by Anne Perry
“Chaplain?” Fields gasped, turning his head a little and trying to focus his eyes. “It’s…it’s still there? I thought…” He stopped, embarrassed. He desperately wanted to be brave.
Joseph nodded. “Our surgeons are pretty good. The bone’s not damaged. Don’t think that’ll make it hurt any less.”
Fields gave a weak smile. “As long as it’s there…”
“It is…I give you my word.”
“…then I don’t care.”
“You will,” Joseph said cheerfully. “I remember how mine hurt. I thought it would never stop. Actually it was only a few weeks, but I think I was a pretty good nuisance most of the time.”
“I’ll bet you weren’t.” Fields closed his eyes as another wave of agony passed through him. His skin was ashen white.
Joseph reached down and touched his hand lightly. “Don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose. I’m not saying it to make you feel better. It’s the truth.”
Fields tried to smile, and nearly succeeded.
Lizzie pushed the damp hair off his forehead with her fingers. She had nothing she could give him to ease his pain. The small amount of morphine they had was saved for their most desperate cases. All she could do was come to him as often as she had time. Now she glanced at Joseph, her eyes bright and soft, and then moved to the next man.
Joseph stayed with Fields, a silent presence, simply being there, until he drifted off into either sleep or unconsciousness. Afraid it was the latter, he touched the pulse in the boy’s wrist. It was not strong, but it was steady.
He should go back to the Admissions tent, but he must speak to Lizzie first. He wished to ask her why she had not answered his last letters, but if she had been training for this, in a hospital somewhere away from St. Giles, perhaps she had not received them. And then here in Flanders she certainly would not have. She might even have thought he had stopped writing, and she would not have pursued him. She would have thought it indelicate, afraid he read into her answers a warmth he did not welcome. How absolutely far that was from the truth!
Now he felt awkward, in case it was he who had presumed to go too quickly beyond simple friendship.
She heard him come and turned around from the medicine table quickly, concern in her eyes.
“He’s asleep,” he assured her. “His pulse is not strong, but it’s regular, not fading or skipping. At least he’s got a little while away from the worst of it. I must go back to the Admissions tent.”
“I know. Thank you for coming. Not to be afraid helps—a bit.”
He smiled. “Some of the time,” he said. Then, abruptly: “Lizzie, why did you stop writing?” Instantly he wished he had not said it, but it would only make it worse to try taking it back, somehow explaining it away. He did not want to know the answer; it might be what he was afraid to hear.
“Because I was out here at last,” she said very quietly. “To begin to realize what it was really like. I’d wanted to be a driver, like Judith, but they needed nurses. I started in Cambridge, actually quite a long time ago. I didn’t tell you because it seemed so…mundane at the time. Safe at home. Then out here they kept moving me. I didn’t know whether you were still writing to me or not. There was no one to forward anything.”
“I was.” Then in case it sounded like blame, he continued quickly, “It doesn’t matter now.” He wanted to add something else, something that would capture the old lightness, the ease they had had with each other in St. Giles, driving through the lanes, seeking a terrible truth, his leg aching like an abscessed tooth.
“Thank you for coming,” she said in the moment’s silence, fitting it in as if she was afraid what he might say if she allowed him. “It was what I hoped you would do. I know you have to go back to the Admissions tent. You’ll be needed there, too.” She looked at him an instant longer, then turned back to the medicines.
It was final, and there was nothing for him to do but go back as he had said he should, his heart bumping in his chest, a mixture of hope and confusion in his mind.
Richard Mason was sitting in Casualty Clearing Station to the east of Messines with a colleague named Harper, who was about to return to London. It was raining outside the Admissions tent, and even inside it was chilly.
“Bit unreal, isn’t it,” Harper said thoughtfully. “Used to think at one time that it would never end, and now we’re nearly there. There’s only one way it can go, and everybody knows it. Yet we go on shooting at everything in sight as if there were still something to fight about and it could all make a difference. It’s as if we got so insanely into the habit of it that we can’t stop.”
