Shoulder the Sky wwi-2

by Anne Perry

  Joseph found his mouth dry, his heart pounding, not for himself but for Judith. It was like the past back again, death where you had never even imagined it, like your own life were cut off, but you were left conscious with eyes to see it, forced to go on being present and knowing it all. The end of life, but without the mercy of oblivion.

  Judith was going to hurt so much! Cullingford was not her husband, but that had nothing to do with the pain she would feel. It was still love! It was laughter, understanding, gentleness, the hunger of the soul met with generosity and endless, passionate tenderness. It was the voice in the darkness of fear, when the world was breaking, the touch that meant you were not alone. She would grieve till she felt there was nothing left inside her. Then rest would restore her, and she would have the strength to hurt all over again.

  “Thank you for telling me, Barshey. I must go to Poperinge, now! Help me find a car, an ambulance, anything!”

  Barshey did not argue—he simply obeyed.

  An hour later Joseph was at the ambulance post in Poperinge. First he went to Hadrian. He must be certain of the details. He even cherished some vague, ill-defined hope that Barshey had been wrong.

  He had not. Hadrian was numb with shock, but he told Joseph that it was true. It had happened at night, in the same street where Matthew lived.

  Joseph left Hadrian and went outside and across the cobbles to where he could see Judith and Wil Sloan standing together laughing. They must have heard his boots on the stone, because they turned to look at him. The laughter died instantly.

  Judith came forward, the blood draining from her skin as she stared at him.

  He put both his hands on her shoulders. She waited, knowing from his eyes that the blow would be terrible. Perhaps she expected it would be Matthew.

  “Judith,” he began, his voice catching in his throat. He had to clear it before he could go on. “General Cullingford was murdered in the street in London—just outside Matthew’s flat. They didn’t find who did it.”

  “What?” It was not that she had not heard him, simply that she could not grasp the enormity of it.

  “I don’t know any more than that. I’m sorry! I’m so very, very, sorry!”

  “He’s . . . dead?”

  “Yes.”

  She leaned forward and buried her head on his shoulder and he tightened his arms around her until he held her as close as he could. It was a long time until she started to weep, then her whole body shook as if she would never get her breath, never ease the rending pain.

  He kept on holding her. Wil stood where he was, horrified, helpless.

  At last she pulled away. Her eyes were shut tight, as if she could not bear to see anything. “It’s my fault,” she whispered hoarsely. “He went after the Peacemaker, because of what I told him! I killed him!”

  He pushed the hair off her face. “No,” he said very softly. “The war killed him.”

  She leaned against him again, very still now, too exhausted to cry again, for the moment.

  He just held on to her.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  There was nothing Joseph could do to ease Judith’s grief. She had to hide it from everyone except those closest to her, such as Wil Sloan, and possibly Major Hadrian. To permit its true depth to be seen by others would in a sense betray Cullingford’s privacy, and perhaps his reputation. A new general was moved forward immediately, with his own driver, and she was returned to ambulance duty. It took a matter of hours, not days. War waited for no one.

  Joseph knew that after that first brief and terrible encounter he would not see her again except by chance. He had been on or near the front line for weeks without leave and the stress was telling on him. He was due two weeks now, and he accepted it gratefully. Apart from anything else, it was important that he speak to Matthew as soon as possible. He believed Judith’s assertion that it was the Peacemaker who had murdered Cullingford, either directly or indirectly, which meant that he had to have been close to finding him.

  Watching the late spring countryside skim past him on the way to Calais, it seemed like an escape from the reality of mud and wasteland. Here the trees were in full leaf. At a hasty glance, the French farms and villages looked as they always had: uniquely individual, yet steeped in history, each with its own vines, cheeses, and livestock. It was afterward, on the boat across the Channel, that he realized he had seen only women, children, and old men. When they stopped to buy petrol or bread, there was a sadness in people’s faces, and always a shadow behind the eyes, a knowledge of fear, probably not for themselves but for those they loved.

