Shoulder the Sky

To allow Prentice to be murdered, and do nothing, would be a betrayal of that, and he would not do it.

“Did you tell Prentice how you felt?” he asked.

Bert shook his head. “None o’ his damn business, beggin’ your pardon, Chaplain. Don’t talk to the loikes o’ him about things loike that. He weren’t one of us.”

Joseph already had a good idea exactly who had been in the area, or could have been so far as they were not known to have been somewhere else. Most men would be able to prove where they were on the front line, and most stretcher-bearers, medical orderlies, or other troops would have been no further forward than supply trenches, more probably in an advance first-aid post, or dugout.

And someone must have seen Prentice, possibly given him permission and assistance to go over the top. Which raised the question as to why he had been there at all! Had it been his own idea, or had someone suggested it to him, or even lured him there? Whatever Joseph asked, he must do it so discreetly no one suspected anything but an interest in informing Prentice’s family of what had happened, and of course General Cullingford in particular. He still had to do that, at least as a courtesy. Someone else might have given him the bare facts.

He must ask his questions quickly, or his reasons would no longer be valid. One did not pursue the fate of any one man for more than a few days, there were too many others. The whole regiment was his concern.

He asked Alf Griggs quite casually where Prentice had been the afternoon beforehand, almost as if it were of no interest to him.

“First-aid dugout, Plugstreet way,” Alf told him, lighting a Woodbine and shaking his head. He was a small, dapper man with the art of finding anything anybody wanted, at a price. “Bleedin’ nuisance ’e were,” he continued. “Followed the quartermaster around like a starvin’ dog for I dunno ’ow long, till ’e got told ter get out of it, or ’e’d be carved an’ served up fer dinner ’isself. Dunno w’ere ’e got ter after that.” He drew on his cigarette. “Wot does it matter, Chaplain? Poor sod’s gone west anyway.”

“Just to give his family some idea of how he happened to get killed.” Joseph was horrified how easily the lie came off his tongue. “Not so easy to understand when it’s a journalist rather than a soldier.”

“That one is not so easy ter understand ’ow ’e didn’t get trod on long before!” Alf said with a curl of his lip. “Nasty little sod! Beggin’ yer pardon, Reverend, but bein’ dead don’t make a man good, just means ’is badness don’t matter anymore.”

Joseph thanked him and went along the relatively straight route of the second-line trench to the stretch known as Plugstreet, after the nearby village of Ploegsteert. He found the first-aid dugout where a couple of stretcher-bearers were sitting having a smoke. A third was dozing, his feet sticking out in the weak sun, his boots unlaced. Near him the mud under the duckboards was nearly dry. The rain had stopped and the sky overhead was hazy blue, and just at this moment the guns were silent. There even seemed to be fewer rats than usual.

Lanty Nunn opened his eyes. “Allo, Chaplain. Lookin’ for someone?”

Joseph squeezed his way past and sat down, making himself comfortable. “Only trying to find out a bit more about how the journalist got killed,” he replied. “I expect the general will want to know—and his family. It’s not as if he had been a soldier.”

“It’s not as if ’e’d bin any damn use at all!” Lanty retorted.

Whoopy Teversham, who had been half asleep, sat up on his elbows. He had bright ginger hair and features like rubber, able to assume any expression. “Chaplain, you don’t want to tell the poor bastard’s mother ’e was a pain in the arse,” he said cheerfully. “Anyway, Oi expect she knew! Hell-bent on getting the story that’d make his name,” he went on. “Into everything, asking questions. Oi thought he was going to write it up like he’d saved the Western Front single-handed. He wanted all sorts of facts and figures; wounded, gassed, sent home to Bloighty, where and how the dead was buried. Guess he knows that now, eh?” He laughed abruptly, and ended up coughing.

“Don’t mind him, Chaplain,” Lanty said dourly. “He don’t know no better!”

Doughy Ward blinked, staring at Joseph with a frown. “Tell his family he went too far forward and got caught in cross fire. What does it matter? He’s dead.”

“He was drowned, actually,” Joseph told him.

“Yeah?” Doughy opened his eyes wide. “We don’t know what he was after up there, an’ to be honest, Chaplain, we don’t care. He were always poking his nose in, asking things what wasn’t none of his business.”

“Did he say anything to you about going over the top?”

“Didn’t listen to ’im. Told ’im to go to hell, actually.” He smiled.

“Looks like he did, an’ all!” Whoopy said with a grin. “I’d have told him sooner, if I’d have known he’d go an’ do it!”

“Not in front of the chaplain!” Lanty shook his head, looking at Joseph apologetically.

Joseph thanked them and went on searching. No one was very eager to help, and he felt their irritation that he was spending his time trying to find out something which they saw as irrelevant.

“He’s dead,” Major Harvester said tersely, his strong, bony face showing his weariness. “So are many better men. Do what you have to, Captain Reavley. Say all the right things, you can even be sorry, if you feel it’s your duty, but after that, get back to our own men. That’s what you’re here for. Prentice was a damned nuisance. He got under everybody’s feet. Well, it looks like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often. I don’t suppose he’ll be the last war correspondent to be killed.”

“I would just like to know how he got so far forward,” Joseph persisted. “He wasn’t supposed to be up there.”

Harvester’s face hardened. “Are you saying someone was to blame, Captain?”

“No, sir,” Joseph denied quickly. He was not ready yet to tell Harvester the truth. “I don’t doubt Prentice himself was to blame. I’d like to be able to prove it, if anyone asks.”

Harvester relaxed. “You have a point. Sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion. But I’ve still no idea how he got past the second trench, let alone the fire trench.”

Nor could Joseph find any sentry for that night willing to say they had recognized Prentice among the figures going over the top. In the brief flares, one man with a rifle in his hands looked much like another. And it was perfectly obvious that none of them cared. They were not insubordinate enough to tell him to leave it alone and attend to the living, but their smoldering anger was clear enough.

But someone had killed Prentice deliberately. It had not been accident or misfortune of war, but murder, and the wrongness of that was one certainty in the chaos and loss that Joseph could do something about. The difficulty of it, the fact that no one else cared, even his personal contempt for Prentice, if anything, sharpened his resolve.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Major Hadrian asked once more if there was anything he could do, then, tight-lipped and unhappy, he closed the door and left Cullingford and Judith Reavley alone in the room. Since the arrival of the British Army the small château, really what in England would have been called the manor house, had been used as divisional headquarters. It was late April, five days since the gas attack, and the situation was increasingly serious. The men in the trenches knew only their own stretch of a thousand yards or so, a platoon, a brigade, but Judith had driven Cullingford around the entire area, and she had seen how few men there were, how short they were of ammunition and the difficulty of getting it up to the front lines, along with everything else. The roads were jammed with troops, horses, refugees, ambulances, even wagons and dogcarts with household goods, terrified women and children seeing a lifetime in ruins.

Cullingford stood in front of the window. The rain drifted in silver sheets across the land, spattering against the glass one minute, the sun making prisms of it the next. The pale light showed the fine lines in his face and the weariness around his eyes and mouth. He stood upright, a little stiffly, but then he always did. It was not only habit, it was part of his inner defense. He had come so close to breaking it: Once he had knelt and spoken to a gassed man, and stayed with him while he died, talking quietly, telling him it was bad, but they would win. He had had no idea whether it was true or not. The other time it had been an injured horse that had moved him beyond his power to hide. He had been in the cavalry in his youth. The loyalty of an animal touched him where he could not allow the emotion of a man to reach.

He knew she had seen his tiredness, the times when he was too vulnerable to hide the fear of failure, the pain of guilt for other men’s deaths, and the fact that he had no more knowledge than the rest of them about what to do to prevent more slaughter, even final defeat. But he had to pretend, their faith depended on it. That was the job of leadership, to endure being thought callous; to defend your mistakes, even when you know them to be mistakes.

They had never spoken of it. If they shattered the illusion of separateness with something as tangible as words, then it would have to be faced, and there was neither time nor strength for that.

“Miss Reavley,” he said quietly, without turning toward her. “You told me that your father was killed just before the outbreak of war, and you implied that there was a conspiracy behind it, of great depth and dishonor. You said it was political rather than financial, and that if it had succeeded it would have altered Europe, perhaps even the world. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. The loss . . .” He did not finish the sentence, it was too painful, too intrusive. “Were you exaggerating?” He asked only to dispel the last possible uncertainty.

She had told him only the barest outline, and then in such broken sentences she was surprised he had remembered so much. They had been stuck at Hellfire Corner, the engine had stalled and darkness was closing in. It had taken her a quarter of an hour in the rain, under sporadic fire, to change and re-gap the spark plugs and jury-rig the commutator to get them as far as Ploegsteert, where they could get proper parts to replace the old ones.

Afterward, when they sat drinking hot tea with rum in it, hands shaking, uniforms soaked and crusted with mud, she had realized just how close she had come to being killed. Heavy artillery fire had landed less than twenty feet away, sending earth and stones whining through the air, clanging against the car, and shrapnel landing within inches of them both.

He had said nothing, treating her as if she were a soldier like himself, and expected to remain calm. His absence of special treatment was the highest compliment he could have paid her. She knew it was not indifference; the warmth in his eyes made that thought ridiculous.

It was after that, when they could relax for half an hour, before she went to see to the car, and he to receive Hadrian’s report on the other sectors, that she had told him about the fatal car crash, the missing document. She had not told him what it had said—that was too dangerous to repeat—nor that Matthew was still looking for the brilliant and terrible mind that had conceived it.

He turned around to face her at last. There was humor in his eyes, but it was only on the surface. “You were very circumspect, but I believe that you know a great deal more than the few details you spoke of,” he said drily. But he was watching her, trying to gauge her pain and how far he must probe into it, and what harm that would do. “You said your father had been a member of Parliament. He would not lightly speak of England’s dishonor, or a conspiracy that would alter the world.”

“No.” She stood very still. How profoundly everything she knew had changed in that time, less than a year. Last spring she had been in St. Giles, aimless, discontented, fretting against the bounds of a society basking in a golden peace she did not yet know to treasure. She had taken for granted the comfort of physical safety, clean linen, the smell of furniture polish, fresh milk, domestic duties, the boredom of the known.

Now it was like a lost world, a dream in the mind shattered on waking, the loneliness of being grown-up, separate, driven by duty and reality, looking back with longing when a moment of peace allowed.

He deserved honesty. “It was real,” she said. “I imagine it still is. My brother Matthew is certain we inflicted only a temporary defeat. It is another war, different weapons from this, only a few people who know they’re fighting it, the rest of us to be moved around like herds of animals, but it’s a shadow of this one. Except I think that’s not true, it is the real one, and we are the reflection cast, the unreality, pulled by it, not pulling.”

“Eldon spoke of a new order.” He was looking at her intently now. “He seemed to imagine he would have a place in it. He had a passion in him, as if he were a disciple rather than an adventurer, and certainly not simply a tool of someone else’s cause. What political conspiracy could inspire that in him, Miss Reavley?”

“Peace,” she replied quietly.

He was startled. “Peace!”

“At the cost of surrendering France and Belgium in return for German military help to regain our lost colonies, like America.”

“God Almighty!” He was ashen. “Are you sure?”

“That is what the document said.”

“But you don’t know who is behind it?”

“No. We call him the Peacemaker, but we have only the vaguest idea who he must be.” Was she telling him more than she should? Had she already broken her promise to Matthew and Joseph in telling Cullingford this much? But he could not be connected with it! He had given his life to fighting to defend the country he loved and the way of life he believed in. If all of them were so distrustful they spoke to no one, that in itself would ensure the Peacemaker’s victory.

Cullingford was waiting. He looked tired and so easy to hurt. Prentice was his nephew and she knew from Hadrian’s expression, the odd words he had let slip to her, awkwardly, as if he wanted her help but would not ask for it, that the relationship was difficult, full of criticisms and resentments. Their values were different and they were too close to disagree with respect.

Suddenly she was furiously angry with Prentice for his supreme self-centeredness in allowing his petty family squabbles to make even one man falter in his step, let alone a general upon whom other lives depended.

“The Peacemaker has to be someone who had access to both the kaiser and the king, sir,” she said firmly. “Someone with the total arrogance to assume that they have the moral right to make decisions that affect the rest of the world, without even telling us, let alone asking us. And he had to know both Sebastian Allard and my father personally. That narrows it down rather a lot, but it still leaves dozens of people—I think.”

“Who is Sebastian Allard?” he said gently, as if he guessed, although he spoke of him in the present.

She forced herself to keep her voice steady, but it was difficult. Her breath was tight in her chest. “The student of Joseph’s who killed my parents, to get the document back.”

“And failed . . .”

“Yes.”

“I see. I think we may assume that the Peacemaker has not given up his aim. The question is how has he redirected his forces, and what are his targets now?” He bit his lower lip. “He will want the war over as soon as possible, and presumably he does not care greatly who wins. No! No, it would be better for his purposes if Germany does. The kaiser must already have signed the treaty, because it was on its way to the king. We do not know if the king would have signed it or not.” He began to pace back and forth, four steps and then turn, four steps and then turn, restless, caged in by more than the plastered and paneled walls. “Germany, he can rely on, England he cannot. But if Germany wins, then a new government would be formed in England—one that would do as Germany told it—it would have no choice.”

Judith stood still, watching him, cold inside. John Reavley would have liked him. They had the same kind of quiet, irresistible logic. It was utterly reasonable, and yet it never frightened her because the human warmth and the rueful humor were always there, an inner tenderness that once given was never lost.

“If I wanted England beaten quickly,” he went on, concentrating with desperate intensity, “what would I do? Attack our weakest point . . .”

“Break through at Ypres?” Her voice was a whisper. “With more gas? Drive for the coast . . .”

“No,” he looked at her, shaking his head. “Too costly. We are weak, but we’re far from beaten. The use of gas didn’t work. The men are more resolved than ever to fight to the last yard. It’s a dirty war. They’ll never surrender now.”

“What then?”

“Attrition, but swiftly. Without reinforcements we can’t last long. If I were in the man’s place, I would attack morale at home, cripple Kitchener’s ‘new army’ before it begins. Dry up recruitment.”

“How?”

“That’s the question. If we can find out how, we might stop him.” His face tightened. “I need to speak to Eldon again.”

“What can you say?” Now she was frightened he would betray them, unintentionally. Yet what could he say that the Peacemaker did not already know?

He smiled ruefully. “I have no idea,” he confessed. “I . . .”

Before he could finish his sentence there was a sharp knock on the door and as soon as he answered, Hadrian came in.

“Is Colonel Fyfe here already?” Cullingford asked unhappily.

Hadrian was acutely unhappy. He was as immaculately tidy as always, but his face looked crumpled and he jerked his tunic down absentmindedly.

“No, sir, Captain Reavley, the chaplain from the second division. He says it’s urgent, sir. I . . . I think you should see him.”

A little of the color ebbed from Cullingford’s face.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Hadrian said with intense gentleness filling his eyes, and confusion, as if several emotions twisted inside him at once.

Unconsciously Cullingford straightened his shoulders. “Ask him to come in.”

“Would you like me to leave, sir?” Judith asked. She desperately wanted to stay. Whatever it was, she would learn of it sooner or later, why not now? Or was privacy kinder?

There was no time for him to answer. The door opened again and Joseph came in. He was thinner than the last time she had seen him, his face gaunt under the high cheekbones. He must have been aware of her, but he gave no sign, facing Cullingford squarely.

“Captain Reavley,” Cullingford acknowledged. “What is it?”

“I’m extremely sorry, sir,” Joseph said levelly. “But I have to tell you that Mr. Eldon Prentice, a war correspondent with the London Times, was killed in no-man’s-land the day before yesterday. Colonel Fyfe asked me to tell you personally, since we believe he was closely related to you, rather than inform you in dispatches. He was buried with the other soldiers who fell that night, but if you believe his family would prefer his body to be shipped home, it could still be arranged.”

Cullingford frowned. “The day before yesterday, you said?”

“Yes, sir. He was found in no-man’s-land. I brought him back myself. I hoped that I would be able to tell you why he was there, and what happened to him, but I’m afraid I don’t know yet.”

“Yet? You expect to?” Cullingford was still confused, stunned by shock. He had heard of or seen the deaths of thousands of men, an average of a score a day, but it was still different when it was someone of your own family. The fact that one did not especially like the individual was irrelevant. It was blood that stirred the loss, the emptiness in the pit of the stomach, nothing to do with affection.

“I intend to, sir,” Joseph said calmly. “It was extraordinary for a newspaper correspondent to be in the forward trenches at all, he should never have been in no-man’s-land.”

“No,” Cullingford agreed. “It was a breach of discipline, but his, Captain, not the army’s. If the army writes to his mother, I would be grateful if you did not make an issue of that. He was . . .” He stopped. He had been about to ask for emotional privilege, and he despised it in others. It was unprofessional. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “There is no need to ship his body home, any more than any other man’s. Flanders clay is an honorable grave.”

Joseph smiled, a momentary gentleness changing his features dramatically. “Of course. And as far as the record will show, he was a man of unusual courage, risking his life in pursuit of truth.” There was an odd irony in his voice.

Cullingford picked it up. “I presume he was shot by the Germans, and you will tell her so. If he was caught on the wire, she does not need to know that.”

“That’s always how people die, sir,” Joseph answered him. “But actually Mr. Prentice was drowned.” He stopped. There was something pinched in his face, an unhappiness far more personal than the fact that he was bringing news of bereavement to someone. He was used to that.

Judith fidgeted, moving her weight, and for the first time Joseph turned to look at her. There was no smile in his eyes, only a kind of desperation. Judith felt it like something tangible in the room. She could not ask. She was merely a driver, like a servant. She was less even than a regular army private. She bit her lip, her breath hurting in her lungs. She knew Joseph too well.

Cullingford looked at her, then back at Joseph. “Is there something else, Captain Reavley?” he said softly.

“Not yet, sir.”

Cullingford stood very still. “You did not say ‘he drowned,’ Captain, you said ‘he was drowned.’ Do you mean that some German soldier found him out there, and held his head under the water?”

Joseph said nothing.

Cullingford let out his breath very slowly. “Thank you for taking the time to come and tell me personally, Captain Reavley. If you could tell me where he is buried, I should like to pay my respects, for his mother’s sake.”

“Yes, sir. It is just beyond Pilkem. I can show you, if you wish?”

“Yes, please. Then I can go on to Zillebeke. Miss Reavley, will you fetch the car.”

Judith drove, Joseph and Cullingford sat in the back. It was a bright, sharp spring day, sunlight one moment, drenching thundershowers the next, and the air was still cold with a cutting edge to the wind.

She drove in silence, aware of the crowding emotions that must be pulling Cullingford one way and then the other. She understood grief, confusion, anger, and how hard it was to fight through them without someone to listen, to help you find the reasons why you could miss someone so fiercely whom you have never missed in life.

She missed her mother. They seemed to have spent little time together, and much of that in quiet disagreement, pursuing different dreams, and yet the ache of loneliness that now she could never go back was deeper than she could have imagined. She missed all the comfortable little things that used to imprison her: time taken to cut and arrange flowers, the need to polish the silver or move the photographs when dusting the table. Now she thought of them as the cords of sanity that held her safe from the emotional violence of life. She caught herself thinking if only she could find a telephone she would hear her father’s voice. And then she remembered, and the tears choked her.

