by Anne Perry
“Hello…Chaplain,” she said awkwardly.
“Lizzie…Nurse…Blaine.” He found his tongue clumsy, words idiotic, banal. Of course she had said she might join up, after her husband had been murdered in 1916. He had thought she was just searching for something to do—ideas, not reality. “I…” He swallowed. “I thought you were going to be a driver.” He remembered the miles she had driven him during that nightmare time when they were looking for a traitor. She had been the only good part of that summer.
She bent and picked up the scalpel, holding it carefully in her hand to keep it separate from the clean ones. “I started that way, but they needed nurses.” She smiled. “I’m quite good on ordinary roads, but out here it’s a different thing altogether, and I’m not so clever at the maintenance. I’m not inventive enough.”
“Have you been in this section long?” How had he not seen her before, or at least known she was here?
“A few weeks. People are being moved around all the time, to fill in the gaps. Are you here because of Sarah Price and what happened to her?”
“Colonel Hook asked me to help, if I can. Did you see Sarah last night?”
“Yes, of course. We were both working in the Admissions tent and then the Operating tent. She was in Resuscitation for a while. She has—” Lizzie stopped and took a breath. “Had more experience than I do.”
“Do you remember what time you last saw her?”
She flinched, understanding exactly why he asked. “Not really. I saw her coming and going up until we had a new lot of wounded in at about half past two, three o’clock. I went to Admissions.” She looked down, avoiding his eyes. “I hate that. I feel so helpless and I’m never sure if I’m making the right decisions. Some of them die before any doctor even gets to them.” She stopped abruptly, violent emotions naked in her face.
“I know,” he said gently. He touched her, just fingers on her arm, but tender with the ache to comfort her that burned through him.
She looked up. “Yes, of course you do. You must spend hours there, doing what you can. I’m sorry. It’s…” Clearly there was no way to finish.
“Did you know Sarah?” he asked. “Can you tell me anything about her?” He would value her common sense. She was older than many of the other nurses, and he already knew her wisdom from two summers ago, the steadiness she had shown in the midst of her own grief at her husband’s death. She had even kept up a bleak, brave humor when she had been suspected of his murder herself. She had been afraid, but she had never sunk to anger or bitterness. How sweet that was now—like sudden sunlight on a winter landscape.
“Not very much,” she answered. “She seemed a nice enough girl, a bit flighty.” Her face was blank for a moment. “But then she was alone, with nothing in particular to go home to.” She said the words with only the slightest tremor. “Her parents are dead, and her brothers; she had only a grandmother. I heard her say that, and for a moment I saw something more than the rather trivial person she seemed to be.”
She looked away for a moment, and he saw that she was struggling with emotions. He wanted to say something wise and gentle that would comfort her. He wanted overwhelmingly to reach out and touch her, but it would be completely inappropriate. It would startle her, and she would be embarrassed; worse, it would be an abuse of the trust she needed to keep in him as chaplain. He put his hands behind his back, clasping them hard enough to hurt.
“Did she flirt, to lead anyone to suppose…” He did not know how to finish the sentence.
She gave a tight little smile, meeting his eyes. Then, seeing him color faintly, her smile widened. “Probably,” she agreed. “But that’s no excuse.”
Of course she had not seen the body. The bestial intimacy of it flooded his mind with a revulsion so violent, it made him feel physically sick.
Lizzie saw it, and without hesitation moved forward to put her hand very lightly on his sleeve. “I’m sorry. Was it terrible?”
“Yes.” She had seen her husband’s body. She was a nurse. He should be able to trust her strength. “Yes, it was bad. Please be very careful.” That was a ridiculously inadequate thing to say. The thought of anything happening to her was worse than it happening to himself. How had he not realized that she was so much more than a friend, even the best kind of friend to whom one could talk of the innermost things, or keep silence and still feel the warmth of trust? He had crossed a boundary within himself, and there was no way to retrace his steps, even if he wished to. Part of him did want that; he was afraid to care again so much. In fact, he was more afraid, because new places had been carved out inside him to a depth he had never touched before, an emotion that was not part of him, but all of him.
