Touchstone (8 page)

Chapter Ten

S
TUYVESANT STARED
at Grey, then picked up the glass he’d left in the middle of the table and took a swallow. This time he wheezed in reaction, a spasm that reached to his diaphragm, but did not cough. “How?”

“How do I know these things? I don’t know how I know. I never do, although sometimes I can follow—” Grey stopped and tilted his head, listening to something Stuyvesant had not heard. He raised his voice, slipping into the dialect he had used earlier. “Robbie, pard, tha may’s well come in, tha’ll get a crick in thy neck listenin’ loik that.”

After a moment, a cloth cap appeared in the door’s polished glass, followed by the tousled head, pale eyes, downy face of adolescence, and finally the red wool shoulders. The latch lifted and the simple lad came in, sidling up to Grey, picking at the loose threads of his jersey in a show of embarrassment.

“This is my neighbor, Robbie Trevalian,” Grey told the American. “He likes to keep me safe. Robbie, say ’ello t’ Mr. Stuyvesant.”

The Cornishman kept his head lowered, but slid his eyes sideways to examine the guest. “Thet nahm’s tew long,” he complained.

“My other name’s Harris,” Stuyvesant told him. “How about using that?”

“Robbie, me ’ansum, Ah godda jawb fur thee,” Grey told him.

The head came up, the translucent eyes gleamed with joy. “Wass tha’?”

Grey pulled out his pocket-watch and laid it on the table, opening the cover. “Thee sawr that other gennlemun, went off daun the lane?”

“Th’ man in black?” Robbie’s voice contained an oddly fastidious note of distaste.

“That’s right. Ah told ’un ee cudden come back ’til four o’clock. Can thee show me where four o’clock is?”

Robbie bent over the instrument, face screwed in concentration. “Long ’and here, short ’and there.”

“Tha’s a beauty at clocks, all right. Naow, if ee starts to come up the lane afore that, you tell him Mr. Grey’s not home to him until four. Can you do that?”

“Mr. Grey’s not oam t’im unnil four,” he parroted, hitting Grey’s precise intonation.

Grey snapped shut the watch and held it out by the chain. The watch-dog carefully gathered it up and poured it into his capacious pocket, then tugged his cap brim at Stuyvesant and shot out the door, leaving it open to the chilly air. Grey rose to shut it, his balance only slightly compromised now.

“I take it that the kid doesn’t give you a headache?” Stuyvesant asked in amusement.

“No. Or at least, not the same kind of headache. Simple people, small children, the very old, they’re restful. I met a holy man once whose presence was so comforting I wanted to weep.”

Stuyvesant retrieved his cigarette case, opened the lid, and offered Grey one. Grey shook his head, so Stuyvesant closed the lid and turned the silver object over in his own, considerably less hardened hands. “You were telling me how you know those things.”

“I was telling you that I don’t know how I know them,” Grey corrected him.

Stuyvesant thought that was all he was going to get from Grey, but after a minute, the man seemed to come to a decision. He sat back and raised his chin as if meeting a challenge, and watched the impact his words had on his guest.

“I was injured during the War, in a way that stripped me of all barriers. Let’s imagine you and I are walking down a city street. You hear noise, but only as a background to the conversation we’re having; I walk beside you and hear what you’re saying, but only as one element in a flood of sounds and sights and smells: the precise beat of a hundred shoes hitting the pavement, the rub of each moving part of the five combustion engines going past, the sourness of the milk on a doorstep that wasn’t collected that morning, the tug of the breeze on a flag, a palimpsest of fifty conversations. I can tell you which shoe is loose on the rag-and-bone man’s horse, whether the bricklayer on the next street is left-or right-handed, and which of the door-frames we are passing have wood rot.”

He paused, studying the American’s face. Whatever he saw there satisfied him, because he went on.

“You ask how I know these things. How would you explain to a race of blind people that there was a horse on a hillside half a mile away? How would you begin to describe your perception of the shape and color of the animal, the motion the legs make, its progress against the landscape? They would only know the horse if they could hear its hoof beats, smell its skin, touch its body.

“I see a man handling a delicate silver cigarette case whose engraving has been worn down by years of rubbing one thumb across it in a gesture of affection and loss. I see his initials engraved on the front, in a highly original and overly elaborate font, which could only be a visual joke. I see the signs of long, hard service, and a furrow carved along the back, where the shrapnel that hit the man’s left face and shoulder cut into the silver. I see a faint, hidden seam in the back with a polished spot where it has been opened regularly. Inside I see a much-handled photograph, folded to fit the space, where a woman would have provided one trimmed to fit. I see a blonde hair pinned to the photograph. And I see a tough man with one vein of vulnerability running through his hard competence, a weakness for weakness. You’re the kind of man who would without a thought risk his life to rescue a kitten from a drain, and as instantly and without second thought, thrash half to death the man who threw it there. When you were young, you could only have fallen in love with a small, blonde woman.”

