At the viewing place where the paths converged, Laura raised her face to the stars. Then, instead of turning downhill to the house, she went up to the ridge, away from Hurleigh House and Richard Bunsen, and towards an earlier loyalty.
Bennett Grey came instantly awake at the first brush of finger-tips on the door-handle. His room was lit only by moonlight through the wide-drawn curtains: the rich odor of the Gloucestershire countryside wafted through the open window. The handle was slightly loose, and shifted a fraction of an inch in its housing before the mechanism engaged; it was that faint rattle that had snatched him out of sleep; movement in the strip of dim light at the door’s lower edge confirmed that someone stood there. The knob turned but the latch held. He heard a faint scratching sound at the wood.
His first thought was that Sarah needed something, and he started to call to her but it occurred to him that it could as easily be Stuyvesant. He lit the candle on the bedside table and walked softly over to the door, putting his mouth to the wood to say, “Who is that?”
The answer was a whisper. “Bennett?”
“Laura?” He shoved back the latch and opened the door.
“Shh!” she hissed, and stepped inside. He eased the door shut behind her, and stepped around so the candlelight shone on her face.
Whatever brought her here, it planted no turmoil in her. She radiated calm, and looked as sure as a Madonna, her eyes smiling as she reached for the buttons of her coat.
“Will your neighbors hear us?” she whispered.
“Sarah’s at the far end,” he said, “and the innkeeper and his wife sleep underneath her room, so if we keep our voices low they—”
She let the coat slump to the ground and stepped towards him. His voice strangled in his throat as she lifted her mouth to his.
Her body against him was like a live electrical wire. The kiss went on, broken only when her fingers made contact with the bare skin of his back and shot a current up his spine, jerking back his shoulders and head, breaking the connection. He gasped and took a dizzy step away, feeling as if the top of his skull had come loose; his fingers dug into her shoulders as much to keep himself from falling as to hold her away.
“I can’t—God, Laura, you mustn’t do that. It’s, just…it’s too much.”
“No, Bennett my love, it’s not.”
His fingers tightened, pushing her, pulling her. “Laura, no, think about this. You and Bunsen—”
“Do you want me to go away?”
“Yes. No.” God, he swore, or pleaded.
“I need you, Bennett. Tonight, I need you. Please.”
He said nothing, as his excruciatingly sensitive nerve-endings listened to her heart beat, felt the night air uncurl from her hair, smelled the warm odor of silk from the blouse against her skin.
“Do you want me to go?” she repeated.
“I can’t…”
“You can,” she said, and the warm-honey intimacy of her tone made it hard to breathe. He knew that voice, had bathed in the sweetness of it during the weeks before he had gone away. Knowing and assured, it was the essence of the woman she had grown into, the woman he had helped to create, the woman who had matured in his arms and under his body. Now, the voice flooded into him, bringing him to a halt, the laboriously constructed machinery of his personality falling to pieces at her touch, all control ceded to her will.
All he could do was wait for her to put him back together again.
He didn’t know what she was seeing in his face, but she suddenly laughed—not a sound of triumph, but of understanding, even sympathy.
“Bennett, my sweet. I have made many choices in my life, but the only one I deeply regret was letting you walk away without saying a proper good-bye. May I do that, tonight?”
So, she was not proposing to throw over Bunsen and all his works; rather, she was proposing a coda on their long-over affair, giving it a rightful finish after all these years. He knew he should object, that she was being unfaithful to the man she had bonded herself to, but he could not summon the righteous protest: In truth, Richard Bunsen had nothing to do with this.
Some slight change in the fingers on her shoulders gave her his answer, and her eyes crinkled, a tiny shift of facial muscles that made him want to fall at her feet. Her hands came back up to rest on his ribs, and in an instant he was again connected to the electrical mains.
Her smallest gesture set him afire; there was no hope that he could control his body’s reaction to her. “I don’t think—” he started, but she silenced him with a gentle brush of her lips, warming now with the room.
