Touchstone (53 page)

Chapter Sixty-Seven

T
HE CANDLE FLAMES WERE STILL LEAPING
from the American’s passing when Laura raised her eyes to Bennett Grey. “I need to talk to Sarah,” she told him. “We haven’t much time.”

“You’re wearing the ring.”

She looked down at her hand, resting on the prayer book. “I am.”

“I could give you another one. Something that doesn’t tarnish quite so much.”

“That would be nice,” she said.

For an instant, Bennett Grey’s heart started to soar, then fell just as swiftly as the world closed in again.

“Kiss me,” she asked.

For an instant, her mouth tasted of brass. He nearly jerked away in horror, but then he caught a sweetness, the taste of stream-cooled wine on a summer’s day. He could feel the fear in her skin, and the hesitation and uncertainty that fought to seize her mind, and the brassy cold despair that moved in the depths. But there was love there, too: love for the Movement, love for the future, and above all love for him.

He drew back to look into her Spanish eyes, and as he watched, the uncertainty faltered and the terror withdrew, until there was nothing but love.

The dark eyes held his, and a spark grew in their depths. The smile she gave him was like a flower, and she said, “If the road is made easy, it is the right one.”

“And here I’d always thought the reverse,” he replied. He gave her another brief kiss, then stood up and scuffled down the aisle in his ill-fitting shoes.

Harris Stuyvesant peered out from under his sheltering arm, braced for a bright light and explosion the moment the book came open.

Nothing happened. The book flew well out from the hill before the air caught it and opened the covers, and changed it from a solid maroon square to a fluttering, wind-blown book. It tumbled, open-paged, in a gentle path down out of sight.

Stuyvesant got to his knees and gaped over the railing, feeling like an utter idiot. The book lay sprawled in complete innocence on the slates of the servants’ hall roof.

“Laura, please—”

“Sarah, we have maybe two minutes before Harris comes back, and I may never have another chance to talk to you with no one listening in. So just listen.

“Harris was wrong. Or partly wrong—oh please, Sarah,
please
let me talk, we don’t have the time. It’s important that you know this.”

“Tell me why,” Sarah begged.

“That…vision you had, five years ago—when the Margolin baby died in your arms? The endless stream of dead infants, pouring through an hour-glass. I’ve never been able to shake that image. It haunted me. Until I finally found something that might be big enough to stop the flow.”

“Killing the Prime Minister?” Sarah sat back in horror, too shocked to protest.

“Listen, Sarah, listen to me. Sacrifice is such an old-fashioned idea, but it is powerful, nothing is more powerful. Sacrifice sticks in the throat, catches the mind, takes a person by the shoulders and shakes him to attention.”

“But, taking the life of—”

“Not just him. Me.”

“You mean…?”

“Think of it. A Hurleigh, offering herself for the cause. I thought maybe—just maybe—a Hurleigh’s blood would be sufficient to stop the flow of dead infants.”

“Sweet Jesus, Laura—”

“But now it’s all come apart. Harris came and the Prime Minister is gone, and I don’t…I don’t know that I’d have had the resolution to carry it out, anyway, not after Bennett and I…”

Laura held out her left hand, looking at the ring with its misshapen brass heart; Sarah could see that she was fighting hard not to weep.

“Oh, it will all be so tawdry now, trial and prison and the family name dragged through the tabloids. It seemed so right, but I can’t do it. I can’t.”

Sarah looked at Laura’s face, but she was seeing the tumbling gray grains of dying children pouring unstoppered through the neck of the glass.

She looked at Laura, and she saw her friend’s sixteen-year-old self, holding aloft Juliet’s vial and declaiming, “
Come, vial. What if this mixture do not work at all?
”

Sarah saw the decades of women who had gone before them, the demonstrations and the brutal arrests and the hunger-strikes and the forced-feedings, all in the cause of winning the vote.

She saw Emily Davison, who threw herself in front of the King’s horse in protest, and was trampled to death.

She saw a thirty-guinea shroud warming the neck of Molly Margolin, ten years old now and still not safe from poverty and oppression.

She saw Laura Hurleigh, proud daughter of a proud family, reduced by love to a joke and a failure in prison drab.

And against it all she saw an act, one bright, shining, decisive act, a bolt of lightning to ignite the people, once and for all. 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 an hour-glass, cutting off the flow of poor.

“Where is it?” she heard herself ask.

“What, the Device?”

“You didn’t give it to Baldwin, did you? Where is it, Laura?”

