by Anne Perry
He began with Erica Barton-Jones. He found her with Stan Tidyman. The soldier was still gray-faced, his eyes hollow, but he was wrapped up with a pillow and a blanket rolled tight to support him. He managed a faint smile.
Joseph asked after him briefly, then took Erica to one side, over in the corner of the tent beside a table piled with old blankets, bandages, and other stores. They could hear the rain drumming on the canvas.
“The night Sarah was killed,” he said without preamble. “Tell me what you can remember of where everyone was, just what you are certain of. From about midnight onward.”
“It was a bad night,” she said grimly. “I can’t tell you times, only where I was.”
“How many surgeons on duty?”
“Two—Captain Cavan and Captain Ellsworth—and there were anesthetists and orderlies, of course.”
He did not tell her that he knew this already, or that all but Cavan were accounted for. “Tell me what you recall,” he said.
She repeated what she had said from the beginning, every case, what was done and an estimate of the time. He stopped her, questioned, made her repeat and be as precise as possible, everything checked against what others had said.
“What is it you expect, Chaplain?” she demanded exasperatedly. “Going over and over it isn’t going to help. I don’t know who killed Sarah, or what snapped in somebody’s head, or why it was her and not somebody else. Except that she was the one who flirted, but she certainly wasn’t the only one who fell in love or had normal human feelings.” Her face pinched, and she turned half away from him. “If you are looking for some unique sin in her that’s going to make you feel there’s any kind of justice in this, then you aren’t going to find it. And quite frankly I think you are morally dishonest to try. There isn’t any justice, and nobody with any…any courage…is going to believe there is.”
He was startled. He had not even considered such a thing. “If life were always just, then there would be no courage necessary,” he pointed out. “If being good automatically made you safe, then it wouldn’t even be good, it would just be sensible: buying safety, buying your way out of pain or failure, confusion, everything that hurts. Is that what you thought—that I was looking for sense in it?”
She stared at him, her face pale and tired in the half-light. “Aren’t you? Aren’t you longing to explain God so we won’t stop believing in Him?”
“No. I gave that up years ago, even before the war, let alone since.” He thought first for an instant how he had felt after Eleanor’s death, the anger and confusion, the long retreat from emotion into the religion of the brain. That was over now, a kind of little death from which he had been awoken. “No,” he said again. “I’m still looking for whoever killed Sarah because they have to be stopped. I’m not sure it’s even anything to do with justice for her, or for them. It’s a very practical matter of them being prevented from doing it again.”
She blinked. “Sometimes I think you are so pointless, so divorced from the realities of life, well-meaning but essentially futile.” She gave a sigh. “Then you come out with something that makes me feel that perhaps you are the only one who really is dealing with the truth, bigger than the little bits of reality we manage.”
“Sometimes,” he said with a slight smile.
She smiled back at him. “I still don’t know who did it.”
“Do you know if Cavan was in the Evacuation tent when he said he was?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Allie Robinson said he was, but she was lying, to cover for him,” he told her.
“That was stupid,” she said drily. “She can’t have been there herself. I saw her at about four o’clock, or shortly after, and she’d been in the Admissions tent for some time.”
“No, she was in Evacuation,” he corrected her. “She was seen there by Benbow, and Eames as well.”
She shook her head. “I saw her, and she was covered in blood. She must have been in Admissions. She was perfectly clean apart from a few spots on her skirt at about half past three, and by the time any of the wounded get to Evacuation they’re bandaged and fit to go, or they wouldn’t be there. You only get soaked in blood like that either in Admissions or in lying wounded, waiting for operations.” Then suddenly her eyes widened and she stared at him, aghast.
He could not believe it. It was hideous, terrible, but he knew exactly what she was thinking. The images raced through his mind also, increasing, growing clearer and more real. The hatred was there, the sense of morality, and the belief that the meaning of life was falling apart. It was not only in violence and death on every side, but then finally at the core, the very fount of creation, the reason that redeemed all else and gave hope for newness, cleanness in the world again.
Men were dead or damaged everywhere, the flower of a generation. No one could count the number of women who would live alone, and childless. A new, harsher order had taken over, and it was terrifying. Women, the keepers of sanity, had themselves cast it aside. There was a way in which that was the ultimate betrayal, the end of hope itself.
That was why the bayonet had been used—woman punishing the suicide of womanhood. How had he not even guessed at it? Sarah’s playing with Cavan and then flirting with the German prisoners was the final, unbearable offense, committed while British men were only yards away, bleeding to an agonizing death, awake and hideously aware of all of it.
Erica was still staring at him, but there was no struggle left in her eyes. She knew it was true. “I’m sorry,” she said gravely. “I didn’t see it, either, and I should have. I was so sure it was a man. I thought it was Benbow. I saw certain…certain things he did, a way he looked at some of the women, especially Moira Jessop. That isn’t evidence, and I misjudged him. I even thought of warning her not to tease him. I would have wronged him, wouldn’t I?” She gave a bleak grimace of self-criticism.