They were driving slowly along the rutted road toward Pilkem. They passed supply trucks going the other way, and long wagons drawn by horses, mostly laden with the powder shells. There was nothing to do but move as they could, wait when they had to, overtaking would be both dangerous and pointless. There were others ahead anyway, as far as she could see along the flat, straight road.

They pulled up where an ambulance had lost a wheel and men from a small column of relief troops were helping replace it, working patiently in the rain. She looked back at Cullingford in the seat behind her, half in apology for not being able to do any better. He was staring at the windscreen, his eyes unfocused. Was he thinking of his sister and how she must be feeling, and that he could not be there to say or do anything to help her? Had she been proud of her son, knowing only what he said of himself?

Alys would have been proud of Judith, and terrified for her as well. But then every mother in Britain was terrified for someone. Probably every mother in Germany, too, and so many other countries.

Cullingford’s face was impassive. He stared ahead. Only some delicacy of his lips indicated any feeling at all. She knew he had quarreled with Prentice because Hadrian had been furious about it. Hadrian was a quiet man, driven by duty and loyalty, meticulous in his job. The intensity of his emotion had startled her, as had the fact that he had refused absolutely to say what the quarrel was about.

Was Cullingford thinking of that, too, his mind racing over the reconciliation there could have been in the future, and now never would be? Did he think of Prentice as he had been when he was a child, times they had spent together when the world was so utterly different? They had been innocent, incapable of imagining the storm of destruction that had descended on them now. She still saw that bright, vulnerable look in the eyes of new recruits, when they did not know what the stench meant, and believed they could do something brave and noble that would matter. They had no conception how many of them would die before they had a chance to do anything at all, beyond the willingness, and the dream.

It took them half an hour to reach the place. The rain had stopped but the mud was still slick and in the pale sun the wet grass glittered with drops of water. Major Harvester met them, looking stiff, formal, and somewhat embarrassed.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” he said, saluting smartly. “Please accept my condolences.”

Cullingford looked at him with a flash of bitter humor. Judith wondered if he knew how Prentice had been disliked, and how much it hurt him. Whatever he had felt himself, Prentice was family. His loyalties must be torn.

“Thank you,” he accepted.

Harvester remained where he was, standing to attention on the strip of mangled grass. Judith could see in his sensitive, bony face that he felt he should add something more, the usual remarks that the dead man had been good at his job, loyal, brave, well liked, all the things one says over graves. Decency, even pity, fought within him against loyalty to his own men, and the truth. It was a kind of betrayal to use the same words for Prentice as for a soldier killed in battle. He stood there tongue-tied, unable to do it.

Judith agonized for him, and for Cullingford. It was too late for Prentice to redeem himself now; he would be remembered as he was. Perhaps only his family would think of him as he could have become.

Cullingford rescued him. “There is no need to say it, Major Harvester,” he said quietly. “Mr. Prentice was not a soldier. He does not warrant a soldier’s epitaph.” His voice shook so very slightly that probably Harvester did not even hear it.

“He . . . he was doing his job, sir,” Harvester said, his face softening with gratitude.

Joseph spoke at last. “Would you like to come this way, sir?” he asked. “I’ll take you to the grave.”

“Thank you.” Cullingford followed him.

Judith waited behind. She had disliked Prentice. She had no right to go now as if she mourned him, and perhaps Cullingford would value a few moments of privacy for whatever grieving duty permitted him. She watched him go, stiff and upright, intensely alone.

A sergeant came over and offered her a mug of tea. Harvester went about his duties.

Twenty minutes later Cullingford came back, his face white, his eyes bright and oddly blind. He thanked Joseph and walked to the car. Joseph looked for a moment at Judith, his face shadowed with anxiety. She would like to have had time to speak to him, ask how he was, and above all, what he had meant by his strange remarks about Prentice’s death. But not only was Cullingford her duty, he was her chief concern also. She smiled fleetingly at Joseph, and went to the car.

Cullingford was already seated, waiting for her, this time in the front passenger seat. Judith cranked the engine, climbed in and drove back onto the road toward Zillebeke.

She would like to have said something good about Prentice, but she knew nothing. To invent it would have been intolerably patronizing, in a way making it even more obvious that invention was necessary.

She was weighed down by a savage awareness of how alone Cullingford was. The men expected him never to show fear, exhaustion, or doubt of final victory. If he had weaknesses or griefs, moments when he was overwhelmed by the horror of it all, he must keep them concealed. There was no one at all with whom he could share them.

Joseph must have seen the conflict in him over Prentice’s death. He might have understood it as grief for his family, pity for his sister, regret for all the possibilities now gone, and perhaps a thread of guilt because he had disliked Prentice and found him a professional embarrassment. He respected the ordinary fighting man, British or German. He understood their strengths, and their weaknesses, and he hated intrusion into their privacy, or their need. Prentice had violated both.

But she did not know how to find words that would not commit exactly that same intrusion, and let him know how much of his emotion she had seen.

“I’m sorry for Mr. Prentice’s death, sir,” she said finally.

The traffic was slowed to a crawl. He looked at her. “Are you? It is unlike you to express a sentiment you do not feel, Miss Reavley, for courtesy’s sake.” There was the ghost of a smile on his lips. “Eldon was eminently dislikable, don’t you think?”

She was startled by his frankness. Had she made her feelings so very obvious?

“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to . . .” How could she finish? “To have been so . . .”

“Honest?” he suggested, his eyes bright and surprisingly uncritical.

“Undisciplined,” she corrected him, looking away, the heat burning up her face.

“Discipline does not require that you swallow your own ideas of morality,” he answered, turning sideways a trifle to look at her more comfortably. “You must have heard about the court-martial of the sapper, and the way Eldon behaved when Charlie Gee was brought into the Casualty Clearing Station?”

Of course she had heard. She knew it was Joseph who had restrained Wil Sloan from half killing Prentice. She was profoundly grateful for that. She liked Wil enormously. He was brave, funny, and generous. She loved the stories he told of working his way across half of America on the railroads in order to get passage to England for the war. She also knew he had had to leave his hometown in the Midwest in an indecent hurry after losing his temper once before.

Cullingford was right about what she had thought. She hated being put in the position of not knowing whether she should deny it or not. He was Prentice’s uncle, and had probably known him since he was born! He had to care, even if largely for his sister’s sake. She would love Hannah’s children, whatever they did. It was not a choice; she could not help it. But Prentice had still been an insensitive man who put his own advancement before basic decency in the face of human pain.

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid I did.” The words were said from a depth of feeling, and she only thought afterward of how they might hurt him. “I’m sorry.”

“Please do not keep saying you are sorry, Miss Reavley. It is growing tedious. And don’t treat me like an aged aunt. Your honesty is one of your better qualities—along with your ability to mend a car.”

She was confused, uncertain how to react, and she felt ridiculous that it mattered so much to her.

Then he smiled suddenly, which lit his face and took the tiredness from it. Images raced in her mind. What was he like away from war? What sort of man was he when circumstance did not force him into this hideous extremity of planning and executing death, having this unnatural power and answerability for the hope, morality, and survival of thousands of other men? What did he do when he was on leave? Did he like gardening, playing golf, walking? Did he have a dog, and did he love it, touch it with unbearable gentleness, as her father had? What music did he listen to? What books did he read? Who were his friends?

“A penny for your thoughts, Miss Reavley?”

Again she felt herself coloring. Thank God he could not know! “I wasn’t thinking of Mr. Prentice,” she answered.

“No, neither was I,” he admitted. “If I had thought you were, I would probably have reduced it to a ha’penny.”

She smiled back, and told him a half truth. “I was wondering what we would be doing if we were not here.” She knew the answer for herself. She would be living the same rather purposeless life she had before the war. She would take part in all the usual village events, feeling unnatural and inadequate at it, watching time slip by having done nothing that made more than superficial difference. She could be wondering if she would settle for marrying someone she was merely fond of, someone who would be predictable, kind to her, who would behave with honor, whom she would probably even like, but never love with all the passion she could feel. Would he be someone she could live with, but not someone she could not bear to live without?

Cullingford fished in his pocket and put a penny on the dashboard.

“I would probably be driving,” she said aloud, not meeting his eyes. “But not really going anywhere, just around the village, trying to do what my mother would have done. Do I have to find a penny for you to tell me what you would be doing, if there were no war?”

“You have a penny,” he pointed out.

“Somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

“I paid you. That one is yours.”

“Oh! Well, it’s yours again, then. What would you be doing?” She wanted intensely to know.

“It’s nearly May. I would be walking down to the woods to see the bluebells,” he said without hesitation. “I would follow the path between the wild pear trees right into the middle of the flowers, where it all but disappears and you can hardly see where to put your feet without treading on them. It would be full of the sunlight and silence. I would stand there and let it sink into me until I was part of it.”

She was seized with an overwhelming hunger to do all the same things, to do them with him, not to say anything, simply to be there.

“It sounds like a lot more use than anything I would do,” she said quietly.

“If you would try to pick up the pieces of the things that your mother used to do for others, is that not useful?” he asked. There was a startling gentleness in his voice. “Isn’t that what we do, when we miss someone almost beyond bearing?”

She looked away from him; his eyes were too tender, too probing. “I hadn’t thought of it.” She choked on the words. “I suppose it is. I miss my father more. He would have gone walking, only he would have taken Henry, our dog.” She blinked rapidly. Her throat was so tight she could hardly speak. “I miss dogs—I miss dogs I could have as friends. You can’t do that here, they’re all messengers, or something. And I can’t bear caring about them, because I know how many of them get killed.”

Ahead of them the traffic was moving again, and she eased the car into gear and started forward. “It’s bad enough to lose people. I can’t cope with it when it’s animals. Don’t tell me that’s stupid, and wrong. I know it is.”

“I don’t know how wrong it is to love anything, or not to love it,” he replied, looking away from her and toward the traffic ahead. “I haven’t learned how to prevent it.” His voice shook a little. “With me it’s the horses.”

A dozen answers streamed through her head, and none of them were what she wanted to say. There had been a depth of emotion in him that was far more powerful than the simple meaning of the words. She put all her attention to driving, forcing everything else out of her consciousness, because she could not cope with it.

It was after they had returned to Poperinge, late in the evening, and extremely tired, that he spoke to her again. They were eating at their usual estaminet, Le Nid du Rat, in English the Rat’s Nest, a small, comfortable place with half a dozen tables. They had stew, consisting mostly of vegetables, and good bread. Today she was acutely aware of how much better it was than anything Joseph would have. She had seen something in his face that troubled her, a kind of blind, painful purpose deeper than simply the duty to tell Cullingford of Prentice’s death. He had suggested that he had been killed by someone who knew him, a British soldier, not a German one. If that was true then it was not an act of war, it was murder. And surely, after the past, Joseph of all people would not accept that unless he was forced to. There must be evidence he could not escape.

Could it be Wil Sloan after all? How violent was his temper? Before driving Cullingford she had driven ambulances nearly all the winter, much of it with Wil. There were ways in which she knew him even better than she did her own brothers. She was familiar with the rhythm of his work, exactly how he liked his tea, how he curled over sideways when he slept, the patterns of his speech, how he hated the lice and would scratch himself raw, and then be ashamed of it. She knew precisely which jokes would make him laugh, and which would embarrass him.

If Wil had been so appalled at Charlie Gee’s injuries that the horror had overwhelmed him, maybe frightened him out of control, could he have gone after Prentice, out to no-man’s-land, and pushed his head under the water? Perhaps they had quarreled about it again, and the misery had come back, the utter blinding helplessness of it. It would not be Prentice that Wil was lashing out at, just Prentice’s blind, uncaring face; Prentice as a symbol of all that hurt too much to bear.

And if that were true, she would lie in her teeth to protect him. The law might require Wil to answer for it, justice did not, not to her.

She looked up and met Cullingford’s eyes. He was watching her anxiously, and there was the same shadow in his gaze. But he did not know Wil Sloan. Who was he worried for? Or was it just the fear that someone had hated Prentice enough to kill him?

“I imagine your brother does not speak lightly?” he said, ignoring his food. It was a question that demanded honesty, even though they both longed for comfort, anything except one more burden.

“No,” she answered. She could feel her stomach hurt. How was she going to answer him if he asked about Wil? Suddenly her loyalties were torn in a way for which she was totally unprepared. Cullingford was authority. He could not turn a blind eye. She could, and must. But she would hate lying to him. “But I don’t think he knows anything,” she went on.

His smile was sad, self-mocking, as if he understood her dilemma, and what she would do, and found a bitter humor in it. “Of course not,” he agreed. “Not yet. But he sees a cause of truth there. He’s a priest. He is used to thinking of morality in absolutes, and letting God take care of the broken pieces.”

Now she was really frightened. She wanted to ask him what he meant, as if she were a child and he the adult to explain it for her and make it right. But if she wanted him to see her as a woman, in moments away from duty as something like an equal, then she must also accept the loneliness and the decisions, and the blame.

“Joseph will try to find out what happened,” she agreed. “And if someone is responsible, who it is.”

“I see.” He picked up his fork, but he did not eat any more.

“Are you afraid it is someone you know?” she asked.

He looked up quickly. “Do you know?”

“No. But that is what occurs to me.”

“Hadrian?” There was a wealth of misery in his face, as if he himself were guilty of it.

She smothered her surprise, turning her gasp into a cough. It had never occurred to her that Hadrian’s very clear dislike was anything more than a proficient soldier’s contempt for a man who did not understand the army or its rules and conventions, and had no genuine respect for its men.

“Surely he didn’t dislike him sufficiently to do that?” She tried to believe it, remembering the loathing in Hadrian’s eyes as he had watched Prentice leave when he had come to see Cullingford a few days ago. Cullingford had given him written permission to pass almost anywhere he wanted. It was a defeat for Hadrian, who had told him such a thing was impossible.

A sane man did not kill for such a reason. Where was sanity here when a score of men could be killed in a night, for no worthwhile reason at all? Everything was exactly the same the day after, most times not a yard lost, nor gained. And it was all meaningless mud anyway, poisoned and violated beyond any conceivable use.

Yet looking at Cullingford’s face, she saw the fear in his eyes was perfectly real—he believed Hadrian could be guilty, and it hurt him, with grief for the fact, and fear of what it would mean in the future.

She made herself smile. “I don’t think so,” she said with a conviction she imitated from him, thinking of him assuring injured men, lying with supreme ease. “He’s too military to do anything so rash. He’d have had to leave his own post. He wouldn’t do that on the night of a raid.”

He smiled back at her, forcing himself to relax as well, let go of it as an act of will. “No. It was a foolish thought.” He picked up his glass and sipped the rough wine. “I didn’t like Eldon, but his death is . . . painful. I cannot return to England for some time, with things as they are. My sister Abby is a widow, and she is going to find this very hard.”

She became aware of how acutely it embarrassed him to admit to such emotions. “You would like me to take some message to her?” she asked, to save him having to.

Then she was afraid she had presumed!

He looked at her with luminous candor. “Please? You know what grief is like. You could speak to her without being sentimental, which she would hate. Loss needs honesty. Nerys, my wife, would not . . .” He stopped, unable to finish the sentence without committing a betrayal. “She does not know a great deal of the reality of war.” His hand fiddled with the small salt spoon on the table. “There is no need to harrow people with details of violence and suffering they cannot help. And certainly not of . . . of your brother’s suspicions. It would add . . . to Abby’s pain. She needs to think of Eldon as what he might have become, not what he was.”

His words were very spare, little more than a sketch, but she saw in it an outline of loneliness that hurt too much to acknowledge. What part of his life did he share with Nerys if he could not tell her of the horror he saw, the fear, the overwhelming physical discomfort of the trenches; or the jokes, the friendship, the sacrifice and the sheer kindness as well? Now of all times, what was there left of meaning in the trivia of life, the things that floated past the windows of the soul but never touched the inner being, pictures without substance.

“Of course I’ll go and see Mrs. Prentice,” she said quickly. “I can tell her as much or as little as you like. I can say I met him several times, and that he was dedicated to his job, and brave enough to do it without fear for his own safety. I can tell her what it is like here—or conceal it, as you think best.”

“Thank you.” He broke a piece of bread off in his fingers and ate it slowly. He looked at her with intense gravity. “I shall leave it to your judgment what you say to her. I . . . I haven’t seen her much lately. I . . .” He gave a shrug so slight his shoulders did not even pull his uniform. “I should have given her more time, especially after Allen died.” He made no excuses.

“I can go the day after tomorrow,” she offered. “If you give me the address and perhaps a letter to explain to her who I am, so she does not think I am simply intruding.”

“Of course.”

She thought he wanted to say more, but he was uncomfortable enough with asking her for help, and he was torn between loyalties. Everyone felt guilty for disliking the dead, especially when they were young, and the grief for them was something you ought to share, and couldn’t.

“Thank you,” he said softly. “It will make a difference to her.”

They finished the meal without speaking again, but it was companionable, as if understanding made further words redundant.

Matthew closed the door behind him and looked at the four men sitting around the long, polished table. One of them was his own superior at the Secret Intelligence Service, Calder Shearing; another was the head of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral “Blinker” Hall, white-haired, fresh-faced, with the nervous habit that had given him his nickname. The third was Brand, a man with receding brown hair and nondescript features, an assistant to Hall.

The fourth man was dark-eyed, dark-haired, of medium height, and at present he looked so tired his skin had a withered, almost parchmentlike quality, shadowed around the sockets of his eyes and pinched near his mouth. The humor that was usually so clear in his expression was gone, as if stripped from him by shock.

“Come in, Reavley,” Shearing directed. “Sit down. You know everyone here.”

“Good morning, sir,” Matthew answered, acknowledging Admiral Hall. He glanced around the table. “Kittredge not here yet?” The answer was obvious, but he was looking for an explanation. He looked again at the dark man with the ravaged face. He was wearing civilian clothing, a shirt that looked crumpled and an old Harris tweed jacket, too warm for the time of year.

“Kittredge is not coming,” Shearing told him. “This is a closed meeting.”

Matthew was startled. Kittredge was one of three other men recruited to the SIS at the beginning of the war as a cryptographer. Before that he had been an academic at Cambridge. Language and codes were his specialties. Matthew took his seat in the place indicated, and waited for them to begin. He knew what he was here for; the fourth man, Ivor Chetwin, had just returned from Mexico. The United States and its neighbors were Matthew’s field of responsibility in SIS.

Of course Shearing did not know that Ivor Chetwin had once been a close friend of John Reavley, until profound differences over the morality of espionage work had divided them. It had driven John Reavley into the dislike and distrust of all intelligence work that had lasted until the evening he had telephoned Matthew to tell him of the Peacemaker’s document given him by Reisenburg. He had been murdered the next day. It was only Chetwin’s brilliance at gaining information, and his undoubted personal courage, that made it bearable to Matthew that they should work together.

Admiral Hall seemed to be in charge of the meeting. He was courteous to Shearing, but he deferred to no one. At the beginning of the war, on the night of August 5, 1914, Britain had sent out a ship that had picked up the transatlantic telephone cable, so all communication between Europe to America since then had had to be made by radio. Germany had routed its messages to its diplomatic staff in the United States and Mexico through various neutral countries, particularly Sweden. Naturally, it had used code.

