Gee, golly, indeed, he now said to himself with interest: That guy with the knife scar and the belladonna eyes just alarmed the crap out of little Harris Stuyvesant.
He took a first swallow from his glass, and felt the satisfying burn down his gullet.
If he’d shown Carstairs his usual, more or less competent face, Stuyvesant wondered, would the man have given himself away with that sharp reaction? Would his guard have been up, as it had not been for the galoot in the chair?
And more to the point, had the man merely found a novel way to ease the departure of an unwanted visitor, or did he honestly intend to meet Stuyvesant at Hyde Park in the morning?
Maybe, Stuyvesant decided, he wouldn’t finish off the whole bottle tonight. Just in case.
He woke the next morning with a hell of a head and no inclination whatsoever to be made a fool of. Still, the narrow slice of sky he could see out of his grimy window was actually blue for a change, and he decided that he couldn’t very well not show up at all. So he shaved and dressed and forced down breakfast, then walked through the spring-greened streets towards Hyde Park. He came out from the back roads directly across from the corner that Carstairs had specified, and looked across the streaming traffic at a riot.
This corner of Hyde Park, an area dedicated to the spirit of free and open debate, was always a hive of activity, but the scene over there now was several steps up from any Speakers’ Corner tumult he’d seen yet. A sea of hats seethed in motion, hedged in between road and park by half a dozen mounted policemen. Stuyvesant hesitated, but it appeared that the crowd’s anger was still at the verbal stage, and the police had it in hand.
Nothing like a man on a horse for intimidating a crowd, Stuyvesant always said.
The restless mass was, inevitably, a group of Miners’ Union supporters trading vehement insults with anti-Union forces. It was the same unrest that festered and fevered throughout the city, come to a head here like a boil. Had it been a hot summer’s day, the boil might have burst and spilled its furious contents into a window-smashing spree down Oxford Street, but this was April, and even if the bitter wind felt more like snow than spring, the English sun was nonetheless shining, and the night’s frost had melted on all but the north-facing lawns. On a morning like this, a man would have to be furious indeed not to succumb to some degree of bonhomie.
Still, not wanting another split knuckle, he gave the yelling debaters wide berth, retreating down the Bayswater road a distance before crossing over to the park. When he came back towards the Corner, he found Aldous Carstairs sitting on a bench, his beautifully gloved hands gathered primly atop a slim dispatch case.
“Morning,” Stuyvesant said when he was near enough for his voice to reach over the nearby commotion. He stuck out his hand, and again received the soft grasp.
“Your man Bunsen moves in some interesting circles,” was Carstairs’ greeting.
Right down to business, then. Stuyvesant lowered himself to the bench beside the Englishman.
“Is that so?”
“One might say that the fellow is a, hmm, veritable Scarlet Pimpernel of the working classes, if your suspicions about him are justified. An open and relatively respectable life here, a mad bomber on the other side of the Atlantic.”
The American sighed, perversely disappointed that Carstairs hadn’t come up with a more original criticism. Didn’t bureaucrats have anything better to do than read that romantic claptrap? British aristocrat-spies in the French Revolution—that Orczy woman should have been strangled. “I really don’t—”
“Do not mind me, Mr. Stuyvesant, I am only pulling your leg. Although the merry conceit of an aristocrat-turned-secret-agent is not a great deal more unlikely than a man of Richard Bunsen’s background being chosen by the Labour Party. It is true that his mentor, Matthew Ruddle, is one of the more left-wing Members of Parliament, but I wouldn’t have thought him an out-and-out radical. The Trades Union tends to be suspicious of extreme politics.”
“I don’t know if Bunsen’s respectability means that the Labour Party has decided it doesn’t mind Red agitators, or if he’s just good at putting on a respectable face. He’s giving a speech down in Battersea on Thursday night—I thought I’d go listen to it, see if I can figure out which is the case.”
“That should prove educational for you. In any event, it’s not unheard of, is it, for a man to live two lives? Sometimes, the one life seems to, hmm, fill in the gaps in the other. Actually, I was referring to a less publicized aspect of Mr. Bunsen’s life. Do you know who I mean by the Hurleigh family?”
