Touchstone (3 page)

Chapter Three

S
TUYVESANT’S
B
AYSWATER HOTEL WALKED
a narrow line between respectable and seedy, but it was quiet, and had weekly rates. His “luxury room” even had a telephone and a nearly private bath, with a helpful restaurant next door for when he wanted to eat in. The looks of the clientele and staff didn’t encourage him to leave his valuables in the desk drawer, but he’d found a bank down the street happy to rent him a safe deposit box. Best of all, the radiators were enthusiastic—a blessing on an evening that had replaced rain with a penetrating cold.

Stuyvesant peeled away the heavy coat, so wet it looked more black than brown, and draped it across the radiator. He put his hat on top, his shoes underneath, and dropped into his chair with the bottle and a glass.

And there he sat, frowning at the amber liquid in his glass.

Harris Stuyvesant was not a person given to introspection. He was a big muscular man who got fidgety when he wasn’t moving, and subtlety was not a thing that came naturally.

Still, Stuyvesant had been an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Investigation since 1911, when he was twenty-five years old. Apart from the two years he’d taken off to point his rifle at Germans in northern France, he’d spent the last fifteen years paying attention to unexpected details, noting them, returning to them until he understood what they meant. He’d also spent so many years undercover—play-acting around the clock, asleep or awake, with his life on the line—that he’d long since learned that when his body made one of its snap decisions, he’d better go along with it.

So he had to wonder why, when he’d been faced with yet another law enforcement bureaucrat, that little switch in the undercover part of Stuyvesant’s mind had flipped and started him play-acting. Because it definitely had: Before his trousers’ seat hit the chair in Aldous Carstairs’ office, he’d been acting a role.

He didn’t think it was just the business of feeling like an utter oaf off the streets in the presence of a man who exuded authority and competence: He’d held his own in conversations with railway barons and U.S. Presidents, and whatever authority Carstairs had, it couldn’t be anywhere near that level.

No, some aspect of Carstairs had set Stuyvesant’s inner alarm to jangling, kicking him into a near-instantaneous assumption of the role of bumpkin, both disarming and concealing. He hadn’t even been aware of his visceral mistrust of the man until he heard his own stretched vowels, found he was slumped like an idiot in the chair, felt his fingers go up to rumple his hair: Gee, golly.

Gee, golly, indeed, he now said to himself with interest: That guy with the knife scar and the belladonna eyes just alarmed the crap out of little Harris Stuyvesant.

He took a first swallow from his glass, and felt the satisfying burn down his gullet.

If he’d shown Carstairs his usual, more or less competent face, Stuyvesant wondered, would the man have given himself away with that sharp reaction? Would his guard have been up, as it had not been for the galoot in the chair?

And more to the point, had the man merely found a novel way to ease the departure of an unwanted visitor, or did he honestly intend to meet Stuyvesant at Hyde Park in the morning?

Maybe, Stuyvesant decided, he wouldn’t finish off the whole bottle tonight. Just in case.

He woke the next morning with a hell of a head and no inclination whatsoever to be made a fool of. Still, the narrow slice of sky he could see out of his grimy window was actually blue for a change, and he decided that he couldn’t very well not show up at all. So he shaved and dressed and forced down breakfast, then walked through the spring-greened streets towards Hyde Park. He came out from the back roads directly across from the corner that Carstairs had specified, and looked across the streaming traffic at a riot.

This corner of Hyde Park, an area dedicated to the spirit of free and open debate, was always a hive of activity, but the scene over there now was several steps up from any Speakers’ Corner tumult he’d seen yet. A sea of hats seethed in motion, hedged in between road and park by half a dozen mounted policemen. Stuyvesant hesitated, but it appeared that the crowd’s anger was still at the verbal stage, and the police had it in hand.

Nothing like a man on a horse for intimidating a crowd, Stuyvesant always said.

The restless mass was, inevitably, a group of Miners’ Union supporters trading vehement insults with anti-Union forces. It was the same unrest that festered and fevered throughout the city, come to a head here like a boil. Had it been a hot summer’s day, the boil might have burst and spilled its furious contents into a window-smashing spree down Oxford Street, but this was April, and even if the bitter wind felt more like snow than spring, the English sun was nonetheless shining, and the night’s frost had melted on all but the north-facing lawns. On a morning like this, a man would have to be furious indeed not to succumb to some degree of bonhomie.

