Touchstone (48 page)

He was standing at the wardrobe when he caught Grey’s quick motion out of the corner of his eye, at the same instant a sound came from the doorway. He dropped the coat and whirled towards the door, but it slammed open and a man stood there, pointing a gun at him—two men, since Aldous Carstairs was behind the man’s shoulder. There was a gun in his hand, as well.

Stuyvesant spread the fingers of both hands, palms out, even as his head was turning towards Grey, to plead with him not to shoot. The words died in his throat. Grey had the revolver, yes, and his finger rested on the trigger, but he was not aiming it at the men in the doorway.

Grey was pressing the barrel of the Colt into his own right temple.

Half a mile away, Sarah Grey stood next to the car, smoking. At her feet was a scattering of cigarette ends, testifying more to the state of her nerves than the length of time she’d stood here. She looked at her watch again, held it to her ear to make sure it hadn’t stopped since she’d listened to it three minutes earlier, and dropped the cigarette to the ground, crushing it under her shoe as if it was the face of one of those clinic doctors. Or that man Carstairs, whom she’d met once and that was enough. He was probably behind this somehow, he seemed just the sort.

She stopped twisting her heel, her head coming up like a frightened deer: Was that a gunshot?

After a minute, she decided it wasn’t. She resumed smashing the object into the ground, took a circuit around the car, and looked at her cigarettes: two left. She looked at her watch: eighteen minutes more would make an hour.

And what then? Could she just motor away? Knowing that Harris and Bennett were, as Harris had put it, “stuck there”? She couldn’t imagine what it would take to keep the American in a place he didn’t want to be—or rather, she
could
imagine, but she didn’t want to.

Come, now, Sarah, she chided herself: This is England, not some despotic country where men vanish overnight. What can happen to a British citizen and his American friend, here in the heart of England?

She lit her next-to-last cigarette, clinging to the distant comfort of the Duke of Hurleigh, standing ready to come to her aid.

Chapter Sixty

I
N THE
H
URLEIGH
G
REAT
H
ALL,
under beams harvested by men whose fathers could have known Chaucer, lifted into place when the sons of the house were fighting the Hundred Years’ War, one of the mine owners snapped. Despite everything Laura Hurleigh could do to present herself as unbiased, her preferences for the working man invariably crept in, and finally, the red-faced Mr. Branning lived up to his complexion and lumbered to his feet, pounding his fist onto the table and sending the crystal bouncing and tipping onto the linen cloth.

“We haven’t gone back on a single one of our agreements!” he shouted. “Not a one, even those that were forced down our throats by the government. We’ve lived up to our word and now we’re looking to be punished yet again for giving way last year and the year before that and every year since 1911. Well, it’s not going to happen, we swallowed those losses because we were asked to and they’re getting bigger every day, until it’s got to the point of standing firm or closing the mines and leaving the country to depend on German coal. And how long will that last, I ask you? No!” He shook off Laura’s supplicating hand on his arm. “I’ll not be patted and cajoled into bankruptcy. I’m a reasonable man, but this has gone too far.”

And that was when the other side of Laura Hurleigh’s heritage came into play. She drew herself to her full height, a scant quarter-inch less than the angry man in front of her. “Mr. Branning, will you please come and talk with me?”

“I’ll not—”

“Please.”

Her voice, not raised in the least, cracked like the end of a whip in his face. She moved not a hair, just waited, rock-hard and implacable, until his chest deflated and his eyes went to the side. She immediately lost half an inch in height as she reached to take the table napkin from his left hand, dropped it on the table, and tucked her arm through his. As they strolled out of the dining room, her voice murmured words inaudible to the others.

Mr. Branning had been raised by a no-nonsense nanny; the habits of obedience were in his bones.

They came back in over the pudding course, Branning looking only faintly defiant, Laura with her customary regal friendliness back in place.

The meeting went on.

The sight of Bennett Grey holding the gun to his head put a whole different complexion on the matter of men with guns. The first man in the doorway had his weapon on Stuyvesant, and held it there, but in seconds, Carstairs had followed Stuyvesant’s horrified gaze and saw Grey.

