by Anne Perry
There had been no time for the two of them to talk, and she did not know what to say anyhow. She did not even know if Lizzie wanted to keep the baby, or if she would be relieved to lose it. Perhaps both were true, at different times. One thing she was certain about; she had seen it in Lizzie’s face, in a dozen small actions even in the short times they had all been together: She loved Joseph. And—perhaps in a more lasting way, the thing that would carry them over the pain, the doubt, the times of failure—she liked him. She was not looking for a solution to her own need, or an answer to any difficulty; she liked him for himself. It was there in the quick, rueful laughter, a brief moment of teasing, the acceptance of help and criticism. Underneath the present fear and the knowledge of future pain, she was comfortable with him.
Judith lay on her back on the hard surface and stared up into the complete darkness of the ambulance, letting the near silence wrap around her. It was almost like being at home again after a long and violent journey. There was no sound but the rain on the roof, and that was intermittent now. Perhaps by morning it would have stopped altogether.
That comfort was the kind of feeling she had about Mason also—at least most of the time. And when she looked at his face, she saw certainty in him, as if he had found at last something he had been looking for, and for longer than he knew.
But he must be afraid underneath the courage. He could not imagine that the prime minister would accept his unmasking of the Peacemaker—with all his own involvement in the plot, and his knowledge that it intended to bring about the surrender of Britain—and then simply allow him to walk away. The fact that he had believed that it was for the purpose of a greater world peace was immaterial. Just the knowledge of such plans, in wartime, was treason, and the punishment for treason had always been death. She closed her eyes tightly, even though she could see nothing in the dark anyway. Death by hanging. These few days of exhaustion in the rain and the ruin of Belgium, the channel crossing, and then the drive to London, were all the time they had left together.
But then, for how many women was that true? She was only one more who would lose the man she loved. It was selfish and cowardly to cry as if she were the only one. She was one of millions, all over Europe, all over the world. It was the price of the battle she had never doubted they should fight. Yet that did nothing to lessen the pain. Every man she looked at, she would wish were him: every man with thick, dark hair, or who stood very straight and turned with grace, or who spoke of wild open spaces as if they were antechambers of heaven.
Would he change his mind about surrendering himself when he got to London and the final moment closed in on them, irreversible at last? Perhaps past loyalties and old dreams would overtake his present sense of duty, and he would find that he could not say the words that would hang the Peacemaker.
But it was equally imaginable that he was going with them to turn at the last moment, betraying them and saving Sandwell so he could help create a peace that would allow Germany to rise again, soon, and resurrect the old plan for dominion.
That was a wild and useless thought, and she would be better asleep. Before they set off she must work on the ambulance engine, then drive all day again. Whatever any of them did, it must be what conscience demanded. Nothing else would bring happiness of any sort, or peace of heart, or the ability to love or trust anything.
In the morning it was clear and colder. They breakfasted on tea and the last of the bread they had brought with them, with plum jam. The bread was hard and stale, but no one complained. Uppermost in Judith’s mind was the fact that they would have to buy or beg everything from now on, and that could be another two days, if they had any problems. Time was pressing urgently. It was already the fifth of November—Guy Fawkes Day at home, when they lit bonfires and set off fireworks to celebrate the fact that the plot to blow up Parliament, and kill all its members, had been foiled. A celebration of freedom and the defeat of treason and murder. Did they still remember what it was about? Or was it just an excuse to have fun?
The ambulance would not start. She cleaned the spark plugs, and it made no difference. It was hard to quell the panic inside her. It felt like a fluttering in her stomach and a tightening of her throat so that it was difficult to breathe. No one else had any idea how to help, but she had expected that from the beginning. Mason could observe, assess, write brilliantly. Matthew could plan, judge men, think ahead, unravel truth and lies, and he was a good driver, but he never mended his own cars. Schenckendorff was at least a colonel. Colonels did not maintain their own cars. Lizzie was a nurse and a pretty good driver, too, according to Joseph, who was more than a little biased. And Joseph himself was good at medical emergencies, a fair army cook—at least with a candle and a tin—and a better soldier than he knew. But mechanics of any sort were a closed book to him.
She worked quietly, steadying her hands with an effort of will. At least it was light, and not raining. She changed the plugs. It was sooner than she would have wished. Now they had nothing in reserve.
Joseph was watching her.
“Perhaps you should say a prayer for it,” she said ruefully. “Otherwise we shall have to descend to stealing. Highway robbery.”
“Do you know what parts we need?” he asked, his face puckered with doubt.
She saw the comical side of it. “I was thinking of a trade,” she replied, picking up the crank handle ready to attempt starting the engine.
“Trade?” He was puzzled. “Still doesn’t help if we don’t know what we need.”
“Their vehicle for ours,” she replied. “I told you, highway robbery.” She passed him the crank handle. “Please?”
On the third attempt it sputtered into life. They looked at each other, laughing, drenched with relief, and clambered in.
After they had gone forty-five miles west, they found the roads more crowded with other vehicles and people on foot. It began to look as if the country closer to Dunkirk was making something of a recovery as well.