That code had been captured by British Naval Intelligence, and the fact that it had been broken was one of the most closely guarded secrets. Any action based solely upon information gained that way would betray to the Germans that their diplomatic exchanges were known, and the code would instantly be changed. All its value to Britain would be lost. Secrecy was vital. The German assumption that their codes could never be broken also helped!

“The situation,” Hall prompted Chetwin.

“Even worse than the reports,” Chetwin replied, his voice gravelly with exhaustion from weeks of fitful sleep, poor food, and the constant harassment of moving from place to place, only a step ahead of suspicion and arrest. “The whole of Mexico is in chaos,” he went on. He spoke slowly, almost without emotion, as if it were exhausted out of him. “Zapata and Pancho Villa have gone crazy. They’re dancing in the presidential palace like so many apes. They have no control over anything. Armed men roam the countryside looting and killing. They steal cattle, grain, horses, anything that can be moved. Bodies swing from the trees like rotten fruit.”

No one interrupted him.

He ran his hand, neat and strong, over his brow. “There’s nothing left to eat. Villages have been razed to the ground, roads and bridges have been torn up. There’s death everywhere, like a pall over the earth. The cities are crawling with typhus and black pox, and there are more firing squads than queues for food.”

“The Germans?” Hall reminded him.

Chetwin sighed. “Pouring in guns and money.”

They all knew what that meant. If the Mexican armies crossed the Rio Grande the United States would mobilize all its forces to defend itself. There would be nothing left of men, munitions, or passion to consider what was happening in the rest of the world.

“How close?” Shearing asked.

Chetwin shook his head. “Not close enough,” he answered the question they had not asked. “I told Washington everything I could, short of giving them our decoded messages. They’ve got explanations for half of it, and don’t believe the rest. Nothing will persuade them that Germany is seriously behind the arming of Mexico, or the projected building of a Japanese naval base on their Pacific coast.”

Shearing pursed his lips. “You know the kaiser, Chetwin. Is he serious about the ‘yellow peril,’ or is it just one of his ramblings?”

Hall jerked his head round. “You know the kaiser? Personally?”

“Yes, sir,” Chetwin replied. “I spent a little time in the court in Berlin, before the war.”

Did Matthew imagine it, or was there a faint, quite different discomfort in Chetwin as he answered? Something in his eyes had changed. His looks were no longer direct in exactly the same way as though he were guarding an emotion, something in which he felt a vulnerability.

Matthew watched more closely, his attention personal as well as professional. Chetwin had been John Reavley’s friend, and in a sense enemy also. Unquestionably he had known him well. If he had been in the court in Berlin, not only had he apparently known the kaiser himself, he could have known Reisenburg. He was a man of acute intelligence and profound political knowledge, and possibly personal connection to the British royal family as well. John Reavley had believed him willing to use any methods, ethical or otherwise, in order to obtain the ends he believed in. That was the cause of their original quarrel.

The possibilities careering through his head made his stomach lurch as if he might be sick. He couldn’t say anything. Dare he trust Shearing? Who else could he turn to for help? Hall would think him a lunatic. All he would achieve would be the loss of his own job, not only crippling him so he had no access to information with which to prove the Peacemaker’s identity, or to block his future plans, but even to prevent any good he could do in his work with America. That was a measure of the Peacemaker’s brilliance: His enemies were isolated from each other by distrust.

Hall and Chetwin were talking about the kaiser, his personality, his erratic mixture of desire to be liked by his cousins George V of Britain and Nicholas of Russia, and his terror of being surrounded by enemies who intended war against his country. He veered between intimate, almost passionate friendship, and then outraged attack.

“I’ve no idea whether he will do it,” Chetwin was considering. “Since he got rid of Chancellor Bismarck, he’s about as predictable as the English summer. Last year was sublime, but I’ve seen snow in June.”

Matthew listened as Chetwin told the rest of what he had seen, recounting his discoveries in Washington as well, but all the time his mind was racing over the possibilities of Chetwin’s own complicity in German plans to have Mexico invade the United States, in the promise of regaining its old territories in the southwest, the price for keeping America out of the European War.

If Chetwin were the Peacemaker, then Germany already knew that British Intelligence had their code. Perhaps all the information gained was doubly compromised. What if it were the most magnificent double bluff in the history of espionage? It was not impossible. The uses of such a deceit were almost endless. Nothing they believed now was real!

As soon as the interview was over he was obliged to return to his own office and reconsider all his information in this light. Most of the ammunition used by Britain was purchased from America, all of it, of necessity, coming by sea. Sabotage was rife, loss to submarine warfare was a growing threat.

It was late afternoon before he had an opportunity to speak alone to Kittredge.

“I’ve heard Chetwin’s report from Mexico,” he said casually, stopping by Kittredge’s desk. “It’s as bad as we thought, possibly worse.”

Kittredge looked up from the sheets of paper he was studying. He was thin and dark, in his early thirties, a man from the Peak District of Derbyshire, used to wild hills and the steep-streeted villages in his childhood, then the sudden intellectual liberties of university. He had not lost the keen edge of idealism, nor the richness of provincial accent.

“What do you know about Chetwin?” Matthew asked.

“Don’t you trust him?” Kittredge looked surprised.

“Of course I trust his honesty, or we couldn’t use him,” Matthew replied. “I’d like a second view on his judgment.”

Kittredge considered for a moment or two before replying. “Well, of course he speaks fluent German, but you know that, or you wouldn’t have sent him into Mexico posing as a German. Did you know that before the war he was engaged to a German girl? Countess or princess, or something.”

Matthew guarded his surprise. “No. I imagine Shearing knew, but he didn’t mention it to me. Why didn’t he marry her?”

“Sad business,” Kittredge replied. “She died. Fever, or something. Don’t know exactly what. He was very cut up about it. Beautiful girl, apparently. In her early twenties.”

“But Chetwin must be nearly fifty!”

Kittredge shrugged. “What difference does that make? He’s very well connected. One of his sisters is very beautiful, married to some descendant of Queen Victoria, and they all get along very well. And of course at his age he has proved his capacity to make a career and earn the respect of his countrymen. Without the war, he could have run for Parliament, or found a pretty decent job in the diplomatic service. Anyway, he was the one she wanted. It was a match of passion on both sides, and her family was quite agreeable. He got along very well at the court in Berlin. He has great wit and charm, you know, and he’s a marvelous raconteur.” He smiled a little self-consciously. “They say the Irish have the gift of the gab, and can charm the birds out of the trees, but I’ve yet to see anyone beat the Welsh. And for all his sophistication at times, Chetwin’s heart is in the valleys of Wales. The music of his own language is always there.”

“Does he speak Welsh?” Matthew was finding more surprises than were comfortable. He should have known these things.

“Oh certainly!” Kittredge raised his eyebrows. “He’s no Englishman!”

Late that evening Matthew was sent for to the office of Dermot Sandwell, a senior cabinet minister with special responsibilities toward the intelligence departments.

“Come in, Reavley,” he invited, waving an arm in the general direction of one of the large leather chairs in his office. It was a beautiful room decorated in cool earth colors and there were exquisite watercolor paintings on the walls. Matthew had been here once or twice before, and knew they were scenes of South Africa, by the artist and humorist Edward Lear. He was always hoping for an opportunity to look at them more closely, but he had been here only on the gravest business, and from the expression on Sandwell’s abstemious face with its vivid blue eyes, this occasion was every bit as grim as the others. He was standing near the window toward Horse Guards Parade, the curtains drawn now.

Matthew did not accept the invitation to be seated. “Good evening, sir,” he acknowledged.

Sandwell regarded him closely. “How are you? You look tired. I believe you have a brother on the Western Front. Heard from him lately?”

“Yes, sir. He’s quite well, thank you.”

“Good. I suppose you’re inundated with stuff at SIS? I imagine you know as well as we in the cabinet do just how serious the situation is? Africa, Gallipoli.” He winced as he said the second name. “The Balkans. There’ll be an Italian front before long, I should think. France and Flanders are only part of it. I’m afraid the war is spreading across the world.”

“Yes, sir.” There was nothing for Matthew to say.

Sandwell jerked himself out of his thoughts and stared at him with sudden focused intensity. “Reavley, what I am about to say to you must not be repeated to anyone. Do you understand me?”

Matthew was startled. Who could he be referring to? All his fears about Shearing came flooding back. Did someone else know about the Peacemaker, perhaps even in the cabinet? Maybe he was not alone after all? Hope surged up inside him that Sandwell was going to say that he knew. The end was in sight!

“Yes, sir,” he answered. “No one at all? Does that include Mr. Shearing?”

Sandwell turned away from the window, the light harsh on his face from the lamps on the wall, his body rigid. “Yes, that does include Mr. Shearing.”

Matthew felt a coldness in spite of the mild April evening. “Yes, sir.”

Sandwell drew in his breath slowly. “I have very good reason to believe that our enemies have turned one of our men in SIS against us. There is a traitor in your department. The evidence seems to be unarguable. Information has passed that can have come from nowhere else.”

Matthew’s stomach turned cold. He asked the question he had to. Sandwell would have thought him a fool if he had not. “Why are you trusting me with this, sir?”

Sandwell smiled, touched by the momentary humor of it. “Because some of the information is material that you do not have access to. For the time being you can trust no one with anything that you alone are privy to, anything that comes from sources that only you have. Report directly to me, but don’t jeopardize your safety, or your position, by hiding whatever will be learned anyway. We have to know who this man is, Reavley. The situation is desperate.” He did not add anything more or make any further emphasis to the danger.

“Yes, sir,” Matthew replied. “Of course.”

“Thank you, Reavley. That’s all. Be careful. When you have anything to report, let me know. I shall make myself available.”

“Sir.” Matthew went out into the corridor without realizing quite how shocked he was until he tripped on the stairs and nearly lost his balance. He grasped the banister only just in time to right himself.

Was it Shearing, or Chetwin? Or God help him—both? It was reasonable to suppose that the Peacemaker would have gathered more disciples over the nine months since the outbreak of war: people who did not believe that violence was the answer to anything, whether from personal revulsion or ethical principle; people who believed they could not win against the power of Germany and Austro-Hungary; people whose businesses and fortunes were being ruined by the economic catastrophe of war and the sheer decimation of so much land; and people who were simply not prepared to lose any more young men they loved, no matter what the cause.

He went out into the evening air and the anonymity of the darkness. On Whitehall he caught a taxi home to his flat. He would collect his car tomorrow; it could remain where it was all night. He could not be bothered to drive. He would like to go to a bar or a club somewhere and have several stiff whiskies, but he dared not. His mind was bursting with fears and shadows, secrets he could not share, and which were too heavy to carry alone.

But there was no one to trust, absolutely no one at all. If he drank, and was vulnerable, forgot to watch and measure everything he said, then he must do it at home, and alone.

Several hours later, in a quiet house on Marchmont Street, the man Matthew referred to as the Peacemaker stared out of an upstairs window at the street below. He saw a taxi draw up about twenty yards along and a figure get out. In the distance and from this height he was foreshortened, but even so the Peacemaker recognized him. He was slender, about six feet tall, and he moved with an energy that marked him out from others on the footpath. He was dressed in a very ordinary suit, and wore a broad-brimmed hat that hid his features. But the man waiting knew exactly what he looked like, he did not need to see the thick, dark hair or the powerful, starkly emotional face with its broad mouth and wide cheekbones.

A few moments later he heard the doorbell, and the servant answering it, then the quick footsteps up the stairs.

“Come in,” he commanded as they reached the landing.

The door opened and the man stood on the threshold, anticipation bright in his eyes.

“Close the door,” the Peacemaker directed.

The man obeyed. They both remained standing. Richard Mason was perhaps the best war correspondent to emerge from this hideous conflict. His writing was lucid, concise, the force in it coming from simple language, a brilliant intellectual grasp of what was happening driven by a passionate anger at human suffering. Time and time again he saw the detail that brought a vast event into the grasp of the reader, making the experience immediate enough to hurt as does the death of one man, rather than overwhelm as does the destruction of a thousand. He gave the enormity of it a human face.

“I want you to go to Gallipoli,” the Peacemaker said quietly. “The news is bad. They say the casualties are terrible. One observation pilot reported that the landing at Cape Helles beach was so fearful he looked down and saw the sea red with blood.”

Mason’s face was pale and his hands by his sides were clenched. He had seen war before, in South Africa. He would have given everything he possessed to prevent such slaughter and human misery happening again, but now, as then, he was helpless to do anything but watch. The Boer War with its civilian casualties, its concentration camps, its legacy of bitterness and destruction, had made him long for peace at any price, as a drowning man longs for air.

It had brought him together with the Peacemaker, and a few others who hungered in the same fierce and passionate way, in an attempt first to prevent this great engulfing conflict, and when that had failed, at least to make it as short as possible. God above knew how many men would die if it continued. He had seen the trenches, and the slaughter of tens of thousands of young men—and he had heard of the nightmare hell of gas.

“What about the Western Front?” he asked. “The Germans are breaking through at Ypres. They’ll be to the French borders soon, and then Paris. What will be the point of Gallipoli if France surrenders?”

“I’ve got a man right there where the gas attack took place,” the Peacemaker replied. “He’s young and keen. He’ll write a good piece. He actually saw it, and the casualties afterward. As of the moment, the Ypres Salient is still holding.”

“For how long?” Mason said bitterly. “We’re bent to breaking, right from Ypres to Verdun and beyond. Austria and Germany have got eight million men mobilized, the French have only got four and a half, and we’ve got barely seven hundred thousand! Now we’ve got the Turks against us as well.”

“I don’t know,” the Peacemaker admitted. “But the story’s in Gallipoli now. If it fails, eventually Churchill will have to go. It may even bring down the government.”

Mason stiffened, his eyes widening. There was a sudden flare of hope in him.

The Peacemaker smiled bleakly. “It’s only a beginning,” he warned. “And we’ll pay for it in blood and tears long before it’s over. But go out there and find the truth, then write it! I’ll see it’s published. I have editors in the small papers who have the courage to print an honest report, not the censored rubbish the rest of us get. People are being deceived. There is no choice without knowledge. Truth is the only freedom.”

“Yes, it is,” Mason said quietly. “But I wish to God sometimes I didn’t have to see it in order to write it.”

“I’m sure,” the Peacemaker agreed. “It isn’t cheap. Like everything else of value, it comes at a high price, sometimes everything we’ve got.”

Mason did not argue. If he had to, he was willing to pay.

CHAPTER

SIX

Judith was on the deck of the transport steamer on the way back across the Channel. She stared into the luminous shadows over the sea and thought about Mrs. Prentice. If she was anything like Eldon, Judith would find it extremely difficult to be gentle with her or offer her any kindness to conceal how he had been disliked, and worse than that, held in contempt. It would cost her all the self-control she possessed to think only of the engulfing sense of loss any woman must feel for her son. Judith had never had a child, but she had watched many men die since coming to the Front, and she could still feel the raw pain of her own loss for her parents. There had been moments in the house when she had expected to hear her mother’s quiet footsteps, or her father’s voice talking to the dog. She had half listened for the car to come back, the old yellow Lanchester that was now so much mangled metal in some scrap yard, probably still stained with their blood. Surely that would help her say something to Mrs. Prentice that would be real between them?

The wind smelled of salt in her face and the slap of the water was swift, rhythmic. They were moving quickly. Surely the moonlight would catch the white line of the chalk cliffs of Dover soon?

What if Mrs. Prentice was like the general? She could picture his face very clearly, every expression, as if she had known him for years, whereas actually it was only a couple of months. Would Mrs. Prentice have the same gravity, and the sudden smile, and eyes that looked into your thoughts, and so seldom betrayed their own, but when they did it was as overwhelming as touch?

She heard the soldiers laughing, and then footsteps as one of them came closer. She turned, happy to be distracted.

“You a nurse, miss?” he asked.

“No, I’m an ambulance driver.” Driving the general was not really her job, and they did not need to know about it. Anyway, she would rather not hear their opinion of him, even in their tone of voice on this dark, windy deck where faces were only pale blurs against the summer night.

There was a moment’s appreciative silence, then they praised her, teased her and roared with laughter, exuberant with the joy of going home, to see family again, wondering what would have changed, saying anything to break the tension.

The boat landed around dawn and she went straight to the railway station for the London train. It was crowded, noisy, slow, like all troop trains, but by nine o’clock she was in London, broad sunshine already warming the pavements.

It was busier and shabbier than she had remembered. There were more cars and fewer horses. She refused to think of the dead horses around Ypres, limbs shattered, carcasses sometimes split wide open, but in spite of her will to blank it out, she remembered Cullingford’s eyes when he saw them. In his cavalry days his life had depended on a good horse, and the trust never died.

She bought a newspaper and looked at it quickly, mostly just the headlines, and a few of the lead articles. The war news was first, of course. Most of it concerned the Western Front or the Dardanelles, but there was a little about East Africa.

The facts were there, at least some of them, but it was the words that fascinated her, the talk of courage, honor, and sacrifice, soldiers fighting for the right. And of course implicit all through was the conviction of ultimate victory. Casualties were given—they had to be—but it was nothing like the reality she knew. No one wrote of terror and dirt and pain. It was as if they had gone smiling into the night, clean and dignified.

It was probably necessary. Too much truth and one would scream oneself into paralysis and be no use to anyone. The only way to go on was to think whatever you had to, believe whatever you could, and take it five minutes at a time, then the next, and the next, help what you could reach.

She did not go immediately to the Prentice house. First she needed to find a hotel and take a bath, a luxury she had not enjoyed for a long time. She filled the tub as high as she dared, then climbed in and sank up to her chin in the steaming water. She let her mind become totally empty, thinking of nothing at all but the smooth, rippling heat over her skin. She put in soap bubbles and let them seep through her fingers and fall in dollops on her body, stretching her legs up, then down again. It was a big tub, an expensive bathroom, and she drowned her senses in every exquisite moment of it.

When the water was cooling she stepped out, wrapped herself in the big towel, and lay on the bed. She intended to dry off, then put on clean underwear and go to sleep. However, she drifted into a delicious haze, and woke with a start to find two hours had elapsed, and it was midafternoon. She was ravenously hungry.

She had already unpacked her dress and hung it up for the steam to get rid of some of the creases. She had bought it last leave. Like everything else in fashion, it was somber blues—no one wore bright colors—but it was very well cut, and had the full skirt to midcalf, then the slender skirt beneath to the ankle. The jacket was short, nipped to the waist, high at the neck, and had buttons all the way down the front. She looked at herself in the glass, and thought it was really very flattering.

Consequently, it was nearly five o’clock when the taxi dropped her in Hampstead and she walked up the path to the quiet house with the blinds drawn in the now familiar sign of mourning. She felt self-conscious, intrusive, guilty for being here at all when she had not liked Prentice. If she had not had General Cullingford’s letter in her hand, which she had promised him she would deliver, she would have turned and gone back to the hotel. The only thing harder would be to tell him that she had failed. He might not blame her, he might even understand, but it would destroy a trust between them that she would not willingly live without.

She knocked on the door.

After several minutes it was opened by a girl of about sixteen in a long, black dress and a plain apron and cap. Her face was pale and her eyes pink-rimmed. “Yes, miss?” she said without interest.

