by Anne Perry
He was surprised, and far more pleased than he wanted to be, because it awoke all the old emotions of friendship, the trust and the hope in Sebastian’s integrity that he feared now was slipping out of his hands.
“My name’s Flora Whickham,” she went on, suddenly aware of not having introduced herself.
“How do you do, Miss Whickham,” he replied graciously.
Her face became somber as she returned to the subject. “Do you think it was summink to do with the war?” she asked.
He was mystified. “War?”
“He was terribly scared there was going to be a war in Europe,” she explained. “He said everyone was on the edge of it. O’ course they still are, only it’s worse now since those people were shot in Serbia. But Sebastian said as it would come anyway. The Russians and the Germans want it, and so do the French. Oi hear people in there”—she moved her head slightly to indicate the bar inside—“saying that the bankers and factory owners won’t let it happen, there’s too much to lose. And they have the power to stop it.”
She lowered her eyes, and then looked up at him quickly. “But Sebastian said it would, ‘cause it’s the nature o’ governments, and the army, and they’re the ones who have the power. Their heads are stuffed with dreams about glory, and they haven’t any idea how it would be for real. He said they were loike a bunch o’ blind men tied together, runnin’ towards the abyss. He thought millions would die.” She searched his face, longing for him to tell her it would not happen.
“No sane person wants war,” he said carefully, but with the earnestness that her passion and intelligence deserved. “Not really. A few expeditions here and there, but not out-and-out war. And nobody would kill Sebastian because he didn’t, either.” He knew as soon as the words were out of his mouth that they were of little use. Why could he not speak to the heart?
“You don’t understand,” she argued, embarrassed to be contradicting him, and yet her feeling was too strong to be overridden. “He meant to do something about it; he was a pacifist. Oi don’t mean he just didn’t want to foight—he was going to do something to stop it happening.” Her face pinched a little. “Oi know his brother didn’t loike that, and his mother would have hated it. She’d think it was cowardice. For her you’re loyal and you fight, or you’re disloyal, and that means you betray your own people. There’s no other way. At least that’s what he said.”
She looked down at her hands. “But he’d grown away from them. He knew that. His oideas were different, a hundred years after theirs. He wanted Europe to be all one and not ever to foight each other again like the Franco-Prussian War, or all the wars we’ve had with France.”
She raised her eyes and met his with intense seriousness. “That meant more to him than anything else in the world, Mr. Reavley. He knew summink about the Boer War and the way everybody suffered, women and children as well, horrible things. And not only the victims, but what it did to people when they foight like that.” Her face was tight and bleak in the soft light. The sun shimmered on the millpond like an old mirror tarnished by the weeds. Dragonflies hovered above it on invisible wings. The evening was so still a dog barking in the distance seemed close enough to touch.
“It changes them inside,” she went on, still searching his face to see how much he really understood. “Can you think how you’d feel if it was your brother or husband, someone you loved, who killed people like a butcher—all sorts, women, children, the old, just like your own family?”
Her voice was soft and a little ragged with the pain she could see. “Can you think o’ trying to feel like a good person again afterwards? Sitting over the breakfast table talking, just as if it all happened to somebody else and you’d never done all those things? Or telling your children a story, putting flowers in a jug, thinking what to make for dinner, and you were the same person who’d driven a hundred women and children into a concentration camp and let them starve? Sebastian would have done anything at all to stop that happening again—ever. But Oi can’t tell that to anybody else. His parents’d hate it; they wouldn’t understand at all. They’d see him as a coward.” Even saying the word hurt her; it was naked in the soft, sad lines of her face.
“No . . . ,” Joseph said slowly, knowing without question that she was right. He could imagine Mary Allard’s reaction to such a concept. She would have refused to believe it. No son of hers, especially her beloved Sebastian, could have espoused anything so alien to the kind of patriotism she had believed in all her life, with its devotion to duty, sacrifice, and the innate superiority of her own way of life, her own code of honor. “Did his brother know how he felt?” he added.
She shook her head. “Oi don’t think so. He’s idealistic, but in a different kind o’ way. For him war is all about great battles and glory, that kind of thing. He doesn’t think o’ being so tired you can’t hardly stand up, and hurting all over, and killing other people who are just like you are, and trying to break up their whole life.”
“That’s not what the Boer War was about,” he said quickly. “Is that what Sebastian really believed?”
“More’n anything else in the world,” she said simply.
He looked at her calm, tear-filled eyes, her mouth with jaw closed hard to control herself, her lips trembling, and he understood that she had known Sebastian better than he had, and immeasurably better than Mary Allard—or Regina Coopersmith, who probably knew nothing about him at all.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said honestly. “Perhaps it does have something to do with that. I really don’t know. It seems to make as much sense as anything else.”
He stayed in the westering sun and ate his supper, had another glass of cider and a slice of apple pie with thick clotted cream, spoke again with Flora, remembering happy things. Then in the dusk he walked back along the pale river’s edge to St. John’s. Perhaps he had discovered where Sebastian went in his unaccounted hours, and it was very easy to understand. He smiled as he thought how simple it was, and that given the same mother, the same imprisoning worship, he would have done so, too.
