“However, no,” he added, his voice coming down to earth. “I shouldn’t think that is a Phoenician village. Although it was no doubt some kind of settlement, round houses with a wide rampart either to keep in cattle or for defense, take your pick. This is the land of the Celt, Mr. Stuyvesant, who brought their Trevethy and their Tregonning, their Penwith and Penhallam, their stone circles and standing rows, their barrows and cairns.
“But I enjoy the idea of Phoenicians trading along the English coastline, carrying alluvial tin from Cornwall to far-off Tyre and Sidon and Rome. Certainly their ships traveled the coasts of Spain and France, and the Channel is narrow; what would be more natural than to venture across on a summer’s day and find the Celts of Brittany here, too, raising their standing stones, worshipping their mid-winter gods, speaking their melodious tongue that survived Rome and the Anglo Saxons and is only now dying out? When I sit up here on the Beacon in the moonlight, out of the corner of my eye I can see their sails rising through the mist, hear the creak and splash of their ranked oars, watch their swarthy faces greeting Robbie’s forefathers, smell the cook-fires as they set up on the shore.”
It was hypnotic, Grey’s vision unfolding behind Stuyvesant’s eyes, until he, too, could picture the sails that had rotted into dust twenty centuries before, hear the voices speaking a tongue dead nearly as long. “There was an archaeologist from Cambridge,” Grey went on, “two or three summers ago, who was digging up a site a bit like it on the other side of St. Just. He showed up here one day and wanted to poke about—you can see, if you look carefully, the lines of a hill fort atop that last rise. But the Celts were an odd people, at home with the Other World, and it does not seem right to throw the cold light of science onto their magical constructions. So I told him he could argue with the next owner about it after I was dead.”
Silence fell, natural as breath. Stuyvesant blinked, and realized that he still had the silver case in his hand, his thumb traveling back and forth over the engraving on the front, his fingers aware of the shrapnel gouge on the back. He clicked it open and allowed his fingers to meditate over the cigarettes, automatically bypassing the solitary American citizen; then he caught himself, and pulled that one out and placed it between his lips. He turned to extend the case to Grey, and was struck by the man’s face: skin gone rosy with warmth, with a faint sheen of sweat, head back and mouth half open to suck in the sea air. The man’s every pore was slack with pleasure as he reveled in the sensation of lying on a warm rock in the sun on a cool spring day.
Then Stuyvesant’s perception shifted, and he realized it was not just pleasure he was seeing, but something close to ecstasy. Grey looked like a man having sex.
Startled, the American turned away sharply to dig around for his lighter. As the breeze cleared the smoke from his face, he noticed a spot of red far below: Robbie, perched like a gargoyle atop the wall, guarding the way to his hero’s abode.
He glanced sideways again at the rapturous expression of his companion, and said, “You must feel like God, up here on a day like this.”
“There aren’t all that many days like this,” Grey murmured.
“Is the view the reason you moved to Cornwall? Your voice doesn’t sound like you were born and raised here.”
“Cornwall is a refuge for me, not a birthplace. I came here because I started walking, and here was where I ran out of ground. I stayed because I can see the enemy coming, with enough warning for me to take a running leap into the sea if I want.” Grey’s voice was light, but Stuyvesant did not think he was altogether joking. Then again, Grey had seen Carstairs coming: Did he have other enemies? Or had he simply not wanted to take his running leap?
“Tell me, Captain Grey, if you sometimes find people physically unbearable, do you find Nature as powerful a sensation in the opposite direction?”
Grey let his head flop sideways towards his interrogator; one eyelid opened to reveal a slit of green. “Now, there is one question that would never even occur to the Major. Or, I venture to say, to most of the agents in your Bureau of Investigation. Which I suppose is why I agreed to talk to you.” It also appeared to be a question Grey did not intend to answer. He spotted the silver case and the lighter sitting on top of the American’s folded tweed coat, and to Stuyvesant’s relief, half raised himself out of his sprawl to reach for the case.