Still, not wanting another split knuckle, he gave the yelling debaters wide berth, retreating down the Bayswater road a distance before crossing over to the park. When he came back towards the Corner, he found Aldous Carstairs sitting on a bench, his beautifully gloved hands gathered primly atop a slim dispatch case.

“Morning,” Stuyvesant said when he was near enough for his voice to reach over the nearby commotion. He stuck out his hand, and again received the soft grasp.

“Your man Bunsen moves in some interesting circles,” was Carstairs’ greeting.

Right down to business, then. Stuyvesant lowered himself to the bench beside the Englishman.

“Is that so?”

“One might say that the fellow is a, hmm, veritable Scarlet Pimpernel of the working classes, if your suspicions about him are justified. An open and relatively respectable life here, a mad bomber on the other side of the Atlantic.”

The American sighed, perversely disappointed that Carstairs hadn’t come up with a more original criticism. Didn’t bureaucrats have anything better to do than read that romantic claptrap? British aristocrat-spies in the French Revolution—that Orczy woman should have been strangled. “I really don’t—”

“Do not mind me, Mr. Stuyvesant, I am only pulling your leg. Although the merry conceit of an aristocrat-turned-secret-agent is not a great deal more unlikely than a man of Richard Bunsen’s background being chosen by the Labour Party. It is true that his mentor, Matthew Ruddle, is one of the more left-wing Members of Parliament, but I wouldn’t have thought him an out-and-out radical. The Trades Union tends to be suspicious of extreme politics.”

“I don’t know if Bunsen’s respectability means that the Labour Party has decided it doesn’t mind Red agitators, or if he’s just good at putting on a respectable face. He’s giving a speech down in Battersea on Thursday night—I thought I’d go listen to it, see if I can figure out which is the case.”

“That should prove educational for you. In any event, it’s not unheard of, is it, for a man to live two lives? Sometimes, the one life seems to, hmm, fill in the gaps in the other. Actually, I was referring to a less publicized aspect of Mr. Bunsen’s life. Do you know who I mean by the Hurleigh family?”

“As in the Duke of Hurleigh? Sure. Our papers love them, and not just the scandal rags—if your country ever wants to try taking back their colonies, that’d be the family to send over to convince us.” But the name conjured some other, more specific stir in the recesses of Stuyvesant’s mind. What?

“As you say, the Hurleighs are of interest to a broad spectrum of the public. And similarly broad is their spectrum of influence: Members of the Hurleigh clan determine policy in everything from a lady’s choice of frock to a government’s choice of ambassador.”

“Okay. What about them?”

“Captain Bunsen may be having an affair with the eldest child, Laura.”

“Jesus.” Stuyvesant’s eyes absently tracked two girls in drab winter coats topped by bright spring cloche hats, whose progress was being thwarted by the turmoil on the corner, but behind his eyes, his mind was in nearly as much turmoil as the crowd. Could his “demmed, elusive Pimpernel” be literally hand in hand with the bluest blood in the realm?

But yes, that’s what the name Hurleigh had stirred up in his mind: a Lady Laura Hurleigh on the passenger manifest of two of the ships Bunsen had traveled on. Stuyvesant would have to retrieve his full folder of case notes from the bank to be sure, but he thought it was the July and January crossings. And if he remembered correctly, both times her cabin had been just down the corridor from his.

Well, well: Richard Bunsen, lover to a Hurleigh. Could The Bastard have used such a woman to camouflage his ties to American radicals?

Or could it be that Stuyvesant was wrong about the man?

He shook himself mentally: Of course he could be wrong about Bunsen, for Christ sake—he wasn’t so utterly fixed on the man’s guilt that he walked around with his eyes shut. But his bones had brought him here, and after spending a week’s spare hours in reading rooms, hunting down the man’s speeches and articles in back issues of the newspapers, he still didn’t think his bones were wrong.

However, this information changed things, no doubt about that. If nothing else, it raised the question of how in hell he was supposed to infiltrate a circle as heady as that one. Quite a different matter from his usual working-men-and-students set.

“You’re pretty sure?”

“It is common knowledge among a certain coterie of, so to speak, political bohemians.”