“I am sorry to intrude,” Judith said, “but I have a letter for Mrs. Prentice. My name is Judith Reavley, and I am General Cullingford’s driver in Belgium. Would you ask Mrs. Prentice if I may see her, please?”

The girl hesitated. The message obviously confused her.

“Please?” Judith repeated. “I promised the general that I would deliver it in person.”

“Yes, miss. If you come in, I’ll go an’ ask ’er.” She pulled the door wide and led Judith across the hall into a sparse morning room. The mirrors were turned to the wall, the blinds drawn down even though it was still daylight, and there was black crepe on the mantelshelf. She left Judith there and went to find Mrs. Prentice.

Judith looked around, trying to imagine Eldon Prentice here. But this was not a room for the family; it was the formal place guests waited, or people came to write letters, or perhaps receive business callers. There was nothing personal.

She wondered what Cullingford’s home was like. Was it comfortable, full of the physical things that spoke of his life: books, paintings, perhaps ornaments, pieces that had memories? Were there gardening gloves, or fishing rods, boots, binoculars for watching birds, a stick for long walks, hats for different occasions? Had he a dog, like Henry, that her father had loved so much?

The door opened and Mrs. Prentice stood in the entrance. Judith knew it was she because there was a likeness to Cullingford. It was not in her features; hers were less defined by experience, gentler and without the underlying fervor. It was the way her hair grew off her brow that was the same, a certain stillness about her, and something in her eyes. Now she was tired and the pain in her was desperately clear to see.

“Miss Reavley?” she said hesitantly. The intonation in her voice was like Cullingford’s also.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Prentice,” Judith answered, smiling very slightly. She was so used to death it no longer embarrassed her and the words came easily. “I know this is not a time you will wish for visitors, but I have a letter from General Cullingford. He also felt you might like to speak with me, because I knew Mr. Prentice a little. Sometimes it helps, at others it doesn’t. I lost both my parents in July last year, and I don’t always know whether I want to talk about them or not. At times I get angry when people are trying to be tactful, and skirt around it all the time as if they never existed.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Prentice said quietly. “That sounds awful. Both your father and your mother?” Her eyes were full of sympathy, and for an instant her own loss was forgotten.

“It was a road accident.” There was no need to tell her it was murder, like her son’s. She did not need to know that either. Judith smiled deliberately. “I’m really an ambulance driver, a lot of the time well behind the lines, but when General Cullingford’s driver was injured I happened to be there, and he needed to go urgently to meet with the French, and I’m quite good at languages.”

“You must be very brave. How is Owen?” The shadow was there in her eyes again, her own pain back, overwhelming her.

Judith knew she should answer with a good deal of the truth; it would make the other lies easier to believe. “He’s quite well, I think,” she said frankly. “But I can’t imagine that he would complain about anything unless it were very serious.” She saw the fleeting acknowledgment in Mrs. Prentice’s face. “Of course he carries a terrible responsibility. He knows far more of what is really happening than an ordinary soldier would, and has some very hard decisions to make, and then the consequences to live with.” That was more than she had intended to say, but a reserve in the other woman had prompted her to defend him. Had his own family any idea at all of the burden he carried? Did he, like a lot of men, write calm, trivial letters home, telling them what they wanted to hear, protecting them from reality? He had implied as much about his wife, was it true of his sister as well? Was there no one with whom he could trust his inner self, the true, unguarded part?

“I imagine it is very hard,” Mrs. Prentice replied, but there was no thought in her voice. She was being polite. “Have you come very far? Would you like a cup of tea?”

“I came from Dunkirk last night,” Judith said. “I got to Dover this morning, and took the train up to London. I’d love a cup of tea, thank you.”

“But—you must have eaten, surely?” It was a refuge in the practical, something uncomplicated to do.

“Oh yes, I ate at the hotel, thank you, but tea would be lovely,” Judith accepted. She must give her the chance to ask questions, or simply to remember her son with someone who had known him.

Mrs. Prentice led the way into the drawing room. It had yellow-flowered wallpaper and windows looking out onto a lawn, and the last tulips in bloom beyond. The scent of lilac drifted in on the breeze. It caught Judith with a sudden ache of absurdity. It was all so normal, so terribly English, clipped lawns, the perfume of flowers, tea in the afternoon, as if life were the same as it always had been. And inside the void of loss was irreparable.

Mrs. Prentice rang for the maid, and requested tea. Twenty minutes later it came, with cucumber and egg and cress sandwiches and slices of Madeira cake.

“My daughter Belinda will be terribly sorry to have missed you,” Mrs. Prentice said, pouring the tea and passing the cup across. “She and Eldon were closer than they sometimes appeared to be. She has found his . . . his death, very hard.” It was difficult for her to say the words. Judith could see that she was deliberately forcing herself to, as if she had not been able until now.

“I have brothers,” Judith tried to help her. “We disagree sometimes, but it’s only on the surface.”

“Yes, of course it is,” Mrs. Prentice responded instantly. “I know what you mean. So often we just don’t get around to saying what matters most. We suppose that people know, and perhaps they don’t.”

Judith wondered if she was thinking of Prentice and his sister, or of herself and Cullingford. Certainly Cullingford did not know. He wanted to reach out to his sister, and was aware with a sense of loss that she would not welcome it. But it was too delicate to touch now.

“Mr. Prentice was very brave,” she said aloud. “I think we all knew that of him.”

Mrs. Prentice smiled, blinking hard. “It’s ridiculous now, I suppose, but we never thought being a war correspondent was a dangerous job. I imagined him talking to injured men, perhaps seeing ambulances, doctors, hearing from others what the actual battle was like. I thought Owen would look after him!” Without any warning the anger was there, the lashing out against unmanageable pain.

“He couldn’t do that!” Judith retorted instantly, remembering passionately, against her will, Cullingford’s anger at Prentice, and Prentice forcing him to write a pass for him to go wherever he wanted. “All our correspondents are ordered not to go to the forward lines, but Mr. Prentice wanted to see what it was like for himself, and he disobeyed.” She heard her own anger harsh in her voice and tried to curb it. She was not the one bereaved. “He . . . he wanted to feel it, not just be told.”

“Of course.” Mrs. Prentice’s anger was mastered again. “It’s just that I know Owen didn’t really approve of him. They used to be close, when Eldon was younger, but then they grew apart. Eldon didn’t have much respect for the army command, and he wasn’t always tactful how he said so.” She was defending a wound too raw to touch. “But he was very clever, you know? He had a brilliant mind. He would have been a great writer.” Her eyes were challenging, daring Judith to deny it, as if through her she were reaching Cullingford, too, forcing him to acknowledge her son, to give him now what he had withheld before, as if it could matter.

“That’s one of the worst things about war,” Judith replied, her throat tight with pity, aching inside herself. “It is so often the best who are killed. I’m so sorry.”

Mrs. Prentice blinked away tears. Outside there was a blackbird singing as the light softened toward evening. “You are very kind to give up part of your precious leave to come here.” Her voice was husky, fighting for control. Now she needed to talk of other things, hold the agony at bay until she could find the strength again.

“I know how it hurts when someone is gone,” Judith said gently. “And no one will talk to you about them. People are afraid of hurting you, and embarrassed in case you break down.”

Mrs. Prentice laughed very slightly. “You are right. Would you . . . would you stay to dinner, and meet Belinda? I know it is an imposition, but it would mean a great deal to her, and to me.”

“Of course. Thank you. I was only going back to the hotel and I would probably have eaten alone.”

“Don’t you know anyone in London?”

“My brother Matthew, but he didn’t know I was coming. I expect I’ll see him tomorrow.”

“You must be relieved he is not in the army.”

“He is, sort of, but stationed in London.”

“You said you had two brothers, or did I misunderstand you?”

“I have. Joseph is at the Front, not far from where I am. He’s a chaplain.”

“I thought chaplains stayed well to the rear, with the injured, advising people, comforting them and conducting services. Eldon said church attendance was compulsory.”

“Yes, it is. But Joseph spends most of his time in the trenches.”

“Eldon would have admired that.” She said it with wistful pleasure.

Judith thought of how Joseph had despised Prentice, and was compelled by honor, not desire, to find out who had killed him. There were too many people who had wanted to, and in spite of himself he sympathized with them, but she must not say that here. She must walk a subtle, razor line between truth and evasion that concealed it.

She glanced around the room with its quiet memories, things of good quality, a little shabby with use. There were several photographs, images of a time only a year or two ago, and yet seeming now to be another age. Several were of Prentice, one of an older man. There was one of Cullingford, holding a horse by the head, its long face close to his. He looked happy. To judge by the unlined smoothness of his features it must have been nine or ten years ago.

Judith looked away quickly. Even in that small black-and-white image there was an intensity of feeling that shook her. This was part of his life she could not touch, except in imagination. He belonged to someone else—with whom he could share nothing of the torment of emotion that tore them apart, blistered with pain, removed them from the ordinary and changed them forever.

A group picture caught her eye: Cullingford smiling with a woman beside him. She had a gentle face and curling hair, a little darker than his, perhaps auburn from the soft freckles on her face, but it was impossible to tell. Prentice was beside them, and to his right a tall girl with startling, direct eyes that looked to be unusually light colored. Prentice was holding an oar in his left hand, upright like a spear, and he was wearing a straw boater hat.

Judith moved her gaze quickly, not wanting to see. It was absurd, but the sight of Cullingford with someone who was almost certainly his wife, reminded her of the reality of life outside the war, life the way it ought to be, and that she had no part in it with him. She belonged to battle, extreme hardship, not the way they longed for life to be again.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck seven. Beyond the windows a slight breeze stirred the leaves of a silver birch tree. At home in St. Giles there would have been starlings in the sky, swirling up behind the elms and swinging wide out over the fields. But that was in the past. It belonged in dreams, preserved where it was safe and the present could not touch it.

Twenty minutes later Prentice’s younger sister, Belinda, came home from the volunteer work she had been doing making up parcels to send to soldiers at the Front. She resembled Prentice also, but she was darker, her face had the same intelligence and eagerness, but it was softened by a kind of inner calm he had not possessed.

When Judith was introduced her weariness vanished. “You’re actually at the Front?” she said with fierce admiration, her eyes alight. “There with our men?”

Judith felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment. “I’m not actually in the trenches, although I know pretty much what they’re like. We don’t go further forward than the Casualty Clearing Stations where they bring the wounded back for us to collect.”

Belinda’s shoulders were tight, her face tense with her imagination. She had not yet sat down. “Is it very dreadful? I used to think of it as heroic, but Eldon said it isn’t, it’s filthy and degrading, and lots of the men are blown to bits without ever having a chance. He said that if we here at home had any idea what it was like, no one would join up to go there, because it’s for nothing. It would be quicker to catch a bus to the local abattoir along with the cattle.” She was searching Judith’s face, hungry for an answer. It was easy to imagine the quarrels they had had over it, her dreams, his anger. Now she was left with nothing but confusion, and no one to help her resolve the truths she needed to know for herself, not only to help her grief, but to continue now.

There might be someone else she loved out there in the trenches; if there was not now, there would be.

Judith composed her answer carefully. “It can be pretty shocking when you first get there,” she said to Belinda, avoiding Mrs. Prentice’s anxious eyes. “The smell is awful, he’s right about that. It tears your stomach, even when you get used to it. And there are rats, lice, fleas, all sorts of unpleasant things. Casualties are high, but we save most of the wounded.”

Belinda sat down slowly, her hands folded in her lap. She did not take her eyes off Judith’s face.

“But what it seems he didn’t tell you about is the friendship,” Judith went on. “The loyalty, the knowledge that the men beside you will share everything they have with you, food, warmth, shelter, jokes, laughter and pain, their lives if need be. Perhaps as a correspondent he didn’t see that, but it’s there in the front line. And the courage and sacrifice are there. That’s not just propaganda. The difference is that it is real, not words; and no words can tell you what it’s like, however passionate or clever. Maybe one poet will capture a little of it one day. Maybe the cold and the pain and the fierce, brave, kind, funny love of one man for his friends can’t even be told.”

There were tears on Belinda’s face, and she was not ashamed of them.

“I wish he could have known that,” she said, swallowing huskily. “I suppose he wasn’t there long enough.” Her words were brave, but her eyes betrayed her fear that it was not time but Prentice’s own character that blinded him. “Are you going back?” she asked.

Judith had never even considered the possibility of not going.

“Of course! I . . .” She gave the faintest smile, but she felt it burn through her like heat. “I have to. My job is out there. That’s who I am. And the people I love are there, too.” The truth of that rang in her voice with a conviction that startled her.

Belinda did not say so, but her admiration was so intense it blazed in her eyes and in her soft, answering smile.

Dinner was served and Judith concentrated intensely, measuring every word so as to tell Prentice’s family as much as she could about his life and his achievements.

She said no more about the details of trench life, there was no need for them to know. Let them sleep as easily as they could. Grief was more than enough to bear. She tried instead to say the decent things about Prentice himself. It was difficult to be specific, as if she had actually known him, without also mentioning his appalling behavior, which had ended with Wil Sloan beating him almost senseless. She could not think quickly enough to avoid lying, so she did, with embarrassing fluency.

When they spoke of Cullingford, with a remoteness that twisted inside her, she imagined how it must have hurt him and she changed the subject.

“But how did he get so far forward?” Belinda asked a second time. “I thought war correspondents stayed well behind the fighting? They all share the information anyway, don’t they? That’s what Eldon said.”

“Yes, they do,” Judith agreed quickly.

“Then why did Uncle Owen send Eldon out into no-man’s-land? That’s where you said he was found!”

“The general didn’t send him.” Judith denied it. Please God that was at least half true. Was it possible that Hadrian had heard his anguish and in loyalty done what Cullingford could not do for himself? The fear gripped hard and tight inside her. King Henry II had cried out “who will rid me of this turbulent priest?,” and his men in mistaken loyalty had murdered Thomas à Becket, and Henry had paid in guilt for the rest of his life.

“How could he do that? He knew Eldon wasn’t a soldier!” Mrs. Prentice demanded accusingly. She was still seeking blame; it was so much easier to explode in anger than face the appalling void of grief.

Judith swallowed. “Mr. Prentice was very keen to see things the other correspondents hadn’t and to gain his own experiences,” she answered. “He insisted that he be given a wider permission, and he used the general’s name to gain it. No one ever intended he should go ‘over the top’ with the raiding party.” She saw the anger harden in Mrs. Prentice’s face. “He was young and he was brave,” she added hastily. “He knew the risks, and he still chose to go.”

Mrs. Prentice’s eyes filled with tears. “Thank you.” She took a shaky breath. “It was very good of you to come.”

“General Cullingford asked me to, and it was no trouble at all,” Judith replied. “I’m so sorry for the reason.”

Belinda smiled at her quickly, a flash of gratitude and understanding, then they turned to other subjects. It was late evening by the time Judith finally left.

She arranged to meet Matthew for dinner the following evening, and waited for him in a restaurant crowded with people all talking earnestly. She heard snatches of news about the war, but much of the conversation was about the latest play, the political news in Westminster, speculation of changes—even exhibitions of art and science. Two young women were excited about a moving picture starring Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressler.

Ten minutes later she saw Matthew in the entrance. His uniform caught her eye before she recognized who he was. He was the same height as Joseph, but a little broader across the shoulders, and fair-haired. He had the same strong nose, and hint of humor around the mouth. He looked very tired, as if he also had been up too many nights and could not easily shake off the anxieties of knowing and caring more than he wanted to.

It took him a moment to see her, then he smiled and strode over to her. She stood up, eager to hug him, and feel his arms around her. It was a moment’s break in a long loneliness. Friendship eased the heart and the mind, but there were times when the touch of arms around you healed an ache within that nothing else reached.

“How are you?” he asked, although he was looking at her face for the answer, and whatever she said would make no difference.

“I’m fine,” she said with a slightly wry smile. She, too, was looking at him, trying to weigh what was merely weariness in his eyes, or the deeper lines from nose to mouth. What she saw was an underlying fear that did not vanish with comfortable words or a long night’s sleep.

“Have you seen Hannah lately?” she asked. “Her letters say a lot about what she’s doing, but not much about how she feels. I think that’s a sign that she doesn’t dare talk about it. Is it hard at home? Is everyone putting on a brave act, terrified it’ll crack if they look underneath?”

“No, it’s not that bad.” He held her chair and she sat down again. He sat opposite her. “Some of us are afraid when we read the news because we tend to look between the lines, and dread what’s worse that they aren’t telling us. And of course pretty well everyone knows at least one person who’s lost a son or a brother.”

The waiter appeared. The choice of food was still surprisingly wide and they ordered roast beef and vegetables and a full bottle of red wine. If there were shortages of anything it had been well disguised.

“How is Joseph?” he said when they were alone again. There was a loneliness in the question, almost an urgency.

Until this moment she had not been sure whether to tell him about Prentice or not, but now that he was here, his face, his voice, everything familiar about him reminding her of home, of the lost sweetness and safety of the past, the idea of not telling him was absurd. He would know she was lying, and fear something even worse than the truth. Also still gnawing at her mind was an anxiety that what Prentice had said about recruitment was true.

“He has a pretty rotten job,” she said aloud. “Especially after the gas, trying to tell people that there’s a God who’s in control of everything, and He loves us. There’s not much evidence of it.”

“I don’t think Joseph ever said God was in control,” Matthew pointed out, sipping his wine even before he had tasted the food. “He doesn’t control us, and we are the ones who’ve made the mess, not God. You’d better remind him of that.” There was wry laughter in his eyes, but pity as well, and the concern was not any less than before.

“We had a young war correspondent up at the Front,” she went on, watching him as she spoke. “Pretty rotten fellow, actually. Arrogant, intrusive, no sensitivity at all. He was General Cullingford’s nephew. He’s the one in charge of our stretch. . . .”

“I know.” Matthew smiled.

She felt herself color a little, and went on quickly. “He persuaded the general to give him written permission to go all sorts of places other correspondents couldn’t, including right into the front-line trenches.”

Matthew was only mildly interested. “How on earth did he do that? I’d have thought Cullingford would have more sense, family or not.” There was a thread of contempt in his voice.

Judith was stung by it. “Prentice didn’t give him any choice. He was a total swine, actually. Major Hadrian, the general’s ADC, was at school with him, and says he’s an awful little worm. And actually I’ve just been to see his mother and sister, because he was killed, and took a letter to them from the general. Mrs. Prentice is his sister. Matthew, Prentice was saying that recruitment of men is dishonest, and if they had any idea of what it was really like on the front line, no one would go. Is that true? Are we losing heart at home?”

He heard the panic in her voice, but he did not answer with platitudes. “No. In some places there’s even a renewed resolve, after the gas attack at Ypres. But I’m not sure if it’ll last. Casualties are heavy, and people are beginning to realize that it isn’t going to be over anything like as soon as they used to believe. Kitchener’s right, we’re in for a very long haul.”

“Will we make it?”

He smiled, but he did not answer her.

“It’s about morale, isn’t it? If we think we’ll lose, then we will.”

“Pretty much,” he agreed.

She looked away from him and concentrated on her food for a while. She could imagine the recruiting station if they heard the sort of things Prentice had apparently told Belinda.

