“Yes, well, that’s why I’m here,” she said.
“You? Not your father?”
“It’s been decided that his presence might prove more distracting than useful. He and Mother will come to dinner Friday evening, and to church on Sunday, but apart from that, he will be absent.”
“So if it comes to breaking up a fight, you’re it?”
“There will be no fights, and I have to concur that a woman can serve better to encourage five powerful men to keep their manners.”
Stuyvesant had to shake his head in admiration: Laura Hurleigh’s presence here was a stroke of pure genius. It was not just that she possessed impeccable credentials on both sides, with a history of supporting the workers while the bluest of blood pumped through her veins. It was Laura Hurleigh herself that made the choice brilliant—intelligent, warm, regal, and feminine; a woman among men drilled from childhood to respect women, particularly aristocratic women; confident but never pushy. Her skills at controlling her parents could have taught Machiavelli a thing or two. Laura Hurleigh: eight hundred years of British blood in a cloche hat.
He began to laugh, and said, “Miss Hurleigh, when you get this little strike of yours straightened out, perhaps you’d like to come back to the States with me and sort out a few of our problems, as well.”
She blushed and shook her head. “I’m only here to remind them of their manners.”
“Sometimes, I think that would be enough for the world,” Stuyvesant told her. “So, if I’m to be a bodyguard, can I get a run-down on the various personnel?”
She went to the papers on her desk, coming back with a sheaf of clipped-together carbon copies. The first page showed twenty names and their assigned rooms; the following pages had diagrams of seating arrangements for meals, for the formal discussions, and for the chapel on Sunday morning: Nothing left to chance.
He was halfway down the main stairway before he remembered the servants’ entrance, but he didn’t think it worth turning around again. He raised his eyes to the window showing the Hurleigh family tree: William the Ready, Richard the Firm. The Royalist who’d shattered half the bones in his body to distract Cromwell.
The weight of this week-end gathering was beginning to feel heavy across Stuyvesant’s shoulders. On the one hand, he was an outsider here, a temporary driver, nothing but hired muscle, who even Laura Hurleigh admitted was there mostly for show. Add to that his actual reason for being here, which was, ultimately, looking for evidence to hang Richard Bunsen with, and what he ought to do was drive back to the phone box he’d seen coming through Hurleigh village and find out what the hell was happening with Carstairs.
On the other hand, he was a sworn law enforcement agent, who was in a unique position here by being, as far as he could tell, the only person on the place to know of twenty ounces of missing high explosive. If he drove into Hurleigh to see why Carstairs had gone off the horn, he could not also examine the rooms where the men would be meeting. If he drove to the village and the place blew up while his back was turned, he’d feel responsible.
He would, in fact, be responsible.
Shit. How’d he get into this mess, anyway? It was the sort of thing his kid brother would laugh himself half sick about. If Tim ever laughed again.
He heard footsteps come up a few stairs, then stop; he looked over the stair rail into the face of the government man, Julian Exeter.
“Was there something you needed, Mr. Stuyvesant?”
“Yeah. You and I need to have a talk.”
He told Exeter as little as he could, and most of that between the lines. He said that Exeter probably knew that Bunsen had been a sapper during the War, so he tended to have explosives on the brain. He said that although he personally didn’t know Bunsen well, they had friends in common (not entirely untrue, although he’d met those friends at the same time). And he said that he, Stuyvesant, had a pretty good eye for a booby trap, although they really didn’t want to go using the word bomb in front of anyone else, did they? Because it would get back to the delegates, and there’s nothing like cutting into your ability to relax and focus on the job at hand when you were afraid your chair was going to go up underneath you.
He’d chosen his man well: Exeter understood (at least, he understood the story Stuyvesant was giving him) and agreed, silence was paramount.
“Let me be clear,” Stuyvesant said. “I have no scrap of evidence that there’s so much as a faint rumor of a story of One of Those Things. But my boss, he’s a worry-wart, and so I look carefully.”