  London was startlingly the same as before. After the loss of men he had expected a silence, some kind of mourning he could see, but it was full of traffic as always, motor and horse-drawn. There were men in uniform, some on leave as he was, some injured, hollow-faced with the gray pallor of the shell-shocked or inwardly crippled. He heard a man with a hacking cough; it was probably no more than a spring cold, but to him it brought back, with skin-chilling horror, the memory of gas.

  He reached Matthew’s flat a little after six, and the porter, knowing him well, let him in. He bathed, letting the hot water soak into his skin, although it stung the scratches where he had torn himself with his nails when the lice or fleas became unbearable. The bone-deep ease of it made him realize how tired he was, how many nights he had lain on the hard clay, or on duckboards, and slept fitfully. It was going to be strange to sleep in a bed with sheets, and waken knowing he was in England. It would seem eerily silent with only the distant sound of traffic, no gunfire, no shaking of the ground as the fourteen-pounders landed. No injuries, no deaths.

  He toweled himself dry, examining the scraped and abraded patches of his skin, and dressed, borrowing clean underwear from Matthew’s drawer. Then he made himself a pot of tea and sat down to wait.

  Matthew came in a little before nine. The porter must have told him of Joseph’s arrival because there was no surprise in his face. He pushed the door shut behind him and hesitated only a moment before flinging his arms around Joseph and hugging him briefly and fiercely. Then he stood back, looking him up and down. “Hell, Joe, you look awful! And you’re thin . . .”

  “You know about Cullingford?” Joseph asked.

  The joy in Matthew’s face vanished. “Yes, of course I do. It was only a few yards from here, practically on my doorstep. He was the one Judith drove, wasn’t he? Is she all right?”

  Joseph found himself torn with all kinds of emotions. A few days ago he had been furious with her, so certain that regardless of temptations, she was morally wrong. Now nothing was so certain. He understood the darkness where, without a human touch, you drown. Perhaps Cullingford had needed that to survive, whether Judith did or not. Who else could he turn to? Not his wife in England, certainly not his junior officers. Maybe right and wrong did not move, but understanding of them did. The wrenching pain of walking the same path, even for a short space, tore away the willingness to judge.

  “I don’t know,” he answered Matthew. “She loved him.”

  Matthew’s eyes flickered wider open. “I didn’t know that!”

  Joseph shrugged. “It’s not only that,” he went on. “She told him about the Peacemaker, all she knew.” He saw Matthew’s start of surprise. “Apparently Prentice was something of an idealist as well, with a lot of the same beliefs, and a driving compulsion to do something about them. Judith’s convinced Cullingford found the Peacemaker and that’s why he was killed, which to her makes it her fault!”

  Matthew sat down slowly in the largest chair, running his hands through his hair, scraping it back off his brow.

  “Oh, God! You mean he was on his way here to tell me when they caught up with him?”

  “Probably.” Joseph sat opposite him.

  “I think it’s Ivor Chetwin.” Matthew looked up at him. “Everything I have points to him. He has the knowledge, the political ability, the family connections in England, and we know he has the brains.” He
pushed his hair back, dragging it off his brow. “It’s absolutely bloody, because he knows our codes in SIS, and other things I can’t tell you! I just need a few last details from a fellow called Mynott, who used to be a military attaché at the embassy in Berlin before the war. That should settle the last doubts there are. Unfortunately he’s ADC to Hamilton out in Gallipoli. I’ve got a berth on a troopship leaving tomorrow night. But you can stay here, as long as you like! Thank God at least Mynott wasn’t a naval attaché, or I’d never find him. I’m sorry, Joe, but I’ve got to go out and ask him the last questions. He knows for sure what Chetwin was doing in Berlin. If he knew Reisenburg, that’ll be enough.”

  It twisted inside Joseph that it should be Chetwin, for his father’s sake, but it had to be someone he had known, or at least had known him. He knew Matthew had even feared it was Shearing himself. Joseph had been afraid it was Aidan Thyer. There was no answer that would be painless, and after Cullingford’s death, there was a new bitterness to it.

  Matthew stood up and poured himself a generous glass of whisky. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever prove that. But I’ll be happy to see Chetwin swing high just for Mother and Father.” He drank the glassful in one draft. “Do you want some?”

