Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  Stuyvesant’s face was without expression, then he gave a little grimace and said, “You’re wrong there, I’ve always been a man for leggy redheads. But you’re right about the cigarettes. How’d you know I didn’t bring them from home?”

  Grey gave him a curious look, amusement and outrage. “Only one in that case is American, and you finger it longingly before settling for the local brand. The others are permeated with the stink of London, not the salt air of Cornwall. And she was blonde.”

  “She was not.” But Stuyvesant was beginning to see why an Intelligence man like Carstairs might be interested in a Cornish hermit.

  “And before you begin to wonder how you might train someone to perceive things as I do, I should tell you that the continual scraping of the world against raw nerve is a fine means of driving a man mad. One need only look at the scar on the Major’s face as proof.”

  “That was your doing?” Stuyvesant was surprised to hear a trace of admiration in his voice, and jerked at his own leash: Carstairs was the ally he needed, not this man.

  “You might call it my letter of resignation from his little project.”

  “What project was that?” Grey gave no sign of having heard the question, but Stuyvesant persisted. “Is that what Carstairs is after, a program to teach people your…skills?”

  The green eyes flashed in a sudden pulse of irritation. “Who the hell knows what Major bloody Carstairs has in that devious mind of his? Ah, Jesus,” he said, standing up so fast the chair crashed over. “This place just stinks of the bastard. I can’t hear myself think. I must have some air before the rain starts.”

  Weaving slightly, Grey stumbled out of the kitchen, leaving the door open to a spring day with not a cloud in sight.

  Stuyvesant downed the last of his cold coffee, and picked up his silver case from the table. His broad thumb soothed the letters of his name, letters Helen had designed herself for the purpose (her giggle, as she told him of the engraver’s disapproval), then moved around to pop open the hidden back of the case. He looked down at the folded photograph, but he did not take it out, just snapped the cover shut again and slid it back into the breast pocket of his shirt, over his heart.

  He shrugged into his jacket and went after his host.

  Chapter Eleven

  ON THE PENZANCE ROAD, nearly a mile away, Aldous Carstairs leaned into a gap in the hedgerow, aiming a set of small but powerful field-glasses at the white cottage. This was the only spot on the entire road where the building could be seen; he had known of it long before his hired car had left Penzance that morning.

  Five years ago, Grey had gone to ground in that cottage, leaving Carstairs with his plans shredded, his future bleak, and his body shaken. But Grey’s betrayal had taught Carstairs an invaluable lesson: Beware eagerness.

  Five years ago, Carstairs had been forced into a rapid reevaluation and drastic change of plans; Captain Bennett Grey had receded into a persistent but distant presence on the horizon.

  Not that Carstairs had ever taken his eyes entirely off Grey. He had all but memorized the Ordnance Survey maps for this part of Cornwall, knew the names and susceptibilities of every local official, constable to postmistress. Every two months, one of Carstairs’ men passed through, selling pots and pans and making gossipy conversation about, among other topics, the blond hermit on the hill: Carstairs studied his agent’s reports and photographs with care. He knew Grey’s contacts, had known of Grey’s first, tentative ventures into the nearby towns, and had agonized over the balance between surveillance and discretion: It was damned difficult to watch a man in open countryside like this—no doubt the reason Grey chose it. And it had proved even harder to lay hands on a local farmer willing to sell information on his likable, boyish, war hero of a neighbor.

  For five years, Bennett Grey had rusticated down here while in London, Aldous Carstairs worked to shape a new vision—one that could incorporate Grey at some future time, but was not dependent on him. He discovered that, with Grey set to the side, he was free to focus without distraction on his renewed vision, striving to build a thing that would hold through the storms of uncontrollable events. He laboriously cemented relationships, created rock-solid foundations, and sought out others who could share his idea of the future.

