Angels in the Gloom

She had never mentioned her mother. He had not wondered before what had happened to her, or if she was still alive. Perhaps she too had died tragically, even violently, and Detta had a burden like his to bear. Why had he not considered that? Why had he not considered many things, now that it was almost over—and one of them was going to pay the price of losing? He forced any dark thoughts from his mind.

“It was a pleasure,” he said aloud.

She gave a little laugh. “Liar!” she retorted, but there was no anger in her. She paid for the watch, and he could see that it was more expensive than she had anticipated, but the extra sacrifice gave her happiness. It was ridiculous that it should hurt him so much. He could give nothing to his father now. And here was the Peacemaker’s daughter, eyes soft with joy because she could give him something that cost her dearly. He walked outside while she finished the transaction.

A moment later she joined him in the street and they crossed into the park. The late afternoon sun was warm, creating an illusion of timelessness that both of them seemed willing to indulge in.

From where they were they could see at least twenty other couples, some walking arm in arm, many standing idly under the trees, some sitting on the grass. They passed one man wobbling on crutches, his left leg missing below the knee. The girl with him was white-faced and she kept looking away, as if afraid she would embarrass him by seeing his awkwardness. Perhaps she was revolted and knew he would see it in her eyes. Matthew caught it in her face, and for an instant hated her for it.

Detta touched his arm. “Some people can’t help it,” she whispered.

“We have to help it!” he exclaimed when they were out of earshot. “Won’t she expect him to love her when she’s older, when she’s put on weight and her bosom sags, or her skin has blemishes? Or does she think she’s always going to be so pretty?”

“She isn’t thinking, Matthew,” Detta answered drily. “She’s just feeling. She loved him as he was. You grow old slowly, this is all in a few days. And maybe he pushed her away? Have you thought of that? When we’re hurt in body and dignity, sometimes we take it out on those closest to us—and they don’t know what to do or how to help. She’s maybe hurting, too.”

He looked at her with surprise and a flood of perception he knew he should have had before. “You’ve seen that.” It was not a question.

She gave a little shrug, swinging her skirt with the elegance of her stride. “Irishmen are no different,” she answered as she walked ahead of him, the sun gleaming on her hair, catching rich, red lights in its darkness. She was slender, and there was the grace of a wild creature in her, moving when and where she would. The elusiveness of her was part of what Matthew loved. She made other women seem tame, too easily caught and held.

In the distance a band was playing, something patriotic and sentimental. Before the war the German bands had played here. Funny that Matthew should equate that music with peace now! What a blessed, lost innocence that was.

Three young men walked by together, in the uniform of the same regiment. They were laughing, teasing each other. They moved with a kind of unity, as if there were an invisible thread that governed them all.

A nursemaid pushed a perambulator. She seemed like a relic from another age.

A man stood in the middle of the grass, looking from side to side as though utterly lost. His face was bleak. Matthew had not seen these symptoms before, but Joseph had described them to him. The man had been so battered and deafened by the guns, seen such horror, that his mind had refused to accept any more. He had no idea where he was; the only reality was inside him, and that was unbearable.

This one looked about thirty years of age. Then as Matthew and Detta drew closer to him, Matthew realized with a twisting pity that he was probably more like nineteen or twenty. His eyes were old, but the skin of his cheek and neck said that he had barely reached maturity.

“Are you lost?” Detta said to the young man. She spoke softly, with a sweet, urgent gentleness.

He did not answer.

She asked again.

He looked at her, then the present returned to his mind. “I suppose so. I’m sorry. You look different. You’ve grown your hair. I thought you said you’d cut it off. Machines, or something. Caught in it—tore it right off. Someone’s scalp, you said.” There was no emotion in his face or his voice. He had seen so many people torn apart that one more made no impact at all.

Detta was startled.

An older woman came across the grass, running as fast as she could with her skirts flapping around her legs.

“I’m so sorry,” she apologized. “I just stopped for a moment. Saw someone I knew.” She looked at the youth. “Come on, Peter, this way. We’ll get a cup of tea at the Corner House, then it’s time to go home for supper.”

He went with her uncomplainingly. It probably made little difference to him where he was.

Detta watched them leave, her face tight with misery. “Why do we do this, Matthew?” she said bitterly. “Why do we care what happens to Belgium? Why do we let our young men be crucified for it?”

“I thought you liked fighting!” he retorted before he thought to guard his tongue. “Especially for a piece of land.”

She swung around to face him, her eyes blazing. “That’s different!” she said between her teeth. “We’re fighting for . . .” Then she stopped, a tide of color rushing up her cheeks.

He did not say anything. It was no longer necessary.

They walked a hundred yards or so in silence. A group of young women were laughing, absorbed in their own conversation. A man in striped trousers and a bowler hat strode briskly in the other direction, stiff and rhythmic, as if he were marching to his own inner beat.

“Is that really how you see us?” she said at last. “Pretty much the same as the Germans invading Belgium!”

“I think you see it from your own point of view, as we all do,” he replied. “You make rather a holy crusade of it, passionate and self-righteous, as if you were the only ones who loved your land, which is a bit of a bore.” It was the most honest answer he had ever given her. But today was different. It would be the last time he would see her. The arrests would be made today and the sabotage ended. Perhaps she knew it also. Their ability to use each other was drawing to a close. The pretense was so thin it was almost broken.

She paused a step ahead of him, forcing him to stop as well.

“Have you thought that all this time?” she asked. “Is that what has bred your calm, English tolerance? Your idea of being fair!”

“I suppose so,” he agreed. “You think that’s cold, don’t you?”

She looked away and started walking again. “I used to.”

He refused to ask if she had changed, still less why.

“I don’t mind fairness,” she added.

It would be dusk in an hour. The air was still warm and the park was full of people, more soldiers on leave, more girls returning from work, two middle-aged ladies, a handful of children. Whoever had been making the music seemed to have packed up and gone home.

“In fact, I admire fair play,” Detta added, still keeping her face half turned away. “ ‘Play up and play the game,’ ” she went on. “That’s what we love, and hate, in you. You’re impossible to understand.”

They were at the end of the grass and crossed the path, then followed it to the gates. The shadows of the trees were long and the light had a muted tone. The traffic was a mixture of engines and the rattle of horses’ hooves.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. They had said all they had to; they had shared time and laughter and pain. She had wanted to know if the code was safe. He had deceived her that it was unbroken, and therefore British Intelligence could continue to use the information it gave them.

He looked at her. Her face was gold in the sun, a lock of hair straggling over her brow, and there was dust on her shoes. Could there possibly be any way not to let her go without betraying all those who trusted him?

“I’m thirsty,” she answered. She turned to him quickly, then away again. He knew with a tightening of the throat that she did not want to end it any more than he did. They were spinning it out, like a thread of gossamer, bright and fragile.

The traffic stopped and they crossed the road and walked in the close heat of the footpath, bumping into others, weaving their way. They crossed another street and came to a café, where they had tea and hard-boiled-egg sandwiches with cress. They talked about books, and ended up arguing over the virtues of Irish playwrights as opposed to English. She said all the best English ones were Irish anyway.

He asked how she would know, since she only read the Irish ones. She won the argument, then they moved to poets. She lost that argument, but she did it graciously, because the magic of the words enraptured her.

It was almost dark when they went out into the street again. The traffic had lessened a little, and the lamps were lit, but there were still people out walking. The breeze that ruffled the leaves at the edge of the park was warm on the skin.

There was nothing else to cling to, no more to say. Detta started to walk and Matthew lengthened his stride to keep up with her. Each was waiting for the other deliberately to make the break.

Then suddenly she stopped. “Lights!” she said hoarsely. “Look!”

He followed her gaze and saw them, searchlights probing the sky, first a couple, then more, long fingers poking into the vastness of the night.

She drew in her breath in a gasp, her body rigid. There was a silver tube, soundless, floating so high up it looked small, like a fat insect drifting on the wind. He knew it was a dirigible; the Germans called them zeppelins. There was a whole ship below the balloon itself, which in peacetime carried passengers. Now it carried a crew, and bombs.

She swung around to face him, her eyes huge, her body stiff. She put her hands on his arms and gripped him till he could feel the strength of her fingers through the cloth of his jacket. She was breathing hard. She knew it could drop bombs anywhere. There was no point in running, and nowhere to run to anyway.

They stood together, staring up as the lights picked out the gleaming object, then lost it, and found it again.

Then the first bomb came. They did not see it fall, only heard the crash and the explosion as it landed somewhere to the south, near the river. Flames burst upward, then rubble and dust. Not far away a woman screamed. Someone else was sobbing.

Matthew put his arms around Detta and held her. It seemed a natural thing to do, and she leaned against him, still clinging to his coat.

Another bomb came down, closer and far louder. They felt the jar of it as the ground trembled. He held her more tightly. There was no point in running because the balloon could change direction at any moment, drift or hover as it willed, or the wind took it, before it finally turned and powered its engines to take it home again.

“How many does it have?” Detta asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. There was something in her fear that made him think the violence of the explosion woke some memory in her.

He looked up and saw the next bomb quite clearly. He could make out the dark, cigar-shaped shadow, black against the lighter sky. He watched it fall with a growing sickness inside, his stomach clenched as it came closer until finally it landed in the next street, shattering the night with a sound that bruised the eardrums. The blast knocked him sideways and tore them apart. He staggered against the wall of the shop behind him, and Detta fell to her knees on the pavement. The air was full of dust and they could hear rubble landing on the roofs and in the street. People were screaming.

Then the flame shot up and the red glare lit the clouds of dust and smoke, and the stench of burning caught in the throat.

Matthew went to Detta, but she was already climbing to her feet. She was dirty, her beautiful dress torn. “I’m all right,” she said clearly. “Are you?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Stay here. I’ll go and see if I can help.” He looked at her, his eyes stinging. He could feel the heat already. “Stay here,” he repeated.

“I’m coming with you.” She did not even consider obeying him. “We’ve got to do what we can.”

“No . . . Detta . . .”

She started forward, moving swiftly toward the corner and the only clear way around to where the shattered building had collapsed into the street.

He went after her, afraid for her and yet with a lift of pride that her only thought was to help. For the moment English and Irish were the same, all capable of courage and pity.

The scene was horrible. Broken walls gaped, and scattered about were household goods, furniture, bedding, a mattress on fire on the footpath, clothes tattered like rags. The body of an old man, his legs missing, lay in blood on his own footpath.

A woman was standing paralyzed, her dress on fire.

“Oh, Mother of God!” Detta gasped, then swung to Matthew. “Coat!” she demanded. “Quick!”

He tore it off and she snatched it from him, lurching forward to throw it around the woman and then knock her to the ground, rolling her over and over.

Someone was shouting, words indistinguishable.

The fire was taking hold of the buildings. Timbers were exploding and showers of sparks arced through the air. Another blast shook the street and splintered glass crashed onto the pavements.

Matthew saw a body trapped under a fallen beam.

“Help me!” he yelled as loudly as his lungs would bear. “Help me lift this!” He charged forward, still shouting, and put all his weight to moving the massive length of wood. “Stay still!” he ordered. “We’ll get you out. Just don’t move.”

More rubble was falling and the heat was intensifying. Someone was there beside him and he felt the timbers begin to give. Then Detta was heaving at the fallen man, trying to reassure him.

An ambulance crew appeared and took the man away. Matthew and Detta moved to the next person, an old woman lying in the rubble, broken-legged and helpless.

“Don’t!” Detta said sharply as Matthew bent to lift her. “We’ll have to tie those legs or the jagged ends could cut an artery.”

Matthew understood immediately, and wondered how he could have been so stupid. But what could they use?

Detta was balanced on one leg. “Here,” she said, handing him her stockings. He bent to work. Another man came to help, hands trembling, sobbing under his breath. The noise around them was sporadic, shouts, sirens, more rubble falling, and above it all, what sounded like the crackle of gunfire. The air was full of dust and smoke, but it was beginning to settle.

Fire engines pulled up, horses tethered, eyes rolling, and another ambulance. The heat subsided as the water hit the flames with a roar of steam. Matthew returned from helping to carry the last injured person to find Detta filthy, her dress torn at the shoulders and her ankles bare beneath the hem of her skirt. There was a kind of triumph in the angle of her head, and weary and bruised as she was, she stood with grace. She smiled at him.

He gave her a half salute. It was not meant in mockery, it was the acknowledgment from one fighter to another. For once they were on the same side, and there was a sweetness he wanted to remember through the long loneliness ahead.

She looked into his eyes and saluted back.

The fire was nearly out inside the house. Somewhere beyond sight another wall collapsed, but with a thud, not an explosion.

“If we get out to the main road we might find a cab,” he said, looking down at her feet. He had never thought of feet being beautiful before, but hers were: neat and strong, high-arched. “Where are your shoes?”

She grimaced. “Under that wall,” she replied, gesturing toward a heap of shattered brick a dozen yards away.

“I’ll carry you as far as the pavement,” he answered, picking her up before she could argue. It felt good to hold her; she was lighter than he had expected.

He reached the end of the street and reluctantly put her down, slowly, so she was standing close to him and he could still feel the warmth of her. Then he saw the airplane. It was a tiny thing, double-winged, like a truncated dragonfly. It crossed the beam of light and disappeared. Then there was another one, climbing upward, veering right and left again. Gunfire tore into the silver ship, not the sturdy lower part carrying the bombs and the crew, but the huge, bright balloon.

There was a moment’s silence. He and Detta stared upward as the searchlights crisscrossed the darkness, catching the planes like angry insects. Tracer bullets arced through the night. And then it happened—an explosion of flame in the air as the gas caught fire and billowed up, lighting the sky.

“Oh, merciful God!” Detta said in horror. “What a terrible way to die!” She huddled closer to him, clinging onto his arm. Without his jacket he could feel the warmth of her fingers.

Matthew wasn’t thinking of the men in the zeppelin, but of the fireball sinking more and more rapidly, new explosions ripping it apart as the bombs left in it went off. He was realizing as it loomed above him that it would come to rest on the streets below in an inferno of destruction.

“Who?” he said hoarsely. “Them or us?”

She turned to look at him. Then she understood and her face went sheet-white. She started to say something and stopped. They stood close together, arms around each other, as the funeral pyre in the sky sank closer to the rooftops. It stretched out, an eternity—and no time at all—too little to escape. The glare increased. It was seconds away. They could feel the heat from where they were. What irony. Perhaps the parting he dreaded would never happen after all.

Everyone was transfixed, staring upward. A man in a long black coat crossed himself. An old woman was shaking her fist. A small dog barked furiously, racing round and round in circles, terrified and not knowing what to do.

A piece of burning debris landed fifty yards away.

People were passing them in the street, cars and wagons, everyone trying to get out of the way, but there was no time. What was left of the balloon with its gondola crashed on a row of houses and shops and another wave of fire billowed up.

Matthew started forward. He had no idea what on earth he could do, but it was instinctive to try. It was Detta who held him back.

“No,” she shouted, her voice harsh. “There’s nothing. No one will get out of that. Come. They need trained people now. We’ve done what we can. We’ll only be in the way.”

It was true, but it seemed a kind of defeat. He was exhausted. His whole body ached. He realized only now that he was also cut and burned. But infinitely more painful was the knowledge that they had said all there was to say, all the lies about England and Ireland, the half-truths about America, the evasions about Germany. Tonight they had seen a moment from the reality of war in the broken houses and shattered lives, the grief and the blood. And in attempting to help, they had seen the best in each other—but with nothing to add to it. This was a clean place to break.

They each thought they had been true to their cause, and deceived the other. Time would show who was right, and who was wrong would pay. It hurt almost beyond bearing that if he could, he had to make it her.

They walked slowly. The first available cab that passed would mean the time to say goodbye. She would not want him to know where she went home to. For minutes he did not look at the stream of traffic passing. The glare of fire made everything red. There were sirens behind them and the sound of other explosions—probably roofs caving in; slate, timbers, and glass bursting in the heat; gas mains exploding.

Was it going to go on like this, war from the air? No one safe anywhere?

He looked at the street and saw a cab moving slowly. It was time to put an end to the waiting. He put up his arm and the cab drew in to the curb.

“Where to, guv?” the driver asked. “You ’urt, sir? Yer din’t get caught in that bombing, did yer? ’Orspital?”

“No, we’re not hurt. Just tried to help a bit,” he replied. “Please take the lady wherever she wants to go.” He handed the driver half a crown, and opened the door for her.

She stood for a moment, the gleam from the fires red on the sides of her face, her dark eyes wide. There was no laughter in her at all, none of the old daring and imagination, only sadness. She looked very young.

“You’re wrong, Matthew,” she said quietly, a catch in her voice. “I don’t always like fighting. Sometimes it’s a rotten way to do things. Don’t change—that’s a battle I wouldn’t like to win.” She reached up and kissed him quickly on the mouth, then got into the cab and closed the door.

It pulled away from the curb, and he watched it until he could no longer distinguish it from the others in the darkness, then he started to walk. He walked all the way back to his flat. It took him an hour and a half, but it seemed like all night.

Joseph was getting considerably stronger. It still hurt him to walk, but far less now and he wore only a light sling on his arm. The bone was knitting well, and as long as he did not jar it he could ignore the occasional twinge.

He had been to see Gwen Neave. He was returning now across the fields, his footsteps soundless on the grass. He had meant to find out how she was, to offer any help, however slight, in the practical duties she would have to perform, although he thought she was probably extremely capable. And so it had proved. It was company she needed, and someone with whom she could speak in confidence about mounting tension in the village. Suspicion was cutting like acid into old friendships, leaving scars it might take years to heal. The Nunns and the Tevershams were whispering about each other. Someone had seen Mrs. Bateman with a foreign letter. One of Doughy Ward’s sisters had been accused of loose talk, or worse. There were fights at school. Children had broken old Billy Hoxton’s windows. It was all stupid and ugly, and growing worse.

Joseph had also felt compelled to pursue the investigation into Blaine’s death because it threatened Shanley Corcoran, and that was something he could not leave, however cruel or inappropriate it might seem to others. He had asked her about the person she had seen on a bicycle coming out of the path through the trees. He had questioned her persistently, but she could add nothing helpful.

Now he walked across the field and turned over in his mind all he knew. It was little enough. Theo Blaine had been on the edge of solving the last problem with the prototype of the invention, perhaps only a day or two from completing it. He had been having an affair with Penny Lucas, and no one was likely to tell the truth as to how serious that had been, or whether it was over, or in what circumstances.

Blaine had quarreled with his wife and gone down toward the potting shed on the evening of his death. She had said she had remained in the house, but there was nothing to corroborate that, or disprove it.

Dacy Lucas was accounted for, according to Perth. No one else was, unless you considered Shanley himself, and Archie, at the Cutlers’ Arms.

Someone had cycled along the path in the woods; the tire marks were there. Perth had estimated someone of moderate weight according to the depth of the tracks in the earth. A person of heavier build than most women, or else a lighter person carrying something. Gwen Neave had seen a man, she was adamant about that.

The fork had a raised screw that had scratched Perth’s hand when he swung it experimentally. If Blaine’s murderer hadn’t protected his hands, he would have a similar scratch. Except that it would probably be healed by now. Still, it might have been noticed by someone.

