by Anne Perry
Matthew’s face went blank with surprise for an instant. Then it changed to anger and disbelief, and the struggle to understand.
“Schenckendorff’s alive, and getting better,” Joseph pointed out. “Except that they’ll hang him for murder. Or more likely shoot him.”
“Lloyd George won’t know that.” Judith was practical.
“It can’t be Sandwell,” Matthew said at last, his voice rough. “We ruled him out. And Lloyd George certainly wouldn’t believe you. I understand your frustration, Judith, but you can’t fling accusations around like that.”
“It’s not an accusation!” she said vehemently. “Schenckendorff told me it was Sandwell. When we ruled him out, we were wrong. He fooled us.”
“You asked Schenckendorff, and he told you?” Joseph’s voice rose sharply in amazement.
“It wasn’t exactly as bare as that,” she explained. “I told him Matthew had been arrested for the murder. I think he felt guilty because Matthew wouldn’t even have been here if he hadn’t come to meet Schenckendorff, at his request.”
“For God’s sake, Judith!” Matthew’s fists were clenched, his back rigid. “The man was prepared to tyrannize half of Europe! He’s not going to feel guilty that I’ve been wrongly accused of a crime because I came over to get him back to London.”
“Guilt is about shabbiness of behavior, hypocrisy, not the enormity of the sin,” she answered him. “Isn’t it, Joseph?”
Joseph put his hand up in dismissal. “I’ve no idea, and it doesn’t matter. We don’t know whether Schenckendorff is telling the truth or not. For that matter, we don’t even know for certain if he is who he says he is. It’s not beyond the Peacemaker’s ability to get him a false identity. Not that much identity is needed by prisoners coming through the lines.”
Judith frowned. “Do you think, this close to the armistice, that he really has time to bother with us, even to get revenge?”
“Maybe it isn’t so much trouble.” Matthew looked at her, his face pinched with a fear he was struggling to hide. “Just a single act by one German who may be desperate and have little to lose. It was our father who ruined the Peacemaker’s plans in the beginning. He won’t have forgotten that, and I don’t think he’s a man to forgive. If you’re losing, revenge may be the only sweet taste left.”
Joseph gazed steadily at the broken duckboards on the floor, and the single piece of old matting over them. “Or perhaps Schenckendorff is completely genuine, and his realization of what the Peacemaker has become, the slow corrosion that power has worked on the morality he started with, perhaps when they were younger, and knew each other well—”
“That wouldn’t account for his killing poor Sarah,” Matthew interrupted. “If he did that, he deserves to hang for it.” His voice was rough with emotion.
Judith knew it was for his own treatment of Sarah also, for the whole, helpless destructive path of violence and blindness that had ended alone in the dark beside the amputated limbs and human refuse of a battlefield hospital. It was no one’s fault, and everyone’s. The world had changed, and much of the brutality of that had altered forever the role of women, not only for themselves but in others’ eyes as well. Nothing was safe and reliable anymore. Nothing could be trusted to be as it was before.
“What I was going to say is that he may be exactly what he says he is,” Joseph explained. “But it won’t have happened suddenly. The Peacemaker could have sensed his change of heart awhile ago, and struck first.”
Matthew stared at him. “You mean instead of just having Schenckendorff shot, he set up this elaborate plan and had him blamed for Sarah’s murder?” His face tightened. “Then there’s someone else here who’s the Peacemaker’s man! He did it, and is making it look like Schenckendorff. God Almighty! What a revenge. A German officer and aristocrat, to be hanged for murder, when really he came through the lines at hideous cost to himself to commit the final act of honor to his principles rather than his leader.” He pushed his hand through his hair. He sighed and caught in his breath. “That’s our Peacemaker! What are we going to do?”
Joseph looked from Matthew to Judith, and back again. “What we set out to do: to find out for certain, beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, who killed Sarah Price. All we’re working with now is people’s stories of where they were, what they were doing, who else they saw or didn’t see, and what kind of a person Sarah was.”
