Angels in the Gloom wwi-3

by Anne Perry

  “Oh . . . yes.” Her voice was hoarse, the words hard to form. “I remember you. A chaplain . . . weren’t you?” She stepped back a little.

  “I still am,” he answered, following her in. “Mrs. Blaine drove me. Can she do anything to help . . . practical, perhaps? I’m afraid I’m still rather useless.”

  She backed farther in toward the sitting room, but with a blank look as if she had not understood him. Lizzie followed, but went toward where she assumed the kitchen must be.

  “Chaplain . . .” Gwen Neave responded. “I’m not sure that I want . . .” There was fear in her face, as if she thought he would start telling her something unbearable.

  “It’s irrelevant,” he said. “Just to help you place me. You must have so many patients.”

  “Military Cross.” She stared at him. “For bringing injured men back from no-man’s-land. I remember you.” She sat down, not so much in any kind of ease but simply because she was losing both her balance and her strength to remain standing.

  What on earth could he say? This proud woman who had helped so many men in their extremity of physical distress, perhaps even death, did not want platitudes about suffering or resurrection. She must have heard it all. She might not even be a Christian, for all he knew. It would be a presumption of extraordinary insensitivity to start speaking as if she were. No words had helped him in the first shock of Eleanor’s death. There was only a vast, aching hole inside him where there had been light and love just a few hours before. What had he wanted to hear, to say? Nothing comforting, nothing prepared and necessarily impersonal. Other deaths had not mattered to him. Only Eleanor’s was real, eating into his heart. He wanted to talk about her, as if it kept her close and real a little longer.

  “Tell me about your sons,” he asked her. “My brother-in-law is at sea, on a destroyer. For all the hardship and the danger, there’s a part of him that wouldn’t do anything else. The sea has a kind of magic for him.”

  She blinked. “Eric was like that. He had a toy boat he sailed in the village pond when he was little. He had very fair hair, straight as stair rods. It flopped up and down on his head when he jumped with excitement. His father used to rig his boat for him and put it in the water, and when the wind caught it, it went right to the other side. Terrified the ducks.”

  There was a moment’s agonized silence, then she went on, memories crowding her mind, falling over each other as she found words for them. Lizzie brought tea in and after she departed, Gwen continued to explore the terrible wounds of her love.

  Then at last she could cry. She bent over, great wrenching sobs of raw, tearing loss for her children who were gone. Joseph said nothing, but very gently knelt on the floor, awkwardly because of his injured leg, and held her with his good arm.

  When finally she was exhausted and pulled away, he was too cramped to be able to move.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “Here. I’ll help you up. No! Don’t do that, you’ll make it worse!” Expertly, accustomed to helping injured men, she eased him to a sitting position.

  “Thank you,” he said again. “A good thing one of us is competent. Would you like Mrs. Blaine to stay with you? She will if you wish, if you’d rather not be alone.”

  “Oh God! Didn’t the poor woman just lose her husband?” She was aghast.

  “Yes. But she’ll stay, if you like.”

  “Do you know who did it yet?”

  “No. They’re still looking.”

  “I saw him . . . I think.” She frowned. “I’d been to see Mrs. Palfrey. She lost her brother a month ago. Posted missing. I saw the man just on the edge of the woods, in the dark. He had a pale coat on. At first, I thought it was a woman, then he relieved himself, so I knew it was a man.”

  He was stunned. “With a bicycle? A woman’s bicycle, coming from the track past the Blaines’ house?”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “It was very late. It must have been . . . after . . .” She stopped. “Does Mrs. Blaine want to stay?” she whispered. “I’d rather be alone, but if she . . .”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he answered. “She just offered. If you want to talk again, or I can do anything for you, let Mrs. MacAllister know, and I’ll be here.”

  “Thank you,” she said automatically, then paused for a moment, looking at him with full concentration. “Thank you, Captain Reavley.”

