by Anne Perry
Judith was alone in one of the Treatment tents, watching the man whose leg had been amputated. She felt helpless, inadequate to ease his pain or offer any comfort that was real. How on earth did Joseph manage to do this day after day and not make things even worse by talking rubbish, promising hope that did not exist, saying it would get better when they all knew that nothing would heal the loss? Driving an ambulance was so much simpler. She had nothing to contend with but an inanimate machine, shortages of parts and fuel, filthy weather, cratered roads, the constant danger of being shot or blown apart. And of course, the knowledge that she might not get the injured men to help before it was too late.
Still, that was uncomplicated compared with trying to find faith and keep your own inner strength clean of lies to cover your despair, or the confusion that threatened to drown every shard of light. How did he manage to cling to any idea of a God who loved, whose plan made sense, and who had even the faintest idea what it was like to be human?
She heard the tent flap pull open with a surge of relief simply that there would be someone else there, a voice other than her own.
It was Lizzie. Her face was white, her dark hair pulled loose from half its pins and curling untidily. She closed the flap behind her and came over to Judith, glancing at the man in the bed moving restlessly in his pain.
“Can you help him?” Judith asked.
“No,” Lizzie answered quickly. “He just has to get through it alone. I expect Joseph will come and sit with him again, if he has time. There are so many…” She bit the inside of her lip, avoiding Judith’s eyes. “And he has to get Schenckendorff back to London.”
Judith was startled, and then the moment after knew that she should not have been. Of course Joseph would trust Lizzie. He had no idea of the burden that it laid on her.
Lizzie rushed on, not allowing herself time to hesitate. “We don’t seem to be having any success finding out who killed Sarah. I’m going to go to Jacobson in the morning and tell him the truth, all of it that I know.” Her voice wavered and she swallowed. “But I have to tell Joseph myself first. He should hear it from me, not from someone else, gossip and half a story. I—”
“Not yet,” Judith interrupted. “At least wait until tomorrow. We might still…”
Lizzie looked at her levelly, blue eyes bright with the grief burning inside her. “So you can find something in a day? We’ve been trying everything we know since it happened. I’ll go as soon as I can find Joseph alone again. I’m only telling you because you’ll have to help him…I think. He…” She could not bring herself to say it.
“He loves you, and he’ll feel like hell,” Judith finished for her. “Wait. Just another day. Please!”
Lizzie hesitated, hope fighting against reason.
“A day,” Judith insisted. “There are no plans to send Schenckendorff out yet. Jacobson’s still trying to find a witness who can tell a straight story. There have been so many lies; he has to find a clear thread. Please…then we’ll tell Joseph, I promise. But don’t, please don’t until you have to.”
“A day,” Lizzie said wearily. “Then I must. I know what it means. What will anything that’s left be worth if I don’t?”
Judith admired her passionately. It was like looking at a man about to go over the top into the gunfire, and she was keeping him balanced on the parapet. But she could not let go of hope, not for a few hours more.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Ever since Matthew had told Mason about the Peacemaker from his family’s point of view, from the murder of John and Alys Reavley right up through the struggle to get Schenckendorff back to London, Mason had been tormented by the weight of his lie to Judith, albeit by silence. He had hidden his own part in it because he had seen confession now as a self-indulgence for which there was no time or emotional energy. They needed his practical help, not his admission to a complicity that would render him useless in their estimation.
Now he was standing on the fire step behind one of the old parapets, staring across no-man’s-land as the morning light picked out the ruts and pools in the gleaming mud, the paths between the old craters a tangled web between the wreckage. There was a faint mist over it, shining silver as the sun struck it. It hid most of the smaller mounds—bodies of men and horses churned up by the shifting pattern of shell holes and seeping water. At this hour it was possible to imagine that sometime far in the future, it could be beautiful again.
