Shoulder the Sky wwi-2

by Anne Perry

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “No, but I’d love a cup of tea.”

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

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

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

  He nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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