Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  The other door clicked open and the driver eased out onto the farm yard surface, a fastidious greyhound to the American’s bull terrier. The man was an unlikely chauffeur, as polished as the motorcar had been before its recent abuse, freshly shaved and dressed in an unrelieved black that might have been appropriate in a City meeting, or a funeral.

  Perhaps it was the American’s presence that made him seem a shade smaller and a great deal more self-contained than he had five years ago. Some things had not changed: the unnerving sensuality of his lips and the blackness of his eyes, those invisible pupils that gave away nothing of the man within. One feature, however, was new: the thin, pink scar that traveled down the side of his face.

  Looking at it, the small man found himself smiling.

  The driver raised a gloved hand to his perfect black hair, a gesture that seemed designed to smooth from his mind the effects of the arduous journey; with his other hand, he set his felt hat into place.

  The impenetrable eyes swept the farmyard and found it empty of life. The driver went to stand near the American, the set of his head indicating that he was more there to judge the view than to admire it. The men gave an appearance of cooperation, even friendliness, but to the watching figure, they were as stiff-legged as a pair of bristling dogs.

  “Looks like once upon a time there was a hell of a house over there,” the American said. His voice was a shade too loud, his shoulders seemed to want to ease themselves against the manner he wore, a manner that fit him as poorly as another man’s coat. “Although that must’ve been a while and a half ago, to leave only those foundations.”

  The dark man’s lips curled and parted, perhaps to offer a sardonic comment on the American fascination for anything old enough to grow moss, but his pronouncement was interrupted by a voice that bounced off the stones and became directionless.

  “It is a city of the dead.”

  The startled American yanked his hands from his pockets and sent the skirts of his greatcoat dancing, but his companion, either less surprised or more practiced at concealment, swiveled deliberately on one glossy heel as he searched out the source of the words. His attention had traveled past the figure, whose garments were the precise shade of the lichen-draped stones behind him, when a gleam of sunlight played off the freshly honed edge of the axe on the man’s shoulder. The black gaze snapped back to the man; in a moment, the wide mouth curled up, lazy and relaxed.

  The woodcutter was not a tall man, perhaps a shade over five and a half feet, with thick white-blond hair in need of a trim. He was clean-shaven, his body muscular beneath once-brown corduroy trousers and a once-good herringbone jacket, both garments tidy and well mended—unlike his cloth cap, which looked like something dredged from the bottom of a cow stall. His eyes were a startling green in a weathered face, his eyelashes darker than his hair and long. Despite the weathering, his boyish build made him seem young.

  Black eyes met green without quailing; if anything, they grew more openly amused. Finally, the American broke the silence. “What do you mean, ‘a city of the dead’? Is this how you people build cemeteries around here?”

  “I have, in fact, come across bones,” the man answered. (His light voice lacked the catches and burrs of the local dialect—not a native Cornishman, then, the American automatically noted. Or if so, he’d shed the accent. In fact, when it came to that ineffable English air of Authority and Right, this rustic figure sounded closer to the real thing than Carstairs in his beautifully tailored clothing.) “But no, it is a village of a people long gone. Phoenicians, according to local mythology. Major, I distinctly remember saying that if I saw you again, I would kill you.”

  Major Aldous Carstairs’ lazy smile deepened, and his voice when he spoke was low, almost intimate. “Captain Grey, it is so very good to see you again. May I present Mr. Harris Stuyvesant from America? Mr. Stuyvesant, Captain Bennett Grey.”

  Stuyvesant looked from the sharpened steel on the man’s shoulder to the expression on his face, and decided not to offer his hand. “Hi,” he said, his fingers sketching a wave.

  Grey still hadn’t taken his eyes from the Englishman. “Major.”

  It wasn’t that Carstairs didn’t hear that raw threat, Stuyvesant thought: The man’s face might be arranged into the fond expression of a parent indulging a child’s whim, but Stuyvesant was close enough to feel his tension—the muscles beneath that fancy coat were just waiting for the command to dive for the car. Anyone less cold-blooded than Aldous Carstairs would have been sweating into his well-ironed white shirt.