Or perhaps the killer had worn gloves. In any event, there were no fingerprints. Was it a crime of passion and opportunity? Or a carefully planned killing, and the fork simply a chance taken at the last minute?

Joseph had talked to Kerr as well, resurrecting everything he knew and had observed for himself. That had amounted to nothing of use. Perhaps he was stupid to have imagined otherwise. It had all ended in Kerr begging Joseph to deliver the sermon on Sunday.

He had stood in the pulpit and looked at the familiar faces turned toward him. He could see the squire, Mrs. Nunn, Tucky still swathed in bandages, Mrs. Gee, Plugger Arnold’s father, Hannah and the children, all the families he knew. They were waiting for him, full of confidence that he could give them some comfort and guidance.

For a moment he had felt panic seize him. No wonder Hallam Kerr was overwhelmed. Did any of the old stories in the old words answer the confusion of today? Would anyone hear the truth wrapped up in the phrases they were so used to?

He thought not. The Bible was all to do with other people, two thousand years ago and somewhere else. They would nod and say Joseph was a good man, and go out exactly the same as they had come in, still angry, frightened, and lost.

What use was religion if it was about somebody else? It was about you, or it was about no one. He had abandoned the story of Christ walking the road to Emmaus, unrecognized by the apostles, although it was one of his favorites. He told them instead of the reality of war in Ypres, where their own families were dying. He reminded them of the corpse-filled craters of no-man’s-land, and the agony endured in terrible wounds. He did not make it anything like as harsh as the reality, only enough to tear them out of their own present.

“These are our sons and brothers!” he had told them. “They’re doing this because they love us. They believe in home, the laughter and the tolerance we stand for, the things of labor and decency. If we don’t keep it a good home, if we soil it with bigotry and intolerance, if we learn how to hate and destroy, if we forget who we are, what are they dying to save? What is there left for those who survive to come home to?”

Now he stood in the grass and the sweet-smelling air, and was afraid he had said too much. No one had spoken to him afterward, and Kerr had looked gray-faced enough to be buried in his own churchyard. Only Mrs. Nunn had smiled at him, tears in her eyes, and nodded before she went on her way home.

The elms were heavy out over the fields, clouds towering high and bright into the blue of the sky, and there was hardly a sound in the wide peace of it, except for the wind and the larks.

He reached the edge of the field and the orchard gate. He unlatched it and went in. There was someone coming toward him, floundering awkwardly. For an instant it took him back to men floundering like that in the mud, the crash and thud of shells around them. But there was no sound amid the apple trees foaming with blossom, except Inspector Perth up to his knees in the uncut grass.

“We should get a scythe to it,” Joseph apologized. “Nobody’s had time.”

Perth dismissed the suggestion with a wave. He was a town man, and he did not expect to find things here comfortable. He looked grim, lips drawn tight and brow wrinkled. “I’ve bad news, Captain Reavley,” he said, perhaps unnecessarily. “Can we stay out here, sir? This mustn’t go any further. In fact I would probably be in trouble if anyone knew I’d told you, but could be as I’ll need your help before we’re through.”

“What is it?” Joseph felt a flutter of fear making him a little sick.

“The Scientific Establishment’s been broken into again and . . .”

Shanley Corcoran! He had been murdered as Joseph had dreaded. He should have done something when he had the chance. Shanley knew who killed Blaine, and he had let himself be—

“I’m sorry, Captain Reavley,” Perth apologized again, cutting through his thoughts. “Mr. Corcoran’s very upset, and knowing you’re a friend of his for a long time, I . . .”

Joseph felt his heart beating in his throat. “He’s upset? Then he’s all right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘all right,’ ” Perth qualified, biting his lip. “He looks like a man at the end of his strength, to me.”

“You said the Establishment was broken into? What happened? Was anyone hurt? Do you know who did it?” Joseph could hear his own voice out of control, and he could not stop it. Corcoran was all right! That was all that mattered. He was dizzy with relief.

“No, we don’t know,” Perth replied. “That’s the thing, sir. Whoever it was smashed the piece of equipment the scientists were working on. Prototype, they called it. Broke it to bits. Mr. Corcoran says they’ll have to start again from the beginning.”

“But he wasn’t hurt?” Joseph insisted.

“No, sir. He was in a different part of the building. Nowhere near it, thank heaven. But he looks proper wore out, like he was coming down with the flu, or something.” He shook his head, his plain, pleasant face twisted in concern. “He’s a very brave man, Captain Reavley, but I don’t know how long he can go on like this. It looks as if there’s no question we’ve got a spy in the village, or hereabouts, and that’s a bitter thing.” His mouth was pinched as he said it and there was a downward tone in his voice, as if he had struggled a long time to avoid facing that conclusion.

Joseph looked at him with a sudden clarity, seeing not just a methodical policeman who was tackling a difficult case, but a man of deep loyalties to his country.

The blossom was drifting off the pear tree, the white petals lost in the high grasses, and a thrush was singing in the hedge.

“War changes us,” he said to Perth.

Perth swung his head around, his eyes miserable and challenging. “Does it, sir?”

“Strips us down to the best and the worst in us.” Joseph smiled at him very slightly, just a warmth in his eyes. “I think so. I’ve found heroes where I didn’t expect, as well as villains.”

“Yes, I suppose,” Perth conceded. “I’d like to put men in the Establishment to keep Mr. Corcoran safe, but I haven’t got anyone to spare. But I wouldn’t know who to tell him to watch, and the intelligence people wouldn’t let me anyway. There’s nothing to do but find the bastard and see that he’s hanged! And they will hang him, for what he did to poor Mr. Blaine, apart from anything else. I’d like to know what ideas you have, Captain. I know you’ve been thinking on it a great deal.”

Joseph nodded. It was a miserable thought, but an inevitable one. He wished with a savage depth that he had more to tell Perth, something of meaning. “I’ll go and talk to Francis Iliffe, and see what I can find out,” he said. But he resolved first to go and try to comfort Shanley Corcoran.

In the house on Marchmont Street the Peacemaker received a visitor. It was the same young man who had called before to bring him word from Cambridgeshire. He stood in the upstairs room, his young face tired. He was trying to hide at least some of his unease, but it was more out of courtesy than any hope to deceive.

“Have the police discovered who killed Blaine?” the Peacemaker asked.

“No,” the young man replied. “To begin with, they considered the probability that it was a domestic matter. Blaine was having an affair with Lucas’s wife. But Lucas couldn’t have killed him. He can prove quite easily that he was somewhere else.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes. I checked it myself.”

“What about Blaine’s wife?” the Peacemaker asked.

“Possible. But they aren’t considering her seriously, I don’t think. . . .”

“Couldn’t be a woman’s crime?” the Peacemaker said with derision. “Rubbish. A strong, healthy young woman, driven by jealousy, could easily have done it. From what you say, it was a crime of opportunity and passion anyway. The weapon was already there. No one brought it! That’s hardly planned.”

“I know that.” A flicker of impatience crossed the young man’s features. “But someone broke into the Establishment the day before yesterday, late in the evening, and smashed the prototype. . . .”

“And you come to tell me now?” the Peacemaker demanded, his hands clenching, fury rising inside him like bile.

The young man’s eyebrows rose, his eyes wide. “And if I’d come racing up to London the morning after, don’t you think Inspector Perth might have regarded me a great deal more closely than either of us want?” There was no respect or fear in his voice. That was a change the Peacemaker noted with interest.

“Smashed it?” he asked. “Didn’t take it?”

“Exactly.”

“Why? Any ideas?”

“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” the young man answered. “The actual guidance system is not too large or too heavy for one man to carry, and that’s all you would need. The rest of it is pretty standard—that’s the beauty of it. It could be used on anything: torpedo, depth charge, even regular shell, if you wanted.”

“I know that!” the Peacemaker snapped. “Is that the best you can do?”

A flash of temper lit the young man’s eyes, but he controlled it. “The Establishment would be extraordinarily difficult to break into. They have doubled the guards, but no one was attacked.”

“Bribery?”

“It’s possible, but they’d have had to bribe at least three men in order to reach where the prototype was.”

“Money would be no object,” the Peacemaker pointed out.

“But the more people you bribe, the more chance of one of them changing his mind or betraying you. And you’ve not only got to get in, you’ve got to get out again. And what about afterward? Do you want to leave three men who have that knowledge?”

The Peacemaker waited.

“I think no one came in or went out,” the young man said. “It was someone inside all the time.”

The Peacemaker relaxed. It made perfect sense. “And I assume if it were you, you would tell me?” he said with an edge to his voice—half humor, half threat.

“I wouldn’t smash it before it’s finished,” the young man replied levelly. “If you don’t believe my loyalty, at least believe my intellectual curiosity.”

“I hadn’t thought to question your loyalty,” the Peacemaker said very carefully. “Should I?” There was something in the young man’s manner, a change in the timber of his voice since the last time he had been here. Or perhaps, on reflection, it dated further back.

“I still believe exactly as I did when we first met,” the young man said intently, his concentration sudden and very real. “More so, if anything.”

The Peacemaker knew that that was the literal truth, but was there some double edge to the meaning of the words? “Then it seems we have a third player in the game,” he said very slowly.

The young man paled. “I think perhaps we have. And before you ask me, I have no idea who.”

“Are they still going forward?”

“Yes. Corcoran is determined, whatever the cost. He’s working all day and half the night as it is. I don’t know when he eats or sleeps. He looks twenty years older than he did two months ago.”

“Were you close to success?” It was a question he hardly dared ask. If Corcoran did succeed, then Britain would gain a whole new lease on life at sea. It could prolong the war another year, even two—and God alone knew how many more lives would be lost.

The young man did not answer the question. His face was bleak, his eyes unhappy.

“If he does, you must take it for Germany,” the Peacemaker said with a sudden flare of passion. “Tell me when he’s anywhere near it, whatever it costs you! I’ll see the prototype is taken, if I have to burn the place to the ground.”

The young man nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll watch. I’m working on it myself. Unless Corcoran gets a sudden breakthrough, I’ll be able to see it in advance.” His voice was oddly flat, possessing none of the hunger there used to be. Was he tired, harassed by the police presence, the questions intruding on his work, the suspicion? Or was he really afraid there was a third player, and his own life was at risk?

Or was he going soft, learning to become too much part of one small village in Cambridgeshire, and its people? He must be watched. The work, the goal was too important to indulge any individual.

Two days later the Peacemaker had a very different visitor. This was not a young English scientist with a pleasant freckled face and brown hair that waved off his brow. It was an Irishman closer to fifty, of average height, lean-bodied, his hair neither dark nor fair. If one did not study the expression in his face, he was unremarkable. Only his eyes reflected his intelligence, and then only if he chose that they should.

He stood in front of the Peacemaker, carefully balanced as if to run or to strike, but it was only habit. He had been here many times, and his weapons in this battle were of the intellect.

“Have they the code?” the Peacemaker asked him bluntly.

“No,” Hannassey replied. “They’ve worked out how the saboteurs get their funding and who they are by turning a German agent in the docks, and using a double agent in the banking system.”

“Are you sure?” the Peacemaker asked with a lift of interest.

“Yes. The double agent was murdered,” Hannassey replied. “We found the body. The main thing is that our plans in Mexico can go ahead. The code is safe. We can run rings around the Americans, keep them busy on the Rio Grande for another year at least. Bleed them dry. After that it won’t matter whether or not they enter the war.”

“And you trust Bernadette—not just her loyalty, but her judgment?” the Peacemaker persisted. There was an arrogance in Hannassey that he did not like.

Hannassey smiled, a cold expression of mirth without pleasure. “Sure, I’d trust her loyalty to the end of the earth and beyond,” he replied. “She has the courage to take on God Himself.” There was a shadow in his face, but he did not explain it. Bernadette was his daughter. If he saw a flaw in her he would admit it to no one else, least of all his men.

The Peacemaker offered no comment. He had assessed Bernadette for himself. He trusted no one else’s judgment.

Hannassey was motionless. His intense, controlled stillness was one of the few things that marked him out physically. “Who are the leaders of British Naval Intelligence?” he asked with the slightest smile. “One superannuated admiral who blinks like an owl, a chief with a wooden leg, and a couple of dozen assorted academics from this college and that.” He was not being dismissive; it was simply fact. The British were amateurs.

The Peacemaker relaxed. He knew the men of British Intelligence. “Tell Bernadette we are grateful,” he said generously. “It’s a fine piece of work.”

“She didn’t do it for you,” Hannassey told him. “Or for Ger-many. She works for Ireland as a united country free of British rule, and with its rightful place in Europe. We’ve a proud heritage, older and better than yours, and far older than Germany’s.” His lip curled very slightly. “Neither do I work for you. We’ve a bargain, and I expect you to keep your side of it, starting with more money to support our men, and the right word in the ear of the right man about how the Easter Uprising is dealt with. We’ll need a great deal more support next time, not only financial but political.” His eyes were unflinching and there was an ugliness in his face, as if threat were very close to the surface.

The Peacemaker saw it, and understood exactly what it was. “Give us a list of your requirements,” he said calmly. “I’ll consider them.” He made a mental decision to get rid of Hannassey as soon as the opportunity offered itself. He had already exceeded his usefulness. If things worked out as he intended in Cambridgeshire, that opportunity would come very soon.

He looked up at Hannassey and smiled.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Joseph needed far more to take to Perth than vague ideasabout Blaine’s death and the terrible fear for Shanley Corcoran corroding inside him. It was now inescapable that there was a German sympathizer within the Establishment. No one had broken in to smash the prototype; Perth had proved that beyond doubt. Whatever Theo Blaine’s romantic affairs had been, it was now ridiculous to suppose they were the cause of his death, or that Lizzie was involved.

It was for that reason that Joseph felt it was acceptable to ask her to drive him to meet with Francis Iliffe in the evening after his conversation with Perth in the orchard.

It was dusk as they left the village street in St. Giles and turned onto the road toward Haslingfield. She was concentrating on the twists, verges now almost hidden by the tall grass and the bursting leaf of hedgerows, here and there an early may blossom blooming white. And there was always the possibility of coming on a farm implement in the roadway, or horses, sometimes even a herd of cows.

“Do you know Francis?” Lizzie asked, slowing down for a curve.

“No.” That was the part that Joseph was going to find most difficult. He was intruding into the home of a man he had not even met, with the intention of asking him impertinent questions, and even implying that he might be guilty of murder. He smiled ruefully, aware of his own absurdity. “I was hoping you would introduce me. I apologize if I am placing you in an embarrassing position.” However, he did not offer her the chance of retreating.

She glanced sideways at him, then back at the road. “You’re really worried about Mr. Corcoran, aren’t you?” she said quietly. There was sympathy in her voice, a sudden gentleness. Her own pain was still raw and full of surprise.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Whoever it is has already killed once, and smashed the machine.”

She winced.

“I’m sorry.” He was callous to have mentioned it to her so clumsily. He realized that he was requiring her to take him to see the man who might have murdered her husband, with as little thought for her feelings as if she had been a taxi driver. He blushed with shame for himself. “Mrs. Blaine, I really am sorry! I’ve behaved with terrible insensitivity. I was so afraid for Shanley I forgot your feelings altogether. I . . .”

“It’s all right. I know what you’re thinking. Truly. You can’t bring Theo back, and you’re trying to save a man who can finish his work and create something to win the war, and—far more important to you—a man you love as a friend and something like a father. I understand.”

He was embarrassed for her gentleness, and his own stupidity. “You are very forgiving,” he said sincerely.

She gave a little laugh, sad and self-deprecatory. “Not usually. It’s something I need to learn. I didn’t forgive Theo, and now it’s too late. I expected him to be clever in everything, not just some things, and people aren’t like that. Just because he could invent new and extraordinary machines didn’t mean he was wise as well, where people are concerned. I think mathematicians are young, the men that are geniuses. Understanding of people tends to come with age.”

“Is Iliffe brilliant as well?” he asked.

She looked at him quickly again, then back at the road. “You mean is he a fool over women? Probably, but I don’t know.”

“Do you know Ben Morven, too?” He thought of Hannah, but he would not ask Lizzie if she knew about the situation.

“Yes. He’s a bit naïve also, an idealist,” she replied. “But a nice one. Not as abrasive as Francis Iliffe.”

“What sort of idealist?”

“Social justice,” she answered. “He thinks education is the answer for everyone. He’s rather sweet, but very provincial.”

They were out on the Haslingfield road and drove in silence for a while. The western sky in front of them flamed with color, and faded as they headed toward Iliffe’s home. Joseph tried to prepare what he would say. It was late to call on anyone, and discourteous to do so without notice in advance, but urgency precluded such niceties.

Iliffe opened the door himself. He was in his early thirties, lean and dark-haired. At the moment he was wearing rather baggy trousers, a white shirt, and an old cricketing sweater against the evening chill. The lighted hallway behind him had the cleanliness of a house kept by a domestic servant, and the untidiness of one lived in by a young, single man who was interested in ideas and to whom physical surroundings were of little importance.

“Yes?” Iliffe looked at Joseph curiously, not immediately seeing Lizzie beyond the circle of the light.

Prepared explanations deserted Joseph and he was left with nothing but bare honesty, and his fear for Corcoran made anything else ridiculous.

“Good evening, Mr. Iliffe,” he said candidly. “My name is Joseph Reavley. Shanley Corcoran is a friend of mine; he has been for years. I’m deeply afraid for his safety, and that of anyone else working at the Establishment.”

A flicker of humor lit Iliffe’s thin, intelligent face. “Thanks for your concern. Did you come here to tell me that?” There was an understandable edge to his voice. “A letter would have sufficed.”

Joseph felt himself blushing. “Of course not. I’m on sick leave from Ypres, where I’m a chaplain.” He saw Iliffe’s expression change and knew he had redeemed at least something of the situation. “I know Inspector Perth from another case, before the war. I intend to help him, whether he likes it or not.”

Iliffe smiled and stepped back. “Come in.” Then he saw Lizzie and his eyes softened. “If you’re a friend of Lizzie’s, you can’t be as bad as you seem,” he added, leading them to a sitting room where books and papers were scattered on every surface. He tidied them, putting them in a pile on the desk, and offered his guests seats.

“It’s not secret stuff,” he said disparagingly, seeing Joseph’s surprise. “I’m designing a sailing boat, one of those to put on ponds? I want to be able to steer it from the shore.”

Joseph found himself smiling.

“So what do you want from me?” Iliffe asked with interest. “If I had any proof who it was I’d have done something about it myself.”

Joseph knew what he wanted to ask; what he did not know was how to measure the truth of the answers he received. “How brilliant was Theo Blaine?” he asked. He wished Lizzie were not there, but the advantage was that she was at least some measure for accuracy.

“The best,” Iliffe said frankly. His eyes went to Lizzie with a smile, then back to Joseph again.

“Can you finish without him?” Joseph continued.

Iliffe shrugged. “Touch and go. Not if some swine smashes the prototype again. It’s worth a try, but I’m not sure.”

“With Corcoran working on it personally?”

Iliffe looked unhappy.

Joseph waited. There was a keen edge of intelligence in Iliffe’s face. He understood the reasoning, and guessed the personal gain and loss.

“If Morven works on it, perhaps,” he answered. “Corcoran alone, no.” He offered no apology and no prevarication.

“What can you tell me about Morven?” Joseph asked.

“Intellectually? He’s outstanding. Almost in Blaine’s category.”