“As in the Duke of Hurleigh? Sure. Our papers love them, and not just the scandal rags—if your country ever wants to try taking back their colonies, that’d be the family to send over to convince us.” But the name conjured some other, more specific stir in the recesses of Stuyvesant’s mind. What?
“As you say, the Hurleighs are of interest to a broad spectrum of the public. And similarly broad is their spectrum of influence: Members of the Hurleigh clan determine policy in everything from a lady’s choice of frock to a government’s choice of ambassador.”
“Okay. What about them?”
“Captain Bunsen may be having an affair with the eldest child, Laura.”
“Jesus.” Stuyvesant’s eyes absently tracked two girls in drab winter coats topped by bright spring cloche hats, whose progress was being thwarted by the turmoil on the corner, but behind his eyes, his mind was in nearly as much turmoil as the crowd. Could his “demmed, elusive Pimpernel” be literally hand in hand with the bluest blood in the realm?
But yes, that’s what the name Hurleigh had stirred up in his mind: a Lady Laura Hurleigh on the passenger manifest of two of the ships Bunsen had traveled on. Stuyvesant would have to retrieve his full folder of case notes from the bank to be sure, but he thought it was the July and January crossings. And if he remembered correctly, both times her cabin had been just down the corridor from his.
Well, well: Richard Bunsen, lover to a Hurleigh. Could The Bastard have used such a woman to camouflage his ties to American radicals?
Or could it be that Stuyvesant was wrong about the man?
He shook himself mentally: Of course he could be wrong about Bunsen, for Christ sake—he wasn’t so utterly fixed on the man’s guilt that he walked around with his eyes shut. But his bones had brought him here, and after spending a week’s spare hours in reading rooms, hunting down the man’s speeches and articles in back issues of the newspapers, he still didn’t think his bones were wrong.
However, this information changed things, no doubt about that. If nothing else, it raised the question of how in hell he was supposed to infiltrate a circle as heady as that one. Quite a different matter from his usual working-men-and-students set.
“You’re pretty sure?”
“It is common knowledge among a certain coterie of, so to speak, political bohemians.”
“Artistic types,” Stuyvesant said. He’d met girls like Laura Hurleigh—Lady Laura, he supposed: rich, spoiled, eager to grab any fruit that society said was forbidden. Girls who played at politics, with no particular conviction except that if their elders disapproved, it must be worthy. Tiresome girls.
“Quite.”
Well, he thought, staring at the two young women without seeing either of them, I suppose I could try that approach. He couldn’t very well clothe himself in the personality of a member of the leisured classes—he was ten years too old, twenty pounds of muscle too heavy, and a whole lot of dollars short of what it called for—but if he didn’t find a way in through Bunsen’s Union connections, he’d try being a starving artist. A Modernistic sculptor, maybe, since he had the build for a man who spent his life bashing stone.
“You need an ‘in,’” Carstairs noted; he might have been reading Stuyvesant’s thoughts.
“You got one?” Stuyvesant asked, not expecting much.
“I may.”
That caught Stuyvesant’s attention.
“I need to
come at this obliquely,” Carstairs began. When Stuyvesant nodded his understanding, the man sat back and took out his cigar case. The girls came along the path, and one of them caught Stuyvesant’s eye. Another day, he’d have risen to the occasion; this time he merely gave a polite touch to the brim of his hat. Disappointed, they went on; when Carstairs had his cigarillo alight, he continued.
“During the War,” the Englishman said, “I was with Intelligence. I spent time in a number of different divisions, but I ended up in the, hmm, research wing. Things cooled off considerably, of course, when the War ended, but there were certain programs that maintained their funding, and mine was one of those.
“I cannot go into any detail, you’ll understand, but I will tell you that from time to time we investigated reports of individuals with particular…gifts. Most of them turned out to be either delusions or outright fakes, but every so often, a man or woman would come along with, hmm, knacks we couldn’t quite explain. And when that happened, we tended to keep an eye on that person. Still do, for that matter, although I personally have almost nothing to do with research these days.”
