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inciting mutiny.
    “He’s an interesting fellow, quite bright, by all accounts very good looking, although I haven’t met him myself. Comes from what you might call mixed stock. His maternal grandfather was knighted, but turned out to have something of a weakness for the horses, so there wasn’t much to pass on. After he died, the daughter took a position in a boys’ school near Leeds to support herself and her mother. There she married a retired accountant, the son of a stone mason, who himself had been born to a family of coal miners. A heritage, you understand, that Bunsen flaunts when he wishes to claim working-class origins.
    “The accountant died when young Richard was ten. The mother worked herself into an early grave to get the boy to a good school, where he shed his accent and learned to fit in—to a certain extent. He was invited to leave that school at fifteen when he threw his first rock through a window—seemed the headmaster had instructed his pretty daughter to have nothing to do with young Bunsen, and the boy resented it. Threatened to burn the school down, in fact.”
    “A temper, then?”
    “Quite. He kept himself under control through his remaining years at a lesser school, did well enough to get into university in London, and joined the Army in 1914, at the age of twenty. He served until Armistice, most of the time in France. Injured twice, once seriously enough for home leave, when I’d say he had too much time to sit and think about things. As I said, he was arrested in the spring of 1919 for inciting soldiers awaiting demobilization to take things into their own hands. To mutiny.
    “Charges were dismissed, eventually, but after that, one began to see Bunsen’s name regularly in the
Workers’ Weekly,
articles or reports of speeches given at Communist rallies. He made a trip to Moscow in 1920, although he quieted down a little afterwards. I’d have said he was becoming a little disillusioned with the Workers’ Party, although he was arrested again in 1921, during our last unrest among the coal miners. He got banged around a bit and spent a few weeks in prison. That may have effected a change of heart in the man, because he drew back from the more extreme policies he’d been promoting, and within a year began to cultivate friends in key places. Such as Matthew Ruddle, Labour Party Member of Parliament.”
    Bunsen was thirty-two years old, Stuyvesant reflected, and fire-brands often cooled with age, as the anger and energy of their radical youth diminished. However, sometimes the bright ones simply learned to hide their fire under a basket.
    And if Bunsen was saving his most radical tendencies for export, it might make it easier to put on a mask of calm and reason at home. He wouldn’t be the first revolutionary to lead a double life.
    “And this, finally—” Carstairs began, but Stuyvesant interrupted.
    “Sorry, I knew some of what you’ve told me, his age and his rank and some of his history, but one thing I’ve never heard was what he did during the War, whether he was frontline or rear echelon. I don’t suppose you know?”
    Carstairs raised his face and gave Stuyvesant a smile that was startlingly full and warm, a smile that even touched those cold obsidian eyes.
    “I wondered when you would ask me that. Halfway through the War, while he was recovering from his wound, Captain Richard Bunsen entered a training course that his maternal forefathers might have understood, one that kept him underground, there to be a leader among a tightly knit group of workers.
    “Bunsen was, hmm, a sapper. He crawled through tunnels dug by his men, to lay explosive charges beneath enemy lines.”

Chapter Four
    C ARSTAIRS’ WIDE MOUTH CURLED slightly at Stuyvesant’s reaction, but Stuyvesant could not begrudge him his gloat—the man deserved it, even if he’d forced Stuyvesant to tease it out of him like a big fish on a light line. This one piece of knowledge alone made his trip across the