Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  “Oh good.”

  Stuyvesant felt like shouting aloud. He’d planned a day of vamping the two girls, feeling more and more like a heel with every passing hour, but trading that for a chance at The Bastard himself, well, that was an unexpected bonus.

  “Mr. Stuyvesant, I trust you slept well?”

  “Thank you, Lady Laura, the room—”

  “Please, I prefer not to use the title.”

  “Okay, Miss Hurleigh. Yes, the room’s very comfortable, but boy oh boy, it’s quiet out here. I kept waking up and thinking I’d gone deaf.”

  “You should have asked Gallagher to stand outside and bang a few pans for you.”

  “If I have the same problem tonight, I’ll be sure to ring for him.”

  “Well, you needn’t have risen so early. You’d find the breakfast things out until noon.”

  “Oh, I’ve been up for hours. In fact, I walked up to the Peak, I think you call it, and had a nice chat with your father.”

  “Yes, the Old Man starts his day before the roosters.” Her voice put capitals on the title, as if at a family joke. “Perverse of him, I’ve always thought. What did you and—ah, Bennett. Good morning.”

  The figure walking towards them looked no more rested than he had twenty-four hours before, following a night’s train trip. Still, he gave Laura Hurleigh an easy smile and tweaked his sister’s hair as he went past her, so maybe he just needed coffee.

  Stuyvesant had to wonder at the timing of his entrance, but decided that if the former lovers had spent the night renewing their acquaintance, the innocence of their salutations was an act worthy of Broadway. Besides, Laura’s smooth skin was rosy with nothing more than the morning warmth, and her lips showed no sign of passion’s bruising, while the powerful out-of-doors air that Grey carried into the room was not the result of a mere two minutes in the garden.

  Stuyvesant folded his suspicions back in their box and set about winning Laura Hurleigh’s approval.

  “I was just telling the ladies that I started the day with a nice chat with the Duke, up on the Peak.”

  “Let me guess: Romans and military history.”

  “Right on the mark. But look, I should ask,” he said, turning to Laura. “Last night I offered to do something about the motor on the Morris. He seemed to think it a good idea, but maybe I should ask you, was that just some form of English manners too subtle for me?”

  “Oh heavens, you don’t want to spend the day bent over a dirty motor! Wouldn’t you prefer a nice ride, or tennis? No doubt there’ll be boats on the stretch as well, nothing like the Isis but it has its own charm.”

  “It won’t be an all-day job, nothing like. And I enjoy working on engines, if no one objects.”

  “I imagine my father would be just tickled pink if you were to beat the thing into submission.”

  “Oh, not beat it. I am of the gentling school when it comes to coaxing proper behavior out of engines.”

  “I thought Bennett said you sold the things, not fixed them?”

  “Nowadays I do. Mr. Ford sent me over here to see if my English colleagues could use any help in their sales techniques, but before I moved into sales, I was a mechanic. Learning the business from the ground up, as it were.”

  “Industry in general might be less wicked if everyone followed the same path to the board room,” she said.

  “Oh Lord,” Grey groaned, and got to his feet. “Politics before breakfast? I need fortification before I can face that.”

  They were, indeed, getting right into the heart of the matter. Well, thought Stuyvesant; so be it. “Yes, you can’t help thinking this Strike would be a non-starter if some of the owners had ever been down their own mines.”

  “Inherited wealth goes hand in hand with inequity,” said the Duke’s daughter, “just as lack of respect leads to lack of self respect.”

  The American sat back, frowning at his cup as he took careful aim. “Interesting opinion, from someone born in a house like this.”

  Sarah stirred, but Laura waved away any would-be defense. “It is because I was born in this house that I can see both sides so clearly, Mr. Stuyvesant. That Hurleigh House was built upon centuries of robbery makes its walls no less graceful, its garden no less lovely. However, this is a new age we live in. I believe it is time to return the wealth from the few to the many.”

  “I don’t know that I’ll talk about the writings of Mr. Marx to your father, though.”