“And in other ways?”

Iliffe looked at Lizzie, but she allowed him to answer without adding anything herself.

“Grew up in working-class Lancashire,” Iliffe said. “Grammar school, Manchester University. Opened up a new world to him. Don’t know if you can understand that, Mr. Reavley. Sorry, I don’t know your rank. . . .”

“Captain, but it’s irrelevant. Yes, I can understand it. I lectured in Biblical languages in Cambridge before the war. I had many students with a similar background, some were even brilliant, in their own field.” He ignored the pain inside him as he said that.

Iliffe saw it. “Gone to the trenches?” he asked.

“Many of them, yes. It’s not exactly a war-exempt skill.”

“Then you know the impact of ideas on a boy from a narrow, working-class town suddenly in a ferment of social, political, and philosophical ideas, realizing he’s got a dazzling mind and the whole world is out there, and his for the conquering. Morven’s an idealist. At least he was a year ago. I think some of the dreams have been tempered a bit by reality since then. One grows up. Are you thinking he’s a German sympathizer?”

“Are you?” Joseph countered.

Lizzie looked from one to the other of them, but she did not interrupt.

“No, frankly,” Iliffe replied. “But a socialist, possibly. Even an internationalist of sorts. I can’t see him killing Blaine.” He glanced at Lizzie. “Sorry,” he apologized gently. He turned back to Joseph. “But then I can’t see anyone doing that, and obviously someone did. Does your pastoral experience teach you how to recognize violence like that behind the everyday faces, Reverend?”

“No,” Joseph said simply. “We all have the darkness. Some act on it; most of us don’t. I can’t tell who will, or who already has.”

“Pity,” Iliffe said drily. “I was hoping you had all the answers. I’m damn sure I don’t.”

Outside on the way home again Lizzie said very little. Joseph apologized once more for having asked her to drive him on such a journey.

“Don’t.” She shook her head. “In an obscure sort of way it makes me feel better to think I’m doing something. It isn’t right to carry on with my life as if Theo were going to come back one day. I was his wife. I loved him. . . . I ought to be trying to find out who killed him, and prevent them from killing his work as well.”

He looked at her face, concentrated on the dark road and the bright path of the headlights. He could see only her profile, lips smiling, and tears on her cheek.

He did not say anything and they drove home in an oddly companionable silence.

The next day was Sunday. Archie had come home late the previous evening for a short leave, but he made the effort to get up and they all went to church together, dressed in their best clothes. Archie and Joseph both wore uniforms and Hannah walked between them, her head high with pride. They spoke to everyone they knew, assuring them they were well, asking in return but never mentioning other members of families. One could not be certain from day to day who was critically injured, posted missing in action, or even newly dead. There was kindness in it, sensitivity to pain and fear, and the knowledge that the blow could come at any moment. There was so much that could not be said, or the dam would break.

Joseph saw Ben Morven in a pew to their left, and caught his eyes on Hannah, watching her with a bright gentleness that betrayed more than he could have known. Once he saw Hannah look back at him, and then away again quickly, blushing.

The submerged tension in the air was crackling. Everyone practiced Sunday-best behavior, but the anger and suspicion were there, conspicuous in the tight lips, the whispers, and the silences.

Joseph wondered if Ben could possibly have killed Theo Blaine. Perhaps in a fistfight? He was young and strong and passionate in his loves and his dreams. But not in the dark, ripping his throat out with a garden fork! Could he?

That was absurdly naÏve. Idealism had crucified men, burned them at the stake, broken them on the wheel. Of course he could. It was hypocrisy that made the hand fail, cowardice, apathy, all the half-hearted emotions. Ben Morven was not half-hearted, right or wrong.

Kerr’s sermon was unusually effective, and Joseph caught his anxious glance two or three times. However much he would prefer to avoid it, he must speak to the minister. He waited behind after everyone else had left.

Kerr was standing at the church door, moving uncomfortably from one foot to the other. His hair was slicked back with its exact center parting, a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead in the warmth of the sun.

“The suspicion is tearing us apart,” he said before Joseph had time to speak. “All sorts of stupid whispers are going around the village. Old feuds we all thought were settled years ago are being opened up again. Anybody gets a letter from a stranger, an overseas stamp on it, and the stories begin. That wretched inspector talks to everyone and either someone says he suspects that person, or they’re telling stories about someone else, trying to plant suspicion.”

“It’s bad,” Joseph agreed somberly. “I came just to commend you on your sermon, but . . .”

Pleasure lit Kerr’s face, and Joseph suddenly realized, with surprise and a degree of guilt, that Kerr admired him intensely. He cared what Joseph thought. His impatience or indifference would wound with real pain, perhaps lasting.

“But perhaps we should think a little about this,” he added. “It’s a very serious problem.”

Now Kerr was surprised. He had not expected help, and that too made Joseph aware of a streak of unkindness in himself. He had had the time, simply not the inclination. If he were going to stay here, then he should face the villagers’ needs, not simply use them as an excuse not to go back to the trenches.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Kerr was saying. “I can’t decide whether it would be better to speak about it generally, without making anyone feel singled out, or to go to each one I know is guilty, and tackle it unequivocally.” He was talking too quickly. “Sometimes an oblique approach is better. It allows people to deny it and at the same time do something about it.” He looked at Joseph hopefully.

They smiled at the Teversham family as they huddled together along the path.

“It’s a good point,” Joseph conceded. “You touched on it today. I didn’t realize at the time quite how bad it had become.”

Kerr nodded. He began to look less tense and he stood still at last as if he were easy in front of his own church. “Of course the difficulty is that if you speak of something in a sermon, so often the people you mean it for are quite sure it is directed at everyone but them,” he said.

Joseph put his hands in his pockets. It was a curiously valuable sense of freedom to be rid of the sling at last, even though he tended to carry his arm bent a little. “Then you will have to speak to people as you become aware of their behavior,” he said decisively.

Kerr gulped.

Joseph smiled at him, but it was an expression of sympathy, devoid of judgment. “Rotten,” he agreed. “But there are ways of doing it. Have you considered asking their help?”

“Help?” Kerr said incredulously, sure he had misheard. “From the ones creating the most damage?”

“Exactly. Tell them how much pain and fear it’s causing, but attribute it to someone else. Think how they can then agree with you and save their pride, and at the same time crush what’s happening.”

“I see! Yes. Yes, I think . . .” He gulped again. “That might work.” He smiled. “Rather well.”

“It’s somewhere to start,” Joseph said encouragingly. “And you are quite right, it must be addressed, and there isn’t really anyone else who has the moral authority.”

Kerr squared his shoulders. “Thank you, Captain Reavley. You really are a very great help. There is something valuable for me to do here. I see that.” He held out his hand. “Please believe me, I shall do my best.”

It was a kind of farewell, as if Joseph would be leaving soon. A sharp guilt stabbed him that he was not. He had not actually sent the letter yet, but it was on the desk in the study, ready to go. He just had not got around to posting it. He had not told Hannah he would stay, but he had allowed her to believe it, to hope, and now in the silent graveyard it seemed a coward’s thing to do, a desertion. He could not make himself tell Kerr that he had decided not to return. There were all sorts of phrases in his mind, ready to say, and none of them sounded good. And above all, Tom would no longer see him as a hero, but just one more man who had escaped when he could, who no longer faced forward.

If he changed his mind now he would be letting Hannah down, but whatever he did he would be letting someone down. It was not that Tom’s opinion of him mattered more than hers, and he would have to make her understand that it was his own opinion. This quiet village with its ancient church, its graveyard where his parents were buried, its vast trees and sunlit fields, its domestic lives, its quarrels, was infinitely precious. The only way to help it was not to cling, but to be willing to let go, to give, not to take.

Kerr was looking at him, waiting for the acknowledgment he needed.

“I have no doubt of that,” Joseph said sincerely. “And it will be enough. But don’t be afraid of failure. No one wins all the time. If you win most of it you will have done a great thing.” He took Kerr’s hand and gripped it hard before turning away and walking down the path to the lych-gate and onto the road.

Archie was reading the newspaper in the sitting room when Joseph burst in. “Can you drive me to the Establishment, now, to see Ben Morven?”

“This afternoon?” Archie said in disbelief.

“Sorry,” Joseph apologized. “It can’t wait.”

“You think it’s Morven?” Archie still looked doubtful.

“I don’t know. I can’t afford to take the risk that it isn’t.”

“And he’ll kill Corcoran as soon as he’s sure the prototype is complete?” Archie’s whole attention was engaged now.

Joseph was confused. He had wrestled with the thoughts, turning them over and over in his mind. He would far rather have come to a different conclusion. He had liked Ben, but the theory fitted too well: the brilliant boy growing up where he could see and taste plenty of anger and social injustice, attending a university where suddenly the whole world expanded before him with its infinite opportunities and where thought had a power close to God! Joseph had seen it in so many young men, the passion of idealism overwhelming patience and caution. Words of warning infuriated where pain was seen on a vast scale, and a solution beckoned.

A man like the Peacemaker would find recruits there so easily. Joseph had experienced it before at St. John’s. It was happening again, it was bound to, as long as there were young men with dreams, and powerful men willing to use them.

Last time the price had been John Reavley’s life. This time it could be Shanley Corcoran’s. The difference was that now Joseph could see it, and stop it.

“Probably,” he answered Archie’s question. “He has no need to keep him alive once it’s finished.”

Archie was still hesitant.

“He killed Theo Blaine!” Joseph said with bitter regret. “He tore his throat out with a garden fork. Why wouldn’t he kill Shanley?”

“He would,” Archie conceded. “We’d better go. Are you going to tell Hannah why?”

“No . . . at least . . .” Joseph was uncertain. “I’ll tell her it’s to do with Blaine’s death, then at least she’ll know why you have to go. I can’t ask Mrs. Blaine to drive me again.”

“I’ll borrow Bibby Nunn’s car. It’s not exactly elegant, but it goes. I’ll see you in half an hour. I suppose Shanley will be at home?”

“If he isn’t, we’ll wait,” Joseph replied simply.

They spoke of other things as they drove—memories, family affairs, nothing of the war. Joseph had wondered whether to say anything of Hannah’s desire to know more of Archie’s life at sea, and decided it was up to her whether or not she asked further. Any intrusion might be clumsy, and apart from that, if what she learned was more than she afterward wanted to bear, then it must be of her own choosing.

Orla Corcoran was surprised to see Joseph on the step. Archie had decided to remain in the car, possibly to walk a little once Joseph had gone inside.

“He’s not home yet,” she said, showing Joseph into the drawing room. The curtains were still open to let in the evening light. Orla looked elegant and faintly exotic with her smooth, dark hair and her eyes so black it was impossible to read their expression.

Joseph could not afford to worry about keeping Archie waiting outside. “Then may I wait?” he asked. “It’s important.”

She stood motionless, lean and graceful, the sun on her shoulders. “Is it about Blaine’s death?” she said quietly. It was a natural guess.

“Yes. I’m sorry.” Did she know, too? Was she just as afraid for Shanley as he was? He realized with shock that in spite of all the years of superficial familiarity he did not know her anything like as well as he knew her husband. She never spoke of herself, always of him. Joseph knew nothing of her dreams, beliefs, or what she might have wanted apart from being Mrs. Corcoran. How deeply did it hurt her that she had no children? He had never seen her spend time alone with any of his own family, nor did she now call on Hannah. It was always Shanley who took the lead.

Was she simply shy? Or uninterested? Or guarding a hurt too deep to expose, even to friends? The mask of shadow created by the sunlight behind her showed nothing in her face. Joseph made the decision. “I’m afraid for him,” he said suddenly.

“Of course,” she agreed. “We’re all afraid. What happened to Theo Blaine was terrible.”

“Who did it?” he asked.

Her fine eyebrows rose. “Do you think I know?”

“I think Shanley does.”

She turned away. “Would you like a glass of sherry while you are waiting?”

So she was not going to answer. Perhaps that was an answer in itself. He accepted the sherry in a small, crystal glass, and they talked of other things. Corcoran arrived fifteen minutes later, pale-faced and clearly exhausted. He could not hide that it cost him an effort to be courteous, even to Joseph, close as they were.

“I didn’t recognize the car,” he said without expression. “You’re well enough to drive. I’m glad.”

“Archie borrowed one,” Joseph explained. “I expect he’s gone for a walk.”

Corcoran turned away. “I see.”

“I’m sorry,” Joseph apologized immediately. “If it could have waited I wouldn’t have come.”

Corcoran sighed. He accepted a glass of sherry from Orla, but did not touch it. He probably had not eaten, perhaps all day. Joseph was consumed with guilt, but his fear for him overtook it all.

Orla slipped out without bothering to excuse herself.

Corcoran turned to face Joseph. “What is it?”

“I’ve been asking questions,” Joseph replied. “I won’t bother you with the details, unless you want them, but you probably know them as well as I do.” He looked at Corcoran’s weary face and felt a pity for him so intense it was a physical ache inside him, and a fear of loss that brought a sheen of sweat to his body. “I think Ben Morven was placed inside the Establishment to be a spy for the Germans, perhaps groomed for it even before the war. One of the idealistic young men who must have peace, at any price, and see us as just as much to blame for the war as anyone else.”

Corcoran’s face tightened, a subtle change in his expression, but one of terrible sadness.

“I think you knew that,” Joseph went on. He was finding it even harder to say than he had expected. The room seemed to be abnormally silent, his own voice thundering, although he was speaking softly. “And I think that for the sake of England, and the war, you are sheltering him for as long as you need his skill to finish the prototype.”

Corcoran took a long, deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “And if you are right, Joseph, what difference does that make?”

“You must have him arrested,” Joseph said simply. “You have no choice.”

Corcoran’s eyes widened. “Must?”

“He murdered Blaine. He’ll kill you, Shanley, the moment he thinks he doesn’t need you. And possibly Iliffe, too, if he gets in his way. Or Lucas, for that matter. But I’m not going to lose you.”

Corcoran’s face was soft, his eyes gentle. “My dear Joseph, it is not about me, or about you. It is about England, and the war. Morven will not harm anyone until he has the final answers. I am safe until then.”

“And you are sure you will judge that correctly?” Joseph challenged. “To the hour? To the minute?”

“Are you returning to Ypres, Joseph?”

“Don’t evade the subject.”

“I’m not. Are you going?”

“Yes.” He was surprised that he did not even hesitate. “Yes, I am.”

“And might you be killed?” Corcoran asked.

“Yes,” Joseph said quietly. “But more probably not. I won’t run any unnecessary risks.”

Corcoran smiled for the first time. “Rubbish! You will go out into no-man’s-land just as you have always done. And if you die Hannah will mourn for you, and her children will, and Matthew, and Judith. And so shall I. But I shan’t tell you that you cannot go. You must do your duty as you see it, Joseph. And so must I. But it matters to me immensely that you cared enough to come and try to prevent me. The fact that it is utterly wrong, and against all you believe yourself, is a mark of your affection I shall not forget. Now please allow me to wish you good night, before I become too tired to keep my feelings under control, and embarrass us both.”

Joseph was defeated and he knew it. Corcoran’s argument was unanswerable. There was nothing for him to do but say good night and go out to find Archie. He did so with a heavy heart, but as much grace as he could manage.

Archie was due to leave on the early train next day. There was no more time left for Hannah to waste. It was late. They were both tired, but if she missed her chance to ask for the truth now, there might be no other time. When he left, she would miss him in every way: his voice, his touch, his laughter, the light in his face, the smell of his skin. But more important, this might be her last chance of knowing the man inside the shell, the thing that was unique and eternal.

She sat on the bed and watched him move his small case to where he could pack it in the morning. She must speak now. Tomorrow he could avoid her; the children might interrupt; there would be any number of reasons and excuses.

“Abby called to see me a few weeks ago,” she began. “You know Paul was killed in France.”

He looked up. “If you told me, I’d forgotten. I’m sorry. How was she?” There was pity in his face and a kind of crumpled sadness, as if he were seeing Abby in her, or perhaps her in Abby.

“Full of regret,” she answered. She hated doing this! It was not too late to leave it, not try to force him to tell her. Let him have a last evening at home in peace. Leave the war until tomorrow.

He did not understand. “Regret? You mean grief?”

She steeled herself. “No, I did mean regret. There was so much she didn’t know about him, about his life, what he cared about, what he felt. Now it’s too late.”

“You never know all that people care about,” he said, pushing the case away behind the wardrobe back where he could not see it.

She forced herself to continue.

“A friend of his came by and told her all sorts of things about him,” she said. “In France, what a good officer he was, what a good friend. That was when she realized that this man knew her husband far better than she did.”

“I’m sorry. But there’s nothing you can do to help her. There’s no point in thinking about it.”

Was he misunderstanding her on purpose?

“No. But I can help myself!”

There was a closed look in his face, touched with anger. “What are you talking about? No, don’t bother explaining. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” she insisted. She was sitting still in the bed. He was less than a couple of yards away, and it could have been miles. “You never tell me what your life is like at sea. I don’t know anything about the men you serve with, who you like, who you don’t, or why.” She gulped and went on, speaking too quickly now, and aware of it. “I don’t know what you do every day, but far more than that, I don’t know what hurts you, or frightens you, or makes you laugh.” She could see the surprise in his eyes, and the defense already. “Archie, I need to know!” she insisted. “I want to! Please—it isn’t really a kindness to shut me out. I know you’re doing it to protect me, and probably because you don’t want to talk about it anyway. You want to keep a place where war can’t intrude, somewhere clean and separate.”

He was staring at her. “For God’s sake, Hannah! Can’t we just have a pleasant evening? I have to go tomorrow.”

“I need to know!” she said with rising desperation. She knew she was angering him, risking pushing him further away. They might even part with a quarrel! That would be unbearable. It could be for the last time. That thought beat in her mind, almost choking the words, her throat was so tight. “When you’re gone it’s as if you disappear!” she said hoarsely. “I know a part of you so well it’s as if we’d always been together, but there’s a whole world, terribly important, that I’m shut out of as if I couldn’t understand and don’t belong. But at the moment it’s the biggest part of you. It’s what you spend your life doing. It’s what makes you who you are, what you believe, what makes you real. I need to know it, Archie!”

“I can’t tell you,” he said with patience that obviously cost him a tremendous effort, almost more than he possessed. “It’s ugly, Hannah. It would give you nightmares and your imagination would torture you. You can’t help! Just . . .”

“I’m not trying to help you!” Her voice was rising in spite of her effort to keep it under control. “Can’t you see that I’m trying to help myself! And if I have to, help Tom. What if something happens to you, and Tom asks me what you were like? What am I going to say? I don’t know? He never told me? Do you think that will satisfy him, when his father’s gone and he can’t ask? Do you think it will satisfy me? We need to know, Archie. Maybe it will hurt, but that’s better than a lifetime of hating myself because I didn’t have the courage to face it.”

“Tell you what?” he said wearily, sitting on the floor and crossing his legs as if he had given up. “What it feels like to live in a few square feet that’s never still, even when the sea’s calm? Do you want me to tell you how cold it is? The wind off the North Atlantic whips the skin from your flesh. How tired you get when you’ve only had a couple of hours’ sleep, and day and night blend into each other till you can’t think, can’t feel, can’t eat, and you feel sick? You know what it’s like to be exhausted. You’ve experienced it yourself with sick children, up every half hour, or more.”