“And you’d know what you were looking at?”
“I’ve found one or two,” Stuyvesant answered, the first half of which was literally true—the man might not be reassured by the whole truth.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Tell me who’s here, what the set-up is, and let’s go look at where they’re meeting.”
As Exeter led the way back up the stairs, he told Stuyvesant, “Four of the five delegates have arrived. Mr. Baldwin is still en route but is expected soon. The next forty-eight hours are arranged to be both formal and unstructured. After tea, there will be drinks, dinner, and then cards or billiards, for those who wish it. Tomorrow after breakfast they will assemble for a formal meeting in the Great Hall, primarily to air grievances. Then there will be an hour’s break, followed by lunch, then two afternoon sessions of ninety minutes each. In between times there are any number of entertainments available—tennis, croquet, there’s even a lawn-bowling court near the barn. And after luncheon, anyone who wishes an excuse for walking will be given a shotgun to pot a few rabbits. Not the same as a proper shoot, but gentlemen often enjoy blasting away at small creatures when they’ve had a tense morning.”
Stuyvesant glanced sharply at the man, but saw no glimmer of humor.
“This is where they’ll take tea.”
It was the long gallery, and the information was rendered unnecessary by the sight of servants laying out tables at the far end.
“So,” Stuyvesant said. “The common rooms will be the long gallery, the solar, and the billiards room upstairs, and downstairs the breakfast room for meals and the Great Hall for more formal meetings.”
“The Hall will also be used for dinner both nights. And, of course, the chapel on Sunday morning, if they manage to work out the details of how to do a joint service, Anglican and Chapel. It may just be a prayer meeting, not Communion.”
As a Catholic who hadn’t been to church since his father’s funeral eleven years before, Stuyvesant figured the exact disagreements that existed between the various factions of Protestant were beyond him. Enough to help check the place for bombs.
Although in truth, Stuyvesant had absolutely zero expectation of finding anything untoward. Certainly not this early in the week-end, especially since the Prime Minister wasn’t even here yet. Nonetheless, he ran his eyes over the familiar paintings and sculptures in the gallery, then opened the door leading into the solar. Exeter followed, watching his every move.
The room was empty, the fire unlit, although the servants had brought in two crates of various drinks. He started there, found all the bottles sealed, then started to work his way around the room, lifting furniture, peering behind the books on the shelves, taking the lids off decorative jars and looking inside.
The first guests came into the gallery, and were offered tea. Exeter shut the door.
“You don’t have to stay here,” Stuyvesant told him, and climbed up on a chair to look at a particularly ugly Chinese vase on a high shelf.
“You’re right, I should probably get back to work. You sure I can’t help you?”
“Only if I find anything,” he said. “I’ll let you know if I do.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Exeter said, a second near-invisible trace of humor, and let himself out of the solar.
Stuyvesant finished with the solar minutes before the servants opened the doors and started setting out the drinks trolley. The billiards room, although larger than t
he solar, was easier to search, being less crowded with decorative knickknacks and furniture.
And being a bigger room, it would require a larger quantity of explosive to destroy.
He found nothing.
Which could mean there was nothing to find, and Aldous Carstairs had gone off for a week-end in Paris and neglected to mention that the Army had found their missing explosive. Or it could mean Carstairs was lying unconscious in the hospital after a road accident, and Harris Stuyvesant was on his own.
It could also mean Richard Bunsen hadn’t put his bomb into place yet.
As he moved into the long gallery, heading for the stairs, he saw Laura Hurleigh and her father, in a group with Bunsen and four others. Laura caught Stuyvesant’s eye, making a small hand gesture to indicate that he should join them.
He shook his head and would have moved on, but her look grew more emphatic, one eyebrow raised in a manner that instantly evoked his mother saying, “Don’t make me come get you, Harris Stuyvesant.”
A look like that, a man had no choice: Stuyvesant walked over to join them.