“Hold it,” Carstairs said to his man. The man didn’t move, because Stuyvesant hadn’t moved. “Snow,” Carstairs said, and reached around him to push the gun down. The man called Snow resisted the push and glanced back at Carstairs, then over at Grey. After a moment’s thought, he permitted his gun to be pushed away from Stuyvesant, although he held it ready as Carstairs slipped past him into the room.

“Captain Grey, what do you think you’re doing?”

Stuyvesant answered for Grey. “You can see what he’s doing, Carstairs. He’s telling you that he’s leaving this place, one way or another.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s just getting settled in.”

“You sure you want to do this in front of your man, here?” Stuyvesant asked.

Carstairs glanced at the man Snow. “Wait in the hallway for me.”

“Sir, I—”

“Are you questioning me, Mr. Snow?”

“Sir,” he said, and stepped into the hall. Carstairs closed the door, not turning his back to the room, and took a step in the direction of Grey. Grey fixed him with a look, and gave an infinitesimal shake of the head. Carstairs stopped, then moved sideways to a chair and sat down, his revolver held loosely between his knees. Stuyvesant stayed where he was. The gun Grey held stayed where it was. Stuyvesant broke the silence.

“Seems to me you’ve got a choice here, Mr. Carstairs. You can either let Grey walk out of here, or you can have his corpse. Up to you.”

“Dear boy,” Carstairs, speaking to Grey, “you don’t want to do anything rash. What would your sister say?”

The gun settled itself more firmly into the skin, and from where Stuyvesant stood he could see the finger tighten a fraction on the trigger. “Now now now,” he said loudly, “threatening his sister isn’t going to do it, Carstairs. Without Grey, that would be just revenge, and we all know your heart wouldn’t be in it. Not with Sarah being a personal friend of the Hurleigh family, and all.”

Slowly, the finger relaxed. Stuyvesant drew a relieved breath.

“Carstairs, you’ve lost this round. And even if I hadn’t come and provided Grey with a weapon, you’d have had the same problem within a few days. You knew it, too—I’d bet he hasn’t been within grabbing distance of a knife or a rope since you took him off the train. By now you have to be asking yourself how long it takes, for a man to starve himself to death.”

Carstairs said nothing, his face stony.

“But even if you stuck a feeding tube down his throat, what the hell good would it do you? He’d refuse to help you, or he’d mess with your experiments until they were useless. He’d make your Truth Project a laughingstock.”

Carstairs still said nothing, but he began to look like Grey had when the food hit his stomach.

Stuyvesant forced himself to turn his back on the man with the gun, and looked into Grey’s eyes.

“Bennett, listen to me. You don’t have to shoot yourself. I’m going to take you away. And after that, I promise, I will keep Sarah safe. Killing yourself will not protect her. But let me just ask you something.

“This ‘gift’ of yours, the ability to see the truth, it’s not a thing I would wish on an enemy. If I knew any way you could get rid of it, I’d tell you in a second. You believe me?”

He waited until Grey gave a brief nod.

“You’ve been dealt a hand nobody should have to take. But. But—and don’t panic here, I promise I’ll back you up, whatever you decide.
If
you could find a way to make this ‘gift’ of yours useful to your King and country, without Carstairs and without being trapped here, would you?”

He didn’t give Grey a chance to answer, but went on. “What I’m wondering is, could you bear to make yourself available to the Project scientists for maybe two days, a couple times a year? Letting them run their tests, giving them results that they can think about for a while, then get roaring drunk and go home to Cornwall. Two days, twice a year, no Aldous Carstairs in sight, and the chance to help your country come up with a machine that reads truth instead of you.”

Grey said nothing, did not move, but Stuyvesant, sitting at arm’s length from him, saw the unmistakable trickle of hope coming into his eyes.

He sat back and turned to Carstairs. “Mr. Carstairs, that leaves the decision with you. You can have the personal satisfaction of keeping Grey under your control, either behind bars or by holding his sister’s safety over his head, when every hour you do so risks his life, your safety, and the future of your Project. Or you can take your hands off him, and preserve your Project.

“I think the Project is important to you. And I think, despite everything, you want to serve your country.”

