Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  The growl became words: “—want to turn the country over to the Bolshies, we’ll deal with your types, one crack of the whip’ll send your working-class mutts back to their holes. Who do you think you are, you Red pansy, coming here?”

  The drunken boy had roused and was lurching forward with the pool cue held aloft.

  Stuyvesant raised himself up to his full six foot two and planted his feet. The boy staggered to a halt, confused by the sudden apparition of a black and white wall. His squinting eyes traveled up the waistcoat studs until they located Stuyvesant’s face.

  Bunsen, Laura, and other voices were coming from somewhere, but Stuyvesant paid them no mind. He reached for the pool cue, but either he was more drunk than he’d thought or the boy less, because the cue jerked just out of his reach.

  “Come on, kid,” Stuyvesant said. “I think it’s about time you called it a night.”

  But the kid had focused on his face, and scowled. “You’re that other one. The working stiff. Well, some of us are stiff where it matters.”

  “I say,” Bunsen protested, and the older women in the room, those who understood the reference, tittered in embarrassment.

  “Now, that really is enough,” Stuyvesant said sharply. He turned to put his glass on the arm of the sofa, and although he heard the sharp cries from the onlookers, he didn’t want to spill the drink on the pretty carpet, and how much trouble could this drunken prig be, anyway?

  But he had not figured in the effects of long years of sport in the raising of the upper class British male, and grunted at the crack of the cue across his shoulders—had he been six inches shorter he’d have been knocked cold. The drink flew in the air and drenched Constance Hurleigh, who squealed in protest; Stuyvesant was aware that others were closing in but he kept his eye on the cue. It rose and spun again through the air back-handed—although this time it seemed to be aimed to one side of Stuyvesant.

  He flung out an arm to seize it, and realized only when the stick had slapped hard into his stinging palm that the boy’s target had been not him, but Richard Bunsen, who had moved forward to help.

  Stuyvesant jerked the stick from the boy’s hand and jabbed him in his rumpled chest, sending him backwards into the arms of a friend—except that the friend seemed more interested in joining the fray than stopping it. “Hey,” Stuyvesant shouted loudly, at the same instant bringing the cue down smartly across the new man’s wrist. With a yelp, the newcomer sprang back, cradling his injured hand, but the first one just ducked down his head and came on as if in a rugby scrum.

  Stuyvesant lowered the butt end of the cue, aiming it at the kid’s belly, and allowed the boy to run full into it.

  That got his attention. He staggered back again (why the hell didn’t he just fall down?) with his hands over his belly. Stuyvesant dropped the cue, snapped his fingers at the nearest person and ordered, “Hand me that waste-basket,” while keeping an eye on the kid. Who must have been numb with drink because he dropped his hands and hunched for yet another run at his enemies.

  Stuyvesant felt the leather object hit his fingers. He switched it into his left hand, stepped forward, and met the kid’s charge with a right to the gut.

  That, finally, stopped him cold. The kid bent over, coughed, and vomited a great quantity of liquid into the waste-basket. Stuyvesant waited until he was finished, then grabbed the back of his collar and propelled him out of the room into the long gallery.

  “You, and you,” he snapped in passing. “Take this idiot out and put him to sleep in the stables. And if he vomits over the cars, I’ll make you clean it yourselves in the morning. Now, scram!”

  The boy’s friends looked at him, looked at their vanquished compatriot, then wisely chose discretion.

  Stuyvesant gave them the reeking waste-basket to take with them.

  He came back in the room sucking a knuckle—the same one he’d broken open on the miner in London eight days ago—to find that for the first time that night, the party’s entire attention was on someone other than Richard Bunsen—whose skull, Stuyvesant realized belatedly, he had saved by grabbing the stick. If he’d moved just a trifle more slowly, the kid’s blow might have scrambled Bunsen’s brains for him.

  “Neatly done,” Bunsen said, sounding frankly admiring.

  “What, slugging it out like a couple of twelve-year-olds?”

  “I meant the trick with the waste-basket.”

  “Oh, that. Comes from a lifetime hanging around the wrong kinds of bars.”