“Do you know—” Stuyvesant stopped, then gave a brief, embarrassed laugh and continued. “This is going to sound pretty stupid, but do you know just who Aldous Carstairs is? In the government, I mean. I came across him in a sort of roundabout way and like I said, I never got around to asking his position.”
“I doubt that he’d have told you if you asked. The Major I knew envisioned himself as a secular éminence grise. He taught himself to read Italian so he could quote Machiavelli, with an atrocious accent I might add. I shouldn’t be surprised if his position doesn’t actually exist. I should think all governments have people like him—the man behind the scenes, the man who takes care of things when prominent people can’t afford to dirty their hands. The man no one acknowledges, and everyone uses. If you’re fortunate, he’s happy to live in his dark hole, like a cockroach beneath the floorboards. If you’re not, he takes you over.”
“He’s not with Intelligence, then?”
“He was, but by now he could be anything. You’d probably find the Major is his own show, no matter what the paperwork says.” Grey got his cigarette going and lay back, one ankle propped across the other upraised knee.
“He called it the Truth Project,” he told Stuyvesant without preface. “A civilian project intended to explore quick, humane alternatives to traditional slow, ineffective, and often brutal interrogation techniques, although I always got the impression that the Project itself was just one part of some larger intent.” Before Stuyvesant could decide how to respond, Grey went on. “You may as well tell me about my sister.”
“I don’t know your sister.”
“You will, if the Major has anything to say in the matter. You’ll like her.”
“Why, is she blonde and needing protection?”
Grey laughed, a surprisingly free and unencumbered sound. “Blonde, yes, although she’s grown out of her kitten phase. Come to think of it, you’re probably finding kittens a bit tiresome yourself. Ten years ago, you’d have groveled at Sarah’s feet. What is she involved in, that she’s attracted the Major’s attention?”
Stuyvesant squinted at the crazy quilt of fields below, trying to rein in his irritation. Back at the house, Grey had called him tough, and he was—but he knew his toughness was also a mask, in daily life as much as in working undercover. Not many would have guessed that Harris Stuyvesant, big, hard, humorless Fed, could easily lose half a day in an art museum, or that about one time in ten, a night at the opera brought tears to his eyes. It was extremely disconcerting to think that this man could so readily trace the softness in him.
“Yeah, well,” he said, “I’ll do my best not to ravage the girl. I don’t know exactly what she’s involved with—like I said, Aldous Carstairs isn’t the most generous font of information. But when I gave him the name of the man I’m after, Carstairs happened to know that your sister has been seen in his company recently. And before Big Brother Grey asks: no, it doesn’t look like your sister and my man are linked directly. It’s more that they have a friend in common, a young woman by the name of Laura Hurleigh.”
Chapter Thirteen
GREY’S RIGHT HAND, carrying the cigarette to his mouth, hesitated for an instant before completing its arc. “Laura Hurleigh. Yes, I know that my sister works with her. I knew the Hurleighs myself, a long time ago.”
“The whole world knows the Hurleighs.” Even in the States it was a rare month that didn’t see some exploit of one Hurleigh or another written up for the amusement of the masses. After Carstairs told him the young woman’s name on Saturday, Stuyvesant had gone to the reading room to bone up on Debrett’s and Burke’s guides to the peers, and to leaf throug
h back issues of the Times and the Illustrated London News. But even before that research, he’d known of the Hurleighs: blood bluer than that of the current residents of Buckingham Palace; a history stretching back to the Magna Carta; related to half the titles in the realm; with a country house in Gloucestershire, a much-photographed house in London, a Scottish hunting lodge, and an innate knack for quirky and occasionally bizarre behavior.
Debrett’s history of the family began with 1215, when a Hurleigh ancestor had been among the barons forcing concessions from a king at Runnymede, and went on to recount a story concerning a seventeenth-century Hurleigh, a chicken, and the Queen. Burke’s more laconically recited battles won by Hurleighs over three centuries—Stuyvesant got the impression that the Hurleigh decorations would fill the back of a good-sized delivery van—culminating with the heroic death in France of this generation’s eldest son, Thomas, and a minor coup de guerre in the 1916 Palestine campaign by the current Hurleigh heir, Daniel, shortly after his twenty-second birthday.