  With each passing year, his creation became clearer, more attainable, more necessary. Inevitable, even—Carstairs had begun to feel as if the nation’s every event and decision was feeding directly into his needs. All was balanced, perfect, necessary. And all was scheduled to reach its pinnacle inside the next three weeks.

  Then came Friday afternoon, when an unkempt, ill-mannered American lout dropped out of the heavens to offer Carstairs, not only his first real access to Grey in all those years, but an expansion of what he had envisioned as an afterthought into something considerably closer to the center of things.

  It was like a light going on in a room one hadn’t realized was dim, or rain on one of those mythic desert creatures that fold up through years of drought.

  However, Carstairs had learned his lesson well. So he had said nothing, although he’d wanted to shout aloud in astonishment. He had sent the lout away, had spent the night exploring the implications and sending out his feelers. Only at the end of that had he decided to trust his original impulse, and come to Cornwall.

  In the two days since, he had seen nothing to make him doubt his decision. He still was far from understanding where this development would lead him, but the tantalizing awareness that things had changed because of the American’s request, that wheels were grinding into motion in unexpected ways, filled him with a mix of equal parts exhilaration and terror.

  Exhilaration because he could suddenly see that, with Grey, so much became possible—one glance at those green eyes today and he’d shivered with the thrill of knowing that time had not cured Grey of his singular talents. Terror because he knew that what he was building was at the moment agonizingly precarious. At a certain point in its construction, even the grandest cathedral was vulnerable to a minor tremor: One clumsy nudge could send the future tumbling. And if the American threatened to provide that nudge, well, Carstairs needed to be on hand, to remove him before he could do any damage.

  Nineteen days from now the coal mines would slam shut; the last thing he’d needed was to break off for a diversion into the reeking, pig-clotted reaches of the Empire. Plus, the other message in those green eyes—that Bennett Grey loathed him as much as ever—told him that even with this opening, winning Grey’s cooperation was going to be delicate work indeed. True, the conquest would be all the more satisfying for its difficulty: He’d always found the challenge of Grey…invigorating.

  If only that American idiot had bumbled in a few weeks earlier!

  Ah well, mustn’t be greedy. The nearness of the deadlines might necessitate a touch more brutality, might mean treading a larger number of people into the dust—for one thing, that American might need putting in place—but as always, one had to keep the end in mind, not the process.

  As they said, birth was a messy business.

  Or as the great Niccolò put it: Non è cosa più difficile a trattare che farsi capo introdurre nuovi ordini. There is nothing more difficult to bring about than introducing a new order.

  And really, adding Grey’s talents to the wave of momentum he could feel building beneath him, could bring Carstairs in serious danger of being carried through the very doors of Downing Street.

  Which would never do.

  He would set the delicate mechanism of this country back on the right path—he, Aldous Carstairs, would do so—but he’d be damned if he would do it in the glare of public life. Leave that to the Medicis of the world.

  At last, a figure appeared in his lenses: Bennett Grey came out from the back of the rustic structure to limp furiously up the hill. That leg was still bothering him, it seemed: He should have let the Project surgeons have another go at it.

  The leg, the stomach wound, the chunk knocked out of the shoulder,
the stubborn infection on the side of his head—after all these years, Carstairs could still list the precise details of Grey’s scars, outward signs of the man’s inner transformation. I wonder if the last pieces of grit ever worked their way out of Grey’s scalp? he mused. That scalp, now hidden beneath thick blond hair, had been freshly shaved when Carstairs first laid eyes on Grey; the naked, pale skin had given Grey a childlike look that contrasted deliciously with the sullenness in his green eyes.

  Carstairs followed the small blond man’s progress around those ridiculous antiquarian hillocks. No doubt he was making for the hilltop where the reports said he was wont to sit by the hour, staring off to sea, invisible from this patch of—

  Suddenly Grey’s foot slipped and nearly brought him to grief; Carstairs caught his breath, but Grey’s hand shot out in time, and he pulled himself upright.