“It’s not the same,” she said, wondering if it was.

“At sea you stare out at the ocean till you’re blind,” he went on, almost as if ignoring her. “You know every wave could hide a torpedo. One moment you are standing on the deck, pitching and sliding, and the next you’re deafened by the noise of tearing metal, and you know you could be pounded, broken, and suffocated by icy waters, dragged down into the darkness and never come up again. You imagine your lungs bursting, and pain obliterating everything else.”

She sat frozen, her muscles locked and aching.

He went on, his voice was softer, cut across with grief. “Shall I tell you about fire at sea? Or what it’s like to see a gun turret hit, and bodies of men you know cut to pieces, blood everywhere, human arms and legs lying on the deck? Or would it be enough if I just stick to the long days and nights of monotony while you wait, and wonder, cold, tired, eating sea rations, trying to work out how you’ll deal with the attack when it comes, how you’ll keep the men together, keep heart in them—be worthy of their trust in you that somehow you can get them out of it? And how you’ll live with it if you fail?”

She blinked. “It’s horrible,” she whispered. “I don’t even know how to imagine it. But if that’s your life, then shutting me out of it would be even worse . . . maybe not straightaway, not now, but in time it would. It hurts to be shut out. A different kind of hurt, but a real one.”

“You don’t need it, Hannah!” He stood up easily, moving with grace in spite of his inner tiredness. The leave had not been long enough. But he had told her only about life at sea, and little enough of that. He had not told her about himself.

“Yes, I do need it,” she argued. “Either I belong to you, or I don’t. If you shut me out, even if you’re right and I don’t have the strength or the courage to bear it, then . . .”

“I didn’t say that!” he protested, turning to look at her angrily.

She ignored him. “You meant it. And when Tom’s confused and hurt, when you’re not here, I have to try and explain to him why you won’t trust any of us.”

“It’s not trust!” He was frustrated by her refusal to understand. “It’s to protect you from the nightmares I have! Can’t you see that? What’s the matter with you, Hannah?”

“Do you think Judith needs protecting?” she asked, controlling her feelings with an effort. This was the time when she must be strong. She had asked for the truth; there was no place for emotional manipulation.

Archie was startled. “Judith? That’s different. She’s . . .” He stopped.

“What?” she demanded, keeping her voice level with intense difficulty. “What is she that you think I’m not? Tell me!”

Archie stared at her. His eyes were so tired they were red-rimmed. She knew he was sleeping little.

“What is it?” she insisted. “You’re not protecting me. You’re shutting me out. I need to know you! Don’t you trust me to love you, even if you’re afraid sometimes?” The words were irretrievable. Her stomach churned with fear.

He looked startled. “No, of course not!” He stopped. “Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she answered. “Do you imagine I expect you to be perfect? I don’t. I never did. That isn’t love; it’s vanity! And lack of faith in us! You really believe I’m not strong enough to hear about what you have to live through?”

He leaned forward, intensely earnest. “I don’t want you to have to think about it, Hannah. Did you tell me how it felt to give birth? I heard you screaming, but I couldn’t share it.”

She took a deep breath. “Then let me hear you scream sometimes,” she begged. “Or at least know what it’s for. I know you might get killed. I do know that! Then I’ll lose you, and for the children’s sake, I’ll have to go on by myself. And they’ll have to go on, too. But I want to have the real you now! I want to know what I will have lost.”

He turned away from her. “You don’t understand what you’re asking. Joseph doesn’t tell you what it’s like in Flanders.”

“I’m not married to Joseph.” That answer was simple, and it made all the difference in the world. “But I would listen if he did, if it helped him.”

“And if he didn’t want to tell you?” he asked, still not looking at her. “What if I would rather have you just as you are, not knowing, not changed by it, not part of that life?”

That hurt. Joseph had refused to tell her. She felt the sting of it like a hand slap. She had difficulty controlling the tears coming to her eyes. “I’m shut out, as I am from you, and I will have to live with it,” she said quietly. “I will be alone. Perhaps you have other people you want to share yourself with.”

“Hannah! That’s not . . .” He sat down slowly on the bedroom chair, lowering his head so she could not see his face. “If you had any idea what it’s like, you wouldn’t say that.”

“I don’t have any idea because you don’t tell me!” she retorted. She couldn’t and wouldn’t go back now. “I only have my imagination and my own nightmares. Is it any worse than reality?”

He was speaking quietly now, almost as if in a way she had beaten him. “Yes, it is! You’ve never been as cold in your life as it is at sea. Your eyelashes freeze, the tears on your face are ice. It hurts to breathe. Your bones hurt with it. Land could be only a hundred miles away, but it might as well be beyond existence.”

He lifted his head to look at her. “There’s nothing but you and the ocean, and the enemy. He might come over the horizon, a black silhouette against the sky, or he might heave up out of the water right in front of you. More likely you won’t know anything at all until the torpedo hits, and the deck under your feet erupts in fire and twisted metal and blood.”

It was not the words—she had heard them before. It was the horror in his face, because he was letting himself relive it now. It was in his voice, his hands clenched on his knees, scars showing white against the wind-burned brown of his skin. A part of her wished she had not started this.

“Do you hate it all the time?” She did not want to know the answer, but she had to ask.

He was surprised.

“No, of course I don’t. There’s laughter, and friendship. Some of the jokes are even funny. There’s immense courage.” He looked away from her again to hide the nakedness inside him. “Heroism you can’t bear. Men who keep going in blinding pain, dying . . . Hannah, you don’t want to hear this. You’ve never seen a human being blown to pieces, or worse, torn open and bleeding to death, but still conscious and knowing what’s happening to him. That was the way Billy Harwood died. I can still see his face when I close my eyes.” He gasped. “There was blood everywhere. We did everything we could, but we couldn’t stop it. There was just too much. You haven’t seen fire in a gun turret when there’s nowhere to escape to and they have to stand there and burn to death, and we watch them. A child shouts in the street, and I hear that again—men like torches in the night.”

Very slowly she moved closer to him and knelt down. She could see there were tears on his face. He was right; she did not want to know this. Her imagination would build enough for her to have nightmares, waking or sleeping, from now on, but she had to.

This was not the man she had first loved, who had gone to sea with pride and enjoyment in it, ambitious to succeed. This man was older, at once stronger and more vulnerable, a stranger in her husband’s skin, whom she wanted passionately to know. She needed to start again, assuming nothing. She reached out her hand and slid it over his very gently.

“We sank an enemy ship a couple of weeks ago,” he went on. His voice was shaking, and Hannah could feel the locked muscles making his legs tremble, even though he was sitting.

“It was at dusk. It was a good maneuver; partly luck, but mostly skill. We’d been shadowing each other for days. He fought hard, but we had the first shot and it damaged him badly.” He was looking beyond her, into his own vision. “The water was gray like lead, pitted dark by wind and rain. We fought for nearly two hours. We took some bad hits ourselves. Lost a dozen men, killed and wounded. The man next to me lost both his legs. Surgeon tried to save him, but it was too much.”

He took a deep breath, searching her face, trying to read her emotions, what she thought of him, how much she was frightened or sickened.

She wished she could think of something wise or generous to say, but her mind was empty of everything but the numb misery of it. He must not see the fear in her, the longing to deny it all.

“We sank him just after sundown,” he went on, saying the words slowly and carefully. “We hit his magazine, and he went down with all hands. That’s the thing I dread more than anything else—being carried down inside, the water rushing in and I’m trapped, going down all the way into the darkness, with the sea above me, forever.” His breath was ragged.

“They went down,” he said quietly. “All of them. We didn’t save a soul. There was no triumph, no victory, just silence. I lay awake all night seeing it again and again. When it comes to it, they were seamen, as we are. We probably would have liked them, if we’d met a few years ago, before all this.” He was looking at her again, waiting for the confusion at his feelings, the revulsion for what he had done.

She blanked her mind. She must not show it, not even a glimmer, whatever it cost. There must be something to say, and she must think of it quickly.

“You’re right; it isn’t easy,” she agreed. “It’s horrible. But we don’t have a choice. We go forward together, or we go forward alone. I don’t want to be ashamed of myself because I refused to look. But don’t tell Tom too much, just a little, if he asks. Tell him some of your men were killed. He’ll understand that was hard to take. Please don’t leave him out altogether. He loves you so much.”

His voice caught and there were tears on his cheek. “I know.”

She smiled, blinking hard. “So do I.” Please God, she would have the strength to go on meaning that, if it got worse, if she woke up with the horror of her imagination night after night when he was not there beside her. She would remember all the laughter, the hope, the tenderness between them, and picture the dark, icy water suffocating the life out of him as he struggled and beat against it, and was crushed and plunged to the bottom of the sea, to places no human being ever imagined. Her heart would go with him. At least she would not be cut off, separate and unknowing.

“Hannah!” His voice cut through her thoughts.

“Yes!” she said quickly. “I’m here.”

He pulled her into his arms and held her.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

Matthew had just returned from Cambridgeshire and a visitto the Scientific Establishment.

“No, sir,” he said quietly.

Shearing looked drawn. The usually smooth flesh of his cheeks was hollow and the web of fine lines around his eyes was cut deeper as if the skin had no life in it. “No hope?” he asked, looking up at Matthew.

“No, sir. Not in any time we could put a name to.”

There was a tension in the room already, as if tragedy were only waiting to be acknowledged. Matthew realized with surprise how afraid he was. For once he wished he were a fighting man where he could at least do something physical to make himself feel better. And perhaps knowing less would also be easier now, a single enemy in front of him to fight, rather than the darkness all around, massive and closing in.

Shearing sat motionless.

The blow was numbing. Corcoran had been so certain he could complete the prototype, even with Blaine dead. He had worked on it himself, night and day. Ben Morven had helped him, taking over Blaine’s calculations. Lucas and Iliffe had continued with their work.

Shearing lifted his eyes and stared at Matthew. There was fury in his face—and fear, steady and unconcealed. It was the first time Matthew had seen it.

“A fatal flaw?” he asked.

“Yes,” Shearing replied.

“But Blaine knew the answer?”

“Possibly. Or maybe they hadn’t got far enough yet to realize it.” Shearing’s hands on top of his desk clenched tight, knuckles gleaming. “When we find the man who killed Blaine I’ll tie the rope around his neck myself, and pull the drop.” There was hatred so deep in his voice it rasped in his throat. “Who is it, Reavley?” That was a demand, almost an accusation.

“I don’t know, sir. Probably Ben Morven, but there’s no proof.”

Shearing looked beaten. He had been counting on success.

So had Matthew. He realized now just how much. He had believed Corcoran could do it, even without Blaine. Corcoran was a giant. He had been there all Matthew’s life—kind, funny, wise, above all, clever.

The sense of loss filled him with rage to equal Shearing’s. Whoever had murdered Theo Blaine might have lost Britain the war, the survival of everything that was of infinite value. He could not even imagine the end of his home and his life in the way he knew it. No more afternoon tea on the lawn, no irreverent jokes about the government, no country churchyards, no freedom to go anywhere you wanted, to be eccentric and make your own mistakes.

“Reavley!” Shearing’s voice was suddenly sharp.

It brought Matthew back to the moment with a jolt. “Yes, sir?”

“We must salvage something from this. Someone in the Establishment murdered Blaine and smashed the prototype?”

“Yes,” Matthew agreed. “Almost certainly the same person.”

“Probably Morven, but not beyond doubt,” Shearing went on. “A German sympathizer?”

“Naturally. There’s no other reason for doing it.”

“Is he on his own?”

“I doubt that.”

“Has Corcoran told him he’s beaten and is giving up?” Shearing leaned forward across the desk. “Be certain, Reavley! It could all hang on this! Who knows it’s a failure, apart from Corcoran himself?”

“No one.”

“Are you absolutely certain? Why? How do you know?”

“Corcoran still wants to keep working on it,” Matthew replied. “He can’t get Morven, Iliffe, or Lucas to do that if he admits it’s over.”

The irony touched Shearing’s mouth for an instant, then vanished. “Good! Excellent! We’ll send the device for sea trials,” he said wryly. “On Archie MacAllister’s ship. He’s already prepared.”

For an instant Matthew was stunned. Then he realized what Shearing meant to do. Morven must be reporting to someone who could not take the chance that the device did not work. They would have to steal it! “You’ll need someone on the ship!” he said urgently. “May I go? I’ve got nothing here that . . .”

“I have every intention that you should go,” Shearing cut across him. “Why do you suppose I’m telling you? I’ll have papers prepared for you and inform MacAllister. You will be a signals officer, newly drafted from a shore job, which will explain your unfamiliarity with naval discipline and the sea in general. We’ll change your name to Matthews. Reavley is too well known, the association would be immediate. We can get you on board the day after tomorrow. We need to be quick, but still give them time to get their man on as well. Be careful. It will not be easy. You will not know who he is, and there may be more than one, although I doubt it. It will be hard enough for them to get even one man there at this short notice.”

“Yes, sir . . .”

Shearing leaned forward over the desk. “Which means he will be good, Reavley! There are new men every voyage because losses are heavy. That’s all you’ll know about him. And you must appear like every other new man, no favors. MacAllister will not be able to do anything for you, except cover. He may tell some of his senior officers, but I have told him not to, unless in an extreme emergency. We can’t rely on them not betraying you accidentally. They are trained for the sea, not for espionage.”

“I understand.” Matthew felt his pulse beat harder, high in his throat. It was something physical to do at last, a real, immediate chance to catch whoever had murdered Blaine. He half hoped, and half dreaded, that it would be Hannassey himself. It was too late to grieve for Detta. That was a pain inside him he did not dare even examine.

He looked across at Shearing and saw his dark eyes studying him. It was a steady, penetrating stare, no readable emotion in it.

“Be careful, Reavley,” he said again. “Whoever comes after it, he will not be a fool, and he will be expecting us to guard the prototype with everything we have.” His mouth turned down at the corners, a delicate acknowledgment of defeat. “After all, it was supposed to be an invention that will turn the war for us. If we don’t guard it with our lives, they will know immediately that we failed.”

“And you’ll arrest Morven, or whoever it is!” Matthew insisted.

“Is that a question?” Shearing said bitterly, a flicker of anger back in his face again, savage, only just under the surface.

“No, sir, I apologize,” Matthew said sincerely. He hesitated a moment, trying to think of something further to say, but there was nothing. He glanced around the room with its impersonal furniture, its one painting of the London docks at twilight. He still did not know if Shearing had the painting because it held some meaning for him, or simply because it was beautiful and perhaps reminded him of somewhere else.

That evening the Peacemaker stood at the window of the house in Marchmont Street and looked down at the footpath below. He saw the young man from the Establishment in Cambridgeshire step out of the taxicab, pay the driver, and walk to the door. That was remiss of him. He should have stopped a block or two away, for the sake of discretion, as Mason always did. The Peacemaker’s lips tightened in irritation. He did not like to have to tell someone anything so elementary.

He heard the bell ring, and then a few moments later the light, rapid footsteps on the stairs, and the tap on the door.

“Come in,” he said abruptly.

The young man was flushed, his thick hair a little windblown as if he had been running, and he closed the door behind him with a sharp click, his hands shaking. He did not wait for the Peacemaker to speak, which was highly uncharacteristic.

“They are going to test the prototype!” he said, his voice sharp and high. “At sea. On the Cormorant. Day after tomorrow. We’ll have to be very quick.”

The Peacemaker was astounded. In spite of his usual self-mastery his heart was beating faster and the palms of his hands were wet. All thoughts of discipline for the carelessness of stopping outside the door vanished from his mind. “Sea trials?” He tried to keep his voice level, and failed. “So you’ve completed it? You told me there were still problems!”

“There were. Corcoran told us he was abandoning it, or at least we were. I didn’t believe him.” His face was a strange mixture of expressions, unreadable. “I didn’t think he would admit defeat, but I had no idea he had the answer and was just going to cheat us out of having a part in it. I suppose I should have seen it.”

“Are you certain?” The Peacemaker could not suppress the excitement bursting up inside him. This could be a superb victory! The device completed, and stolen for Germany. It could end the war in months. “Absolutely certain?” This gamble had proved a stroke of genius. His heart was lurching in his chest, making his breath uneven.

“Yes,” the young man answered. “They are taking it down to Portsmouth tonight and putting it on board the Cormorant, ready to sail in the morning.”

“Who are they sending with it? You?”

“No. I don’t know who’s guarding it. Probably someone from naval intelligence, but it’s supposed to be used by ordinary gunners.”

“Gunners?” the Peacemaker was surprised. “Not scientists?”

“No. Unless they have plans they haven’t told us. But if it were anyone from the Establishment it would have to be Iliffe or me, and it isn’t.”

The Peacemaker steadied his breathing with an effort. “You have done extremely well,” he said gravely. He must not praise the young man too much. It was the cause that mattered. Arrogance always caused mistakes in the end, and there was much ahead for this man yet. He would be rewarded appropriately, not more. He smiled. “Now I understand why you came so hastily that you overlooked the rudimentary precaution of getting out of your taxi a street away. Don’t do that again.”

The eagerness did not dim in the young man’s face. “No time,” he said simply. “You’ll need to move immediately. Whatever you’re going to do, it will have to be right now.”

“I’m prepared. I assume that if the police had progressed any further in learning who killed Blaine, you would have told me?”

“Of course. But it doesn’t matter now. It’s finished without him.”

“On the contrary,” the Peacemaker said with a touch of chill. “It matters even more. Since it was not us, and would hardly be British Intelligence, it means there is some other interest of which neither of us is aware.”

“Domestic tragedy after all?” the young man said, but there was not quite the same certainty in his voice as before, nor the bright edge of intelligence.

“And smashed the first prototype?” the Peacemaker said sarcastically.

The young man blushed. “Sorry,” he apologized. “It has to be Lucas or Iliffe, but I have no idea which one.”

“Then go back and find out,” the Peacemaker ordered. “I need to know.”

“Yes, sir.” The young man’s face was paler now, the fire within him under control.

“Go,” the Peacemaker said softly. “I have much to do. You have done brilliantly, Morven. Your action today may have saved a hundred thousand lives.” He held out his hand.

The young man hesitated, suddenly uncomfortable. “I’m doing what I believe to be right,” he said quickly. “I don’t want thanks for that. I do it for myself.”

“I know.” The Peacemaker’s voice was gentle, a different kind of warmth in it, almost a tenderness. “I know you do. Go back. You are not finished yet.”

Once he was outside, Morven took a long, deep breath, and his whole body trembled. Then he controlled himself with a passionate effort and walked along the footpath.

As soon as the Peacemaker was alone, he moved across the room toward the telephone. He had not expected the guidance device to be completed so soon. In fact, he had come to the conclusion that it would not be created at all. Now suddenly it was going to be tested at sea. He had to send someone with the skills and the resources to get themselves into the crew of the Cormorant at a day’s notice, and the strength, the iron nerve, and the ingenuity to steal the device. That meant a man of wide experience and the ability to blend into any group of men and seem to be one of them, but also with an organization behind him who could and would do whatever they were asked.

And of course he would also have to inform Germany of it, so they could send a U-boat to intercept the Cormorant, which would take skill and some planning. If the device was as brilliant as Morven had said, it was the ultimate weapon!

