by Anne Perry
Judith could not tell Lizzie why Matthew had come here, but naturally she knew he had been arrested. Everyone did. The sense of relief was palpable for most of them. He had not actually been charged yet; Jacobson was still gathering evidence, hoping for something more concrete, witnesses who had seen something, heard something. But it was only a matter of time.
News was coming about the front line moving east, towns falling one by one. The fighting was still bitter, with murderous losses on both sides, but the end could not be much longer in coming.
Judith was in the Evacuation tent making room for more wounded to be moved into it.
“I need to see one of the German prisoners,” she said urgently to Lizzie. “It’s important. For Matthew.” She was almost on the edge of telling Lizzie why, but she remembered with a stab of pain still fresh the consequences of a previous confidence she’d made, and she kept silent.
Lizzie must have heard the emotion in her voice. She did not argue or ask for further explanation. “You’d better come with me,” she said, looking away the moment after she had agreed. “I have a duty there as soon as we’ve finished this, but I expect you know that.”
Judith felt guilty. She was using Lizzie, who was a friend, but she would have used anyone at all to help Matthew, and to get Schenckendorff to tell them everything he knew about the Peacemaker. Her mind told her that he must not be permitted to influence the terms of the armistice; her heart demanded that he answer for the deaths of her parents.
“Thank you,” she said sincerely.
A flicker of a smile warmed Lizzie’s face, then she led the way. There were two guards on duty, as usual, but they took no notice of nurses coming and going, and to them Judith in her V.A.D. gray was just the same. The thought flashed in her mind to wonder if nurses were always invisible to them. Had Sarah come and gone this way without being noticed?
Inside the hut eight men lay on narrow cots, close to one another. Dark blankets covered their bodies up to the chin; the white bandages that were visible were mostly stained with blood. Lizzie stopped at the first bed. Judith went on, looking for a man whose foot was bandaged.
She found him quickly, although he was not at all as she had expected. He looked leaner, more vulnerable, lying on the cot, his hair untidy from the rough pillow, his face tired and unshaven, etched with pain. She was aware of what Joseph had said about the courage it must have cost him to abandon his life’s belief and promises because his moral loyalty was to a higher principle. How many people can ever do that? The loneliness must be almost beyond the imagination. Could she have left all that she knew and loved for any principle of right, however deep? Would not the accusation of betrayal, however false, bleed inside her forever?
Would he be able to go through with it, when the moment came?
The man stared straight ahead, not looking at her because he did not expect to be spoken to. She was anonymous, just another English nurse who was here only out of duty. The young man in the bed beyond him looked no more than sixteen or seventeen. There was barely down on the fair skin of his cheeks. He looked at her with fear.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said in German. She wanted to add that nobody would, but she knew that might not be true.
Schenckendorff looked at her, woken from his thoughts. “It is not himself he is afraid for,” he said in almost unaccented English. “He is afraid for his family. He comes from a village in the path of the army on its way to Berlin. They are alone there now. His father is dead and his sisters are only children, younger than he is. I apologize for him. He has heard stories.”
“Of course he’s afraid for them,” she replied. “I understand that. My brother is in danger, and I’m afraid for him.” She smiled at the boy, who stared at her, an answering smile touching his mouth and then vanishing. She looked back at Schenckendorff. “He has been blamed for something he didn’t do. If we can’t prove that he didn’t, they’ll shoot him.”
There was no comprehension in Schenckendorff’s eyes.
“One of our nurses was murdered,” she said.
“I know,” he answered. “It was not any of us, although I suppose it is inevitable that you should think it is. I cannot help you, Miss…”
She found her eyes filling with tears, and was furious with herself. “Reavley,” she said in little more than a whisper.
His face was gray with exhaustion and pain, but he still managed to blush. “I’m sorry,” he said so quietly that she saw his lips move more than heard the words.