Laura’s fingers tightened around the book she held. Sarah looked down, and like a bolt, knew that the means of their salvation was literally at hand.

Stuyvesant was running again, another lap in this nightmare traverse of the hillside, back past the Prime Minister and the inhabitants of Hurleigh, past the guards with expressions ranging from confusion to outrage, pounding up the white gravel path, lungs burning, hoping against hope that the stone chapel would continue to sit on the top of its hill, a beacon of faith and light as it had been since the days of St. Columbine.

The lych gate, the cemetery, and here was Grey, curled over his knees on the church porch. Stuyvesant shoved past, hand outstretched for the door.

And then he was falling, with two steely arms circling his legs.

Laura, too, was curled up, over the prayer book that she fought to keep away from Sarah’s fingers. A great thud came from the door, and startled her into glancing up. In an instant, Sarah’s hands thrust past her. Laura shouted at her not to do that, it was dangerous, what did she—

Stuyvesant crashed down on the porch floor, his fists cracking against the heavy wooden door. He squirmed around to pound at Grey’s arms.

And the world exploded.

When the guards reached the chapel, they found Harris Stuyvesant, dazed and deaf and struggling to get out from under the remains of the door, but otherwise intact. A small blond man in peculiar clothing was picking himself up from the ground outside, stumbling in a circle before he headed towards the chapel.

But the big man was upright and he stepped in front of the smaller man, folding his arms around him, keeping him from the smoking doorway as if it meant his life.

The chapel windows were gone, the ground a carpet of glittering glass shards. Inside, they found the front pews lying crooked as if kicked by a furious giant. A fine layer of dust and blood lay over everything.

Oddly enough, the small Tiepolo of the Madonna and Child and the time-blackened carving of the life of Christ were found in the lee of the altar, dusty but undamaged. Almost as if someone had taken them down from the wall before the service began, and placed them there, for protection.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

S
T
. C
OLUMBINE’S CHAPEL WAS DESTROYED
shortly before ten-thirty that Sunday morning. Within ten minutes, neighboring farmers were beginning to arrive, to see if help was required. One of them was dispatched back home to fetch his farm lorry.

It was thought faster than waiting for an ambulance from the city.

It hadn’t been the Army’s experimental explosive, although its effect on Laura was devastating enough. But Sarah was still breathing when they brought her off the hill on the Hurleigh stretcher. She was still breathing when they got her settled on the feather bed laid in the back of the lorry, and when they tucked the blankets around her torn body. Grey got in on one side, with a farmer’s wife who had trained as a nurse, and the lorry started off.

Stuyvesant watched the farm-lorry ease gingerly away. He wanted to grab his head and scream, he wanted to curl up and weep. Most of all, he wanted to climb up beside them and help Sarah take one breath, then another.

Then he was running, catching it opposite the stables. He pulled himself up, startling the nurse with his sudden appearance.

“Laura said Bunsen had nothing to do with this. Was she telling the truth?” Grey’s eyes did not leave his sister.

“Grey, I have to know.
Was Bunsen involved?
”

The lorry lurched over a pothole, and Grey bent to hold Sarah steady. There was as much blood on him as there was on her, his tight grip supplementing the tourniquet on her arm.

“Bennett,” he begged.

The lorry was nearly at the ford before Grey looked up. Stuyvesant didn’t need his hearing to read the answer on the other man’s face.

“No. Bunsen had nothing to do with it.”

After a long minute, when accusations and self recriminations passed back and forth between them, Stuyvesant let go and stepped down to the drive. He watched until the vehicle was out of sight, then began the long uphill trudge to Hurleigh House.

He did not see the garden or the lodge, did not think where he was or what he was doing until he somehow found himself inside the house, with a familiar face talking at him.

“What?”

It was Alex, the Hurleigh footman. He repeated loudly, “Luncheon, sir. It was thought that people might need to eat, regardless. We’ve set it up in the breakfast room. However, if I may suggest, perhaps you might permit Mrs. Bleaks to treat your injuries first. May I take you to her?”

Stuyvesant looked down at his hands, then at the front of his shirt. Clothes and hands were stiff with dried blood, but it wasn’t his it was Helen’s. No, not Helen…

“No. Sorry. I’ll take care of it.”

As he passed through the house, he overheard pieces of conversation that came as through cotton-wool; for all their meaning, they might have been distant birdsong.

“Why did they send the fire teams? There’s no fire.”