There was only one answer: Patrick Hannassey. He was perfect. If there was any man in Europe who could get himself onto the Cormorant as a member of the crew, and be unremarkable, competent, a man whose face or mannerisms no one would remember, and yet have the intelligence, the imagination, and the cold, brutal instincts to kill if necessary, it was he.

He would get the prototype into the hands of the Germans. And in so doing, he would have to go with it himself. The Germans would probably have to employ more than one U-boat, and in all likelihood end in sinking the Cormorant, which was a loss the Peacemaker regretted. Still, bitter as that sacrifice would be, it was small as a price for ending the war now in May of 1916, instead of God knew when!

And it had the added, and now quite urgent, beauty that a word from the Peacemaker to his cousin in Berlin, and the Germans would keep Hannassey, get rid of him if necessary. He must not be allowed to return. A mention of his aims, a free and peaceful Ireland, demanding money, an even larger share of power and total independence, would be sufficient to see that Berlin removed him from the scene.

Yes. It was excellent! A better outcome than he would have dreamed possible, even this morning. He picked up the telephone.

Matthew reported for duty on board the HMS Cormorant. He was familiar with the sea from having spent holidays on the coast in small boats, but this would be very different. It was a relief to be able at last to do something personally to strike against the enemy who had, until this point, outwitted and outplayed him at every stroke. Somewhere on this ship, unless both he and Shearing had misjudged, there would be another man placed as late and as artificially as he was. That other newcomer would be here to steal the prototype for Germany, just as Matthew was here to catch him, and through him the murderer of Theo Blaine.

He had never been on a warship before, only seen them from the shore, low and sleek, gray castles of steel on the gray water, decks dominated by bridge and gun turrets. There was very little rigging, just one relatively small mast and two cross-spars, enough for signaling and radio. Funnels proclaimed the power of mighty engines. There was no grace and beauty of sails as at Trafalgar, or sound of the wind in canvas. They were more like wolves than swans in flight.

Once on board the differences were perhaps less great. He was welcomed without ceremony, merely one of eight new men replacing those killed or injured. As an officer, albeit junior, he had a cabin to himself. Perhaps that was Archie’s doing. As he unpacked his few belongings and stowed them in the space under the high, hard bunk and in the chest of drawers, he concluded that if shared, such cramped quarters would have made his task infinitely more difficult.

The only other furniture was a washstand, a chair, and a hinged table that let down as a desk. The whole space was about five paces by three, with a port over the bunk. But then the entire ship was less than two hundred feet long.

He must familiarize himself with it as soon as possible, learn every passage, stairway, every fitting and its use, every room, and at least something of every one of the hundred and twenty-seven men, and what his job was. One of them was his enemy.

He must go up and report to the signal room, and he could not afford to get lost. All the passages were narrow; one could barely pass anyone without touching him. On the floor was a curious substance, rough to the feel, a mixture of cork and India rubber known as corticine. Everything else was metal, with the occasional glass lightbulbs.

When he came above into the air, he found the deck itself was wood, but there was still the steel of gun turrets, and the mass of the bridge and signal house above, the only place from which almost everything could be seen.

He felt the thrum of engines and the surge of power. They were already under way; the safe, familiar outline of Portsmouth harbor was slipping astern. Soon there would be nothing around them but the gray water, and whoever else was on it, or under its concealing surface.

He thrust the thought from his mind and clambered up to the signal house to report for duty, not to Archie, but to the chief signals officer.

Ragland was a quiet man of about thirty-five, with a plain, intelligent face and sandy red hair. But when he spoke there was a sincerity in his voice and an authority of manner that earned almost instant respect. There was no dissembling in him and no bravado. He made it known he required the same of others.

He did not betray by any flicker of expression that he knew Matthew was any different from the ordinary replacement: raw, uncertain of himself, but adequately trained.

“Matthews? Settled in?”

Matthew stood to attention. He had no seniority here, he was a new recruit, given rank only because of his knowledge of signals. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. My name is Ragland. You’ll report to me. I don’t know what you did ashore, but here obedience is exact and immediate, or you’ll end up at best in the brig, at worst at the bottom of the sea. There is no room for hesitation, individual will, or taste, and certainly not for any man who doesn’t fit in. We rely on each other, and a man who can’t be trusted is worse than useless, he’s a danger to the rest of us. Understood, Matthews?”

“Yes, sir.” He thought bitterly of how companionable that sounded, that perfect fellowship, the sort of thing people described in the trenches, and it did not apply to him at all. He could trust no one, except Archie, and Archie was remote from him in the hierarchy. He was more alone than he had ever been in his life. He knew the rudiments of his job, little more. He did not know the sea. To none of the men he would see day by day could he tell anything of the truth, nor dare he trust them. Somewhere on this ship there was a German agent who would think nothing of killing him if he blocked his path to the prototype. It was Matthew’s job to find him, before he found Matthew.

He had to do his job in signals without relying on anyone else. He could confide in no one and at all times must guard his tongue, the way he responded to anything, even the silent betrayal by his ignorance of duties, perhaps most of all the physical fear he had never had to face before.

“Then you had better familiarize yourself with your station, and the ship in general, and get about it,” Ragland told him. “You can start now.”

Matthew spent the rest of the day doing exactly as he was told, and trying to look as if it were natural to him. By the end of the evening he was becoming more used to the smells of salt, oil, and smoke, the sound of ship’s bells, and on deck the constant hiss and whine of wind and water. He was glad that at least the movement of the sea was something he was acquainted with.

Below he had eaten in the officer’s mess, listening a great deal more than talking. The food was good enough, but they were newly provisioned and he expected it to get worse. At least there was enough of it, and they were not under fire. He was a lot better off than Joseph had been most of the time.

He wondered about Joseph, aware that his conscience had driven him to go to Flanders in the first place, and perhaps it was all that made him consider returning now. His physical injuries were healing, but the wound to his mind and his emotions appeared to be deeper. Something in him had changed, and here in this close, crowded room with other men who also faced the enemy every day, and the possibility of mutilation or death, Matthew found that the change grieved him. Joseph was not a soldier in fact, but he was in spirit. He was as much part of the regiment and of its battle to survive and win as any other man.

Matthew ate silently, answering only if he was spoken to, and he watched the others. He had no idea if the man here to steal the prototype was an officer or a seaman. He must learn everything he could of each man, because his life might depend on seeing the tiniest element that did not fit in. He may not be given more than one chance before it was too late.

The crew was complete without him. They had a bond he would never be part of. They were not unkind, but they knew his inexperience and mistrusted it. He would have to earn his place. The jokes passed over his head. He did not understand the teasing, the laughter, the references to one man’s boots, another’s compulsive tidiness, a third’s lapse of memory. They were based on terror and violence shared and endured together, tolerance of moments of weakness easily understood, the loss of friends, and above all, the knowledge of horror yet to come, and that they might not survive it. They knew each other’s values, and that tomorrow or the next day their own survival might hang on that courage and willingness to sacrifice even life for the good of the many.

Matthew slept badly, aware all night of the shifting and turning of the ship, the sound of footsteps along the narrow passage on the other side of the door, and of course every half hour the ship’s bell ringing the time. About three in the morning he heard running, and a brief burst of gunfire, but there was no alarm. He lay rigid in his bed, gulping air.

With jarring reality he became aware of physical war, shells tearing apart the metal of the ship, men injured. He was not afraid of pain; he never had been. But since the murder of his parents, violent death horrified him in a new way. The reality of it reached inside him and touched his innermost being. Now the knowledge that he was on a warship that might become involved in the slaughter and injury of battle made him nauseated and a little cold. But at least it would not be personal, face to face, as it was for Joseph. He might see the injured or the dead, but they would be people he barely knew, and above all, he would not have to inflict injury himself. The enemy would be distant, a ship, not men. Except, of course, for the one man on the ship that he had come here in order to find.

It was more than an hour before he went to sleep again. His rest was uneasy and full of violent dreams.

The next two days were difficult and exhausting. It took all his concentration simply to learn his job and he was embarrassed at the mistakes he made. Ragland was patient with him, but he made no allowances. He could not afford to. At home in St. Giles, Archie was a friend. They had known each other for over fifteen years, but mostly at family occasions, bound by a love for Hannah, taken much for granted. Here on the ship his word was law, his decisions governed the life of every man on board—and very possibly the death also.

On the one occasion Matthew passed him in the narrow passage up toward the signals room, he remembered to salute only just in time, and received a brief acknowledgment in reply, an instant meeting of the eyes. Then Archie was past him and on the steps up to the bridge, and the isolation of command.

It was a strange, artificial situation, and yet unbreakable. Here the sea and the enemy were the only realities. Friendship and duty were the core of survival, but neither must ever trespass upon the other. In his own way, Archie was every bit as alone as Matthew could ever be, and with a burden of trust enough to break the mind, if you allowed yourself to think about it. Better not to. Just act, each moment for itself. Do your best.

At the end of the third day, Matthew lay on his bunk staring up at the ceiling and realized he ached in every muscle and his head throbbed from the tension of concentrating on getting each decision right, and drawing no attention to himself. He hadn’t had any chance at all to try to find the man sent here to steal the prototype.

Presumably they would be ambushed by a U-boat. There would be no point in torpedoing them. The last place the Germans wanted the prototype was on the bottom of the Atlantic.

Time was short. What would he do, in their place? Have a U-boat shadowing them, stalking, and keep in touch with them somehow. Radio signals. A sharp burst, too quick for anyone on the Cormorant to detect. Just sufficient to keep in touch and mark their position. A destroyer was not an easy target to disable adequately enough to be certain of getting the prototype off before sinking it. They carried four four-point-seven-inch guns, two pairs of pom-pom guns, and four torpedo tubes, and they could move through the water at twenty-five knots. They were the wolves of the sea—swift, maneuverable, and often running in packs. But even alone, they would fight hard for their lives. It would take two U-boats at least to be sure.

Whoever was on the Cormorant had to be one of the new men on this voyage. It was a matter of elimination. He must begin immediately in the morning, even if he had to get Archie’s permission to delegate some of his signaling watch duties to somebody else.

But he did not get the chance. He woke in the dark to the urgent sound of alarms. All hands on deck. He scrambled into his jacket and boots and, heart pounding, he made his way up to the bridge, feet slipping on the steps.

The ship seemed to be alive with movement, men running, shouting orders, manning the gun turrets. The wind was rising, sharp and startlingly cold for the end of May. The ship bucked and slithered on the long Atlantic swell. Over in the southeast there was a gray blur across the horizon. It would be dawn in half an hour.

Matthew scanned the surface of the sea for any sign of the black presence of a U-boat, but he saw nothing except the glimmer of waves as the half-light caught their backs, and the occasional paler tips of spume.

“You won’t see them,” Ragland said from beside him.

“What do we do?” Matthew asked.

“Wait,” Ragland replied. “Listen. Be ready to act.”

Minutes dragged by. There seemed to be noise everywhere, the wind on the metal of the ship, whining in cables, wires, against the housing of the bridge, the rhythmic hiss and crash of the water, and now and then footsteps of men. Matthew found his breathing was ragged; his muscles ached, and he was so cold his legs were numb below the knee.

Suddenly the order came and they changed course dramatically, swinging to the west, and a few moments later back again. The light was broadening in the sky. Then he saw it, a long silver trail in the water to the left. He knew what it was: a torpedo. It had missed them, but somewhere under that dark, heaving sea was the U-boat that had fired it.

A moment later there was another, closer this time. The U-boat commander had anticipated their turn and moved more rapidly.

The Cormorant replied with a torpedo of its own, but no one expected to see wreckage on the paling water.

They zigzagged again, avoiding more torpedoes, and discharged their own sporadically, not to waste shot. The game of hunter and hunted went on for four more hours, tense, eyes aching. The torpedoes shot past in glistening trails, many times far too close. Twice they knew the U-boat passed directly under them. The depth charges exploded with deep rumbling violence, churning up gouts of water, but still no wreckage.

If this was the U-boat sent to take back the device, why only one? Was another going to appear and take them down? Hit them where they would sink slowly enough for one man at least to leave them and board the U-boat with the prototype, presumably the man on the ship who was signaling them? He was here, wasn’t he? One of the seven other new men on this voyage?

Matthew stood in the signal house, cold, hungry, eyes aching, his muscles locked with the tension of waiting. He turned to the east and in the sunlight bright on the water saw for an instant the black conning tower of another submarine. An instant later the Cormorant’s guns blazed in a deafening roar.

Matthew was totally unprepared for the sheer noise of it. Then he was thrown off balance as the ship veered again, and he felt a violent jolt as if they had been slammed in the side of the hull. They had been struck! This was it. They would begin to sink. That ice-cold sea would suffocate them after all. At least he must make sure they did not lose the device. The Germans must never know it did not work.

He swung around to Ragland. “I’ve got to get below, to the torpedo room!” The man would go for the prototype. At least Matthew would get him before they went down. Then he was filled with white-hot rage. The whole crew would be lost, and this man was responsible for it. God knew how many women would be widowed or lose their sons and brothers. Hannah! Even thinking of that choked him so he gagged for breath. She would lose her husband and her brother in one night. How would she bear it? How did anyone?

And Joseph. He would never see Joseph again. Would he go back to the trenches, or would this imprison him in St. Giles . . . ?

Ragland’s hand was on his arm, hard enough to hurt. It was the pain of his fingers digging in that stopped him.

“It didn’t explode,” Ragland shouted at him. “They’ll deal with it. Get on with your job.”

Matthew felt the sweat break out on his body, in spite of the cold. But it was not over. This would happen again and again, until one time it really was the end. How in God’s name did they bear it?

There were shouts, commands, followed by a long raking salvo of gunfire on the starboard side toward the east, and the sea erupted in water, smoke, and flying debris. Then the Cormorant changed course again, and again. Torpedoes streaked past the sides and disappeared.

An hour later Matthew was standing in the captain’s cabin and Archie was leaning back in his chair. He looked pale and haggard from lack of sleep, but calmer than Matthew felt. How many times had he been through this?

“Was that an ambush for the prototype?” Archie asked.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Matthew replied. The sir had come to him so naturally he only realized it afterward. Archie was no longer his brother-in-law; he was his captain. They had sunk a U-boat, killing the men on it suddenly and violently. They had looked back and seen the other U-boat combing the seas, but there were no survivors visible.

In one morning he had learned with his heart and his gut what war was. Nothing like the imagination, even the knowledge of the figures from all the battle zones of the world. This was as intimate as one’s own churning stomach, the blood and bile in the mouth, the sweat on the skin, the dark water waiting to swallow them all.

“How close are you to finding him?” Archie asked. His voice sounded far away, an intrusion into Matthew’s racing mind and its horrors.

He wanted desperately to give him a positive answer, but he knew the cost of lying, even by implication.

“There are seven new men on this voyage, apart from me,” he said. “Coleman is only seventeen, which excludes him from having the knowledge or the connections. Eversham’s just lost a brother in France and I think his grief and his anger are both real. That leaves Harper, Robertson, Philpott, MacLaverty, and Briggs.”

“It’s not Briggs,” Archie said flatly. “His parents were killed in a zeppelin raid on the east coast. I know that’s true. Knew his elder brother as well. That leaves you four. You haven’t much time.”

“I know. We have to assume that was only the first attempt, and there’ll be more.”

Archie nodded, lips thin. “Apart from that, how are you getting on?”

Matthew smiled. “I think when this is over I’ll go back to intelligence,” he replied ruefully. “And work twice as hard.” He said it lightly, but he meant it. Emotions of all sorts were banked high inside him, like a spring tide; a respect for the men who defended the sea that was gut-deep, a passion, not a thought: and the beginning of a new perception of what Joseph felt, just a shadow, a glimpse of how much there was beyond it that he would never know.

“No risks,” Archie warned. “Whoever it is, he’ll kill at the drop of a hat. Remember that. He’d have sent the whole ship down last night. The only thing stopping him from killing you is that so far he may not know who you are, any more than you know who he is. But he’ll be looking for you!”

A flutter of physical terror twisted in Matthew’s stomach. His lips were dry. “I know.”

“Don’t forget it—ever,” Archie warned.

“No, sir.”

“Right. Go back to your duty.”

“Yes, sir.” He saluted and left.

They steamed on northward beyond the coast of Ireland, and then east into the North Sea. Matthew moved very carefully, but he knew every hour mattered. Whoever it was would expect the sea trials of the prototype to begin, or they might suspect there was something wrong. How could the Admiralty not wish to deploy such a weapon as soon as possible?

He became so used to the movement of the ship that most of the time he barely noticed it. He still had to count the bells and work out what they meant, and think in watches: five of four hours each, and the two half-length dog watches.

He had studied the plan of the ship, but found no believable excuse to be in the engine room or the magazine. However, he knew the names and service records of every man, but the majority of them he did not recognize by sight.

Gradually he learned enough about both Philpott and MacLaverty to eliminate them, leaving only Robertson, a large gunner with a dark sense of humor and quick, intelligent eyes; and Harper, a skilled engineer in his late forties. He was lean and muscular, moving with a grace that suggested both strength and speed when necessary, but oddly colorless features and fairish brown hair as straight as rain.

The second U-boat attack came not long after midnight, about two hours into the middle watch. Again Matthew was woken by the alarm. He could roll out of bed and into his jacket and boots almost automatically now. Knowing what was coming did not make it better. In an instant he thought of going to where the prototype was stored rather than up to the bridge, but then Archie’s warning brought back some sense. To do that would give him away immediately. And it would then be only a matter of time, perhaps minutes, before Harper or Robertson, whichever it was, would kill him and put him over the side. During the battle with the U-boat would be the ideal time.

Instead he went with the other men, hurriedly. Feet were pounding along the narrow, corticine-floored, metal-walled passages and up the steps, boot soles clanging and scraping, all the way up to the bridge.

He got there before Ragland. The duty officer looked tense in the yellow glare of the lights, his eyes searching the rain-swept night, and the endless black waves around them.

“Bastards are bloody invisible in this,” he said bitterly. “The sooner we try this damn invention we’re supposed to have, the sooner we’ll have a chance! What the hell are we waiting for—Jerry to sit there in the middle of a calm sea so we can take a shot at him and see if we strike? Damn it, we can do that already.”

“Wish I knew,” Matthew said sympathetically. “Maybe it needs daylight to see the results? I’ve no idea.” That was an approximation of the truth. He did not know how they would have tested it to be certain of its abilities.

Further conversation was lost in the noise of gunfire, and it was several minutes before he realized it was not depth charges going off, nor torpedoes fired at them. It was a surface vessel opening up with its four-inch guns and the shells were landing only just short, the water shooting up in columns and falling back again. They were being attacked from both sides, surface and beneath.

They changed course and returned fire, orange flame blossoming from their guns. The noise ripped through the night, bruising the senses.

The next hours passed in a haze of chaos with smoke and flame so thick it choked, then ice-cold air hurting the lungs, then more guns again. Every now and then Matthew saw through the clearing smoke the silver trail of a torpedo or the pale gout of water leaping two hundred feet high as a depth charge exploded in the sea, or a shell fell wide and burst.

Then the shooting got more accurate. Shells tore into the decking, sending splinters of hot metal flying. One gun turret erupted in fire and there was a desperate scramble to get the injured men out. Matthew was sent with a message, stumbling down the gangways, choked with the acrid fumes of cordite and the smell of burning rubber from the corticine.