“That isn’t all,” she said at last, her voice subdued, catching in her throat. “Prentice isn’t just dead—someone murdered him.” She ignored his response. “It wasn’t obvious. He went over the top—nobody knows what made him do such a stupid thing, or what he went for, except bravado, but Joseph was the one who found his body in no-man’s-land, and brought him back.”

Matthew was appalled. His knife slipped out of his fingers onto his plate with a clatter. “What the hell was Joseph doing out there? He’s a chaplain, for God’s sake!”

“I know.” Now at least she was on sure ground, filled with one moral certainty, and a hot, sweet pride. “But he takes that as part of his job—searching for people and bringing them back. Sometimes they’re alive, but it matters to recover even dead bodies.” She saw the reflection in his face of her own emotions. “But Prentice hadn’t been shot, he’d been drowned in one of the craters still full of water. And Joseph worked out that there were no Germans anywhere near them at the time. It had to have been one of our own men. He was pretty rotten to a few people. . . .”

“Enough to kill over?” He was incredulous.

She looked away. “Lots of people are dying, every day. Unless you really care about someone personally, you have to get used to it, or you’d go mad. This is . . . different.”

He reached out his hand as if to touch her, then changed his mind. It was not something he did naturally; this was born of a sudden, urgent understanding. “Are you afraid it could be the general?” he said very gently.

Lies would not do. “I don’t know,” she admitted, looking up at him. “And even if he didn’t, I’m not sure he wouldn’t be blamed for it. Not everyone likes generals.”

He laughed outright: a short, bitter bark of sound. He did not need words to encompass the confusion of anger and fear, torn loyalties felt by the vast mass of people who knew only what they read, and the pain of losses, the day-and-night struggle between pride and terror for those they loved trapped and fighting in a horror they could only imagine. It was natural to blame someone.

He refilled his glass again, and she felt another flicker of worry brush her, as if someone had opened an outside door onto the cold again. “Matthew, have you learned anything more about the Peacemaker?” she asked, taking the bottle from him and adding a little to her own glass, even though she had barely touched it. “I wish we could be more help to you. We’re doing nothing. . . .”

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said quickly, his face softening. “It’s enough that you do your own job.”

She searched his face, his eyes. “You know something, don’t you,” she pressed. The darkness, the tension in him frightened her. “Do you know who it is, Matthew?”

“No. I think it could be Ivor Chetwin, but I need a lot more proof.”

“Ivor Chetwin? But . . . but doesn’t he work in Intelligence?” She was horrified, the betrayal could reach anywhere. “Matthew, please—”

“I am careful,” he said quickly. “And I don’t know that it is him. It could be lots of people. I’ve been working on how he contacted Sebastian to tell him what to do. It isn’t the sort of thing you say in a letter, or explain over the telephone. It had to have been a fairly lengthy and persuasive conversation, in person somewhere. And it has to have been that afternoon. There wasn’t any other time.”

“Well, where did Sebastian go?” she reasoned. “Can’t we find out?”

“I’m trying to.”

“Be careful! We don’t know who the Peacemaker is, but he knows us! Don’t forget that! He’ll be expecting you to come after him.” She gulped, suddenly aware of how frightened she was. “Matthew . . .”

“I’m being careful,” he repeated. “Don’t gulp like that, you’ll give yourself indigestion. If I’m paying for you to eat roast beef instead of corned beef and army biscuits, I’d rather you didn’t ruin it by making yourself ill!”

She forced herself to smile, impatient with him, frustrated, aching to protect him and thoroughly afraid. “I’m going home tomorrow. I’d like to see Hannah for a day or so.”

“Good idea. Rest for a while, at least. Now eat that before it’s cold. Judith . . .”

“What?”

“Don’t tell Hannah anything about all this—or the journalist getting killed. She doesn’t need to know. She has enough to do looking after three children, and the losses in the village. Trying to help everyone keep up hope, and not be sick every time the postman arrives, dreading the telegram. They feel so helpless. That’s a kind of suffering in itself.”

“I know. I won’t tell her anything I don’t have to,” she promised. “I’ll be quite happy not to talk about it, believe me.”

But it was not as easy as she had expected. She took the train to Cambridge, and then a taxi to St. Giles. The village still looked just as it always had, until she noticed the blinds half drawn in the Nunns’ house, and another house a few doors down. There were no errand boys, no children playing by the pond. An old man walked slowly on the grass, a black band around his arm. She saw Bessie Gee carrying a basket of shopping, and looked away because she could not face her. It was cowardly and she knew it, but she was not prepared to see what she must be feeling, not yet, anyway.

The taxi stopped at her own door. She paid the driver and got out. She had to ring the bell and wait until Hannah came.

“Just for a couple of days,” Judith said with a smile. It was absurd, but she was overcome with emotion to be on the familiar step. It looked smaller, shabbier than she remembered, and impossibly precious. It was peopled with memories of sounds and smells of the past so strong they were the fabric of all life that had formed her, the woven threads of who she was. This is where she had loved, and grieved, where she had been safest, and in most danger.

“Of course!” Hannah said, her face lighting with pleasure so the anxieties of the moment slipped away. “It’s wonderful to see you! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I haven’t got any decent food in!”

Judith hugged her and they clung together fiercely for minutes. “I don’t care!” she said, laughing at the triviality of it. “Anything’s got to be better than army rations!”

“Are they awful?” Hannah said with sudden concern.

Judith remembered her promise to Matthew. “No, not bad,” she claimed quickly. “I don’t look starved, do I?”

Hannah’s children came home from school, pleased to see her and a little shy, now that she was certainly part of the war. The conflict was not real to them, and yet it was the backdrop and the measuring stick of everything that happened.

“Do you think it’ll go on long enough for me to join the navy, Aunt Judith?” Tom asked with a shadow of concern in his soft face. He was thirteen, his voice breaking, but no suggestion of down on his cheek yet. He was frightened in case he missed his chance of all that he thought of that was heroic, and the test and goal of manhood.

For a moment Judith could see nothing but the men she knew who had been blown to pieces, men like Charlie Gee—who had been boys like Tom only a few short years ago.

“I don’t know,” she answered, refusing to look at Hannah. “I don’t think anybody knows at the moment. We just do our best. Take it a day at a time. Your job’s here right now. A good soldier or sailor does the job he’s given. Doesn’t argue with his commander to pick and choose.”

He stared at her solemnly, trying to work out whether she was treating him like a child or a man.

She gave him time, without pushing either way.

“Yes,” he nodded, accepting. “But I will join the Royal Navy when I can.”

“Good,” she said lying in her teeth, and still avoiding Hannah’s gaze. “As an officer, I hope?”

He grinned suddenly. “You mean concentrate on my schoolwork and do all the exams and everything,” he said knowingly.

“Something like that,” she agreed.

After the children had gone to bed, Judith and Hannah walked up the garden in the dusk. Appleton had gone to work on the land. Food was more important than flowers. Mrs. Appleton had gone with him, over in Cherry Hinton direction. Not far away, but too far to come back here to cook or clean. The weeds were high in the spring warmth and the long daylight hours.

“I can’t keep it up,” Hannah said, looking at it miserably. “Even the raspberries are overgrown. The children help a bit, but it isn’t enough. There’s always so much to do. There are fifteen families in the village now who’ve lost someone, either on the Western Front, or at sea. We heard about Billy Abbot just yesterday. His ship went down in the North Atlantic, with all hands.”

Judith said nothing. She knew Hannah was thinking about Archie, but neither of them wanted to say so. There were some things it was better not to put into words, the silence helped to keep at least the surface of control. There was work that had to be done, children who needed to feel at least some faith in survival. As long as you did not give in to terror, neither would they. You had to be busy, to smile, if you must cry, then cry alone. Perhaps the women with children were lucky. They gave you a reason to force yourself to be your best, always. The act became a habit.

It was Hannah who broached the subject of the Peacemaker.

“Matthew won’t tell me anything about his search for the man who killed Mother and Father,” she said as they stood at the end of the lawn and looked west toward the last echoes of light in the sky. “Has he given up?”

“No.” Now a lie seemed like a betrayal, and she was not in a mind to be able to deal in the loneliness of deceit. “He’s trying to find out who Sebastian Allard spoke to the evening before.”

“Why? Oh . . . you mean the Peacemaker . . . what a ridiculous name for him! The murderer must have told him what to do?”

“Probably not himself,” Judith replied. “He wouldn’t risk that. He has to be someone well known, very highly placed, and someone Father knew already, and trusted. He will have sent someone else to persuade Sebastian what to do. It couldn’t have been easy. You don’t just walk up to someone and say ‘By the way, I’d like you to murder one of my friends tomorrow. It has to be tomorrow because the whole thing has become rather urgent. Will you do that for me?’ You’d have to give him all sorts of reasons, and persuade him. Sebastian was a passionate pacifist. It will have taken some time to argue him into believing it was the only way to preserve peace in Europe.”

Hannah was silent for several minutes. The last shreds of light from the west, no more than a luminescence in the air, caught her cheekbones and brow and the curve of her mouth, softening the anxiety and making her look as young as she had a year ago.

“I talk to Nan Fardell quite a bit. Her husband’s in the navy, too. She lives in Haslingfield.” She hesitated a moment. “Nan said she saw Sebastian in Madingley the afternoon before . . . he was with a girl. They seemed to be very close, talking earnestly, having an argument, which they made up before they parted.” Hannah frowned. “She mentioned it because she knew he was engaged and she thought it was a bit shabby. She assumed he was trying to break it off with this girl, and she wouldn’t let him, so he gave in, and apparently they parted in agreement. Nan said she was rather beautiful, nearly as tall as he was. I expect the Peacemaker’s a man, but does the person who gave Sebastian his instructions have to be a man as well?” She turned to Judith. “He doesn’t, does he? Lots of idealists who really get things done are women. They were in the past, and they are now. What about Beatrice Webb, or even more, Rosa Luxemburg? Nan said this woman was very unusual, she had remarkable eyes, pale blue and very bright.”

Judith’s mind whirled. It could be! It was a cold thought, and she had not the faintest idea who the woman was, or how to find her, and trace her back to the Peacemaker. But it was a beginning, or it might be. “I suppose Nan Fardell doesn’t know who she is?”

“No idea at all. I asked her, just out of curiosity. She’s never seen her before. Do you think it could have been she who gave Sebastian the order to . . .” She did not finish the sentence.

Judith shivered. “Yes, it could. It’s possible. Matthew thinks the Peacemaker could be Ivor Chetwin, which is a horrible thought.”

“It has to be someone we know,” Hannah said quietly. “It’s all horrible. Let’s go inside. It’s getting cold.”

They turned and walked together slowly, not needing or wanting to discuss it anymore, but in Judith’s mind was a photograph of an unusually tall girl with light, clear eyes, and she was standing next to Eldon Prentice.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Days and nights continued their routine of alternating violence and boredom. Joseph helped with digging and shoring up in the trenches, carrying food, helping the wounded or dying, writing letters for people, often just listening when men needed to talk. They swapped stories, the longer and more fantastic the better. They made bad jokes and sang music hall songs with bawdy army lyrics to them, and laughed too loudly, too close to tears.

Little Belgian boys came by selling English newspapers, and they read voraciously to see what was happening at home. Joseph conducted the mandatory church parades, and tried to think of something to say that made sense.

But all the time at the back of his mind was the question of why Eldon Prentice had been in no-man’s-land, and who had thrust his head under the water and held it there until he was dead. The thought was horrible, filling him with a revulsion quite different from the gut-turning pity of other deaths. There was a moral dimension to it he could grasp, a personal evil rather than the vast, mindless insanity around them all.

Nobody wanted to talk about it. To everyone else it was the one death that did not matter. Prentice had had a letter from General Cullingford giving him permission to come and go pretty well as he pleased, and he had used it freely. There was an impulsive feeling that he had got what he deserved. Grief was saved for other men, like Chicken Hagger, and now Bibby Nunn, caught by sniper fire.

Mail delivery was one of the best times of the day. Letters from home were the lifeline to the world that mattered, to love and sanity, the precious heart of what was worth dying for. For each man it was a little different, a different face, a different house that was familiar, but they shared them with the half dozen or so men who were their “family” here.

As chaplain, Joseph was uniquely alone. He was an officer, and apart. He belonged to everyone and no one. The nearest he had to a family was Sam. With Sam he could share Matthew’s letters, even if they referred to the Peacemaker.

One witheringly cold night in January, he and Sam had crouched together on the fire-step in the trench known as Shaftesbury Avenue, the wind whining in the wires across no-man’s-land, ice cracking on the mud, duckboards slick with it underfoot. Joseph had told Sam about his parents’ deaths, and a brief outline of the Peacemaker’s conspiracy, enough for Sam to understand at least the anger and the passion that drove him to seek the men who would still bring such betrayal to pass, if he could.

He could see Sam’s face in his memory, sharply outlined for a moment in the glare of star shells.

The smile on his lips, the heaven and hell of irony in him. He had said nothing, simply put out his freezing hand and touched Joseph for a moment.

Now Joseph sat alone with the sheets of paper, the sun warming him in the stillness of the afternoon. Tucky Nunn and Barshey Gee were asleep a few yards away, faces at ease, their youth achingly apparent. Tucky half smiled, perhaps home again in dreams.

Further along Reg Varcoe sat bare-chested, holding a match to the seams of his tunic. In the distance someone was singing “Keep the Home Fires Burning.”

For a moment Joseph thought of home: grasses deep in the lanes, woods full of bluebells, may blossom in bud. In Northumberland where he used to walk with Harry Beecher, the hills would be alight with the burning gold of gorse, the perfume of it like honey and wine. Sometimes it helped to think of the sanities of life, at others it hurt too much. He missed Matthew—he missed the easy conversation of trust, the knowledge of a bond that stretched back to childhood, a safety, before pain or failure were known.

He read Matthew’s letter three times. There was nothing particular in it, just gossip about London, a short description of the countryside when he had been home, the weather, a few jokes. It was like listening to the voice of someone you loved. What they were saying was unimportant, the message through it was I am here, and that was what you needed to know.

There was a second letter for him, in a hand he did not know. He opened it with curiosity and read:

Dear Captain Reavley,Thank you for your letter telling me of my husband’s death. I know from the casualty figures that you must have this dreadful duty to perform very often. It was generous of you to write so personally to me.I shall share your words with my brother-in-law who lives up in the family manor house a few miles away. Garaint was a quiet man who loved the land and the hills here. He would walk miles, even in the rain, and he sang beautifully, as so many Welshmen do. He seemed to be able to play any musical instrument if he turned his hand to it.I find it hard to believe he is not coming back, but then there are many other women all over the country who must feel the same. Perhaps it is worse if it is a son, someone you have known and loved all their lives. That is a grief that won’t come to me, and I am grateful for it.I believe that you get newspapers quite often in the trenches, so perhaps you know as much news as I do. Some of it is very grim. I think the thing that saddens me the most is the death of Rupert Brooke. He died on April 23rd, off Gallipoli somewhere. It wasn’t in action, it was blood poisoning. I feel horribly empty, because he was so wonderfully, vibrantly alive. Of course I never knew him in person, but I loved his poetry. He said all the things I wished I could. His dreams soared to the places I longed to be, passion and imagination and a fierce hunger for the intensity of life, as if you could touch it, taste it, for a moment hold it in your hands, as if you could stand in the sunset and in silence take its fire inside you.The lights are going out, aren’t they? What can we hold on to so that one day we can kindle them again?Thank you for the strength of your faith that somewhere there will be meaning to all of this, if we have the courage to hang on. It does help.

Yours sincerely,

Isobel Hughes

He did not read it again. Perhaps he would later, at another time, when the words would matter. Now he was stunned and filled with loss, not for Garaint Hughes whom he had held as he died, but for a poet whose thoughts and words had woven themselves into the fabric of his own life. Rupert Brooke had been eight years younger than Joseph. He had studied at Cambridge and loved it with a passion he had made wild and beautiful in verse, to live beyond generations, let alone his own lifetime. But here in this mortal little space, they had seen the same stones and trees, the same burning sunset across the west from Harleyfield to Madingley, breathed the same air and watched the same birds in flight.

It was almost as if Sebastian had died again, only a better, brighter version of him, a man whose heart achieved the gold that Sebastian had tarnished.

The words of Brooke’s poetry flooded his mind, painting with bone-deep nostalgia the beauty of the land they had both loved, familiar now in the pain of memory.

How could such hunger for life be gone, without warning? How many young men would have their promise shattered before it bloomed, their talents never more than a hope? Was it worth this price? He had told Isobel Hughes that it was, because it was what she needed to believe, but did he believe it himself?

Maybe the whole thing was just as tragic and insane as the Peacemaker had thought, the suicidal delusion of men who had more courage to die than to grasp reason, and unity and life. Was there a God somewhere weeping at this gigantic error? Or was life a blind chance anyway, and purpose only a dream created by man to comfort himself in the darkness of a universe without sense?

The soldier somewhere along the trench was still singing, a clear, true voice, caressing the melody.

How long before he was crushed as well?

He looked up to find Sam standing in front of him, a packet of Woodbines in his hand.

“No, thank you,” Joseph said automatically.

“You look terrible,” Sam observed. “Letter from home?” His voice was gentle, and for a moment there was fear in his eyes, not for his own pain but for Joseph’s.

“No, not really. A widow I wrote to—to tell her.”

Sam waited, squatting down in the sun, his back to the mud wall, his feet on the duckboards.

“Rupert Brooke’s dead,” Joseph said.

Sam did not answer, his eyes were far away, seeing something beyond the clay wall and the strip of blue sky above.

“Blood poisoning,” Joseph added.

“ ‘Break the high bond we made and sell love’s trust, And sacramented covenant to the dust,’ ” Sam quoted.

This time it was Joseph who did not answer. His throat ached and his eyes stung with tears, not only for Rupert Brooke, but for all the lost, the ones he knew and had cared for, and all the others he had not. He remembered walking along the Backs at Cambridge, watching the punts on the river in the evening light, the black fretwork of the Bridge of Sighs against the blaze of the burning sky, the gold on Sebastian’s face as he spoke of all that war would destroy, not only of the flesh but of the spirit. And Sebastian was dead, too.

“ ‘The Great Lover,’ ” Sam said aloud.

“What?”

“Rupert Brooke,” Sam explained. “That’s what it comes from—the lover of life. ‘Nor all my passion, all my prayers have power To hold them with me through the gates of death.’ ”

He smiled, and there was a strange sweetness in his face. “We have to make it count now, Joe. Maybe your God will sort it out in eternity, but I think He means us to do something here and now as well. There’s enough that needs fixing for all of us to have a place.”

“You’re right,” Joseph agreed. “Perhaps if I do something, I’ll forget how much there is I can’t do. I need a little forgetting. I can’t afford a sense of proportion; it would crush me.”

Joseph knew what he had to do, find justice for Eldon Prentice. It was something definite that could be forced into making sense, if he could learn who had done it. He might well discover that it was someone he liked, such as Wil Sloan, but his personal feelings did not alter the morality of the issue. It would be far worse if it turned out to be someone such as Major Hadrian, who had done it on General Cullingford’s behalf. But that was unlikely. There was no motive powerful enough to prompt such an extreme action, especially since Hadrian was a staff officer, not a soldier actually carrying arms. He did not see death personally, only in numbers and reports. Joseph would need to know of something far more urgent, more visceral, than the fact that Prentice was arrogant and manipulative, and possibly something of an embarrassment to a general for whom Hadrian had a deep loyalty.