  But give the icy bastard credit: His voice gave away no trace of fear as he said, “I believe, Captain Grey, that your precise words were, ‘If I lay eyes on you again, be prepared to die.’ However, before you come after me with that archaic weapon, I should hope you might listen to a request. It concerns…your sister.”

  Stuyvesant had plenty of time to consider those last two words, words that clicked like a queen on a chess-board, words with a whole lot of history in them. He had time to speculate about the axe on Grey’s shoulder, if it was why Carstairs had wanted him along. And to wonder if, should the woodcutter come at them, he maybe shouldn’t just stand back and let him swing: God knew, anyone who said those words to Harris Stuyvesant in that way wouldn’t walk away in one piece.

  But the man Grey just stood, motionless.

  The American was beginning to think Carstairs’ words had set off some peculiar mental process, turning the fellow into one of those standing stones they’d passed in the fields that morning, when Cornwall itself broke the tension by dropping into the tableau a wild-eyed countryman in a bright red fisherman’s jersey.

  Almost literally dropping: The unlikely figure tumbled over the wall into the farmyard as if thrown there, picking himself up and trotting across the yard in an oddly crablike gait. He scuttled over to Bennett Grey and seized the small man’s free hand, edging around in back of him to glare over Grey’s head at the others with a pair of blue eyes so pale they seemed white. His large body was draped in much-patched trousers held up by twine, and the red jersey looked as if it had been rolling in gorse bushes. He was probably near to Grey in age, but Stuyvesant half expected him to poke his thumb into his mouth to complete the picture of childishness.

  Grey finally moved, to crane his neck and look at the person behind him.

  “Naouw, Robbie, shudden tha be at oam helpin’ tha Mutherr?”

  The Cornishman answered in the same peculiar tongue. “Ah ’eard the motorr. Ah diddun loik its looks. Ah knawed you wud wan’ ma help.”

  Behind the impenetrable accent, it was clear that the man was simple as a six-year-old. He clutched Grey’s hand and scowled from Carstairs to Stuyvesant; if he’d been a dog he’d have been growling.

  But Grey gave a laugh that sounded only the slightest bit forced, and reached down to lean his long axe against the side of the building. “Robbie, tha’s a good lad, but thee mun go back to tha Mutherr naow. Ahm foin. These twa gennelmun come all the way from London town to talk t’me, so Ah mun keep them, naow, must Ah?”

  Robbie’s shoulders relaxed, and he turned and eyed the motor for a moment before tilting his head and whispering loudly into Grey’s ear, “Ah wanna zit een ’un.”

  “Na, Robbie, you wudden loik the smell. Motorrs like tha’ are not fit for thee. Off tha go, me ’andsum. Say good day to Mr. Stuyvesant and Major Carstairs.”

  With great reluctance, either at abandoning Grey or leaving the shiny motor unexperienced, the Cornish lad tugged at his cap and withdrew. Grey had to urge him twice more before Robbie threw his leg over the wall and dropped away on the other side.

  The instant he was gone, that green gaze snapped back onto Carstairs.

  “Does your American friend here know the details of what you’re about?”

  “Some of them. Not all.”

  “Of course not. No matter. Major, I want you out of my sight until four o’clock. That gives your Mr. Stuyvesant four and a half hours to tell m
e everything he knows. You’d better hope he’s convincing.”

  Carstairs’ look of amusement faded. “Grey, really, I—”

  “You’re giving me a headache, Major. Four o’clock.”

  The Englishman studied Grey as though committing his face to memory. He glanced at Stuyvesant, then, to the American’s astonishment, walked off. No argument, no protest at the cold or the lack of transport, just tugged at his gloves and walked away down the track they’d come up.

  In moments the walls had swallowed Carstairs, but Grey waited, long after the sound of footsteps on gravel faded. Stuyvesant shifted, took his cigarette case from his left breast pocket, turned it over in his hand once or twice before putting it away again, then cleared his throat, preparing to speak. Grey held up a finger to stop him, his eyes on the end of the adjoining field: a brief flicker of dark, glimpsed through a narrow break in the wall, and Carstairs was gone.

