by Anne Perry
Matthew was lost for words. “I beg your pardon?”
“The kaiser, Reavley! What do you know about Kaiser Wilhelm II of the German Empire?”
“Is that what he is calling himself?” Matthew asked incredulously, scrambling together his thoughts, stories he could repeat about the kaiser’s tantrums, his delusions that first his uncle Edward VII and now his cousin George V were deliberately snubbing him, ridiculing and belittling him. There were a great many it might be unwise to retell.
“He’s the king’s cousin and the czar’s,” Matthew began, and instantly saw the impatience in Shearing’s face. “He’s been writing to the czar for some time, and they have become confidants,” he went on more boldly. “But he hated King Edward and was convinced he was plotting against him, that he despised him for some reason, and he has transferred that feeling to the present king. He’s a temperamental man, very proud and always looking for slights. And he has a withered arm, which is possibly why he is rather bad on horseback. No balance.” He waited for Shearing to respond.
Shearing’s mouth flickered, as if he thought of smiling and decided against it. “His relationship with France?” he prompted.
Matthew knew what Shearing was expecting. He had read the reports. “Bad,” he replied. “He has always wanted to go to Paris, but the French president has never invited him, and it rankles with him. He’s . . .” He stopped again. He had been going to say “surrounded by awkward relationships,” but perhaps that was a bit presumptuous. He was uncertain of Shearing’s regard for royalty, even foreign. The kaiser was closely related to George V.
“More importantly,” Shearing pointed out, “he perceives himself to be surrounded by enemies.”
Matthew let the weight of that observation sink into his mind. He saw the reflection of it in Shearing’s face. “A conspiracy to start a war, beginning in Serbia?” he asked tentatively.
“God knows,” Shearing replied. “There are Serbian nationalists who will do anything for freedom, including assassinate an Austrian archduke—obviously—but there are radical socialists all over Europe as well.”
“Against war,” Matthew cut in. “At least international war. They are all for class war. Surely that couldn’t be . . .” He stopped.
“You overheard the remark, Reavley! Could it or not?” Shearing asked tartly. “What about a pan-European socialist revolution? The whole continent is seething with plots and counterplots—Victor Adler in Vienna, Jean Jaurès in France, Rosa Luxemburg everywhere, and God knows who in Russia. Austria is spoiling for a fight and only wants the excuse, France is afraid of Germany, and the Kaiser is afraid of everyone. And the czar doesn’t know a damn thing about any of it. Take your pick.”
Matthew looked at Shearing’s dark, enigmatic face, filled with a kind of despairing humor, and realized that he had worked with him for over a year but knew almost nothing about him. He knew his intellect and his skills, but his passions he had not even guessed at. He had no idea where he came from, nothing about his family or his education, his tastes or his dreams. He was an intensely private man, but he guarded his inner self so well no one was aware he was doing it. One thought of him only in connection with his work, as if he walked out of the entrance of the building and ceased to exist.
“Perhaps I had better forget it unless something else develops,” Matthew said, aware that he had learned nothing and very possibly made himself look incompetent to Shearing. “It doesn’t seem to tie in with anything.”
“On the contrary, it ties in with everything,” Shearing answered. “The air is full of conspiracies, fortunately most of them have nothing to do with us. But go on listening, and advise me if you hear anything that makes sense.”
“Yes, sir.”
They discussed other projects for a further twenty minutes, particularly who might replace the minister of war, who had resigned over the mutiny. There were two primary candidates, one in favor of peace, even at a high price, the other more belligerent.
“Details,” Shearing said pointedly. “All the details you can, Reavley. Weaknesses. Where is Blunden vulnerable? It’s our job to know. You can’t protect a man until you know where he can be hurt.”
“Yes, sir,” Matthew agreed. “I know that.”
He left, forgetting the minister of war for a moment and pondering what Shearing had said about conspiracy. It seemed as if he did not believe that John Reavley had found anything that was of concern to England.