He leaned forward a little, the candlelight gold on his cheek. “But all the time we’re thinking of what we did to her.”
Matthew turned toward him. “What do you know that we don’t, Joe? There’s a lot of talk about rape or mutilation, but if anyone knows, they aren’t saying.”
Judith winced. She had been refusing to think further. No one had imagined that the motive was anything other than sexual, but that was not the same as giving words to the act.
Joseph’s eyes moved from one to the other of them gravely. “It’s the violation of the inner person that is unbearable,” he answered. “The complete loss of control of your own body and its passions and needs, the core of the way in which it belongs to you. In a woman it is if she is violated by someone else; in a man it is if his own body betrays him by degrading every decency he ought to hold and turning him into a creature outside the acceptance of his fellows. We’re all afraid of it. We don’t know how to stop it from touching the core of identity, of life. We run away from truth; we build lies that we can live with.”
Judith stared at him. He was trying to say something bigger than she had even considered, a more painful idea. There was something in it that touched her own knowledge of passion and change, the freedom she had won here in slaughter, and was not sure how to deal with once her carefully outlined job was over. Without an ambulance…a uniform…who was she then?
“We need the truth,” Joseph finished, his voice half an apology. “Whoever it hurts. It was somebody here. To find that we may also find a whole lot of other things we would very much rather not have known. Do you believe Schenckendorff’s guilty?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said.
“No.” Judith had no hesitation. “I think somehow or other it’s the Peacemaker.”
Judith was not called out that night. She slept on a cot in one of the outer rooms of the hospital until four in the morning, when the first casualties came in. They were now some considerable distance from the fighting as it moved eastward toward the borders of Germany itself, and there were other casualty clearing stations far closer. This was just the excess that others could not treat.
She worked helping the orderlies, carrying stretchers, assisting those able to walk a little way the few steps from the ambulance to the waiting area, or from there into a theater.
By six o’clock the worst was over. She drank a hot mug of tea and ate a heel of bread, then she went to help the nurses. She had not their skill, but she could at least fetch and carry for them and do the simpler jobs. She was prepared to sit, with a calm face and a quiet voice, with those who were beyond all practical aid. She knew Joseph did it often enough. It was a small service, but no young man should face the final darkness alone, unnoticed, and with no one to say they cared.
By eight o’clock she was sharing rations with Lizzie and trying to think of what questions she could ask to strip bare the lies that were painting Schenckendorff as a murderer. She refused to accept that there were no loose ends anywhere, no one who knew something that would eventually unravel it all.
Moira Jessop joined them, sitting on an upturned empty box with her mug in both hands. “In a month’s time we could all be home,” she said cheerfully. “Eating proper food. Having a bath and sleeping in sheets. I’d love to be clean.” She pulled an expression of complete disgust.
Lizzie gave a slight, bleak smile.
“What’s the matter with you?” Moira asked cheerfully. “At least now we know it was a bloody Jerry who killed poor Sarah, and not one of us. We don’t need to look sideways at each other anymore. Or wa
lk around in fear, for that matter. And don’t pretend half of us weren’t!”
Lizzie swallowed hard, but with the dryness of the bread that was not surprising. “Half of us were afraid it would turn out to be someone we knew well, or really liked,” she said, not looking at either of them.
“Were you?” Moira’s eyes opened wider. “Who do you like, then?”
Lizzie shook her head. “I am speaking generally.”
Judith looked at her, not just at her face but also the angle of her shoulders and body, the slightly awkward way she sat on the ammunition box, as if maintaining her balance with an effort. She didn’t know that Schenckendorff was important; she probably hadn’t even known his name before the evidence implicated him. Why was she not as relieved as everyone else? Surely she had not thought she knew something or suspected something about one of their own men? If so, how could she have allowed Matthew to be blamed, and said nothing? To whom could she possibly owe a loyalty like that?