Stuyvesant’s face was without expression, then he gave a little grimace and said, “You’re wrong there, I’ve always been a man for leggy redheads. But you’re right about the cigarettes. How’d you know I didn’t bring them from home?”

Grey gave him a curious look, amusement and outrage. “Only one in that case is American, and you finger it longingly before settling for the local brand. The others are permeated with the stink of London, not the salt air of Cornwall. And she was blonde.”

“She was not.” But Stuyvesant was beginning to see why an Intelligence man like Carstairs might be interested in a Cornish hermit.

“And before you begin to wonder how you might train someone to perceive things as I do, I should tell you that the continual scraping of the world against raw nerve is a fine means of driving a man mad. One need only look at the scar on the Major’s face as proof.”

“That was your doing?” Stuyvesant was surprised to hear a trace of admiration in his voice, and jerked at his own leash: Carstairs was the ally he needed, not this man.

“You might call it my letter of resignation from his little project.”

“What project was that?” Grey gave no sign of having heard the question, but Stuyvesant persisted. “Is that what Carstairs is after, a program to teach people your…skills?”

The green eyes flashed in a sudden pulse of irritation. “Who the hell knows what Major bloody Carstairs has in that devious mind of his? Ah, Jesus,” he said, standing up so fast the chair crashed over. “This place just stinks of the bastard. I can’t hear myself think. I must have some air before the rain starts.”

Weaving slightly, Grey stumbled out of the kitchen, leaving the door open to a spring day with not a cloud in sight.

Stuyvesant downed the last of his cold coffee, and picked up his silver case from the table. His broad thumb soothed the letters of his name, letters Helen had designed herself for the purpose (her giggle, as she told him of the engraver’s disapproval), then moved around to pop open the hidden back of the case. He looked down at the folded photograph, but he did not take it out, just snapped the cover shut again and slid it back into the breast pocket of his shirt, over his heart.

He shrugged into his jacket and went after his host.

Chapter Eleven

O
N THE
P
ENZANCE ROAD,
nearly a mile away, Aldous Carstairs leaned into a gap in the hedgerow, aiming a set of small but powerful field-glasses at the white cottage. This was the only spot on the entire road where the building could be seen; he had known of it long before his hired car had left Penzance that morning.

Five years ago, Grey had gone to ground in that cottage, leaving Carstairs with his plans shredded, his future bleak, and his body shaken. But Grey’s betrayal had taught Carstairs an invaluable lesson: Beware eagerness.

Five years ago, Carstairs had been forced into a rapid reevaluation and drastic change of plans; Captain Bennett Grey had receded into a persistent but distant presence on the horizon.

Not that Carstairs had ever taken his eyes entirely off Grey. He had all but memorized the Ordnance Survey maps for this part of Cornwall, knew the names and susceptibilities of every local official, constable to postmistress. Every two months, one of Carstairs’ men passed through, selling pots and pans and making gossipy conversation about, among other topics, the blond hermit on the hill: Carstairs studied his agent’s reports and photographs with care. He knew Grey’s contacts, had known of Grey’s first, tentative ventures into the nearby towns, and had agonized over the balance between surveillance and discretion: It was damned difficult to watch a man in open countryside like this—no doubt the reason Grey chose it. And it had proved even harder to lay hands on a local farmer willing to sell information on his likable, boyish, war hero of a neighbor.

For five years, Bennett Grey had rusticated down here while in London, Aldous Carstairs worked to shape a new vision—one that could incorporate Grey at some future time, but was not dependent on him. He discovered that, with Grey set to the side, he was free to focus without distraction on his renewed vision, striving to build a thing that would hold through the storms of uncontrollable events. He laboriously cemented relationships, created rock-solid foundations, and sought out others who could share his idea of the future.

With each passing year, his creation became clearer, more attainable, more necessary. Inevitable, even—Carstairs had begun to feel as if the nation’s every event and decision was feeding directly into his needs. All was balanced, perfect, necessary. And all was scheduled to reach its pinnacle inside the next three weeks.

Then came Friday afternoon, when an unkempt, ill-mannered American lout dropped out of the heavens to offer Carstairs, not only his first real access to Grey in all those years, but an expansion of what he had envisioned as an afterthought into something considerably closer to the center of things.

It was like a light going on in a room one hadn’t realized was dim, or rain on one of those mythic desert creatures that fold up through years of drought.

However, Carstairs had learned his lesson well. So he had said nothing, although he’d wanted to shout aloud in astonishment. He had sent the lout away, had spent the night exploring the implications and sending out his feelers. Only at the end of that had he decided to trust his original impulse, and come to Cornwall.

In the two days since, he had seen nothing to make him doubt his decision. He still was far from understanding where this development would lead him, but the tantalizing awareness that things had changed because of the American’s request, that wheels were grinding into motion in unexpected ways, filled him with a mix of equal parts exhilaration and terror.

