by Anne Perry
“Finished,” Matthew said as they reached the ambulance. “Took his identification and insignia of rank off him and burned them. That’s what took the time. Hard to get wet cloth to ignite, but we can’t afford to be caught with it…if he’s got allies. Is Judith all right to drive, or shall I? That engine sounds very rough.”
“Then she’d better,” Joseph replied. “She knows it. If anyone can nurse it along, she can.”
“Right.” Matthew opened the back doors and climbed inside.
“I’ll ride with her.” Mason made it a statement, not an offer.
A few minutes later the engine was cranked again. It sputtered to life and they lurched uncertainly forward, then stalled. It took four attempts before they were finally on their way, moving at about twenty-five miles an hour in the cold morning sunlight.
“I think we have to face the fact that the Peacemaker knows Schenckendorff has crossed sides,” Mason said after five minutes of silence as they wound their way with difficulty through a small village. The streets were crowded with carts and people walking: some soldiers, some refugees returning to stare in dismay at once-familiar houses now crumbled to stained and ugly ruin.
“Do you think he’ll send someone else after us?” Judith asked.
“We can’t afford to take it for granted that Hampton was the only one,” Mason replied. “It’s a toss-up which is better: speed on the better and more obvious roads, or discretion in taking byways, perhaps even having to ford the odd stream and follow a few farm tracks.”
“Wouldn’t an ambulance on a farm track draw attention?” she asked. She was worried now. This road was bad enough, and the engine was misfiring. She had no more spark plugs, and much could go wrong now that would be beyond her ability to mend. “And we’ll need more fuel in another fifteen miles.” She smiled grimly. “We might be better to fight, if we have to, than to try running. The poor old thing’s not got it in her anymore.”
“We need to make the coast by tomorrow night, if we can,” Mason answered, a sudden sadness in his voice. “We’ve still got to make it from Dover to London, or from wherever we land.”
“Did you like Dermot Sandwell?” she asked as quietly as she could and still be heard over the noise of the engine. They were through the town and onto open, flat road again. “I met him once,” she added, thinking back to 1915 and a brief leave in London. “He was different, powerful, as if he had a brilliant mind. I remember his eyes: pale blue and very bright.”
Mason thought for a moment or two before he answered. “I don’t think like is the right word,” he said finally. “I admired him. I thought he had a greater vision than the rest of us, and the courage to do what he believed was right for all mankind, not just a narrow few. Other politicians were always so partisan, playing to the crowd. Sandwell was above that. He didn’t really care if he was liked or not, or even if the majority understood him or saw his vision.”
She drove with difficulty for half a mile, veering right and left to avoid all the rubble in the road, and potholes deep enough to break an axle. She was thinking about Mason, and how the disillusion must hurt him. It had been a great dream, selfless. At least that was how he had seen it at the outset.
“How did you know him?” she asked when the road was less dangerous and she could increase speed a little.
“After Africa,” he answered. “We were both involved in the Boer War, although we didn’t meet then. At that time it seemed terrible.”
She looked sideways at him and saw pity and self-mockery in his face. He must have been aware of her gaze, because he turned to meet her eyes and smiled. The tenderness in them was overwhelming, the pain for all that was impossible, and that he longed for.
It caught her breath, and tears blinded her eyes. She veered sideways and hit a pothole, jarring the ambulance. She swore, partly in fury with herself.
He started to laugh, the emotion in him too powerful to contain.
She laughed with him, and managed to stop it from turning into weeping. They had today and tomorrow, and they were infinitely precious. They must not be spoiled with a word, a look, an instant of self-pity or blame that they would afterward regret. Above all there must be no cowardice.
“No, I don’t think I did like him,” he said at last. “But I loved the dream. Now it’s time to wake up.” He put his hand over her shoulder and she felt the warmth of it through her. “I hate to admit it,” he added. “But I rather like Schenckendorff. There’s nothing manipulative about him.”
She smiled, steering around a chicken in the road. “So do I. And I admire his quiet courage. He never complains.”
In the early afternoon they came to a village that seemed unusually deserted on the outskirts. But as they reached the square in the center, they found at least thirty people gathered. Most of them were watching while half a dozen crowded close, pushing and jostling, arms raised, flailing against one person who cowered beneath the blows, unable to resist.
Judith jerked the ambulance to a stop and Mason jumped out. A moment later the back door opened and Joseph and Matthew scrambled out.
Joseph started straight toward the crowd, most of whom were shouting and snarling at the figure now fallen to the ground and being kicked. They parted to allow him through, thinking he wanted to join them.
“You lost someone? You deserve to help her die!” a heavy-boned woman cried out. “Kick her for me! Kick her for my son!” Her voice became choked in a racking sob.
Another woman let out an animal cry of hate, wordless and raw with pain.
Joseph found himself pushed to the front, only feet away from the figure huddled on the ground. Her head was shaven, and her few remnants of clothes torn and covered with blood.
Joseph stared at her. She was no more than thirty, and slight. Barefooted, she looked as if she had been dragged along the ground.
Joseph was sick with revulsion at the violence. He stared around him at the people, their faces gloating, vivid with hate.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” he demanded in French.