  “No.” He looked at Matthew with anxiety. He seemed to have drunk the whisky with unusual ease. A few months ago he would have sipped it, made it last the evening.

  Matthew turned back to look at him, the glass still in his hand. He frowned. “Exactly what did she tell Cullingford, Joe? How could he find the Peacemaker in a couple of days when we haven’t in a year?”

  “What’s the connection between Chetwin and the woman who spoke to Sebastian in the pub the day before he killed Mother and Father?” Joseph asked.

  “I’ve no idea. Could be anything: relatives, lover, disciple, possibly just a paid messenger, a mercenary. If we get him, she won’t matter.”

  “That’s how Cullingford trailed him, I think.” Joseph tried to remember exactly what Judith had said. She had been certain it was her fault, and he thought it was not hysteria but a deep and terrible knowledge. “There was a photograph of Prentice in his mother’s home that Judith saw when she was there, taking Cullingford’s condolences, as it were,” he explained. “Prentice was with a young woman who answered pretty closely to the description of the woman Hannah says was seen with Sebastian the day before the murders. If it was the same woman, perhaps Cullingford knew who she was, and knew her connection to the Peacemaker.”

  “Then go to Mrs. Prentice tomorrow and look at the photograph!” Matthew said urgently. “I can’t, I have to go on the early train to Portsmouth in time to get on board the troopship. Look at the picture, and for God’s sake, Joe, do nothing! Just remember what the woman looks like, and get out.” He finished the whisky, pulling a face as if he disliked the taste of it. His voice was hoarse, fear in his eyes, and more emotion than he could control. “I don’t want to come back from Gallipoli and find you dead, too.” He tried to smile. “Apart from anything else, what would I tell Judith? Just go and tell Mrs. Prentice that you were the man who brought her son back, and buried him. Say something nice about him. . . .”

  “Matthew!” Joseph exclaimed. “I understand! I’ll just look at all the photographs of Prentice, then I’ll come back here. I may go home for a few days, see Hannah. . . .” He saw Matthew’s face fill with alarm. “And I won’t go asking questions in any pubs! I swear!”

  He was prevented from any further persuasion by the telephone.

  Matthew stood up to answer it. He listened in silence for several moments, his body rigid, his hand holding the mouthpiece shaking a little, then he said “Yes, sir,” and replaced it on the hook. “That was Shearing. The Germans have sunk the Lusitania,” he said with a gasp. “Over eleven hundred people drowned, including Americans. I’m . . . I’m sorry, Joe, but I’ve got to go in to the office. Washington can’t overlook this! It could turn the war!”

  Joseph was stunned. “The Lusitania! I thought that was a passenger liner! How could that happen? Where?”

  “The Irish Sea. It is a passenger liner, and I don’t know how it could happen, just that it did.”

  “What about Chetwin . . . and Gallipoli?”

  “I can’t go. Can you?”

  “Me?” Joseph was startled.

  Matthew’s face was white. “If you don’t go to Gallipoli, and I can’t, and Mynott’s killed before he can give us the proof, then the Peacemaker goes on, and England loses the war.”

  Joseph leaned forward, head in his hands. “All right. I’ll go in the morning,” he whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” Matthew said with sudden gentleness. “I know you haven’t had leave in months, and God knows, you deserve it. But I can’t trust anyone else.”

  “I know,” Joseph agreed. “I’ll be all right. Tell me about Mynott, and what I need to do.”

  The sea journey was, as Matthew had said, roughly three days, steaming at full speed south through the Straits of Gibraltar, then east across the Mediterranean. The weather was perfect, blazing sunshine and warm, blue seas.

  At first Joseph was glad simply to sleep as much as cramped and shared accommodation allowed him to. The ship was full of men going out to fight on the beaches and landings at Gallipoli, and they must have heard of the storm of casualties there already. Many of them would not come home, and most of them who did would have sustained injury and loss.