“Okay,” Stuyvesant said.
“There is one man, currently living in Cornwall, who came to my attention shortly after Armistice. He’d been wounded and was convalescing near London. I interviewed him, supervised a series of tests, and found that, indeed, some of his abilities were verifiable. Unfortunately, his wartime experiences had left him, shall we say, vulnerable to stress, and he proved…unsuitable for our purposes. Still, every so often I take a look at him, to see how he is, and to see if his skills remain. When last I had word, he appeared to be, hmm, recovering nicely.”
“Shell shock?”
“Of the worst kind.”
“I’ve seen a few.” Felt it himself, too, although thanks to the ox-like Stuyvesant constitution and a job to get back to, he’d pulled out of it entirely. Almost entirely: Back-firing engines occasionally found him diving for cover. “What do you mean by ‘abilities’? Mind-reading? Talking to spirits?”
Carstairs bristled. “Mr. Stuyvesant, do I seem to you like a gullible person?”
“No,” the American admitted.
“Then please rest assured that our, hmm, tests of his abilities were thought out with care. This man is not a mind-reader. It is not parlor tricks. He is, as they say, the real thing.”
As they were talking, the crowd on the corner had continued to grow. Now, one of the speakers, who was either seven feet tall or standing on a soap-box, launched himself into the sea of hats—working-men’s cloth caps, office-workers’ bowlers, and fashionable soft felt—heading in the direction of his rival, thirty feet away. A roar rose up, whistles pierced the air, and the policemen urged their enormous mounts forward. Carstairs stood impatiently.
“Let us leave this entertainment for the quieter reaches of the park. It’s a pity to waste a fine spring day.”
It was hardly spring, not going by the thermometer anyway, but Stuyvesant had grown up in New York and he wasn’t going to be intimidated by anything less than knee-deep snow. Carstairs led him into the park, away from the riot, while Stuyvesant’s mind chewed on the possibility that this shady Englishman wasn’t just feeding him a heap of horse crap, for some unguessable reason of his own.
“What’s this guy’s name? And what is it he can do?”
“His name is Grey. Captain Bennett Grey.” Carstairs’ oddly sensuous mouth seemed to linger over the name. “As for his abilities, I think the details shall have to wait for a time. Let us say merely that Captain Grey knows things he should not be able to, as if he sees into people. He can, as it were, tell gold from gilt at a touch.” This phrase seemed to please its speaker; one corner of his mouth curled a fraction.
Jesus, these Brits, Stuyvesant thought—you ask them a simple question and they give you Shakespeare, or hints to a maze. Were they always as convoluted as he’d found them, or was all this wool-pulling a way of hiding their Strike jitters? Every bureaucrat he’d talked to acted as if he felt solely responsible for holding the working class at bay with a stack of forms.
“Okay, so Captain Grey has some funny skills. Why should I be interested in him?”
Carstairs’ cigar had gone out, so he slowed his steps to concentrate on restoring it to a clean, burning end, then resumed. “I needed to tell you about Captain Grey so you would know why Richard Bunsen’s name caught my attention when you brought it up. In fact, I had to go back into the files to refresh my memory, but it turns out that we have been, hmm, aware of Mr. Bunsen as early as 1919, when he was arrested for inciting mutiny.
“He’s an interesting fellow, quite bright, by all accounts very good looking, although I haven’t met him myself. Comes from what you might call mixed stock. His maternal grandfather was knighted, but turned out to have something of a weakness for the horses, so there wasn’t much to pass on. After he died, the daughter took a position in a boys’ school near Leeds to support herself and her mother. There she married a retired accountant, the son of a stone mason, who himself had been born to a family of coal miners. A heritage, you understand, that Bunsen flaunts when he wishes to claim working-class origins.