  Grey blew out a long breath and leaned back against the shed’s stone wall, eyes shut, both hands coming up to press their heels against his eye sockets, fingers in his hair. Stuyvesant had thought he meant a figurative headache, but apparently not: The man did not look boyish now.

  “Do you work for him?” Grey’s voice sounded strained.

  “No. I only met him three days ago.”

  “He’s planning something. What is he planning?”

  “Planning…? I’m sorry, I honestly don’t know.”

  After a few seconds, the hands came away from the face. The man raised his head to drill Stuyvesant with that emerald stare. He seemed to be listening intently, not only to Stuyvesant’s denial, echoing off the stone walls, but to his own inner voice.

  Stuyvesant found himself opening his mouth to speak, to explain his statement, to swear that honestly, he wasn’t—

  Harris Stuyvesant, as cool under pressure as any man in the Bureau, ready to blather and vow and declare his innocence like a two-bit criminal feeling the handcuffs.

  Abruptly, Grey nodded his head, as if resigned to a decision handed down by some internal court, then bent to retrieve the axe. Stuyvesant’s protest died unspoken.

  The small man strode across the yard towards the house. As he passed the chopping block, his arm came up and he sank the heavy tool, single-handed, two inches deep in the hard surface. He climbed the concave stone steps and went inside, leaving the door standing open.

  Harris Stuyvesant ran a hand over his hair, not quite sure what had just happened.

  All the same, he figured an open door was an invitation. Or at least, as much invitation as he was likely to get.

  Chapter Seven

  TWO STEPS UP and a duck of the head brought the big American inside the stone cottage. He paused to let his eyes adjust to the light, and found he was in the hallway of a building even smaller than it had appeared from the outside. To his left was a closed door. To his right was a room with a pair of easy chairs before a time-blackened fireplace; a clock ticked on the mantelpiece. One entire wall was solid with books, its shelves beginning to make inroads on a second wall. A small table beside one chair held a stack of books, an unlit paraffin lamp, and a ceramic ash-tray with a pipe. On a larger table beneath the window stood a small crystal-wireless set.

  The room’s only sign of disorder was a drift of newspapers beside the chair. One of them was the Friday Times, with a determinedly low-key headline tut-tutting over the Strike as if it were little more than a college prank. On top of the Times was a paper whose font he didn’t recognize, folded to an article—he took a step in, just to see—about the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. It was a name he’d come across once or twice during the last week, some semi-official group that sounded like a cross between old boy’s club and reactionary militia. The sort of group that might make him question his stand against Communism, were it to raise its head on the other side of the Atlantic.

  A clink of glass pulled Stuyvesant’s mind from the building hysteria of faraway London and drew him deeper into the house, to another doorway, where he ducked his head again, so as not to be brained on the lintel. Here lay a bright and obsessively tidy kitchen: wooden table with patterned red-and-yellow oil-cloth pinned to its top, three wooden chairs, a scrubbed stone sink and single tap, and open shelves, lined with more of the oil-cloth, that held plates, cups, glasses, and a variety of canisters and packages. The windows were spotless, no easy task this near the sea; the room was cozy with the sun and the heat from the black iron stove.

  Bennett Grey was standing next to the sink, his back to the room as he drank thirstily. He swallowed—two, three gulps—then set the glass down hard. His right arm came up with a clatter of glass against glass as he poured from a bottle, then he carried the fresh drink around the table, to drop heavily into one of the chairs. He set his elbows on the oil-cloth and cradled his temples in both hands; Stuyvesant might not have been in the room.

  The American eyed the bottle sitting in a patch of sunlight. Its shoulders held a light coating of dust, now showing clear marks from Grey’s fingers: not a daily comfort, then.

