Angels in the Gloom wwi-3

by Anne Perry

  The Cormorant’s guns were silent for minutes. They were closing on the cruiser.

  Then they opened fire again, the noise mind-numbing. There seemed to be flame and smoke everywhere, searing the skin and hair, choking the lungs. The bridge and signal house were shrouded by it. Matthew had not the least idea whether anything was hit or not.

  He stared to the east, straining until the smoke cleared. Ragland beside him seemed to be holding his breath, his face masklike in the glare of the lights.

  Gradually the wind blew the smoke away, cold salt instead of burning cordite, and they saw the cruiser engulfed in flame. The magazines had taken a direct hit and exploded, breaking its back. It was listing already, in the first terrible throes of its long plunge to its tomb in the depths.

  Matthew was speechless. The tactics had been brilliant. The Cormorant had sunk an enemy cruiser with more weight, more guns, and more men, but there was no sweetness in it at all. The fact that they were German, and would have sunk the Cormorant if they could, seemed almost irrelevant. They were close to a thousand living, breathing men, seamen like themselves, going to a fearful and certain death. It was all he could think of as he stood transfixed with pity watching as the great ship burned lower and lower in the water. Ammunition still exploded, tearing her apart until she slid beneath the black surface, shining in the flames of other gunfire, leaving the sea littered with struggling men and the debris of death.

  There was no one there to help, and no one came. They were under the guns of the Cormorant. Please God, Archie would not have shot at a rescuer, but they could not know that, nor could the Cormorant risk going any closer to the array of German destroyers on the farther side, well within firing range.

  Matthew turned away and saw Ragland’s face in the light. The same wrenching pity was in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth, although it was impossible to tell in the red and yellow glare of muzzle flames and the smeared darkness of drifting gun smoke, if he was as ashen as he looked. The noise had started again closer, others joining those of the injured ships around them. There was no time for shock or mourning. The battle raged on.

  Midnight passed. In the signal room they heard that both the Ardent and the Fortune had been sunk.

  At two o’clock news came that the armored cruiser Black Prince had blundered into the German firing line and been lost with all hands. For the first time Matthew began to believe that the British fleet might lose. It was a strange thought, alien and hard to grasp. Britain had not lost a crucial battle at sea since before the Spanish Armada in the reign of Elizabeth I, over three hundred years earlier. This would mean the end. Without a navy to guard the shipping lanes, to evacuate the army from France, to prevent the German army landing on the beaches of Britain, the war was lost. In a month, two months, the fields and trees of England could be trampled by German boots, burned, torn up, destroyed by an occupying army.

  What then? Retreat to the hills of Wales, Scotland? Fight in the forests and fens until there was no one left? Or submit, sue for peace and some kind of survival? On what terms? Would that be to betray the dead who had already paid so high a price, only to have it thrown away now? Or the living, who had to make the best of what was left? At what point was it no longer worth fighting?

  He listened to the signals coming in with a kind of grim despair. He thought of Hannah and the children, the village, the fields under the great, silent elms. Were they better destroyed in the last battle, or conquered, surviving, and changed forever?

  He was still thinking of that, angry and tormented, his ears deadened by the noise, when he heard shouting and saw Archie waving his arms, signaling frantically to the men on the deck below him.

  Ragland peered forward. Then Matthew saw it as well, a German cruiser coming straight toward them. He realized what Archie’s order had been—“Clear the foc’sle!”

  The next instant they crashed together with an impact that hurled Matthew off his feet and the whole room seemed to pitch over on one side and then right itself and send him back again, staggering against the table. The ship rolled over to starboard, and the next moment there was the roar and crack of fire raking the length of the ship.

  Matthew clambered to his feet, shaken and hurt. Ragland was doing the same, but with more presence of mind, he made for the door, threw his weight against it and burst it open. Matthew followed him. The front glass was shattered; only then did he see on the port side the vast, towering bow of the German cruiser almost cleaving them amidships, buckling and ripping off the steel plating.

  “God Almighty!” Ragland gasped, standing momentarily rooted to the deck.

  Very slowly the German ship eased back into the sea and the Cormorant rocked violently and righted itself a little, wallowing hard in the water.

  The German guns had cleared the decks. The foremast was toppling, the for’ard searchlight had fallen from the fire-bridge down to the deck, and the funnel was blown back until it rested between the two foremost ventilation cowls. The boats had come down and even the davits were torn out of their sockets. The cruiser’s guns must have been elevated too high to rip open the deck, or they would have been on fire by now, and settling in the water.

  Matthew knew it before the order came to man the boats: They were sinking. There was no way to save her. A wild terror assailed him that Archie would go down with her. He swung around, looking for him, but the bridge was invisible through the smoke.

  Someone was manning the guns, firing with everything they had at the German ship, spewing shell, flame, smoke in choking clouds. They’d go down locked together!

  Except that the German ship was not holed. It was still well afloat.

  One of the boy sailors, not much older than Tom, came scrambling up the steps, shouting something. Matthew tried to read his lips and the meaning in his wildly swinging arms.

  “The brig’s burst open!” the boy yelled, the words piercing a sudden moment’s lull.