Moira was still talking, rattling on about going home once all the wounded had been evacuated, what it would be like in peacetime again, which hospital she would find work at in England. Lizzie was obviously not listening to her.
Judith finished her tea and stood up. “Let’s go and clean up the theater while there’s a chance,” she said to Lizzie. “I’ll help you.”
Lizzie rose a little stiffly. “Thanks, but don’t you have to do maintenance or servicing on your ambulance?”
“Not yet,” Judith said firmly. “The theater’ll probably be needed first anyway.” She led the way, and Lizzie caught up with her. It was a warm bright day with only a hint of chill in the air. At home, late October was one of Judith’s favorite times of the year, with its rich, heart-aching beauty of wind-riven skies, stooks gold in the fields, wood smoke, blazing color in the leaves, bright berries. Here it was like a harvest aborted, the barren earth too full of blood to bear the fruits of summer.
The Operating tent was deserted, the surgeons and orderlies either with critical patients or taking a brief respite, snatching sleep or some kind of food.
As soon as the flap was closed, Judith turned to Lizzie. She had no time for subtlety. She liked Lizzie better and better each time she saw her, and she was perfectly sure that Joseph loved her, which mattered far more. Now she was also intensely grateful to her for her courage and decisiveness in going to Jacobson and getting Matthew released.
“What is it?” she asked bluntly. “Everyone else is thrilled that Jacobson has arrested a German, but you’re not. Is there someone else you’re afraid of?”
Lizzie lifted her chin and stared back in surprise and complete denial. “No! If I knew anything like that, don’t you think I’d have told you when they were blaming Matthew? I’d have grasped at any other answer rather than tell him about Hodges.”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry,” Judith said immediately. “But something is wrong. Everybody else is relieved, and you look as if it’s worse. What is it?” She was aware the instant she had said it that she was being intrusive. Nothing gave her the right or excuse to demand answers to what might be a very private grief.
Lizzie turned away and began to tidy up the theater, moving soiled dishes and swabs, picking up bandages and pieces of bloody cloth cut away from a wound. All this would have to be done before they could even consider cleaning the blood off the floor. “Perhaps you’d fetch some water,” she asked, head still averted, watching what she was doing. “If you can find anything fit to use. I’ll have this ready by the time you get back.”
It was dismissal. She was not going to discuss the subject. She kept on picking up, tidying, folding. She did not meet Judith’s eyes at all.
Judith obeyed because she recognized that she was not going to receive an answer, and pressing any further would make an enemy where she wanted a friend. She went looking for water. It did not have to be especially clean—it would only be swilled around the worst of the blood and mud on the floor. Nothing dropped could possibly be used again without sterilizing anyway.
She walked along the boards deep in thought. Why would Lizzie not confide in her? They had spoken openly before. Even if briefly, it had been honestly. The only answer that came to her was the one she least wanted to believe. Had Lizzie realized how deep Joseph’s feelings were for her, but she could not return them? Perhaps she was still grieving for her husband, who had been murdered in the summer of 1916, and she could not yet love anyone else. Theo Blaine had been brilliant, one of the finest scientists of his generation. How could Joseph equal him in her estimation?
It was a crushing thought Judith could not tolerate. Joseph had endured enough pain with the loss of Eleanor and their child. Lizzie knew that, and it would hurt her to have to reject him, but you could not accept someone out of pity; that would be the worst of all.
She filled the pail with cold water that was too stale to drink but good enough for a floor, then carried it back to the Operating tent. She opened the flap and banged the pail down. Lizzie looked up at her. Her dark hair was coming out of its pins, and her skin was almost drained of color. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
Judith was pinched by the loneliness in Lizzie’s face. She looked as if she was managing not to weep only by exercising the most rigid self-control. She opened her mouth to ask again, but Lizzie took the pail and turned away, and Judith felt clumsy.
