“Don’t tell my wife,” the Duke said eventually.
He couldn’t have been talking about the dogs. “About the cigarette?”
“No. The dog-fox opposite.”
Stuyvesant glanced over at the fallen tree; sure enough, the animal was still there, its attention riveted by something in the bark, halfway along the trunk.
“The creature moved in going on two years ago, half dead. Some damned bugger’d shot him, his seg went leptic. I came across him one morning about this hour, thought he was a goner, but he somehow pulled through. He’s a good sort, keeps the pests down. Never known him take a chicken. Prefers the taste of rabbit.”
Stuyvesant wondered what comment he should make on this, but couldn’t think of anything except, “I see.”
“You ever looked into a wild creature’s eyes?”
Stuyvesant’s eyes slid sideways at this unexpected question; the old man’s profile bore a resemblance to some kind of bird of prey himself—but Stuyvesant thought he was talking about mammalian wildlife, not avian. He decided to venture a small story. “I like to fish, sometimes,” he began. “Once a few years ago I was in Oregon, following a stream about five miles from the nearest road, and I looked up to see a cougar watching me from the bank, wondering what the hell I was doing.”
“Cougar. That’s a kind of catamount.” One of the dogs came up, sniffed at Stuyvesant’s leg, and settled at his master’s feet. The Duke’s hand went out absently to knead the animal’s ears.
“Like a panther, only brown. Yellow eyes with a world of speculation in them, and a voice like ripping silk. It’s a hell of a sensation, feeling yourself being considered for dinner.”
The Duke gave a bark of surprised laughter, and Stuyvesant took a draw from his cigarette to conceal the trace of self-satisfied smile he could feel on his mouth: Teamster or duke, it didn’t matter—he could get on the good side of anyone, anywhere.
“What kind of fishing?”
“Fly, of course. Is there any other kind?” Stuyvesant said in mock surprise.
The Duke grunted in approval. “River here’s no use at all. Too many cows. But I’ve a place in Scotland with a nice little stream for trout, fill your pan in no time at all.”
The “place in Scotland” was, Stuyvesant’s research had told him, a castle with twenty bedrooms, in one of which a very young Queen Elizabeth had slept. This in addition to Hurleigh House and the requisite house in London, plus assorted French vineyards, Italian olive groves, and an island in Greece.
“Sounds idyllic.”
“Had Baldwin up there in the autumn. You know Baldwin?”
“Not, er, personally.”
“Means well,” he reflected, a damning statement on either side of the Atlantic. “Might be more likable if he wasn’t so earnest.”
“I know the type,” seemed a safe comment.
“Any rate, if you’re heading to Scotland, let us know. Even if we’re not there, the servants are always happy to open a couple of rooms for a visitor.”
“Good Lord. I mean, that’s extraordinarily generous, sir.”
“Not at all. You should meet the Scottish trout, I imagine he’s a different creature from his American cousin.”
Stuyvesant thanked him, and they went back to watching the fox for a while. The creature hopped without effort onto the tree trunk, sniffed around the snarl of roots, then jumped down on the other side and began to dig.
“So you’re a friend of the boy’s? Bennett’s?” The Duke hadn’t come up here to talk about car repair or fly-fishing, then.
“I am, sir, yes.”
“Been knocked about some.”
“So I understand, sir.”
“He was sweet on my daughter. Oldest one…Laura,” he added, the pause suggesting that he’d needed to retrieve the name from some distant store of memory. “Had hopes. Knew his family—good blood, common or not. But in the end, it fell apart. If I was to guess, I’d say it wasn’t as entirely his say-so as they give out. Laura knows her own mind, like none other, and what’s more she has a way of making others want to go along. She’s a leader, not a follower—and the most stubborn girl I’ve ever met. Makes her mother look soft, and that’s saying something. Had two sons in uniform this last war, both good, solid officers, but Laura—if she’d been a boy, she’d have made one of those colonels you send in when the odds are impossible and all you’re hoping for is a tactical delay, only about half the time he’ll manage to bring off a miracle and snatch victory from a place no one was looking. And bring his men home to boot. My father was like that—Crimean was his war, you know. Or she’d have made one of those powerful nuns of the Middle Ages, abbess who looks the Pope in the face.”