CHAPTER
TEN
Matthew did not immediately tell Shearing of his intent to continue pursuing Patrick Hannassey as well as Neill. There were too many uncertainties to make a justifiable case for using his time, and he still did not know whom he trusted. If there was a conspiracy to assassinate the king, he could not believe Shearing would be party to it.
And if it was something else—although the more he thought of this, the more did it seem to possess all the qualities of horror and betrayal—then he would be wasting time. He would have to abandon his investigation instantly and change course to pursue whatever new threat loomed. There was no time to waste in explanations.
Special Branch had been set up in the previous century, at the height of the Fenian violence, specifically to deal with Irish problems. Since then it had become involved in every area of threat to the safety or stability of the country—threats of anarchy, treason, or general social upheaval—but the Irish problem remained at the core. Matthew made one or two discreet inquiries among professional friends, and Wednesday lunchtime saw him walking casually across through Hyde Park beside a Lieutenant Winters, who had expressed himself willing to give him all the assistance he could. However, Matthew knew perfectly well that each branch of the intelligence community guarded its information with peculiar jealousy, and it would be easier to pry the teeth out of a crocodile than shake loose any fact they would rather keep to themselves. He cursed the necessity for secrecy that prevented him from telling them the truth. But his father’s voice rang in his ears with warning, and he dared not yet ignore it. Once given away, his own secret could never be taken back.
“Hannassey?” Winters said with a grimace. “Remarkably clever man. Sees everything and seems to have a memory like an elephant. What is more important, he can relate one thing to another and deduce a third.”
Matthew listened.
“An Irish patriot,” Winters went on
, staring at the cheerful scene in the park ahead of them. Couples walked arm in arm, the women in high summer fashion, much of it nautical in theme. A hurdy-gurdy man played popular ballads and music hall tunes, smiling as passers-by threw him pennies and threepences. Several children, boys in darker suits, girls in lace-edged pinafores, threw sticks for two little dogs.
“Educated by the Jesuits,” Winters continued. “But the interesting thing about him is that to the eye or ear he is not obviously Irish. He has no accent, or at least when he wishes to he can sound like an Englishman. He also speaks fluent German and French, and has traveled very considerably over a great deal of Europe. He is reputed to have good connections with international socialists, although we don’t know if he sympathizes with them or merely uses them.”
“What about other nationalist groups?” Matthew asked, not sure in which direction he was driving, but thinking primarily of the Serbians because of their recent resort to assassination as a weapon.
“Probably,” Winters answered, his cadaverous face furrowed in thought. “Trouble is, he’s very difficult to trace because he’s so unremarkable to look at. I don’t know that he deliberately disguises himself. Nothing so melodramatic as wigs or false mustaches, but a change of clothes, parting the hair on the other side, a different walk, and suddenly you have a different person. No one remembers him or can describe him afterward.”
A young man in a Guard’s uniform walked past them whistling cheerfully, a smile on his face.
“So he has a sense of proportion, no theatrics,” Matthew observed, referring to Hannassey. “Clever.”
“He’s in it to win,” Winters affirmed. “He never loses sight of the main purpose.”
“And the main purpose is?”
“Independence for Ireland—first, last, and always. Catholics and Protestants together, willing or not.”
“Obsessive?”
Winters thought for a moment. “Not so as to lose balance, no. Why are you asking?”
“I’ve heard rumors of a plot,” Matthew said with studied casualness, adding, “Wondered if Hannassey could be involved.”
Winters stiffened slightly. “If it’s an Irish plot, you’d better tell me,” he said, keeping up his steady, easy pace as they passed an elderly gentleman stopping to light his cigar, cupping his hands around the flame of his match. The breeze was only a whisper, but it was sufficient to blow out the match.
The hurdy-gurdy man changed to a love song, and some of the young people started to sing with him.
“I don’t know that it is.” Matthew was sorely tempted to tell Winters all he knew. He desperately needed an ally. The loneliness of confusion and responsibility weighed on him almost suffocatingly. “It could be any of several things,” he said aloud.
Winters’s face was bleak. He was still looking straight ahead and avoiding Matthew’s eyes. “How much do you really know what you’re talking about, Reavley?”
It was the moment of decision. Matthew took the plunge. “Only that someone uncovered a document outlining a conspiracy that was profoundly serious, and he was killed before he could show it to me,” he answered. “The document disappeared. I’m trying to prevent a disaster without knowing what it is. But it seems to me that with the Curragh mutiny, the failure to get any Anglo-Irish agreement, and now the king coming out on the side of the Loyalists, a plot against him fills the outline too well to ignore.”
Winters walked in silence for at least fifty yards, which took them around the end of the Serpentine. The sun was hot, baking the ground. The air was still, carrying the sounds of laughter from the distance, and a thread of music again.
“I don’t think so,” he said at last. “It wouldn’t serve Irish purposes. It’s too violent.”