As he drew near, he realized that one of the men was Stanley Baldwin. The Prime Minister was a placid man with a high forehead, a large nose, and a slight look of eyebrow-cocked disbelief that lent his face more humor than one would expect. He had a reputation for being a fair-minded plodder, which Stuyvesant didn’t think at all a bad thing to be, for a government official, and although he had been through Cambridge and was a cousin of Rudyard Kipling, he’d managed the family iron works before running for Parliament. The Prime Minister was listening to something Laura was saying, and when she finished, he and the others laughed.
They called it “breaking the ice,” Stuyvesant reflected; he could only pray that once the ice broke, it wouldn’t drop them all into deadly cold waters below.
Laura reached out and pulled him in. “Mr. Baldwin, I don’t believe you’ve met Richard’s friend from America, Harris Stuyvesant? Mr. Stuyvesant is a particularly appropriate addition to this little get-together, not only bringing the outsider’s point of view, but because he can claim membership in both the working class and management. Harris, Mr. Baldwin.”
She made it sound as if the Prime Minister of Britain should be just delighted to make his acquaintance, and to Stuyvesant’s astonishment, Baldwin was. Or acted as though he was. She gave the conversation a couple of gentle nudges and then stood back as five men—Britain’s Prime Minister; a recently elevated Ford Motor consultant; the charismatic Union representative with the film-star looks; a mine owner with a face like a bulldog; and a slim young male secretary on his longest trip out of London in his whole life—began to argue genially about cricket.
After a bit, Laura rested her hand briefly on the Prime Minister’s sleeve, murmured something, and faded backwards out of the circle.
Five minutes later, Stuyvesant pulled the same self effacement, and walked towards the tea samovar. Laura detached herself from another group, this one centered around her father, and slipped her arm through his to continue in the direction of the refreshments.
“It seems to be starting off well,” he said.
“It was heavy going for the first few minutes, but a bit of oil has spilt on the gears and it’s moving more easily now.”
“Is that your job, spilling oil?”
“We aristos have to be good for something.”
“Well, better oil than blood.”
“Hmm,” she said, distracted by the pouring of tea out of the samovar, and Stuyvesant decided she hadn’t heard him. She was, he noticed, one of two women (other than the maids) in a room full of powerful men, the other being the iron-faced lady secretary of the miners’ president, Herbert Smith.
“Can I ask,” he said, lowering his voice for her ears only, “is it going to be a problem for you, being Bunsen’s…”
“Associate?” She completed his sentence, one eyebrow arched with amusement. “I am openly an advocate of the working class, Mr. Stuyvesant. Anything further, well, they may have heard rumors, but the British are far too polite to believe rumors. Here, I am no one’s mistress but my own. One lump or two?”
She held out a cup and saucer that looked as if they might have come from a London museum, and he closed his big fingers gingerly on the saucer. “No sugar, thanks.”
“Really? Well, you must have one of the cheese savories, they’re divine, and one of these little purply things, for after. Now, my dear Mr. Stuyvesant, please tell me you know something about the sport of boxing?”
“I’ve been in the ring once or twice, in my youth,” he admitted.
“Oh, bless you! Come,” she ordered, and propelled him across the room to where a gruff old man and a nervous-looking young man were planted. “Mr. Smith, this is a friend of Richard’s from America, Harris Stuyvesant, who was telling me that he used to box when he was a boy. Harris, this is Herbert Smith, who as you know is the president of the Miners’ Federation. Mr. Smith was a prize fighter when he was a lad in the fields, weren’t you, Mr. Smith? And this is his associate, Tom Decater, who’s interested in baseball.”
Smith was a stolid old Yorkshire miner who looked as if he could still manage a hard right to the chin if he had to. Born in a work-house, orphaned not much later, he’d gone into the pits at the age of ten. He gazed calmly at the American over a pair of wire spectacles, and seemed to have summed him up in two seconds flat—not, the American was relieved to see, disapprovingly. The men did as they’d been told, and talked about boxing for a few minutes, then moved to cricket, and baseball, and to life in New York.
