by Anne Perry
“It’s time to begin,” Lizzie said, touching Joseph’s hand lightly. “You don’t have to lie to them. Tell them how hard it will be, just don’t say it’s impossible.”
He climbed out of the ambulance, standing a little unsteadily at first, then turned and thanked her. Matthew was waiting. He followed him to where the villagers were gathered together with a pile of food in boxes and three cans of petrol. They were the most precious things they had; perhaps a week’s supply. There were also spark plugs and a small tin of oil. They looked frightened, and hopeful.
Suddenly Joseph wanted to tell them they were forgiven, but that would be weariness, gratitude, and pity speaking, the desire to escape, and none of those made it the right thing to do. It would be facile, an escape for himself.
“Thank you,” he said to them, looking at the pile. “We know what a great gift all of this is, and how much it represents of what you have. I would like to say that it will redeem you from what you did to Monique, but that would not be true. You don’t deserve that. Like all of us, you need honesty. The way back from such a sin is longer and far harder than that, which you know as well as I do. But never forget that the way does exist, and you can walk it if you wish to enough. I can’t tell you how to find it, because I don’t know. But your chance to pay the price will come, if you want it enough to look for it, and accept it.”
They stared at him, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. No one spoke. Hope sprang to life in one or two faces. In others it died. They had been expecting something easier.
“I apologize for standing in judgment of you,” Joseph went on. “I have no right to. That is something you will have to do for yourselves. You know what you did, and why, and what drove you. And you know she didn’t deserve it. Begin by not lying to yourselves. What I say is true, for you, for me, for everyone.”
One of the older men nodded. Then he turned to others, and they signaled agreement also. They said their goodbyes formally, and seemed relieved to see the ambulance begin its journey to the coast, with one young woman of the village in the cab beside Judith to guide them for the next ten miles. No one asked how she would get back.
They reached the harbor a little after sundown. The salt wind off the sea smelled clean and felt bitterly cold, but there was an excitement to the taste of it, an energy in the wind and tide.
It took considerable bargaining, and ultimately a threat on Matthew’s part, but by midnight they were on their way across the channel. Most of them attempted to sleep, but Matthew paced the deck looking out over the dark water. The foam rose and fell, patterns shifting on the surface. He remembered standing like this on the deck of the Cormorant, before the Battle of Jutland, knowing that any moment it could erupt in white water, then flame and inconceivable noise. There would be twisted metal, screams, the smell of burning corticine, and juddering, pitching decks as the ship reeled. Always at the end lay the threat of being swallowed by that black sea and sucked down, never to be released.
There were only days to go until the end, and yet ships were still being sunk, all hands lost. It was a kind of wild madness he did not understand. What was there left to win or lose now? Only hate, the most pointless of all passions.
He kept looking ahead, trying to discern the dark outline of land. They were making for Harwich, not Dover, so there would be no familiar cliffs to see, but they had been grateful to take the first transport that would take them and the ambulance, too. They couldn’t have simply abandoned the vehicle. It would be an added difficulty to try to get rail transport with as little money as they had been able to gather, and on a crowded train it might be impossible to conceal the fact that Schenckendorff was German.
It was still before dawn when at last he saw the low, black line of land ahead. An hour later they were on the windswept quay with the ambulance—which, to their intense relief, had started after the third attempt.
“We should be in London by early afternoon, unless we run into major difficulties,” Matthew said, shivering as the wind blew spray up off the water. They were all tired, and the cold bit into them. It was now his responsibility to make certain that they persuaded Shearing, and then the prime minister, of Sandwell’s guilt. They would have only one chance, and Sandwell already knew they were coming. The danger was far from over; in fact, this could be the worst part. Victory was so close that emotions that had been held in check for years were now boiling to the surface. There was hope and a desperate fragility almost perceptible in the air.