It was with great reluctance that he went to the Casualty Clearing Station to find out exactly where Wil had been on the night of Prentice’s death. It was a warm April day. The new grass was springing up lush and green in the few untrodden patches of earth. He passed a cart pulled by four horses, who squelched in the mud as they strained to heave it toward the ammunition depot. One man at their head, urging them on, gave Joseph a wave and called out to him.

Further along he ran into Snowy Nunn, the sun shining on his fair hair, making it look almost white. He was very grave, face tremulous, eyes confused since the death of his cousin Bibby. It was somehow different when it was so close. It was more than grief, it was as if death had touched your own body, not a grip, just a brush, which reminded you of its power.

Joseph stopped and spoke to him. There was nothing in particular to say, and he did not seek to find anything of meaning. He had given up believing there was anything, it was simply a matter of friendship.

Half a dozen huge black rats shot out of one of the connecting trenches, and they heard somebody swearing ferociously. Snowy’s hand went to his gun, then away again. They were not allowed to shoot rats; there was no ammunition to spare for it. Anyway, it made no difference. There were tens of thousands of them. And their rotting bodies would only add to the stench.

Joseph reached the Casualty Clearing Station and found the American nurse, Marie O’Day, again. She seemed pleased to see him, her fair face lit with pleasure.

“Hello, Captain Reavley, what can we do for you? It’s a bit quiet at the moment. Would you like a cup of tea?”

He accepted, partly to give him a chance to talk to her less bluntly. He asked general questions while she boiled the kettle, then took the tin cup carefully. It was hotter than he was used to—heated over candles in a Dixie tin. It actually smelled quite good, like real tea. He thanked her for it.

“What can I do for you, Captain?” she asked again.

He smiled. “Am I so transparent?”

She nodded, smiling.

“Do you remember that awful young newspaper correspondent?” he asked.

Her face darkened. “Of course. But if you’re going to ask me if I saw Wil Sloan hit him, no I didn’t. I know that’s a lie, Captain, but I’m perfectly happy to tell it. What Mr. Prentice did was terrible.” She bit her lip, and her eyes filled with tears. “Poor Charlie Gee died, and . . . and perhaps that was a release for him. I . . .” she swallowed hard and took a moment to compose herself. “I couldn’t wish a young man to live like that. I wish the Lord had seen fit to take him immediately, without his ever having to know what had happened to him.”

“I’d like to be able to say something wise,” Joseph confessed. “But I don’t know anything. I don’t understand it either. It stretches faith very far. But I wasn’t going to ask you if you saw Wil Sloan hit Prentice. I would rather not know. What I would like you to remember is if you saw Wil Sloan two nights after that.”

“Why? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“Prentice is dead, Mrs. O’Day.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” She looked guilty rather than grieved.

“He was a correspondent, not a soldier,” he said. “I need to find out why he was so far forward. It shouldn’t have happened. Where was Wil Sloan?”

“You can’t think he’s concerned! Can you?” She was afraid, and he could see it in her eyes.

“I’d like to prove that he’s not, Mrs. O’Day. You might be able to help me to, if you tell me where he was. That is, if you know?”

“He brought a badly wounded man in here, about four in the morning,” she replied. “I don’t know where he picked him up.”

“Where is the man now? He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said gravely. “But he isn’t conscious yet. He lost a lot of blood. He was very badly torn up by shrapnel. He wouldn’t be alive if it were not for Wil.” The warning look in her expression was trying to guide him away from pursuing the subject at all.

He was uncertain how much to tell her. He needed her cooperation, and instinctively he liked her. He admired women like her, who left behind all that was familiar and comfortable and came thousands of miles to work in extreme hardship, for people they did not know, because they believed it right. It was a spirit of Christianity far more powerful than anything shown by most clergy who preached a faith of which they were only half convinced, accepted money and status for it, and considered themselves servants of God.

But Prentice’s death was an absolute. He wanted to prove Wil Sloan innocent, but he could not turn away and refuse to see it if he proved him to be guilty after all. It would be painful, deeply so for himself, and because it would hurt Judith as well. But it would have a certain cleanness to it in that no matter how Prentice had behaved, possibly beating him up was excusable, or at least an offense for which apology was sufficient. Murder was not.

And in silence, a confession of heart, uncertain if he was right or wrong, he thanked God for Charlie Gee’s release.

Matthew had enjoyed seeing Judith more than he expected to. He had driven home to his flat after dinner with a sense of happiness, for once forgetting the vulnerability he had been so aware of since March’s Zeppelin attacks on English east coast cities. Suddenly war had developed a new dimension. It did not require an army landing or a naval bombardment to be struck in one’s own home; bombs could rain down from the air with fire and explosion almost anywhere.

As he pulled up outside his flat and parked his car, for a moment he envied her. Usually she would sleep wherever she got the chance to, often in the back of an ambulance. Her food would be army biscuit and tins of greasy meat. There would be terrible sights of death and violence, horror he could barely imagine. But there would also be a comradeship that was denied to him, a trust in her fellows, an inner peace he had not known since Joseph and he had found the document.

He unlocked the door and went inside. He turned on only a small light, just sufficient to see the shadow of the bookcase, but not the individual volumes. He knew what they were, poetry, a few plays, adventures from his childhood, not there to read again, just reminders of a different, more innocent time, a link to be looked at rather than touched. And there were books on current political and social history, warfare, and economics.

He poured himself a stiff whisky, drank it, and went to bed.

In the morning he had toast and tea for breakfast, his head aching, then he looked at the newspapers. They were full of more losses in Gallipoli, and of course all along the Western Front. It was discreet, no hysteria, no rage, only the long lists of names.

It was Churchill’s plan to capture the Dardanelles and free the Russian Grand Fleet imprisoned in the Black Sea, then take Constantinople and give it back to the czar as a prize. They would be able to form a new battle line in the Austro-Hungarian rear, forcing them to fight a second front. So far it was a chaotic failure, costing thousands of lives, French and British, and more particularly Australian and New Zealand volunteers.

The war had also been extended to Mesopotamia, and the Indian Ocean, Italy, and southwest Africa. An Italian ship had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, and five hundred and forty-seven people had drowned.

He drove to work, and found a message waiting for him that Shearing wished to see him. He went immediately.

“Good morning, Reavley,” Shearing said tersely, pointing to the chair on the other side of the desk from his own. “Sit down.” He looked so tired his skin was like paper; his eyelids drooped as if he needed all his force of will to focus. His neat, strong hands clenched and unclenched on the desk.

Matthew obeyed, but he knew that had he taken the liberty of doing so before he was invited he would have been criticized for it. It was Shearing’s way of establishing the rules of hierarchy before he allowed himself to break them. It was not in his nature to do the expected, even now when he seemed on the edge of exhaustion.

“The Lusitania is setting sail from New York,” he said bitterly. “The Germans have warned us that any ship flying the British flag, or that of the Allies, is liable to U-boat attack. We can’t protect it! We’re stretched too thin to protect our merchant shipping as it is. We need American steel in order to make guns. Without it we’ll lose.”

For the first time Matthew saw a flicker of fear in Shearing’s eyes. Even the desperate battles of last autumn, the winter on the Western Front, then the gas attack at Ypres, had not stripped from him his outer composure before, and it chilled Matthew more than he would have believed. It was as if a step he thought certain had given way beneath his feet. He struggled to mask it in his face.

“Surely they’ll never sink a ship everyone knows has American civilians on board, sir? It would force America into the war, and we know that’s the last thing Germany wants.” Or was that what they expected, a sudden and cataclysmic escalation of the war, involving all the world, like an Armageddon?

Shearing’s face was bleak, the skin stretched across his cheekbones. “I think you are being naive, Reavley.” Now his tone was critical, impatient. “You’ve read the correspondence from President Wilson. He’s a highly moral man with no understanding whatever of European character or history. In his mind he’s still a schoolmaster who is going to arbitrate between two unruly children in the playground. He intends to be remembered as the honest broker of peace who brought Germany and the Allies together and saved the Old World from itself.”

Matthew swore, and then apologized.

The faintest smile curved Shearing’s lips. “Precisely,” he agreed. “But unhelpful. Chetwin believes that even if the unthinkable happens, and the Lusitania is torpedoed and goes down, Wilson will still dither in virtuous inactivity, and his advisers will remind him of the very real threat to American copper and railroad investments, by Mexico’s chaos. Their army is far too small to fight on two fronts, so their own border will naturally take priority. Unless we can persuade them of Germany’s part in their troubles—which we cannot—Wilson will do nothing.”

Matthew did not reply. He already knew every ploy the British ambassador had used to try to move President Wilson, and failed. America would sell Pittsburgh steel to Britain, as indeed it did to Germany. Individual Americans would come to Europe to fight, and sometimes to die, because they believed in the Allied cause. But there was also a large number of German-speaking Americans, and their heritage and loyalties mattered also.

To act upon any of the messages they had intercepted between Berlin and Washington would betray the fact that the code was known, and the Germans would instantly change it.

“Hoist on our own petard,” Shearing said drily, as if reading Matthew’s mind.

“Yes, sir.”

Shearing looked very steadily at Matthew. “We need something to give us victory in the naval war,” he said softly, his voice gravelly with weariness and the possibility of defeat. “German U-boats hold the Atlantic passages. We have skill, we have courage, but we are being sunk faster than we can replace men or ships. If it continues at this rate, we will be starved into submission before Christmas.”

Matthew thought of Hannah’s husband, Archie. He imagined what it would be like for the men at sea, knowing the elements were impartially violent, battering and devouring all ships alike. But uniquely for them, the enemy could attack from any direction, even the fathomless water below their fragile hulls. One could stand staring at the empty sea stretching to the horizon in every direction, silent but for the wind and water, and the throb of the engines. Then the deck beneath you could explode in destruction, fire, and flying metal. The sea would pour in, pulling you down into its vast darkness and closing over your head.

Shearing was talking. Matthew jerked himself to attention and listened.

“You know Shanley Corcoran, don’t you,” Shearing said.

Matthew was startled.

“Yes, sir. He and my father were friends since university days. I’ve known him all my life.” He could not even say it without the old warmth returning, memories of a hundred occasions of happiness. “He’s one of the best scientists we have.”

Shearing was watching him closely, studying his face. “Do you trust him?”

For once Matthew did not have to think, and the pleasure of that was almost intoxicating. “Yes. Absolutely.”

Shearing nodded. “Good. You’ll know he’s in charge of the Scientific Establishment in Cambridgeshire.”

“Yes, of course.”

A flicker of impatience crossed Shearing’s face. “I wasn’t asking you, Reavley! I know where you live! I don’t want to send for Corcoran, nor do I want to be seen down there myself. What I want done could win us the war, and if we are betrayed either intentionally or by carelessness, we will lose it in a space of weeks. Therefore what I say to you, you will repeat to no one else at all, in SIS or beyond it—do you understand me?”

Matthew felt the room swim. His head was pounding. It was almost as if he were back in Sandwell’s office again, with fear of traitors within, suspicion, doubt everywhere.

“Reavley!”

“Yes, sir!”

“What the hell’s the matter with you, man? Are you drunk?” Shearing demanded, his frayed temper unraveling. “The situation is desperate, a lot worse than we can afford to let the country know. We need to stop the German navy, that’s where the real war is. The sea is our greatest friend, and enemy. We have to hold it to survive.”

Matthew stared at him, mesmerized. There was a hideous truth to what he was saying, and yet it supposed defeat in France, and Europe dominated by Germany. Was he really preparing for that kind of disaster? The thought was deeply and painfully frightening. He pulled his attention together with an effort, waiting for Shearing to continue.

Shearing had not moved his eyes from Matthew’s face. “We need something to stop the submarines, a missile that hits every time, instead of one in a score,” he stated. “Ships are made of steel, so are torpedoes, and depth charges. There must be some way; magnetism, attraction, repulsion, electricity, something that will make a missile find a target with more accuracy. Imagine it, Reavley!” His dark eyes were blazing now, wide, almost luminous. His hands described a shape in the air, delicately, fingers spread. “A torpedo that changes course, if necessary, that searches out a U-boat through the water, and explodes when it strikes! Have you ever played with magnets on either side of a piece of paper? Move one, the other moves with it! Something like that must be possible—we just have to find the way. If any man can do it, it will be Corcoran!”

Matthew saw the brilliant possibility of it! Then at the same instant, like the crash of ice, he saw total surrender if the Germans obtained such a weapon. Never mind before Christmas, the war could be over in weeks.

“You see?” Shearing was leaning across the desk.

“Yes . . .” Matthew breathed out shakily. “Yes, I see.”

Shearing nodded slowly. “So you will go to Corcoran and brief him to put all other projects aside, reassign them to his juniors, and give this priority. He must put each part of it to different people, so no one knows the entire project. All must be sworn to absolute secrecy, even so. I will see that it is funded directly from Whitehall, nothing through the treasury or the War Office. He will report only to me, no one else at all! Is that understood—absolutely?”

“Yes, sir.” Matthew could see it was imperative, there was no need to add any explanations. He could also see, with a wave of nausea that made his gorge rise, what it would do if Shearing were the Peacemaker. It was an irony of exquisite proportions. He could be getting England’s finest brain to create a weapon for German victory, and stealing it at the precise moment it was ready for use. And no one but Matthew Reavley would know, because he would indirectly have helped create it. The irony would be sublime; the vengeance for foiling his first plan!

He had no alternative. His heart was pounding, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. “Of course I will.” He could not refuse. At all cost he must keep it in his own hands. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

Shearing nodded. “Good.”

Matthew drove to Cambridge, leaving London before six in the morning when the traffic was light, and he was well on the way north by the time he stopped for breakfast a little after eight. It was a bright clear day with white clouds riding the horizon and the sun bathing the landscape in an illusion of peace. Looking at the fat lambs in the fields, the cattle grazing, and the great trees towering into the air, green skirts brushing the high grasses, the whole idea of war seemed like an obscenity that belonged in the madness of dreams.

But in the village where he stopped there were only girls and old men in the pub, and their faces were strained, their eyes lonely. They looked on a healthy young man out of uniform with suspicion.

One old man with a black armband asked him outright. “You on leave?”

“Yes, sir,” Matthew answered, with respect for his loss, which he judged from the band to be recent. “Sort of. I’m taking the time off for a duty, but I can’t discuss it.”

The old man blinked back tears. There was anger as well as grief in his face, and he was ashamed of them both, but his emotion was too strong to hide. “A healthy young fellow like you ought to be doing something!” he said bitterly, ignoring his tankard of ale.

“I know,” Matthew admitted, his voice suddenly gentle. The old man was racked by loss, the details did not matter, the pain obliterated them all, he simply railed against the unfairness of it. “But some things have to be done secretly,” he went on. “I lost both my parents. I think they were the first casualties of the intelligence war, which one can’t afford to forget. My elder brother is on the Western Front, and my younger sister drives an ambulance out there.” The moment the words were spoken he wondered why he had said them. He had never bothered to tell anyone before, and it was certainly not the first time anyone had looked at him with doubt, or even open blame. These days, coward was perhaps the ugliest word there was. One despised one’s own who stayed at home and left others to fight, bleed, perhaps die, with far more passion than one ever hated the enemy.

Perhaps it had something to do with the pent-up despair he had seen in Shearing, or the fact that he was coming from the city and going home to the land he loved. In another hour or so he would pass along the very length of road where his parents had been killed. It would look just as it had on the hot June day when he and Joseph had first seen the gouge marks on the surface, and the broken twigs, the scars on the bark, mute witnesses of the violence that had cost so much.

And it still hurt to go into the house in St. Giles, with its familiar hallway, the furniture he had grown up with, the way the light fell in patterns he could see even with his eyes closed. But his mother would not be in the kitchen, nor his father in the study.

“My son,” the old man said with choking pride as he touched a gnarled hand to the black band. “Gallipoli. They buried him out there.”

Matthew nodded. There was nothing to say. The man did not want understanding, and there was no help to give. Platitudes showed one’s own need to attempt something that was impossible.

He finished his meal and went back to the car. He was in Selborne St. Giles by ten past nine. The main street was quiet. Children were in school. The village shop was open, newspapers outside full of the same sort of thing as always these days, the Dardanelles, the Western Front, politics; nothing he was unaware of, and certainly nothing he wanted to read.

He turned off the main street and along the short distance to the house. It looked silent in the morning, almost unoccupied. In the imagination he still saw his father’s yellow Lanchester that Judith had sneaked the chance to drive whenever she could. Hannah had never wanted to. Before the war she had had no need, there was always someone to drive her. Now few people had vehicles. Petrol was expensive. Tradesmen did not make deliveries anymore, the men who would have performed such a service were in the army. People walked, and carried. If they lived too far out, then there were dog carts, pony traps if you were lucky. God knew how many horses were in the army, too, poor beasts!

He switched off the engine, took his small case out of the boot, and went to the front door. It was unlocked. He hesitated before pushing it open. It was an idiotic moment, but just for an instant time telescoped and it was a year ago. Hannah would be in Portsmouth, Joseph at St. John’s in Cambridge, but everyone else would be here. His mother would be pleased to see him, thinking about what she could make for dinner that he would like.

His father would leave his study and they would take the dog and walk around the garden together, deep in contemplation, admiring the view across the fields without ever needing to speak of it, knowing its goodness with quiet certainty, the great elms would stand deep-skirted, silent above the grass. Starlings would whirl up against the sky, and the poplars would shimmer gold in the sunset breeze.

He pushed the door open and went in. The first thing he saw in the hall was Hannah’s daughter Jenny’s blue coat on the hook by the cloakroom door. She was eight, and possibly at school today, but it was too warm for her to have needed it.

The dog came bounding up the hall, wagging his tail, and Matthew bent to pat him. “Hello, Henry! How are you old fellow?” He straightened up and called Hannah.

There was a moment’s silence, then she appeared from the kitchen. Her hair was almost the same color as her mother’s had been, and she had the same wide, brown eyes. It cost him all the strength he had to make himself smile. He must love her for herself, for her griefs and joys, not because she reminded him of someone else. She was probably missing Alys even more than he was. They had been so close, and now she was in so many ways taking her place in the village, trying to pick up in the multitude of small duties, kindnesses, unseen things that Alys had done over the years. And she was living here in this house where the past was like an echo to every word, a reflection gone the moment before one glanced at the mirror.

Her face lit with surprise and pleasure. “Matthew! You didn’t say you were coming! You just missed Judith, but I’m sure you know that!” She came toward him quickly, drying her hands on her long, white apron. She was wearing a plum pink dress with a skirt fashionably close at the ankle, but he knew enough to see that it was last year’s cut.

He put his arms around her and hugged her closely, feeling how quickly she responded. She must miss Archie dreadfully. She probably was not even allowed to know where he was. It was her duty to keep up the façade of confidence for their three children, Tom, Jenny, and Luke, and hide whatever her fears were, her loneliness or the long hours of gnawing uncertainty. And it was not only about Archie, it had to be about Judith and Joseph as well. If she had very little idea what it was actually like in the trenches, of the horror or the daily hardship, so much the better. He hoped Judith had been as discreet as she had promised.