“We are all being careful,” she said wryly. “None of us has gone anywhere alone today. It’s all ridiculous and ugly. I find myself talking to someone quite naturally, a doctor or an orderly or driver, or a man wounded but not disabled by it. Then suddenly I remember, and I can see that he does, too, and neither of us knows what to say. I’m frightened of him, embarrassed, and he knows it and is sorry for me, or angry because I’m being unjust. It’s all horrible.”
He nodded. It was a situation he had never faced before, and he tried to imagine it. “It won’t be long,” he said aloud. “We’ll be able to prove pretty soon that there were only a few people it could have been, then all the others will be cleared.” Please God that was true. Apart from the other sordid and dangerous things, they had to solve the murder and be free to get Schenckendorff back to London. But he dare not tell Lizzie that, for her own safety.
“Is that what you are doing?” she asked. “Helping the police?”
“Yes. Can you account for any of the men last night, from three o’clock onward, or when you last saw Sarah?”
She thought hard before answering. “I was working with two of the orderlies for most of the couple of hours when the new cases came in. I don’t think they were out of the Admissions tent for more than a few minutes at a time, and then it was to take them into the Pre-operation tent.”
“Names?” he asked.
“Carter and Appleby. I think the surgeons were operating all the time, or with people in Resuscitation.” She looked at him anxiously, searching his eyes. “I saw people after that, of course, but about five or six in the morning. You don’t look at watches when you’re trying to stop people from dying. And everyone was covered with blood. We always are.”
He nodded. There was nothing to say. He took brief notes of all she told him, then reluctantly left her and started to speak to the injured British men who had been here last night. The first he saw was Major Morel. They had known each other since Morel had first come to Cambridge as Joseph’s student in 1912, to learn biblical languages. He had been there when Sebastian Allard had died. That had been his first experience of the shock and emotional confusion of murder. They had served four years of war, seeing most of the same horror, enduring the grief for loss of men they both knew. Morel had been the leader of those who had come so close to mutiny last year, and together he and Joseph had gone east and through the lines into Germany to bring back the one man guilty of murder.
Morel had been injured in the shoulder last night, and was now among the wounded. Joseph found him propped up in a bed in one of the Treatment tents. He was very pale, his cheeks sunken, but that was the result not so much of the new injury as of the weariness and hunger of four years in the trenches. His dark eyes were red-rimmed and looked enormous.
“Hello, Reverend,” he said with a twisted smile. “Have you come to do your holy duty, or to find out if I killed that poor woman? I hope to God it wasn’t one of us. What a bloody miserable way to end the war.”
“Do you think it might have been one of us?” Joseph asked him.
“Of course not!” Morel said in assumed horror. As always, he was struggling between intellect and dreams. He desperately did not want it to be one of his own men. For all his pretense at an armor of cynicism and his biting, irreverent wit,
his care for his own men was deeper than any loyalty that duty could impose. They had journeyed through a kind of hell together, seen the deaths of half of those they loved, and it was not over yet. The ones who survived were weighed down by the ghosts of lost lives—joy and pain to carry for those who had forfeited their own chance to feel at all.
Joseph looked at him. His skin where his uniform usually protected it was clear and fine, apart from the scratches and louse bites they all had. The bones of his shoulders were still slender as a youth’s, yet his eyes were those of an old man. Everyone was like that, but Joseph knew Morel, and that made it different.
“Do you mean not British, or not the Cambridgeshires?” he asked him.
Morel grimaced. “I’m a realist, Reverend. Not the Cambridgeshires. I know a lot of people are saying it had to be one of the Germans, and since they’re not locked up because we’ve nowhere to put them, it’s a nice thought. But it could have been pretty well anybody. I don’t envy you your job of finding out who, and I suppose you have to. You would, anyway.” He winced. “You never could leave well enough alone, even when nobody else knew there was even a problem.”