“That’s probably close to the truth,” Mason remarked. “Have you ever thought how we are suddenly going to start enforcing the law and saying you can’t shoot people anymore, or stick a bayonet into them, even if you think they thoroughly deserve it?”
“You talking about that bloody horrible business up with the Cambridgeshires near Ypres?” Harper asked, pulling a sour face, although it might have been the last of his tea that caused it.
Mason had avoided the sludge at the bottom by leaving the final couple of mouthfuls, but then he had been here many times before. “What are you talking about?” he asked absently.
“Haven’t heard?” Harper winced again. “Some damn lunatic hacked a nurse to death in the clearing station nearest to Ypres. No idea who, or why. All pretty violent and disgusting. Killing any woman is bad, but one of our own V.A.D.’s is beyond the pale.”
Mason’s head swam. His mouth was dry, and there was suddenly a senseless roar in his ears, as if he were in the middle of a river. “V.A.D.?” His mouth could hardly form the letters.
“Yes. Nurse, or ambulance driver, or something,” Harper answered. “As I said, pretty vile. I daresay they’ll shoot the bastard when they find him. You were talking about the general difficulty of settling back into civvy life.”
Mason swallowed, feeling as if he had a stone in his chest. “What was her name, the V.A.D.?” He felt bruised and sick.
“Don’t know,” Harper replied. “Don’t think they said. Got to tell the poor girl’s family first anyway. Pretty rotten way to be killed.” He frowned. “You have family up there? I’m bloody sorry. I didn’t know.”
“No,” Mason said with a feeling of being bereaved. Judith was not family. She should have been.
“Still pretty rotten,” Harper responded. “Don’t think you can make a decent story out of it, one that should be told right now. But of course I can’t stop you going up there if you want to. Last throes of battle and all that.”
Barely listening to him, Mason made a pointless remark, wished Harper well, and went outside to inquire for any sort of transport that would take him toward Ypres. He was prepared to set out and walk if necessary.
Impatiently he asked two or three people for a lift; he was refused because ambulances were full or staff cars were going in the wrong direction. As dusk was mantling the ruin of the fields and woods, he set out on foot, leaving the broken town, bombed out and abandoned, fire-blackened skeletons against a lowering sky.
He passed columns of walking wounded, the German prisoners among them looking just as gaunt and shell-shocked as the British. It moved him to an intense pity, but he had no time for it to scorch his emotions. He must find Judith.
He moved from one first-aid post to another, using his press credentials. His name alone had earned a kind of respect, so people were more willing to help him. They wanted to talk, to ask what news he had and when he expected the war to end. Troop movements were no longer secret; they were reported in the newspapers, because it was one victory after another, as relentless as a tide coming in. He tried to answer the men who asked with the honesty they deserved, remembering that they had been here for long, desperate years and lost entire platoons of friends. Some were the last survivors of regiments raised from factories, neighborhoods, villages. They would go home to quiet streets and drawn blinds.
He did not tell the
m that he knew there was a strong German counterattack on the River Selle, or that Dunkirk was finally shelled by long-range guns. He did tell them that he had heard a rumor that there were peace demonstrations in Berlin.
Everywhere he asked if the ambulance crews included Judith Reavley. Many knew her, but events were moving too rapidly for certainty of anything anymore. A regiment that had been here a day or two ago was farther forward now, and ambulances went wherever they were needed.
“Could be in the Casualty Clearing Station that’s closed off,” one lance corporal told him grimly. “Been a murder there, so I heard. Don’t know why the hell there’s such a fuss. Been thirty million murders, last reckoning.”
Mason was shivering. “Who was killed?”
“Half Europe,” the lance corporal replied.