  He could not sleep. At two o’clock he was still wide awake, seeing Gwen Neave’s shattered face in his mind—her consuming grief, not furious, not questioning or railing against fate, simply a kind of inner death.

  He got up and went to the window, pulling the curtains back. The night was radiant with moonlight that flooded the sky, catching every flake of the mackerel clouds with silver. Just below the sill the first white roses were out, single flowers, pale as the moon, like apple blossom.

  He stood gazing at the scene. The beauty was almost too intense to bear. Then he heard the piercing sweetness of a nightingale—once, twice—then the silence washed back again like a deep ocean, drowned in light.

  He ached with a measureless hunger to hold the moment forever, make it part of him so he could never lose it.

  He was needed here. It was a lifetime’s work to touch this grief and heal even a fraction of it. He must stay.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Patrick Hannassey might be the Peacemaker. In fact, theprobability stabbed like a knife into Matthew’s thoughts no matter which avenue he followed. He told himself it was ridiculous. He had always known that Hannassey was an enemy of England, willing to resort to violence. But it was different to think that he could be the man behind the murder of his parents.

  He and Joseph had done everything they could to learn the Peacemaker’s identity. They had considered all they knew that must define him: first, his access to both the king and the kaiser in a manner sufficiently confidential to present the treaty and its astounding contents for their consideration; second, John Reavley had to have known him well enough to have stumbled accidentally on the treaty and taken it. There were times when in order to commit other acts, the Peacemaker had to have been in London. Finally, there was little doubt that he had also had a powerful influence on Eldon Prentice, and upon Richard Mason. Therefore he had strong connections with the press—not the national newspapers who obeyed the government’s restriction notices, but the smaller, less responsible provincials.

  How did these criteria apply to Patrick Hannassey? Matthew had to put them to the test, whatever the answer.

  The appalling violence of the Easter Rising in Dublin and the British suppression of it gave him the opportunity he needed. On Easter Monday the gunboat Helga opened fire on Dublin, setting alight Liberty Hall and several other buildings, and killing civilians. British troops landed at Kingstown and marched to Dublin, entering the city, in spite of de Valera’s men ambushing them.

  The next day Major-General Sir John Maxwell’s troops, sent by Prime Minister Asquith, and mostly untrained, began shooting Irishmen on sight, and the General Post Office went up in flames. It became obvious that even worse was to come. Questions about leading Irish Nationalists did not need to be explained.

  Matthew was dining with a friend with whom he had been at school. It was a quiet restaurant and they sat in the corner discreetly, sharing a bottle of claret and a rather good game pie. He asked the questions that pounded in his mind, hoping for the answers, and dreading them.

  “Hannassey?” Barrington said thoughtfully. “Do you think he’s behind this uprising? Behind Connelly and Pearse?”

  “Can’t say,” Matthew replied, meaning to imply that he was.

  Barrington smiled. “So what is it you want to know?”

  Matthew began with the least controversial issue. “His history. For example, before the war what sort of influence did he have? Where did he travel?”

  “Travel?” Barrington was surprised. “Europe. He had some sort of diplomatic position regarding Anglo-Irish interests.”

  “I
ncluding Germany?”

  “Naturally. Hadn’t you better tell me what this is about, Reavley?”

  “I don’t know what it’s about yet,” Matthew evaded. “Still in the stage of seeing if it’s anything at all. Diplomatic service in Germany?”

  “If you’re asking me if he’s a German sympathizer, yes, of course he is. Sympathizes with anyone who’s against us.”

  “I took that for granted, given other circumstances. Would he know anyone connected with the kaiser?”

  Barrington frowned, twiddling his coffee spoon in his fingers.

  “Yes. He’s a very personable man, highly intelligent and if he wants to be, very cultured. Certainly the kaiser. King too, come to that.”

  “And members of our Parliament?” Matthew persisted.