“Too violent!” Matthew said in amazement. “Since when has that stopped the Irish Nationalists? Have you forgotten the Phoenix Park murders? Not to mention a score of other acts of terror since! Half the dynamiters in London have been Fenians.” He barely refrained from telling Winters he was talking nonsense.
Winters seemed unperturbed. “The Catholic Irish want self-government, independence from Britain,” he said patiently, as if it were something he had been obliged to explain too many times, and to men who did not wish to understand. “They want to set up their own nation with its parliament, foreign office, and economy.”
“That’s impossible without violence. In 1912 over two hundred thousand Ulstermen, and even more women, signed the Solemn League and Covenant to use all means necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule parliament in Ireland! If anyone thinks they’re going to suppress Ulster without violence, they’ve never been within a hundred miles of Ireland!”
“Very much my point,” Winters said grimly. “To have any hope at all of succeeding, the Irish Nationalists will have to win the cooperation of as many other countries outside Britain as they can. If they assassinate the king, they will be seen as merely criminals and lose all support everywhere—support they know that they need.”
They passed an elderly couple walking arm in arm, and nodded politely to them, raising their hats.
“Hannassey is not a fool,” Winters continued when they were out of earshot. “If he didn’t know that before the assassination in Sarajevo, he certainly knows it now. Europe may not approve of Austria’s subjugation of Serbia, and they may get into such a violent and ill-balanced tangle of diplomatic fears and promises that it ends in war. But the one group who will not win will be the Serbian nationalists. That I can promise you. And one thing Hannassey is not is a fool.”
Matthew wanted to argue, but even as he drew breath to do so, he realized it was to defend his father rather than because he himself believed it. If Hannassey was as brilliant as Winters said, then he would not choose assassination of the king as a weapon—unless he could be certain it would be attributed to someone else.
“The Irish wouldn’t be blamed for it if it appeared to be . . .” He stopped.
Winters raised his eyebrows curiously. “Yes? Whom did you have in mind? Who wouldn’t be traced back or betray them, intentionally or not?”
There was no one, and they were both aware of it. It did not really even matter whether the Irish were behind it or not, for they would still be blamed. The whole idea of such a public crime was one they would abhor. They might be even as keen to prevent it as Matthew himself. He was at a dead end.
“I’m sorry,” Winters said ruefully. “You’re chasing a ghost with this one. Your informant is overzealous.” He smiled, perhaps to rob his words of some of their sting. “He’s an amateur at this, or he’s trying to make himself more important than he is. There are always whispers, bits of paper floating around. The trick is to sort out the real ones. This one’s trivial.” He gave a bleak little gesture of resignation. “I’m afraid I’ve got enough real threats to chase. I’d better get back to them. Good day.” He increased his pace rapidly, and within a few moments he was lost to sight among the other pedestrians.
Shearing called Matthew into his office the next day, his face grave.
“Sit down,” he ordered. He looked tired and impatient, his voice very carefully under control, but the rough edge to it was still audible. “What’s this Irish assassination plot you’re chasing after?” he demanded. “No, don’t bother to answer. If it’s not important enough for you to have told me, then you shouldn’t be wasting your time on it. Drop it! Do you understand me?”
“I have dropped it,” Matthew said tersely. It was the truth, but not all of it. If it was not Irish, then it was something else, and he would continue to investigate the matter.
“Very wise of you,” Shearing said. “There are strikes in Russia. Over a hundred and fifty thousand men out in St. Petersburg alone. And apparently on Monday there was another attempt to murder the czarina’s mad monk, Rasputin. We haven’t got time to chase after private ghosts and goblins.” He was still staring at Matthew. “I don’t consider you to be a glory seeker, Reavley, but if
I find I am mistaken, you’ll be out of here so fast your feet will barely touch the ground on your way.” There was challenge in his face, and anger. Matthew was overcome for a moment by the chill realization that there was also a shred of fear in it as well, a knowledge that things were out of control.
“The situation in the Balkans is getting worse almost by the day,” Shearing went on harshly, glaring at him. “There are rumors that Austria is preparing to invade Serbia. If it does, there is a very real and serious danger that Russia will act to protect Serbia. They are allied in language, culture, and history.” His face was tight, and his hands, dark-skinned, immaculate, were clenched on the desk until the knuckles shone white. “If Russia mobilizes, it will be only a matter of days before Germany follows. The kaiser will see himself as ringed by hostile nations, all fully armed, and growing stronger every week. Unbalanced as he is, to a degree he is right. He will face Russia to the east, and inevitably France to the west. Europe will be at war.”
“But not us,” Matthew said. “We are no threat to anyone, and it’s hardly our concern.”
“God knows,” Shearing replied.
“Isn’t that exactly the time the Irish Nationalists would strike?” Matthew could not forget the document and the outrage in his father’s voice. He could not let go. “It would be if I were their leader.”
“I daresay God knows that, too,” Shearing said waspishly. “But you will leave it to the Special Branch. Ireland is their problem. Concentrate on Europe. That is an order, Reavley!” He picked up a small bundle of papers from the top of his desk and held it out. “By the way, C wants you in his office in half an hour.” He did not look up as he said it.
