“Name it.”
“Keep Richard occupied? It’s just, he’s rather used to being the center of everything, and is apt to become irritable if he feels pushed to one side. And unfortunately, the only way I could see to handle this was to, as it were, become the center myself. If you see what I mean?”
In other words, Bunsen’s getting jealous and is apt to spoil everything with a tantrum. But not to say that to his loyal lady. “I’ll be happy to let him chew on me for a while, although it may give him indigestion.”
She laughed, her weariness lifting for a moment. Then there came another knock at the door. This time it was Julian Exeter, asking if they might arrange for another room in the servants’ hall for his men.
Stuyvesant made his escape.
The afternoon session went well. Although no agreements were signed, no handshakes made, the air of cooperation, even friendliness, that came out with the delegates was marked, and it carried them through tea-time with the Canaletto, the Constable, and the eighth Duke’s curry puffs.
Laura Hurleigh was the first in the room when the delegates reassembled, dressed for dinner. Any second thoughts that might have risen as they threaded their studs and wrestled with their bow ties had no chance to develop: Lady Laura Hurleigh believed that every man there was working towards the same goal, and they found that they agreed. When everyone was there and the orchestra of voices were being tuned to her satisfaction, Stuyvesant slipped away to the Great Hall, and peeped under the table-linen and in the flower arrangements for anything more explosive than words—just in case.
When he heard voices from the stairs, he left, and as soon as the first course was in front of the diners, he went upstairs for a closer look at Bunsen’s room.
It took an hour, lifting every piece of furniture, checking under every carpet, opening every book, but at the end he was certain: There was no place in the room where Bunsen could have hidden anything more deadly than an exploding cigarette.
Of course, the man had the house at his disposal, and he could have tucked it on top of a toilet cistern, into one of the myriad vases, or behind any of a dozen life-sized sculptures that dotted the house and grounds.
Doing so would suggest that Bunsen thought someone was onto him, and he hadn’t been acting that way.
Which in turn suggested that there wasn’t any bomb to begin with.
Still…He went down the corridor to Laura Hurleigh’s room and conducted a more cursory search. This room had been lived in for many years, and the accumulation of objects was considerable. He searched the more obvious places where a woman would be apt to hide a packet for her lover, and other than a decidedly non-working-class collection of undergarments, he found little of interest.
He walked down the corridor to the toilet (where by habit he looked on top of the cistern), checked his tie in the looking-glass, and went to join the others.
Again, Laura permitted the men very little time on their own before she returned. Stuyvesant watched her move through the room, noting how her beauty, after thirty hours of intensely delicate maneuvering among the sharks, had become ethereal with fatigue. Every man there was aware of the tall, slender body moving inside its blue-silver gown.
Including Richard Bunsen. Who was, as Laura had implied but not quite said, not well pleased with the increasingly obvious authority held by his mistress.
Up to now, Bunsen had kept his irritation under control, doing little more than shooting her the occasional glance when her laugh rang out, or scowling when her hand rested too long on another’s wrist.
Alcohol, however, encouraged a man’s control to slip. Twice, he made sharp remarks aimed in Laura’s direction. The first time, Laura shot him a glance of apprehension; the second, her eyes sought out Stuyvesant.
He picked up his half-smoked cigar and moved over to where Bunsen stood, propped against the brass fender around the fireplace, his conversation with the Prime Minister temporarily forgotten as he watched Laura attend to something Lord Stalfield was saying about his daughter. Stuyvesant moved casually in front of Bunsen until he was blocking the man’s view of Laura, and said, “So, Mr. Bunsen, what’s your game?”
Bunsen was far from drunk, but he had taken enough to lend a slight exaggeration to his speech. “What do you mean, my game?”
“I mean to say, a man in your position, the Army and politics and all, I imagine you’ve done a bit of everything—billiards, snooker, darts, chess, checkers—no, you don’t call it that here. Draughts, is it?”
“So?”
