Touchstone (27 page)

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

Chapter Thirty-Five

S
TUYVESANT 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.”

He glanced down at her face, glowing with possibility unleashed, and said nothing. It was a pretty picture, but in his long experience, radicals and revolutionaries were rarely content to nudge events towards an end. Sooner or later, the fancy thinkers got tired of talk, and decided to rush the barricades.

He put on a thoughtful expression. “I like what you’re saying. I’ll think about it.”

“Well, here’s the stables—and I’ve really got to scramble and write this letter for Alex to drop in the post when he goes into town at noon. I’ll come find you when I’ve finished. Have fun!”

Stuyvesant’s eyes followed the jaunty figure retreating up the drive, bright hair reflecting the morning sun, before he turned to the problem of a duke’s faulty engine.

He found a partial set of tools in the back of the Morris, and a more complete set on a shelf that had originally been designed for tack. The magneto problem was soon resolved, resolving the back-fire and the smoke, but he cocked his head and listened, and decided to adjust the valves as long as he was here.

Going back to the shelves he found some rags and a coverall nearly large enough for him, if he took care not to bend over.

Whistling happily, he laid out his tools on the cloth-covered fender, and got to work. He did, in fact, enjoy tinkering with machines. And the smell of the engines seemed to grease his thought process as well.

He had half the car’s guts on the stable floor when he heard voices. He walked over to the doorway, wiping his hands on one of the rags, to see Grey and Laura Hurleigh coming down the road, both of them resplendent in formal riding gear, from polished boots to riding hats. The Cornish woodcutter had seemed more suited to the shabby garb he wore when Stuyvesant met him than he had to the proper clothes he’d worn since, but now, in this borrowed finery, he was revealed as what, in fact, he was: a gentleman, bred and born. Were it not for his light coloring, he might have been one of the Hurleighs.

Stuyvesant let loose with a wolf-whistle. “Well, ain’t you the peachy pair?”

Grey halted, startled. “I can’t say the same for you, I’m afraid.”

Stuyvesant looked down at the grease-spotted garment straining across his chest and shrugged. “To each according to his abilities,” he said.

“Mr. Stuyvesant,” Laura said, “are you
sure
you want to do this? Wouldn’t you rather come for a ride? Gallagher can outfit you.”

“I like fixing motors, and horses and me, we never really clicked,” he told her. It was not entirely true, but he did not think the benefits of a ride would outweigh either the credit he’d get with the Duke of Hurleigh or compensate for the state of his thighs after a day of horse-straddling in an English saddle. All in all, he thought it better to let Bennett have her on his own. “Besides, if the car’s needed at noon, it doesn’t give me much time to put her together again.”

“Alex will happily take one of the other motors,” she said. “Especially if you’d lend him yours. He adores new motorcars.”

“Good to know. You two have a nice time.”

The one-time lovers continued down the drive towards the stables proper, leaving Stuyvesant to wonder if he was making a mistake, not to glue himself to them. Then he shook his head: If he couldn’t trust Grey, it was best to know it now.

He returned to his engine, and his thoughts.

Sometime during this week-end, he’d like to get Laura Hurleigh to himself for a bit, and burrow into her beliefs a little more closely. Nothing better in getting to know a suspect than to pick his girlfriend’s brain.

And some of Laura Hurleigh’s speechifying over the breakfast table hadn’t been just the usual cant. At times she’d spoken in the rhythm of well-used rhetoric, although some of the phrases were new to Stuyvesant—“rouge to enliven a corpse” had a certain ring to it.

The thing was, some of the phrases Bunsen’s two women had used struck him as being other than the straight Communist line. Sarah’s “leadership is archaic” and Laura’s “inherited wealth goes hand in hand with inequity” were, to his ear, less Communist than Anarchist.

Granted, radical theory was as tangled as a packrat nest, and the lines between Socialism and Communism or Marxism and Bolshevism were often drawn with a very fine and meandering pen. Add into it the tendency of isms to splinter, like factions in a large and argumentative family, and you had a state of affairs too damned complicated for someone like him to keep track of.

Still, working around radicals as much as he had, you picked up patterns of thought. Anarchists believed devoutly in the innate goodness of the individual and the innate evil of society’s structures—religion, property, or government. Laura had described Hurleigh House as being built on robbery; the other night on the stage, Bunsen had declared, “Capitalism is theft.” The idea of property being robbery was straight out of the French Anarchist, Proudhon. Stir in Sarah’s vision of crumbling social structures, and he thought he could smell Anarchist influence in Richard Bunsen’s thought.