Her fingers were warm, too, as they came down his belly to the waist of his pajamas, and continued inexorably on. His breath caught, and he struggled for control, but when a small sound of deep content came from her throat and her body pressed against his, he cried out.
“God,” he started to say, I’m so sorry, but her finger was on his lips, and she was looking at him with those dancing dark eyes. “Now,” she said, “maybe you’ll be able to keep your mind on me.”
He laughed breathlessly, and reached for the top button of her silk blouse.
Laura left in the morning when the stars began to fade. He pushed back the bed-clothes and sat up to light the candle again, but she stopped him.
“I want to remember you this way, rumpled and with your head on the pillow.”
“And unshaved.”
She bent down to salute his bristle with lips that were swollen with the night’s activities, then wrapped herself in his dressing gown and ducked next door to the bath-room. He got out of bed to retrieve the lower half of his pajamas and pulled them on, then obediently lay back and waited for her to return.
For the first time in eight years, ever since the essence of Bennett Grey had trickled into his new-born body on a battlefield in France, he felt at home.
The splashing noises ceased and after a minute she came back, rubbing her hair with his bath-towel. He watched her every move, the shift of her shoulder muscles as she bent to pull up her silk pants, the angle of her arm as she fastened the clasp on her brassiere, the smoothness of her leg stretched to receive the stockings.
Finally, she stood, brushed her skirt unnecessarily, and came to sit by him on the bed. They held each other until the dark threatened to leave from the sky, and she sat back, her hand cupping his face.
“Good-bye, my dear heart.”
“Come to Cornwall with me,” he said, although he knew what her answer would be.
“Maybe I will,” she said. “I’ll buy a pig and raise ten children with you, there at the end of the world.” She did not intend him to believe her. It was her way of telling him that their paths were going separate ways.
He knew it, anyway.
He kissed her hand, feeling her strong, supple fingers tighten on his, then loose again as her will took hold. “I won’t see you again, not for a long time.”
“Actually,” he said, “I thought I might come to the chapel this morning, for services.”
She sat back sharply. “Please don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Please, Bennett, promise me you won’t. I couldn’t bear saying good-bye twice.”
He studied her face, frowning slightly, listening to unspoken messages. But in the end he nodded, and she kissed him again.
“Besides, it would be too much of a shock to see a pagan like you with a prayer book in his hand two Sundays in a row. And who knows?” she said as she stood up. “You may look up one of these days in Cornwall and see me.”
“And what if you find that I already have a wife raising her own pig and ten children?”
“Then I suppose we’ll just have to talk about converting into Mormons or Moslems or something polygamous.”
“Take care of yourself, Laura,” he said. “Don’t let Bunsen push you around.”
“Never,” she said with a grin.
And she was gone.
He blew out the candle and settled back against the pillows, s
melling her, feeling the air against his face that had so recently lain against hers. The world was filled with her again, and paradoxically, her means of saying good-bye had guaranteed that she would be with him forever. He lay with his eyes on the ceiling and his inner vision on Laura’s face, and wondered what it was that so alarmed her about seeing him in church. Before he could solve the problem, sleep claimed him.
He slept so deeply, he did not consciously hear the sound of the motorcar pulling up in front. Did not hear the pounding on the innkeeper’s door or the raised voices from the far end of the building. It wasn’t until the feet were outside and the fist was at his very door that Grey startled awake from a dream, paralyzed with horror and the sure knowledge that he had overlooked something: something frightening and immediate and terribly, terribly urgent.
Chapter Sixty-Five
THE CLOCK HAD JUST CHIMED seven on Sunday morning when Laura Hurleigh climbed the stairs in the family house, greeting the man who had spent the night napping lightly in the hallway.
“Good morning, Mr. Stuyvesant.”
“Good morning, Miss Hurleigh,” he replied.
“I fear you are not very rested,” she said.
“Not very, no.”
“Nor I,” she said, “although I think for rather different reasons.” She showed him an unexpected and demure dimple, then let herself into her room.