He saw smoke-grimed faces bent to guns, stokers heaving coal into the boilers, bodies gleaming in the red light of flames, skins almost black, other men injured, blood on their uniforms, eyes hollow with shock.

This time there was no conclusion, no strike of depth charges and wreckage spewed up and floating on the sea, no wait for bodies, just a long, slow winding down of tension and release of fear as time stretched out after the last burst of gunfire.

They had lost two men dead and thirteen wounded, most of them flesh injuries or burns. Three were serious; one would be fortunate if he survived. He had been in the gun turret that was hit.

Matthew was coming up from carrying a message to the ship’s surgeon, and on the way back up to the bridge, when he passed Robertson in the passage. For a few moments they were alone, the thrum of the engines loud, like a mechanical heartbeat, the air close, suffocating with the smell of oil and smoke and rubber, the swing and surge of the sea now so familiar they both adjusted to it without thinking.

Matthew was the senior. Robertson stood aside for him. He was broad-chested and heavy shouldered. His face was expressionless except for the illusion of lopsidedness created by streaks of oil on his nose and left cheek.

It was a chance that Matthew could not afford to pass by, little as he wanted to take it. He was exhausted as well, and he realized how physically afraid he was. He had just survived a battle and he wanted to escape and be safe, even if only for a few hours. He stopped. He needed to say something, provoke an answer. With every hour there was less time ahead.

“Are you all right, Robertson?” he asked. “Is that blood on your face?”

Robertson looked alarmed. He brushed off the smear then put his hand to his nose. His relief was palpable. “No, it’s oil, sir.”

“Good. Makes one wonder why I chose the navy and not the army,” Matthew said with a slight smile.

Robertson met his eyes squarely. “Why did you, sir?” In the narrowness of the corridor he was about two feet away from Matthew.

Matthew drew in his breath to answer just as the ship juddered and pitched, and Robertson lunged forward, throwing his arms out to save himself, and catching Matthew, pinning him to the wall.

Matthew lifted his knee to jab Robertson in the groin just as Harper came around the corner. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted at Robertson. He charged forward ready to attack him.

Matthew felt a wave of relief so intense he almost burst out laughing, he could feel it well up inside him, hysterical and absurd.

Robertson looked stunned. “Sorry, sir,” he said with alarm. “Suppose I haven’t got my sea legs as well as I thought.” He turned to Matthew. “Didn’t mean to hurt you, sir. Meant to go against the wall.”

Matthew did not believe him, but there was no point in saying so now.

“No harm done,” he replied, straightening up. “Thank you,” he said to Harper. There was no need to let him know what he had interrupted. “All a bit tired, I expect. It must be dawn soon.”

Harper stretched his hand out to look at the watch on his wrist.

“Yes sir, in about half an hour.”

Matthew stared at it. It was beautiful, wrought of mixed silver and gold, with a green line around the face. He had seen it before, when Detta had showed it to him as the gift she had selected for her father.

Matthew was standing in the bowels of the Cormorant, facing Patrick Hannassey. That level, hard gaze, the bony features that looked so ordinary at a glance, were those of the Peacemaker who had caused the murder of so many men, and at least one woman: Alys Reavley.

He must get out of here, quickly, before he betrayed himself even if only by his shaking body or the sweat on his skin and his ashen cheeks.

“Thank you,” he gasped, his voice hoarse. “We must be well into the North Sea by now.” He nodded briefly and walked away, his legs like jelly, forcing himself not to run.

He went straight to the bridge and asked for permission to see the captain. It was refused.

“The captain gave me a particular duty to perform,” he said urgently, hearing the panic inside himself. “I have to report a conclusion. Tell him so, and do it now.”

Something in his manner must have caught the man’s belief. He returned and conducted Matthew up to where Archie stood alone, staring across the gray water, Cape Wrath to the south, the open North Sea ahead.

“Yes?” he asked.

“It’s Harper. I have no doubt at all.”

Archie smiled, his eyes brighter, something inside him easing. “Good. I’ll have him put in the brig. Well done. Now you can go and get some sleep.”

Matthew knew that it would be a long time before Archie himself could sleep. There was no one else to carry any of his burden. He was alone.

Matthew stood to attention. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Matthew slept easily that night.

He woke in the morning to the news that the Grand Fleet had been ordered to sea and the German High Seas Fleet had left harbor. For one idiotic moment, feeling the steel steps under his feet and the rail in his hands, he wondered if this was what it had been like on the morning of Trafalgar a hundred and nine years ago. There would have been the silence of wind and sail then, but the same tingle in the air, the unbearable sweetness of life bound up in the knowledge that this could be the last day of it for thousands of them. Then they had been outnumbered and outgunned and knew Napoleon was massed on the shores of France.

Now they faced the kaiser, and the might of Germany and Austria. France was driven to the wall and England desperate again.

He tightened his grip and pulled himself up onto the level of the bridge. Ragland was in the signal house, surveying a calm, slightly hazy sea.

“Looks as if you’re going to have more than you bargained for, Matthews,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s all hands on deck.”

“Are we going to be in time?” Matthew asked.

Ragland smiled. “Of course we are. But at least you’ve got your man. If you want to ask him anything, you’d better do it now. By midday you may not have the chance. We’ll probably catch up with the main fleet about then.”

Matthew considered it, but what could he ask? What was there that he didn’t know already? He did not want to face Hannassey, but perhaps he must, even if there was nothing to learn.

He accepted the advice and went back down into the bowels of the ship and along the narrow, steel-enclosed passages. He could feel the entire hull vibrate with the racing of the engines. The stokers must be shoveling coal till their backs ached and their muscles felt as if they were tearing off the bones.

Hannassey was in the brig, guarded by armed men. They knew who Matthew was and let him in, but with a warning to be careful.

Hannassey was sitting on a wooden bench. Stripped of his assumed naval uniform he was a lean man, hard muscled with a flat stomach and broad, supple hands. But it was his face that held Matthew’s attention. He was no longer pretending to be ordinary, and the cold, brilliant intelligence in him was undisguised. His features were powerful, his eyes bright blue-green. He looked at Matthew with amusement. “Well, I never thought I’d go down in the belly of some damn English ship!” he said wryly.

Matthew searched to see if he could recognize anything of Detta in the man in front of him. His coloring was utterly different—pale, washed out, where she was dark and vivid with life. He was cold where she was warm. He was all angles; she was fire, soft lines, and grace.

Hannassey smiled. “Looking for a resemblance, are you? You won’t see much. Detta’s like her mother. But she’s mine, all right, heart and soul of her. She had the measure of you, boy.”

Funnily enough, it was his smile that was like hers, the set of his teeth. The memory of her tore inside him. “Did she?” he responded.

“Oh, yes,” Hannassey’s smile widened, colder than the wind over the sea. “You were desperate to trick her into confirming what you guessed about the sabotage of your munition ships. You hoped that if she believed you knew it all anyway, she’d tell you the rest. She gave you nothing! But she learned from you what she needed.”

“Oh? And what was that?” Matthew heard the quiver in his own voice.

“That you’re desperate,” Hannassey replied wolfishly. “You know nothing, you’re guessing and fishing around for proof of anything at all.”

So Detta had told him what Matthew had wanted her to. She had believed the code intact. Then he felt an ice-cold fear for her. Without meaning to, he looked at Hannassey.

Hannassey saw the fear and understood it in a flash of revelation. “You did break it!” he said, his face bleached white. His voice choked in his throat as if he were gagging blood. He lurched forward, hands stretched out to grasp and crush, but the chain on his ankles held him. “Mother of God, do you know what they’ll do to her?” he cried. “They’ll break her knees! My beautiful Detta . . .” He stopped, looking up at Matthew, his eyes burning with hate.

Matthew froze. He knew she would be punished for failure, when at last they found out. He had thought it would be later, a long time, when there was so much lost one more person would not matter.

“She’ll be alive.” He whispered the words, emotion choking him. “My parents are dead, and God knows how many others. You too now, whether this ship goes down or not.” He had nothing more to say. He was sick with the thought of Detta mutilated, never to walk with that easy grace again.

He turned and left without looking back at Hannassey and his pain-twisted face. He heard the guards lock the brig door, but he said nothing to them.

Up in the signal house again he found himself jobs to do, anything to keep his mind busy. He went down to the transmitting station where the fire-control table was continuously recording the data for the range and bearing of whatever enemy ship was targeted. All around the walls were different electrical instruments for sending the information up to the guns, voice pipes and telephones. There were about twenty men there, each with his own job to do.

Up on the deck again he took the glasses and scanned the horizon, trying to force Detta from his mind.

The weather was calm, the swell slight. There was a haze over the water, the wind from the south too little to dispel it completely.

Everyone was looking for something to do to take their thoughts from the mounting tension. All the watertight doors were thoroughly examined, every piece of apparatus was tested and spare parts broken out to be handy if needed in an emergency. Was this going to be it, the big one at last? Perhaps by this time tomorrow it would be over. Trench warfare went on and on, a battle of slow wearing down, death month by month, a matter of who could survive the longest.

Here at sea the war could be lost in a day because without naval supremacy, Britain was finished.

The afternoon passed slowly, minute by minute. Matthew obeyed his occasional orders and waited, watching Ragland’s face, his self-controlled calm. What was he thinking? Did his stomach churn with fear, too, imagination of physical pain, of not being good enough, clever enough, quick enough, above all brave enough?

What about Archie on the bridge? In the final count it all depended on him. A hundred and twenty-seven men. Would he make the right decisions?

It was just short of four o’clock in the afternoon when they saw the smoke of gunfire on the horizon and after that, sighted the rest of the fleet spread across the sea to the east. Bugles and drums sounded the general march to call all hands to battle stations. Within minutes every station reported to the bridge that they were ready for action.

After that Matthew was occupied with signals, messages flashing back and forth. The whole High Seas Fleet was engaged.

He saw smoke on the starboard bow, and a few long, dragged-out minutes later he could hear the gunfire. There appeared to be at least two light cruiser squadrons coming across their bows. The roar of gunfire was now almost incessant, and great plumes of water shot into the air, up to two hundred feet high where the shells exploded upon hitting the surface.

Matthew found himself shivering uncontrollably, but there was a strange kind of excitement inside him as well, a mixture of fear and a driving hunger to be involved, part of the action striking back.

They were plowing through the water at tremendous speed. There was gunfire, heavy and continuous, somewhere to the rear, but through the clouds of smoke and the towers of water in all directions, it was hard to have any clear idea what was happening.

Twice he saw torpedo tracks racing toward them, and the ship swung hard, screws thrashing, hull juddering under the strain as infinitely slowly they turned in the tightest circle possible. He heard a shout and saw through a break in the chaos the vast shape of a battle cruiser, bow high, stern wallowing. He was unaware of crying out. The thing was sinking, belching smoke, forward guns still blazing. It was struck again and the bow lifted higher, steam roaring, flame yellow as the magazine caught. He was sick with the horror of it, vomit bitter in his mouth.

Shot fell only six hundred yards short of the Cormorant and he saw the water drench the deck, bridge, and signal house.

“Bloody close!” Ragland said tersely.

The next instant Matthew felt the lurch and jolt as a shell hit the upper deck and exploded. He swung around, instinct driving him to do something, anything. He felt Ragland’s hand on his arm hard enough to hurt.

“Not yet!” he shouted in the noise of returning gunfire from their own turrets. “Sounds like the boys’ mess deck, or the after dressing station. Others will attend to it. There’ll be enough here for you to do if the signals get hit.”

Matthew made an intense effort to control himself. His brain told him he had his own job to do and people relied on him to be in place and keep the communications open at all times.

They were past where the cruiser was sinking. He swiveled to look, but he couldn’t see it. It must be behind the smoke.

Another shot fell five hundred yards short of them and again the bridge and signal house were drenched with black, foul-smelling water.

“It’s gone!” Ragland told him.

Matthew was stunned.

“It was German!” Ragland added. “Pay attention to what you’re doing!”

“Yes, sir.”

Again they changed course sharply and this time Matthew could see that they were steering straight into the area where the previous shots had landed. It seemed to work. He looked ahead to the bridge but he could not see Archie. He must be there, knowing everything depended on his judgment.

There were ships all around them. One moment he could see the German ships ahead and the British fleet to the port and starboard—dreadnoughts, hard gray outlines knifing through the water, spurting flame. The next moment he was blinded again.

The noise was almost unbearable—the roar and crash of shot, the churning of the sea, and the screaming vibration of the engines. There was oil and water everywhere, towering into the air, crashing on the deck, splinters of shell flying from shots exploded on the sea, and clouds of mist and smoke.

Matthew worked in the signal house, hearing the intermittent bleep of the radio, voices on the telephone, shouts. He had to concentrate to make sense of it, disentangle one message from another.

Then came one that turned his stomach cold. The British battle cruiser Indefatigable had been sunk, all hands lost. It was hideously real. In the noise and the violence men were dying, crushed, torn apart, burned, and drowned.

Time passed in violence, half-blindness, and mind-bruising noise. The ships moved with what seemed like agonizing slow motion, the sea dragging at everything, pulling against escape, against change, against turning or maneuvering of every sort. It was a chaos of destruction. Matthew had no idea what was going on, or even if they were winning or losing.

It was growing dusk. They took several more hits, one shell going straight through the armor plating but failing to explode. There was a bad fire aft, and Matthew was sent to help get control of it. The blast of the shell had momentarily put out the lights, but candles were lit. There seemed to be shards of broken glass everywhere, and the resin out of the corticine covered everything with a black, sticky gluelike substance that smelled ghastly, filling the throat and churning the stomach. His own stomach was too empty to be sick now.

Some men were struggling to extinguish the flames, others to pad and block the hole in the plating, more to help the injured. Matthew had no experience, no skills. He could see in his mind’s eye the zeppelin, a sheet of flame, descending out of the sky on top of him, feel the heat of it, Detta beside him.

He wished he knew what to do, anything to help. He knew nothing about fire, or the force of water trying to crush a steel hull from the outside. He moved, lifted, passed, everything he was told, carried bleeding men, staggering under their weight.

He was up on the deck again before dark, his skin singed, eyes aching and gritty with smoke. As it cleared in the wind he could see a burned-out gun turret, charred wood, broken rigging, and a German battle cruiser ahead, just within range. The starboard guns fired from the good turrets one after another and he saw at least half a dozen plumes of water spout up. They were just short of the battle cruiser, but closing.

There was another destroyer to the port side, about two thousand yards away, as near as he could judge, and beyond it, almost obscured by smoke, another. The battle cruiser was firing. A salvo of shells landed almost on them, sending up mountains of water, drenching the entire ship. They veered across rapidly to avoid the range, hull shuddering under the strain, and then swerved again, coming closer.

All the starboard guns fired. The noise was a kind of hell in itself. A gun turret on one of the other destroyers was hit and Matthew knew the men in it would all have been killed. He found himself praying it had been outright, not slow burning to death. He had seen the men’s white faces when they saw it happen a hundred yards away, and knew that even if they had been on board, there was nothing they could have done.

Was this how Joseph felt, battered and deafened by sound, watching men being torn apart, struggling to fight, to survive, to do all that was asked of them? Matthew had experienced it for a few hours, not yet even twelve. Joseph saw it every night, and knew it would go on, maybe for years. You knew men, you cared for them, laughed with them, shared jokes and memories and family pictures—all the time knowing the chances that sooner or later they would be killed or mutilated beyond recognition.

How did Joseph bear it and keep sane? Or Archie? Above all, how did Joseph find something to say that was anything but idiotic in the face of such reality? The kind of courage that it demanded amazed him and awoke a staggering admiration. He would never be able to look at Joseph, or even think of him again in the same casual, familiar way as before. As a child he had regarded Joseph as a hero because he was his elder brother, but this was entirely different. The Joseph he had known all his life was only part of it, the core of it was a stranger that until now he could not have seen.

There was incessant gunfire from huge steel monstrosities—ten, twenty feet long, firing shells it took two men to lift and load. When they struck, they tore apart plate steel, and if they hit magazines, they exploded in sheets of white-hot fire that engulfed whole decks, burning men to death in minutes.

The sky and sea were lit up by muzzle flashes all around them. He knew it must be nearing midnight by now. They were still firing at the German cruiser. Radio signals were stuttering from all directions, some making sense, others too broken to read. The losses were appalling—innumerable ships and thousands of men. The sea was rough, choppy; the wind swung around to the west.

The Cormorant’s guns were silent for minutes. They were closing on the cruiser.

Then they opened fire again, the noise mind-numbing. There seemed to be flame and smoke everywhere, searing the skin and hair, choking the lungs. The bridge and signal house were shrouded by it. Matthew had not the least idea whether anything was hit or not.

He stared to the east, straining until the smoke cleared. Ragland beside him seemed to be holding his breath, his face masklike in the glare of the lights.

Gradually the wind blew the smoke away, cold salt instead of burning cordite, and they saw the cruiser engulfed in flame. The magazines had taken a direct hit and exploded, breaking its back. It was listing already, in the first terrible throes of its long plunge to its tomb in the depths.

Matthew was speechless. The tactics had been brilliant. The Cormorant had sunk an enemy cruiser with more weight, more guns, and more men, but there was no sweetness in it at all. The fact that they were German, and would have sunk the Cormorant if they could, seemed almost irrelevant. They were close to a thousand living, breathing men, seamen like themselves, going to a fearful and certain death. It was all he could think of as he stood transfixed with pity watching as the great ship burned lower and lower in the water. Ammunition still exploded, tearing her apart until she slid beneath the black surface, shining in the flames of other gunfire, leaving the sea littered with struggling men and the debris of death.

There was no one there to help, and no one came. They were under the guns of the Cormorant. Please God, Archie would not have shot at a rescuer, but they could not know that, nor could the Cormorant risk going any closer to the array of German destroyers on the farther side, well within firing range.

Matthew turned away and saw Ragland’s face in the light. The same wrenching pity was in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth, although it was impossible to tell in the red and yellow glare of muzzle flames and the smeared darkness of drifting gun smoke, if he was as ashen as he looked. The noise had started again closer, others joining those of the injured ships around them. There was no time for shock or mourning. The battle raged on.

Midnight passed. In the signal room they heard that both the Ardent and the Fortune had been sunk.

At two o’clock news came that the armored cruiser Black Prince had blundered into the German firing line and been lost with all hands. For the first time Matthew began to believe that the British fleet might lose. It was a strange thought, alien and hard to grasp. Britain had not lost a crucial battle at sea since before the Spanish Armada in the reign of Elizabeth I, over three hundred years earlier. This would mean the end. Without a navy to guard the shipping lanes, to evacuate the army from France, to prevent the German army landing on the beaches of Britain, the war was lost. In a month, two months, the fields and trees of England could be trampled by German boots, burned, torn up, destroyed by an occupying army.

What then? Retreat to the hills of Wales, Scotland? Fight in the forests and fens until there was no one left? Or submit, sue for peace and some kind of survival? On what terms? Would that be to betray the dead who had already paid so high a price, only to have it thrown away now? Or the living, who had to make the best of what was left? At what point was it no longer worth fighting?

He listened to the signals coming in with a kind of grim despair. He thought of Hannah and the children, the village, the fields under the great, silent elms. Were they better destroyed in the last battle, or conquered, surviving, and changed forever?

