Touchstone (35 page)

Chapter Forty-Six

W
HEN THE BARN HAD HELD ITS SILENCE
for half an hour, Harris Stuyvesant stood. With slow and cautious steps, he moved across the room, taking his kit from the table near the door: soft leather bedroom slippers, a small electric flash-light and extra batteries, some twice-folded sheets of paper and a pencil, and a pair of old, supple black gloves. The big man crept out of his room, down the stairs, and out of the door.

Outside, he pulled the slippers from his trouser pocket and put them on—bedroom slippers were not only silent on gravel, they were disarming, should he be discovered. Who could suspect a man in bedroom slippers of any worse sin than insomnia?

In his ornate room in the main house, lighted only by a bedside candle, Richard Bunsen studied the naked man in the looking-glass. Two weeks past his thirty-second birthday, and as fit as he’d been during the War—the firm outlines of his body were clear despite the flecks and tarnish of the two-hundred-year-old mirroring.

His mind lingered over the image:
New Man seen through the patina of history.
How to use it in a speech, how to work it so it sounded natural? He walked over to the desk, relishing the Hurleigh air drifting against his bare skin, to write the idea down on a piece of house stationery.

He stood, frowning down at the page. Too cumbersome, really, for a speech. But the image could be used somewhere. Maybe invent a story to go with it? He made another note, then capped the pen and dropped it onto the desk.

It had been a hard day in Manchester with Lord-bloody-Almighty-Malcolm followed by an evening of tricky self control among the Hurleighs, and he wanted another drink. Two or three more drinks, for that matter, but he’d had enough for one night, especially if he was going to talk to the old man first thing. And meet with Ruddle about the P.M. in the afternoon. No drink.

Restless, he circled the sumptuous room, feeling his toes dig into the thick carpet, running his hand across the velvet and the polish. He pulled aside the curtains to throw open the heavy glass. Cold, damp air swept over his skin, bringing up goose-flesh. Bringing up other flesh, as well.

Standing naked in the open window was weirdly stimulating, as if he were about to fuck the house itself. He angled his hips forward until his half-erect cock was brushing the sill, and found himself wishing that someone were standing in the garden below—the window’s lower edge came just below his umbilicus, so he would be showing nothing unseemly, just the firm outline of a man younger than his age.

And if it was that mouthy American out there, he’d have no way of knowing what lay hidden: Men over six feet tall had an unfair advantage over normal males, and there was no need to give the fellow illusions.

Abruptly, the cold air ceased to be stimulating. Bunsen banged the window shut and jerked the curtains across it, walking back to the center of the room, running his hand over his smooth chest and belly, then down to cup the mild ache in his balls.

Why had he told Laura that he’d stay? She had been irritatingly aloof recently, as if he’d disappointed her in some way. And distressingly willing to vamp the most unlikely men, men he was absolutely positive that she had no interest in, but who could be useful to the Movement. Although he had to admit that tonight she’d met his eyes with the old affection and openness. Perhaps he just needed to make her feel more useful, and if that meant dragging himself halfway across England to bow and scrape to the old horrors who were her parents, that’s what he’d do.

Oh, he liked them well enough, the mother at least, but surely people like that should realize when their kind was dead? However, until that class had their last vestiges of power wrested from their hands by the new age (
New Age/New Man/through a glass, darkly
—no, people might think he was making reference to that bloody Alice story), until then, he’d have to keep working on her father, keeping him sweet. Not long now, he told himself, before the world could do without the Duke of Hurleigh, leaving commoners like little Dickie Bunsen free to walk openly down the corridor of this ancient house to have his way, loudly and often, with the Duke’s daughter.

He’d intended to be traveling back to London by now, working in his wheeled office while Jimmy drove, then sleeping for a couple of hours before setting off for his afternoon meetings, and in the evening finishing off two speeches and an article. Instead, here he was in Gloucestershire while in London events were building—vulnerable events, requiring his constant touch on the reins.

Another phrase with a certain ring to it:
events that require a constant touch on the reins.
Use it with Ruddle? Or save it for Baldwin?

He held out his own hands to study them. His mother, long ago, had once called them surgeon’s hands. Not that he would have wished to become a doctor, even if the money had been there: If you’re going to be up to your elbows in blood, it had better be for something more important than catching a squalling brat or repairing some old sot’s ruptured gut. No, his hands were repairing something much larger than could be brought to a surgery: attending the birth of a new age, cutting into the body politic.

“A surgeon for the body politic,”
he said aloud, trying it out, then walked over to write that phrase beneath the other.

He looked at the bed, looked at the decanter, then wandered back to the looking-glass.
Through a glass, darkly. Through the glass of history, darkly?
What about,
New Man glimpsed through a glass, darkly?

None of those were quite right, but he did like the image. Liked, too, what his eyes saw: He really was not a bad-looking man, even if that damned American had compared him to a bloody film actor. (What about that American? Intriguing fellow, competent and bright, but it was almost as if he’d been trying to irritate.) Well, why not a film actor? He’d been talking to a man in Liverpool during this last trip, on how to make movies work for the Movement.
Birth of a Nation,
without the half-naked girls. Or maybe with them, and a few half-naked boys, as well. Artistically done, of course, but didn’t propaganda encompass many forms? And why couldn’t that include the bourgeoisie’s favored forms of entertainment?

Why did the bourgeoisie put up with the limitations around them? Why go to gawk at scantily clad females on flickering screens when the world was full of women?

Then again, he was one to talk, standing here in the nude, playing with himself in front of the mirror and trying to get up his courage to creep down the hallway. If only the Duke were out of the way, he’d have no problems. If—

A small movement in the looking-glass caught his attention: the door-knob. He whirled; the door began to open.

Chapter Forty-Seven

S
TUYVESANT REACHED THE GARAGE
unseen, although he’d had a bad moment in the garden when he’d realized someone was standing in a dimly lit upstairs window. But whoever it was had been looking out into the darkness, and had not seen him. In a moment, the figure had banged the window shut and closed the curtains.

Stuyvesant went on, making no more noise than a cat.

Laura Hurleigh did not stare into her own looking-glass, although she was sitting on the chair directly in front of it. Instead, she had spent the past quarter of an hour searching through the detritus of her past.

Specifically, she was sorting through the contents of her jewelry box. There was nothing of value in it—the rubies her grandmother had left her lay locked in the safe downstairs, along with two or three other pieces that would bring something at the pawn-broker’s. The Hurleigh servants were trustworthy, but it was not nice to lay temptation before them. And jewelry was wicked anyway; when Mother asked yesterday if she wanted to wear the rubies for dinner, Laura had been adamant that, if she wasn’t allowed to sell them, she was damned if she was going to flaunt them around her neck. The one time she’d sold a necklace, to buy desperately needed equipment for the clinics, it had created hell’s own uproar when her father had to buy it back.

No, the jewelry box contained treasures with little market value: a ring she’d bought at the St. Giles Fair when she was ten or eleven, thought to be turquoise until the blue paint had begun to peel; a tiny fresh-water pearl on a tarnished chain, one of a matching trio exchanged by three sixteen-year-old friends for life, who now hadn’t seen each other in years; six pair of decorative hair-combs, useless to a modern woman with short hair.

On the dressing-table next to the box were the two objects she had spent a quarter-hour extricating from the tangle inside.

One was a thumb-nail-sized cockle shell with a slightly off-center hole in it, drilled by some hungry predator. A string made out of black silk sewing thread, laboriously braided then braided again, had been threaded through the hole: the hand-made cord was frayed where it passed through the shell.

Bennett Grey had made the necklace for her the first summer he had spent here, when Laura was eleven, Thomas and Bennett around ten. One August day, Bennett’s father had come to take the two boys to the seashore; she could no longer recall the details of why he had come, or why more of the Hurleigh children had not gone with them; what she remembered were the hot tears of rage when the Greys’ touring car had pulled away, leaving her, the oldest but a girl, behind.

Bennett had seen her tears, and instead of flaunting his privilege or making fun of her, he had brought the shell back from the seashore, then spent hours plaiting and twisting the cord from a spool of sewing floss. She fell in love with him then, and she’d worn the shell every day for years, until she noticed the wear on the cord and feared it would be lost.

The other object was a small tarnished brass ring incorporating a tiny heart, but it possessed an oddly similar history. Bennett had made this for her, too, over a period of many weeks, huddled in the trenches of northern France. Its raw material was also a shell, but of a very different sort, the shell of the first bullet he had fired in the heat of battle, thrust in a pocket and come across when the dazed survivor had finally reached a calm place again. He had snipped the brass into strips and laboriously bent and woven it into a ring. It would never be a lovely object, but it was an eloquent one.

Ten years after the first gift, in the summer of 1914, Bennett had promised his mother that he would complete his degree at Oxford before he enlisted—hard to remember, but that first summer they’d all been convinced the War would be over by Christmas. Three weeks after War was declared, he and Laura happened to meet for the first time in years, at a garden party dominated by uniforms. Five days later, he had formally written for permission to call the next time her family was in London, although by then she was twenty-one and able to answer for herself. In any case, he was known to the family, and the answer had been Yes.