  Hannassey! He’d go for the prototype. He didn’t know it was no good. And perhaps it wasn’t. The Germans might be able to finish it!

  There was no point in trying to explain anything to Ragland. The roar of the guns had started again and he would hear nothing anyway. Matthew pushed past him and plunged down the steps, now twisted and torn loose at the bottom.

  Men were running up. Smoke caught in his nose and throat, half blinding him, making him cough and his eyes stream, but he was determined to catch Hannassey, at all costs. If they were going down, all of them—Archie, Ragland, all the men and boys he had eaten with, worked beside, and whose courage and good humor he had known—then Hannassey was bloody well going down with them. He was not going to escape to the German ship that had rammed them, not even for a few minutes before it too sank. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Maybe someone would survive, and it was not going to be the Peacemaker!

  Where would he go when the brig burst open? To the prototype, surely. He wouldn’t leave the Cormorant without at least trying to get it. He was not a man to save his own skin without playing the last card!

  He swiveled in his tracks and went toward the torpedo room where the prototype was stored, theoretically ready for testing.

  It was difficult to keep his balance; the list to starboard was growing worse. He kept sliding, losing his footing and having to catch himself, one hand against the bulkhead, then an elbow, then a shoulder as he ran. He stumbled over bodies and wreckage. The guns were still roaring, as if the crews were determined to take the German ship with them. There was shattered glass on the floor and the air was thick with the stench of gun smoke, burning oil, and rubber from the corticine. And it was getting hotter all the time as he got closer to the fires.

  There was another explosion, a tearing thunder of sound, and the whole ship juddered and sank lower, throwing Matthew forward onto his hands and knees, then rolling him over, bruised and wounded, hands cut, burned, streaming blood. He clambered to his feet again, gasping and coughing, retching to catch his breath.

  Was H
annassey still somewhere ahead of him? What if he was wrong, and he had abandoned the prototype and was even now saving his own life by jumping to the German ship? It would be possible. It was lower in the water now, at least from the raised port side.

  He hesitated. Which way?

  The ship lurched again. Was it even lower? There seemed to be smoke everywhere, and the heat was intense! Were they on fire? Please God, if they were, they would explode! Better to be consumed in a fireball, blown apart in an instant, than to sink knowingly, wide awake, into the darkness and the crushing weight of the ocean, struggling for breath, or drowned as the water poured in, black and ice-cold from the lightless depths.

  But he’d get Hannassey first! If he’d already got the prototype, and was struggling to carry it, which way would he go?

  Portside, of course. It was higher. If she listed any more there was a risk the starboard side would actually be below water level, and if it was holed either by enemy shot or their own gun turrets or magazines exploding, that would be the end.

  It was not his imagination; it was getting hotter. His hands hurt from the broken glass. Somewhere there was burning. It could reach the magazine any minute. He had no idea where it was, or how bad. A voice inside him screamed to go up, toward the light and the air! Escape . . . escape . . . escape!

  The smoke was thicker. He was having trouble breathing. His eyes were streaming, he could hardly see. He fell over another body, inert and wet with blood.

  But he would get the Peacemaker, and die knowing for certain that he had destroyed him. It was worth it. Don’t die for nothing. He just wished he could have told Joseph that he’d done it.

  And Judith and Hannah—they deserved to know, too. Especially Judith. He could not tell Detta, he could never tell her, but she deserved to know, for the way he had used and broken her also, and taken from them both what they could have had.

  He went to the port side, sliding on the floor as the tilt became steeper, grabbing at anything he could reach to help himself, and finding it slick with oil. The noise was roaring in his ears, the engines racing, the shrill hiss of steam, the crash and boom of guns.

  Then he saw Hannassey about five yards in front of him. He was balanced with the prototype in his arms. He saw Matthew at the same instant.

  “Told you you’d go down,” he shouted above the din. “Never had time to use your marvelous invention, did you!” His teeth gleamed in what was left of the lights. Then his face changed. All triumph vanished in a snarl of rage and furious, complete understanding. “It doesn’t bloody work!” he screamed. He hurled it from him, toward Matthew as if he could hit him with it. “The goddamn thing’s no use! You didn’t use it because you can’t! Mother of God! All this for—nothing!”

  Matthew avoided it easily, the pitch of the ship carrying it hard against the other wall, and Hannassey stumbled with the release of the weight.

  “That’s right!” Matthew shouted back at him. “You came for nothing! You’ll die for nothing! You’ll never see your bloody empire!”

  “I don’t . . .” Hannassey started, but the rest of his sentence was drowned in another bellow of gunfire. He turned and stumbled over wreckage toward the steps upward.

  Matthew went after him, clawing his way along, feet slipping on burning corticine and broken glass, climbing over twisted iron and crumpled bodies he could not help, Hannassey always just a few yards ahead of him.

  There was another crash somewhere above and the ship heaved, sending them both flying. There were several more explosions as ammunition caught fire and a roar as a gun turret burst into searing flames. The heat hurt the skin and tore the breath away even where Matthew and Hannassey were sprawled on the burning floor in what was left of the passageway.

  Then Hannassey shot forward and dived for the steps hanging loose-ended from the mangled deck and hauled himself up, swung his body over, and went on.