On the non-military fields of battle, the current generation looked to live up to the iconoclastic strain in the family line: One Hurleigh sister wrote a wildly successful gossip column for one of the afternoon newspapers, breathless and daring and regularly skirting the edge of actionable; another was an outspoken advocate of nudism, with a preference for conducting interviews in her chosen state. The current, eleventh, Duke, whose given names were Godlake Reginald Gryffin Herbert Noah, held a string of titles (some of which were so obscure their origins had cobwebs, such as Holder of the Pen to the Prince of Wales). He had been a close personal friend and informal advisor to three monarchs and seven of the last ten prime ministers, and was known for his extensive collection of Staffordshire porcelain dogs, his expertise in Roman Britain, and his picturesque habit of running intruders off his land with a pack of hounds—rumor had it there was an annual cup for pranksters from nearby Oxford, given to the first team to plant their college flag on the Hurleigh doorstep during something called Eights Week. The family did have a few quiet and hardworking members, some of whom went so far as to generate income, but those dull and responsible Hurleighs were for the most part overlooked by the press.
“That is true. But I mean to say, I knew them to stay with—they’re distant cousins through our mothers—our grandmothers used to ride with the same hunts. I used to meet Thomas and Laura at children’s parties and such, and I spent two or three long vacs at Hurleigh House, beginning when I was maybe twelve. I was between Thomas and Daniel in age.”
That Bennett Grey had grown up alongside the Hurleighs confirmed Stuyvesant’s suspicions of the man’s class. Even in the relatively egalitarian U.S. of A., the rich tended to live in each other’s pockets; in England, he thought, it was unlikely that children of the aristocracy would be permitted to mingle with those too far below them in rank. Grey might be chopping his own firewood now, but Stuyvesant would lay money that he’d started out in a house considerably grander than the stone cottage below.
“What is Laura doing with your agitator?” Grey asked.
“Didn’t you know? All the best upper-class girls have to collect a few revolutionaries before they settle down to a good marriage and good works.”
Grey sat up, tucking his heels under him. “Is this confirmed, or a tabloid rumor?”
“Twice in the past year, Lady Laura traveled to the States on the same ship as my agitator.”
There was a moment of silence, as Grey thought about this. “A commoner?”
“One grandfather was knighted, the other was a stone mason, son of a coal miner.”
“I can imagine what the Duchess had to say about the liaison.”
“I don’t suppose Lady Laura’s parents care for it any more than an untitled family would. But apparently she has an independent income from a granny who died, which gives her a fair bit of leeway when it comes to thumbing her nose at Daddy.” This tidbit of gossip was thanks to one of the scandal sheets, disapproving of Lady Laura’s unseemly dedication to the great unwashed of the East End through her free medical clinics.
“The Laura I knew would never thumb her nose at her father unless there was a purpose for doing so. Laura has always been a brilliant natural strategist—she’d be far more likely to pat the Duke’s graying head, sit down with him, and in five minutes flat have him believing the whole thing was his idea. And I’ve seen Laura get around the Duchess, as well, a claim few can make. So, which of Laura’s crazes had got my sister into trouble? The clinics or the politics?”
“I’d say the politics.” It would seem that Grey kept up with his sister’s interests, despite Carstairs’ claim that the siblings saw each other sporadically. “Although I don’t know that she’s in any trouble, exactly.”
“The Major thinks she is. How do you tie in?”
“Okay, it’s like this. Because the man I’m after has been very good at covering his trail, as far as my bosses are concerned he’s no more than a suspect. I came here for two reasons: One, to see if he’s been doing the same things here that nobody’s been talking about, and two, to find out about him. He doesn’t have a record here, other than small stuff, so I plan to work my way into his circle and take a look from the inside. It’s what I do best—in my job, we call it going undercover. Basically I follow my nose and see what I can unearth.”
“And in the course of your information-gathering, you met the Major, and he suggested you might use me to make contact with Sarah, and from her to your man?”
This was no turnip-head farmer, that was for sure. “In my experience, the only sure way into any radical group is by personal introduction. If I were just to walk in off the street, it would take me months to earn as much trust as I could get if someone on the inside vouched for me.”