Judith was beside him. It was one of the few places they could be certain of not being overheard. She was more desperate than ever to find the truth of who had murdered Sarah Price, partly because she knew all these people in the regiment—and particularly in the Casualty Clearing Station—and felt the pain of suspicion tearing apart the few certainties they had after years of hardship and the loss of half the people they knew. Yet even more urgent was her need to clear Schenckendorff from suspicion so they could take him to London and expose the Peacemaker.
That was the burden that crushed him now.
He looked at Judith, her face calm and pale in the harsh light. He saw very clearly the weariness in her, the depth of emotion, the intense vulnerability in her eyes and mouth. And yet he knew her courage also. If he wished her ever to speak to him in the time ahead, whatever it held for them, then he could not build it on such a vast lie as silence over his alliance with the Peacemaker. He had already carried it almost too far to forgive. Once Schenckendorff was cleared and they left Ypres, it would be too late.
He had thought how he would do it, which words he could use to begin, but now that he was faced with it they all sounded trite and self-serving. They had talked about Schenckendorff, and a silence had settled between them that at least for her seemed comfortable. If he said nothing now it would become a lie, one from which he might never be able to return.
“Judith…”
She turned to look at him, waiting for him to speak.
There was no alternative to honesty; he would make it brief and perhaps brutal, like a quick knife thrust.
“I used to believe in the same ideals as Sandwell does, or did in the beginning,” he told her.
It was a moment before she realized the meaning of what he had said. Then, very slowly, a light of astonished disbelief filled her face, and after it, pain. “You knew,” she said, her voice husky. “When?” She swallowed. “Always?”
“Yes. I always knew it was Sandwell. I didn’t know that he had killed. I should have. I could see that the power was taking him over, the desperation to stop the slaughter at any cost. What is one life here or there, quickly, when tens of thousands are dying slowly and hideously every day?” He waited for her answer as if it were a verdict on him—hope or despair.
He saw the flicker of uncertainty, as if, for a moment at least, she had understood.
She frowned. Her words came very slowly, with intense thought behind them. “If that is a serious question, I think the difference may be in small acts, one by one, when you can refuse to do the violent thing, the irreparable thing. But then that might also be cowardice, mightn’t it? And to say that he should have asked us isn’t really honest, either, because we couldn’t have given an answer that had any meaning. Most of us had no idea what the alternatives were. We hadn’t seen war. We wouldn’t have known what we were being asked to choose.”
“So what were we supposed to do?” he asked, surprised that she had addressed the problem with pity rather than rage. “Just let Europe stagger blindly into a holocaust rather than try everything possible to stop it?”
This time she did not hesitate. “Yes. Rather than sell our honor, yes, he should have argued, pleaded—perhaps uselessly—but not tried to sell us without our knowledge.” She stared across the cratered land in the broadening light. Now the waste of it was easier to see. The mist no longer softened the outlines or hid the corpses. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Trying to make a nation of Englishmen do what they don’t want to is like trying to herd cats into a barn. You can’t
do it. There’s always some awkward cuss who’s going to go the other way, or stop and demand to know why. It isn’t practical, Richard; it never was. Some of us might buy peace at that price, but you’d never get us all to.”
He was watching the light on her face, not on the land. “I know,” he admitted. “At least I do now. There’ll always be someone like John Reavley, and Joseph, and perhaps tens of thousands of others just as willing to die for their dreams. I’m not sure how practical they are, but I’m beginning to believe that they hold the one hope we have of surviving into a future that is still worth keeping, worth having paid this much to have.”
She turned to meet his eyes, searching, trying to read into the depth of his mind to see if the final honesty was there inside him.
He answered impulsively, and yet he was absolutely certain that the very best of himself meant it. “I’ll come to London with you, and tell Lloyd George all I know, and that will back up everything Schenckendorff says. He will have to believe us.”
She stiffened with instant fear. “You’d be admitting to treason,” she said in a whisper. “Don’t you know that?”