  “You’ve read Karl Marx?”

  “Sure. I don’t fully agree with him, but he has some ideas worth bringing up. Why do you think this country’s fling with Socialism a couple years back didn’t work? I’d have thought it would catch on like a house afire.”

  “That’s rather like saying you’d have expected us to have a lovely picnic out in the fields, while guns are pounding on either side. The half-hearted, imitation Socialism of the Labour Party did not succeed simply because there was nothing to differentiate it from the capitalist policies all around. If one accepts that all government is based on enslaving the worker, then one realizes that no government can be otherwise—democratic, Socialist, monarchical, or what have you. Trying to change the nature of government by replacing one party with another is little more than using rouge to enliven a corpse.”

  He blinked at the image. “So what would you do?”

  “I, Mr. Stuyvesant? Fortunately the decision isn’t up to me, although I will say that if laws were passed by the miners, farmers, and housewives who have to live under them, more sensible decisions might be reached.”

  “And where would that leave owners of houses like this one? Would your parents be given rooms over the kitchen and families of ten brought in to fill the rest?”

  “Now you’re teasing me, Mr. Stuyvesant,” she scolded. “But yes, my family is like anyone else’s. Of some members and their actions, I am inordinately proud. Other portions of my family tree fill me with shame. But no matter our history, we have outlived our function, and all that remains are the chains that bind us as well as our working-class brothers. A house like this could be a resource for the nation.”

  “So you wouldn’t follow the example of the Russians and the French and just execute the upper classes?”

  But with that, he’d gone too far. She sat back, looking down her aristocratic nose at him in a manner worthy of her mother. “Mr. Stuyvesant, the reason the working class turns on their oppressors with violence is that violence has been done to them—literally, but also figuratively, in the violence done to their self worth. I believe there is hope in this country for non-violent change. No birth is achieved without pain, but with care, bloodshed is unnecessary.”

  Grey had returned with a laden plate and paid no attention to their talk. Instead, he addressed himself to a glistening sausage, its crisp brown skin oozing juice. He eased his fork into it, then sliced it open with a knife, head bent over the plate. A rich aroma of spices and fatty pork rose up. Grey’s nostrils flared and his eyes half shut as he lifted the sausage round to his mouth—and by this time, the other three were staring at him.

  He closed his lips around the morsel, withdrew the fork, chewed twice, and moaned with pleasure.

  Sarah burst out in laughter, but Laura Hurleigh flushed scarlet. Stuyvesant had to agree, the overt sensuality was a little unnerving—he had to wonder if Grey had done it deliberately, to break up the discussion.

  “For heaven’s sake, Bennett,” Sarah scolded. “Nanny would smack you with her ruler for making a noise like that at the table.”

  “I’ve dreamt of Mrs. Bleaks’ sausages every morning for the past twelve years. You Philistines are not going to spoil my pleasure.”

  “Nor am I going to share it. I have a letter to write.”

  Stuyvesant rose along with her. “And I’m off to tinker with an engine. I’ll see you later, Bennett. Miss Hurleigh, Sarah.” He would rather have stayed and explored Laura Hurleigh’s political leanings, but long experience with undercover work had taught him
the benefits of playing hard to get—or at least appearing marginally uninterested. If Laura Hurleigh was half as passionate about the matter as he thought, she would not let it rest.

  As they left the breakfast room, Sarah Grey asked, “Shall I show you where the motors are kept?”

  “One of the servants can show me,” he protested, but she declared that she wanted a breath of air before writing her letter, and he allowed himself to be talked into it.

  “Just give me two minutes,” she said. “I’ll meet you in the garden.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  STUYVESANT PACED ALONG THE PATHS, too restless to sit down, too tired to relax. He marched twice the length of the garden without seeing so much as a flower before he noticed what he was doing and took himself in hand: Sit down, have a smoke, and enjoy the place by daylight, he ordered himself. You won’t get to Bunsen any faster by champing at the bit.