“So, what’s the game you’re best at? What’s the one where you always have to be careful to lose a few points when you’re playing with someone you don’t want to humiliate too badly?”
“What makes you think there is one?”
“Because I’ve known you for a week now, long enough to be sure that you don’t settle for second best, in anything. And I know also that you don’t need to advertise, that you’re happy enough keeping quiet about some things. It’s enough to know you’ve got something, without having to shout about it.”
Stuyvesant was very glad to see the light of awareness creep into Bunsen’s eyes: He’d been afraid the man might be too far into his cups to read the hidden meaning behind his words. Instead, Bunsen studied the American’s face, then shifted his cigar to the hand that held the glass, clapping Stuyvesant on the arm. “You’re absolutely right, Stuyvesant. I don’t advertise. And it’s darts.”
“Ha! I thought so. I don’t suppose they’d have a dart board here?” Stuyvesant looked around at the walls, none of which held the tell-tale circle of punctures.
“Darts!” the cry rose, as Baldwin’s assistant caught the word.
The long-suffering Gallagher was dispatched to the distant room where passions past were stored away, returning with a handful of beautifully shaped if somewhat tarnished darts, and a lesser servant carrying the heavy board. In sympathy for the four-hundred-year-old linenfold walls, Stuyvesant suggested that they tack a heavy throw-rug behind the board; the butler shot him a glance of gratitude.
As it happened, the enthusiastic civil servant fell out of competition early, leaving the field to Bunsen, Stuyvesant, and one of Mr. Branning’s assistants. Stuyvesant was eliminated next, and Bunsen and the mine owner’s man played with increasingly forced joviality. Competition was in their blood, after all, and Stuyvesant began to wonder if this had been a very good idea. Clearly, Laura thought it was not, as she stood with her hands wrapped white-knuckled around her glass, envisioning all her work coming undone in a childish contest.
Bunsen and the assistant were neck and neck, with Bunsen looking to edge the other man out with his final throw, when Stuyvesant sidled near Bunsen to murmur, “What was that we were saying about advertising?”
The hand clenched down hard; Stuyvesant thought for an instant that he was about to have the dart in his neck. But Bunsen stood still for a count of three, then reached down for his glass, took a final swallow, and readied the last throw. It hit just outside the bull’s-eye, leaving him one point down.
The game went to the mine owners, but with Bunsen’s good-natured congratulations, the tension leaked out of the room. The evening broke up twenty minutes later, with expressions of goodwill riding them up the stairs.
Tomorrow would be Sunday. They would go to the chapel, pray together, then return to the house, filled with holy purpose, for a final vote on the proposals made during Saturday’s meetings.
Stuyvesant trotted to the servants’ hall and threw off his formal dress, donning clothes more suited for lounging on guard duty all night, then hurried back to resume his chair in the corridor. He had scarcely taken up his position when the door to Bunsen’s room came open. Bunsen saw Stuyvesant sitting there, and stopped.
“Can I get you something, sir?” Stuyvesant asked.
“I, um.” Bunsen’s eyes flicked briefly down the hallway, then came back to Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant held his gaze evenly, thinking the words he’d have like
d to say aloud: The poor woman is absolutely shattered with fatigue. If she wants you, she’ll send for you; if she doesn’t, you’d be a real shit to inflict yourself on her, just to reassert your importance.
Something of the non-verbal message must have gotten through. Bunsen glanced down the hall in the other direction, where there was absolutely nothing to see, and said to his watch-dog, “No, I was just checking if you were here.”
“All night,” Stuyvesant answered implacably.
“Good,” Bunsen said. “Well, good night, Stuyvesant.”
He closed the door and locked it; Stuyvesant was amused at the clear thread of hate beneath the joviality.
But to his disappointment, shortly after that the door to Laura Hurleigh’s room opened and she came out. Her hair had been combed, her make-up refreshed, and she was wearing a pair of walking shoes and her overcoat. Perhaps she’d forgotten to bring a dressing gown, Stuyvesant thought as he got to his feet. Or maybe she thought it too revealing a garment for a country house corridor peopled by guards, and she’d put on her coat over it.