Hannah drew back in surprise. “You’re squashing me!” she said with a smile, but her eyes were searching his, afraid he had come with bad news. The closeness with which he had held her awoke fear.

He smiled back broadly. “Sorry,” he apologized. “It’s just good to be home, and to find you here.” She had moved up from Portsmouth a few months ago. Archie seldom had leave, and when he did it was for long enough to come to Cambridgeshire. It was foolish to let the house lie empty and none of them had wanted to lease it to strangers.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No, but I’d love a cup of tea.”

She led the way to the kitchen. It looked as it always had, blue-and-white china on the Welsh dresser, the brown earthenware jugs with milk and cream on them in white, the half dozen large plates hand painted with wildflowers and grasses on the wall. She had been making pastry and the mixing bowls, white inside, ocher on the outside, were still on the big wooden table.

She piled the coals in the stove then pulled the kettle over to the hob. For a quarter of an hour they talked of the village, and people they both knew.

“Bibby Nunn was killed,” she said, gazing at him over the top of the cup she was holding in both hands, as if she were cold. “They heard yesterday. Mae Teversham was one of the first to go to Sarah. Ridiculous, isn’t it, that it should take a death that could have happened to either of them, to bring that stupid argument to an end. Both Mae’s boys are out there, too, and it could be her turn next. I think everyone feels that.”

He nodded.

“And Jim Bullen from the farm on the Madingley Road lost his leg in France and he’s now invalided home. Roger Harradine was missing in action. His father’s grieving silently. He can’t even speak of it yet, but Maudie still hasn’t given up hope.”

They had finished tea and were walking in the garden before he dared ask what she had heard from Archie lately.

She was staring at the weeds in the flower bed. “I miss Archie,” she said quietly. “I can’t keep ahead of it. The children do as much as they can. Tom’s pretty good, although he doesn’t like gardening. Luke is too young, but he tries.” She blinked quickly, turning away. She would say nothing to him, she would consider it disloyal, but he knew how hard it was for her without Archie. They all missed him, but she was the only one who knew the danger he was in. She read the newspapers and knew every time a ship went down. She hid her fear from them.

She took a deep breath, still staring at the raspberry bed that was Joseph’s favorite. He couldn’t pass it without picking half a dozen, when they were ripe. “He says he’s fine,” she answered his question. “Tom is praying the war will go on long enough for him to join the navy, too,” she said with an attempt at a laugh.

Mathew put his hand on her shoulder. “He’s got a father to be proud of. You can’t blame him for wanting to be like him.”

“He’s only thirteen!” she protested, her eyes blazing, swimming in tears. “He’s a child, Matthew! He hasn’t any idea what he’s talking about. He thinks it’s all exciting and brave and wonderful. He doesn’t know how many men get maimed or killed, or how many are blown to bits. And when a ship goes down, they hardly ever save anybody.”

“I know,” he agreed. “But do you want Tom to have the same nightmares you do?”

She turned away sharply. “No! Of course I don’t!”

“Then you’ll just have to put up with it, and thank God he is thirteen, and not fifteen,” he said as gently as he could. “And be glad Luke’s only five.”

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, her cheeks momentarily flushed. “It was good to have Judith here, even if it was only a day and a half. She’s changed, hasn’t she!” She laughed as if at herself. “She’s so competent lately, so . . . full of purpose. She’s just as emotional as ever, but now it all has direction. It seems almost wicked to say it, but the war has given her something. She’s . . . found herself.”

He smiled in spite of not wanting to. “Yes.” It was unarguable. It had confused Hannah, divided her loyalties between the safety of the past and the needs of the present. It had faced Joseph with horror that stretched his faith beyond its limits, it had taken away all the old answers and left him alone to find new ones. It had destroyed Matthew’s safety as well and filled him with suspicion of everyone. There was no trust anymore, he was totally isolated. But to Judith it had given maturity and purpose, something to do that mattered, and, for the first time in her life, people who needed her.

“I wish I could,” Hannah said quietly. “I’m trying to help in the village, the way I know Mother would have. But everything is changing. Women are doing jobs that the men used to. I can understand that.” She was staring into the distance. Clouds were drifting in, bright, silent towers in the sky. “But they like it! Tucky Nunn’s sister Lizzie is working in the bank in Cambridge, and she loves it. She’s found that she’s really clever with figures and managing. She wants to stay on, even after the men come back! She wants to get a lot of us organized to push harder for votes for women. I can’t even think of an argument against it, I just hate everything changing.”

He put his arm around her shoulder and she leaned a little toward him, comfortably.

“It frightens me,” she admitted quietly. “I hate everything changing, I mean any more than it has to.”

He considered saying that it would probably all change back, after the war, but he had no idea whether it would or not; or even if they would win the war. Part of him wanted to comfort her at any price. This was Hannah, not Judith. He would never have lied to Judith. But Hannah did not deserve it either. “Let’s get the men back before we decide who’s going to do what,” he said instead. “I have to go and see Shanley Corcoran this evening. I won’t be here for dinner, but I’ll come back for the night. If I’m late, I’ll let myself in.”

“Oh . . .” There was disappointment in her. He felt it as sharply as if she had spoken the words, and he realized again how lonely she was. There must be a million women over Britain that felt the same, and countless more over France, Austria, and Germany, too. He pulled her a little tighter, but there was nothing to say.

“Wonderful to see you,” Shanley Corcoran exclaimed with enthusiasm shining in his eyes. He wrung Matthew’s hands vigorously but with a familiar gentleness that awoke memories of childhood again, safety that seemed like another world, just accidentally placed in the same houses, with the same trees towering above, and the same broad summer skies.

“Sorry it’s been so long,” Matthew apologized, and he meant it. He had had to spend far too much time in London and old, safe friendships had suffered.

Corcoran led the way inside the high-ceilinged house with its spacious Georgian windows, wide wooden floors, and colored walls whose richness had mellowed into warmth.

“I understand,” he said, indicating a chair for Matthew to sit once they were in the drawing room with its French doors onto the terrace. They were open, letting in the evening air and the sound of birdsong and the faint rustle of wind in the trees. Corcoran’s face was grave. He was not handsome in a conventional way, but there was an intelligence and a vitality in him that made him more alive than other men, lit with more passion and more hunger for life. “We’re all too busy for the pleasures we used to have. But what kind of a man grudges any blessing at a time like this?” He looked at Matthew with sudden concentration. “You look tired—worried. Is it bad news?” There was a shadow across his eyes, an anticipation of pain.

Matthew smiled in spite of himself. “Only war news,” he answered. “Judith was home on leave briefly and I saw her the day before yesterday.”

“And Joseph?” Corcoran asked, still watching intently.

“It’s a hard job,” Matthew answered. “I don’t know how I would try to tell men out there that there really is a God who loves them, and in spite of everything to the contrary, He is in control.”

“Nor do I,” Corcoran said frankly. “But then I’ve never been sure what I really believe.” He smiled, a warm, intimate gesture of self-mocking humor. “I couldn’t bear the thought that it is all random and senseless, or that morality is only whatever our society makes it. And yet if I look at it closely, organized religion has so many contradictions in logic, absurdities that are met with ‘Oh, but that’s a holy mystery,’ as if that explained anything, except our own dishonesty to address what contradicts itself.”

His mouth pulled tight. “But far worse than that is the insistence on petty, enforceable rules to the exclusion of the kindness that is supposed to be the heart of all of them. If there is a God as the Christians conceive Him, there can be little room for blindness, hypocrisy, self-righteous judgment, cruelty, or anything that causes unnecessary pain, and there can be no place at all for hatred. And religion seems to nurture so much of it.”

“Joseph would tell you it’s human weakness,” Matthew replied. “People use religion as a justification for what they wanted to do anyway. It isn’t the cause, it’s only the excuse.”

Corcoran’s eyes were bright. “Would he indeed?”

“For certain—it’s exactly what he told Father, to the same argument.” Matthew could remember it as vividly as if it had been last week, although actually when he counted, it was over seven years ago. Joseph had been newly ordained to the ministry, not medicine as John Reavley had wanted him to be. But he had still been proud of Joseph’s honesty, and his dedication to serve others, even in a different path. They had sat in the study by firelight, rain beating on the windows, and talked half the night. He could see their faces in his mind, Joseph’s so earnest, so eager to explain, John’s calmer, with deep, slow growing satisfaction that the argument had logic as well as passion, that right or wrong, it was not blind.

Corcoran was looking into the past as well, at a long friendship stretching back to their own university days when he and John Reavley had studied together, walked the Backs along the river in the sun, or sat up all night sharing philosophy, dreams, and long, rambling jokes. “Are you worried about him?” he asked, bringing himself back to the present.

“Joseph?” Matthew asked. “No more than about anyone.” It was not the truth, but he did not want to admit to Corcoran, or to himself, the weight of the burden he feared Joseph carried. “Tell me about yourself. You look . . .” He thought for a moment. “Full of energy.”

Corcoran smiled broadly, lighting his uniquely vibrant face. “If I could tell you about the Establishment here, you’d understand.” His voice had a sudden lift of urgency. He leaned forward in his chair. “We have excellent men, brilliant, and I use the term as your father would, the best minds in England within their fields. I think much of this war is going to be won or lost in the laboratory, with ideas, inventions that will change warfare, perhaps even stop some of this terrible slaughter of men. Matthew, if we can create a weapon more powerful, more destructive than anything the Germans have, once we prove it to them, they won’t throw more and more men into the battlefield where they cannot win. At first the cost would be high, but for a short time, very short. In the end it would save hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Matthew felt a sudden leap of hope. “Could you work on something to help in the war at sea?” he asked. “Our losses are mounting, men and ships, supplies we need desperately if we are to survive.”

Corcoran did not rush into speech; he studied Matthew’s face, the intensity in him, the measure of his words. “Is that why you’re here?” he said softly. “You didn’t come just because you’re in Cambridge, did you?”

“No. I’ve been sent by my chief in SIS,” Matthew answered. “The matter is so secret nothing is to be put on paper. He doesn’t want you to come to London, and he won’t be seen here. You are to trust no one. All the work you do is to be divided up among your men in such a way that no one person can deduce what the whole project will be.”

Corcoran nodded very slowly. “I see,” he said at last. “What is it? I assume you can tell me that much?”

“Something to improve the accuracy of depth charges or torpedoes,” Matthew told him. “At the moment it’s a case of dropping a cluster and hoping you’ve outguessed the U-boat commander. If you’re lucky one of them will go off in the right place, at the right depth, and damage him.” He leaned forward. “But if we could invent something that would attach the depth charge to the U-boat, or perhaps even detonate it at a certain distance, then we’d have so much advantage they’d lose too many U-boats to make it worth their while anymore.” He did not add how vital it was to keep some control of the sea-lanes. Like every Englishman, Corcoran knew that, never more so than now.

He sat in silence so long Matthew grew impatient, wondering if his request was somehow foolish, or out of place in a way he had not considered.

“Magnetism,” Corcoran said finally. “Somehow the answer will lie in that. Of course the Germans will work that out, too, and we will have to think of a way to foil any guards against it that they use, but it must be able to be done. We must find the way, before they do! If they think of something first and can attach it to torpedoes before we do, then we are beaten.” His words were lethal, catastrophic, but the energy in his face belied any sense of despair. He was accepting a challenge, and the fire of it already burned in him. “We need a budget,” he went on. “I know everything does, but this is priority. I will come up with some specifications, things we have to have, who I recommend to work on the project. I need some figures from the Admiralty, but that shouldn’t be difficult . . .”

Matthew took the papers out of his inside pocket and passed them across. “That may be most of what you want. But there are two conditions.”

Corcoran was startled. “You said the work must be positioned out so no one knows the whole. What is the other?”

“You report to Calder Shearing and him only. It’s top secret—no one else, not even Churchill, or Hall. Do you accept that?”

Corcoran looked at him quickly, a flash of appreciation in his eyes, then he bent to examine the pages. It was several minutes before he finished them. “Yes,” he said decisively. “I have ideas already. Perhaps we can accomplish something to make history, Matthew.”

His belief was contagious, uplifting. It was not a blind optimism but a faith rooted in possibility and endeavor. Looking at his face, the burning intelligence and the self-knowledge, Matthew found his own hope soaring. “I’ll see you get the budget,” he promised.

He was prevented from pursuing it any further, although there was little more to say, because Orla Corcoran came into the room and Matthew stood to greet her. She was slender, very elegant, her hair still dark. Conversation turned to other things. Orla was keen to hear of news from London; she had not been for nearly three months.

“There seems to be so much to do here,” she said ruefully when they were seated at the dinner table. “Of course the most important thing in the area is the Establishment, but we have factories as well, and hospitals, and various organizations to look after people. We all try to pretend, but nobody’s life is as it used to be. Everyone’s got somebody they care about either on the Western Front, or at Gallipoli. We’re all terrified to listen to the news, and when the mail comes in I see the village women’s faces, and I know what they’re dreading.”

“I know,” he said with a strange guilt for his own part in spoiling the plans of the men who would have made peace, with dishonor, and prevented all this. He did not doubt that he was right, only he had not imagined at the time that the cost of it would feel like this, the individual loss over and over again, in a million homes throughout the land.

But then if the Peacemaker’s plan had succeeded, what would have happened to France? A German province, occupied by the kaiser’s army, betrayed by Britain whom it had trusted. And that would be only the beginning. The rest of the world would fall after, like so many bloodied dominoes, treason, collaboration, betrayals multiplied a thousand times, secret trials, executions, more graves.

No—this price was terrible, but it was not the worst.

The conversation went on about familiar things. As the evening deepened they spoke less of the present and more of happy things of the past, times remembered before the war.

Matthew left a little after eleven, and by midnight he was home at St. Giles, to sleep well for the first time in weeks with the silence of the country around him, the wind in the elms, and the starlight beyond.

In the house in Marchmont Street the Peacemaker was also speaking of Cambridgeshire, in fact specifically of the scientific Establishment there. The man opposite him was young, his face sharp, full of passion and intelligence.

“Of course I can get in,” he said earnestly. “My qualifications are excellent.”

“Don’t be too eager,” the Peacemaker warned. He was standing by the mantelpiece, looking at the younger man where he sat in the armchair, elbows on his knees, staring up. There was great confidence in him, extraordinary for one so untried in the professional world. He had a first-class honors degree in mathematics and engineering. He knew precisely what he wanted to achieve, and he had no doubt he would succeed. It was faintly unnerving to see someone with such blindness to the vagaries of fate.

“Every good inventor is eager,” the young man responded. “If you don’t believe in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?”

The Peacemaker was irritated with the man for his arrogance, and with himself for allowing a form of words to be twisted against him.

“A man who knows his own worth is not eager to be accepted at less,” he said coolly. “Insist upon a reward that meets your wishes, whether it’s in money, honors, opportunities, or colleagues with whom you work. They must believe in you. Your opportunity may not come quickly.”

The other man’s face became suddenly very serious. “I know what I’m there for,” he answered. “I won’t forget it. World peace, an empire in which the creators and inventors, the artists, writers, musicians are not harnessed to the wheels of war and its insane destruction, but to the betterment of mankind!” The timbre of his voice was urgent. “In peace, order, and universal rule of law, we can build houses fit to live in, airplanes that can fly across continents and oceans without having to stop and refuel. We can conquer disease, perhaps even hunger and want. We will have the leisure to think, to develop great philosophy, write drama and poetry. . . .”

The Peacemaker felt the warmth of his enthusiasm and it refreshed the weariness in him.

The young man’s face hardened into a cold fury. “We can’t send our greatest visionaries and poets to be slaughtered like animals in a senseless waste, killing young Germans who could also give fire and skill, art and science to the world—if they weren’t lying facedown, bodies shattered, in the mud of some godforsaken shell hole.” He rose to his feet, fists clenched. “I know what I’m here for, and I’ll wait as long as it takes. You think you’re using me to further your plans? You aren’t! I’m using you, because I know what I do is right.”

The Peacemaker smiled very faintly. “Shall we agree that we use each other? I shall exercise my influence to see that you are taken very seriously in the Establishment. Report to me seldom, and with the utmost discretion. Shanley Corcoran is a brilliant man. Earn his respect and his trust, and you will succeed—when the time comes.”

The younger man smiled back, his eyes bright, his shoulders straight. “I will,” he promised.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

The ambulance jolted over the rough road and Judith woke up and straightened in her seat. She had begged a lift from a lorry carrying supplies about thirty miles back in France, where the train had stopped. Now the familiar stench was in the air and she knew she was almost up to the lines. She looked out of the window and saw the flat country stretching out on every side, pale green poplars along the roads, here and there two or three dead and bare.

“Thought that’d wake yer,” the driver said cheerfully. He was a man in his late thirties with a toothbrush mustache and a finger missing on his left hand. “Nose tell yer yer ’ome, eh?”

She smiled, pulling the corners of her mouth down. “Afraid so. It isn’t exactly that you forget what it’s like, but it has a renewed power when you’ve been away for a night or two,” she agreed ruefully.

“Was Blighty good, then?” There was a suppressed emotion in his voice, things he dared not allow too close to the surface of his mind.

She hesitated only a moment. If there was no home to return to, no ideal to fight for, what was the meaning of all this? “Wonderful,” she answered firmly. “Same old traffic jams in Piccadilly, same scandals in the newspapers, same things to talk about: weather, taxes, cricket. I even got home for a couple of nights. The villages are just the same, too: farmers complaining about the rain, as usual, too much or too little; women quarreling over who’s to arrange the flowers in church, but they always get done, and they’re always gorgeous; someone’s riding their bicycle too fast down the street; someone’s dog barks. Yes, Blighty’s just as it was, and I wouldn’t change it, even at this price.” Now she was intensely grave. “At least I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.”

“Me neither,” he answered, looking straight ahead at the road running like a ruler between the ditches. A windmill in the distance was the only break in the tablelike flatness of it. “Where yer want ter stop off then, love?” he asked.

“Poperinge,” she answered without hesitation. “Or as near as you can get.” She was going to find Cullingford, give him Mrs. Prentice’s letter, and then take up her job as his driver again. She realized how eagerly she said it. She was sitting forward, already half prepared to get out, and they were still at least three miles away. She knew all these roads probably better than the driver beside her did.

He glanced at her. “Yer got a boyfriend here, ’ave yer?” he said with a grin.

She felt the heat wash up her face. He must wonder why she was pleased to be back when she had just been home. What other explanation could there be?

“Sort of,” she answered. That was near enough the truth for him to believe her, and she did not want to be questioned more closely. There was no truth that she could tell, even to herself.

He laughed. “I bet he ‘sort of’ thinks so, too!” He took her all the way into Poperinge and she thanked him and got out in the square. It was a warm day, a few bright clouds sailing along the horizon, the sunlight gleaming on the cobbles. A couple of bicycles were parked against the tobacconist’s shop window. Women were queuing at the bakery. She could hear the sound of voices from the Rat’s Nest on the corner of the alley, and a snatch of song. She walked over, and as the group of a dozen or so soldiers saw her, they sang more loudly, clapping on the beat, and finishing with a rousing chorus of an extremely bawdy version of “Good-bye, Dolly Grey.”

“ ’Oo are yer lookin’ fer, love?” one of them asked her hopefully. He looked about twenty, with bright blue eyes and a lopsided face.