Would Sandwell try again? Of course. But how? Overt violence would be harder now that they were in England. Anything he did would have to look like an accident. Was it possible that Sandwell did not yet know that Hampton had failed? Probably not. He would have some prearranged signal, a time to contact each other. Hampton’s silence would be answer enough.
“We need to get to London as soon as we can,” he said aloud. “Thank heaven we don’t need to use trains, or risk getting separated or lost in a crowd, where we’d be far more vulnerable.”
He saw Lizzie start, and realized she had thought they were already safe. She was standing next to Joseph, and unconsciously she moved closer to him.
“Sorry,” Matthew said briefly. “He’ll assume we are home, and he knows what for. He’ll have worked out by now that Hampton failed. We need to keep close together and on our guard. I’ve still got Hampton’s gun, but I don’t imagine any attack will be as obvious as that.” He turned to Mason. “You know him. What’s your best guess as to what he’ll do now?”
Mason thought for several moments. “He might try to stop us between here and London. It would be too good a chance to miss, unless he has no one he can trust…”
“We can’t rely on that,” Joseph said instantly.
“Agreed,” Matthew replied. “Then maybe we’d better travel separately. Finding three or four men to reach us would be very much harder. And since we’ve traveled together so far, he won’t be expecting it.”
“That’s not all,” Mason went on. “There’s only one thing we can do in the end, which is accuse him openly. He’ll be expecting that. It’s the last throw of the dice left, so to speak. He’ll be prepared for it. I don’t know whether he’ll try to say the Peacemaker is someone else.” He smiled with bitter amusement. “Possibly even me. He might do it well enough to confuse events for a while. Or he might deny that there was ever such a conspiracy at all. That’s why we need to have the original treaty that your father took in 1914.” He turned to Joseph. “You still have it in Cambridgeshire, don’t you?”
Matthew felt a moment of alarm. They were so close to the Peacemaker at last, but was it possible that there was a final twist and it was not Sandwell—and Mason’s slight, almost halfhearted jest was the truth? Was Mason himself the leader, and perhaps Sandwell and Schenckendorff followers? No, that was ridiculous. Mason was in love with Judith, deeply in love. He was not attempting to hide it now: This was the last time they would have together.
He looked at Joseph, wanting to know his thoughts, wishing he could speak to him alone.
Mason was waiting.
“Joe—” Matthew started.
“Yes,” Joseph cut in. “I know where it is.”
Too late. They were committed. Had Joseph thought of Mason’s possible complicity, or was his religious naïveté still too powerful for him to consider that the man Judith loved could yet betray them?
“Better not tell us where,” Matthew said aloud. “That way we can’t accidentally reveal it.”
Mason smiled. “Understood,” he said wryly. “Joseph should get the treaty and we’ll all meet somewhere in London. Perhaps Judith and I should travel together, and Matthew with Schenckendorff, and Lizzie with them to see to Schenckendorff’s foot. You take the ambulance. You can drive it, can’t you?” The last question was directed toward Matthew.
Matthew hesitated. He did not want Mason to direct what they did, and yet he could not think of a better alternative. If they stayed together, they were on
e target. They could not hope to convince Lloyd George without Schenckendorff, Mason, and the treaty. It had to be either he or Joseph who went to St. Giles to get the treaty from the gunroom. Judith didn’t know one end of a gun from the other, and the last thing he would allow was for Mason to go with her.
“Right,” he said decisively. “I’ll take the ambulance with Lizzie and Schenckendorff and I’ll meet you at my flat. Judith and Mason go by train to London. Joseph, take the train to Cambridge and then to St. Giles. We’ll wait for you in London. Telephone me, but not from St. Giles.”
Goodbyes were brief as they pulled up outside the railway station. Judith and Mason went to wait for the first train to London, Joseph to Cambridge.
