Touchstone (4 page)

Jesus, these Brits, Stuyvesant thought—you ask them a simple question and they give you Shakespeare, or hints to a maze. Were they always as convoluted as he’d found them, or was all this wool-pulling a way of hiding their Strike jitters? Every bureaucrat he’d talked to acted as if he felt solely responsible for holding the working class at bay with a stack of forms.

“Okay, so Captain Grey has some funny skills. Why should I be interested in him?”

Carstairs’ cigar had gone out, so he slowed his steps to concentrate on restoring it to a clean, burning end, then resumed. “I needed to tell you about Captain Grey so you would know why Richard Bunsen’s name caught my attention when you brought it up. In fact, I had to go back into the files to refresh my memory, but it turns out that we have been, hmm, aware of Mr. Bunsen as early as 1919, when he was arrested for inciting mutiny.

“He’s an interesting fellow, quite bright, by all accounts very good looking, although I haven’t met him myself. Comes from what you might call mixed stock. His maternal grandfather was knighted, but turned out to have something of a weakness for the horses, so there wasn’t much to pass on. After he died, the daughter took a position in a boys’ school near Leeds to support herself and her mother. There she married a retired accountant, the son of a stone mason, who himself had been born to a family of coal miners. A heritage, you understand, that Bunsen flaunts when he wishes to claim working-class origins.

“The accountant died when young Richard was ten. The mother worked herself into an early grave to get the boy to a good school, where he shed his accent and learned to fit in—to a certain extent. He was invited to leave that school at fifteen when he threw his first rock through a window—seemed the headmaster had instructed his pretty daughter to have nothing to do with young Bunsen, and the boy resented it. Threatened to burn the school down, in fact.”

“A temper, then?”

“Quite. He kept himself under control through his remaining years at a lesser school, did well enough to get into university in London, and joined the Army in 1914, at the age of twenty. He served until Armistice, most of the time in France. Injured twice, once seriously enough for home leave, when I’d say he had too much time to sit and think about things. As I said, he was arrested in the spring of 1919 for inciting soldiers awaiting demobilization to take things into their own hands. To mutiny.

“Charges were dismissed, eventually, but after that, one began to see Bunsen’s name regularly in the
Workers’ Weekly,
articles or reports of speeches given at Communist rallies. He made a trip to Moscow in 1920, although he quieted down a little afterwards. I’d have said he was becoming a little disillusioned with the Workers’ Party, although he was arrested again in 1921, during our last unrest among the coal miners. He got banged around a bit and spent a few weeks in prison. That may have effected a change of heart in the man, because he drew back from the more extreme policies he’d been promoting, and within a year began to cultivate friends in key places. Such as Matthew Ruddle, Labour Party Member of Parliament.”

Bunsen was thirty-two years old, Stuyvesant reflected, and fire-brands often cooled with age, as the anger and energy of their radical youth diminished. However, sometimes the bright ones simply learned to hide their fire under a basket.

And if Bunsen was saving his most radical tendencies for export, it might make it easier to put on a mask of calm and reason at home. He wouldn’t be the first revolutionary to lead a double life.

“And this, finally—” Carstairs began, but Stuyvesant interrupted.

“Sorry, I knew some of what you’ve told me, his age and his rank and some of his history, but one thing I’ve never heard was what he did during the War, whether he was frontline or rear echelon. I don’t suppose you know?”

Carstairs raised his face and gave Stuyvesant a smile that was startlingly full and warm, a smile that even touched those cold obsidian eyes.

“I wondered when you would ask me that. Halfway through the War, while he was recovering from his wound, Captain Richard Bunsen entered a training course that his maternal forefathers might have understood, one that kept him underground, there to be a leader among a tightly knit group of workers.

“Bunsen was, hmm, a sapper. He crawled through tunnels dug by his men, to lay explosive charges beneath enemy lines.”

Chapter Four

C
ARSTAIRS’ WIDE MOUTH CURLED
slightly at Stuyvesant’s reaction, but Stuyvesant could not begrudge him his gloat—the man deserved it, even if he’d forced Stuyvesant to tease it out of him like a big fish on a light line. This one piece of knowledge alone made his trip across the ocean worth-while.

“Demolitions, huh? Thank you, Major Carstairs.”