He was still thinking of that, angry and tormented, his ears deadened by the noise, when he heard shouting and saw Archie waving his arms, signaling frantically to the men on the deck below him.

Ragland peered forward. Then Matthew saw it as well, a German cruiser coming straight toward them. He realized what Archie’s order had been—“Clear the foc’sle!”

The next instant they crashed together with an impact that hurled Matthew off his feet and the whole room seemed to pitch over on one side and then right itself and send him back again, staggering against the table. The ship rolled over to starboard, and the next moment there was the roar and crack of fire raking the length of the ship.

Matthew clambered to his feet, shaken and hurt. Ragland was doing the same, but with more presence of mind, he made for the door, threw his weight against it and burst it open. Matthew followed him. The front glass was shattered; only then did he see on the port side the vast, towering bow of the German cruiser almost cleaving them amidships, buckling and ripping off the steel plating.

“God Almighty!” Ragland gasped, standing momentarily rooted to the deck.

Very slowly the German ship eased back into the sea and the Cormorant rocked violently and righted itself a little, wallowing hard in the water.

The German guns had cleared the decks. The foremast was toppling, the for’ard searchlight had fallen from the fire-bridge down to the deck, and the funnel was blown back until it rested between the two foremost ventilation cowls. The boats had come down and even the davits were torn out of their sockets. The cruiser’s guns must have been elevated too high to rip open the deck, or they would have been on fire by now, and settling in the water.

Matthew knew it before the order came to man the boats: They were sinking. There was no way to save her. A wild terror assailed him that Archie would go down with her. He swung around, looking for him, but the bridge was invisible through the smoke.

Someone was manning the guns, firing with everything they had at the German ship, spewing shell, flame, smoke in choking clouds. They’d go down locked together!

Except that the German ship was not holed. It was still well afloat.

One of the boy sailors, not much older than Tom, came scrambling up the steps, shouting something. Matthew tried to read his lips and the meaning in his wildly swinging arms.

“The brig’s burst open!” the boy yelled, the words piercing a sudden moment’s lull.

Hannassey! He’d go for the prototype. He didn’t know it was no good. And perhaps it wasn’t. The Germans might be able to finish it!

There was no point in trying to explain anything to Ragland. The roar of the guns had started again and he would hear nothing anyway. Matthew pushed past him and plunged down the steps, now twisted and torn loose at the bottom.

Men were running up. Smoke caught in his nose and throat, half blinding him, making him cough and his eyes stream, but he was determined to catch Hannassey, at all costs. If they were going down, all of them—Archie, Ragland, all the men and boys he had eaten with, worked beside, and whose courage and good humor he had known—then Hannassey was bloody well going down with them. He was not going to escape to the German ship that had rammed them, not even for a few minutes before it too sank. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Maybe someone would survive, and it was not going to be the Peacemaker!

Where would he go when the brig burst open? To the prototype, surely. He wouldn’t leave the Cormorant without at least trying to get it. He was not a man to save his own skin without playing the last card!

He swiveled in his tracks and went toward the torpedo room where the prototype was stored, theoretically ready for testing.

It was difficult to keep his balance; the list to starboard was growing worse. He kept sliding, losing his footing and having to catch himself, one hand against the bulkhead, then an elbow, then a shoulder as he ran. He stumbled over bodies and wreckage. The guns were still roaring, as if the crews were determined to take the German ship with them. There was shattered glass on the floor and the air was thick with the stench of gun smoke, burning oil, and rubber from the corticine. And it was getting hotter all the time as he got closer to the fires.

There was another explosion, a tearing thunder of sound, and the whole ship juddered and sank lower, throwing Matthew forward onto his hands and knees, then rolling him over, bruised and wounded, hands cut, burned, streaming blood. He clambered to his feet again, gasping and coughing, retching to catch his breath.

Was Hannassey still somewhere ahead of him? What if he was wrong, and he had abandoned the prototype and was even now saving his own life by jumping to the German ship? It would be possible. It was lower in the water now, at least from the raised port side.

He hesitated. Which way?

The ship lurched again. Was it even lower? There seemed to be smoke everywhere, and the heat was intense! Were they on fire? Please God, if they were, they would explode! Better to be consumed in a fireball, blown apart in an instant, than to sink knowingly, wide awake, into the darkness and the crushing weight of the ocean, struggling for breath, or drowned as the water poured in, black and ice-cold from the lightless depths.

But he’d get Hannassey first! If he’d already got the prototype, and was struggling to carry it, which way would he go?

Portside, of course. It was higher. If she listed any more there was a risk the starboard side would actually be below water level, and if it was holed either by enemy shot or their own gun turrets or magazines exploding, that would be the end.

It was not his imagination; it was getting hotter. His hands hurt from the broken glass. Somewhere there was burning. It could reach the magazine any minute. He had no idea where it was, or how bad. A voice inside him screamed to go up, toward the light and the air! Escape . . . escape . . . escape!

The smoke was thicker. He was having trouble breathing. His eyes were streaming, he could hardly see. He fell over another body, inert and wet with blood.

But he would get the Peacemaker, and die knowing for certain that he had destroyed him. It was worth it. Don’t die for nothing. He just wished he could have told Joseph that he’d done it.

And Judith and Hannah—they deserved to know, too. Especially Judith. He could not tell Detta, he could never tell her, but she deserved to know, for the way he had used and broken her also, and taken from them both what they could have had.

He went to the port side, sliding on the floor as the tilt became steeper, grabbing at anything he could reach to help himself, and finding it slick with oil. The noise was roaring in his ears, the engines racing, the shrill hiss of steam, the crash and boom of guns.

Then he saw Hannassey about five yards in front of him. He was balanced with the prototype in his arms. He saw Matthew at the same instant.

“Told you you’d go down,” he shouted above the din. “Never had time to use your marvelous invention, did you!” His teeth gleamed in what was left of the lights. Then his face changed. All triumph vanished in a snarl of rage and furious, complete understanding. “It doesn’t bloody work!” he screamed. He hurled it from him, toward Matthew as if he could hit him with it. “The goddamn thing’s no use! You didn’t use it because you can’t! Mother of God! All this for—nothing!”

Matthew avoided it easily, the pitch of the ship carrying it hard against the other wall, and Hannassey stumbled with the release of the weight.

“That’s right!” Matthew shouted back at him. “You came for nothing! You’ll die for nothing! You’ll never see your bloody empire!”

“I don’t . . .” Hannassey started, but the rest of his sentence was drowned in another bellow of gunfire. He turned and stumbled over wreckage toward the steps upward.

Matthew went after him, clawing his way along, feet slipping on burning corticine and broken glass, climbing over twisted iron and crumpled bodies he could not help, Hannassey always just a few yards ahead of him.

There was another crash somewhere above and the ship heaved, sending them both flying. There were several more explosions as ammunition caught fire and a roar as a gun turret burst into searing flames. The heat hurt the skin and tore the breath away even where Matthew and Hannassey were sprawled on the burning floor in what was left of the passageway.

Then Hannassey shot forward and dived for the steps hanging loose-ended from the mangled deck and hauled himself up, swung his body over, and went on.

Matthew ran at it and jumped, catching the third rung, and flailed wildly for a moment or two before his feet found the bottom one and he swarmed up it after Hannassey.

He reached the deck and blessed air just in time to see Hannassey running into a pall of smoke under the blackened gun turret. The bow of the German ship was only yards below them. It had heaved away but now it was coming back. Deliberately for Hannassey? He could make it. He had only to leap. He turned for an instant, jubilation in his face, that wide smile, showing his teeth.

Matthew hurled himself forward and caught Hannassey at the knees, overbalancing him. Hannassey fought, kicking, gouging, tearing at Matthew’s face, his hair, anything he could reach.

But this was the Peacemaker, the man who would have sold England in the greatest betrayal of its history! But for Matthew, overpowering it like a drowning wave, was the fact that he was the man who had murdered John and Alys Reavley, simply because John Reavley had stumbled onto his plan. Matthew thought only of their bloodied bodies in the car, and his grip was unbreakable unless Hannassey could have crushed the bones of his hands.

They were near the rail. The German ship was only fifteen yards away, less, and closing. Even through the smoke he could see the vast darkness of it.

He pulled away with all his strength, then lunged forward, catching Hannassey on the jaw with his head. Hannassey gasped and let go for an instant. It was enough. Matthew scrambled to his feet. He made the decision without thinking. He bent and grasped Hannassey and heaved him over the side.

Matthew heard him scream as he went down and in the light of the fires saw him flailing in the water for long, desperate, terrible seconds until the steel bow of the German ship crushed him like a fly against the hull of the Cormorant.

Matthew clung to the rail, nausea sweeping over him, the deck lurching beneath his feet till he fell to his knees, still clinging on. He had killed Hannassey, with his own hands he had thrown him to a hideous death. He would remember that thin scream above the guns’ roar. The falling figure, arms wide, was seared onto his brain, and then the crunch of flesh and bones lost in the din of the sea, the flame, and the ear-splitting explosion of the rear gun turret. Then everything vanished in smoke and darkness, his lungs bursting, the deck heaving violently beneath him. He would die with the ship and all the men in it, but the Peacemaker was gone, dead forever.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Joseph had been to see Gwen Neave again and was walking back on the road homeward, Henry at his heels. He was no longer even aware of the slight ache in his leg. He had been over seven weeks away from his regiment, and he was actually in better health now than many of the men who were still there. The thing that kept him at home in the warmth of the sun and the quiet peace of the fields was his fear for Shanley Corcoran.

His feet crushed the stems of the grass and he could smell the sweetness of it in the air. The larks were singing above, high up beyond sight, less than a black dot against the blue.

Why had Corcoran not told Perth yet? Lack of proof? Or did he still need the man, assuming it was Ben Morven? It was a dangerous game to play. No wonder his voice had sounded strained on the telephone. There was so much to win, or lose.

Archie had just gone back to sea, and Matthew had telephoned to say that he too would be away for perhaps a week or more.

Then it struck him like a physical blow. The prototype was finished and on trial at sea. That was why Matthew was gone.

And here was Joseph walking through the grass with the may blossom heavy in the air as if there were nothing to be done but drink in its splendor.

It must be Archie’s ship being used for the sea trials. Archie had said Corcoran had talked to him about sea trials on the night Blaine was killed. They had been at the Cutlers’ Arms, over at Madingley.

No, Corcoran had said that was where they were. Archie had said . . . He stopped. It was absolutely clear in his mind, as if it had been only minutes ago, Archie had said they had met at eight, when Blaine had still been alive, and at the Drouthy Duck, here in St. Giles.

Could Archie have been mistaken? Surely he must have been. It did not matter to him where or when it had been. No one could have suspected him of being involved with Theo Blaine either personally or professionally. To Corcoran it was far more important, because he had said it was where he had been at the time his best scientist was murdered. Presumably that was what he had told Perth also, if he had asked. He would have, wouldn’t he, as a matter of course, if nothing else, to find out if Corcoran could have seen anything, or heard anything? Not that he would normally be anywhere near Blaine’s house. Corcoran lived in Madingley. Except that he was out that evening, which was unusual. He worked far too hard to take time off, except for the most important occasions—such as discussing sea trials.

He must simply have made a mistake, in tiredness and anxiety, even grief for the loss of his best scientist, and a friend, and been uncharacteristically careless. And of course it was impossible now to check with Archie so he could correct it.

Why did that make him feel uncomfortable? Why was he even considering the possibility that Shanley Corcoran could be lying about where he had been? What was it he thought? That somehow Corcoran knew the truth, and was lying about it? He already knew that he was protecting whoever had murdered Blaine because he needed him to complete the project. There was little doubt in his mind that it was Ben Morven. Lucas could not have killed Blaine, and he did not believe it was Iliffe, although it was not impossible.

Was it conceivable that Corcoran had guessed beforehand, and gone to Blaine’s home to prevent his murder, and been too late? What tragic irony.

But why had he then lied about it? To prevent any possibility of having to betray Morven, before the work was completed.

Had he gone openly, or in secret? Joseph was cold in the sun and the larks sounded tinny and far away. Did Morven know? Had he seen Corcoran there? No, surely not, or he would have killed him before now. He could hardly afford not to.

No, worse than that, he was waiting for Corcoran to complete the prototype, just as Corcoran had been waiting for him.

But if Joseph was right, then it was completed and already at sea! Was Morven waiting for news that it worked? Hardly—it would be a wildly unnecessary risk. Far more likely he was simply seeking the right moment to kill Corcoran so that he was safe himself, and the only man left who could re-create the machine.

Joseph started to walk quickly, calling Henry to follow him. He took long strides, ignoring the trampled grass. He reached the gate to the orchard and flung it open, slamming it behind him as soon as Henry was through, and sprinted under the trees to the hedge and the end of the garden. He was out of breath by the time he got to the back door and into the kitchen, oblivious of trailing mud over Mrs. Appleton’s clean floor.

He went straight to the telephone in the hall and asked the operator to connect him to Lizzie Blaine. Please heaven she was at home. She was the only person he could think of who would take him to the Establishment. He waited impatiently while it rang. Why should she be at home? There were a dozen other places she could be.

He heard her voice with intense relief.

“Mrs. Blaine? This is Joseph Reavley. Can you take me to the Establishment please, right away? It’s extremely urgent.”

“Yes, of course,” she said immediately. “Is everything all right? Has something happened?”

“Not so far, but I must go there and warn them so that it doesn’t. I’ll be waiting in the road. Thank you!”

It was ten minutes before she arrived, during which time he apologized to Mrs. Appleton and left a message for Hannah that he had gone on an errand, and would be back in the evening.

Lizzie swept up in the Model T. She looked anxious, her hair falling out of its pins and a smear of dirt on her cheek. Obviously she had taken him at his word as to the gravity of the occasion.

“Thank you,” he said, climbing in and closing the door.

She eased out the clutch and increased the acceleration before replying. “Are you going to tell me what it is? Do you know who killed Theo?”

“Yes, I think so,” he answered as they turned the corner into the High Street. “But I’ve got to make sure he doesn’t kill Corcoran as well. I believe they’re testing the invention, and if it’s a success he won’t need Corcoran anymore.”

“He wouldn’t kill him for that,” she said, increasing speed onto the open road and narrowly missing the may branches sloping wide. “It would be a stupid risk.”

“Not because they don’t need him,” Joseph explained. “This man killed your husband, and Corcoran knows it. I don’t know why he hasn’t turned him in already.”

“Perhaps he has no proof,” she suggested, her knuckles white on the wheel as she swerved with considerable skill and straightened up again. “Are you going to tell me?”

“Yes, when I’m absolutely sure. With Corcoran gone he would be the only man left alive who knows exactly how to re-create the invention.”

She concentrated on her driving for several minutes in silence, her face intense on the road.

“I’m sorry,” he said in sudden contrition. He was speaking of the murder of her husband as if it were incidental to the scientific achievement, not the death of the man she had loved, probably more than anyone else in the world.

She flashed him a sudden smile, and it vanished as quickly. “Thank you. I’m not sure how much I want to know what happened. I thought I did, but now that it could be any minute, it’s more real, and a lot uglier. In a way it was better drifting into the past unsolved. Am I a coward?” There was pain in her voice, as if she cared what he thought and had already decided it was harsh.

“No,” he said quietly. “Just wise enough to know that answers don’t always help.”

“I’ll miss you when you go back to France.” She stared ahead, deliberately avoiding his eyes. She put her foot down and increased the speed, now having to concentrate fiercely to keep on the road. The silence settled between them as if by agreement. They both had much to think about.

She screeched to a halt at the gates of the Establishment and Joseph got out, thanking her and leaving her to wait. He spent nearly a quarter of an hour explaining to officials that he had to see Corcoran urgently, and then waited, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, while messages were sent, answers returned, and more messages sent in reply.

It was nearly twenty-five minutes after arriving that he reached the waiting room, and a full quarter hour after that before he was ushered into Corcoran’s office. Corcoran, pale and tired, looked up from a desk littered with papers.

“What is it, Joseph? Surely it could have waited until this evening? You would have been welcome to come over to dinner.”

“I don’t think it can wait,” Joseph answered, too tense to sit down in the chair opposite him. “Not safely. And I couldn’t have said it in front of Orla anyway. You’ve got to have Perth arrest Morven before he kills you as well.” He leaned forward onto the desk, refusing to allow it to separate them. “I’m not going to let you run this risk anymore!” He nearly added that he cared too much, but it sounded melodramatic, and selfish.

“The work . . .” Corcoran began.

“It’s finished!” Joseph said impatiently. “It’s on sea trials, isn’t it? With Archie. You said he was going to do them. Isn’t that where Matthew’s gone?”

Corcoran’s dark eyes opened very wide. “You think I know?” he said slowly, surprise and a flicker of fear in his face.

“Don’t affect ignorance!” Anger welled up dangerously inside Joseph, too close to breaking his control. The danger was real, and he could not bear to lose Corcoran as well. It was as if the past and all he loved in it were being taken from him piece by piece. “You may not know where they’ve gone, but you know you finished the prototype and they took it! And Morven knows it.”

“To test!” Corcoran shook his head. “There’s so much that you don’t understand, and I can’t tell you. Morven will not kill me. . . .”

“He can’t afford not to!” Joseph was raising his voice in spite of himself. “For God’s sake, you were there that night! You saw it, or something! Enough to work it out.”

Corcoran gulped. “What makes you think that, Joseph?”

Joseph’s patience was close to ripping apart. “Don’t treat me like a fool, Shanley! You lied to me about where you were when Blaine was killed. You said you were with Archie at the Cutlers’ Arms. You weren’t.” He saw Corcoran wince as if he had been hit. “I’m not checking up on you!” he said angrily. “Archie told me where he met you, at the Drouthy Duck! I just today realized what you’d said.”

He steadied his voice, dropping it to be gentler, hearing his own anguish in it and unable to moderate it. “You were protecting Morven because you needed his gifts to finish whatever it is you were making. Well, it’s finished now! And the first chance he gets he’ll kill you. Give him up!”

Corcoran stared at him, amazement and grief battling in his face. He looked old, almost beaten. There was only a last shred of will left to hang on to.

“Shanley, you can’t protect him anymore!” Joseph pleaded. God, how he hated this war! Year by year it was stripping him of everything he loved! “I know you may like him,” he urged, his voice panicky, too high. “Damn it, I liked him myself, but he killed Theo Blaine. He stabbed him in the neck with a gardening fork and left him to bleed to death in the mud under his own trees—for his wife to find!” He leaned farther forward. “And he’ll do the same to you, but I won’t let that happen!”

“We . . . we still need him, Joseph,” Corcoran said slowly. “It’s only sea trials. It may need work yet!” He sat forward, elbows on the desk, his face, almost bloodless, only a yard away from Joseph’s. “This is the greatest invention in naval warfare since the torpedo! Perhaps even greater. It could save England, Joseph!” His eyes burned with the fire, the passion of it. “The whole British Empire rests on our mastery of the sea!” His voice trembled. “If we master the sea, we master the world, and lay peace on it. I can’t turn him in yet!”