As Joseph sat by the window—given a seat willingly because of his uniform—he watched the countryside slip past him. For a moment he could delude himself that nothing had changed. The soft slopes of the land rolled away to the horizon, dotted with occasional copses of trees. The late-harvest fields were stubble gold, one or two plowed ready for a winter crop, the earth dark and shining, black soil rich. The villages looked as they always had: many roofs steeply thatched; square church towers, Saxon solid; little streets winding. Here and there he saw the flash of light on a duck pond in the center of a green. The leaves were bronze where they remained. Most were already shed in copper-colored drifts on the ground.
He ached with a love for the ancient, familiar beauty of it. To come and go as he wished, here in these lanes and across this land, was what they had fought and died for. It was far from perfect, because people made mistakes, but there was a freedom here that had been learned and paid for over the centuries. It was the right—not only in law but also in practice—to disagree, to be different, inventive, sometimes to be wrong, and still be a part of the fabric that was treasured. There was honor and tolerance throughout all the errors and wrongs of history, and that must be saved, whatever the cost.
They pulled into Cambridge station, and he asked about the next train to St. Giles. It was too long to wait for. It would take him hours to get there and back. Nor did he have sufficient money. Even as it was, he was going to have to borrow the return fare, Cambridge to London, from Hannah. He would not even entertain the thought that she might not be home.
His mind raced. Who could he ask to drive him, with precious petrol, first to St. Giles, and then back to Cambridge? Who did he know?
St. John’s. That was the only answer. There must be somebody there he still knew. The question was, would they have a car, and petrol to put in it? Aidan Thyer, the master of St. John’s, would be his best chance, and there was no time to waste starting with others he might prefer. He remembered ruefully that Thyer was one of those he had suspected of being the Peacemaker. He had never been ruled out. The only thing he could do now was trust that Schenckendorff was telling the truth, and Mason also. Good men could lie, if the cause was great enough; he knew and understood that, but it was too late to hedge his bet.
He walked rapidly through the ancient streets, past the colleges he had known and loved so long. Most of them were centuries old, built of towering stone, carved, bearing their coats of arms proudly. Behind them the green grass of the Backs sloped down to the river where four summers ago young men had pushed flat-bottomed boats along the quiet waters. Pretty girls had sat in the sterns trailing their fingers in the stream, muslin dresses stirred by the breeze, hats shading their faces. Now there were no young men in sight, and girls had short hair, and skirts not far below their knees, and they were working on buses, in factories, and on the land. How short a time it had taken for the world to change utterly.
The Master’s House at St. John’s looked exactly as it always had, probably for at least three hundred years. The quad was silent. There were no leaves on the trees.
He knocked on the door. If Aidan and Connie were in, they would answer it themselves, since nobody had servants anymore. The silence closed in around him. Would they still even have a car? If they did, would Aidan be willing to help Joseph? Would he just drop everything, ask no questions, and give up his day to drive Joseph to St. Giles, wait, then bring him back?
What if he was one of those who sympathized with the Peacemaker? Victory could slip out of their hands at any moment up to the very last.
The door opened. It was Aidan Thyer himself. He still looked elegant and faintly mystified, as if he had sustained some unexpected wound and was wondering how to deal with it. Was it still because he loved Connie more than she could ever love him? Or was it the loss of so many of his young men before they had fulfilled the promise or the hope of their lives?
“Joseph?” he said in amazement. “Joseph Reavley! My dear fellow, come in.” He stepped back, holding the door wide. The light shone on his pale hair and the subtle lines of his face. “What can I do for you? Is it acceptable to ask what you are doing home so soon before the end? I hope it is not bad news of your family?” Sudden deep concern shadowed his eyes.
“No, thank you.” Joseph followed him inside. “We are all fine, so far as I know. But I have an urgent errand. I need to get to St. Giles as soon as I can, and then back to the station to London. It is very urgent indeed, and I need help.” There was no time to waste in prevarication, and he would not have known how to do that anyway. “Can you drive me, please? Or if you can’t, do you know someone who would?”
