Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  He reassured the guest that he would check the ice and the tonic. The young man said, “Right-ho.” The door banged shut; Gallagher’s footsteps retreated down the stairs; Stuyvesant moved to another stud, musing on the fact that the young guest had not expected Gallagher actually to fetch him a drink.

  Stuyvesant had limited experience with the ways of the English, but over the years, he had spent a certain amount of time among the American rich. The rigidity of pre-war households had relaxed a great deal, mostly because few could still afford the number of servants they had once employed. Still, he’d have thought that servants, when available, might generally be expected to wait on guests.

  He was on the last stud when he heard a door open and close and footsteps approaching down the hallway. Stuyvesant stretched out an arm to pull open his door, then stepped back to the mirror.

  “I’ll just be a second,” he told Grey when the blond man appeared. “Whoever staged a lightning raid on my wardrobe and plastered my shirt-front with starch did not account for large and clumsy fingers.”

  “Large, perhaps.” Grey leaned against the door and watched as Stuyvesant adjusted the neck-tie around his collar and began shaping the knot.

  “Tell me, the role of the servants here seems a little unusual. I mean, I’ve been in houses where you practically have to lock the bath-room door to keep the maid from scrubbing your back for you. Here you’re left to fetch your own drinks, but then they go and iron your clothes and polish your shoes when you’re not looking.” He scowled at the bow and tugged it loose to start over.

  Grey chuckled. “The Duke’s interpretation of aristocracy takes some getting used to. You see, when he was a young man, he went through a radical phase. He decided feudalism was A Bad Thing, so he changed the way his servants lived—decent housing, education for their children, no demeaning labor, fair pay, the lot.”

  “Sounds positively Bohemian—I’m surprised they didn’t hang him for high treason.”

  “The House of Lords cherishes its eccentrics. Then during the War, Laura had another bash at his hibernating radicalism. She badgered him into banning all the trappings—which among other things meant the livery.”

  Stuyvesant just grunted in response, having reached a tricky part with the tie.

  “Push down with your middle finger,” Grey suggested, which did, indeed, help. He waited until the tie was past danger, then continued. “Unfortunately, the servants rather liked some of the trappings, and as for the rest, well, they had their own very definite way of running things. Basically, for the past forty years it’s been a tug-of-war. No livery, but the clothing they wear might as well be a uniform. And guests mustn’t be overly coddled, both because it’s one of the Duke’s pet rants and, more rationally, since it loads on the work too much—this house has less than half the number of servants it had twenty years ago. On the other hand, the maids can’t bear to see a guest poorly turned out—it reflects badly on their professional standards.

  “What it boils down to is if an able-bodied guest can do a thing without stepping on the house’s toes, he’s expected to do it. Fetching his own drinks from the general room comes under that category; fetching a bucket of ice from the pantry does not, since that would require his intrusion onto the servants’ territory. A guest is expected to dress and to draw his own bath—or have his man do it for him, if he’s brought one—but a guest cannot be expected to carry a shirt to the laundry, heat up a flatiron, and produce a freshly pressed garment, as that would be another intrusion on Gallagher’s realm.”

  While Grey was talking, Stuyvesant had tweaked the tie to his satisfaction. He pulled a handkerchief from the drawer, shook his head at its remarkable crispness, and tucked it into his pocket, looking at the result in the mirror. He’d been right, last year, to spring for the more expensive suit, which he could wear with pride, no matter the surroundings.

  He smoothed his hair a last time, and followed Grey into the hallway. “So if I go shooting I wait to be given a gun, but once I have it, I carry and load it myself.”

  “You’ve got the flavor of the thing.”

  “And if I ride, I rub down the horse afterwards myself.”

  “That might be one of the gray areas. I’d say, you start the process and, if no one comes to take the job over, you’ve been judged competent enough to be trusted with the animal’s welfare.”

  Stuyvesant grinned. “Sounds about what I’d expect of a titled family that tools around in a decrepit old Morris instead of a Rolls or a Daimler.”

  “That’s the Hurleighs for you.”