As solutions went, it was simple and it was obvious, but it required the people involved to put their own interests to the side. Which meant that Stuyvesant wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have to shoot his way out of the place until he saw Carstairs sit back and slip his gun into his coat pocket.

Grey immediately let the gun fall away and gasped, as if a hand had been taken from his mouth and nose. Stuyvesant grabbed the weapon, turning it on Carstairs, just in case.

“Get your things, we’re going now.”

It took Grey two tries, but he made it to his feet, and walked shakily over to where Stuyvesant had dropped the overcoat.

Stuyvesant kept his eye on Carstairs, and kept the gun at the ready. If the man opened his mouth to say something about bombs, Stuyvesant would have to knock him out: The last thing he needed was to get Bennett Grey all hot and bothered over twenty ounces of missing explosive—he was sure to learn about the Hurleigh House meeting, and he’d put the two together in a flash, and no doubt insist on turning the people there upside down, negotiations be damned.

But Carstairs said nothing, just watched Grey limp across the room to the table and stuff his possessions into various pockets.

“I’m ready.”

Carstairs stirred. “You and I have unfinished business, Mr. Stuyvesant.”

In response, Stuyvesant raised the gun, aimed at the spot where the silken tie disappeared behind the charcoal waistcoat, and pulled the trigger.

Sarah Grey looked at her watch: Harris had said to leave in an hour, and that was ten minutes past. But she couldn’t just leave, not without being sure.

She studied the treetops as if there might be a note from him, wafting out of the blue, and then she settled her hat and turned to the woods.

She wasn’t going after him. She was just making sure that she didn’t leave ten seconds before he came out from the trees.

It seemed a long, long walk through the house and past the outbuildings to the woods. When they had reached the line of trees, Stuyvesant stopped to let Grey catch his breath. He cracked open the revolver and loaded it with a handful of bullets from his pocket, putting it back into his belt. Then he looked at his companion with a slightly sickly grin.

“When did you know the gun had no bullets in it?” he asked Grey.

“I suspected when you left it on the table next to me. I wasn’t sure until I picked it up. It was too light.”

“I couldn’t take a chance that you would use it.”

“I might have done, at that.”

“And you’d have missed the chance to see Aldous Carstairs practically shitting himself.”

“Yes,” Grey replied. “Moments like that make it almost worth-while.”

Stuyvesant had pulled the trigger, and the click rang loud. Carstairs blinked fast, many times, as Stuyvesant walked over and bent down before him, seeing his own face in the black eyes. “Never doubt,” he said. “Never. Grey would have pulled the trigger. And if the gun failed, he would have found another way. Send the rest of his things to Cornwall, Mr. Carstairs. And I suggest you write him there, when your scientists are ready for him. I’ll phone you this afternoon. And now you can tell your man outside that we’re leaving.”

Now, safe from pursuit, Stuyvesant looked at his watch. “Damn, that took longer than I expected. Can you go now?”

They moved deeper into the trees, Grey walking more easily, although with few reserves of energy.

“Do you think he’ll stick to his side of the bargain?” he asked.

“I think that when it comes down to it, he’ll choose power over controlling you. Want to know how I came up with it?”

“How?”

“I asked myself what Laura would do. Last night I watched her walk into a roomful of men who hate each other’s guts, and in no time flat she had them all moving from their sides onto her side. And so when I thought about your problem, and asked myself how Laura Hurleigh would handle it, I realized that it was time for a third point of view. Neither wins, neither loses—offering your limited participation was obvious, once I’d thought about it. The tricky bit was to be certain that Sarah couldn’t be used as a weapon against you in the meantime.”

“And you are certain of that? That she’s done nothing to put herself at risk of arrest?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you have any evidence?”

“Not a blessed thing. Someone could claim she set those three American bombs all on her lonesome and I couldn’t
prove
otherwise. But you can’t fake her kind of goodness. There’s not a jury in the land that would convict her of anything but naïveté. I’d bet my life on it.”

And as if his praise had summoned her from the trees like a naiad, she was there, running down the faint pathway to fling herself first at her brother, then at Harris.

Back at the car, Stuyvesant folded himself into the narrow back seat, and fell asleep listening to Sarah’s cheerful chatter.