The man nearest him spat one word. “Collaborator!”
Others took up the cry, adding taunts and curses. It was the worst accusation of all, worse than enemy, even than spy. It was the lowest form of human life, the final betrayal. Still Joseph was horrified that they could do this to her. Without thinking of the danger of attracting their anger, he bent and lifted the woman off the ground, pulling first at her shoulder, gently, to turn her so she could rise.
Her face was beaten; her nose broken and bloody, her eyes swollen half shut, her teeth chipped and lips torn. Even so he recognized her, because the one time he had seen her had been so powerfully engraved in his memory. It had been last year, in Paris, when he had needed to get evidence for the court-martial. Sam Wetherall had asked her to help. Her name was Monique, and she worked for the French, spying against the Germans in the heart of their command, risking her life every day.
“Monique…,” he said softly. “Monique…”
She blinked once, her eyes focusing with difficulty. “Did you find him?” she whispered, her words distorted by her shattered face.
“Yes, I found him. Thank you…” She knew him. There could be no doubt it was her.
He cradled her in his arms, trying to think what he could do for any of her injuries. How bad were they? She was covered in blood and it was still oozing through her thin dress, but—far more urgent than that—how bad was the bruising, what bones were broken?
“Collaborator!” A man spat on the ground. “Get out of the way, Monsieur, I am going to hang her. You, too, if you stand in the path of justice.”
“She worked for the Germans,” a woman said harshly. She looked no more than thirty herself. “Pig! Filth!” She aimed a kick but was too far away to reach.
Another man lashed out, and he was closer. His boot caught Monique in the chest, and she gasped and cried out. She slipped from Joseph’s arms onto the cobbles. Her eyes rolled back and she stopped
moving, blood running from her mouth.
The man regained his balance and lifted his foot to do it again.
Joseph shot to his feet and hit the man as hard as he could with his fist, all his weight behind it. “She’s not a collaborator, you fool!” he shouted. “She’s part of the resistance!” He hit the man again and again, feeling his fist strike bone, then soft flesh: yielding, sagging dead-weight. Still he didn’t stop. “She was braver and better than any of you, you cowards!”
The man staggered and fell backward onto the stones himself, but Joseph didn’t stop. He lunged after him and hauled him to his feet, then hit him again, one fist and then the other. His own hands were bleeding, but he didn’t care. Another man came at him, and he hit him, too, full in the face, sending him reeling backward, then again, knocking him to the ground. He was bending over him, ready to strike, when he felt arms holding him, stopping him from moving, sending him off balance.
He heaved himself away and spun around to lash out, and saw with surprise that it was Matthew. Then Mason caught him from behind and pinned his arms to his sides.
Judith was on the ground by Monique. The crowd was staring at them, shocked into silence.
Judith laid Monique down gently. “It’s too late,” she said, looking at Joseph. “She’s dead.”
Joseph stiffened.
Mason held him more tightly.
Lizzie and Schenckendorff were standing on the edge of the crowd, their faces white.
“You know her?” Matthew asked, looking at Joseph with concern.
“Yes. I met her in Paris last year. She worked for our intelligence there. She risked her life to help her country, and these stupid animals have murdered her.” He was finding it difficult to breathe, as if there were a great weight tightening around his chest, crushing him. The distance blurred in his vision, figures becoming fuzzy and distorted.
“Not a collaborator?” someone asked quietly.
“We didn’t know,” someone else offered.
“No, you didn’t!” Joseph grated the words between clenched teeth. “And you didn’t care. You murdered her anyway.”
“But we didn’t…we thought…” His words trailed off in the withering blaze of Joseph’s eyes.
“Tell her that!” Joseph said bitterly.
“Joseph, she’s dead.” Matthew’s voice was gentle, insistent.
“I know!” Joseph shouted, ending in a sob. He struggled for breath. They were all dead: his mother and father, Sebastian Allard, the man who had brought the treaty from Germany in the first place, Owen Cullingford, Charlie Gee, that damn reporter in his arrogance, Theo Blaine, Shanley Corcoran, Tucky Nunn, half the men of the Cambridgeshire regiment that he had grown up with, the young men from St. John’s College, half the armies of Europe torn and blinded and choked in their own blood. Now Monique: stupidly, senselessly murdered after all she had done for her own people. It was unbearable.
He was too late to save her, or to save those stupid, ugly people from their own fate. They could not undo what they had done. Had he really helped anyone? Those who believed, or those who didn’t? The sick, the frightened, the hopeless, anyone at all?
He had kept a grip on all the despair that threatened him like a towering, consuming darkness all the years of war. He had not wept for his own pain, but now it could not be denied. It tore through him like a storm, sweeping reason, self-mastery, and consciousness of others away like a tidal wave. He wept for all of them: every lost and terrified soul of the last dreadful years. Matthew held him, and the crowd swirled around, confused and ashamed, frightened by the power of what they had done. Suddenly they understood that it was irretrievable, and one by one they also saw that it was undeniable. Ignorance did not pardon them.
Matthew took Joseph back to the ambulance. Someone brought him a stiff jolt of cognac. It burned his throat and set a deep fire in his stomach. He was aware of people coming and going.