As they talked, Stuyvesant watched out of the corner of his eye as Laura closed in on the next group, all miners’ representatives, and abducted two of the men—one thin and with an office stoop, the other who would look more at home in front of a punching bag—in a manner that was halfway between flirtatious and maternal. She deposited the two in a group of the Prime Minister’s men and started them talking, then performed the same exchange with a pair of that group, returning them to the miners’ representatives. She spent the next hour stirring the mixture, providing constant variety, planting conversational seeds and waiting until they had begun to germinate, then moved on to the next flagging group. She touched and patted, laughed and admired, stepped in the instant any voices were raised and soothed, distracted, and amused.
He was exhausted just watching her.
At half-past five the platters were allowed to go empty, and Laura began to circumnavigate the room with the suggestion that drinks would be served in the room next door in an hour, if any of the gentlemen wished to change for dinner.
Stuyvesant waited until he saw Bunsen leave, and drifted away behind him until he turned into his bedroom, at which point the American moved rapidly to intercept the closing door. Bunsen looked around, surprised, when the door didn’t shut.
“Oh, it’s you. Come in,” he said, although Stuyvesant was already in and the door shutting behind him. “I hope you brought your D.J. We didn’t have much time to warn you what you’d need here.”
Stuyvesant assured him that he was well set for dinner jackets, then asked him, “How close do you want me to stick to you?”
“Sorry?”
“As your bodyguard, that is. Yesterday in London, I made it a point to be at your shoulder in a crowd, but I don’t imagine that’s what you’d want here.”
“Certainly not. You probably ought to talk to Laura about that, she’s the one who thought I should have a bodyguard.”
“I will. But as far as you’re concerned, you’d like me to be discreet?”
“Discreet would be good.”
“That’s fine. But we should have a signal if you want me to back away for a while. Perhaps lifting two fingers, like you’re holding a cigarette only without the cigarette?” It was a gesture unnatural enough not to be made by accident, but easy enough to work into a conversation’s normal hand gestures—he’d used it before, with men he was guarding.
B
unsen stretched his index and middle fingers out from his other fingers experimentally, and said, “Sure, that’s easy to remember.”
“Just try to forget I’m there. If you go for a walk, I’ll be behind you, but you can ignore me. If you’re in a room with a few others, I’ll probably be nearby rather than inside, although in a crowd like this afternoon, I’ll stick closer. And whenever you’re in here, I’ll be right outside the door.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. And didn’t add, And if you’d thought of sneaking off to Laura Hurleigh’s rooms during the night, you’ll just have to keep it in your pants.
“If you say so.”
“Now, I have to go and talk with Laura for a few minutes, but I should be back before you’re ready to go down. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t go out of your rooms or let anyone in while I’m away.” It was absolutely unnecessary, would have been unnecessary even if Bunsen was one of the good guys, but if it discouraged him from wandering, fine.
“Very well,” he said, beginning to sound irritated. It was a phase most people went through, who weren’t accustomed to a tight guard.
“Thank you. So if you’d lock your door now, I’ll be off.”
He stood outside until he heard the key turn in the lock, and went to find Laura Hurleigh.
She was not in her room, nor in the solar, nor in the Great Hall. He finally located her under the portico where he had sheltered while watching the rain fall on Grey. When Stuyvesant came out, she was fumbling through the pockets of her skirt for a somewhat crumpled packet of cigarettes.
Stuyvesant snapped his lighter into life and held it to her; she guided his hand with hers until the cigarette was going, and nodded her thanks. She pushed her dark hair away from her face and leaned back against the wall, smoke drifting from her narrow Spanish nose. He took off his jacket and eased it between the thin fabric of her dress and the stones.
“You must feel like you’ve been run through a mangle,” he said.
Touchstone Page 45