  Idiotic boy, Carstairs thought in exasperation. What if he’d fallen and cracked his head, what would become of all that precious potential then? I ought to have him taken into custody for his own protection.

  And here came the yokel, plodding along in the rear, too far from Grey to be of any help, planting his great Yankee clodhopper boots deep into Grey’s Cornish soil. Carstairs shifted the glasses in time to see Grey disappear over the rise, then lowered them again to follow Stuyvesant. The American stopped from time to time, gawping like a tourist in Trafalgar Square; once he turned around and appeared to look straight at Carstairs, but the watcher did not move, and the gap was narrow, the lenses shaded; after a moment, the man turned and continued on his way.

  When Stuyvesant, too, had gone over the rise into invisibility, Carstairs pulled away from the bushes, making a face when a hawthorn caught at his sleeve and snagged a thread loose. He extricated his sleeve, then slid the binoculars into his overcoat pocket and took out his note-book, to write a few words. He capped his pen with a flourish and put the leather journal away, satisfied that all had gone more or less as anticipated.

  Although, he reflected, he hadn’t anticipated being banished by Grey into this primitive wasteland, given over to the slender mercies of the Celtic peasant. He scowled at the standing stone in the field before him. Enormous effort had gone into bringing that rock here, time and sweat and danger to prop it upright, and for what? Here it stood, covered with multicolored blotches of lichen that looked like a skin disease, tipped like a drunk in the direction of the sea, girdled by a black ring where it had served as scratching-post for three millennia of scrofulous cattle.

  But as he tugged on his gloves, he studied the standing stone, and wondered if it might not be a parable. The message of the stone standing in the field was not the absurdity of the labor, but the fact that once the props, ropes, and sweat were cleared away and forgotten, what remained seemed magical.

  As once the props, the chaos, and the behind-the-scenes manipulation were cleared away, the British people would look at their new world, and see merely the magic of its rightness.

  Aldous Carstairs glanced at his wrist-watch, his expression rueful. How on earth was the Machiavelli of the new age expected to pass four hours in this place without being driven to murder?

  Chapter Twelve

  STUYVESANT TRAILED Grey at a distance, letting the man work off the alcohol-fueled anger, watching the small figure stump through the lumpy pasture that he had called a Phoenician village. It was the knee that caused Grey’s uneven gait, Stuyvesant saw—that and the drink: He used his right leg to climb, drawing the left up behind it. Probably the same war injury that had blown him to pieces and—if Carstairs wasn’t just feeding him a line of crap, if Grey’s business with the cigarette case hadn’t been some kind of stunt—had left the officer some pretty strange talents.

  Grey wove a path among the hummocks and walls that lay half hidden beneath centuries of grass and ivy, ferns and bramble, hawthorn and gorse. Twice he clambered over waist-high remains of walls, where the grass showed evidence of regular passage; once he nearly fell; another time he paused to shed his jacket. The buried village ended, but Grey kept on, over a rickety stile and along a sheep-worn path to the top of the hill, where an enormous stone slab protruded from the turf. He climbed onto it and turned his back to Cornwall while he rolled up his shirt-sleeves, then abruptly vanished; Stuyvesant hoped that merely meant that he had sat down.

  Stuyvesant took his time, pausing to examine the exposed stonework, turning occasionally to admire the view. Twice he found himself kneading the back of his neck, as if the hairs there felt some distant marksman settling his sights on an out-of-place Bureau agent, but he could see nothing, and told himself that it was just a memory spilling over from that earlier trench sensation. Much as he had disliked having Carstairs so close, he was finding it equally uncomfortable not knowing where the man was.

  But he told himself not to be childish: If Carstairs wanted him dead, he wouldn’t have had to travel to Cornwall to do it.

  Still, the back of his neck was not much interested in logic, and subsided only when he cleared the ridge and the countryside was temporarily out of sight.