He stared at her closed door, and gave a startled bark of amusement.
When everyone was tucked into their breakfast ninety minutes later, Stuyvesant went to his quarters. He bathed and shaved and eyed his bed with longing, then looked at his watch: 8:55. If he hustled, he could just make it to the Dog and Pony and back to the chapel to meet the 10:00 service. He put on his coat again and climbed the hill past the chapel to the ridge path.
The morning, when Stuyvesant turned his mind to it, was perfectly glorious, with all the requisite birds, flowers and fluffy white gamboling lambs. His mind, however, was bouncing around rather like one of those lambs between that delicious and suggestive dimple, and the thought that although breaking into Bunsen’s office was a priority, perhaps he didn’t need to address the job tonight, ending up wondering if Sarah would find stage plays too bourgeois an entertainment.
Distracted by both the thoughts and his surroundings, Stuyvesant didn’t register the car parked at an odd angle in front of the Dog and Pony until he was climbing the penultimate stile and the sun, reflecting off its wind-screen, momentarily blinded him.
He looked, and looked more closely, and then he was pounding across the field and hurdling the last stone wall in one leap. He diverted only to slap his hand on the car’s hood—still hot—then swung around the permanent fixture of the leaning bicycle and through the door of the inn, bounding up the stairs, not needing to follow the sound of raised voices to know where he was going.
Grey’s door was shut but fortunately not locked, or he’d have smashed it from its hinges when he went through it; as it was, the door crashed open so hard it bounced off the wall and slammed shut again.
Aldous Carstairs whirled at the interruption, cutting short his harangue and taking a step back from the object of his wrath. Grey was huddled on the edge of the bed, bent over his knees in a futile attempt to find shelter from Carstairs’ words.
“Stuyvesant!” Carstairs snarled. “My God, you’d better hope nothing comes of this or you’ll spend the rest of your life in a British prison, I’ll see to it personally.”
Stuyvesant shoved himself between the two men, then stepped forward onto Carstairs’ toes, forcing him to retreat.
“Let’s you and me go outside and you can tell me what the problem is,” he said firmly, but before he could get Carstairs out the door, the man dumped everything across Grey’s head.
“They found Bunsen’s work-room, where he made the bombs, that’s the problem. And Captain Grey here spent all last week-end in the company of your Mr. Bunsen, but didn’t think to mention that the man made him the least bit suspicious.”
“Did they find any sign of the missing explosive?”
“The missing—? No, nothing, just the equipment.”
“Bomb?” said a voice. The big man glared furiously at Carstairs, then turned to see Grey, squinting as though into a bright light, his face screwed up with the pain.
“Yeah,” Stuyvesant said. “Mr. Carstairs here got rumor that some of the Army’s bomb-making materials walked off. Looks like more than a rumor.” He looked back at Carstairs. “When did you come across this? Have they had a chance to look for fingerprints?”
“No, they haven’t had a chance to look for fingerprints, bloody hell, man, Bunsen’s made a bomb and I want to know why you didn’t bother to ask Grey about—”
“For Christ sake, Grey spent maybe five minutes in conversation with Bunsen, all week-end.”
“Then you should have arranged for them to talk further!” Carstairs shouted. On the heels of his shout, small sounds came from two directions: Outside the door, Sarah tentatively called her brother’s name; from the bed, a thin sound of protest, obscuring a word.
“You’re not helping matters any,” Stuyvesant snapped at Carstairs, and squatted beside the small man. “Bennett, I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
“She…” Grey said, and gasped, pressing the heels of his hands into his temples. “Ah, God. Something.”
The door creaked open, but Stuyvesant didn’t look around.
“She? You mean Sarah? Or Laura? Laura was here, wasn’t she?” One pained eyelid crept open, looking a question at him; Stuyvesant gave a shrug. “Somebody had to get her past the guards.”
“You let Lady Laura out of the house? And you call yourself a bodyguard!” Carstairs sneered. “Sounds to me like you’ve got them wandering all over the bloody countryside. Do you even know where Bunsen is now?”