“My sister being the one you want to vouch for you.” Grey’s voice had gone cool.
“I’d be undercover—he’ll probably never know who I am,” Stuyvesant protested, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.
“Unless you arrest him in America, and have to testify in court.”
“Well, I wouldn’t—”
“Stuyvesant, for God’s sake!”
Stuyvesant scratched at the bristle on his chin, casting around for some way out of this, but in the end, he had to shake his head. “Yeah, damn it, you’re right, it’s a lousy idea.” And it was—Stuyvesant wouldn’t have put up with trying to use one of his sisters like this, either. God damn Carstairs. “And I don’t know how much good it would do, anyway—sounds to me like your sister spends most of her time at the clinics, and I don’t imagine she has a lot of time to spare for my man’s kind of politics. No, it’s a pretty thin connection altogether, I’d say.
“Tell you the truth,” he muttered in disgust, “I haven’t a clue why Carstairs bothered dragging me out here.”
“He brought you here in order to follow in your shadow—you offered him an opportunity, however thin, to approach me.” Grey saw Stuyvesant’s puzzled expression, and his mouth curled in what might have been a smile, or a grimace of pain. “The Major’s been circling around me like a jilted lover for five years, since I left his precious research project in shambles and came to Cornwall.”
“Five years?” Stuyvesant said, trying not to sound too dubious. “The man must have the patience of a tick. You have ticks in this country?”
“Waiting for the approach of warm blood. They watch me, you know—his men do; they question my neighbors. Twice they’ve broken in and gone through my possessions.”
Stuyvesant smoked for a minute, considering. On the one hand, Grey’s suspicions sounded like what the head-shrinkers would call paranoia, where enemies lurk in every corner. On the other hand, there’d been Carstairs’ odd jolt of reaction.
“You know,” he said finally, “when I met Carstairs on Friday and brought up Bunsen’s name, I thought at the time it was funny how fast he made the jump from Bunsen to Laura Hurleigh to your sister. Almost like he’d been waiting, like you say, for
some kind of opportunity. I’m truly sorry, Captain Grey. My questions seem to have dropped you in the soup.”
Grey seemed interested neither in the declaration of guilt, nor the apology. “Bunsen?”
“Like the burner.”
“This is the Bunsen who—”
“Yeah,” Stuyvesant interrupted, “it’s that Richard Bunsen: decorated soldier, Labour Party golden boy, working-man’s friend. And you can just leave out the Scarlet Pimpernel remarks, I’ve heard ’em all.”
“I can imagine you have.” He sounded bemused, as if his thoughts had gone somewhere else.
“My sister has mentioned Richard Bunsen, in her letters. She says I met him when we were children, although I don’t remember doing so. I know the family remotely—there was a Bunsen a year behind me at Oxford. A brother, maybe? No, more like a cousin.” He still sounded distracted.
Stuyvesant had been right to think they were living in each other’s pockets—although Bunsen’s foothold as far up as Grey’s social class might be a little shaky. Stuyvesant wondered if Aldous Carstairs might not actually have had a point in bringing him here: If in the U.S. it made sense to work the personal contacts in getting close to someone, here in Britain the network of relationships was probably ten times as strong. And what if Carstairs did have a—what did they call it?—a fixation on Grey? It didn’t necessarily mean that all his suggestions should be rejected out of hand. Sure, only some pretty strong personal interest would explain why Carstairs was willing to spend two days coming to see Grey, but that didn’t mean that what he wanted didn’t go hand in hand with Stuyvesant’s needs.
And conversely, assuming Carstairs was being genuinely helpful, maybe Stuyvesant should in turn try to smooth Carstairs’ way with Grey a little, as he’d sort of agreed to do.
“In any case, I have to tell you, there’s a real possibility that, Scarlet Pimpernel or no, Richard Bunsen is headed for a world of trouble. And if your sister’s in the vicinity when the wall falls on him, she could end up getting caught up in it. If you don’t want to see your sister in prison—”
Touchstone Page 9