“ ’Ave a glass o’ beer!” another called out. “Drink enough of it, an’ yer’ll forget this is a bleedin’ slaughter’ouse an’ think if yer go round that corner you’ll see a couple o’ cows, an’ a village pond wi’ ducks on it, not some stinkin’ crater full o’ the corpses o’ yer mates.”

Someone told him abruptly to shut up.

“It would take more than beer to do that for me,” she answered with a quick smile. “I’m looking for General Cullingford. I’m his driver. At least I was till I went on a couple of days’ leave. But I’m back now.”

One of the men looked her up and down appreciatively, and muttered something under his breath. Someone jolted him hard, and he did not repeat it.

“Sorry, love,” the first man said. “Looks like yer lost yer job. The general went out of ’ere yesterday evenin’ wi’ a new driver. Dressy little feller, ’e were, in a smart uniform an’ a face like a schoolboy, but civil enough, an’ could ’andle a car like ’e’d built it ’isself.”

It couldn’t be. She was stunned, as if she had driven into a wall and she was bruised to the bone. He wouldn’t do that!

“Sorry, love. Looks like yer back ter ambulances, or whatever.”

“What?” She looked at him as if she had not really seen him before. He was slim and dark, perhaps in his middle twenties, older than many of the men, and the insignia on his sleeve marked him as a corporal.

“What did you drive before you took the general?” he asked. “Ambulances?”

“Yes.”

“Then yer’d best get back to ’em. As a volunteer yer can do wot yer like, I s’pose, but that’s w’ere yer needed most, if yer can drive.”

She nodded. It was ridiculous that it should hurt this much. If she thought about it honestly, she knew perfectly well that she could not go on driving a general around. It was a man’s job. “Thank you,” she added absently.

“Yer all right, love?” the corporal asked with concern. “You look a bit—dunno—off.”

She forced herself to smile at him. “Yes, thank you. It’s just funny—coming back. You have to get used to the smell again.”

“In’t that the truth! ’Ere, sit down a mo’. Wally! Get ’er a quick brandy, eh? We’d better get ’er right an’ on the road. I couldn’t drive them damn great ambulances, an’ neither could you. We might need ’er—though please Gawd we don’t!”

There was a bark of laughter, and a moment later a glass was put into her hand. The raw spirit burned down her throat, jolting her awake and into sharp attention. She realized their kindness, and felt slightly guilty for acting a lie as to the reason for her lapse. But the truth was secret—it had to be. She did not want to recognize it herself. She thanked them, finished the brandy, and went to look for a lift to the VAD ambulance headquarters.

She arrived in the early afternoon. It was a quiet time when most of the drivers were doing small maintenance and repair jobs on their vehicles. She found Wil Sloan standing over the engine of the ambulance she used to share with him, looking ruefully at the filthy commutator. His face lit when he saw her and he put the oilcan down and threw his arms around her.

“Hey, sugar! Where’ve you been?” He pushed her away from him, holding her by the shoulders and looking earnestly into her face.

“All around,” she answered. “Then home to London for a couple of days.”

“What’s wrong?” They had shared too many experiences, good and bad, for him to be blind to her feelings. They had laughed together, told awful jokes, split the last piece of chocolate, read each other’s letters from home.

“I went to see Mrs. Prentice, the mother of the war correspondent who was killed,” she replied. “I had dinner with my brother, then I went home to St. Giles for a couple of nights. That’s about all. I guess what really matters is, I had three hot baths. Let’s get our priorities right!”

“And dinner in a restaurant where you couldn’t hear guns?” he added. “What did you have?”

“I know I had ice cream for pudding!”

“Torturer!”

She smiled. In spite of driving Cullingford, she had missed Wil. “Yes,” she agreed with a smile.

“So what’s wrong?” he persisted.

“Are you going to clean that?” She indicated the commutator with a jerk of her head. “You won’t get far with it as it is!”

He understood and handed her the oilcan, then bent his attention to cleaning the grit out of the commutator. They worked together for several minutes, put it back, then lubed the spindle bolts on the tie rods and oiled the steering post bracket. Finally the whole job was accomplished, polished and clean, and they were correspondingly filthy.

“So what are you doing back here?” he said at last, looking at her so directly she could not avoid his eyes.

“Driving ambulances, I expect,” she answered, wiping her hands ineffectively on one of the discarded rags.

“Is that what’s wrong?” he persisted.

“I suppose so. He’s got a new driver, practically straight out of school, from what I hear. But I was only ever a short-term replacement anyway.”

He looked at her, an oil smudge on his cheek. “You’re sure burned about it. Why? That your pride speaking?”

She looked away. “No . . .” Then she did not know how to finish. She was afraid Wil knew her well enough to guess without words, but it was still something she would prefer not to make so honest between them. There were some things you did not discuss, even with your best friends.

With innate tact he assumed the truth, and evaded it. “You like the job, don’t you. You’re probably better at it than this guy anyway. What does he know?”

“Everything about cars, apparently,” she replied.

A wide grin split his face. “That all? Well, we can fix his wagon any time! This is Ypres, not Piccadilly Circus.”

“You’ve never been to Piccadilly Circus!” she pointed out. She was familiar with his adventures all the way from his hometown in Missouri where his explosive temper had lashed out one too many times, albeit in defense of someone smaller and weaker. But the ensuing fight had left two other young men hurt, one of them quite seriously. Wil had been advised he would be very foolish to remain around to face the unpleasantness that would undoubtedly follow. He should give people at least a year or two to forget.

The uncle who had given him the advice had also given him his sea fare to France, but Wil had had to make his own way to New England, and then New York itself. He had ridden the railways, worked where he could, and seen more of his own country than most of his fellows. But to serve in the war had been his goal, and although it had taken him nearly three months he had finally made it to Calais, and then north to Ypres.

Judith had listened with fascination to his stories of a vast land, of wonderfully varied people full of compassion and ingenuity. She had cried over their misfortunes, over those who had been injured in heart or body, laughed at their escapades. More than once during their bitterest nights, sodden, wind slicing across the unprotected land, she had realized that Wil was inventing things as he went along, to entertain her.

But the core of it was true, and it had not taken him to London. That was a dream he was keeping ahead of him, for before he finally went back to Missouri—London and Paris.

He was grinning at her now. “Aw shucks! I can read. I’ll get there one day. You’ll take me. You want your job back?”

“Yes.” She had said it too quickly, and it alarmed her.

He raised his eyebrows. “Can’t you make up your mind, then?”

She gave him a light punch on the arm, suddenly feeling tears prickle her eyes. “I can’t have it, Wil. He’s got a driver.”

“A greenhorn!”

“A what?”

“A guy who knows nothing,” he explained. “Still wet behind the ears. C’mon! Let’s get cleaned up and onto the road. We’ll find out where this guy is and get rid of him.”

She had a sudden stab of alarm, thinking of Prentice, “Get rid of him! How?”

He half shrugged. “I dunno, but we’ll think of something.”

“Actually I do have a letter I have to take to the general,” she said, walking beside him toward the water and soap. “And since it’s personal, and I should tell him about his sister, I really do need at least to find him.”

“ ’Course you do,” he agreed. “Never explain.”

She flashed him a broad smile. “Never. We aren’t army, right?”

“Right!” He saluted smartly. “Let’s go look for the general!”

It was a long task. The day before there had been a large offensive that had failed and the losses had been very heavy. General Plumer had been forced to retreat and there was a considerable amount of disorder; it was hard to battle against anger and despair. The second German use of gas had made it even worse.

“General Cullingford?” Wil asked a harassed sergeant major.

The man wiped his sleeve across his brow, leaving a smear of dirt and blood. “Jesus, I don’t know! Leave it to this lot and they’d ’ave all the bloody generals six feet under! And I’ll not argue with ’em. What d’yer need ’im for anyway? The injured’ve bin evacuated from ’ere, and most of the dead are buried—at least those we can find.”

Wil stood very stiff, his face pale. “Cullingford’s not bad, as generals go. We have a message for him. Lost a member of his family.”

The sergeant major’s eyebrows rose. “Go on! You mean generals have families? An’ here we was thinking they crawled up out of an ’ole in the ground.”

“Someone should teach you the facts of life, Sergeant Major!” Judith snapped. “Unlikely as it may seem, even you had a mother once, who wiped your nose—and the rest of you. And probably even thought you were worth it.”

The sergeant major blushed dark red, although it was impossible to tell whether it was shame for his attitude, or embarrassment at what she might be imagining about him. “Yes, miss. I ’eard he went toward Wulvergem, but I’m not sure.”

“Thank you,” she said stiffly.

The next person they asked was a major, and considerably less willing to help. Instead he directed them to take half a dozen men with shrapnel wounds or broken limbs back to Poperinge.

It was strangely familiar to be dealing with injured men again, ordinary soldiers who obey orders, made no decisions except to steel their nerves and go forward, live up to what was expected of them, not by the army or those at home who loved them, but by the men they lived with every day.

She had not meant to do it, except as a necessary act of obedience. Her mind was filled with finding Cullingford, telling him of her visit with his sister, the beginning of a softening in her, the first steps forward. She did not try to consider what she could do to replace his new driver, that was Wil’s idea, perhaps his way of making her feel better.

Among the wounded was a ginger-haired man with a head wound. His right ear was torn off and there was a deep gash across his cheek, but the side of his face that was still visible under the bandaging was cheerful enough. If it cost him a terrible effort, he did not show it. He was busy talking to another man whose leg was shattered at the thigh. It was bound in a splint, but he looked gray-faced with pain, and his teeth were clenched together so tightly his jaw muscles bulged.

Two others bore shrapnel wounds, one in the leg, the other in the shoulder. They sat quietly, side by side, waiting their turn.

“I’ll ’ave ter grow me ’air,” the ginger-headed man was saying, talking for the sake of it, perhaps to keep the most badly wounded man’s mind on something else, just to know he was not alone, or forgotten. “Me ma always said as I never listened anyway, so I s’pose an ear gorn won’t make no difference. Yer all right, Taff? There’s VADs ’ere, right enough. They’ll get yer ter ’orspital where they’ll fix that up for yer.”

Judith smiled at him, and then bent to the man with the shattered leg.

“We’re going to lift you up,” she told him. “We’ll be as gentle as we can.”

“That’s all right, miss,” he said hoarsely. “It ’urts, but not too much. I’ll be okay.”

“Of course you will,” she agreed. “But it could be a bit shaky for a while. I’ll do my best not to hit the potholes.”

“You drive that thing?” Ginger said with surprise. “I thought you was a nurse.”

“I’m a better driver than nurse, believe me,” she assured him. Wil was beside her, and one by one, with as much ease as possible, they loaded the wounded men in and drove back very carefully to Poperinge. There was a quiet companionship in doing their jobs together, working to exhaustion for a passionate common cause. They did not need to speak, but when they did it was almost in a kind of abbreviated language, references to past experiences, jokes they knew, a touch or a word of understanding.

It was nearly dark when they finally pulled into the central square in the town of Wulvergem and she saw the general’s car outside the Seven Piglets. Judith’s heart was pounding, her breath high in her throat as Wil parked the ambulance and she got out and walked over the cobbles, hearing her heels loud on the stones.

The laughter was audible even before she reached the door, men’s voices raised, cheerful, calling out across the room, a shout, another guffaw. She pushed the door open and the smells of beer and smoke swirled around her. The inside was lit by gas lamps, old-fashioned ones with glass mantles. The tables had checked cloths on them and there were half a dozen men to each.

Few of them turned to look at her, supposing it to be just another soldier, then someone noticed it was a woman, and one by one they fell silent.

She saw the lamplight on Cullingford’s fair hair and knew the shape of his head even before she saw the insignia of rank on his uniform. Opposite him sat a young man with a round, bland face. His skin was pale and his hands on the tablecloth looked soft and clean.

The boiling resentment welling up inside her was unreasonable and totally unfair. She knew that, and it made no difference at all.

The talk resumed again, but at a lower level. It was impossible now for her to retreat. However hard it was, she must go in, walk between the tables and speak to Cullingford, and give him his sister’s letter.

He looked up as her shadow fell across the table. His eyes widened very slightly and his expression barely changed, but he could not keep a faint color from rising in his cheeks.

“Miss Reavley?” he said quietly. For an instant she thought he was going to rise to his feet, as if they were both civilians, just a man and a woman met by chance at a dinner table. But he remembered the reality before he moved.

“Good evening, General Cullingford,” she said more stiffly than she had intended to, as if she were guarding herself from hurt. But she realized with amazement that the hurt had already happened, perhaps months ago. Even this afternoon in the ambulance she had pretended to herself that she was only angry at losing a job she liked, though it was even harder to bear when she could see the whole picture and knew how serious the losses were, and the possibility of defeat. But there were also ways in which driving the general was easier than seeing individual men, real wounds not figures, blood and pain and fear you couldn’t help, except to try to get the men back to the hospitals before it was too late.

Now, looking at him, seeing his eyes, his face, his hands on the table in front of him, she knew it was because she wanted to be wherever Cullingford was. She wanted to watch him as he talked with the men, see the hope rekindle in them as they listened to him, feel the shiver of pride because they believed in him. She had seen his unguarded moments; she had a close, painful idea of how much it sometimes cost him to maintain that façade when he knew numbers they did not, facts and figures that added up to something close to despair.

His odd, dry half-jokes made it bearable, the things he spoke of very seldom—walking, his dogs, horses he had loved, quotations that pleased him—made sense of the battle that cost so unbearably much.

Now he was waiting for her to explain herself, to tell him something about his family, the people he belonged to. She forced herself to meet his eyes and smile very slightly, as if she were simply a messenger and neither knew nor understood anything more than the facts of the errand. She was acutely aware of the new young driver sitting opposite.

“When I was in London I managed to call on Mrs. Prentice,” she told him. “She wrote a letter and asked me if I would give it to you personally, sir. She was afraid it might take too long to get to you otherwise.” She took the envelope from her pocket and held it out.

He reached up and took it. He did not mention the young man, or even glance at him. From the intensity of his gaze upon her it was as if he had forgotten the new driver’s existence.

“Thank you, Miss Reavley. That is very good of you. Have you just returned?”

“Yes, sir. I went to Poperinge first, then to my ambulance unit.” Would he understand from that that she had requested to resume her job? She heard the echo of accusation in her voice, and was embarrassed by it. She did not want him to know she minded. “Then I got ordered to drive a load of wounded men to Poperinge again,” she added.

“Of course.” There was every shade of expression in his voice, and she could not read any of it.

“Thank you for visiting Mrs. Prentice, and for bringing the letter,” he repeated. He seemed to be about to add something, then changed his mind. It was pointless to ask how a bereaved woman was; she could only be racked with grief. The issue was only how openly she showed it, and that meant nothing. “You must be tired after your journey, and you have the care of your vehicle to attend to. Good night.”

Was that as remote as it sounded? Or simply the necessity of the circumstances?

“Yes, sir.” She stood to attention, then turned away immediately so he should not read in her anything more than a kindness accomplished, such as anyone might have performed.

Outside she found Wil waiting for her. She walked on, into the square toward the ambulance, furious with herself for the emotion boiling up inside her until she was choked with tears, and a rejection so agonizing it almost took her breath away.

Wil caught up with her, taking her arm.

“They’re right,” she said with an effort, keeping her face turned away from him, even in the dark. “He looks like a schoolboy.”

“Then he shouldn’t be too hard to get rid of,” he retorted.

“General Cullingford may prefer to have a male driver,” she said stiffly, opening the ambulance door and climbing in.

Wil went around to the front, cranked the engine to life, then got in on the driver’s side and they moved off slowly. “My ma always reckoned my pa didn’t know what was good for him, until she’d fixed it,” he said casually, deliberately not looking at her, giving her the privacy of pretending she wasn’t weeping. “Great woman, my ma.” She could hear the warmth in his voice, the pride and gentleness, even though his face was hard to see in the sporadic light as they bumped over the cobbles and out of the square.

“Thank you, Wil,” she said softly.

They were two miles down the road before he spoke again.

“I think I should make friends with him. In fact we both should.”

She had been lost in her own thoughts. “With whom?”

“I love the way you folks speak! With the general’s new driver, of course.”

“I don’t particularly want to make friends with him.”

“Oh c’mon! Let’s be nice to him. Take him out for a drink—or several. Give him some good advice. After all, he’s new to this. He needs to know a few of the tricks. Help him on his way.”

“Wil?” Had she really understood him correctly?

He was grinning. She could only see the gleam of his teeth in the fitful light.

“C’mon, sugar, you got to fight for what you want! If you don’t, that means you don’t want it enough to rate getting it! I didn’t have you pegged for a giver-upper!”

“How could we do that?” she said reasonably, but wild ideas surged up inside her. “He’d be with the general all the time. I know I was. If I wasn’t driving him somewhere, I was waiting for him.”

“That’ll make him the easier to find,” Wil responded. “Wherever the car is, he’ll be close.” He had already pulled into the side of the road, and was now busy maneuvering the ambulance back and forth to turn it to face the way they had come.

“Now?” she said, aghast. She was not ready yet, she had not thought it through, or considered all the possible consequences.

“Of course, now!” He reached for the accelerator and the ambulance lurched forward. “Tomorrow could be too late. We could be busy with army things. You gotta do things when you can!”

She drew in breath to argue, then had nothing to say. A couple of days at home in England and she had lost the urgency of the Front, the knowledge that there may be no tomorrow. The only question was, did she want to get back her job as Cullingford’s driver or not! Yes, she did.

“How much money have you got?” he asked.

“About thirty francs. Why?”

“Thirty!” His voice lifted in amazement. “What d’you think I’m going to feed him, Napoleon brandy?”

The edge of his excitement began to infect her. The ambulance was speeding along the road now, jolting over the potholes, lurching a little from left to right.

Twenty minutes later they were back in the square in Wulvergem, and they parked on the cobbles in the dark. Now the enormity of the plan struck her. She was a fool to go ahead with it! And a coward to back out. She wanted to drive Cullingford again. She would be more loyal to him than this new man could possibly be. She would see him more accurately, and believe in him more. She could feel the loneliness in him, the need to have one person to whom he could explain if he wanted, and yet to whom he did not need to.

She walked across the square after Wil. There were a few lights on in windows, a gleam here and there spilling out into the darkness. Someone else walked across the square, footsteps loud on the stones.

They were getting there much too quickly. And she was lying to herself. She wanted to be with Cullingford because she loved him. That was the first time she had admitted it. He was twice her age, and married. She was behaving like a complete fool. But what was sane in the world anymore? Was it wrong to love, if you didn’t ask for anything in return?

They were at the door of the Seven Piglets.

“Wait here,” Wil ordered abruptly. “Don’t want you seen yet.” Then he pushed the door open and disappeared inside.

Ten minutes later half a dozen soldiers came out, joking with each other, one of them laughing and staggering a little. She moved back into the shadows. They walked away and she was left alone. An old man crossed the far side of the square, pushing a handcart with something bulky in it. He moved as if he were infinitely tired. She felt a wave of pity for him, and tried to imagine how it would be if armies were camped in St. Giles, if foreign soldiers marched in the streets she had grown up in, and the peace of her own fields were shattered by shell fire, her own trees smashed. How it would hurt her if the familiar earth were gouged up and poisoned, soaked in blood, if generations ahead farmers would still plow the ground and find human bones.