  At the bottom of the stairway, Stuyvesant hesitated. “Didn’t your sister want us to let her know when we were going over?”

  “She’s already gone. Nearly ten minutes ago.”

  Ten minutes ago, Grey had been in his own room, behind closed doors, at the far end of the building from the main door, yet he had heard his sister go out. Stuyvesant nodded, and stepped outside.

  Instead of following the path towards the drive, this time they circled the house, and Stuyvesant entered Hurleigh’s formal garden for the first time.

  It was nearing dusk, a clear April evening. The air was rich with scents: fresh-turned soil, mown grass, the musk of a rose, some spicy herb, and a number of unidentifiable teasing traces of growing pleasures. The sky’s arc described the full spectrum of blue, from near-white to throbbing violet; lamps had been hung from branches and in the small building at the center of the rectangle, lamps so delicate they seemed less to push back the gathering darkness than to pull it in and play with it. The sounds of merriment spilled into the garden from above, voices and music, punctuated by the occasional clink of glass.

  Suddenly, the anticlimactic arrival made sense: Hurleigh House was intended to be entered by its front door, which could only be reached through this garden. Slightly longer, slightly deeper than the house, terraced on a gentle slope towards the river below, the entire garden—the shape of its paths, the arrangement of benches and pools, the very plantings—demanded that the visitor pause before entering the house, to reflect on the nature of Garden as Paradise.

  The big manor houses, the Blenheims and the Chatsworths, illustrated a family hammering its name across a vast stretch of landscape. Their approach was that of the gods: a sweep of the arm here, and acres of parkland rolled out like a carpet; an outstretched finger described a circle there, and behold, a lake was born, to reflect the house and provide the ladies with their afternoon stroll.

  Hurleigh showed an entirely different approach to the horticultural arts. Here was retreat and shelter, not the steam-roller of transformation. Within these ancient garden walls, poised between moving water and wooded hills, was a world in miniature: ordered, inward-looking, everything in its place—Nature improved upon, not dominated. It reminded Stuyvesant of tapestries he’d seen in France, spangled with flowers and long-skirted women, peopled with unlikely looking lap-dogs and birds.

  He would not have been astonished to find a unicorn, legs tucked demurely to its chest, studying him from beneath the wall’s long tangle of fragrant white roses.

  Reluctantly, he moved to join Grey, who was waiting on the steps, apparently unmoved by the magic. When Stuyvesant paused on the step below him for a final glance, he noticed that the first lights had come on across the valley, underscoring the oncoming darkness.

  Grey’s hand slipped into his breast pocket, and came out with a flat shiny object.

  The silver flask glittered in the lamp-light as Grey uncapped it and raised it to his lips. Two large swallows followed by the familiar reek of the Cornish liquor, and he capped the flask and turned to the house.

  Without a word, Stuyvesant followed.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  THE YOUNG FOOTMAN WHO HAD CARRIED their bags to their rooms that afternoon was posted at the door, his pull-over and corduroy trousers replaced by a magnificent uniform coat studded with gold buttons and draped with gold fringe, gold thread, and gold braid. It must have wei
ghed twenty pounds. Closer inspection showed the preposterous garment to be at least a hundred years old, but it didn’t take a man of Grey’s sensitivity to perceive the lad’s enormous pleasure in it—he seemed two inches taller than he had in mufti. The uniform was actually just the coat, since the trousers beneath it were modern and black rather than the knee-breeches that would have been more appropriate, but with the hem coming past his knees even in the front, the anachronism was hardly noticeable.

  Stuyvesant half expected to have the young man bawl their names into the hallway, maybe with a blast of trumpets for good measure.

  Instead, he just yanked the door open and tried hard to present a face of dignity.

  “You look splendid, Alex,” Grey told him.

  “It’s not too much?” he asked, sounding less like a manservant than one schoolboy to another.

  “Not in the least.”

  “We found it in one of the dressing-up trunks in the attic—the Hurleighs used to put on plays during the holidays, worthy of the West End, they were. Deedee was going through the trunks for the moth and said it was the same as in one of the paintings in the gallery. We thought the guests would enjoy it.”