Matthew walked the long, quiet corridors back to his own office, nodding to this person, wishing a good evening to that one. He felt extraordinarily alone because he realized suddenly that he was profoundly angry. Shearing had in effect damned John Reavley’s perception of truth. If Shearing was right, then Matthew’s father had misinterpreted a piece of paper, and he had died horribly for nothing. Matthew was so fiercely defensive of the suggestion that his father was incompetent that his fists were clenched, and he deliberately had to loosen them in order to open the door of his office.
But John Reavley was dead! And there had been the rope on the tree and marks on the road, scars where a row of caltrops had ripped all four tires and sent the car veering one way and then the other until it crashed into the copse. Where did one buy caltrops in the modern world? Or had they been homemade? It might be simple enough, with strong fence wire, wire cutters, and pliers. Any man could do it with a few hours to spare and a knack with his hands.
Someone had searched the house in St. Giles, and his office.
But he could not prove it. The crushed foxgloves would grow back; the marks would be obliterated by rain and dust and other traffic. The rope end tied to the tree could have been put there for any of a dozen reasons. And no one else could say whether objects in the study or the bedroom had been moved or not. The evidence was in remembered details, a sense of disturbance, minute things not as they should be, marks on a lock that he could have made himself.
They would say that John Reavley was a man out of office and out of touch, who dreamed up conspiracies. Matthew and Joseph were deluded by grief. Surely the violent loss of both parents was enough to cause, and to excuse, disjunction of reason in anyone?
It was all true. And the anger inside him turned to a dull, inward ache of confusion. In his mind’s eye so clearly he could see his father’s keen face. He was an eminently reasonable man, his mind so quick, so very sane. He was the one who curbed Judith’s excesses, who was patient with Hannah’s being less fluent at expressing herself, who hid his disappointment that neither of his sons had followed the career he so longed for them to embrace.
He had loved the quaint and eccentric things in life. He was endlessly tolerant of difference—and lost his temper with arrogance, and too often with fools who stifled others with petty authority. The real fools, the simple-minded, he could forgive in an instant.
It hurt almost beyond intolerably to believe that his father had utterly misinterpreted one stupid, minor endeavor that would make not even a mark in history, never mind turn the tide of it to ruin a nation and alter the world!
The irony was that he would not have found it as hard to be wrong as Matthew found it for him. Matthew knew that, and it did not help. He stood in the center of his office and had to fight to stop himself from weeping.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Joseph slipped back into the routine of teaching again and found the old pleasure in knowledge easing a little of the pain inside him. The music of words closed out the past, creating their own immediate world.
He stood in the lecture room and saw the earnest faces in front of him, different in features and coloring, but all touched with the shadows of anxiety. Only Sebastian had voiced his fear concerning the possibility of war in Europe, but Joseph heard the echoes of it in them all. There were reports of a French airship making reconnaissance flights over Germany, speculation as to what reparation Austro-Hungary would demand of Serbia, and even discussion of who might be assassinated next.
Joseph had s
poken once or twice on the subject to the other students. He had no knowledge beyond the newspaper reports available to everyone else, but since the dean was on a short sabbatical and therefore unavailable, he felt that he should fill his place with the spiritual resources that would have met just such a need as this. There was nothing better than reason with which to answer fear. There was no cause to believe that there would be a conflict involving England. These young men would not be asked to fight, and perhaps to die.
They listened to him politely, waiting for him to answer their needs for assurance, and he knew from their eyes, the tension still there in their voices, that the old power to comfort was not enough.
On Saturday evening he called by at Harry Beecher’s rooms and found his colleague reclining in his armchair and reading the current edition of the Illustrated London News. Beecher looked up, laying the paper flat immediately. Joseph could see, even upside down, a picture of a theater stage.
Beecher glanced at it and smiled. “Eugene Onegin,” he explained.
Joseph was surprised. “Here?”