“Shut up!” Stuyvesant ordered over his shoulder, then calmly went on to Grey. “What did Laura tell you?”
Carstairs was bending over Stuyvesant, snarling at the back of Grey’s neck. “Have you been up to something with the Hurleigh woman? Christ, Grey, maybe you’re in on it, as well.”
“Carstairs, back the fuck off!” Stuyvesant said warningly. “Bennett, please, if you have something to say, now would be a really good time.”
“Hard to think. There was…church.”
“There’s a church service about to begin, yes.”
Carstairs’ arm snaked past Stuyvesant and locked on Grey’s hunched shoulder. “Is something going to happen at the service?”
Grey cried out at Carstairs’ touch, and Stuyvesant snapped upright. In a convulsive twist of muscle and sinew, his left hand drove upwards with the strength of his entire body behind it, connecting with the point of Carstairs’ chin. The Englishman’s head cracked back and he fell, limp before he hit the floor. Sarah peered wide-eyed at the dark rag-doll at Stuyvesant’s feet.
“Sorry,” Stuyvesant told her, and stepped over Carstairs’ legs to feel his throat for a pulse: alive. Sarah’s voice came, asking what was happening, if that was—but he turned his back on her and returned to Grey, holding his hand over the hunched shoulder, not quite touching him.
“Bennett, tell me.”
Grey tentatively raised one eye from his fetal crouch. “Did you kill him?” he croaked.
“Not yet. What is it about Laura?”
“She said. She was here, all night. I thought…It felt like the parting we never had, those years ago. Not unfaithfulness, you understand?”
“Bennett, for Christ sake. What did she tell you?”
“Sorry. There’s something, I can feel it there, the Major got in the way.” Stuyvesant forced a lid on his impatience, seeing at last that the man was trying to retrieve some stray piece of knowledge driven into hiding by Carstairs’ arrival.
“It was deliberate,” Grey said suddenly. “She did everything she could to keep me from paying attention to what she was thinking. Like that time in the crowded pub, with you. There was
something you were hiding, I just couldn’t hear it behind the noise. Was that about the bomb? And you didn’t want me to know?”
“Yeah.”
“You should have told me.”
“Bennett—” Stuyvesant began, but the man waved his reminder away.
“She came here while I was asleep. Two minutes after she came in, her hand was on my cock, and two seconds after she left this morning, I fell sound asleep. She knew I would. Deliberately not giving me a chance to stand back and listen to her.”
Stuyvesant made an impatient gesture. “You told me that, what’s that got to do with—”
“I mean, good-bye. Final. She said she might see me again, but she made certain that I would not come to the church service, and the way she was holding herself—it was halfway to good-bye.”
“Shit,” Stuyvesant said as his mind opened to the knowledge.
Not Bunsen: certainly not Bunsen alone.
Laura. Lady Laura Hurleigh, the natural-born strategist.
The chapel, God damn it. He looked at his wrist-watch—quarter to ten, and no telephone in miles. Was that a church-bell?
He turned to the door, then stopped, and knelt to dig into Carstairs’ pockets—keys in one pocket, gun in another.
“Get your brother out of here,” he told Sarah. “Take him to London, take him to Cornwall, I don’t care, just get him out of here.”
Without waiting to answer her protests, he dove into the hallway and down the stairs, taking them three at a time, to explode out of the front door of the hotel. He dropped behind the wheel of the car, and shoved in the key.
(Why was Carstairs so shit scared? his mind nagged. The idea of a bomb a week ago didn’t make him turn a hair, but this morning it scared the hell out of him.)
The city car bounced up the rutted lane to the wooden gate at its end. Stuyvesant drove straight through it, sending pieces of wood flying, one of them coming down hard on the wind-screen ahead of him. Past the spider-web of cracks he could see a stretch of bumps and stones and terrified sheep, and the car cracked and screamed as he forced it cruelly over the rough pasture, his mind chewing at the question.
Touchstone Page 51