In any case, she was loveliness in a cloth coat, pale but undaunted: She’d never looked more like her ancestress in the painting, the human equivalent of the husband’s sword. His heart went out to her gallant self.
She closed the door without a sound and came over to where he stood, whispering, “Good evening, Mr. Stuyvesant.”
“Evening, Miss Hurleigh.”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t mention to anyone that I’m not in my room,” she said, meeting his gaze evenly.
“You’re far too tired to be disturbed,” he agreed.
“Either that or I couldn’t sleep and went for a breath of fresh air.”
“One or the other.”
“Good night, Harris. Thank you for everything.” She reached out and touched his arm, and turned to go.
But to his astonishment, instead of heading down the hallway to Bunsen’s room, she turned towards the stairs. Make-up; walking shoes; overcoat: Good Lord.
“Miss—Lady—er, Laura?”
She stopped to look over her shoulder at him.
“Would you like me to distract the guard?” She smiled at him, and Harris Stuyvesant would have happily sliced open an artery and bled onto the guard’s foot to distract him, if she’d asked.
They went through the silent house and past the kitchen to the back door. He touched her shoulder and breathed, “Wait here until he’s gone. And I should warn you, there may be another guard up past the chapel.”
“It won’t be a problem,” she said.
He slipped out, and nearly stepped on top of Gwilhem Jones, who cursed in surprise and asked what the hell he was up to. Stuyvesant said, “I thought I saw someone making off down the road out in front, and wondered if it might be one of the guards. But it’s not you.”
“Let’s go see.”
They went to see, and found what Stuyvesant expected, which was nothing. But when they got back to the door, there was no noble-woman standing behind it.
Chapter Sixty-Four
LAURA HURLEIGH CLIMBED THE HILL her feet had been climbing since she could walk. She stopped for a minute when she came to the viewing place above the servants’ hall to sit on the wrought iron bench, looking across the roof-tops of her home by the light of the almost-full moon.
Two or three windows glowed with light, but the outside lamps had been shut down. Without their interference, she could see the white mass of Grandmamma’s Madame Alfred Carriere roses along the wall, and behind them the faint sparkle of moon off moving water in the valley below.
She’d wandered these hills in moonlight since she was a child, letting herself out of the ancestral house and into the pale blue countryside, whose every lump and hollow she knew as well as the lumps and hollows of her own body. She had developed a reputation for dreaminess in those years of early adolescence; she thought it curious, then and now, how no one noticed that young Laura’s dreaminess corresponded to times of full moons and clement weather.
But people didn’t notice, generally speaking. They just created an image, and only if something happened to shatter the image completely did they see what lay behind it.
Even Richard. She was his helpmeet, a bright and dedicated combination of secretary and mistress who had brought with her a dowry comprising immense respectability and familial authority. She had felt his eyes on her this week-end, first approving, then increasingly astonished, and had no doubt that tonight he was lying in his bed picking over his grievances. By the time they assembled for church tomorrow morning, he would be cold and resentful.
Had she wanted to disarm the process, she would have had Harris Stuyvesant look away for a moment while she went to Richard’s room.
Men were such simple creatures, easily handled.
But instead, here she was, taking her leave of Hurleigh, about to set out across Gloucestershire in the middle of the night.
She should turn around and go back to Richard.
She did not.
With a final look at the other-worldly view, she took a torch from her pocket and switched it on, pointing it at the ground. She did not need it, and it made the world vanish in its dazzle, but it served to warn the guard of her approach.
“Who goes there?” a startled voice demanded.
“Hullo!” she called. “Sorry to surprise you like this, I just wanted a few minutes alone to say my prayers. Oh, it’s Laura Hurleigh,” she added, turning the light on her face for his benefit.
“Yes, my Lady. I thought everyone at the house was asleep for the night.”