Thyer regarded him with concern. “Of course I will. Are you sure you are all right?”
“Yes.” Then suddenly it occurred to him that Thyer might wonder if one of the Cambridge students he knew was in trouble. “It’s not personal business at all,” he added. “It’s something I have to collect and get to London today.”
Thyer nodded. “Would you like anything to eat first, or even to drink? You look as if you have been up all night.”
“Yes, I daresay I do,” Joseph agreed with a smile. “But I haven’t time. Perhaps after.”
“I’ll get the keys and tell Connie. She’ll be glad to hear that you at least are all right.”
Thyer returned a few moments later, accompanied by his wife. As always, Connie was delighted to see Joseph, but she understood that it could be no more than hello and goodbye. She had made a quick sandwich for him and offered it to him now, wrapped in a piece of paper.
“Only bread and what I would like to call pâté, but it’s really meat paste,” she apologized.
He thanked her and suddenly realized he was ravenously hungry.
She watched him, smiling, and handed him a glass of lemonade, knowing that anything hot to drink would take possibly more time than he was willing to afford.
Standing just inside the Master’s House, looking at Connie, gave Joseph a startling sense of timelessness. She was still beautiful in her own warm, generous way. And there was still the restlessness in her eyes, although the edge of it had softened, and she looked toward Thyer more often than he remembered her doing before.
It was as if only months had passed since he had stood here in the summer of 1914, speaking of war and peace with such innocence. No one had imagined that the world could change so much in so short a time. The past they had known was gone forever. He knew that here in its fullness for the first time. In this quiet hallway looking into the quad where nothing changed, he realized the enormity of the change in everything else.
“Joseph?” Thyer asked. “Are you ready?”
“Yes…thank you.” Joseph gave the empty glass back to Connie and bid her goodbye. He followed Thyer across the first quad and then the second into the street to where the car was parked.
The drive to St. Giles was swift. Not once did Thyer ask him what the purpose was of his sudden and urgent journey; nor did they talk of those they knew who were dead. Instead he discussed politics, in particular the character of Lloyd George, and the new ideas of widening the political franchise to include all men, property owners or not, and even many women.
“Times are changing at an extraordinary pace,” he said with a slight frown. “I
hope we can keep up with them without too many casualties. The men coming home aren’t going to recognize the land they left behind, and may possibly not like it entirely. Women have all kinds of jobs, and we need them to keep doing them. We can’t now send them back to the kitchen.” He shook his head slightly. “A great number of them will not marry because there is no one for them to have. They have no choice but to earn their own way. We cannot make that impossible for them.”
Joseph did not reply.
“And very few places for servants. We’ve learned to do without them,” Thyer went on. “Jack’s as good as his master. We discovered that in the trenches. There are an awful lot of ‘Jacks’ to whom we owe our lives. I daresay you know that better than I do.”
Joseph smiled and agreed. They were racing through the November countryside at a far higher speed than Joseph would have expected from the master. He had always thought of him as a trifle staid, a scholar with little action in him. Perhaps he had been wrong.
They passed the quiet fields of the farm where Charlie and Barshey Gee had grown up, then that of Snowy and Tucky Nunn. The blacksmith’s forge was open, Plugger Arnold’s father bent over the anvil. It was all desperately familiar, and Joseph would have given all he possessed if the men he had known and loved could have come home again with him.
The street was quiet. There were half a dozen women in it, coats closed tight against the wind. The green was deserted, the duck pond flat and bright in the momentary sun.
They pulled up outside the house where Joseph had grown up, from which John and Alys Reavley had left that morning the world had changed, when Gavrilo Princip had fired a shot in Sarajevo that had ended history and begun the present.
“I won’t be long,” Joseph said briefly. “One day I’ll tell you exactly what all this is about.” He climbed out, walked a little shakily to the door, and knocked. He had already made up his mind that, if Hannah was not home, he would break in and leave her a note to explain what he had done.