They managed to find a roadside café at which to buy a meal. It was meager—no eggs, no meat, only dumplings seasoned with herbs—but it was sufficient to sustain them. They spoke little and listened to the conversation around them. There had been other victories. Judith watched Schenckendorff’s face as one group talked about Allied troops pressing forward rapidly now, with terrible loss of German life. She saw the sudden flash of pain in him, and then the effort to hide it and pretend to feel pleasure, like the people around them. A few people around them started cheering, as if each death or mutilation were some kind of victory in itself, a payment for all the loss over the last years: the dead they would never even find, let alone bury.
Then the conversation shifted. There was other news that was more frightening. Spanish influenza had struck, and thousands of people were dying. No one could count how many, and the disease was spreading. Paris was particularly hard hit.
They left the café with a new sense of darkness on the horizon, unknown and closing in. Joseph walked closer to Lizzie. Mason touched Judith’s arm and stood beside her as if to help her up into the driver’s seat, although he knew better than to do so. Instead he went to the front and cranked the engine.
Inside the ambulance as it set off again, Joseph sat with Lizzie, absorbed in quiet conversation. Matthew sat opposite Schenckendorff, clearly searching for something to say, but all conversation seemed trivial compared with the enormity of the truth.
At lunchtime they stopped for necessities and to eat some of their rations. They had pulled in at the side of the road, leaving the engine running in case it was reluctant to start again. All of them were aware of its frailty. They looked for clean water to drink, and found nothing. There was no time to light a candle and heat any. Thirst would have to wait.
Matthew and Schenckendorff walked back together from the semi-privacy of a clump of trees, picking their way through rough grass. The land was flat, cut by canals where once there had been straight lines of trees. It was more orderly than England; it lo
oked man-made. Someone had created these avenues and dikes, these farmhouses with their stone walls dipping down into water. In Cambridgeshire, even in the fen country where there was water everywhere and it was as flat as a table, the paths were winding and the rivers seeped in all directions, as though taking as long as possible to reach the sea. Invaders had been lost there since the last stand of the Saxons against the Normans in 1066. They were a people who fought to the last ditch and dike, to the last island and quicksand, the final stand.
Schenckendorff was limping badly. He should not have been walking on that foot. It must hurt like hell, but he had never complained. Matthew found himself hoping intensely that it would not be damaged permanently. He waited for him to catch up so they could walk side by side.
“Where are you from?” he asked conversationally.
“Heidelberg,” Schenckendorff replied. “It’s a very old city, steep, overlooking the Rhine.” He smiled slightly. “It’s nothing like this.” He left the wealth of comparison unsaid, but Matthew guessed at what might be racing through his mind.
Schenckendorff glanced at him and saw it in his eyes. “And you are from Cambridgeshire,” he said as if it were all some easy exchange—two men passing the time of day. “Flat like this, but far more eccentric, more full of individual oddities that go back to your Domesday Book and before. Nobody has ever forced you to change them. You are very stubborn.” He gave a little shrug. “It used to annoy me. Now I have changed my mind. I think perhaps it is good. We found some kind of identity in being different, something to stand on and believe it worth paying the greatest price to save. If you give up the right to be different, maybe sooner or later you give up the right to think at all, and then perhaps you are dead anyway. You haven’t had your life taken from you, you gave it up yourself—for nothing.”
Matthew stopped in the rough grass by the edge of the road, staring at him.
Schenckendorff smiled. “You were wondering if I would change my mind when I got to London. I know. You all are. You would be foolish if it had not at least crossed your mind. You must take every possibility into account. I won’t change. The cost of the peace I thought of is too high, and I am not sure now that it is peace at all.” His face shadowed. “I think it might be the beginning of a slow death. Life, real, growing, passionate life, is not peaceful. Learning hurts, and has costs. My onetime friend Sandwell misunderstood that, and he lost sight of the purpose of it all.”
Matthew waited.
“Individuals matter,” Schenckendorff said quietly. “Moments of joy, a man’s victory over the darkness within himself, a perception of beauty, whether it is of the eye or the mind. I think we had better get back into the ambulance. Your remarkable sister is waiting to leave.”
Some of these same thoughts crossed Joseph’s mind, but he was preoccupied with Lizzie. As a child he had watched his mother endure the same distress, but she had been in her own home, secure and deeply loved, and the children she was carrying were wanted.
For Lizzie it was in every way different. She was alone, facing an unknown future and a child she must dread. Would she think of the violence, assault, degradation every time she looked at its face? Could she possibly learn to love it, to be tender, to laugh, to find joy in its growth, its achievements? It. Would it be harder if it was a boy?
Now she was sick again, desperate for privacy, and surrounded by men, two of whom she barely knew. They were always in a hurry, feeling the urgency all the time, the need to move, the knowledge that if they made even one slip they could be stopped, imprisoned, even executed summarily. The hunger for revenge was in the air like the smell of decay.
How could he help her? She was walking back over the grass a little shakily. Her face was bleached of all color, and her hair was straggling out of its pins. He ached to comfort her, but might he be making promises he could not keep? Could he love that child as if it were his own, and never even for a moment look at it and hate it because Benbow was its father?
