“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.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
STUYVESANT FOUND THE OBJECT, as ugly a piece of art as he’d ever seen, but it did seem to be a prize to the Duke, since he had placed it in the middle of the right-hand glass door.
Once he’d found it, he left the little china dog alone. He took up a place at the back corner of the study, as if that might get him out of its range, and waited with twitching nerves.
He jumped when the door came open and Gallagher peeped in. He quickly crossed the room and led the butler back down the hallway.
“Mr. Bunsen will be right down, sir,” Gallagher told him. “He is…not quite as indisposed as you feared. Would you…I should be happy to stand outside the door if you wish to cleanse your hands. There’s a lavatory directly across the corridor.”
Stuyvesant looked down at himself. “Good idea.”
He tried not to notice the color of the water that ran across the white porcelain, but he briskly scrubbed his face and hands. When he came out, Gallagher was still there. “Thanks, Gallagher. You go on with the rest of them. I’ll let you know when you can come back inside.” I will, or a loud boom, he thought.
Back in the study, he glanced at the clock on the Duke’s desk: creeping away from one-twenty. Christ, he hoped the bomb-maker hadn’t cut corners and bought a cheap clock.
Three minutes later the door opened again, and the part of Stuyvesant’s heart that wasn’t in his throat sank. Bunsen looked like the tail end of a bad month. His handsome face was drawn, his skin gray, his eyes dull.
“Gallagher said you needed me.” The words came out as if each were being pulled, and the effort of speech nearly had him turning his back and leaving.
“There’s a bomb.”
The man studied him as if waiting for the end of a remarkably tasteless joke.
“Another bomb. Someone sent the Duke one of those damn porcelain dogs he loves, only it’s filled with explosives. Set to go off in sixteen minutes. I need you to disarm it.”
At last a flicker of emotion passed over Bunsen’s face, but his slight frown was merely curiosity. “Who are you?”
“Honestly, does that matter at the moment?” Stuyvesant asked. “Bunsen, you need to disarm that bomb.”
“Why?”
That rocked Stuyvesant back on his heels. The man was serious.
A major shock was required. “Because if you don’t, Laura’s sacrifice—her attentat—will be lost. Everything Laura was, all you worked for together, was aimed at what happened in that chapel. But if there are two bombs? And one of them is here, aimed at her father? Two bombs makes her a madwoman, not a martyr. Worse—an incompetent madwoman, whose death was an accident. They’ll write her off. She gave her life for your cause, Bunsen. You can give her death meaning. Only you.”
Fifteen minutes.
“And I should also mention, the dog—that one with the blue bow around its neck—will be traced to you.”
Bunsen’s hand came up and drew hard down the length of his face. He glanced at the cabinet. “Fifteen minutes?”
“That’s what I’m told. Assuming the timer is accurate,” Stuyvesant added, unable to help himself.
“There is always that question, with a timed device,” Bunsen said. He sounded more in control.
“Can you defuse it?”
“Be more sensible to carry it out and drop it in the river.”
Stuyvesant felt a flood of relief at the thought—why hadn’t he thought of that?—then a cold question: Who was going to carry the thing through the house?
He started to force himself upright on unwilling legs, when Bunsen added, “Of course, it might have a backup trigger.”
“Wouldn’t that have gone off when it was shipped and unpacked?”
“It would depend on the sophistication of the device. Perhaps I should take a look.”
Jesus. Take a look. Stuyvesant wanted to tip himself out of t
he window and take his chances with the ground below; instead, he went to the box of tools on the desk, aware with every step that, if the dog blew up, the left side of his body would be shredded.
“What tools do you want?” he asked Bunsen.
Bunsen came to paw through the tools, and Stuyvesant despaired: Bunsen stank of booze, and he wove slightly as he crossed over to the cabinet. “Uh, look, Bunsen. Your hands may not be quite steady enough for this.”
The man held up his hand with a pair of jeweler’s wire snips in them. Dispassionately, he watched them tremble. “You should leave.”
Yes oh yes please. “I’ll stay.”
The look Bunsen gave Stuyvesant was as cool and amused as his expression that first evening they had met. Grief, shock, bewilderment, fury—everything was clamped down, leaving nothing above the surface but the iron-nerved sapper. “You’re sure?”
“Can we get on with it?” Thirteen minutes.
“You want to help?”
I want to run. “What do you need?”
“Talk. If you take my mind off what I’m doing, it’ll go just fine.”
“Talk? About what?”
The odd amber eyes rose to look at him. “Why don’t we begin with why my replacement driver has such an interest in explosive devices, Mr. Stuyvesant?”
Somewhere a clock ticked, a slow grandfather-clock kind of a tick. Stuyvesant felt the sweat down the side of his body, while Bunsen just stood and waited, wire cutters in his hand. He looked as if he could wait forever.
And Stuyvesant was fresh out of lies.
“I’m an American agent,” Stuyvesant told him. “I came here hunting a bomber. I thought it was you.”
Bunsen considered that for a moment, then said, “Go on,” and turned to the object on the shelf.
Stuyvesant’s own voice came dimly through the cotton-wool in his ears, but the stream of words seemed to buoy the sapper’s movements. Bunsen’s eyes remained focused, his hands controlled, so long as Stuyvesant’s tale flowed: coming to London; meeting Aldous Carstairs; Carstairs’ offer to help; forging the links between Bennett Grey and Sarah and Laura to Bunsen himself.
“But Carstairs has plans of his own, and when I came to his office with my story of a mad English bomber, he probably thought, Why not? Here’s an English Communist, working with the Unions, who’s already suspected of similar crimes in America. At a time when England is teetering on the brink of class war, when one outrageous act is all it will take to convince the great voting public that the Unions have to be crushed, absolutely and permanently. And then one of the country’s most powerful and beloved individuals invites a group of men to his home for the purpose of forging peace: Wouldn’t it solve a whole lot of problems if that English Red were to turn viciously on his host and try to murder him?
“So he arranged for a bomb of his own, and I have no doubt there will be a number of arrows pointing at you, and that those arrows will be ready for instant publication in the press. In the end, they will prove groundless, but by that time he will already have what he was after, and your career will be ruined.
“I should apologize, by the way. For what that’s worth. I didn’t mean to, but I set him on you.”
“The rise of the Fascists.” Stuyvesant was startled by Bunsen’s voice, echoing from the storage cabinet.
“Could be. In fact, knowing Carstairs, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” For the first time since he’d launched into his story, Stuyvesant glanced at the clock and felt a cold rush of terror: He’d been talking for five minutes: 1:37. “Do you think—” he started to say, then broke off.
Bunsen stood away from the cabinet with the dog in his hand, a hole in the bottom of it showing a spray of wires. “This? I finished it yonks ago. I just wanted to hear what you had to say.”
Stuyvesant lowered his forehead to the Duke of Hurleigh’s desk, and left it there for a long time.
An explosion, he reflected, would have made everything a lot simpler.
THE AUGUST SUN was surprisingly hot in this distant corner of England, on the afternoon when a tall figure in a rucksack, boots, and walking stick closed in on a white washed cottage in Cornwall.
The owner of the cottage had been working in the vegetable garden when he had seen the rambler on the distant road. He had stopped to watch. When the man slid behind the hedgerows, the gardener put down his spade and went inside the cottage.
Now, twenty-five minutes later, he sat on the chopping block, his collarless shirt rolled up above his elbows, a glass in one hand. He took a swallow from time to time, and once mopped his forehead with a handkerchief.
Harris Stuyvesant reached the point where walls surrounding the narrow lane fell away and the farm yard began. Two chickens scratched in the soil near the shed. The blond man sat on his chopping block.
“I think I’m lost,” Stuyvesant called. “I was looking for Land’s End.”
All he could do then was wait. If Grey went inside, or did not answer, he would leave, and sail for America next week.
But Grey stood up and walked across the yard. When he was standing in front of Stuyvesant, he put out his hand.
Stuyvesant took it gratefully. “I was wondering if you’d come after me with your axe.”