  Matthew ran at it and jumped, catching the third rung, and flailed wildly for a moment or two before his feet found the bottom one and he swarmed up it after Hannassey.

  He reached the deck and blessed air just in time to see Hannassey running into a pall of smoke under the blackened gun turret. The bow of the German ship was only yards below them. It had heaved away but now it was coming back. Deliberately for Hannassey? He could make it. He had only to leap. He turned for an instant, jubilation in his face, that wide smile, showing his teeth.

  Matthew hurled himself forward and caught Hannassey at the knees, overbalancing him. Hannassey fought, kicking, gouging, tearing at Matthew’s face, his hair, anything he could reach.

  But this was the Peacemaker, the man who would have sold England in the greatest betrayal of its history! But for Matthew, overpowering it like a drowning wave, was the fact that he was the man who had murdered John and Alys Reavley, simply because John Reavley had stumbled onto his plan. Matthew thought only of their bloodied bodies in the car, and his grip was unbreakable unless Hannassey could have crushed the bones of his hands.

  They were near the rail. The German ship was only fifteen yards away, less, and closing. Even through the smoke he could see the vast darkness of it.

  He pulled away with all his strength, then lunged forward, catching Hannassey on the jaw with his head. Hannassey gasped and let go for an instant. It was enough. Matthew scrambled to his feet. He made the decision without thinking. He bent and grasped Hannassey and heaved him over the side.

  Matthew heard him scream as he went down and in the light of the fires saw him flailing in the water for long, desperate, terrible seconds until the steel bow of the German ship crushed him like a fly against the hull of the Cormorant.

  Matthew clung to the rail, nausea sweeping over him, the deck lurching beneath his feet till he fell to his knees, still clinging on. He had killed Hannassey, with his own hands he had thrown him to a hideous death. He would remember that thin scream above the guns’ roar. The falling figure, arms wide, was seared onto his brain, and then the crunch of flesh and bones lost in the din of the sea, the flame, and the ear-splitting explosion of the rear gun turret. Then everything vanished in smoke and darkness, his lungs bursting, the deck heaving violently beneath him. He would die with the ship and all the men in it, but the Peacemaker was gone, dead forever.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Joseph had been to see Gwen Neave again and was walking back on the road homeward, Henry at his heels. He was no longer even aware of the slight ache in his leg. He had been over seven weeks away from his regiment, and he was actually in better health now than many of the men who were still there. The thing that kept him at home in the warmth of the sun and the quiet peace of the fields was his fear for Shanley Corcoran.

  His feet crushed the stems of the grass and he could smell the sweetness of it in the air. The larks were singing above, high up beyond sight, less than a black dot against the blue.

  Why had Corcoran not told Perth yet? Lack of proof? Or did he still need the man, assuming it was Ben Morven? It was a dangerous game to play. No wonder his voice had sounded strained on the telephone. There was so much to win, or lose.

  Archie had just gone back to sea, and Matthew had telephoned to say that he too would be away for perhaps a week or more.

  Then it struck him like a physical blow. The prototype was finished and on trial at sea. That was why Matthew was gone.

  And here was Joseph walking through the grass with the may blossom heavy in the air as if there were nothing to be done but drink in its splendor.

  It must be Archie’s ship being used for the sea trials. Archie had said Corcoran had talked to him about sea trials on the night Blaine was killed. They had been at the Cutlers’ Arms, over at Madingley.

  No, Corcoran had said that was where they were. Archie had said . . . He stopped. It was absolutely clear in his mind, as if it had been only minutes ago, Archie had said they had met at eight, when Blaine had still been alive, and at the Drouthy Duck, here in St. Giles.

  Could
Archie have been mistaken? Surely he must have been. It did not matter to him where or when it had been. No one could have suspected him of being involved with Theo Blaine either personally or professionally. To Corcoran it was far more important, because he had said it was where he had been at the time his best scientist was murdered. Presumably that was what he had told Perth also, if he had asked. He would have, wouldn’t he, as a matter of course, if nothing else, to find out if Corcoran could have seen anything, or heard anything? Not that he would normally be anywhere near Blaine’s house. Corcoran lived in Madingley. Except that he was out that evening, which was unusual. He worked far too hard to take time off, except for the most important occasions—such as discussing sea trials.

  He must simply have made a mistake, in tiredness and anxiety, even grief for the loss of his best scientist, and a friend, and been uncharacteristically careless. And of course it was impossible now to check with Archie so he could correct it.

  Why did that make him feel uncomfortable? Why was he even considering the possibility that Shanley Corcoran could be lying about where he had been? What was it he thought? That somehow Corcoran knew the truth, and was lying about it? He already knew that he was protecting whoever had murdered Blaine because he needed him to complete the project. There was little doubt in his mind that it was Ben Morven. Lucas could not have killed Blaine, and he did not believe it was Iliffe, although it was not impossible.

  Was it conceivable that Corcoran had guessed beforehand, and gone to Blaine’s home to prevent his murder, and been too late? What tragic irony.

  But why had he then lied about it? To prevent any possibility of having to betray Morven, before the work was completed.