He remembered how he had felt as a child: the certainty of his father’s interest, his time and attention. He thought of countless hours shared: in listening to his father’s long, rambling funny stories; in pottering in the garden feeling he was helping, learning weeds from flowers. Later there had been more complicated discoveries about the first thoughts in philosophy, feeling his way toward wisdom. He remembered long walks in comfortable silence, always certain that he was not only loved but liked, valued, believed in, a necessary part in the greater happiness. Arguments meant nothing; the security was always there underneath, like a deep ocean with an inexhaustible current.
A warmth opened inside him, a steadiness that had been absent for some time—he could not remember how long. It was back again now, a bedrock on which every good thing could be built. Lizzie’s child deserved that. Everyone did. Nothing less was enough.
He walked toward Lizzie and took her arm, lending her his strength. She looked up at him quickly, and he met her gaze without wavering.
She saw the knowledge of something new in him, a complete absence of fear. She took a deep breath and smiled at him, hope flaring up.
By evening the rain had returned, steady and hard. They were grateful to be offered both food and shelter at what before the war must have been an excellent café. During the occupation it had housed German soldiers. Now the original owners had taken it back and were trying to salvage all they could of the past.
“Broken!” Madame said furiously, picking up a blue-and-white china platter to arrange the food on. It had been cracked across the center and carefully glued together again. “Everything is tired and dusty and broken. I’d kill every last one of them if I could.”
Joseph struggled for something to say. She clearly wanted justice, some answering pain to compensate for all that had been taken from her and from all the others she had known and loved.
“I know,” he answered her. “There’s not much left.”
She grunted and regarded his chaplain’s uniform with contempt. “Aren’t you going to tell me to have faith in God?” she demanded. “Or at least remind me that we should be grateful to you British for fighting for us? That’s what my husband tells me.”
“You don’t do what you think is right for other people’s sake,” he said. “You do it for yourself.”
She was surprised. It robbed her momentarily of the response she had been going to give. “I suppose you’d like something decent to eat?”
“Wouldn’t we all? But we’ll be grateful for anything,” he replied.
“Don’t be grateful!” she snapped. “I’m not giving it to you.”
But when the meal came it was prepared not only with care but with imagination and skill as well. Dark bread was set out on the mended blue-and-white platter, made to look inviting with a few leaves of parsley and red radishes. There were small dishes of something that resembled Brussels pâté, and others of pickled fish to add taste, and the suggestion of meat. They were all sitting around one long table, and she placed them in the middle with a baleful glare, daring them to make any remark.
They thanked her and shared the meal in equal portions, although Lizzie gave half of hers to the others.
Monsieur came and stood in the doorway smoking a clay pipe with something dark and pungent in it. It might have been half tobacco, but it smelled as if it were at least half dung.
“So what are you doing away from the fighting, then?” His English was thickly accented, but he had some confidence in the language. “Isn’t over yet, you know. Still some men out there being killed.”
They had expected this, and were prepared.
“Taking information back to London,” Matthew replied. “It’s urgent, and secret. Can’t trust it to letters.”
“All six of you?” Monsieur clearly did not believe them. He looked at Mason. “You’re not a soldier. Why not? You look fit enough. Flat feet, have you? Shortsighted? Know what I tell people who are shortsighted? Get closer to the enemy. You’ll see him all righ
t when he’s a bayonet length away.”
Madame mumbled something unintelligible at him.
He ignored her and glared at Mason, waiting for an answer.
“War correspondent,” Mason said truthfully. “Miss Reavley is an ambulance driver and Mrs. Blaine is a nurse. Major Reavley is an intelligence officer.” He indicated Schenckendorff. “And Major Sherman is also. He’s been behind the lines and, as you can see, been injured.”
Monsieur was mollified, but not happy. He looked at Schenckendorff doubtfully. “What’s any use behind the lines now?” he asked. “Kill them, I say. Same as they killed us.”
Everyone stiffened. Joseph drew in his breath sharply, afraid of what Schenckendorff would answer. He loathed what the Belgian was saying, but perhaps—if this had been his land and his people—he might have felt much the same.
Monsieur was waiting, a challenge in his eyes.
“Exactly,” Judith said, swallowing her mouthful of food with a gulp. “We are not so different from them.”
Monsieur’s face flushed hot red. “Speak for yourself, woman! We are nothing like them. They are animals, pigs! They steal and they rape and they kill.”
Lizzie’s spoon slid out of her hand, spilling gravy on the table.
Joseph searched frantically for something to say or do to cover it. Nothing came to his mind but fury.
Judith looked at the man. “Yes, of course. I only see the enemy who have been wounded. I forget: The ones who are able to be are violent. We are not like that. We don’t steal, we don’t hurt women, and we don’t kill the unarmed.”
Mason bent his head to conceal his expression.
Madame glared at Schenckendorff, challenging him to argue.
The silence grew.
“The hunger for revenge is natural,” he responded uncomfortably at last. “Especially after so many years of being helpless.”