“I’ve learned,” Joseph said rather tartly.
Suddenly Morel’s face softened and a sweet affection shone through. “I know.” Then it vanished again. “But I hear there are a couple of policemen this time, so you won’t be able to hide anything. Don’t even try!”
“I have no intention of trying!” Joseph snapped. “There’s nothing ambiguous about the morality of this.” Even as he said it he knew that that might not be true. When was a crime ever utterly one-sided? Was the man who did this born violent—bestial? Or had they taught him how to hate, and that killing was the answer to rage? Had they created what he was now?
Morel rolled his eyes and did not bother to answer. Instead he recounted what he knew of men’s comings and goings through the night from the time he had arrived, in pain but very definitely conscious and observant.
Joseph thanked him, asked what he could do to help, then moved on to the next man.
That evening Joseph joined Matthew in the dugout. There was no spare accommodation in the clearing station now that only the most seriously wounded could be moved on. Anyone able to stand remained, imprisoned by Jacobson’s command. The Germans were herded together, but they had only the barest shelter, apart from those for whom exposure might mean death. Even the male members of the Voluntary Aid Detachment—Wil Sloan and two others—were not allowed to leave.
“It can’t last,” Matthew said grimly, trying to get a candle lit in a tin in order to create a makeshift stove to boil water. “Damn this thing! How the hell do you ever manage?”
Joseph did it for him with the ease of practice.
“Thank you,” Matthew said drily. “I hope I leave here before I do enough of that to become as good as you are.”
“I’ve had four years’ experience,” Joseph replied. “Although I usually managed to cadge from somebody else.”
Matthew looked at him gravely. “You love these men, don’t you, Joe.” It was an observation; there was no question in his voice.
“Of course,” Joseph answered without hesitation. “If you can pass through this with men and not care for them, then you aren’t fit to call yourself human. It’s a kind of friendship no number of years of safety could forge. There won’t be anything like it again in our lives. We leave part of ourselves here with those who’ll never come home: an obligation, a debt.”
He swallowed hard, his eyes stinging. “We’ve got to get this solved, and get Schenckendorff back to London,” he finally said. “His foot is a bit better today. His fever seems to be breaking.”
“That’s the least of our worries,” Matthew answered grimly. “Somebody butchered that girl, which would be bad enough at any time, but as you know, out here nurses are viewed pretty well like angels. They’re the one link with the women they love who represent home, and decency, and everything they’re fighting for. For one or two I spoke to, it was as if something inside them had been violated, too.”
Joseph stared, realizing suddenly that this was what he had seen in Morel and the others he had spoken to. They assumed it was rape, although the details of the crime had been kept quiet. That kind of violation, he realized, causes a deep internal injury to men also, all decent men.
Matthew gave a little shrug. “If we don’t solve it soon, Joe, there’s going to be a whole lot more violence, possibly toward the German prisoners. Our men want it to be one of them, not one of our own. I’ve heard some ugly things said. The veneer is thin; it won’t take much to break it.”
It was another hard night, but most of the casualties were taken to a clearing station five miles away, which was closer to the actual fighting as it moved eastward. Joseph arrived back to find Matthew waiting for him outside the tent for the walking wounded. His face was haggard and his uniform sodden wet in the rain. As soon as he saw Joseph he strode toward him, splashing through the mud with complete disregard.
“Joe, it’s getting worse,” he said abruptly. “There’s been more violence. Several British soldiers, three or four at least, lit into half a dozen German prisoners and beat the hell out of them. The worst thing is that the officer in charge didn’t do anything to stop it. He didn’t even punish them for it after. What in God’s name is this…this whole bloody slaughter for”—he swung his arm around violently to encompass the entire battlefield—“if we end up acting like barbarians ourselves? We might just as well have surrendered in the first place. We had nothing worth saving.” He was so shaken that his hands were trembling. “We’ve got to get Schenckendorff out of here,” he went on, deliberately lowering his voice. “If he still thinks we’re worth saving?”