“It adds a certain pleasing, hmm, completeness to the picture, does it not? And this brings us around to your particular need. As I was saying, Bunsen appears to have been distancing himself from the radical fringe. He is working his way up in the more mainstream political world, in part by immersing himself in Union work, but also through his establishment of a politically orientated organization with the, shall we say, rather optimistic name of Look Forward, which sponsors speakers, free legal representation, and educational opportunities to the working classes.

“As a part of this transformation, Bunsen takes care to make regular appearances in the vicinity of Good Works. In recent years, many of those stem from his attachment to Lady Laura Hurleigh. She is a founding member of a group of health care clinics called Women’s Help, which operate in the poorest areas of London. An association with these clinics bestows on Bunsen a distinct cachet of respectability and responsibility.”

“Like they say, you can’t buy that kind of press.”

“Er, quite. In any case, Lady Laura has a number of staff who oversee the day-to-day running of the clinics, but her overall assistant, her right-hand woman, if you will, who appears recently to have taken on a number of functions in the Bunsen organization as well”—(if he dragged this out any longer, Stuyvesant was going to throttle it out of him)—“is a sweet but naïve young lady by the name of Sarah Grey.”

Ha! Stuyvesant thought—at last. “Grey. Related to your mind-reader?”

“His sister. But please don’t call him—”

“Yeah, I know, he’s just another shell-shocked officer.”

Carstairs frowned again at the end of his cigar, although it was burning just fine. “You know, Agent Stuyvesant, I am grateful to you for bringing me your question regarding Bunsen yesterday. Not only have you caused me to focus on a potential troublemaker, but in reviewing his file, I remembered Captain Grey, and realized that I hadn’t been in touch with him in some time. Honestly, I’d nearly forgotten about him, but I’d be neglecting my duty if I didn’t check on him.”

When someone like Aldous Carstairs used the word
honestly
—and in a speech devoid of
hmm
s,
shall we says,
or
so to speak
s—it might have been a neon arrow flashing at the opposite.

“Glad to be of service. So, how does your man Grey come into this?”

“Almost not at all, considering how much of a hermit the man has become. I gather that he and his sister—whom I met briefly, long ago—see each other rarely, although they no doubt exchange letters. However, they are in some contact, which is what brought him to mind as a potential link in your chain. What if Captain Grey were to provide you with an introduction to his sister? Would that give you enough of a foot in Bunsen’s door?”

To this point, all they’d traded was information; now, Carstairs was proposing action, a thing that could put Stuyvesant in his debt. “It would save me days of footwork,” Stuyvesant admitted slowly. Weeks, even. “But why would Grey do that? He doesn’t know me from Adam.”

The smile returned, but the earlier flower of warmth had been replaced by something very cold indeed. “He would do it if
I
asked him.”

“Doesn’t sound to me like your Captain Grey would be that enthusiastic about it.”

“Mr. Stuyvesant, I assume that America’s enemies are like our own, serious and without qualms. If you’re going to go all polite and ethical on me, perhaps you ought to return to New York.”

Stuyvesant replied lightly, “Oh, it’s not being a bastard that worries me. It’s just that forcing someone to help has a way of back-firing in your face.”

“Perhaps, Mr. Stuyvesant, you haven’t tried the correct kind of force.” Carstairs dropped the stub of cigarillo to the ground and stepped on it. “So, would you care to come to Cornwall with me and ask him?”

Stuyvesant turned away to survey a not terribly inspiring vista, pretending to consider the offer while in fact he was composing his face. He was badly taken aback by the first honest emotion he’d seen in the man—frankly, he wished he hadn’t seen it.

What Carstairs had shown Stuyvesant, either inadvertently or on purpose, was clear, raw
pleasure.
The black eyes had sparkled, his heel had nearly danced as it came down on the smoldering tobacco; suddenly, Stuyvesant was as physically aware of the man as he would have been of a dog with bared teeth; he found that he had instinctively half turned to face him rather than have Carstairs at his back.

“You need me to be there?”

“If you’re going to pretend to be Captain Grey’s friend when you meet his sister, you ought at least know what he looks like and how he lives. And I can see no reason, once you have met him, why I should not give you further information on him. Some of it may prove useful when you are in conversation with his sister.”

“You could just tell me now.”