Matthew left, and it was Lizzie who sat beside him. She said nothing, simply held his hands. He had no idea where anyone else was, or what they were doing.
Finally his mind cleared and the vision of Monique’s bleeding, disfigured face faded from his vision. He began to think, to remember other people, other losses that were also what he grieved for, young men whose deaths would always be woven into his mind and his memory.
He had wanted to serve, to lessen the suffering, to give people the hope and the love of God in the darkest places they would pass through. He would have given his own life had it been asked, but it had not. He was barely even injured, except the once in 1916.
He had promised God in the beginning that he would keep faith, but he would not attempt to feel everyone’s grief. That he could not bear. It was too much to ask of anyone.
But in Gethsemane, that was exactly what Christ had asked—“Watch with me.” It was what He asked of everyone.
Joseph remembered all the men he had sat with in their pain, their fear, their loneliness, their acceptance of death. He had cared intensely. So often all he could do was simply be there. He could not ease their agony, take away their terror of mutilation, of failure, of the last unknown step of death. He could not promise victory, or offer any reasons for the horror of it, or explain why God allowed such hell to be.
He had crouched in the mud of no-man’s-land, freezing and sodden wet, smelled the stink of decaying flesh, of gas, of death, and all he could do was promise “I will not leave you.”
And in that moment it came to him with absolute certainty that what he wanted, needed, was to stay with Lizzie. He could do it, and love the child because it was hers, and because it needed to be loved, as everyone needs to be. He could give it the love his father had given him: wholeheartedly, generously, because he wanted to. He—or she—would never for an instant imagine that it was the product of violence or pain. The child would not be unwanted, so it would never feel pain more deeply than the growing pains all humans know, the finding of identity in the world.
He turned to Lizzie and smiled, then pulled his hands from hers, wincing as his lacerated skin was touched, then took hers again and held them gently, more firmly. “When we get home,” he said, “there’ll be a lot to do, a lot of people who’ll need help, and more courage than they may think they have now. There are those wounded not only in body, but in heart and hope as well. There’ll be disappointments, changes that are very difficult to accept. I expect there will be injustices and a great deal of loneliness. The bad things of war will be gone, but so will the good things: the friendships, the purpose, the knowledge of who you are and what you are doing, and that it matters.”
“I know,” she answered him. “I had planned to go on nursing…until…” She stopped, a slow color working up her cheeks. She was afraid of pity, and he saw it in her eyes.
How could he ask her to marry him without her fearing, even for an instant, that that was what it was—pity, not love?
“I would very much rather that you helped me,” he told her. “I am not sure that I can do it without you, and I am perfectly certain that I don’t wish to. But with you, and the child, I might make a reasonably good job of it. I’ve learned something about what a real ministry is.”
She looked at him, searching his eyes slowly, very carefully.
He smiled, knowing there was nothing in him that he needed to hide from her. She knew his weaknesses already, as he knew hers, and he knew that in the end they would bind them together, not apart.
“I think that would be a good idea,” she said at last. “We might make quite a passable job of it.”
Happiness opened up inside him like a great dawning light. He leaned forward and kissed her, and realized with surprise how long he had wanted to do that, and how sweet it was.
He had only just let her go when Matthew opened the door.
“Are you all right?” Matthew asked, then decided that the question was unnecessary.
“Yes…thank you,” Joseph replied. “We should go. We can’t be far from the c
oast now, but there isn’t much time.”
“We’ve got a lot more help,” Matthew told him. “Food, petrol, and someone to show us the best roads. We could make it tonight.”
Joseph was startled. “How did you do that?”
“Guilt,” Matthew answered simply. “They felt like hell.”
Joseph was embarrassed. For the first time in years he had completely lost control of himself. He had wanted to kill the man who had kicked Monique. He might have, if Matthew had not stopped him. That was a frightening thought. He had had no idea that there was so much rage inside him, or bottled-up pain.
“The man I…hit. Is he all right?”
Matthew rolled his eyes. “He’ll live, but you broke his nose and jaw and two or three ribs. Good thing he’s fairly heavily built, or you might have done worse. You took him totally by surprise. He didn’t imagine that the priest would try to kill him, or you might not have come out of it so well.”
“You don’t need to belabor the point,” Joseph said a little tartly. “His behavior was unforgivable.”
“That rather is the point, Joe.” Matthew looked at him steadily, not moving from the spot where he stood. “You can’t leave them like this. You’ve pretty well consigned them to hell and left them in no doubt that you meant it. That isn’t how you’d like it to stay.” He said it with certainty, no shadow in his eyes.
Joseph did not want to go back and face them again. It was deeply embarrassing, and he did not forgive them for what they had done to Monique. He could not tell them it was excusable. It would betray his own beliefs, and no one with an ounce of sense would believe him anyway.
“I can’t offer them any forgiveness,” he said aloud. “There’s no penance I know of that’s going to heal what they just did. To say there is would be a lie.”
“There’s always a way back, Joe, from anywhere,” Matthew replied. “You told me that. If you can’t help them, what hope is there for any of us?”