  Joseph made himself available to offer what support and encouragement he could, but they were raw recruits, and he had already seen nearly a year of war in the trenches of the Western Front. It was better he tell them nothing. There were truths too overwhelming, too shattering to the mind and the hope, to be faced all at once. A step at a time was all the mind could bear. He thought it was not cowardice that kept him silent when he heard their laughter and their talk of heroism in battle, of honor and sacrifice and the glory of courage.

  The Dardanelles were among the great legendary places of the world, a crossroad for the nations of history: Persia, Judea, Greece, Rome, Islam, and the vast empires of the East beyond. Alexander the Great had left Greece to conquer the ancient realms of India and Egypt. Xerxes had crossed the Dardanelles in his attempt to crush the rising Athens. Leander had swum the Hellespont to be with Hero, and died for love. And in the mists of time Homer’s Greeks had come that way bound for the siege of Troy: Helen, Menelaus, Achilles, and Odysseus on his long return to Ithaca.

  In even older dreams, Jason and the Argonauts had pursued the Golden Fleece through these same straits up into the Black Sea.

  Now he heard young Englishmen talking of it as if this were another great heroic saga, and they would return with the honor of war. He stared across the dancing blue water, and felt his eyes sting with tears. He, too, had grown up with the poetry of the wine-dark seas of Homer flowing through his dreams. He had wanted to walk the ruins of Troy in the magic light of the Mediterranean, hear in the silence of the wind in the grass the echoes of the wars between men and gods that laid the dreams of Western man and built the cities and laws, the philosophies and poems, upon which Europe had nourished its heart for two thousand years.

  And he would see it, but now it would be amid the slaughter of today, and perhaps out of it he would find the truth of a betrayal he had to know, however much he did not want to.

  The ship dropped anchor in the Aegean Sea, north of the Dardanelles, opposite the landing beaches of Anzac Cove. All the men crowded to the side to stare at the shore and the pale, steep hills behind, jagged right down to the shore. The bay was dotted with ships, but far out, beyond the firing range of the Turkish artillery from the fortresses and placements on the crown of the ridge above. Men crowded the beaches, hundreds of them, wounded and sick waiting to be escorted out to hospital ships. Medical orderlies were trying to help, fighting units huddled under the brief stretch of rocks and outcrops, making a slow and bloody way upward, surrounded by fire on all sides except the sea.

  Joseph had to
ld the commander that he was on Secret Intelligence Service work, backed up by the documents Matthew had given him. He was quite open that he was here to find a particular officer who might have information, but he did not give any name, until he was on the tender, making its way through the pale Aegean. The water should have been a limpid blue, but here it was turgid with sand, and blood, and the dark figures of men struggling to help the wounded into makeshift carriers of any sort, just to get them off the beach.

  Above in the distance the Turkish guns occasionally raked the sea with shot, but most of the boats were just out of range, and the warships returned fire with a roar of shelling.

  The score of men in the same boat with Joseph were huddled together, pale and excited, wanting to appear brave and not having any idea what to do. The fact that they wanted to do anything at all made their innocence heartbreakingly obvious. Seasoned men would have been happy to do nothing, knowing the time would come.

  The prow of the boat scraped the sand and the foremost men leaped out. Joseph scrambled ashore with them. The water was warm and the sand soft under his weight. He ran through the gentle surf and floundered up to a pile of ammunition crates where a couple of medical orderlies were passing around water. One of them noticed Joseph’s uniform with its clerical collar.

  “We don’t need you yet, cobber!” he said cheerfully. His accent was broad Australian, his face sunburned and lantern-jawed.

  Joseph gave him a gesture of salute. “I’m looking for General Hamilton’s headquarters,” he said. “At least I’m actually looking for his ADC, Major Mynott. It’s urgent I find him.”

  “Yeah?” the soldier was unimpressed. “Pass me that splint, will yer? Everything’s urgent here, including that bleedin’ water!”

  Joseph reached for the canteen and handed it to him, and the splint, then looked around slowly. As far along it as he could see, the beach was crowded. Long lines of the injured stood waiting for medical attention. Others, more seriously hurt, lay in silent pain, faces crusted with blood and sand. There seemed to be flies everywhere.