rose, but above the men’s voices came that of Laura Hurleigh. “Mr. Bunsen,” she said firmly. “We do not encourage name-calling here.”
Stuyvesant nodded in satisfaction, and took his gritty eyes and heavy limbs off to bed—round-the-clock bodyguarding was all well and good, but if he didn’t get some sleep, he’d be in no shape to recognize a bomb if he was handed one with a fizzing ignition cord.
He found Exeter (who looked disgustingly well rested) and told him he was going to sleep for a few hours, tacked a Do Not Disturb note on the door of the broom-closet bedroom, stripped to his shorts, and fell into bliss.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
THE VOICE CAME from a great distance. A voice speaking a foreign language. He was in the trenches; the Germans must have overrun them. He pulled the pillow over his head, in hopes they would pass him by, and the voice retreated.
Then a rat landed on his shoulder, and in a whirl of movement he was upright with his revolver on the German.
Not a German. A young woman. What was a young woman doing in the trenches? A terrified young woman, white, wide-eyed, her hands up and out. A familiar, terrified young woman. Honey.
“Deedee,” he croaked.
“Sir?” The maid’s voice climbed and broke.
He looked at the thing in his hand, shoved it under the pillow, and twitched the covers over his bare, dangling legs. “Sorry, hon—Sorry, Deedee, you surprised me. What is it?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I—That is to say, Mr. Gallagher—There was a—”
“Kid: Spit it out.”
“Sorry sir. There was a message. She said it was urgent.”
“Who?” At the word urgent, he flung the blankets aside and stood up: Deedee took a quick step back. “Who?”
“Miss Grey, sir.” Finally, the girl recalled the envelope in her left hand, and held it out to him.
He ripped it open, and read:
Harris, I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, but if you have a minute, could you come to the chapel? It’s about Bennett.
Sarah
“Okay, thanks,” he said, and reached for the trousers on the back of the chair. Deedee fled.
He left the building by way of what Gallagher had called the buttery, which some thoughtful person had designed for the needs of stray men hungry at odd times. The coffee was hot, and he drank one cup while hacking slices from a slab of cold roast beef, slapping it onto some bread, and smearing the whole with horseradish and mustard. He filled his cup again, picked up the crude sandwich, and walked out.
He finished the sandwich before he was halfway up the side of the hill, drained the cup and left it on the bench in the small porch, and pushed open the door to the Hurleigh chapel.
It was frigid inside, the stone walls wintry. Sarah was up behind the altar, dressed in coat, hat, and gloves, looking at a small painting. Not gloves plural, he saw as he came near, but glove; in one bare hand she grasped a soft, leather-bound book, whose oversized pages she had been consulting.
“Harris! My, that was quick.”
Instantly, Stuyvesant’s driving anxiety vanished: If it was truly urgent, she wouldn’t be perusing the art like a tourist, nor would she look so perky and rested. If anything, she seemed more embarrassed than worried. He went up the aisle towards her, feeling his fear turn over and go back to sleep.
“The mere mention of your name sets me flying,” he said.
“They woke you up, didn’t they? I can tell by the wrinkles in your face.”
“You told them it was urgent.”
“Not that urgent. I am sorry, Harris, I didn’t imagine you’d be sleeping at this hour.”
“Just a nap. Hey, this wasn’t here last Sunday.”
The painting Sarah had been looking at was not much larger than a sheet of foolscap; on Sunday, there had been a larger, fairly ordinary nineteenth-century Madonna hanging here. This one was older, and far from ordinary.
“It’s one of the Duke’s favorites, so they only put it in the chapel for special occasions. I haven’t seen it in years.”
He let himself through the small gate in the railing that divided the body of the chapel from the altar area. A candle suspended in a hanging glass protector flickered gently, then calmed as the stir of his entrance subsided.
The small painting was dark and exquisite, done with a brush so fine one must have been able to number its hairs. The subject was a mother and child, both with faint golden marks radiating from their heads. Mary was sitting on some stones beneath a twisted tree that he guessed was an olive, her back to a faint panorama of dry hillsides and a city below—little more than a few lines, but enough to indicate that she was on the top of a hill. The baby was teetering on her thighs, kept upright by his mother’s strong young hands. He was leaning back to gaze into his mother’s face, and he was laughing, an infant’s crow of delight. Mary smiled back at him, but she also appeared not far from tears. Stuyvesant moved closer to look at the dim surface, thinking that her expression was due to the ravages of time, but no, he could discern no ease and amusement on the mother’s face: The infant might drink in the joy of living, but the mother was having a har
der time of it.
“Is this a Tiepolo?” he asked.
“Very good,” she said, then her surprise turned to suspicion. “Did you read the description?” She gestured with the book in her hand, and Stuyvesant reached out and took it from her.
The page she had kept open with her thumb read: Mother and Child, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, probably 1756, brought from Venice in 1864.
“Some people bring back bits of Venetian glass as souvenirs,” he commented.
“Isn’t it the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen? The baby’s laugh, and yet Mary is so sad.”
“She knows what’s coming.”
Sarah was silent, as if his statement had layers of meaning. She was standing so close, he could smell the scent she’d put on in London that morning. He took a casual step away, bending over the sad Virgin.
“Would you want to know?” she asked suddenly.
“What, if I were Mary?”
“Anyone. Would you want to go through life knowing what was coming your way? I don’t know that I would.”
“It wouldn’t make things easy,” he agreed.
“My brother wears that expression, sometimes,” she said, gazing at the Virgin’s face. “He meets someone, and it’s as if he’s listening to a voice saying how horrible things are going to be for this person.”
“He’s been through a lot,” Stuyvesant said, feeling stupid.
“Bennett loves high places, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. He used to spend hours on the Peak above Hurleigh House when he was a boy, and now there’s his beloved Beacon in Cornwall. At home, he used to climb up into a tree we had in the back garden. It used to drive Mother wild, worrying that he would break his neck.”
“But he’s—”
“I can’t find him, Harris,” she said abruptly, “he didn’t make it home Wednesday night.”
“Are you sure?”
She took an envelope out of her pocket and held it out to him. It was addressed to Sarah in London; inside was a brief letter, in the deliberate hand of a person unused to writing:
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