  “You’re fast, for a big man.”

  “You’re not bad, yourself,” Stuyvesant replied.

  Bunsen lifted an eyebrow and shot Stuyvesant a look of pure camaraderie. “Not bad, for a ‘Red pansy’?”

  And then he laughed. Bunsen’s laugh was a full-bodied expression of masculine delight, utterly unforced and instantly contagious. In an flash, the room’s tension was swept up in a paroxysm of humor.

  Reluctantly, honestly, Stuyvesant had to join in.

  But when the laughter ended, when the room had gathered itself to refill its glasses and take surreptitious glances at the clock, he stifled a sigh. Yeah, this really would have been a whole lot easier if he’d neither liked nor respected the man. If he could have kept calling him The Bastard.

  Laura and her brother Daniel moved towards the billiards table, playing a desultory game. The gramophone shut down next door, the musicians packed up, the last of the latecomers drifted away into the night. Bunsen seemed content to talk about lesser matters such as rain and the oddities of Prohibition in America, and Stuyvesant did his part, trying to ease the sharp pang of the bruise across his shoulders.

  The billiards game came to a close, with Daniel winning by a thin margin, and the two eldest Hurleigh children returned their cues to the rack and wandered over to the fire. Laura took a seat on the long settee between Sarah and Bunsen, draping her slender arms along the back of it in a position eerily similar to that of her ancestress in the painting. One finger stretched out to brush Bunsen’s collar, then returned to the settee back; Stuyvesant was grateful that Grey hadn’t been forced to witness the gesture.

  “Are you sure you have to go back to Town tonight, Richard?” she said, clearly expecting the answer to be Yes.

  “Actually,” he said, “I think I’ll stay the night, after all. Since there’s a room ready for me in any case.”

  Her face lit up, as much with surprise as pleasure. “Oh, that’s lovely, Richard. I don’t—we don’t see enough of you these days. I’ll tell Gallagher you’re staying.”

  Stuyvesant tossed back the final drops in his glass to hide his own triumph. Gotcha! he thought.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  HARRIS STUYVESANT WATCHED the self-satisfied man in the mirror brush his teeth. He stripped to his shorts, then dressed again in dark wool trousers, black pull-over sweater, and thick stockings. He drew back the bed-clothes and climbed into the feather bed, lying on the crisp linen with his hands tucked behind his head, staring at the dark ceiling. He thought about Sarah and her brother, and about the play of emotions beneath the well-controlled skin of Richard Bunsen’s face, and about the age of the house and the generations of men who had influenced the life of the nation from this place, and about what that age and that influence might mean to Richard Bunsen. Then he thought about how Sarah’s warm hair had smelled like honey when he danced with her in his arms, how he’d wanted to whirl her right out the door into the garden and put his mouth on hers and then let it wander down to taste those freckles at the base of her throat, Sarah Grey in a moonlit garden.

  He dragged himself upright, wincing: It was a beautiful dream and he craved sleep to his very bones, but his day was not over yet, not by a long shot.

  He moved to the hard chair where discomfort and cold would keep him awake. For an hour, he sat in the dark and listened to the barn. At first, it shifted beneath the steps of the guests upstairs and down, and although he could not hear voices, he felt that someone was speaking, from time to t
ime. After a while, the last closing door vibrated through the building. The stones and wood grew still.

  While Harris Stuyvesant stood watching his self-satisfied reflection in the glass, downstairs from him and at the other end of the building, Sarah Grey sat watching the puzzled young woman in her looking-glass. She was brushing her hair, giving it her customary nightly hundred strokes, while her mind dwelt on her drunken brother in the room overhead.

  She truly couldn’t see why Bennett had ventured out of his self-imposed exile. And she had to say, as an experiment in normal life it didn’t look to be wildly successful. The last few times she had been to see him, he had been happy, closer to his old self than she could have hoped. Not, however, this evening.