Joseph did not answer. It was all past, and it would not help. He needed to find Onslow, and Jacobson, too. Jacobson deserved to know. They would have to arrest Allie Robinson and release all the rest of the men kept here, sending the wounded home and the few able-bodied back to the fighting. The station itself would be moved forward to where it was still needed.
“A woman?” Onslow said slowly, as if the very word were a new concept to him, let alone the idea.
Patiently, allowing the horror to fill his words, Joseph explained to him the passion of betrayal that he believed Allie had seen: the ultimate obscenity of a woman like Sarah threatening to defile the very source of life, of nurture, of every hope to make everything clean and new.
“If there is no home to go back to, no one to love, to forgive and to start again, what was the pain all for?” he finished.
“Can we prove it?” Onslow asked, his voice hushed.
“Not easily, but I think so,” Joseph answered. “We must certainly try.”
Onslow wiped his hand over his brow. “Come on, then. We’d better go and find her.” His hand went automatically to the revolver at his belt, reassuring himself that it was there.
Joseph did not tell him that it was unnecessary. He did not know.
Allie Robinson was in the Operating tent. Cavan was busy suturing a lacerated foot. He barely looked up.
Allie saw Joseph’s face, and Onslow just behind him. She stiffened, her eyes wide.
Onslow walked forward slowly, moving a little toward the operating table so he cut her off from it, placing himself between her and the soldier whose foot was being stitched.
She saw the finality in his expression. She stepped back, closer to the table with the instruments on it, scalpel, forceps, needles, clamps.
“Don’t do that,” Onslow said quietly. “It’s all over, Miss Robinson. Don’t make it worse.”
“Worse?” she said, as if he had asked her a question. “What could be worse? We’ve destroyed everything. What we haven’t killed or maimed, we’ve defiled beyond help. There isn’t anything left to win or lose. Our civilization is dead. Not
hing is clean or modest or gentle as it used to be. It’s all strident, dirty. We’ve forgotten who we are, and when you do that, there’s nothing worth having at all. It’s all dirt and blood.” She took another step back.
“Miss Robinson!” Onslow said loudly, his voice high with alarm.
But it was too late. She swung around and grasped the scalpel, looked at him for an instant, then plunged it into her chest. She was a good nurse; she had seen lots of men torn open by shrapnel. She knew exactly where to strike. The blood gushed out scarlet. She crumpled to the floor and did not move again.
The soldier on the table fainted.
Cavan went as white as his coat and gagged, holding his hands over his mouth, the needle dangling by its thread.
Onslow sighed. “I’m so sorry,” he said quietly. “I should have stopped that. Not that it would have helped, really.”
Joseph bent and straightened her out, removing the scalpel. The blood was still pouring, but it would stop soon. She was already dead. He felt sad and helpless.
“Poor creature,” he said quietly. “And it won’t change anything. We’ll still have to find a way to heal.”
CHAPTER
TEN
Now they must race for the coast. There were only days to get Schenckendorff to London. Judith and Lizzie were volunteers, and could leave without difficulty. Mason could do as he chose. Matthew was due to return to London. Only Joseph was regular army, and for him to leave would be desertion.
“You have to,” Matthew said simply.
“I’ll tell Colonel Hook—” Joseph began.
“You can’t!” Matthew’s expression left no room for argument or negotiation. “We’re this close, Joseph.” He held up his hand, fingers and thumb half an inch apart. “The Peacemaker has eyes and ears everywhere. Hook has the power to stop us all. We can’t take the chance.”
“Colonel Hook!” Joseph was incredulous. They were all crammed into his bunker, which was so narrow they could not sit without touching one another. Only Schenckendorff was missing. Joseph looked at Mason, having to twist around to do it.
Mason’s face was bleak. “Anyone,” he said simply. “I don’t know who else believes the Peacemaker, or I’d tell you. We have to just leave. Fill cans with as much petrol as we can get hold of, as much food, and go. We could still lose it all.”
Joseph gave in. It was legally desertion, and it felt like it: no goodbyes, no explanation. But it was his men he cared about, and if Hook explained to them, news of it could reach the Peacemaker in hours.
He sighed and nodded.
Matthew resumed making plans.
Judith wanted to say goodbye to many people, particularly Cavan and, above all, Wil Sloan, but she, too, was aware of the danger. However she did it, or whatever she said, someone would notice and say something. Word would be passed around before they were more than a few miles away. For her, as for Joseph, any risk, however small, was too much. No one else could know how ruthless the Peacemaker was, or how far his knowledge and his alliances had spread.
So she said nothing and felt disloyal as, shivering in the dark, she drove the ambulance out of the Casualty Clearing Station onto the mud track to pick Joseph and Matthew up. They were supporting Schenckendorff between them, as he was still unable to put his weight on his injured foot. A few yards farther on they were joined by Lizzie and Mason, climbing in the back of the ambulance hastily and closing the doors as Judith accelerated and made for the road.