“In the Casualty Clearing Station?” Mason had no heart to banter. His chest was so tight, it was difficult to breathe. He thought of all the times he had seen Judith since their first encounter at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1915, at a meeting to help coordinate the women wanting to help the war effort, to sort the chaos into something useful. She was there because she was a V.A.D. on the Western Front and knew what they actually wanted. She had been wearing a blue satin dress that elegantly hugged the curves of her body. He could still see in his mind the way she had walked with the easy grace of one whose mind is so absorbed in her purpose, she cared not a jot what other people thought of her. She had barely glanced at him. Even then the passion in her face had captured him.
Later it was the vulnerability. Once he had found her slumped over the wheel of her ambulance, pulled in at the side of the road, only just behind the front line. He had been terrified that she was wounded, even dead. He was overwhelmed with relief to find her breathing. Then he saw her face, her eyes empty of the fire and the will that had always been there before. He had hauled her out of the driver’s seat and forced her to walk with him along the road, talking to her, angry, fighting with her, anything to make her care again. When at last she did, he had held her in his arms and whirled her around for the sheer joy of having her back.
And then last year they had quarreled. It had not been violent, in a way that might be healed, but quiet, and with certainty. She still cared passionately for the same hopeless, naïve ideals she had started out with, and he had seen them for the delusions they were.
Except perhaps they were not. Perhaps Oldroyd was right, and faith, whether founded in dreams or in reality, was the only thing worth fighting or dying for. Or, more importantly, worth living for.
Still, he knew that if it were she who had been murdered in the casualty station, he would feel as if the light had gone out everywhere. There would be nothing left to win, or to lose.
The man, the lance corporal, did not know who had been killed; he could only say that it was a nurse. Mason moved on, mostly on foot. Always there was the smell of death and the knowledge of cold and pain, the sound of guns in the distance and squelching, struggling feet walking beside him.
He found her in the ambulance bay at the Casualty Clearing Station miles from the lines now, somewhere behind Ypres. She was bent over the engine, muttering to herself, an oily rag in her hands and her hair wet and falling forward over her face.
The relief was overwhelming. He wanted to laugh and shout and run over to her across the earth and stones, clasp hold of her, swing her around, kiss her so hard and so long she would fight for breath. Of course he could not. They had parted as enemies, at least ideologically. He had denied everything she had believed in, and her loyalty to her dreams was greater than to him. Perhaps that was the way to survive. Maybe she was one of the few who would come out of this something like whole?
He walked toward her, then stopped. She did not look up.
“Broken?” he asked. “Or are you just cleaning it?”
She froze, then very slowly turned and looked at him. Her eyes widened, and suddenly the disappointment and the hurt were there. His heart pinched. That was what he loved in her, the passion and the courage to care enough to be hurt and not grow bitter or run away.
She straightened up and took a deep breath. “Hello, Mason. Come to report on our murder? Or are you just passing through to the front? I think we’re well beyond Menin now.” She sounded nervous, even defensive.
He made himself smile, trying to look as if he were at ease. Would she believe such a pretense? Perhaps. She had no real idea how he felt. There was no certainty in her eyes, none of the confidence of a woman who knows she is loved.
“So I hear,” he agreed. “I came about the murder. Actually…” Should he tell her the truth? It might not be wise, but there was no time to retreat from a lie. A couple of weeks and the war could be over. Would he find her after that?
She was waiting.
“Actually I heard about it near Messines, but they didn’t know who it was, just a V.A.D. I was afraid it could be you.”
Her face barely changed. In the reflected light from the lamps he could not see if she was blushing. “I’m all right,” she said, looking away. “It’s just rather rotten for everybody because we have no idea who did it, so we are all looking sideways at one another and misunderstanding half of what’s said. You don’t want to think it’s anyone you know, but you can’t help wondering.” She stopped again, still keeping her face averted as if concentrating on the engine. “The worst thing is you realize that some people have very different ideas from the ones you thought they had. I am happier not knowing some of the beliefs they have about…assault.” She straightened up and faced him, eyes hot and angry. “And if you write any of that down I’ll not ever forgive you.”
