Touchstone

A small thing, a pure white, light-as-air length of weaver’s art, exquisitely rare and unbelievably warm, one of her grandmother’s idiosyncratic Christmas whims.

Thirty guineas of screaming luxury, and she tore it from her neck without a thought, to wrap the tiny body going cool in her arms. Make the shroud snug, tuck it around the shriveled limbs, as if it mattered. As if a dead infant could find comfort in swaddling.

Even then, as she thrust the child at its mother and wiped her hands surreptitiously on her coat—even then, the heavy-laden camel staggered on, the snow-pack gave a shudder, but held.

It wasn’t until the following day that the hillside of snow began to groan and creak. The following day, when she came with a motorcar to take the Margolins to the cemetery.

She trudged up the dark, filthy, stinking stairway to the third floor, knocking on the door to the two tiny, ice-cold rooms that housed the last five Margolins. The family emerged, dressed in its pitiful attempt at funeral finery: Mary first, carrying her bundled two-year-old, then the boys, Tom and Jims. Five-year-old Molly came last, tugging her hat down to hide the shame of lice-cropped hair. She looked down at the little girl, and felt the premonitory tremor, deep within.

Molly was wearing the dead infant’s shroud.

Afterwards, the only thing she was grateful for was her own self control, which had stopped the exclamation before it could reach her tongue, kept her hands from snatching her grandmother’s gift from the throat of a child the old lady wouldn’t have bothered to rein a galloping horse around.

The scarf had been a shroud, yes. But it was also a warm garment, and warmth belonged to the living. The Margolin family simply couldn’t afford sentiment.

She made it through the funeral without breaking down. She accompanied the little family back home, she summoned words, she made promises, she sat unseeing as the driver steered her back through the London streets to her flat.

It wasn’t until she was alone that the avalanche let go its hold.

The Margolins were one of “her” families. They should have been safe. But everything she was—all the wealth, honor, and authority at her command—had proved just so many delusions of usefulness, inadequate to keep one tiny human being from death. She’d been called and she had come, but before she could summon a doctor, while she’d stood in that dim room with its scrubbed floor and the threadbare, neatly tucked bed-clothes, the wise infant-gray eyes held hers, and the child stopped breathing.

Just stopped.

The death of a badly wounded man was one thing: God knew she’d seen enough of that during the War. This was another matter altogether. She’d looked up in horror at the survivors: bright little Molly pressed against her mother’s side, thumb in mouth; Tom and Jims kicking their heels in embarrassment on the bench; their once-pretty mother, Mary, at twenty-five a widow with lank gray hair and rotting teeth, seated dry-eyed on the room’s other chair with the toddler.

They’d named the infant Christopher. And because his family could not afford sentiment, he’d gone to the earth without his shroud.

Her teeth chattered against the glass, her fingers refused to carry the silver lighter to the cigarette. She placed her hands on her knees, but the slow, calming breaths refused to come, and sounded more like gasps.

It was exhaustion, as much as anything, that broke her, the bone-deep fatigue that came from too many fourteen-hour days followed by too many sleepless nights. Rage had burned to ash long ago, despair was her daily bread, but the bitter cold and the disgusting surroundings and the glimpse into those newborn eyes, heaped as they were on top of grinding worry and the devastating failure of love, made the world flare and consume itself. In the bleak, scorched hopelessness that followed, she broke.

She bent forward over her knees, her arms curled around the back of her head as if to protect herself from a beating, and she wept.

There was just no end to London’s store of graying twenty-five-year-olds; no end to their damaged men, their malnourished children, their dying infants. Huddled before the fireplace, she had a hallucinatory vision of the baby Christopher as a grain of sand, tumbling with ten thousand other grains through an hour-glass. The sheer futility of trying to catch all those grains before they fell overwhelmed her; the sobs came so hard she gagged on them.

But eventually, every avalanche must reach its plateau and settle. The sobs slowed, the choking noises trickled into hiccoughs. She sat upright in the chair, clawed the hair from her swollen eyes, and stretched out a steady hand for her drink. When the cigarette was lit, she stared into the heedless coals, thinking about lives pouring unstopped through an hour-glass.

The poor will be with you always.

Wasn’t that the bitter, cold truth? Even if she were given the keys to the Hurleigh coffers, to empty everything—paintings and jewels, houses and land—into the slums of London, it would disappear without a trace. The Hurleigh legacy could be reduced to the bones, and still poor mothers would strip the dead to warm the living.

Yes, money narrowed the neck of the glass, slowing the stream. Money bought medicine, nutrition, warmth, education, giving the poor a chance against the downward pull of the sand.

But it was so
slow,
so terribly, agonizingly slow. What the world needed was a cork to stop the flow completely. Some invention, some idea, some electrifying event that would not only galvanize the working classes, but would stick in the minds of the powerful like a stone in the neck of the hour-glass, to cut off the flow of poor.