“The accountant died when young Richard was ten. The mother worked herself into an early grave to get the boy to a good school, where he shed his accent and learned to fit in—to a certain extent. He was invited to leave that school at fifteen when he threw his first rock through a window—seemed the headmaster had instructed his pretty daughter to have nothing to do with young Bunsen, and the boy resented it. Threatened to burn the school down, in fact.”
“A temper, then?”
“Quite. He kept himself under control through his remaining years at a lesser school, did well enough to get into university in London, and joined the Army in 1914, at the age of twenty. He served until Armistice, most of the time in France. Injured twice, once seriously enough for home leave, when I’d say he had too much time to sit and think about things. As I said, he was arrested in the spring of 1919 for inciting soldiers awaiting demobilization to take things into their own hands. To mutiny.
“Charges were dismissed, eventually, but after that, one began to see Bunsen’s name regularly in the Workers’ Weekly, articles or reports of speeches given at Communist rallies. He made a trip to Moscow in 1920, although he quieted down a little afterwards. I’d have said he was becoming a little disillusioned with the Workers’ Party, although he was arrested again in 1921, during our last unrest among the coal miners. He got banged around a bit and spent a few weeks in prison. That may have effected a change of heart in the man, because he drew back from the more extreme policies he’d been promoting, and within a year began to cultivate friends in key places. Such as Matthew Ruddle, Labour Party Member of Parliament.”
Bunsen was thirty-two years old, Stuyvesant reflected, and fire-brands often cooled with age, as the anger and energy of their radical youth diminished. However, sometimes the bright ones simply learned to hide their fire under a basket.
And if Bunsen was saving his most radical tendencies for export, it might make it easier to put on a mask of calm and reason at home. He wouldn’t be the first revolutionary to lead a double life.
“And this, finally—” Carstairs began, but Stuyvesant interrupted.
“Sorry, I knew some of what you’ve told me, his age and his rank and some of his history, but one thing I’ve never heard was what he did during the War, whether he was frontline or rear echelon. I don’t suppose you know?”
Carstairs raised his face and gave Stuyvesant a smile that was startlingly full and warm, a smile that even touched those cold obsidian eyes.
“I wondered when you would ask me that. Halfway through the War, while he was recovering from his wound, Captain Richard Bunsen entered a training course that his maternal forefathers might have understood, one that kept him underground, there to be a leader among a tightly knit group of workers.
“Bunsen was, hmm, a sapper. He crawled through
tunnels dug by his men, to lay explosive charges beneath enemy lines.”
Chapter Four
CARSTAIRS’ WIDE MOUTH CURLED slightly at Stuyvesant’s reaction, but Stuyvesant could not begrudge him his gloat—the man deserved it, even if he’d forced Stuyvesant to tease it out of him like a big fish on a light line. This one piece of knowledge alone made his trip across the ocean worth-while.
“Demolitions, huh? Thank you, Major Carstairs.”
“It adds a certain pleasing, hmm, completeness to the picture, does it not? And this brings us around to your particular need. As I was saying, Bunsen appears to have been distancing himself from the radical fringe. He is working his way up in the more mainstream political world, in part by immersing himself in Union work, but also through his establishment of a politically orientated organization with the, shall we say, rather optimistic name of Look Forward, which sponsors speakers, free legal representation, and educational opportunities to the working classes.
“As a part of this transformation, Bunsen takes care to make regular appearances in the vicinity of Good Works. In recent years, many of those stem from his attachment to Lady Laura Hurleigh. She is a founding member of a group of health care clinics called Women’s Help, which operate in the poorest areas of London. An association with these clinics bestows on Bunsen a distinct cachet of respectability and responsibility.”
“Like they say, you can’t buy that kind of press.”
“Er, quite. In any case, Lady Laura has a number of staff who oversee the day-to-day running of the clinics, but her overall assistant, her right-hand woman, if you will, who appears recently to have taken on a number of functions in the Bunsen organization as well”—(if he dragged this out any longer, Stuyvesant was going to throttle it out of him)—“is a sweet but naïve young lady by the name of Sarah Grey.”
Touchstone Page 3