Mason came forward and sat beside her. He alone was of no immediate use in the back, where Lizzie was swallowing her occasional morning nausea and attending to Schenckendorff’s injured foot. Joseph and Matthew were talking quietly about a route back through Belgium, and then across the channel. Time was short. It was already the third of November; a cease-fire could be declared within days. Matthew had a little money, but where to find further supplies was a far greater problem than paying for them. Food and petrol were too scarce to be had simply for the right price.
Judith drove steadily, with concentration. She worried not only about fuel but also about spare parts if they should have any sort of breakdown, not to mention accident. The ambulance was on its last legs anyway. Once away from the army lines with their supply stores, there would be nowhere to get oil or any of the parts she might need. She had had no compunction about taking with her all that she could, begging, borrowing, or removing without the owner’s consent three new spark plugs. Had she been able to explain the urgency, she was quite sure they would have been given willingly.
Now they drove through the fine, dry night. The air became increasingly cold in the open front of the vehicle, and the wind from the north swirled around, creeping between folds of coats and scarves, numbing hands and whipping the blood in cheeks and brows.
Mason was used to it. He had spent the last four years in every kind of vehicle, on every battlefront from the deserts of Arabia to the arctic snows of Russia. As he sat here now moving along the ruined roads of Belgium on the last journey of his own battle, he had a smile on his face and seemed almost relaxed.
Judith looked sideways at him once or twice and saw the change in him. She was almost frighteningly happy to think that it was his feeling for her that had caused it. She wanted it to be so much that she could neither believe nor disbelieve it. And she felt guilty, because it would cost him a high and terrible price. In exposing the Peacemaker he would be confessing to his own part in the treason. Only now was she realizing the meaning of that. There was peace ahead, and justice that would finally call Dermot Sandwell to account for the betrayal of his countrymen and the murders of all those who had stood in his way.
And there was honor for Matthew and for Schenckendorff. Perhaps for Mason there would be at least the acceptance of a faith in life that he had denied before, even fought against. But there would be no future for him with Judith. The only future he could await was execution. That thought hurt her with a finality she had not expected.
She stared into the darkness ahead. The road was nearly dry. At the sides were occasional poplars. Many of them were little more than stumps, but now and then a few had branches, leafless like broken bones. Clear patches in the sky let the moonlight gleam fitfully, showing a landscape of craters and stretches of mud, and now and then the jagged walls of a bombed-out building. They passed a canal, its walls breached, the flooded water flat and pale and irregularly shaped as it seeped away into the fields, sometimes lapping right up to the raised edges of the road.
She would not have changed Mason or had him sink back into the cynicism of before. She remembered their quarrel at the court-martial, the sense of futility that seemed to touch all his thoughts. It was not simply that he believed Joseph’s efforts were pointless, but that he found them foolish, in a way even contemptible because they were rooted in a refusal to face reality. He had thought both she and Joseph were cowards, clinging to faith in a God who did not exist because they lacked the courage to live alone in the universe.
Why had he changed? Yes, he was in love with her. But so was she in love with him. No matter how much you loved someone, you could not alter who you were in order to be comfortable with them. If you loved the right person it should make you stronger, braver, gentler, perhaps eventually wiser. It should never make you deny your intelligence or forsake your integrity. What were you worth if you would do that?
She looked sideways at him again, trying to read his face in the few moments she could spare from watching the road. His eyes were wide and dark, staring ahead of him, and there was a deep sadness in the curve of his mouth.
He must have been aware of her—because he turned and smiled.
“It isn’t for me, is it, that you’re doing this?” She asked it with something close to certainty, willing it to be so.
“No,” he said without hesitation. “Because of you, perhaps, you and Joseph, but because I have to to satisfy myself.”
She felt something of the fear ease out of her, the knots loosen.
Perhaps at last they understood each other in the deepest things; the values that are woven into nature, the need to be at peace with who you are, together or alone.
As if the emotion were too strong, and the time too short, he moved away from it. “I know you’ve dressed Schenckendorff as a British V.A.D., but you’d better not let him speak. He still sounds German to me. I’ll wager any Belgian in the country knows German when he hears it. They have five years’ hate to avenge. They aren’t going to forget it. Does Joseph really think they will?”
“No,” she said simply. “Have you got a better idea?”
“No, I haven’t. But we’d better be right. We’re going to have to stop for fuel sometime. We won’t make it all the way to the coast on what we have. One mistake will be the last.”
“I know.” It was what she had been dreading. Even the basic difficulty of finding fuel could be enough to delay their journey fatally, let alone if any part of the ambulance broke down and she could not find the parts to mend it, or had not the skill. Even any prolonged time in one place brought the danger of exposure. The very best they might be taken for was British deserters. Once anyone realized Schenckendorff was German, they might all be suspected.
“Judith?” Mason said quietly, his voice breaking through her thoughts.