  “He might have known pretty well anyone of influence.” Barrington shook his head. “Who do you have in mind, Reavley? You are being very evasive. Are you sure this isn’t something we should know?”

  “It’s to do with something my father said before he died.” That was obliquely true, more or less.

  “I heard about that. Road accident, wasn’t it? I’m very sorry.”

  “Yes. Rather got swallowed in the news at the time.”

  “Oh?”

  “Same day as the assassination in Sarajevo.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad. Do you think he knew something about Hannassey that still matters?”

  “I’m chasing a possibility. Do you keep tabs on Hannassey?”

  “Sometimes. Lose him pretty regularly. He’s a master of looking so damn ordinary he disappears. What dates are you interested in?”

  “Late May, early June last year.”

  “London, mostly. Can’t tell you where exactly.”

  “Thank you. Last question: Has he any influence with the press?”

  “None that I know. I should doubt it very much.”

  “Not even local press, small papers in the north?”

  “No idea. Why?”

  “I’ll tell you, if it comes to anything.” He drank the last of his coffee. “Do you fancy a brandy?”

  In his office again, Matthew received a wireless message from America and decoded it. He read it with acceptance and perhaps a kind of satisfaction, grim as it was. A stevedore in the New York docks had been murdered.

  He wrote his reply. It was not necessary to say much. His man already had his instructions. The corpse was to be made to appear a spy, trained by Germany and then “turned” to betray their plans to Britain. His murder was payment for that act, an object lesson to would-be traitors.

  Now also was the time to show the evidence on paper of a fictional agent in the German-American banking system who had revealed the details of all the transactions paying the man in the docks who had placed the bombs in the ships’ holds.

  Matthew reread his letter once more, making certain of every detail, then encrypted it and gave it to the operator to send.

  He reported to Shearing in the late afternoon as if no thoughts teemed in his mind except those of the allied shipping crossing the Atlantic with smoke bombs hidden among the tightly packed munitions. He forced away all thought that he was on the verge of exposing the Peacemaker at last, and the deeply painful knowledge that it was Detta’s father. The knowledge of how she would be hurt was something he could not face. He concentrated instead on the vast entanglement of loyalties, political office, and judgment that made up the Anglo-American relationship.

  “Well?” Shearing asked. He looked tired. His usually immaculate suit was creased and his tie was not quite straight. Once again Matthew wondered where he lived, and why he had never mentioned even a parent or a brother. Why was there nothing in his office that betrayed any love or memory, any ties to place or culture? He seemed a man without roots. That very anonymity was vaguely frightening. It made him less than human. Every other man had a photograph, an ornament, pictures—some ties to who he was. At least the fear had gone that he could be the Peacemaker. Matthew realized only now that it was gone how much that had hurt.

  “We have a suitable body for the double agent,” he said briefly. “I’m going to tell Detta Hannassey about it this evening.”

  Shearing nodded. “She’ll know if she’s being fed, Reavley. Don’t do it all at once.”

  “I won’t.”

  Shearing smiled with a bleak humor. “On the other hand, time is short.”

  “Yes, sir.” Matthew stood to attention for a moment, then turned and left. As so often before, he wished profoundly that he could trust Shearing. Perhaps now he could, but the old caution was too deep to cast aside. John Reavley’s last words to him had been that the conspiracy reached right to the top. Who also was tainted? And if he did trust, who else would die?

  There were moments when he missed his father with exactly the same desperate, incredulous pain as on the very first day. There was an emptiness inside him that no one else could fill. They would have sat together, probably on a bench in Regent’s Park, watching the ducks, and talked about whatever the problem was. They might have walked around an art gallery, seeing what was for sale, looking for bargains, old watercolors that needed cleaning and restoring, the foxing taken off, and refreshed to show their beauty.