  He spotted a stone bench tucked beneath the white rose along the wall, and sat there. From that angle, he noticed that the house, its garden, and the stream below seemed to have an almost mathematical relationship, as if it had been laid out according to some Golden Mean: x to y; house to wall; wall to stream; height of house to height of wall and height of ridge behind. The result might have been cold and inhuman but for the warm color of the stones used, the naturalness of the setting, and the enormous rambling rose behind him, its green expanse revealing glimpses of a central trunk as thick as Stuyvesant’s forearm.

  Before half the cigarette was gone, Sarah came out of the house. He rose, but seeing her hand go up, he stayed where he was, enjoying the sight of her trotting down the steps and along the paths towards him.

  She tipped her head back and fixed him with those stained-glass eyes. “Tell me something, Mr. Stuyvesant.”

  “I thought you agreed to call me Harris.”

  “Harris, do you have such a thing as a nice manly handkerchief, that you could use to clear a section of that bench for me?”

  Solemnly, he took out his handkerchief and brushed away a few petals and leaves. The cloth came up pristine, testifying to the cleanliness of the stone itself, so he did not feel it necessary to spread out his coat to protect her dress.

  She thanked him and sat down. He offered her a cigarette. She accepted, thanked him again, and lifted her face to the sun, eyes closed.

  After a minute, he made himself look away from her throat and cast around for a conversational topic. “The garden looks as old as the house,” he noted.

  “This house, perhaps, although they say there’s been some kind of dwelling here for two thousand years. The garden itself was taken in hand by a friend of the Duchess’s named Jekyll, a rather famous landscape designer. Do you like gardens, Mr.—Harris?”

  “Never had one. Although my mother had a wisteria trained over the front door of one of the houses we lived in. Used to have one great load of purple blossoms every year in the spring, then drop them all and never do anything the rest of the year. I remember asking her once why she didn’t plant something that bloomed for longer, and she said that the whole point of it was the brevity of the beauty, that it made you think about it all year.”

  “Your mother sounds like a wise woman.”

  “She was a sickly woman, which meant she had a lot of time to sit and think. She died when I was eight.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Long time ago.”

  “Does the brevity of her life mean that you think about her all year?”

  He looked down at her in surprise. “I never thought of it that way. I suppose you could say it does.”

  “My own mother is alive and going strong, and when I’m not at home, I doubt she comes to mind more than once in a week. Come, Mr. Stuyvesant, I shall show you the motorcar stables.”

  They left the garden by a gate hidden beneath the rose, strolling down the road in the spring sunlight. At the far side of the circle, with the small orchard to their left, the road’s downhill angle grew suddenly steeper. At the beginning of the slope, Sarah turned to admire Hurleigh House; at this spot, one could just glimpse the Peak rising up behind the roof-line.

  “Bennett says he used to come to Hurleigh for the summer holidays,” Stuyvesant said.

  “He did, lucky brat. I was so jealous—Mummy would bring us, and then take me away while he could stay on. Oh, I used to have such tantrums!”

  “Paradise withheld. So you’ve known Lady—Miss Hurleigh—since you were small?”

  “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?” Sarah took it for granted that any male would instantly fall under Laura Hurleigh’s spell.

  “She’s got a lot of…charisma, I guess you’d call it.”

  “And she’s ever so smart, considering that she never had any formal schooling. Less than me, even, and I had little enough. She says she used to go around and suck the brains of the boys’ tutors.”

  “Your lack of schooling doesn’t seem to have slowed you down much—those clinics have to be a job to run, to say nothing of your political work with Richard Bunsen.”

  At the name, her face relaxed into pleasure. “I’m glad you’re going to meet Richard. Do you know about him?”

  Besides the violence that follows him across an ocean and the man’s compelling presence in a crowded hall? “No,” he lied.