It was on the edge of his tongue to say that she had not forgiven him from last time, but he bit it back. He needed to begin again with no memories of failure. He was stunned by how overwhelmingly important it was to win her, and how hard it would be. He refused to face the possibility that he might not succeed.
It surprised Matthew to be called to see Jacobson, who was still questioning people, though with no success thus far. He had not told anyone of his true rank or position in the Secret Intelligence Service. With the Peacemaker’s connections and his network of informants, he could not afford to trust even those of the most patent innocence. Far better Jacobson take him for the more junior officer he pretended to be.
Actually he had not told even Joseph that he had been promoted from major to lieutenant colonel. It could wait.
“Major Reavley,” Jacobson began. “Sit down.” He waved to the chair. Sergeant Hampton was standing behind him, his face almost expressionless. “You are not with the Cambridgeshires; in fact, you are not regular army at all. What are you doing here, sir?”
It was a blunter opening than Matthew had expected, and certainly more immediate. It left him no choice but to tell some version of the truth. “I’m with the Secret Intelligence Service, Inspector. I can’t discuss my reason for being here.”
“Really?” Jacobson looked skeptical. “Can you prove that, Major?”
“I could, of course, but you would have to get in touch with Colonel Shearing in London, and you would have to do it in some secure way. Otherwise you could ask the chaplain. He would vouch for me.”
“Isn’t he your brother? Hardly an unbiased witness,” Jacobson pointed out. “The fact that you are an intelligence officer of some sort doesn’t automatically mean you couldn’t have committed a crime.”
Matthew was startled. Being suspected was a possibility he had not even considered. And yet what Jacobson said was true.
Silence fell as Jacobson waited. Behind him Hampton shifted from one foot to the other.
“I cannot tell you what I am here for,” Matthew replied at last. “It would jeopardize my mission.”
“Are you saying you distrust the inspector?” Hampton asked a little sharply.
“We make no exceptions,” Matthew told him. “For anyone. I’m surprised you don’t know that. I had never met or heard of Sarah Price befor
e her death. I have no idea who killed her. If I had, I would already have told you. I am also unaware of the movements of anyone here that night. I was asleep in a dugout a mile or two away, so I cannot offer any information of use.”
“Were you alone?” Jacobson asked.
“No. My brother was there.” Even as Matthew said it, he realized that Joseph was used to the conditions and had slept for several hours without waking. He could not truthfully swear to Matthew’s presence.
“Asleep or awake?” Hampton questioned.
He could be caught in a lie, especially if Joseph were asked without knowing the reason. He would answer honestly. “Asleep.”
“All night?” Jacobson asked.
Matthew hesitated. He had gotten up twice, walked outside, and lit a cigarette. He knew the smoke would disturb Joseph, and even more he found the underground bunker claustrophobic. The second time he had gone some considerable distance along the old trench.
“All night, Major?” Jacobson repeated.
Someone might have seen him. “No,” Matthew replied. “I got up a couple of times and went along the line a bit to smoke a cigarette. But I was the best part of a mile from the Casualty Clearing Station, and then I walked even farther away. I wasn’t gone longer than fifteen minutes.”
“Did anyone see you?”
Matthew tried to recall exactly what had happened. His mind had been on Schenckendorff and the possibility that this was one more trick of the Peacemaker’s. Alternatively, if Schenckendorff was exactly what he said, how could Matthew make sure they got him back to London alive?
“Major Reavley!” Jacobson said impatiently. “Either you saw someone or you did not! Which is it?”
Matthew remembered one picture vividly, perhaps because he did not understand it. He had been tired, sickened by the stench, shivering with cold, but in the flare of star shells in the distance he had seen a man and a boy struggling. There had been a quick lunge, as if with a bayonet, then the boy had fallen, and the man had picked him up and carried him. He had seen the man’s face for an instant, in profile. He had a large nose. It had made Matthew think for a moment, idiotically, of the cartoons of Mr. Punch.