“Actually,” Carstairs said, sounding very final, “I’d prefer that you meet Captain Grey without, as it were, preconceptions. Afterwards, I will tell you all about him.”

Stuyvesant couldn’t imagine why Carstairs was so almighty eager to take him to see this Grey. Did the man, unlike everyone else in the city, have nothing better to do than hare off to Cornwall? There was something going on here he wasn’t too sure about, some invisible trip wire in front of his toes.

Still, it wasn’t like he had a whole lot of other choices on his plate.

“Okay, if you think we need to go to Cornwall, I’ll go with you. When do we leave?”

“Ten o’clock tomorrow evening.”

The instructions that followed made it clear that Carstairs had the trip planned out before they met. Before they parted, Carstairs handed him the case, telling him that it contained a few items about the players in their little drama.

“One last thing,” he said, his hands still locked on the handle.

“What’s that?” Stuyvesant asked, fighting the urge to rip the thing out of the man’s hand.

“His sister. I would request that you make it clear to Captain Grey that his sister is in considerable danger of finding herself enmeshed in a kind of political action that has, hmm, profound consequences. If he cares for her, he must intervene.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

Carstairs relinquished his hold on the case, and strolled away into the park.

Stuyvesant was so eager to see the papers that he walked over to the nearest bench and took out his reading glasses, then and there. He found, however, that
a few items
was distressingly accurate. And those were, for the most part, about Lady Laura Hurleigh and Sarah Grey, with almost nothing about Richard Bunsen. And nothing at all concerning Bennett Grey.

He folded away his glasses and tucked Carstairs’ case under his arm, making his way back to the library he’d been using that week, wrestling with his thoughts.

Richard Bunsen, his suspect, was a Red trained in the use of explosives. And beyond the mere fact that he possessed the requisite skills, this was a man who had occupied a distinct niche in the military hierarchy: the tightly knit world of the sappers, who labored out of sight of their compatriots, burrowing in silence through the terrible wet earth, raising their thin props against the suffocating weight overhead. Once their secret tunnel reached enemy lines, the miners themselves would draw back, leaving the field to the demolitions man, to lay his charges and breach the enemy’s defenses from the hidden depths. The demo man worked with the miners, but not only was he an officer, he was also subtly apart, slightly above those of his own rank, in the aristocracy of the trenches. He had proved himself, time and again, as a man with icy resolve, unwavering focus, and the steadiest hands on the Front.

Richard Bunsen had been that man. And not only had he survived, he appeared to be one of those rare men who’d had
a good war:
Despite injury and long service, he’d come through with his wits, his nerves, his body, and, most particularly, his reputation intact.

And now, eight years after the war ended, thirty-two-year-old Richard Bunsen, decorated officer and passionate advocate of the working man, had managed to snare the daughter of one of the highest families in the land as his mistress. On the surface, an admirable sort of fellow, as was this enigmatic Captain Grey whom Stuyvesant would cross the country to see. Stuyvesant could only pray he didn’t actually come to like either man. It had happened before, that he liked his enemy, but it always made things tough.

And in the other corner of the ring, he thought, Aldous Carstairs: behind-the-lines Intelligence major, whose mouth suggested debauchery and whose handshake spoke of distaste. A man Scotland Yard didn’t care to acknowledge. A man who for some inexplicable reason relished the idea of using force on Captain Bennett Grey. And the man who was, apparently, to be Stuyvesant’s confederate on these shores.

He’d met men like Carstairs before, men who came to the world of Intelligence for the power. And occasionally, for the pleasure: During the War, Intelligence meant interrogations. In the years since, Stuyvesant had done his share of questioning, hard interrogations with weighty consequences. Enemies, as Carstairs had said, who were serious and without qualms. He’d used his fists when he had to—hard men required hard treatment, and sometimes the only way to get their respect was to beat it into them. But he’d never permitted one of his interrogations to descend into outright torture.

And he’d never taken any pleasure from the process. He’d never enjoyed seeing a man broken. He’d never felt bigger or happier or fulfilled when his opponent gave way.

However, he’d seen men who did. Law enforcement, especially Intelligence, could provide a haven for such men.

Men like Aldous Carstairs.

In a lifetime of having to overlook the means in the interest of the end, he couldn’t remember ever having less enthusiasm about a colleague.