Perhaps if she stayed here a while, alone and resting in the quiet, she might think of something.

March 1926

T
HE SMALL MAN STOOD ON THE HILLTOP,
naked beneath the gibbous moon, welcoming the air with his body.

His clothing lay, neatly stacked, in the center of the slab of stone: coat at the bottom, socks tucked into boots at the top. His bright hair stirred with the breeze, catching reflections of pale moonlight. His hands were stretched out at his sides, palms facing the horizon, and he swayed, ever so slightly, to the rhythm of the waves sixty feet below.

Moments like this were rare, when he could let down the barriers and open himself to his surroundings. During daylight hours, even in this remote place, human intrusion was a constant threat. Even on those days when he saw no one, the texture of the outside world was ever on his tongue, the sound of events in far-off London insinuating itself into his mind, like the scuffle of the monster beneath his childhood bed.

In recent weeks, the creature under the bed had begun to stir and swell. It had not yet taken notice of him as he lay frozen beneath the covers of his retreat. There was no real reason to believe it would. It was just as likely to lumber into life, jostling the bed as it emerged, and shamble away to devour some other innocent child.

Of course, if he was already gone from the bed when the monster came looking, that would solve the problem. A slight sway forward, here on the edge of the world, and the salt fingers below would reach for him, embrace him, soothe and welcome and bury his worries forever.

To, and fro. To, and fro. To…

His body would decide. The same body that read the breath of the wind as it flowed off the sea, that drew in the flavor of the land behind him, that noted the passing of an owl a quarter mile inland, that felt the thump of a rabbit going to ground a hundred yards off, that counted the hairs on his forearms stirred by the breeze…

One by one, the barriers slipped away, leaving the man naked and exposed to the night, like some soft and defenseless undersea creature when the waters drew back, and back again as they built into a monstrous swell on the horizon.

The wave was building—even now, he could feel it in the distance. But until it broke over him, or until his body chose to sway forward a fraction too far, he would stand in the moonlight and give himself, body and soul, to the brush of air, the odor of green, the solidity of rock.

To the joy and the terror of pure sensation.

111

April 1926

T
HE FINGERS PAUSED
to warm themselves against the radiator, for the room was very cold. Pressed against the ticking metal, they could feel the vibration of the water within, transferring heat from boiler’s flame to inert metal and thence to flesh, making possible the job at hand—which, in a fitting completion of the cycle, entailed the creation of flame.

When circulation was restored, the fingertips rubbed one another into suppleness, then resumed their work. They moved with delicacy and deliberation, sure of themselves and their purpose: switch, wire, detonator, snip, twist, fold; nestle the mechanism against the final purposeful load of explosive, perfect beneath its creator’s hand.

Some such objects were raw and ugly, aimed at nothing but immediate effect. The Devices shaped by this pair of hands—this particular builder had never cared for the blunt monosyllable
bomb
—were invariably simple and balanced: elegant. The pleasing irony of a small, perfectly shaped conveyer of brutal mayhem was an essential part of the process—perhaps even the most essential part. Curiously like the radiator, designed to transfer the bright, hot violence of ideas into society’s inert status quo: flames into warmth; an infernal machine effecting very human change.

The fingers paused for a moment as the mind considered, then they went on: No, this was not the time for a public speech advocating the transformative aspects of violence.

Still, wasn’t that precisely what people did not understand? That death was the very foundation of life; order was built from the raw material of disorder? The Prayer Book had it backwards when it said,
In the midst of life we are in death
—. St. Paul put it more precisely:
That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die.
A seed had to die before it could come to life. Wasn’t that the whole idea behind the Resurrection?

Now, they called it
Anarchy.

The word had become synonymous with
chaos,
but the true Anarchist community was a place of exquisite balance and stability, a society of equals. True, the path to Anarchy must be carved through the rubble of the status quo, but birth was never an easy business.

Or another analogy: A well placed Device was like a surgeon’s blade. It caused pain and shed blood, but it was necessary for healing. A sacrifice for the greater good.

And, truth to tell (shameful truth, never spoken aloud, never acknowledged even to one’s self, but somehow, the fingers knew), there was a definite frisson of satisfaction in creating a Device. Not the deaths themselves—one was not an animal, after all, killing for pleasure—but nonetheless, there was an element of gratification about making, literally, an impact on society.

(The hands paused again, with amusement, then finished their task.)

Fingers, slim and deft, tucked the final wire into a more pleasing arrangement. Two meditative hands eased the oversized cover shut, feeling the gentle pressure before the minuscule latch hooked into place.

Simple; elegant.

Order through Anarchy.

Life out of death.

The hands tidied the workbench, patted the Device as if soothing an infant in its cot, then switched off the lights.

On the bench, the gilt letters on the spine of the Device caught the light from the corridor as the door swung open, then shut:

BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER