Touchstone Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Book One London

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Book Two Cornwall

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Book Three Hurleigh House

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Book Four London

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Book Five Hurleigh House

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Laurie R. King

  Copyright

  To Michael and Josefa,

  with thanks for giving far, far beyond duty’s call.

  Prologue

  1

  March 1921

  SMALL THINGS: STRAWS ON CAMELS’ BACKS. A spark on a tinder-dry hillside. A whisper of falling snow, settling just below an infinitesimal crack.

  For her, it was the scarf.

  A small thing, a pure white, light-as-air length of weaver’s art, exquisitely rare and unbelievably warm, one of her grandmother’s idiosyncratic Christmas whims.

  Thirty guineas of screaming luxury, and she tore it from her neck without a thought, to wrap the tiny body going cool in her arms. Make the shroud snug, tuck it around the shriveled limbs, as if it mattered. As if a dead infant could find comfort in swaddling.

  Even then, as she thrust the child at its mother and wiped her hands surreptitiously on her coat—even then, the heavy-laden camel staggered on, the snow-pack gave a shudder, but held.

  It wasn’t until the following day that the hillside of snow began to groan and creak. The following day, when she came with a motorcar to take the Margolins to the cemetery.

  She trudged up the dark, filthy, stinking stairway to the third floor, knocking on the door to the two tiny, ice-cold rooms that housed the last five Margolins. The family emerged, dressed in its pitiful attempt at funeral finery: Mary first, carrying her bundled two-year-old, then the boys, Tom and Jims. Five-year-old Molly came last, tugging her hat down to hide the shame of lice-cropped hair. She looked down at the little girl, and felt the premonitory tremor, deep within.

  Molly was wearing the dead infant’s shroud.

  Afterwards, the only thing she was grateful for was her own self control, which had stopped the exclamation before it could reach her tongue, kept her hands from snatching her grandmother’s gift from the throat of a child the old lady wouldn’t have bothered to rein a galloping horse around.

  The scarf had been a shroud, yes. But it was also a warm garment, and warmth belonged to the living. The Margolin family simply couldn’t afford sentiment.

  She made it through the funeral without breaking down. She accompanied the little family back home, she summoned words, she made promises, she sat unseeing as the driver steered her back through the London streets to her flat.

  It wasn’t until she was alone that the avalanche let go its hold.

  The Margolins were one of “her” families. They should have been safe. But everything she was—all the wealth, honor, and authority at her command—had proved just so many delusions of usefulness, inadequate to keep one tiny human being from death. She’d been called and she had come, but before she could summon a doctor, while she’d stood in that dim room with its scrubbed floor and the threadbare, neatly tucked bed-clothes, the wise infant-gray eyes held hers, and the child stopped breathing.

  Just stopped.

  The death of a badly wounded man was one thing: God knew she’d seen enough of that during the War. This was another matter altogether. She’d looked up in horror at the survivors: bright little Molly pressed against her mother’s side, thumb in mouth; Tom and Jims kicking their heels in embarrassment on the bench; their once-pretty mother, Mary, at twenty-five a widow with lank gray hair and rotting teeth, seated dry-eyed on the room’s other chair with the toddler.

  They’d named the infant Christopher. And because his family could not afford sentiment, he’d gone to the earth without his shroud.

  Her teeth chattered against the glass, her fingers refused to carry the silver lighter to the cigarette. She placed her hands on her knees, but the slow, calming breaths refused to come, and sounded more like gasps.

  It was exhaustion, as much as anything, that broke her, the bone-deep fatigue that came from too many fourteen-hour days followed by too many sleepless nights. Rage had burned to ash long ago, despair was her daily bread, but the bitter cold and the disgusting surroundings and the glimpse into those newborn eyes, heaped as they were on top of grinding worry and the devastating failure of love, made the world flare and consume itself. In the bleak, scorched hopelessness that followed, she broke.

  She bent forward over her knees, her arms curled around the back of her head as if to protect herself from a beating, and she wept.

  There was just no end to London’s store of graying twenty-five-year-olds; no end to their damaged men, their malnourished children, their dying infants. Huddled before the fireplace, she had a hallucinatory vision of the baby Christopher as a grain of sand, tumbling with ten thousand other grains through an hour-glass. The sheer futility of trying to catch all those grains before they fell overwhelmed her; the sobs came so hard she gagged on them.

  But eventually, every avalanche must reach its plateau and settle. The sobs slowed, the choking noises trickled into hiccoughs. She sat upright in the chair, clawed the hair from her swollen eyes, and stretched out a steady hand for her drink. When the cigarette was lit, she stared into the heedless coals, thinking about lives pouring unstopped through an hour-glass.

  The poor will be with you always.

  Wasn’t that t
he bitter, cold truth? Even if she were given the keys to the Hurleigh coffers, to empty everything—paintings and jewels, houses and land—into the slums of London, it would disappear without a trace. The Hurleigh legacy could be reduced to the bones, and still poor mothers would strip the dead to warm the living.

  Yes, money narrowed the neck of the glass, slowing the stream. Money bought medicine, nutrition, warmth, education, giving the poor a chance against the downward pull of the sand.

  But it was so slow, so terribly, agonizingly slow. What the world needed was a cork to stop the flow completely. Some invention, 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 the hour-glass, to cut off the flow of poor.

  Perhaps if she stayed here a while, alone and resting in the quiet, she might think of something.

  11

  March 1926

  THE SMALL MAN STOOD ON THE HILLTOP, naked beneath the gibbous moon, welcoming the air with his body.

  His clothing lay, neatly stacked, in the center of the slab of stone: coat at the bottom, socks tucked into boots at the top. His bright hair stirred with the breeze, catching reflections of pale moonlight. His hands were stretched out at his sides, palms facing the horizon, and he swayed, ever so slightly, to the rhythm of the waves sixty feet below.

  Moments like this were rare, when he could let down the barriers and open himself to his surroundings. During daylight hours, even in this remote place, human intrusion was a constant threat. Even on those days when he saw no one, the texture of the outside world was ever on his tongue, the sound of events in far-off London insinuating itself into his mind, like the scuffle of the monster beneath his childhood bed.

  In recent weeks, the creature under the bed had begun to stir and swell. It had not yet taken notice of him as he lay frozen beneath the covers of his retreat. There was no real reason to believe it would. It was just as likely to lumber into life, jostling the bed as it emerged, and shamble away to devour some other innocent child.

  Of course, if he was already gone from the bed when the monster came looking, that would solve the problem. A slight sway forward, here on the edge of the world, and the salt fingers below would reach for him, embrace him, soothe and welcome and bury his worries forever.

  To, and fro. To, and fro. To…

  His body would decide. The same body that read the breath of the wind as it flowed off the sea, that drew in the flavor of the land behind him, that noted the passing of an owl a quarter mile inland, that felt the thump of a rabbit going to ground a hundred yards off, that counted the hairs on his forearms stirred by the breeze…

  One by one, the barriers slipped away, leaving the man naked and exposed to the night, like some soft and defenseless undersea creature when the waters drew back, and back again as they built into a monstrous swell on the horizon.

  The wave was building—even now, he could feel it in the distance. But until it broke over him, or until his body chose to sway forward a fraction too far, he would stand in the moonlight and give himself, body and soul, to the brush of air, the odor of green, the solidity of rock.

  To the joy and the terror of pure sensation.

  111

  April 1926

  THE FINGERS PAUSED to warm themselves against the radiator, for the room was very cold. Pressed against the ticking metal, they could feel the vibration of the water within, transferring heat from boiler’s flame to inert metal and thence to flesh, making possible the job at hand—which, in a fitting completion of the cycle, entailed the creation of flame.

  When circulation was restored, the fingertips rubbed one another into suppleness, then resumed their work. They moved with delicacy and deliberation, sure of themselves and their purpose: switch, wire, detonator, snip, twist, fold; nestle the mechanism against the final purposeful load of explosive, perfect beneath its creator’s hand.

  Some such objects were raw and ugly, aimed at nothing but immediate effect. The Devices shaped by this pair of hands—this particular builder had never cared for the blunt monosyllable bomb—were invariably simple and balanced: elegant. The pleasing irony of a small, perfectly shaped conveyer of brutal mayhem was an essential part of the process—perhaps even the most essential part. Curiously like the radiator, designed to transfer the bright, hot violence of ideas into society’s inert status quo: flames into warmth; an infernal machine effecting very human change.

  The fingers paused for a moment as the mind considered, then they went on: No, this was not the time for a public speech advocating the transformative aspects of violence.

  Still, wasn’t that precisely what people did not understand? That death was the very foundation of life; order was built from the raw material of disorder? The Prayer Book had it backwards when it said, In the midst of life we are in death—. St. Paul put it more precisely: That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. A seed had to die before it could come to life. Wasn’t that the whole idea behind the Resurrection?

  Now, they called it Anarchy.

  The word had become synonymous with chaos, but the true Anarchist community was a place of exquisite balance and stability, a society of equals. True, the path to Anarchy must be carved through the rubble of the status quo, but birth was never an easy business.

  Or another analogy: A well placed Device was like a surgeon’s blade. It caused pain and shed blood, but it was necessary for healing. A sacrifice for the greater good.

  And, truth to tell (shameful truth, never spoken aloud, never acknowledged even to one’s self, but somehow, the fingers knew), there was a definite frisson of satisfaction in creating a Device. Not the deaths themselves—one was not an animal, after all, killing for pleasure—but nonetheless, there was an element of gratification about making, literally, an impact on society.

  (The hands paused again, with amusement, then finished their task.)

  Fingers, slim and deft, tucked the final wire into a more pleasing arrangement. Two meditative hands eased the oversized cover shut, feeling the gentle pressure before the minuscule latch hooked into place.

  Simple; elegant.

  Order through Anarchy.

  Life out of death.

  The hands tidied the workbench, patted the Device as if soothing an infant in its cot, then switched off the lights.

  On the bench, the gilt letters on the spine of the Device caught the light from the corridor as the door swung open, then shut:

  BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

  Chapter One

  EIGHT DAYS AFTER stepping off the Spirit of New Orleans from New York, Harris Stuyvesant nearly killed a man.

  The fact of the near-homicide did not surprise him; that it had taken him eight days to get there, considering the circumstances, was downright astonishing.

  Fortunately, his arm drew back from full force at the last instant, so he didn’t actually smash the guy’s face in. But as he stood over the prostrate figure, watching the woozy eyelids flicker back towards consciousness, the tingle of frustration in his right arm told him what a near thing it had been. He’d been running on rage for so long, driven by fury and failure and the scars on Tim’s skull and the vivid memory of bright new blood on a sparkling glass carpet followed by flat black and the sound of the funeral dirges that—well, the guy had got off lucky, that was all.

  He couldn’t even claim it was self defense. The cops were right there—constables, he should call them, this being England—and they’d already been moving to intercept the red-faced Miners’ Union demonstrator who was hammering one meaty forefinger against Stuyvesant’s chest to make a point when Stuyvesant’s arm came up all on its own and just laid the man out on the paving stones.

  A uniformed constable cut Stuyvesant away from the miner’s friends as neatly as a sheepdog with a flock and suggested in no uncertain terms that now would be a good time for him to go about his business, sir. Stuyvesant looked into the clean-shaven English face beneath the helm
et and felt his fist tighten, but he caught hold of himself before things got out of control.

  He nodded to the cop, glanced at the knot of demonstrators forming around the fallen warrior, and bent to pick up the envelope he’d dropped in the scuffle. He turned on his heels and within sixty seconds and two corners found silence, as abrupt and unexpected as the sudden appearance of the Union workers had been five minutes earlier.

  He put his back against the dirty London bricks, closed his eyes, and drew in, then let out, one prolonged breath. After a minute, he raised his hand to study the damage: a fresh slice across the already-scarred knuckle, bleeding freely. With his left hand he fished out his handkerchief and wrapped the hand, looking around until he spotted a promising doorway down the street. Inside was a saloon bar. “Whisky,” he told the man behind the bar. “Double.”

  When the glass hit the bar, he dribbled half of it onto the cut—teeth were dirty things—and tossed the rest down his throat. He started to order a repeat, then remembered, and looked at his wrist-watch with an oath.

  Late already.

  Oh, what the hell did it matter? He’d spent the last week chewing the ears of one office-worker after another; what made him think this one would be any different?

  But that was just an excuse to stay here and drink.

  Stuyvesant slapped some coins on the bar and went out onto the street. It was raining, again. He settled his hat, pulled up his collar, and hurried away.

  It had proven a piss-poor time to come to London and talk to men behind desks. He’d known before he left New York that there was a General Strike scheduled at the end of the month, in sympathy for the coal miners. However, this was England, not the States, and he’d figured there would be a lot of big talk followed by a disgruntled, probably last-minute settlement. Instead, the working classes were rumbling, and their talk had gone past coal mining into a confrontation with the ruling class. The polite, Olde Worlde tea-party dispute he’d envisioned, cake-on-a-plate compared to some of the rib-cracking, skull-smashing strikes Stuyvesant had been in, didn’t look as if it was going to turn out the way he’d thought, either—not if men like those demonstrators had their way in the matter.