  The stone slab was on the very crest of the hill, surrounded by a nest of brambles and gorse. Between the thickness of the thing and the rise it sat on, he could not see Grey at all. It had to have been put here, Stuyvesant supposed—one of those massive and mystifying prehistoric structures, Stonehenge’s little cousins, that he’d seen standing, singly or in groups, across the face of Cornwall. Tombs or temples or something. Sacrificial altars for the local druids.

  In any case, this was not just a piece of bedrock from which the soil had eroded; its presence was artificial, although it must have weighed tons: There was room for three or four men to stretch out on top.

  As Grey was stretched out, sprawled with the abandon of a sleeping boy, head resting on his folded jacket, face raised to the sun. Feeling oddly middle-aged, forced to use the rough footholds as a ladder where Grey had gone up them as a stairway, Stuyvesant scrambled onto the high surface. Once there, he brushed off his hands and stepped to the end of the rock—only to shy suddenly back, startled by the precipitous drop at his feet. The brambles had hidden how close the rock was to the cliff’s edge: One kick from Grey’s boot and he’d have been airborne.

  He glanced involuntarily down at the small man. Despite his shut eyes, Grey’s mouth now had a distinct curve, as if he’d felt his companion’s abrupt movement, known the reason, and found it amusing. Disconcerted, Stuyvesant retreated to the far side of the deliciously warm stone and settled with his feet pointing towards the mainland: No Bureau agent worth his salt would sit with his back exposed, but the nerve-endings along his spine reassured him that the drop to the sea was as good as a wall. He laid his coat to one side and thumbed open the buttons to his waistcoat, leaning back on braced arms and crossing his outstretched legs at the ankles. His upper foot beat a rhythm in the air until he noticed it, and stopped.

  At first, his mind circled furiously around the problem of Bennett Grey: Who was he, why had Stuyvesant been brought to him, how could he use the man to get at The Bastard? But after a few minutes, a bird passing high overhead distracted him from purposeful thoughts, and he couldn’t help noticing how sweet the air was, and how the sky was an endless arc of blue with a smatter of decorative clouds out to the west. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw that the outstretched water, far from being huge and empty, supported a surprising number of boats, both near the shore and out to the horizon.

  Harris Stuyvesant filled his lungs, and eased the breath out. No offices here, no bureaucrats shoving cups of tea at him, no muscular toughs in cloth caps jamming their leaflets in his face, demanding that he admit the iniquities of mine owners. No knots of tension, no sudden wariness on seeing a handful of men coming down the sidewalk at him. No sidewalks, for that matter. No parcels or carts that could hide a bomb—that sudden flash: shattering glass, torn bodies.

  He took another slow breath, and felt peace slip over him like a glove. He wanted to lie down next
to Grey and take a nap.

  Instead, he sat upright and patted his pockets for the cigarette case, keeping his eyes on the countryside. He could now see that the ruined foundations of the field below formed three clusters of rough joined circles, marks from a prehistoric giant’s bubble pipe.

  “Nice view.”

  “The Beacon, they call it.”

  Stuyvesant glanced over his shoulder at the cliff’s edge, but could see no indication of a structure. “An early light-house that fell into the water?”

  “More like an enormous pile of firewood. In 1588.”

  “Fifteen…? Ah, the Armada.”

  “Possibly the first beacon lit, on July 19. And very probably by an inhabitant of my cottage.”

  “You’d think they’d at least have carved the date over the door. I mean, there’s history and there’s History.”

  “Just another day, fending off the Spanish threat.”

  “And is that really a Phoenician village?”

  “The men from the land of purple,” Grey said, his voice going dreamy. “A nation of sailors who plied the seas from Alexandria to the gates of Gibraltar and beyond, their ships mighty with sail and oar, who traveled at night by the pole star. A trading people, the Phoenicians, peace-loving for the most part, who nonetheless held off a siege of Nebuchadnezzar for thirteen years. All in all, not a bad paradigm for a sea-going people.