  Growing up, Bennett had been a good brother, affectionate and willing to listen. He still was—apolitical himself but happy to let her give voice to her thoughts, hopes, and frustrations. There’d been a night on one of her trips to Cornwall, two or three summers before. She’d gone on a—what else?—whim, following a bad disappointment with a local official who had encouraged her to think he supported a project, kept her dangling for months, and finally told her it was impossible. She blew up in his face and called him something childish like “repulsive little corpuscle,” which, of course, was terribly foolish and only made everything worse—even as she was saying it she knew she was creating an enormous mess for Laura to clean up.

  And when she got home to her dull little flat that afternoon, she’d looked at the contents of her cupboards and simply couldn’t face any of it. She’d thrown some clothes in a bag—and then rung Laura to say she was leaving town and would Laura cover her appointments, the only sensible thing she did all day. She didn’t even send Bennett a telegram to warn him that she was coming. Of course, one thing about having a hermit for a brother, one knew he’d be home.

  “‘Too Red,’” she’d stormed at Bennett that night. “I ask you, one small dental clinic to treat the rotting teeth of poor children, deemed a part of the Bolshevik takeover because it would be run by volunteers! Bennett, what is this country coming to? We can’t treat the poor that way, it’s unnecessary and utterly cruel.”

  As she’d paced up and down his small sitting room, Bennett smoked his pipe and watched her, saying nothing much. Finally she’d dropped into a chair and picked up the glass of good single-malt he’d poured for her twenty minutes before.

  “Feel better?” he asked.

  “Oh, my dear brother, I so wish you didn’t live at the far end of an entire day’s journey.”

  “You could move to Penzance. There are poor people there in need of help.”

  “I need to be in London. I need to feel useful.”

  “I, on the other hand, am tired unto death of being useful.”

  He sounded it, too, exhausted with life itself, and she blurted out the question that had been so long on her tongue. “Bennett, what happened to you? I don’t mean in France, but afterwards, that…mental place where you lived after the hospital. Mother said it would help you, but it just made your heebie-jeebies worse, didn’t it? Oh, I’m sorry, you don’t like to talk about it, but I don’t even know what was wrong with you!”

  She didn’t think he would answer, but after a while he said, “I lost myself, Sal. After I was blown up, I became someone else. And in the clinic, they tried to put me back together again, in a fashion that might be useful, to myself and to them. But they were killing me. So I left, and wandered around until I came to a place where I could listen to nothing. The clinic was like…Remember old Mackelby, my maths tutor?”

  “Oh, crumbs, I was so grateful when you left home and I didn’t have to have him any more! He gave me a permanent phobia about maths—I break into a sweat whenever anyone says the word accounts.”

  “Exactly: He’d give one a problem, and then before the poor pupil could even read through it, there would be Mackelby growling away at his shoulder, harassing him and building up to shouts—‘Come, boy, let’s see some action from that pencil, the problem isn’t going to solve itself, do we have to begin again with the times-twos?’ And so on, until the stick came out and he’d start in on one’s knuckles. I suppose the idea was to help one perform under pressure, and it did that. In fact, I used to find myself doing trigonometry in my head in the trenches, waiting for the signal to go over the top. But later, I lost the ability to narrow my focus and think only about the problem at hand. In the clinic, I felt as if there were ten Mackelbys standing at my shoulder shouting all day, every day.”

  “And that was supposed to help you heal?” she exclaimed. “You must’ve been driven mad!”

  “Precisely.” She remembered how he’d said that word: Precisely. Dry and grim, a signpost to the end of the world. She never had learned just what they did to him there. But after that conversation, she no longer complained at his quirky choice of domicile.

  She was sorry he’d come to Hurleigh. She should have put him off, knowing there was a chance Richard would come, knowing what Laura had once meant to Bennett. She was glad that Laura had never told Richard about Bennett. They’d talked about it, she and Laura, whether or not she should tell him: True freedom included freedom from society’s conventions, from the burdens of personal history, from the complications of one’s past. And although Sarah certainly agreed in principle with the idea of complete disclosure, at the same time she’d wondered aloud if it wouldn’t prove a distraction to Richard.