“Oh, you know the village, they’re always—”

Those voices drifted out of his hearing, replaced by, “Mrs. Bleaks wants to know if they’ve decided about the afternoon meeting, will it be—”

“I do not care to disturb the Duke.” This was Gallagher. “Perhaps the Prime Minister would—”

“Mr. Gallagher, sir, there’s a problem in the drive, I—”

Stuyvesant heard the words, if dimly, but could summon no more interest in the all-important afternoon session, when declarations were to be signed and loyalties declared, than he could for the problem in the drive.

He walked out of the house to the circle, where he paused, distracted by the change that had taken place in the past few minutes.

The circle was now clotted with vehicles, from a shiny fire-truck to a rustic cart whose horse was eating the white roses. Gallagher came out of the gate behind him, spotted the desecration, and set off at a unbutlerian sprint to pull the animal away. Stuyvesant watched the man as he might have watched a cat stalking a mouse or a bird flying through the sky, a simple creature going about its business. His inability to make out Gallagher’s words made the ensuing event as compelling as any celluloid adventure on a big screen: faintly comic reaction, wild gestures, theatrical emotions of the butler’s fury and the cart driver’s disdain, two men facing off nose to nose. Stuyvesant wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if captions had appeared before his bemused eyes.

He was dimly aware that his brain was not exactly functioning at peak sharpness, but there seemed no particular reason to worry. It was more comfortable this way.

But then the cinematic adventure playing out in front of him took a decidedly bizarre and ominous turn, when Aldous Carstairs walked on stage.

Carstairs was, as always, entirely in black from his shoes to his collar. In the clear light of a spring day, he looked like something brought from another world, winding through the frozen vehicles and their owners.

Then Carstairs saw him. Stuyvesant had never before had a dream in which a character looked at him, registered his presence, and turned towards him. He closed his eyes hard, then stretched them open again.

Carstairs was still coming. What’s more, Gallagher appeared to have noticed the intruder as well, for the butler was breaking off his attack on the cart driver to perform his age-old task of greeting visitors.

This visitor ignored him. He was closing in on Stuyvesant.

Perhaps it wasn’t a dream.

Carstairs’ face said it wasn’t. Carstairs’ face was swollen, his mouth scabbed, as if someone had punched him. Someone
had
punched him, Stuyvesant recalled, his fist tingling with the memory. Was that what was making Carstairs so angry? Because he was furious, but he was frightened, as well—far more frightened than he had been in Grey’s room at the Dog and Pony. He looked almost desperate as he rounded the alpine planting in the center of the circle.

Stuyvesant saw the man’s full lips part and move, but the sounds refused to sort themselves out. He held up a hand to stop the man.

“You’re going to have to talk loud and slow,” he said. “I’m half deaf.”

Carstairs glanced at his wrist-watch and pursed his mouth in irritation, but when he spoke, it was slowly enough for Stuyvesant to make it out. “What happened here? They said something about a bomb in the chapel?”

“Yeah. Laura Hurleigh blew herself up.”

Suddenly, the dreaminess of the past couple of hours quivered, and took a step back. Stuyvesant became aware that his body was bruised and bashed and cold. He craved a bath, as he had never craved anything in his life.

“With what?”

“What do you mean, with what? A bomb. She wanted to assassinate the Prime Minister.”

“Laura Hurleigh?”

“Yeah. Not Bunsen, after all. I haven’t talked to him. Figured it wasn’t my job.”

Carstairs glanced again at his watch. “Where is everyone? The Prime Minister? The Duke?”

“In the house. They’re serving lunch.”

Carstairs’ face went taut, his mouth tugged in on itself: being unable to hear his voice’s subtleties, Stuyvesant had to go by the man’s face, and what it looked like to him was sheer panic. “We’ve got to get them out,” Carstairs blurted, and took a step towards the house.

Stuyvesant caught his arm. “Why?”

Carstairs jerked away.

“What’s going on?” the American demanded. “Why do we have to get them out?”

“It’s just, if there was one bomb, there could be another.”

It had the desperation of a spur of the moment story, and Stuyvesant didn’t believe it for an instant. He hung on to the man’s arm, his thoughts whirling.

“Why are you here? And how the hell did you know where—”

He stopped. Carstairs knew where to find Grey because he’d had them followed the previous afternoon. And Carstairs was in a panic—actually sweating, this man of ice. Why? The bomb was over and done and everyone but Sarah was…

He saw Grey’s face twisted with pain:
He’s planning something.
The sense that Carstairs was working on two levels. His sudden interest in Bunsen, after dismissing him as without importance.

And now, the look of desperation, as if some plan was about to blow up in his face.