She pointed the light back at the ground and continued moving towards the chapel. “The rest of them are, but it’s been a long day, and I couldn’t sleep. Do you mind awfully, if I just go in for a few minutes? You can come and watch, if you like. To make sure I don’t plant a bomb or anything.”
He chuckled along with her, and said, “I’m sure it will be all right.”
No doubt he was thinking how charming it was, that even a Red like her had prayers to say. He let her in, lit one of the paraffin lamps mounted on the walls, and went to the door. Seeing her kneel onto the cushion in one of the front pews and bow her head over her hands, he went outside, letting the door swing shut.
The tossing flame settled; more slowly, Laura’s thoughts did the same. She recited aloud the declarations of belief and her own pleas for help and guidance, ritual phrases that had not changed since childhood, words that ran through her lips with the familiarity of prayer beads through fingers. Empty, perhaps, but there were times when emptiness was to be desired.
At the end, she eased herself onto the smooth wood and pulled the oversized Hurleigh prayer book from its slot in the pew ahead. She let the pages fall open, let her eyes skip over the words she had recited a thousand times. Those words had not been empty to the men who shaped them: The words had burst like flame from their pens and their minds, shaping the hearts and souls of generations of Englishmen. On the other side of the globe, where the sun had already brought the Lord’s Day, men and women were opening their copies of the Book of Common Prayer, fingering those worn gilt letters on the cover, and listening to the day’s lessons and Gospel reading. Men in Nairobi and Delhi, women in Hong Kong and Sydney, reciting the liturgy of their grandparents, unaware as yet that the very heartbeat of their empire was about to falter and change irrevocably.
She’d heard that a heart could stop beating and then, under the impetus of a hard shock, start again. She’d also heard that, when a person dipped into the edges of death and was brought back to life, he was never the same.
Like Bennett.
That was what England was about to undergo, a transformative shock to its heart: shattering, heart-stopping, all-changing.
She closed the covers of the book and ran both thumbs across it, looking at the lettering.
St. Paul called it bearing witness; Emma Goldman called it propaganda by deed. In one week the miners’ agreement would run out and,
she had no doubt, despite their efforts here, a strike would be called that would place the worker at the fore in Britain. The parasitic owners’ class, the class into which she had been born, was in its final days.
Testimony by deed.
The weight on her shoulders made her want to lie down before the altar and weep. She felt flattened by the consequence of all she had done that day; the fates of those sleeping men in the house below; the future of the sea of her countrymen with work-hardened hands and coal-blackened skins. She could not breathe for the awareness of what she owed family alone: her father the Duke, her mother the Duchess, her brothers and sisters, all the generations of a noble line. And that wasn’t even thinking of the burden of friendship and loyalty, all those women and men who had devoted their time to build Look Forward and Women’s Help.
And all the while, underlying it all, was the continual awareness of a blond man with emerald eyes, the only man she had truly loved, all her life: her responsibilities towards him were enormous.
As this endless day had worn on, she had felt more and more translucent, worn down by the effort of keeping the exquisite balance of forces. And she had done a good job—no, she had done the perfect job. For once, she was content with herself: No person on earth could have made more of this event than she had.
One more thing, yet to do.
Or rather, two: one for the world and the future, and one for herself alone.
Laura Hurleigh, in whose veins ran the blood of heroes, whose bones were the bones of warriors, sat in the quiet stone chapel amidst the looted artworks, feeling the prayers on her lips and thinking about tonight. It would be, she supposed, a betrayal of loyalty, but it could also be seen as a restoration of an earlier loyalty, set aright.
She sat in the Hurleigh chapel and searched her heart, and one by one, the objections fell away. When the last doubt had gone, she bowed her head, grateful for peace at last.
She put the prayer book into its slot, her thumb brushing a last time on the shiny lettering, and rose, holding to herself a comforting absence of thought. She let herself out of the chapel, thanked her father’s man politely, and walked back to the pathway.
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