“Yes.” Said aloud like that, it brought a chill he had not fully realized before, but it did not alter his certainty that this was what he had to do. It was a payment he owed, and it was the only way she would ever look at him with the shining honesty that she did now, with the possibility of the kind of love that he could not turn away from, even if his life were the price. He would be clean; he would have given all he could to pay for his mistake.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
He was sure. He did not know if he would still have the courage when he was alone, and knew that his name would go down in history not as Britain’s greatest, bravest, and most articulate war correspondent, but as a man who had betrayed his own country for a flawed ideal. If he faltered later it would be because of fear crowding in; weakness, not a change in belief. “Yes, I am sure,” he said firmly. “I love you. More than anything else I want to be the man who can live up to your dreams, and your courage to pay what they cost.”
She gave a little nod. It was a very small, very certain gesture, and then she smiled. Then she touched his face and leaned forward and kissed him, long and tenderly. For those moments he felt an infinite happiness he thought it would be impossible ever to forget.
Later in the morning, when Judith found Joseph in his bunker having just finished more letters, she knew that he saw the happiness in her immediately, and that he also probably recognized it as what it was. But she had no intention of telling him that Mason had always known the Peacemaker, or—at this point—that he was willing to come to London with them and tell the prime minister so. They still needed Schenckendorff; otherwise they could not expect to be believed against a man as powerful as Dermot Sandwell. Alone, Mason might be written off as a lunatic, a man too shocked by his experiences at war to have retained his balance of mind.
And Schenckendorff had not brought any papers with him. It would have been impossible to keep them after capture, even if he had dared to take the risk of removing them from Berlin.
The only written proof was the treaty John Reavley had hidden in the house in St. Giles.
“We’ve got to think,” she said to Joseph. “Have you made a list of all the people it still could be, so we can concentrate on them and eliminate them? It’s the first of November. We can’t have much longer or they’ll have ended the war and we’ll be too late anyway. Jacobson must be working on it all the time. He’s out there like a dog worrying a bone. And Hampton is, too.”
She sat down on the cot, and he turned himself around on the box to face her. He looked tired, and there was an unhappiness under the surface courage that twisted her inside to see. She knew it was because a gulf had opened between Lizzie and himself, and he could not understand it.
Judith ached to be able to reach out and help, tell him that it was because Lizzie loved him intensely, not because she didn’t. But would he be able to bear the knowledge of what had happened to her, and that she was now carrying the rapist’s child? She did not know. He had been so desperately hurt by Eleanor’s death, and the scars had taken years to heal. Might this new blow even rock his faith? And wasn’t that the foundation of his strength?
Staring out over no-man’s-land, Lizzie thought that of course Joseph would have to know. Soon her pregnancy would become obvious. Then she would either have to tell him or walk out of his life forever, without explanation, and that would surely hurt him even more.
Mason had described to her how Joseph had been in Gallipoli when he had first met him. He had tried to capture his compassion, his tireless work for the wounded no matter how exhausted he was himself, his steadiness in the unspeakable horror of it. He had said the sea was red with human blood.
Then he had told her about his long argument with Joseph in the open boat on the channel, after the U-boat had sunk their steamer and left them to find their way back to England as best they could. The others had died, leaving only Joseph, Mason, and one injured crewman. Joseph had been willing to die, if that was what it cost to prevent Mason from writing his story on Gallipoli and sabotaging morale for the recruitment needed to prevent surrender. Yes, Joseph could take disappointment, betrayal, even defeat, and survive them all.
Her eyes had moistened with tears of pride, and of happiness that Mason believed so well of Joseph. Still, she wanted to protect both Joseph and Lizzie as long as she could—and perhaps all the others here as well, except the one man who was guilty. It was the very last resort of all to tell Jacobson about the earlier rape.
Joseph was holding out a piece of paper to her with names and times and places on it. She took it and read.