“I might yet.”
“I’d deserve it.”
“I think you’ve been hit enough. You want something to drink?”
“I’ll have what you’re having.”
Grey handed him the glass, saying, “You won’t like it.”
He was right. “God. What is that?”
“This morning’s cold tea, with water.”
“Maybe I could just have the water?”
“Come inside.”
Grey gave the American a glass of water. Then he gave him a bottle of beer, and a plate of sandwiches, and another bottle of beer, and later, some coffee. When the sun was low in the sky, the two men walked up the hill to the Beacon.
The stone was almost hot to the touch with the day’s stored sun, but Grey stretched out on top as he had all those months before, when the sun was thin and the hills were bright green instead of the tired shades it wore now.
Back in May, the General Strike had collapsed after twelve short days. The half-hearted commitment of the conjoined Trades Unions had proven no match for their government’s intensive countermeasures. The revolution failed to ignite, and although the miners themselves battled on still, no one expected them to prevail.
“You’re not drinking,” Stuyvesant said.
“No need to, here.”
“I’m glad.”
“Every so often, I am, too. And you? How are you?”
“Empty. Yes, I think empty describes it. I sent the Bureau a letter of resignation.”
“I thought you might.”
“The Major offered me a job.”
Grey sat up to stare at the American’s face, then relaxed. “You didn’t take it.”
“I’d rather clean toilets. Funny thing is, even before…well, I was thinking of quitting. Getting a job repairing cars. Working on the Hurleigh estate.”
“I understand the Duke wanted to raze the chapel down to the ground. The Duchess won’t let him, but he refuses to repair it. He’s going to have it deconsecrated.”
“You heard this through Sarah?”
If Grey heard the effort it took Stuyvesant to say her name, he did not comment. “You know she’s been living at Hurleigh, since getting out of hospital?”
“I keep track, even if she won’t answer my letters. I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Healing takes time.”
“Some wounds don’t heal.” Broken bones knit, but time has little effect on loss of a hand, a ruptured ear-drum, or the memory of one’s best friend coming to pieces in one’s arms. Nor on the feeling that an American suitor has been responsible for it all.
“She’s strong, Stuyvesant. Give her time.”
There was little answer for that. After a while, Grey stirred.
&
nbsp; “What was the Major after, do you know?”
“Not entirely. It’s like…have you ever been in a glass-bottomed boat? You get glimpses of life, but mostly you get the sense that there’s all kinds of currents and behaviors and obstacles just outside your little window. I have spent most of the last three months finding out about Major Carstairs, and it seems he had larger plans for the Strike than just preserving order. And I—I just fed right into it. I gave him Bunsen, I tied him back to you. I think he planned on using me in a more substantial manner, too.”
“How do you mean?”
“There were several things he did that, looking back, seem odder and odder. And things he lied to me about—that an experimental explosive had gone missing from an Army munitions depot, showing me pictures of some of the people linking that explosive with Richard Bunsen. Two of those people are now dead. The man, a Communist by the name of Marcus Shiffley, was found floating in the Thames that weekend we were at Hurleigh. His female associate turned up a few days later. And a stray Russian Bolshevik disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. The more I thought about it, the more I saw the signs of a good, clean set-up, with yours truly the one being framed. I think his story was going to be, this American with a crazy fixation on Richard Bunsen comes over, locates a couple of Bunsen’s associates, tortures them for information, and kills them, then aims himself at Bunsen. In the meantime, a bomb is sent to the Duke of Hurleigh, made to look like it came from Bunsen.”
“But that’s two ends of rope that don’t connect.”
“Yes, except, what if Bunsen had been killed by that bomb? What if at, say, one thirty-five that afternoon, Bunsen is sitting down to lunch when he’s given a message on the Duke’s stationery saying something like, ‘Please come immediately to my study, and stand near the collection so as to explain your presence in case you are seen.’ Bunsen would go, and at one forty-five, boom.”
“Was there any such note?”
“None was delivered. But by that time, all plans were shot to hell.”
“If Bunsen were dead—”