  Until tonight, she hadn’t been sure if Laura had told Richard or not. But she knew him well enough to be certain that, if he’d known, he’d never have overlooked Bennett as he had this evening.

  Although, come to think of it, maybe she didn’t know Richard as well as she thought she did. After all this time, why choose tonight to flirt with her?

  Maybe he did know about Bennett, and he’d been trying to make Laura jealous?

  Or maybe he’d been trying to get Harris Stuyvesant’s goat? But why? He didn’t even know Harris. And even if he did, why would he care if Sarah liked the American or not? He’d never before tonight expressed an interest in her apart from her role in the Movement. Oh, he’d occasionally come out with a flirtatious comment or mildly risqué suggestion, but it was always as if he needed to remind everyone including himself that he was a man, and not just a mind. She’d tended to treat him as an older brother, until tonight.

  Maybe she was imagining it all. She had to admit that Harris Stuyvesant was stirring up feelings she’d nearly forgotten she had, and maybe the effects of that disturbance were spilling over into other parts of her life.

  In which case, she should add another maybe: Maybe it was time to step back from the big, tasty American before things grew any more complicated.

  Was that what Richard was trying to teach her, by his unaccustomed attentions? That she wasn’t big enough to divide her loyalties?

  The Movement mattered: She knew that with an absolute and unquestioning certainty of body and mind. And in any enterprise as vital as the one to which she and Laura and Richard were devoted, sacrifice was built into its very bones. The world could simply not go on as it was; change had to come on all levels. Men had to sacrifice their expectations of inherited power, women had to give up the expectations of another age.

  Maybe that’s what Richard was trying to tell her, that the Movement couldn’t afford for her to get any deeper with Harris Stuyvesant.

  It was, she decided sadly, the only interpretation of Richard’s behavior tonight that made any sense.

  Sacrifices would be required, without a doubt. The sacrifice of Harris Stuyvesant might be the least of them.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  WHEN THE BARN HAD HELD ITS SILENCE for half an hour, Harris Stuyvesant stood. With slow and cautious steps, he moved across the room, taking his kit from the table near the door: soft leather bedroom slippers, a small electric flash-light and extra batteries, some twice-folded sheets of paper and a pencil, and a pair of old, supple black gloves. The big man crept out of his
room, down the stairs, and out of the door.

  Outside, he pulled the slippers from his trouser pocket and put them on—bedroom slippers were not only silent on gravel, they were disarming, should he be discovered. Who could suspect a man in bedroom slippers of any worse sin than insomnia?

  In his ornate room in the main house, lighted only by a bedside candle, Richard Bunsen studied the naked man in the looking-glass. Two weeks past his thirty-second birthday, and as fit as he’d been during the War—the firm outlines of his body were clear despite the flecks and tarnish of the two-hundred-year-old mirroring.

  His mind lingered over the image: New Man seen through the patina of history. How to use it in a speech, how to work it so it sounded natural? He walked over to the desk, relishing the Hurleigh air drifting against his bare skin, to write the idea down on a piece of house stationery.

  He stood, frowning down at the page. Too cumbersome, really, for a speech. But the image could be used somewhere. Maybe invent a story to go with it? He made another note, then capped the pen and dropped it onto the desk.

  It had been a hard day in Manchester with Lord-bloody-Almighty-Malcolm followed by an evening of tricky self control among the Hurleighs, and he wanted another drink. Two or three more drinks, for that matter, but he’d had enough for one night, especially if he was going to talk to the old man first thing. And meet with Ruddle about the P.M. in the afternoon. No drink.

  Restless, he circled the sumptuous room, feeling his toes dig into the thick carpet, running his hand across the velvet and the polish. He pulled aside the curtains to throw open the heavy glass. Cold, damp air swept over his skin, bringing up goose-flesh. Bringing up other flesh, as well.

  Standing naked in the open window was weirdly stimulating, as if he were about to fuck the house itself. He angled his hips forward until his half-erect cock was brushing the sill, and found himself wishing that someone were standing in the garden below—the window’s lower edge came just below his umbilicus, so he would be showing nothing unseemly, just the firm outline of a man younger than his age.