  He ran his eyes over the room, taking in the bachelor’s neatness, the precise borders of the paint and the solidity of the windows. Seven eggs, a spectrum from white to brown, rested on the back of the counter in a lop-sided basket; four elegant wine-glasses with gold trim sat next to three eggshell porcelain teacups on one rough shelf, over a drying-rack filled with dinner plates Stuyvesant’s mother would have crooned over. He’d have laid money that the utensils in the drawer would be solid silver, and that thought made him suddenly, unreasonably, angry.

  He felt like taking that carefully preserved medicinal bottle of hooch and smashing it into that spotless stone sink. Or maybe he could just pick up the little man and shake him, headache or no, until Grey told him what the hell was going on and why Aldous goddamn Carstairs had brought him here.

  But impatience was rarely a helpful tool—one piece of wisdom he’d gained at high cost over the years. And face it: If he wasn’t here, in this pretty piece of countryside, he’d be chewing at the carpets in London with nothing to do but walk the streets and keep from beating up Union sympathizers until the Bastard’s Battersea speech on Thursday.

  Considering the blanket of anger draped over London at the moment, much better to be here, frustration or no. He gave a mental shrug, then pulled one of the cut-glass tumblers off the shelf, pouring himself a scant two fingers of the clear liquid. He took off his overcoat, sat down in the chair across from Captain Bennett Grey, and felt the bumptious American act slide away at last.

  Grey peered out at the glass from beneath his hands. “Sorry, I didn’t take you for an early drinker.”

  “I’m not, any more than you are. But I’ve been in London for the last week and a half, which is about as restful as strolling through a pack of rabid dogs, followed by twenty-four hours in the company of your friend in the black coat. I think just this once my sainted mother would permit a belt before lunch.”

  Despite his brave words, Stuyvesant raised his glass with caution, warned by the powerful fumes. He took a sip. The liquid seared a path from lips to stomach lining, and he coughed, blinking against the astounded tears in his eyes. “Jesus, what is this?”

  “I try not to ask,” Grey told him. “One of my neighbors distills it. It makes an excellent fire-starter, if you’re ever caught with wet wood.”

  Stuyvesant gently set the glass down far across the table, half expecting its contents to crawl out and come across the bright oil-cloth at him. He’d drunk his share of bathtub gin since the Volstead Act had passed, but this was one for the books. In self defense, he pulled out his case and placed a cigarette between his lips, then hesitated, lighter in hand. Surely if the vapors from the glass were as explosive as they smelled, the coals in the stove would have blown out the kitchen windows already? Still, he brought the flame gingerly towards his face, and was relieved when his exhaled breath did not turn into a flame-thrower.

  He snapped the lighter out
, then looked around until his eyes hit on a tin saucer with dark stains in the bottom, and got up to retrieve it. Before sitting again, he shed his jacket, both for the comfort and to set an informal, just-us-boys note to the upcoming conversation.

  Grey finished his second drink more slowly than his first, but in all, Stuyvesant figured, the man had just downed eight or ten ounces of raw liquor—extremely raw liquor—with no reaction. Or rather, with one reaction: The man was no longer squeezing his head to keep it in place.

  “You find this stuff cures headaches?” the American asked.

  “It’s about the only thing that does.”

  Stuyvesant flicked the ash from his cigarette over the tin saucer. “I take it Major Carstairs gives you a headache?”

  “Like a spike through the brain. It sounds as though he gave you one, as well.”

  “Not like that.”

  “I hope to God not, for your sake.”

  “However, I don’t. Seem to give you one, that is.”

  “The day is young,” Grey said grimly.

  Stuyvesant sat back against the chair to study the man on the other side of the table. The information he’d managed to drag from Carstairs about Grey had struck him as a closely calibrated doling out of facts, more tantalizing than informative. Still, the bare outline of Grey’s life had led him to expect a typical shell-shock victim: jumpy, pale, and pitiful. Instead he was faced with this sturdy brown-skinned farmer with the high-class accent, whose gaze was even and hands without tremor. Who, moreover, had just managed to squeeze out a little humor despite a pounding fury inside his skull. He’d set out from London anticipating the need to conceal a healthy man’s distaste for a weakling like Grey, yet what he felt now was something very like sympathy.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why does the Major give me one, or why should you keep trying to?”