“And if he kills you first?” Joseph demanded. He heard what Corcoran said about England, about the empire, even about victory and peace, words that sounded like the vision of a forgotten heaven of the past, a glory remembered now like the gold of a dream. But he could not bear to let go of the love he still had, the memories of all certainty and goodness bound up in this man. “Morven is a spy! He killed Blaine, and he’ll kill you!”

Corcoran blinked as if his vision were blurred and his eyes so exhausted he had trouble seeing. Then, very slowly, he sank his head on his hands. “I know,” he said softly, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Tell Perth!” Joseph reached across and placed a hand on Corcoran’s wrist, a touch more than a grip.

“I can’t, not yet.” Corcoran lifted his head. “Leave it, Joseph. There’s more to it than you know.”

“I won’t let you be killed!” He thought of his father. The pain of his loss ached inside him like a bruise to the bone, as if he had been beaten and it hurt even to breathe. Why couldn’t he make Corcoran see his danger? His father would have known what to say. Even Matthew might have done better than this. He wished Matthew were here with his judgment, his sanity. But he wasn’t. There was no one else.

Corcoran stared at him, his face gaunt, almost like dead flesh. “Leave it, Joseph,” he said again. “I know what Morven is. I’ve known for months. But it’s not time yet!”

“Why not?” Joseph demanded.

“I can’t do without him until we’re sure the prototype works.” Corcoran tried to smile. He looked like an old man staring death in the face with all the courage he could still grasp. “Please, Joseph, let it go for now. I know what I’m doing. He caught Blaine by surprise. Poor man had no idea. I do, and I’ll be careful. It’s not in his interest to kill me yet.”

“Is that why you were there?” Joseph asked, still struggling with the idea of asking Perth to end it all now, while he was sure Corcoran was alive and well.

Corcoran looked inexpressibly weary, as if suddenly his mind had lost the thread. He blinked.

“Were you trying to save Blaine the night he died?” Joseph insisted.

Corcoran sighed and pushed his hand across his hair, as if to take it back off his brow, but it had grown suddenly more sparse, and the gesture was pointless. “Yes. I was too late.”

“Tell Perth!” Joseph urged. “Let him put more men here!”

Corcoran smiled. “My dear Joseph, come back to reality! I know you are afraid for me, and it is just the love and concern I would expect from you. You have always been the most like your father, passionate, tender-hearted.” He blinked as if to hide tears, and his voice was softer. “You have much of his intellect, but not his power to separate the dream from the practical. This is an establishment where we do work that may save thousands of lives, tens of thousands, even end the war with a British victory and save England and all the literature, the law, and the dreams that have built an empire.” His lips tightened. “Perth is a decent man, adequate in his way, but it is impossible to have him or his men in here except for an hour or two at a time, under supervision, as they have to be. And I need to get back to my work. There are other inventions, other plans. Had you been anyone else I would not have taken the time from them to see you.” He rose to his feet stiffly. He looked as if every year of his age weighed painfully on his shoulders. “But it means much to me that you care so deeply. I shall make time to see you again before you return to Flanders.”

Joseph felt curiously beaten. There was nothing for him to do but say goodbye and leave.

He found Lizzie waiting for him in the car, parked just beyond the gate. He climbed in and sat down, closing the door. He felt drained and inexplicably defeated. Corcoran knew, but still Joseph had not been able to do anything to ensure his safety. And although he realized the murderer was beyond question Ben Morven, it was still an ugly thing to have it confirmed. He had liked Ben. He had thought there was something good in him, something of gentleness and honor. Perhaps he was a complete failure as a judge of people? He saw what he wanted to see. To judge kindly is a virtue, sometimes the difference between love and self-righteousness, but to miss the truth altogether, to fail to see evil, allows it to grow until it poisons everything. It is a kind of moral cowardice that leaves the battle to others, while calling itself charity. In the end it is not courage, honor, or love, simply evasion of discomfort to oneself.

“Are you all right?” Lizzie said softly. “You look pretty awful.”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m not even any use. I’ll get out and crank. You start.”

When they were a few yards down the road, around the corner into the lane back toward St. Giles, she turned to him again. “You’re like a dentist hovering over a bad tooth. It has to come out! Who killed Theo?”

“Ben Morven,” he answered. “He’s the German spy here. He needed to take Theo’s place on the project, so he could have the information it would give him, and I suppose the opportunity to sabotage the whole project.”

She said nothing for several moments, frowning as she turned a sharp corner, and then another. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said at last. “Ben Morven is very good, but he’s not in the same field. To a layman it might look as if they were, but they weren’t. Theo talked to me about his work—not the details, of course, but I know what his skills were.” She looked at him quickly, then at the road again. “They were both physicists, but Theo’s specialist field was wave transmission through water, Ben Morven’s is servo mechanisms. He couldn’t have taken Theo’s place. Corcoran himself could have, except that he wasn’t as good.”

“Not as good!” Joseph said incredulously.

“Not in that field,” she replied. “Physics and mathematics of that order, inventive, original, are a young man’s skills. Corcoran was the best in his time, but that was twenty-five years ago.”

“But . . .” He struggled after explanations, something to rebut what she was saying. It was heading toward an abyss that appalled him.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

He sat stunned. He did not want to think of it, but the reasoning unrolled in front of him just like the ribbon of road ahead, and he was carried along just as inevitably as if he were in a vehicle of the mind that he could neither stop nor steer away.

Corcoran had lied about Morven, not in order to protect the work, but about their relative abilities, even the nature of their skills. Morven had not taken Blaine’s place; Corcoran had taken it himself, or tried to. Was that why the work had taken so much longer? Corcoran was not as good, he had not the keenness of grasp, the agility of intellect.

Lizzie drove on silently.

Other things came into Joseph’s mind, like the branches coming into sight as they turned a corner in the road. Corcoran sitting at the family table making them all laugh, years ago, when Joseph was a boy; Corcoran telling stories, complimenting Alys and making her blush but laugh at the same time; Corcoran talking about his work, eyes burning with pride and enthusiasm, saying how it would revolutionize the war at sea, how it would save Britain. He had not boasted that his name would go down in history as the man whose brilliance altered the course of life, but it was there between the lines.

Only had he lived, it would have been Theo Blaine’s name that was written, not Corcoran’s.

Was that it? Glory? Had he, not Morven, murdered Blaine, believing he could take his place, and then found he could not? The thought was unbearable! What treachery to the past, to friendship, to his father, that he could even allow such a thing into his head! Joseph despised himself that he could do it, but it was there, immovable.

How could he have been so wrong all his life? And his father be wrong as well? John Reavley had loved Corcoran as a friend since university days. Was he so deluded that he had missed such a fatal hunger for fame, for endless adoration?

At last Lizzie interrupted, her voice strained as if she could keep silent no longer. “What is it?” she asked. “I have to know one day. You don’t need to protect me.”

“I . . .” he started. Then he realized how rude that would sound, saying that it was himself he was protecting, his dreams and his beliefs, all the safety of the past that comforted and sustained now. He watched her face, strong and humorous and brave, trying to find a way through loss. She deserved the truth, and he realized with surprise that he would like to share it with her. It would be easier, not harder for him.

Finding the words with difficulty, he described to her what he had thought, the slow piecing together until the picture they made was inescapable.

It was several moments before she answered.

Had he made a hideous mistake, turned on the one man who was doing all he could for the best, selflessly? Would Lizzie despise him for it as much as Corcoran himself would, and Matthew, and Hannah?

But a voice inside him said that he was not wrong. War could strip a man down to essentials of strength or weakness that the comforts of peace had layered with deceit. It revealed flaws that lesser times left decently covered.

Lizzie pulled the car to a stop at the side of the lane and turned to face him. Her eyes were full of unhappiness and a deep and terrible pity.

“I wish I could think of anything to argue you out of that, but if I did I would be lying, and we can’t afford anything less than the truth, can we.” It was a statement, not a question. “I’m so sorry. It would be so much easier if it were anyone else.”

He was not alone in his knowledge. It left him no choice. The dilemma and the guilt of choice were gone, and the freedom. He was propelled forward now, whatever he wished.

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked softly.

“Yes, of course I am,” he answered, looking at her, then seeing her strong, steady face, turning away again. There was no doubt in her. She understood all that it meant. “Lizzie, you must say nothing. Not for Corcoran’s safety, for your own. Do you understand me?” he said urgently, even roughly.

She shivered. “Yes. I know. As long as you are going to do something. I’m not going to cover for anyone at all who killed Theo, whatever the reason.” They were in the main street of St. Giles. She turned the corner and pulled the car to a halt outside the house and looked at him, her eyes wide and bright from the lights in the doorway. “He doesn’t deserve that. He behaved like a fool with Penny Lucas, but not enough to die for, or be forgotten as if he didn’t matter.” She was quite steady now. “He did matter. He was brilliant, and stupid, brave and vulnerable and thoughtless, like most of us, except he did everything more. I’m not going to let him be forgotten. I’m not looking for vengeance, I suppose not even justice. It seems as if half the young men in Europe are dying. I just refuse to let it pass as if it wasn’t worth trying to do the right thing.”

“I’ll do the right thing,” he promised. He meant it intensely, for her sake as well as his own. “I’ll go to London tomorrow, and speak to the people who can deal with it, but not here, not Inspector Perth. I don’t have the kind of proof he would need. It’s just my word, at the moment.”

She reached across quickly and touched his hand, then gave a little smile, and nodded.

“Thank you for taking me,” he acknowledged her help, and got out of the car. He looked back at her for a moment and saw her smiling at him, the tears wet on her cheeks in the lamplight. He turned and went inside.

In the morning he took the bus to Cambridge, and then the train to London. He had told Hannah that it was business, but he had not told her the nature of it. She saw the darkness in his face and she did not ask.

He had no idea how long he would be gone, but he had a key to Matthew’s flat and if he had to stay in London, then he would do, as long as it was required until Admiral Hall of naval intelligence would see him. He would not trust Calder Shearing, because he knew that Matthew did not. This must go as high as he was able to reach. He still half hoped that there would be someone who could prove to him that he was wrong. He would look like a disloyal fool, but he could deal with his own weakness, blame himself and execute the appropriate penance. It would still be better than facing a truth as bitter as that which he knew his mind already accepted.

He went to naval intelligence. He knew where it was from his previous experience the year before, after the business at Gallipoli. Of course it was a different man who met him this time.

“Yes, sir?” the man asked blandly.

Joseph gave him his name, rank, and regiment, and said that Matthew was his brother. “I have information regarding the murder of Theo Blaine at the Scientific Establishment in Cambridgeshire,” he went on. “I can repeat it only to Admiral Hall.”

“I’m sorry, sir, that is not possible,” the man said immediately. “If you would like to write it down it will be submitted in due course.”

Joseph kept his temper only with the greatest difficulty. It was a kind of absurd nightmare that this dreadful task should be so difficult, as if fate were testing his resolve.

“The matter is in regard to immediate danger threatening a device currently being tested in sea trials on the HMS Cormorant,” he told the man.

That provided the result he wanted. Quarter of an hour later he was in the office of Admiral “Blinker” Hall, a short, robust man with a keen face and a shock of white hair. It was apparent within minutes how his nickname had been earned.

“Right, Captain Reavley, what is it?” Hall asked bluntly. “And don’t waste time explaining, I know perfectly well who you are. Well done on the Military Cross.”

“Thank you, sir. I know who killed Theo Blaine, and I fear that I know why. It appears to have nothing to do with the Germans.”

Hall frowned at him. “You had better sit down and tell me exactly what you mean.”

“Yes, sir. Do you want to know how I reached . . .”

“No. Just tell me who did what, and I shall ask you what I cannot deduce for myself.”

As briefly as he could, Joseph recounted what he believed to have happened. Hall stopped him every time he needed proof, or the process of his reasoning was unclear, but that did not happen often. The more Joseph laid out his knowledge the more hideously plain it became.

“And I believe you are testing the device now,” he finished. “When it works, and Corcoran does not need Ben Morven anymore, then I’m afraid he may either kill him, or else try to turn him in for the murder of Blaine,” he finished. His chest felt tight, as if he could not draw air into his lungs. Put as baldly as that it was logically inescapable, and yet emotionally he still felt as if he had betrayed the past and somehow broken a thing of infinite value that was not his alone, but belonged to his whole family. Most especially it belonged to Matthew, and he would not be forgiven for destroying it. He had created immeasurable pain, and he should have found some way to avoid it.

“That will not happen,” Hall said quietly.

“Yes, it will,” Joseph contradicted him. “As soon as the Cormorant returns and he knows it was successful.”

Hall looked at him steadily, his eyes bright and sad. “It will not be successful. Corcoran could not complete it. Mrs. Blaine is right, he has not the brilliance Blaine had. He thought he could do the last little bit himself, but he misjudged his ability. He killed Blaine too soon.”

Joseph was stunned. “You mean we . . . we’ve lost the invention?”

“Yes.”

He refused to grasp it.

“But we’re testing it! On the Cormorant . . .”

“In the hope that the Germans will try to steal it.” A flash of bleak humor touched Hall’s face. “Then we might at least find the leak from the Establishment. But if it was Corcoran himself who killed Blaine, and I believe you, then there may not be one. It looks as if he also smashed the first prototype in order to hide the fact that he was unable to complete it. It bought him some time, and increased our belief that there was a German spy in St. Giles.”

“You’re not surprised?” Joseph said with profound misery, still fighting to find some shred of disbelief. It was futile, and in his heart he knew it, but he could not let go yet.

“Yes, I am surprised,” Hall admitted. “But your logic is perfect. More than anything else I am grieved. I know Corcoran, not well, but I know him. I saw he was ambitious and that he loved admiration, he fed on the love of his fellows, which he more than earned.” His clear blue eyes were sad, and perhaps guilty. “I did not recognize the hunger for glory that it seems finally destroyed everything else in him.” His voice dropped. “I’ve seen it before, in military men, and in politicians, where the original desire to win the battle is overtaken by the lust for fame and to be admired, and then finally to become immortal in memory, as if their existence were measured only by what others think of them. They become so addicted to fame their appetite is insatiable. I didn’t see it in Corcoran, but I should have.”

“I can’t prove it!” Joseph said with a kind of desperation. It was Shanley that Hall was speaking of as if he were a stranger, somebody one could diagnose with impartiality, not a friend, his godfather, and a part of his life woven inextricably with every memory he had.

“You won’t prove it with Archie’s evidence,” he went on aloud, insistent, as if it could still matter. “Not beyond reasonable doubt.”

Hall looked at him with pity. “I know. He will have to be arrested immediately and tried in secret. None of this can be known. It is murder and treason. The evidence will be given in camera because of the prototype, and because such a betrayal would cripple morale, and we might not survive that just now.”

“In secret?” Joseph was startled.

“Yes. We will call you when you are needed.”

“Me? But . . .”

“You must testify as to what Commander MacAllister told you, and Mrs. Blaine.”

“But it’s hearsay!” Joseph protested. “It’s not evidence!”

“Is it true?” Hall’s eyes opened very wide.

“Yes! But . . .”

“You will swear to it?”

Joseph hesitated, not because he had any doubt, but because it meant that he was casting the final pieces that would weigh damnation for Shanley Corcoran.

“Are you telling the truth, Captain Reavley?” Hall repeated.

“Yes . . .”

“Then you will swear it before the tribunal if you are called. Thank you for coming forward. I realize what it has cost you.”

Joseph rose to his feet slowly, straightening his leg and his back. “No, you don’t,” he said wearily. “You have no idea at all.” He turned and walked to the door slowly, as if each step were too long, and too slow. He heard Hall speaking behind him, but he did not listen. There was nothing he could say that would do any good.

Joseph returned to St. Giles the next day. He walked into the house in the early afternoon and he was barely in the hall when Hannah came out of the kitchen white-faced, her hair coming loose from its pins.

“Joseph, something terrible has happened,” she said immediately, without waiting for him to speak. “Orla Corcoran telephoned, but I couldn’t reach you at Matthew’s flat. You must have left already.” She stepped in front of him, so close he could smell the sweetness of the lavender soap on her skin. Her voice was trembling. “Joseph, someone came this morning to arrest Shanley and took him away. They didn’t say what for, and Orla is almost beside herself. She has no idea what it’s about and she doesn’t know what to do. They told her to say nothing, so she can’t even call a lawyer. How can we help? I told her you would know.”

“We can’t help,” he replied, seeing the grief and incomprehension in her face. He opened the sitting room door and pulled her in, closing it after her. He did not want Mrs. Appleton to hear. “It is to do with Blaine’s murder,” he explained. “And the project they have at the Establishment. It has to be secret.”

“They’ve found the spy.” She searched his face, her eyes serious, probing for honesty. “Was Shanley protecting him? Is that what’s wrong?”

“No, actually they haven’t. I’m not sure if there is one.”

“There has to be! He murdered Theo Blaine.” She stated it as fact.

Should he let it go? It would be easier. The temptation was so powerful it burned through his mind like a fire, hurting and destroying.

She saw something of the turmoil inside him and reached up her hand a little uncertainly to touch his cheek. “Joseph, please don’t shut me out. I’m not running away anymore. I am sure that whatever it is, it’s terrible. I haven’t seen such pain in your eyes since Eleanor died. What is it?”

He looked at her. She was so like their mother, and yet stronger. Her innocence was gone; not destroyed but transformed into something else, something prepared to love, whatever the cost. She needed him to trust her, and now overwhelmingly he needed her to share the burden with him. He had not intended to, but he told her.

“Shanley killed Blaine himself because Blaine was going to create something brilliant, and take the credit,” he said. “It was his, rightly. Shanley killed him out of envy, thinking he could finish the work, but he was wrong. He wasn’t clever enough.”

He saw the incredulity in her face, then it turned to hurt, then finally grief. “Oh, Joseph, I’m so sorry!” She put her arms around him and held him as if he had been younger than she, the wounded one, the sleepless one whose nights were too long, too dark, and too cold to be endured alone.

He was glad of it. It was all he could do not to let the hot tears of disillusionment and betrayal burn his face.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

It was a long time before Joseph could compose himself sufficiently to telephone Orla Corcoran and say to her that for the moment there was nothing he could do to help, and in Shanley’s best interest she would be wisest to say as little as possible. If anyone should ask her, she should tell them he was not well and could not be reached.

She was unhappy with that advice, knowing that there was something desperately wrong, but he refused to tell her more. He left the study, where he had been with the door closed, to find Hannah in the hall saying that Hallam Kerr was here again, in a degree of anxiety because Mrs. Hopgood was expecting her son home from France, and he had lost both his legs. The boy was nineteen.

“Do you want me to tell him to go away?” she asked with a slightly twisted smile.

“Thank you, but I’ll tell him myself,” he replied, walking past her.

“Joseph . . .”

He stopped and half turned.

She gave him a tight smile, wry, soft-eyed. “Isn’t it also time that you told him you are going back to your regiment, and he’s going to have to deal with her on his own?” she asked.

How did she know? He had not even faced telling her yet, knowing how much she wanted him to stay.

She looked at his dismay. “I’m learning,” she said with a touch of self-mockery. She turned and went toward the kitchen, her head high, her back stiff, deliberately not glancing back at him. Their understanding was better than to need it.

Joseph went into the sitting room, where he found Kerr standing in front of the fireplace, although of course the fire was not lit, and the room was full of sunlight. He looked anxious and there was something close to panic in his eyes. He cleared his throat and his voice was husky.