“No, St. Petersburg. The world is smaller than you think, isn’t it! And Carmen.” Beecher indicated the picture at the bottom of the page. “But apparently they’ve revived Boito’s Mefistofele at Covent Garden, and they say it’s very good. The Russian Ballet has Daphnis and Chloe at Drury Lane. Not really my kind of thing.”
Joseph smiled. “Nor mine,” he agreed. “How about a sandwich or a pie and a glass of cider at the Pickerel?” It was the oldest public house in Cambridge, just a few yards along the street, across the Magdalene Bridge. They could sit outside in the fading light and watch the river, as Samuel Pepys might have done when he was a student here in the seventeenth century, or anyone else over the last six hundred years.
“Good idea,” Beecher agreed immediately, rising to his feet. The room was a pleasant clutter of books. Latin was his subject, but his interest lay in the icons of faith. He and Joseph had spent many hours positing theory after theory—serious, passionate, or funny—as to what was the concept of holiness. Where did it move from being an aid to concentration, a reminder of faith, into being the object of reverence itself, imbued with miraculous powers?
Beecher picked up his jacket from the back of the old leather chair and followed Joseph out, closing the door behind them. They went down the steps and across the quad to the massive front gate with its smaller door inset, and then out into St. John’s Street, and left to the Magdalene Bridge.
The terrace outside the Pickerel was crowded. As usual, there were punts on the river, drifting along toward the bridge, silhouetted for a moment beneath its arch, then gone as they turned and followed the stream.
Joseph ordered cider and cold game pie for both of them, then carried the provisions to a table and sat down.
Beecher regarded him steadily for a moment or two. “Are you all right, Joseph?” he asked gently. “If you need a little more time, I can take some of your work. Really—”
Joseph smiled. “I’m better working, thank you.”
Beecher was still watching him. “But?” he questioned.
“Is it so obvious?”
“To someone who knows you, yes.” Beecher took a long draft of his cider, then set the glass down. He did not press for an answer. They had been friends since their own student years here, and spent many holidays walking together in the Lake District or along the ancient Roman wall that stretched across Northumberland and Cumbria from the North Sea to the Atlantic. They had imagined the legionaries of the Caesars who had manned it when it was the outer edge of empire against the barbarian.
They had tramped for miles, and sat in the sun staring over the moors in the light and shadow, eaten crusty bread and cheese, and drunk cheap red wine. And they had talked of everything and nothing, and told endless jokes, and laughed.
Joseph wondered whether to say anything to Beecher about his father’s death and the fear of a conspiracy of the magnitude he had suggested, but he and Matthew had agreed not to speak of it, even to their closest friends.
“I was contemplating the ugly situation in Europe,” he said aloud, “and wondering what sort of future lies ahead for the men who graduate this year. Darker than for us.” He looked at his cider, sparkling a little in the long amber light. “When I graduated, the Boer War was over, and the world had all the excitement of a new century. It looked as if nothing would ever change except for the better—greater wisdom, more liberal laws, travel, new art.”
Beecher’s slightly crooked face was grave. “There are shifts of power all the time, and socialism is a rising force—I don’t think anything can stop it,” he said.
“Nor should it. We’re moving to a real enlightenment, even votes for women in time.”
“I was thinking more of the crisis in the Balkans,” Joseph said, taking another bite of his pie and talking with his mouth full. “That’s what many of our students are worried about.” He said many, but he was thinking primarily of Sebastian.
“I can’t see any of our students joining the army.” Beecher spoke just before swallowing the last mouthful of his pastry. “And no matter how heated it gets between Austria and Serbia, it’s a long way from us. It’s not our concern unless we want to make it so. Young men always worry before leaving university and stepping out into the world.” He smiled broadly. “In spite of the competition, there is safety here, and a multitude of distractions. The college is a hotbed of ideas most of them have never even imagined, and of the first temptations of adulthood—but the only real yardstick is your own ability. You may not get a first, but the only person who can prevent you succeeding is yourself. Outside it’s different. It’s a colder world. The best of them know that.” He finished his cider. “Let them worry, Joseph. It’s part of growing up.”