  “It might have been cut to fit you,” Grey assured him.

  “Had a couple of moth-holes in it,” Alex confided. “But Mrs. Bleaks got out her needle and set them right in an instant.”

  “Busby Berkeley couldn’t have chosen better,” Stuyvesant said.

  Alex beamed, taking the remark as a compliment, and swept them inside with a wave suited to a courtier with a feathered hat. If the Duke had wanted to bury the feudal elements at Hurleigh House, he’d certainly succeeded with this footman, whose film-star panache overcame the costume’s Gilbert-and-Sullivan absurdity.

  Grey started up the stairs that rose up across from the entrance, then glanced upwards. Despite the pull of distant voices, he came back to Stuyvesant’s level. “Let’s just pop in and show you the Great Hall—one of the family can take you on a proper tour later, but you should see the Hall without distraction.”

  The Great Hall was a sizable cube that was clearly more of a room to impress than a room to sit around in. It was designed for a style of living that had died out so long ago Stuyvesant found it surprising that no Hurleigh had stuck his head in one day and thought, “Surely we can use this space for something better.” A bowling alley, say, or an indoor tennis court. Then again, a grand family might have need for a grand room, for the occasional hunt ball if nothing else. And what if the King and all his retainers dropped in for dinner?

  The two men moved into the center of the Hall. The walls and ceiling had changed little since the carpenters had taken down their scaffolding, centuries before: plaster had been repaired, not replaced with new-fangled designs. Tapestries covered one wall although, lacking light from the two massive chandeliers, the room was too dim for the faded designs to be more than vague shapes: a tree rising along one side, a group of heads down below. The fireplace could take logs the size of a man; the antlers decorating the wall above it might have belonged to some prehistoric forefather of a deer.

  “When was this built?” Stuyvesant’s voice was small in the quiet expanse.

  “Parts of it are Norman. But in its present form, family documents have it completed in 1455.”

  Fourteen fifty-five. For four hundred and seventy-one years, Stuyvesant reflected, Hurleighs have walked into this room and lifted their eyes to those beams. The Renaissance rose, London burned, Elizabeth reigned and died, thirteen Colonies fought their way free of the King. Pestilence raged, industry and an empire rose up. Sons went forth to fight and die in sun-baked lands, bombs rained on London, and all the while, Hurleighs walked into this room and looked up at those beams.

  Perhaps it wasn’t so astonishing, after all, that this room hadn’t fallen to another purpose.

  Stuyvesant shook his head. “Can’t you just hear the man saying to his builder, ‘My family’s going to be needing this room four centuries from now; let’s make sure they don’t have to fix anything because we cut a few corners here and there’?”

  “It is true. It breathes an unquestioning belief in its time and place.”

  They stood for another few seconds, and Grey asked, “You want a drink?”

  “God, yes,” Stuyvesant said, and followed Grey out of the past.

  The stairway was wide and dark and felt nearly as old as the Great Hall. In fact, Stuyvesant thought, the whole place felt ancient—clean and polished and comfortably lived in, yes, but the very air seemed heavy with centuries. Grey started briskly up the stairs, but Stuyvesant took his time, feeling the solid wood of the stairway flex infinitesimally under his weight like a living thing, its myriad joins loosed by tens of thousands of similar weights.

  The stairs formed a sort of tower, with a landing halfway up and walls on all four sides. A faded stained-glass window in the north wall depicted an elaborate family tree, its details all but invisible with the growing darkness outside. As he rounded the landing, Stuyvesant glanced up.