  “He’s quite extraordinary. One grandfather was knighted, the other was a stone mason, killed in an accident when Richard was ten. His mother ran a boys’ school in the village where she’d been born. He was wounded twice in the War, and while he was convalescing, he began to read about the inequity of the capitalist system. After the War, he decided to work for the benefit of the common man.”

  “How did you and Miss Hurleigh come in touch with him?”

  Sarah tucked her arm loosely into his and they ambled down the drive. “I knew him first. One of my responsibilities in Women’s Help is to set up educational programs for the mothers through their children’s primary schools. Richard happened to be speaking at one of my schools when I was there, and he was so eloquent, so passionate, he struck me as someone Laura simply had to meet. For her work, you understand—I didn’t anticipate a more personal connection. But Laura fell in love with his ideas, and then…well, she’s more or less allied her cause to his.”

  “I look forward to meeting this paragon.”

  “Try not to be too disappointed if he doesn’t make it—he has so much to do with this Strike coming up. And it sounds terrible, but the Strike could be a real opportunity for Richard to make his name known. He has political ambitions, but for a man without money, it is necessary to spend huge amounts of time making the right connections. Still, they say that by the next general election, he’ll be a certainty.”

  “I can imagine he’d be too busy with Strike preparations to drop into a house in Gloucestershire for a drink.”

  “If it were anyone but Laura, he wouldn’t, but he has tremendous respect for her parents, and will certainly come if he can get free. But in any event, he’s not that involved with the everyday preparations for the Strike.”

  “Doesn’t sound like anyone is.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, it occurred to me this morning that the papers are full of actions the government’s taking, calling for volunteers to ensure that the lights don’t go out and the food gets delivered and there are plenty of constables to keep troublemakers in line—”

  “The O.M.S.,” she said with distaste.

  “That’s the Maintenance of Supplies thing? Yeah, I heard of that, sounds like vigilantism to me. But it made me think that I haven’t heard a thing about what the Unions are doing. They seem to be awfully quiet, considering the Strike’s only two weeks away.”

  “I don’t know about your American newspapers, Mr. Stuyvesant, but ours tend to print very little in support of the workers.”

  “So you think the Unions are planning, it’s just not being talked about?” This was a question he’d chewed over ever since Carstairs had brought
it up during their dinner on the train: If the Unions weren’t summoning their forces, why the hell not? Back home, he was used to all-out brawls—one of the I.W.W.’s tricks was to bus in so many demonstrators the local jails were overwhelmed—but he’d caught not a scent of any similar response here, and it had struck him as odd. Either the Unions were deluded into thinking the Strike would run itself, or its plans were remarkably hush-hush.

  Or, as Carstairs feared, they had some clandestine, no-fail card up their sleeves, to be played at the last minute.

  “You know,” she replied after a moment, “I’m actually a very low person in the organization. If it weren’t for my long-time friendship with Laura, I’d be typing and fetching cups of tea. So although it looks as if I’m in the center of things, there’s actually an awful lot that I’m not brought into.

  “I do know that the Strike is going to make an impact on society far beyond winning the miners their demands. With all the workers in all the Unions linking arms to say, ‘This is what we want, and now is when we want it,’ the leisure classes won’t have a choice. I mean to say, I love the Duke and Duchess, but people like them just can’t see that they’re at the top of a pyramid that’s only held together because everyone underneath them agrees that it needs to be that way. Once the working people lift up their heads and refuse to carry them, the entire structure will crumble.”

  The idea of this pretty blonde thing linking arms against the zealous truncheons of amateur constables made him wince, but despite her self deprecation, she was clearly a person of more substance, and commitment, than her appearance would indicate. He took care only to nod.

  “As Richard says, once equity takes place, once the barriers are down, society’s unnecessary structures will just atrophy and die. The royal palaces will become museums to hold the beauty of art and craftsmanship, the churches will become places where the human spirit is worshipped, not the commands of a distant god.”

  “That’s quite a vision.”

  “Isn’t it just? Oh, Mr. Stuyvesant, what a time you chose to visit. These are exciting days.”