Again Joseph thought of Sebastian’s tortured face as he had stared with such intensity across the burnished water toward the dark outlines of the college. “It wasn’t anxiety for himself. It was for what war in Europe would do to civilization in general.”
Beecher’s face split into a good-natured grin. “Too much poring over dead languages, Joseph. There’s always something ineffably sad about a culture whose people have vanished when an echo of their beauty remains, especially if it is part of the music of our own.”
“He was thinking of our language being overtaken and our way of thought lost,” Joseph told him.
“He?” Beecher’s eyebrows rose. “You have someone particular in mind?”
“Sebastian Allard.” Joseph had barely finished speaking when he saw a shadow in Beecher’s eyes. The still evening light was unchanged. The sound of laughter from a group of young men drifted on the twilight breeze from the green swath of the Backs, but inexplicably the air seemed colder. “He’s more aware than the others,” he explained.
“He’s got a better intellect,” Beecher agreed, but he did not look at Joseph.
“It’s more than intellect.” Joseph felt the need to defend himself, and perhaps Sebastian. “You can have a brilliant brain without delicacy, fire, vision. . . .” He had used the same word again, but there was no other to describe what he knew in Sebastian. In his translations the young man had caught the music and understood not only what the poets and philosophers of the past had written, but the whole regions of passion and dream that lay beyond it. To teach such a mind as his was the wish of all those who wanted to pass on the beauty they themselves had seen. “You know that!” he said with more force than he had intended.
“We’re not in any danger of going the way of Carthage or Etruria.” Beecher smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. “There are no barbarians at the gates. If they exist, then they are here among us.” He looked at his empty glass but did not bother to catch the barman’s eye. “I think we are equal to keeping them at bay, at least most of the time.”
Joseph heard a note of pain in his voice and knew that it was real, the tip of something he had not seen before. “Not all the time?” he asked gently.<
br />
Then into his mind burst back the crushed foxgloves on the verge of the road, the scars of the caltrops on the tarmacadam, the screaming of metal in his imagination, and the blood. And he understood violence and rage completely, and fear.
“Of course not all of it,” Beecher replied, his gaze beyond Joseph’s head, unaware of the emotion all but drowning his friend. “They are young minds full of energy and promise, but they are also morally undisciplined now and then. They are on the edge of learning about the world, and about themselves. They have the privilege of education in the best school there is, and of being taught—forgive the immodesty—by some of the best mentors in the English language. They live in one of the most subtle and tolerant cultures in Europe. And they have the intellect and the ambition, the drive and the fire to make something of it. At least most of them have.”
He turned to meet Joseph’s eyes. “It’s our job to civilize them as well, Joseph. Teach them forbearance, compassion, how to accept failure as well as success, not to blame others, nor blame themselves too much, but go on and try again, and pretend it didn’t hurt. It will happen many times in life. It’s necessary to get used to it and put it in its place. That’s hard when you are young. They are very proud, and they haven’t much sense of proportion yet.”
“But they have courage,” Joseph said quickly. “And they care—intensely!”
Beecher looked at his hands on the table. “Of course they do. Good God, if the young don’t care, there isn’t much hope for the rest of us! But they’re still selfish at times. More, I think, than you want to believe.”
“I know! But it’s innocent,” Joseph argued, leaning forward a little. “Their generosity is just as powerful, and their idealism. They are discovering the world and it’s desperately precious to them! Right now they are frightened they’re going to lose it. What can I tell them?” he pleaded. “How can I make that fear bearable?”
“You can’t.” Beecher shook his head. “You can’t carry the world, and you’d only rip a muscle trying—and still probably drop it. Leave it to Atlas!” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Do you want another cider?” And without waiting for an answer, he took Joseph’s glass as well and walked away.