  On the wall facing the window hung a painting larger than most of the walls in Stuyvesant’s New York apartment, showing a family dressed in sixteenth-century ruffs and pearls. The stocky, fair-haired father wore the sword on his hip as a tool rather than a decoration; his slim, Spanish-looking wife—dark, faintly almondine eyes, black hair, and a nose that on a less dramatic face would have been unfortunate—was sitting with a cloud of lace in her lap; between husband and wife were two girls and a boy, all three with their mother’s dark coloring. The woman’s left arm was gathered around the lace-draped infant, but the artist, whose name Stuyvesant did not recognize but who might have been a student of Titian, had placed her other arm across the back of the chaise, arranging its curve to mirror that of her husband’s sword. At first glance, she seemed merely to be gesturing the children to her, but an attentive viewer could not miss the resemblance between woman and weapon: thin, taut, and razor-sharp. Another artist—one who permitted his artistic frustrations to come out on the canvas—might have depicted the Englishman as a buffoon. It wouldn’t have been difficult to do so, given a woman like that at his side, but this artist had shown only the pride and affection, and maybe even a trace of amusement, in both of his subjects’ stances and the set of their heads. A formidable pair.

  On the walls separating the family portrait from the window, two Reynolds portraits, a man and a woman, gazed at each other across the stairs. Had it not been for his dress, which was two hundred years more recent, the man might have been the Spanish woman’s brother—dark, slim, haughty, and with that unmistakable nose—a descendant, without a doubt, but one who showed no trace of his blond ancestor’s coloring. The man stood with one hand resting on a desk, whose arrangement of objects no doubt conveyed allegorical meaning to the initiated. The woman across the stairway from him was seated, her full hair a glossy brown, the ornate white folds at her bodice hinting at the breasts beneath. A baby, little more than a swirl of white with a face, lay in a rocking bed at her side.

  Bemused, Stuyvesant ordered his feet to continue upwards. When the stairs came to an end, passing beneath the Elizabethan couple, he found behind it not a room, but a hallway. The wall across from him was pierced by two doors, both open, between which stood an ancient, roughly carved wooden trunk with iron straps and a clasp so enormous it would require a padlock the size of his fist. The trunk looked as if it might have floated ashore after the sinking of the Armada, filled with maps and doubloons and letters of marque. On the wall above it were three small framed pieces of needlework mounted behind glass, faded to invisibility.

  The rest of the hallway was lined with six—no, seven glass cases containing porcelain figurines, most of them canine: King Charles spaniels, Dalmatians, Alsatians, and brace after brace of bull terriers.

  The Duke’s collection was indeed extensive.

  With an effort, Stuyvesant pulled himself away from porcelain Canidae and continued in the direction of the
voices.

  Behind both open doorways stretched a long gallery nearly the entire length of the house. Facing south, it was warm from the day’s sunlight, but the expanse of mullioned windows must have made the two wide fireplaces a necessity in winter. The floorboards clicked slightly as Stuyvesant moved inside, as they would have clicked with the daily passing of family and friends, the long-skirted women and the men with lace at their throats. Here was where generations of Hurleigh women paced up and down, up and down during the dreary English winters, listening to musicians, reading aloud, gazing at the garden and the river beyond, yearning after spring. Here was where generations of Hurleigh men had gathered, away from the walls that might conceal listening servants, to speak in low voices about the doings of kings and of kingmakers, plotting business and politics, reviewing rivalries and partnerships.

  It was nearly the undoing of Harris Stuyvesant. The walls were linenfold woodwork, lovingly polished by generations of servants; a worn, faded carpet ran the length of the room; he took three steps onto it before museum treasures on the walls brought him to a standstill. He stopped and frankly gaped at the scintillating Venice of Canaletto, and next to that, Gainsborough’s summer England. Another step brought him to Matthias Grünewald, then Claude Lorrain; on the opposite wall rested a Hogarth; down at the other end he spotted a Constable.

  He could no more have left that room unexplored than if he’d been chained to a wall. He made a slow, stunned circuit, all by himself with a collection that would have been the pride of a good-sized city in the States. When he eventually made it back to the Canaletto, he glanced down the room to his right to where the sound of conversation entered, and for the first time noticed Gallagher, posted at the door to what must be the solar. With reluctance, Stuyvesant made his way back up the length of the gallery, a series of Hurleighs looking down their long, Spanish noses at him from the walls. Near the end, he spotted the one wearing Alex’s coat; on him, it did not look in the least preposterous.