  Matthew would have wanted to tell him of his strange relationship with Detta Hannassey, and how they knew that each was playing a game with the other, with a mixture of lies and truths. In the big matters—the ideals and the battles—they were against each other, even to the extent of using deceit and counterdeceit. In the little things—the jokes and the teasing, the tenderness, even the fleeting pleasures of flowers or music, a moment of sunlight on the water, the flight of a bird—they were passionately honest. But Matthew could not have told his father this. John Reavley would have seen it as one more example of the loathsome duplicity and betrayal innate in espionage. Would he ever have understood how many lives it saved? Matthew wished he could have told him! It would have undone an ache inside him if he could.

  This was all in his mind when he met Detta at the theater that evening. He never collected her from her home, as he would have with another woman. She did not permit him to know where she lived. He thought it more than possible she did not always sleep in the same bed each night. He preferred not to know. Jealousy would be ridiculous, but he knew its taste well enough to avoid even the suspicion.

  He had intended to be there well before she was, which ought not to be difficult. She was often late, arriving casually at the last moment when he was on the point of giving up, her smile as bright as usual. But this evening she was there already. He saw her standing in the foyer as soon as he was through the doors. She was dressed in dark blue. She tended to choose cold colors, but she never looked cold. They heightened her drama, as if she did not belong in the everyday world but was merely visiting it from a more mystical place. Her gown was very simple and she wore a dark cloak over it, as the evening would be cooler after the performance.

  She did not come toward him. She stood quite still, smiling, until he should reach her. He wondered if she was always as intensely sure of herself as she seemed. Perhaps her doubts were more of others, of life itself.

  “Hello, Matthew,” she said warmly. She never abbreviated his name. “This was a fine choice. I’m in the mood for farce.” She looked up at him, her eyes so dark he could see the laughter in them, and the pain as well.

  “Hello,” he replied. “Yes. It’s supposed to be a good production.”

  She glanced around at the other people coming in. As so often these days, they all seemed very young, no more than in their mid-twenties, but there was a gauntness to their faces that was deeper than hunger or tiredness. It was something in the skin, a certain look to the eyes. They were men on leave from the trenches, for a few days pretending nothing existed but these lights and laughter, the jokes, the music, the girls on their arms. They wanted to have fun, to taste youth and irresponsibility again, gulping at it like a diver coming up for air.

&nbs
p; “Poor devils,” Detta said quietly. “They know, don’t they!” She did not add any more; the soft lilt in her voice told of a long familiarity with the dark side of love. “They’re as Anglo-Saxon as you are.” Then her mouth twisted in wry laughter. “But they know, all the same. I suppose if you make it plain enough, often enough, then even an Englishman will see it eventually.”

  “As opposed to an Irishman, who’ll see it immediately, whether it’s there or not?” he asked. If he were too gentle with her she would detect pity, and hate him for it.

  “Something like that!” She shrugged.

  They did not speak while they found their seats.

  “Mr. Manhattan,” she repeated the play’s title when they were comfortable. “Your mind still on America?”

  It was the opening he wanted, but actually he had chosen the show because it was a light musical comedy, with emphasis on the comedy. The star, Raymond Hitchcock, had a reputation for engaging the audience in a way that drew them in whether they intended it or not. A friend had said that Iris Hoey was excellent in the burlesque, and the music was very good.

  “Hard not to be,” he answered Detta’s question. “Our men are still getting dud ammunition.”

  She did not look at him. “But you’re doing something about that, aren’t you? That is, when you’re not here with me, forgetting your responsibilities and having fun!” It was more a comment than a question, and there was a play of humor around her mouth.

  He knew the complexities of her thought. This was a jibe at him that he was too sober, that he had not the wild Irish imagination. His feet were earthbound, and his mind as well. And she was also leaving the opening wide for him to pursue the subject, which was what they were both here for. Was she also testing to see if he cared about her and was willing to say so? She knew he did. He was not a good enough actor to pretend otherwise. Perhaps her sudden vulnerabilities were all a pretense on her part? He should not let that thought hurt so much.