“An awful lot of this doesn’t make sense,” she said at last. “For a start, I really don’t believe it could possibly have been Major Morel. I know he’s a bit odd, and I think he really would have led a mutiny last year.” She glanced at Joseph’s wry expression. “All right, he did. But I don’t believe he would rape anybody. He’s a rebel in his own way, and he’d fight for any cause he believed in, but violence against women isn’t a cause.”
“And Tiddly Wop Andrews?” Joseph asked. “He said Moira Jessop saw him in the supply tent the only time he wasn’t with the walking wounded, but she says she wasn’t there. Why would she lie?”
“I suppose she was somewhere she shouldn’t have been,” Judith answered. “Or she’s already lied to protect someone else, and she can’t go back on it. But I can’t believe it’s Tiddly Wop. We’ve known him for years! He’s good looking, but he’s as shy as…as a choirboy.”
“That’s rubbish, Judith, and you know it,” Joseph said gently. “He was shy at home. He’s been on the battlefront for four years. He’s not a boy anymore. He’s twenty-six, and a soldier.”
She was startled. “You don’t believe it could be him, do you?”
His face was tight. “I don’t want to, but we’ve all changed. The whole world’s changed. Nobody is who they used to be.” He looked at her earnestly. “It won’t only be those of us who’ve been here who are changed, or on other fronts; it’ll be the people at home, too. Read Hannah’s letters between the lines. She hates some of what is new, but she knows she can’t escape.” He gave a slight shrug. “We don’t look at anything the way we used to, socially or economically. The old rules of how to behave have been swept away. Distinctions in social class are blurred into each other more and more all the time. We’ve been forced to see the courage, intelligence, and moral value of men we used to barely even notice. They aren’t going to go home and doff the cap anymore. We know, in a way we can never forget, that we are all equal when it comes to injury and death, human need, the will to live, above all the honor and the self-sacrifice to go over the top and give your life for your friends.”
“I know,” she said softly. “But I’m so afraid that once we’ve grown used to the silence and the comfort again, we’ll sink back into the old bad things as well
: the indifference, the malice, the inequalities, the stupid lies that we only believe because they’re comfortable. Will we go back to ignorance of what real pain or real sorrow is, and complain about stupid little things again as if they mattered? Will we take offense over trivia, get greedy for more than we need, forget that we are more alike than any differences there are among us? Will we even remember to be grateful just to be alive and at home, able to see and hear and walk? Will we remember to look after those who can’t see or hear? And those who are alone, and will always be alone?”
“I don’t know. But I know what we’ll deserve if we don’t,” he said softly. “If there is a God, a resurrection—and I have to believe there is—then when we meet those who paid, I want to be able to look in their faces and say that I honored their gift.”
“So do I. If I can’t, maybe that would be hell,” she agreed. “And I still hope it wasn’t Tiddly Wop, or Barshey Gee, or Major Morel.”
“Or Cavan,” he added. “There’s something odd about his story. I don’t know what yet, and I wish I didn’t have to find out, but I do.”
“Cavan would never have killed anyone!” she said aghast. “Even you can’t imagine that!”
“I don’t,” he replied. “But he’s lying. I need to know why, unless we can solve it first.”
“I will!” she said, standing up. “I’ll go to it right now.”
“Be careful!” he said with quick fear, standing as well. “You’re not safe just because you’re an ambulance driver, Judith.”
She swiveled to face him, one hand holding back the sacking. “I know!”
Joseph started to look for Tiddly Wop Andrews. They were all finding the enforced idleness a strain, especially since they were held here in a sense captive and away from the last of the fighting. Most were torn between relief that now they would get home uninjured, and the sense of having let down their friends by not being there at the very end. They felt useless. Hours dragged by in small jobs that were largely no more than filling in time. There was no point at all in shoring up trenches; they would never be used again. Rifles had not been fired, so they did not need cleaning. It was still done, but it was a waste of time. The only thing that actually had value was helping the injured, but there was only so much that an unskilled man could do.