The following ten months had been fraught with the knowledge that time was short, that life would never be the same, that their friends and family were being swallowed up in the carnage across the Channel. And finally, in July 1915, Bennett had come to her house, wearing his uniform and an expression of manly apprehension. She had wept; he had laid his hand across her shoulders and pulled her to his woolen chest, then given her a clean handkerchief and vowed that he would come back to her.

He made the ring a few weeks later, and sent it as a birthday gift in October.

All terribly ordinary, really; a play acted out tens of thousands of times during those years.

But what had happened to him four years later had been in no sense ordinary.

Sarah had rung with news of her brother’s injury. Laura found out when he would arrive in England and drove through the bright dawn of a late May morning to be there when he landed. She found a bundle of moaning bandage, drugged to high heaven, but she was a V.A.D. nurse, and there was little she hadn’t seen by them in the way of ripped bodies and battered minds. She went back again, and again, for since the death of manners in 1914, there was no one to stop her.

With Laura’s help, Captain Bennett Grey was hobbling by July, and by August able to move himself from the Bath chair to her motorcar. She took him for long drives through the fields of summer, buying and begging petrol from all directions, once even stealing it. For most of these expeditions, Bennett sat motionless and mute as the warm wind played through their hair.

It only rained once during these outings. They had brought a picnic tea, and Laura, determined to have her hard-fought rationed delicacies, hunkered under the umbrella he held out of the motorcar’s window, boiling water on the small camp-stove. In triumph she had made the tea and poured it, handed him the two cups through the window, then run laughing through the downpour to the driver’s side. He had laughed, too, and dried her hair with their checked table-cloth. They had drunk their tea with decorum, eaten the two petit-fours she had located in Piccadilly, and when they were finished, he had taken her empty cup, stretched an arm into the rain to place it on the bonnet, followed by his. Then he had kissed her, and undressed her, and had finally taken her virginity in the cramped confines of her Tin Lizzie.

From that September day until the first week of March, Bennett had been hers. At least once a week, in out-of-the-way hotels all over the south of England, she had been Mrs. Grey and worn this ring. At the end of each such outing, she had relished the green shadow on her finger, scrubbing it away only at the last minute.

From the beginning, and now more so, the object had brought mixed feelings. Love, yes, but from a thing used to kill a man? (And it probably had: Bennett was as careful and methodical at his marks-manship as he was in other things.)

When spring came and Bennett had his break-down, coming near to murdering the horrid Aldous Carstairs, she went to his family’s house and begged him to marry her.

He refused. White and shaking and in terrible pain, he would not let her in. He told her how sorry he was, told her it was impossible, then shut the door in her face.

She went back to London, and to her work, and to Sarah Grey and Mary Margolin, who were more sisters to her than silly Connie or brittle Pam. Three mornings later, Bennett’s letter reached her. And two days after that, the infant Christopher Margolin had died, and been wrapped in a luxurious shroud.

She slipped the tarnished ring onto her finger. Bennett had been right, she knew that now. Her presence had only made matters worse for him, and their union would lead nowhere. Not like Richard, who loved her and needed her, who challenged her and demanded that she grow and learn and find her strength, who confused her and only explained his ideas, never his feelings, and who sometimes grew furious with her and had twice hit her, only to fall to his knees immediately and beg her forgiveness.

Bennett Grey had been a gentle lover and a wounded hero, but Richard Bunsen was a flame: lover, teacher, father, son. She yearned after him even when he was with her, longing to touch him in public, reveling in his magnificent speaking voice. She loved to drown in his words, to burn with his passion, to support him in his unexpected moments of uncertainty, to lie beside him and listen to him breathe. He was not as attentive in bed as Bennett had been—at the memory of Bennett’s touch, the room felt suddenly warmer—but at the same time, the process didn’t seem to tear him between pleasure and agony the way it had Bennett.

If only he didn’t embrace the idea of free love with quite so much abandon. Faithfulness was a concept for the bourgeoisie, small and limited, and she felt petty every time the complaint came to mind. (Although really—
Sarah!
That was a bit much.)

She pulled off the ring and put it away, placing the shell necklace beside it. Poor, poor Bennett, she thought, rubbing the green from her finger; it had been a mistake allowing Sarah to bring him here to witness his replacement.

She closed the top of the jewelry box and slid it back in the drawer of her dressing-table, then looked at her reflection in the glass. If the road is made easy, it is the right one.

The house had long since subsided into the night-time creaks of its age; Laura rose and snugged the tie of the dressing gown, letting herself out of the door and padding barefoot down the familiar carpet of her family home. No one saw her, no voice questioned her passing—she’d been avoiding detection in this house since she was nine years old, when she’d mapped out where each squeaky floorboard was.

She opened the door at the far end of the hallway, and looked at the naked, semi-aroused man standing in front of the looking-glass. She shut the door silently, then murmured, “It looks like I got here just in time.”