She had no idea what to say. She wanted to accept what she thought was at least in part an apology as well as an expression of sympathy, but her father’s face was so vivid in her mind that the absolution would not come. “Who is the Peacemaker?” she said instead.
He remained silent.
“They are accusing my brother Matthew of having killed that girl,” she went on. She heard the rasping emotion in her voice and could not control it. “If we don’t manage to prove that he didn’t, they’ll shoot him. Everybody just wants an end to it. We’d like it to be one of you, but it seems it couldn’t be. The next best thing from them is if it was someone like him, who’s only just arrived here. Anything is better than it being someone they know.”
He frowned. “Why do they think it’s him? Why would an intelligence officer from London, who’s never seen her before, suddenly do such a thing?”
“Because he knew her before, and told them he didn’t. It was a long time ago, and she wasn’t married then. He knew her by her maiden name and he didn’t associate the two.”
“Don’t they understand that?” he asked.
“They don’t want to.” She lifted her shoulders very slightly in dismissal of reason. “It’s an answer. They can take him and the regiment will be happy. The police can pack up and go home, get away from the smell, the mud, and the hard rations.” She stared at him, seeing a pain of disillusion far deeper than anything physical could be. “Who is the Peacemaker, Colonel von Schenckendorff?” She almost added that he owed them that much, then changed her mind. He knew it already, or he would not be here.
“That is dangerous knowledge, Miss Reavley.”
“You think it is going to make Matthew’s life any more dangerous than it is? They’ll shoot him—or hang him perhaps.” To say that was so painful, she faltered.
He closed his eyes. “Dermot Sandwell,” he whispered.
She was stunned. Was that true? Could it be? She thought they had proved it could not be, years ago. Was this the Peacemaker’s last, most daring trick of all, to blame someone else? Was Schenckendorff prepared to sacrifice his life to save the real Peacemaker and ruin Sandwell?
She realized he was looking at her, even smiling very faintly.
“You don’t believe me,” he observed. “That is why I have to go to England, whatever the cost. Knowing his name will give you nothing, Miss Reavley, except perhaps a bullet in the head. I must face him and prove it. I know dates and telegram texts, people, places. You must free your brother from this absurd charge, however you do it, and we must go to London. We have not much more time to waste. Please…”
She nodded. “Thank you. I’ll do everything I can.”
His smile grew a little. “You are still not certain, are you? You think it could be a double cross, a triple cross.”
She nearly said she did believe, then something in his eyes made her feel that lying would be cheap, a thing unworthy of either of them. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Can I do anything for you? I’m really an ambulance driver, but I can do basic nursing, emergency care, something to make you more comfortable.” It was evasive, a moment’s release from the tension that threatened to snap inside her, and yet part of her meant it. They were both trapped, and he was in a different kind of pain. She would have helped it if she could.
“Matthew Reavley?” Mason said in disbelief. “That’s impossible!”
He had followed the Cambridgeshire regiment forward to get the stories that would
justify his being here. The weather was gray, with a slicing wind and occasional bursts of sun, but they were beyond the old battleground with its trenches lacing through the wasteland. Here there was nothing to shelter them except a slight rise in the ground and a few scratched-out hollows for sleeping.
“Maybe,” the other correspondent said drily, shifting his position to ease his cramped legs. The guns were too close for carelessness. Snipers could shoot a long way. “Nevertheless it’s true,” he went on. “Been a lot more convenient if it’d been one of the Germans, but apparently it wasn’t. Just as well, or we could have had a bloodbath in reprisals. Anyway, who is this Reavley? Why is it impossible? That’s a word I wouldn’t expect to hear you use so casually.”
“I know him.” Mason’s mind was racing. Judith would be desperate. He could barely imagine what she must be feeling. He should go back to the Casualty Clearing Station immediately and do something to help. The police must be idiots. Surely a word with whoever was in charge would unravel the mess they had made?