“Artistic types,” Stuyvesant said. He’d met girls like Laura Hurleigh—Lady Laura, he supposed: rich, spoiled, eager to grab any fruit that society said was forbidden. Girls who played at politics, with no particular conviction except that if their elders disapproved, it must be worthy. Tiresome girls.

“Quite.”

Well, he thought, staring at the two young women without seeing either of them, I suppose I could try that approach. He couldn’t very well clothe himself in the personality of a member of the leisured classes—he was ten years too old, twenty pounds of muscle too heavy, and a whole lot of dollars short of what it called for—but if he didn’t find a way in through Bunsen’s Union connections, he’d try being a starving artist. A Modernistic sculptor, maybe, since he had the build for a man who spent his life bashing stone.

“You need an ‘in,’” Carstairs noted; he might have been reading Stuyvesant’s thoughts.

“You got one?” Stuyvesant asked, not expecting much.

“I may.”

That caught Stuyvesant’s attention.

“I need to come at this obliquely,” Carstairs began. When Stuyvesant nodded his understanding, the man sat back and took out his cigar case. The girls came along the path, and one of them caught Stuyvesant’s eye. Another day, he’d have risen to the occasion; this time he merely gave a polite touch to the brim of his hat. Disappointed, they went on; when Carstairs had his cigarillo alight, he continued.

“During the War,” the Englishman said, “I was with Intelligence. I spent time in a number of different divisions, but I ended up in the, hmm, research wing. Things cooled off considerably, of course, when the War ended, but there were certain programs that maintained their funding, and mine was one of those.

“I cannot go into any detail, you’ll understand, but I will tell you that from time to time we investigated reports of individuals with particular…gifts. Most of them turned out to be either delusions or outright fakes, but every so often, a man or woman would come along with, hmm, knacks we couldn’t quite explain. And when that happened, we tended to keep an eye on that person. Still do, for that matter, although I personally have almost nothing to do with research these days.”

“Okay,” Stuyvesant said.

“There is one man, currently living in Cornwall, who came to my attention shortly after Armistice. He’d been wounded and was convalescing near London. I interviewed him, supervised a series of tests, and found that, indeed, some of his abilities were verifiable. Unfortunately, his wartime experiences had left him, shall we say, vulnerable to stress, and he proved…unsuitable for our purposes. Still, every so often I take a look at him, to see how he is, and to see if his skills remain. When last I had word, he appeared to be, hmm, recovering nicely.”

“Shell shock?”

“Of the worst kind.”

“I’ve seen a few.” Felt it himself, too, although thanks to the ox-like Stuyvesant constitution and a job to get back to, he’d pulled out of it entirely. Almost entirely: Back-firing engines occasionally found him diving for cover. “What do you mean by ‘abilities’? Mind-reading? Talking to spirits?”

Carstairs bristled. “Mr. Stuyvesant, do I seem to you like a gullible person?”

“No,” the American admitted.

“Then please rest assured that our, hmm, tests of his abilities were thought out with care. This man is not a mind-reader. It is not parlor tricks. He is, as they say, the real thing.”

As they were talking, the crowd on the corner had continued to grow. Now, one of the speakers, who was either seven feet tall or standing on a soap-box, launched himself into the sea of hats—working-men’s cloth caps, office-workers’ bowlers, and fashionable soft felt—heading in the direction of his rival, thirty feet away. A roar rose up, whistles pierced the air, and the policemen urged their enormous mounts forward. Carstairs stood impatiently.

“Let us leave this entertainment for the quieter reaches of the park. It’s a pity to waste a fine spring day.”

It was hardly spring, not going by the thermometer anyway, but Stuyvesant had grown up in New York and he wasn’t going to be intimidated by anything less than knee-deep snow. Carstairs led him into the park, away from the riot, while Stuyvesant’s mind chewed on the possibility that this shady Englishman wasn’t just feeding him a heap of horse crap, for some unguessable reason of his own.

“What’s this guy’s name? And what is it he can do?”

“His name is Grey. Captain Bennett Grey.” Carstairs’ oddly sensuous mouth seemed to linger over the name. “As for his abilities, I think the details shall have to wait for a time. Let us say merely that Captain Grey knows things he should not be able to, as if he sees into people. He can, as it were, tell gold from gilt at a touch.” This phrase seemed to please its speaker; one corner of his mouth curled a fraction.