“She certainly did an efficient job last night of keeping the various factions in order.”
“Promised her mother no fights would break out while we were there. Not altogether certain the agreement covers tonight. You may have an interesting time of it.”
“I’ll do my part to protect the furniture,” Stuyvesant said, unable to tell if the man was making a joke or not.
“You were in uniform.”
“Two years. I was on one of the first troop ships to reach France, didn’t leave until it was over.”
“Good man. You Americans, you skipped the tale for us.”
Tipped the scale? “It was already tipping.”
“Jerry and us, we’d been battering each other so long it was down to a question of who ran out of bread first. Your guns brought it back to fighting, and that took care of it in no time.”
“You may be right,” Stuyvesant said, then remembered that the man himself had been decorated in another long and brutal war, this one in South Africa: He was better qualified than some stray American sergeant when it came to military tactics. But before he could retract his dismissive remark, the Duke had moved on.
“Too bad you lot weren’t early enough to save the boy Bennett from that shell. Instead of a happy battlefield of a marriage, he walked off into the night and ended up in a hut with some chickens. A gentleman’s act, and what Laura half wanted, but it left my girl up to her neck in Nod goes what all kind of politics.” God knows what, Stuyvesant translated. He made an encouraging sound, hoping to evoke a few details, but all the Duke cared to add was, “Bad show, all of it.”
Stuyvesant wasn’t certain if the bad show was Grey’s knocking-about, his parting from Laura, or the God-knows-what-all of Laura’s politics, but before he could find out, the other man made a growling noise deep in his throat, then said, “And now she’s made a liaison with this upstart Union man from Leeds. You know him?”
“Bunsen? I haven’t met him yet, either.” What was it with imagining that he knew everyone? It wasn’t that small a country, surely?
“Not a bad brain,” the Duke said, an unwilling admission. “A little smooth for my taste, neither fish nor fowl when it comes to class, but that’s modern life. Pity about the grandfather.”
“You mean the stone mason?”
“What? No, don’t be ridiculous, nothing wrong with honest toil. No, I’m talking about the shoe salesman.” Bunsen’s paternal grandfather had made, then lost, a fortune shipping raw cowhides in one direction and expensive leather goods in the other. His knighthood had marked the height of his personal fortunes, and the beginning of a rapid slide downhill.
“I don’t understand. What’s wrong with, er, shoes?”
The Duke glanced at him. “Are all Americans slow, or is it just you? There’s nothing wrong with shoes, I wear them all the time, myself. But the grandfather was a cheat at the horses. Sure sign of a through-and-through bounder.”
Stuyvesant was tempted to ask if Bunsen owned horses, but clearly that was not the point. “Well, sir, I’d imagine your daughter will keep him in line.”
“By God, you got that right,” he declared. Stuyvesant felt exonerated from the charge of slowness.
The old man crushed his cigarette out against the rock he was sitting on, d
ropped the stub into a pocket, and turned to fix Stuyvesant with the beam of those dark Spanish eyes.
“You’re his friend. The boy Bennett’s.”
“I…yes.”
“My girl was badly hurt last time. Didn’t show it, but it changed her. She gives her all, to a cause or to a man. Nothing halfway. Don’t let him hurt her again.”
And with that command, it appeared that the audience was at an end. The Duke stood up with the ease of a man half his age, and settled his hat. “Breakfast is sure to be ready. Good of you not to disturb the servants before they’d had their own.”
Then he walked away. The dogs bounded after him as he strode down the path, his stride sure and even. Stuyvesant, who had risen automatically when the Duke stood, settled back on the rock and watched the man’s retreat.
So, that was what a Duke looked like. Absolutely sure of his footing, on a hillside or in a conversation.
Or anyway, that was how it appeared. Stuyvesant had seen no indication that this scion of an illustrious name was aware of how very fragile the Hurleigh future was, with two adult sons and no grandchild in sight. And even the daughters: two of them deeply immersed in every meaningless thing modern life had to offer, while the third was out to undermine the Hurleigh way of life.
Somehow, he did not think that the Duke, for all his surface dottiness, was anything but rock-hard in his fundamental beliefs, which meant that he must be very worried indeed. And if, as Grey had said, the Duke succumbed to verbal gymnastics when in the grip of strong emotion, there had been three obstacles sufficient to trip the Duke’s tongue: the shooting of a fox, the American relief of the forces in 1918, and his daughter’s politics.
On the heels of this thought came another: Looking past the ducal waffling, when it came to getting on the good side of someone, Harris Stuyvesant had just been handled by a real expert.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
BENNETT GREY, TOO, WOKE EARLY, with the soft closing of Stuyvesant’s door and the subtle shift of the old building under the big man’s weight. Was the American always up at this time of day, or was something preying on his mind? He’d certainly been disturbed the night before. Grey had to wonder if something other than the revelation of his ties to Laura had been at issue. Maybe it was the residual effect of Sarah, whose appearance had so astonished the man—Grey had felt the American’s pulse shoot up from ten feet away: redheads, my foot. Grey couldn’t quite tell now, by the mere feel of Stuyvesant’s movements, if he was still angry. He thought about getting up to look out of the window—he’d know in a moment, by the pitch of the American’s head and how he held his shoulders.
But Grey stayed where he was.
Pamela’s two antiques-shop friends were snoring on the other side of the hallway. They had begun the night in separate rooms, but not long after they’d all retired, the younger one, Dubuque, had come out of his room and tip-toed along to Stuyvesant’s door, only to be met by a rebuff of no uncertain terms. He had then retreated to his friend across the hall, who (Grey had been relieved to hear) had been too drunk or too blasé to do more than exchange a few words before falling back to sleep. Dubuque had begun to snore a few minutes later, leaving the barn to subside into its rest.
Sarah, in the room below, spoke a few dreaming words, turned over, and went quiet again. He lay, listening to the sounds of Hurleigh over the eternal whine in his left ear: Birds—seven, eight, nine of them within the confines of the garden—woke to song; the rooster down the valley produced a tentative crow; a young dog-fox two miles away yapped restlessly; the pack of hounds in the Hurleigh kennel across the stream grumbled from time to time. He could smell the family of mice that lived in the barn’s attic, although they had fallen still a while earlier. The cold air trickling through the small gap at the bottom of the window had the texture of a brief rainfall by evening. The odor of lavender had begun to fade from the bed-clothes and he could feel the start of a worn place in the linen under his left heel; in another few washes, the laundry-woman would discover a hole. Another set of footsteps trod softly through the garden, feet that knew the path intimately—an older man, a faint odor of cigars: the Duke. A faint breeze scratched a leaf across Sarah’s window downstairs, half an inch then it stopped. Someone in the main house, a hundred yards away and through several thick walls, dropped a pan; the last man to sleep in this bed had worn a flowery hair-cream, and water ran through distant pipes and the rich tang of coffee wafted in under the window followed by the warm tendrils of baking bread and in a minute he would catch Laura’s scent riding the dawn, taste a scrap of air she’d breathed out, across in the house. I wish…
Grey jerked up onto one elbow and reached for the flask on his bedside table. The sound it made as it sloshed told him precisely how much was inside, and the sound of metal against metal as he unscrewed the top grated on his feverish nerves. But that was exactly what he needed, one sensation that could overcome all the others. He listened with all his might to the symphony the flask top made: a scraping noise, going smooth as worn metal turned against worn metal; a faint hesitation was followed by an infinitesimal ting as the threads hit the tiny dent where he’d dropped it two weeks before; smooth again, loose and looser, and then a microscopic sigh as the top came free.
He placed the flask to his mouth (the whistle tasted of brass) tasting the worn silvering of the edge. The liquid within hit his teeth like a miniature wave beating the shore, washing in over his tongue, filling his sinus cavity, giving him its burst of tastes—clear and identifiable, although he’d told Stuyvesant he didn’t know: Potatoes, yes, but his neighbor had then added a handful of dried cherries and some apples (which had been starting to spoil), and he’d cooked the mixture in a copper pot. The cool liquid coated Grey’s mouth and throat, seared his esophagus, and punched his stomach with its force. He took another, deeper swallow of the poisonous stuff, then lay back on his pillow.
The intense concentration broke his mind’s mad gnawing; the alcohol blunted the sensations, and on an empty stomach, with last night’s drink still running through his veins, it didn’t take long before the sounds and smells that picked and squabbled incessantly at his attention took a small step back. Slowly, the filtering mechanism of his mind went back into place, and he could begin to feel lawn take shape around him instead of a million distinct and clear-edged, clamoring blades of grass.
Once upon a time, he had felt safe here at Hurleigh. He had spent weeks of happiness, protected and in the company of friends. Now, he was all too aware that he was not in the safety of Cornwall, where he could see people coming. Here in the green heart of England the trees pressed in, the hills might hide a thousand men, and birdsong rose to conceal a stealthy approach. Here, the soft edges of easy agriculture and the smooth open vowels of the inhabitants threatened to weaken his defenses, make him forget his wariness.
And why shouldn’t he? The War was over, the enemy driven back to his own fields to lick his wounds.
Don’t believe it for a moment, Bennett told himself. You thought the convalescent hospital would be a retreat, until the Major found you and beguiled you away with encouraging words, with flattery and usefulness and before you knew it, you were standing beside him helping him inflict pain, looking on in interest while his victims gasped out their shame and terror.
Strangely enough, although he’d spent nineteen months with the Major’s so-called Truth Project, he still was not absolutely certain what its purpose was. Probably he hadn’t wanted to know—after all, when he had arrived at the clinic from his convalescent hospital, in August 1919, his legs could hold him and his mind could follow conversations, but it was all he could do to bear human company for more than a few minutes without curling into a shuddering heap.
It was Laura who had saved him, Laura and her infinite patience and her motorcar that carried him off to the unpeopled countryside. Laura with her caresses and her eager response that restored to him a sense of manhood, a rock on which he could cling when the world trembled arou
nd him. With Laura, with the clinic’s doctors and physical therapists, by the spring he felt in himself the semblance of a human being.
It had been months before the Major entered his life. He was aware of the man, as a presence in the background who made him uncomfortable but wasn’t around too much. Grey knew he had something to do with bringing him to the clinic, knew as well that the clinic was not simply another sanitarium, but again, he was too caught up in the work of building himself anew to think about it.
In the spring of 1920, however, the Major was there more and more often. Grey would be with the masseuse and the Major would stop in for a brief chat, then go, leaving Grey with the sensation of spiders creeping over his skin. Grey would be taking a meal in the dining room and become aware that uneasiness had settled in beside him; when he glanced at the doorway there would be the Major, casually studying the room at large. The Major would catch Grey’s eye and nod, but when the doorway went empty, Grey’s appetite would be gone and his bones would be tingling, as if he’d narrowly escaped stepping onto a gaping hole in a stairway.
Then in September, one of the clinic doctors asked Grey to observe a session with another patient, to give his impressions of the man’s truthfulness. It was in the interest of therapy, he said, because there was some confusion as to the man’s history, and they had noticed that Captain Grey could somehow put his finger on the truth. If the soldier was lying, that was one thing, but if he was actually delusional…to help the man…if Captain Grey was willing…? And, if Grey didn’t mind, they’d just attach a couple of wires to the man’s hands, to read his responses…
Afterwards, the doctor had thanked him profusely, saying what a difference it had made in the patient’s therapeutic process, to know for certain where the truth lay.
It started there. And God knew, it was a blessing to be of some small use to the world, since his body was nearly whole again but his nerves remained incapable of everyday social relations.
Touchstone Page 23