“And nobody you know could commit a crime?” the other correspondent said with mockery in his voice. “Come on, Mason! Whoever it is, somebody knows him! It’s not like you to be stupidly sentimental.”
Mason slithered down the hill until he was well below the ridge, then stood up. “I know him well, you damn fool!” he snapped. “I know his whole family. I have for years. He’s based in London, for a start. He wouldn’t even know the damn woman. You can have this.” He waved his arm to encompass the entire region of the battle line. “I have to find out what’s behind the…the foul-up at the clearing station.”
“You can’t…,” the other man began, but he was addressing Mason’s back, and he gave up.
Mason started to walk—there was no other means of transport this far forward—and the sheer physical effort of it gave him some release from the fury of frustration inside him. Why was Matthew Reavley up here at the front line anyway? What had brought him to France or Belgium so close to the armistice? Why was he not in London doing all he could to influence events the way he would want them to go?
He passed a gun crew hauling a cannon up the incline until it was clear of the stream. He had no time to think of helping them.
He remembered vividly his last encounter in Marchmont Street, and how the Peacemaker had been at his wit’s end to prevent a settlement on Germany punitive enough to create a vacuum in the economy of Europe that might end swallowing half the world. Could it be something to do with that? Or was he being fanciful to imagine that anything that any handful of men could do would seriously affect the tide of history? Was there not going to be chaos whatever they did?
They were firing behind him, the noise almost deafening. One blessing peace would bring would be silence. He trod on a patch of shifting ground and nearly lost his balance. There were shell craters all around, and a low mist rising off the wet earth. Some of it stank of old gas, and the clinging odor of decay was everywhere. He thought of the clean wind in the grass off the high fens, the scent of bracken, the silence that stretched to eternity, the blue hills beyond the hills, and the bright sky.
How ironically senseless that this policeman, whoever he was, should arrest Matthew Reavley of all men for a barbaric murder. Matthew had been the Peacemaker’s most implacable enemy, even more than Joseph. But this was one thing the Peacemaker could not have accomplished, another absurd twist of fate. This final injustice to the Reavleys was sheer, blind chance.
And yet they had never given up. He could imagine their efforts now. They would be doing everything possible, at any cost, to prove that Matthew was innocent. They would be outraged, burning with the stupidity and fear of it, but not self-pitying, certainly not defeated.
He was passed by an ambulance taking wounded back to the nearest casualty clearing station, but it was not the one where Judith was. The tide of events had left that behind. It would be another two or three miles before he could hope to beg a lift on any vehicle.
His feet squelched in the mud. His legs ached with the effort of pulling himself out of it again and again.
The Peacemaker had begun with such high, clear ideals. They would broker peace, prevent the slaughter and ruin of war, at a relatively small price. Except that it was not a small price. They had not seen then that the lack of open war is not the same thing as peace. There are internal prices to pay that create a different kind of war, another sort of destruction. The Peacemaker had paid, principle by principle, until the crusader in him had become a tyrant, making choices for others that they would not have chosen for themselves.
Why had Mason joined him in the beginning? So that the atrocities he had seen in the Boer War would never happen again. He was heartsick at the suffering he had seen and would have made any sacrifice to prevent another single further human from enduring such loss. Nationality was irrelevant.
But it wasn’t nationality that was the issue. It was the passion and the belief of the individual, the right to rule himself in the manner of his choice, the chance to be different, funny, inventive, to learn anything and everything, to question, to make mistakes and to start again. And to be bloody-minded and brave and kind, like half the ordinary soldiers he had seen. And like the crewman who had given his life on the way back from Gallipoli, to avoid betraying the people who trusted him. Mason would never forget him. He could still see his white face in the bottom of the boat, then in the water. In the moment of his death he had become Everyman, the ordinary British soldier, the one Joseph Reavley had said would never understand or accept the Peacemaker’s world—not at the price it cost.
Without realizing it he had quickened his step, sloshing through the mud in what he hoped was the general direction of the station. He must help Judith; that was one thing about which there was no question or doubt. Where he stood or what else he believed could wait until later.