Joseph understood his anger. The sight and the stench of so much suffering, and so unaccountably many dead, had temporarily torn away his normal reserve. His brother was used to the intellectual tensions of waiting, of cat-and-mouse games of the mind, but the sheer physicality of the line was new to him. “Who were they, do you know?” he asked.
“Two of them were Black and Youngman. I don’t know the others.”
“Bill Harrison’s men. I’ll go and speak to him.”
“The officer already knows!” Matthew said impatiently. “I told you, he didn’t give a damn. He just let it go.”
“I’ll deal with it.” Joseph turned and walked away.
He found Harrison surprisingly easily in the Casualty Clearing Station. Stan Tidyman, one of his men, had lost a leg; the officer had come to see if he was still alive and give whatever support he could.
Joseph looked at Stan’s gray face and sunken eyes, and waited until Harrison was ready to leave him. Not that you were ever ready, but there came a time when it was necessary.
He waited outside and spoke to Harrison as he stepped onto the boards and into the wind. His face was tight and vulnerable with pity, and he looked relieved to see Joseph. “There’s not much you can do right now, Chaplain,” he said grimly. “But he’ll be pleased to see you.”
Joseph felt a stab of guilt. “Actually it is you I was looking for,” he answered. “Four men beat more injured German prisoners last night. Two of them at least were from your unit, Black and Youngman. It’s got to stop, Bill. Apparently the lieutenant on duty didn’t do anything. That isn’t good enough.”
“I didn’t know,” Harrison said unhappily. “They’re on guard duty, and they resent it. They’re only slightly injured and they want to be pressing forward with the rest of the regiment.” He gave a slight, rueful smile. “We’ve been telling them to go and kill Germans for the last four years, Chaplain. Some of them hated doing it so much they were almost paralyzed at the thought of deliberately blowing another man’s body to pieces, even if he was German. They look just like us, walk and talk, have homes, parents, pet dogs, things they like to do.”
He was obviously distressed, his disgust running deep, but he refused to evade the issue. “I’ve had to punish
men because they couldn’t pull the trigger, and I hated doing it. I’ve seen hundreds of men aim high, on purpose. And I’ve seen those who didn’t, and the nightmares they’ve had afterward.”
He shook his head. “We gave medals to the ones who could do it without flinching. They were ordinary men when they came here, bakers and blacksmiths, bank clerks, farm boys, bus drivers. A lot of them have lost brothers, friends, even parents at home from the bombings.” His voice dropped. “Wives have been unfaithful over the long years alone, sweethearts have found someone else. It hurts. It doesn’t seem fair to punish them now for being what we’ve made them into.” His gray eyes looked steadily into Joseph’s with an honesty that would not flinch or accommodate. “I’ll speak to them, but I’m not going to punish them, sir.”
Joseph admired his loyalty, stubborn though it was, and perhaps technically wrong. He could understand it, and he knew that from Bill Harrison he should even have expected it.
“What if it takes us awhile to find this man?” he asked aloud. “Closed up here like this, these incidents could get worse, especially since he got away with it this time. I know that what someone did to Sarah Price was bestial, but that isn’t the reason for this, it’s the excuse. Next time someone may be critically injured, or even killed. Then we will have to charge whoever did it with murder, because beating to death an injured and unarmed prisoner is murder, Bill. You know it, and so do they. So do the Germans, incidentally.”
Harrison stood very stiffly, shoulders square. “I’ll talk to the men, Chaplain. I won’t let that happen.”
“Good.” Should he trust him? What if the violence did break out again, and this time Schenckendorff were killed? He dare not say anything. The Peacemaker had eyes and ears in all sorts of places, followers who were often good men, idealists whose dreams were more passionate than their understanding of human nature. They killed for another man’s vision, and Joseph could not afford that. They were so close. This was the last hand to play against the Peacemaker, win or lose.