Exhilaration because he could suddenly see that, with Grey, so much became possible—one glance at those green eyes today and he’d shivered with the thrill of knowing that time had not cured Grey of his singular talents. Terror because he knew that what he was building was at the moment agonizingly precarious. At a certain point in its construction, even the grandest cathedral was vulnerable to a minor tremor: One clumsy nudge could send the future tumbling. And if the American threatened to provide that nudge, well, Carstairs needed to be on hand, to remove him before he could do any damage.

Nineteen days from now the coal mines would slam shut; the last thing he’d needed was to break off for a diversion into the reeking, pig-clotted reaches of the Empire. Plus, the other message in those green eyes—that Bennett Grey loathed him as much as ever—told him that even with this opening, winning Grey’s cooperation was going to be delicate work indeed. True, the conquest would be all the more satisfying for its difficulty: He’d always found the challenge of Grey…invigorating.

If
only
that American idiot had bumbled in a few weeks earlier!

Ah well, mustn’t be greedy. The nearness of the deadlines might necessitate a touch more brutality, might mean treading a larger number of people into the dust—for one thing, that American might need putting in place—but as always, one had to keep the end in mind, not the process.

As they said, birth was a messy business.

Or as the great Niccolò put it:
Non è cosa più difficile a trattare che farsi capo introdurre nuovi ordini.
There is nothing more difficult to bring about than introducing a new order.

And really, adding Grey’s talents to the wave of momentum he could feel building beneath him, could bring Carstairs in serious danger of being carried through the very doors of Downing Street.

Which would never do.

He would set the delicate mechanism of this country back on the right path—he, Aldous Carstairs, would do so—but he’d be damned if he would do it in the glare of public life. Leave that to the Medicis of the world.

At last, a figure appeared in his lenses: Bennett Grey came out from the back of the rustic structure to limp furiously up the hill. That leg was still bothering him, it seemed: He should have let the Project surgeons have another go at it.

The leg, the stomach wound, the chunk knocked out of the shoulder, the stubborn infection on the side of his head—after all these years, Carstairs could still list the precise details of Grey’s scars, outward signs of the man’s inner transformation. I wonder if the last pieces of grit ever worked their way out of Grey’s scalp? he mused. That scalp, now hidden beneath thick blond hair, had been freshly shaved when Carstairs first laid eyes on Grey; the naked, pale skin had given Grey a childlike look that contrasted deliciously with the sullenness in his green eyes.

Carstairs followed the small blond man’s progress around those ridiculous antiquarian hillocks. No doubt he was making for the hilltop where the reports said he was wont to sit by the hour, staring off to sea, invisible from this patch of—

Suddenly Grey’s foot slipped and nearly brought him to grief; Carstairs caught his breath, but Grey’s hand shot out in time, and he pulled himself upright.

Idiotic boy, Carstairs thought in exasperation. What if he’d fallen and cracked his head, what would become of all that precious potential then? I ought to have him taken into custody for his own protection.

And here came the yokel, plodding along in the rear, too far from Grey to be of any help, planting his great Yankee clodhopper boots deep into Grey’s Cornish soil. Carstairs shifted the glasses in time to see Grey disappear over the rise, then lowered them again to follow Stuyvesant. The American stopped from time to time, gawping like a tourist in Trafalgar Square; once he turned around and appeared to look straight at Carstairs, but the watcher did not move, and the gap was narrow, the lenses shaded; after a moment, the man turned and continued on his way.

When Stuyvesant, too, had gone over the rise into invisibility, Carstairs pulled away from the bushes, making a face when a hawthorn caught at his sleeve and snagged a thread loose. He extricated his sleeve, then slid the binoculars into his overcoat pocket and took out his note-book, to write a few words. He capped his pen with a flourish and put the leather journal away, satisfied that all had gone more or less as anticipated.

Although, he reflected, he hadn’t anticipated being banished by Grey into this primitive wasteland, given over to the slender mercies of the Celtic peasant. He scowled at the standing stone in the field before him. Enormous effort had gone into bringing that rock here, time and sweat and danger to prop it upright, and for what? Here it stood, covered with multicolored blotches of lichen that looked like a skin disease, tipped like a drunk in the direction of the sea, girdled by a black ring where it had served as scratching-post for three millennia of scrofulous cattle.

But as he tugged on his gloves, he studied the standing stone, and wondered if it might not be a parable. The message of the stone standing in the field was not the absurdity of the labor, but the fact that once the props, ropes, and sweat were cleared away and forgotten, what remained seemed magical.

As once the props, the chaos, and the behind-the-scenes manipulation were cleared away, the British people would look at their new world, and see merely the magic of its rightness.

Aldous Carstairs glanced at his wrist-watch, his expression rueful. How on earth was the Machiavelli of the new age expected to pass four hours in this place without being driven to murder?