Blow up…

“You have to tell me,” Stuyvesant said. Carstairs tore his gaze from the stones of Hurleigh House. He looked up into the American’s hard eyes, then down, for the third time, at his watch.

“There’s another bomb,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I…”

“You know because it’s
yours.
You? Set a bomb in Hurleigh House?” Stuyvesant’s hand must have clamped harder because Carstairs grabbed it and worked to pull it off. He let go, but felt it make a fist. He wasn’t going to knock the man out again, much as he would love to: Carstairs couldn’t be so sure.

“I didn’t set it, but it’s there. It’s due to go off at a time when the D—when the delegates are elsewhere, in their afternoon session. It is just to frighten them. Who could have imagined that…” The man’s words trailed away.

Who could have imagined that a real bomb would go off, rendering a planted one highly suspect? Stuyvesant had time for one stark self accusation—
Would Carstairs even have considered a bomb, if I hadn’t laid a bomber in his lap?
—before his mind snapped to attention.

“When?”

“One forty-five.”

Stuyvesant looked at his wrist, found his watch missing, and grabbed at Carstairs’: One-oh-seven. Thirty-eight minutes. If the timer was accurate.

“Where is it?”

“I’m not—”

“You lie to me, I’ll break your knee, right now. In the Great Hall? The solar? Where. Is. It.”

Carstairs slumped. “It will probably be in the Duke’s study.”

“You’re trying to murder the Duke of Hurleigh?” Stuyvesant said, appalled. Carstairs glanced around, but there was no one close enough to have heard.

“It’s a fake,” Carstairs said, or maybe,
It’s a feint.

“The bomb’s a fake?”

“The bomb’s real. The attempt is a fake. He’s supposed—He
was
supposed to be with the others in the Great Hall.”

All that meticulous planning, all those precise timetables and specific seating charts had flown out the window with Laura’s
attentat
in the chapel. God only knew where the Duke would be, now.

Stuyvesant wondered vaguely who Carstairs’ inside man was, but this was not the time. “Where is the bomb hidden?”

“The Duke collects Staffordshire dogs. Porcelain, you know? A parcel was delivered yesterday, with a thank-you gift for his collection. It’s inside that.”

“What does it look like?”

“I have no idea. Lakely bought it.”

“Great,” Stuyvesant said. There must be hundreds of the damned things in the house. “What about the device itself? What’s the explosive? Does it have any detonator but the timer?”

Carstairs shook his head.

“I should just shoot you here,” Stuyvesant told him, “but I need you to get everyone out. Nobody goes back to their rooms, everyone gets accounted for, family, servants, and delegates. I don’t care what you tell them,
everyone
out in five minutes.”

Without looking to see Carstairs go, Stuyvesant turned to shout, “Gallagher!”

His voice seemed to be loud, because the butler leapt as if a gun had gone off. His return speed through the cars and lorries in the circle wasn’t quite as fast as his outward sprint had been, but it was fast enough.

“Yes, sir?”

“A parcel arrived for the Duke on Friday. One of his porcelain knickknacks.”

“Yes, sir. An anonymous gift, although he knew it was from Mr. Bunsen.”

Stuyvesant was distracted enough to ask how he’d known.

“It came from the same dealer as a smaller one that Mr. Bunsen gave him last year.”

“Right. What was it?”

“Sir?”

“The thing. What did it look like?”

“I don’t know, sir. I carried it into the Duke’s study and he unpacked it there. He’s very particular about his little treasures, sir.”

“You didn’t see it at all?”

“Not then. Although I did, of course, notice that he had put it into his cabinet.”

“Of course you did. Where did he put it?”

“On the center shelf, towards the right. Which indicated that he was rather taken with it, sir.”

“Thank you, Gallagher. Now, there’s a problem in the house and I need you to help get everyone outside, fast. You’ll find a fellow named Carstairs, starting the job. But,” he said, and hesitated. To trust Grey, or not? If he’d been wrong, or distracted, or lying…Stuyvesant made up his mind. “Find Mr. Bunsen and send him to me. I’ll be in the Duke’s study. And we’ll need tools—wire snips and screwdrivers, an assortment.”

“Mr. Bunsen is…rather indisposed, sir.”

“I hope that doesn’t mean dead drunk.”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. Although I did leave him with a decanter.”

“Shit. Well, bring him, anyway.”

Most of the work Stuyvesant had done with bombs involved the result, not the object itself. When it came to defusing Carstairs’ bomb, the best chance they had was a sapper’s iron nerves and steady hands.

A drunk, Communist sapper whose lover had just deliberately blown herself to pieces.