CHAPTER
SIX
Matthew stared at the rough wooden walls of the inside of the hut in which he was locked. It had been a toolshed once, then used for supplies. Now it was the only place secure enough to keep a prisoner. He had been left a cot, two blankets, and a pail—that was all. He could hardly believe that Jacobson really considered him guilty of having murdered Sarah Gladwyn—Sarah Price, as she now was. He had not lied; he had never connected the present army nurse with the girl he had known at the university. “I haven’t thought of her from that day to this!” he had protested with absolute honesty. It was preposterous that Jacobson stood there convinced he was lying, not a shadow of uncertainty in his face.
“Hard to believe, Major Reavley,” he said almost without expression. “Pretty girl. Doesn’t look in that picture as if you’d forget each other.”
“Know lots of pretty girls, do you?” Sergeant Hampton had asked, his lip very slightly curled perhaps less from skepticism than a faint contempt, an unworded suggestion of moral callousness on Matthew’s part.
“Yes,” Matthew snapped. “Actually the university is full of them. Lots of them are pretty, and some are clever as well.” Instantly he wished he had not said that. It was an arrogant remark, and in the circumstances extraordinarily stupid. It was just the sort of indifference to feelings that justified their suspicion of him. The truth was that it had been an uncomfortable episode. Sarah had been pretty and fun, in a superficial way, and he had certainly been flattered that she chose him. It had had a lot to do with beating the competition, which was not a pleasing thought, and far too close to what Jacobson assumed of him.
Sarah had been easy to like, undemanding, ready to laugh. He remembered now how pretty her hair had been, soft and always shining. Her features were no more than pleasant, but she had danced marvelously, following as if she read his thoughts in every step. He blushed now to think how much he had enjoyed that, the easy movement in unison, the way she had never been heavy in his arms, never tried to lead. Poor Sarah.
He had wanted to forget it because he had not behaved well. The flattery had turned his head,
and he had not considered anyone else’s feelings. It was one of the stupidities of youth he preferred not to recall, but that was a luxury he could not afford now.
“I behaved badly,” he admitted, staring at Jacobson. “We were both young, and only flirting. It meant nothing in any lasting sense, just fun at the time. She moved on to somebody else, and so did I.
Sarah is not an uncommon name. I didn’t see her here, and I didn’t connect the woman you spoke of with the girl I had known.”
Jacobson had said nothing. Hampton’s face expressed his total disbelief.
Matthew walked four paces, turned, and walked back again.
Jacobson had interviewed him again, briefly, but there was nothing to pursue. There was a soldier nicknamed Punch, but he had denied being anywhere near where Matthew had been. He had brought in a wounded soldier, a fifteen-year-old, but he’d come from the opposite direction, naturally, from where the fighting was.
Jacobson had pressed Matthew about his exact position in the intelligence service, and what he was here for. Matthew had considered telling him, but he had nothing with him to prove it, and he had left London telling Shearing only that he had gone to collect vital information—nothing as to what it was. If Shearing had read between the lines anything of the Peacemaker, he would not substantiate that to anyone, certainly not to a policeman he did not know. The Peacemaker’s power was far too wide and deep to take sides like that.
Matthew’s rescue depended on Joseph and Judith. The only answer was to find whoever had really killed Sarah. The huge and ugly thought always at the edge of his mind was that the whole trip here was the Peacemaker’s last ploy before the defeat of Germany, and the end of at least this part of his plan.
Was Matthew in some way closer to him, more of a danger than he had supposed? Or was it no more than revenge for the trouble the Reavleys had caused him from the day John Reavley had found and taken the copy of the treaty, in 1914? If he had not found it, or not understood it, might there now be an Anglo-German Empire across the northern half of the world? Would there have been peace, at least on the surface, even if there were terror, betrayal, and suffocated lives underneath?