“You’ll need more,” she said aloud. “As soon as you’ve used that, I’ll fetch another one.”
Lizzie did not answer, as if she could not trust herself to speak.
Judith spent the rest of the day on an ambulance run taking men who had arrived after the murder to the next hospital along the line. Wil Sloan rode with her. He, too, was unusually somber. There was no time for her to say much on the way south with the injured men, but on the way back he sat beside her as dusk mantled the fields and hid some of the scarring of the land. They moved in their own small, noisy world, their headlamps picking out only occasional ruined buildings, skeletons of walls and windows jagged and partial against the darkening sky.
“Are you still thinking about going home?” she asked him after a violent jolt on the road where she had hit an unexpected crater.
“Oh, probably. Sooner or later,” he replied. “Longer I leave it, harder it’ll be. I suppose.”
She glanced sideways but could not see his face in the dim light. “I didn’t mean will you go, I meant are you still worrying about it,” she corrected. “Don’t. They’ll be proud of you. They’ll have forgotten about your quarrel. It’s history. The whole world’s different now.” She said it firmly, trying to think only of the positive, and convince him.
“You reckon?” He looked straight ahead.
“Of course! You were one of the first to come, long before the rest of America. You nailed your colors to the mast. You should remember that.”
He frowned.
“Naval term,” she explained, negotiating the next crater, but only at the last minute and throwing him off balance so that he grasped at the dashboard. “Means attaching them to the mast so you can’t pull them down and surrender, no matter what.”
He smiled. She heard the amusement in his voice. “I know that! Just because I came from the Midwest doesn’t mean I know nothing about history, even if I’m a thousand miles from the sea.”
“Sorry.”
He rode in silence for a while, so obviously deep in thought she did not interrupt him.
“Do you reckon someone lost his temper with Sarah ’cause she flirted with him, then wouldn’t come across?” he asked as they veered around a corner and straightened up again.
She realized the question was serious, deeper than she had thought. He had fled his hometown originally because of a stupid quarrel in which he had lashed out and hurt a man far more than he had intended to. He had stowed away in a railcar and gone east until he reached the coast, then taken a ship to England to join the ambulance service as a volunteer.
“Wil? Was your fight
a lot worse than you’re telling me? You said he was all right, just bruised and maybe a broken jaw.”
“He was.” Wil was still looking forward, as if his seeing the road would somehow make them safer. “I was lucky. I should stop kidding myself, Judith. I could have killed him. I lost my temper—I mean really lost it. I didn’t know or care what I was doing. Maybe I would do it again?”
“What made you think of that now?” she said, puzzled by the intensity of his feelings. She had never heard that before. Was she so insensitive?
“Sarah,” he replied after a moment. “I guess I never really thought about…that sort of thing before. And don’t tell me he just killed her, as if being British was enough. Nobody said exactly what he really did to her, but I know there was a hell of a lot of blood. I can guess. He didn’t choose a woman because she was weaker…lots of the men are wounded and couldn’t have fought back.” His face was flushed. She could see the dark color in the occasional flashes of light. “I can see now that all the women feel…embarrassed, threatened,” he went on. “Some of them even blame her because it makes them feel that they can be safe by not doing whatever she did. Even if they are angry with all men, as if it were all our fault, when actually we’re just as…No, I guess it’s different.” He was fumbling for words, awkwardly, trying to be honest. “We’re scared of being blamed, not of it happening to us. But we’re scared that it could happen to the women we like. I’m not in love with you or anything, but I’d want to kill anyone who hurt you!” He very carefully did not look at her, even for an instant.
“Thank you,” she said gravely. She knew that he had been at least a little in love with her a year ago, but of course she did not ever want him to know that she had seen it in his eyes, his hesitation, the things he had not said. “I would like to think you’d hate them. But nothing’s going to happen to me. Not that sort of thing, anyway.”
“You reckon that German did it?”