by Anne Perry
“If you don’t know who it is, how can you know it isn’t him?” Judith asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Lizzie did not answer.
Judith waited. The bunker was silent, nothing moved. Outside boots squelched in the ruts of mud and voices came from far away.
At last Lizzie took a deep, hollow breath and let it out very slowly, then another. “Because someone else was raped before Schenckendorff came through the lines.”
“Someone else! Are you sure?” Then with a sudden shock, Judith realized what Lizzie had really said. She put her arms around Lizzie’s shoulders and clung to her, longing to be able to comfort her and knowing it was impossible. What ease of any kind could there be? She had been violated beyond imagination. How must she have felt when Sarah’s body was discovered, and she knew the man who had raped her had been capable of such a thing?
Moments ticked by. They seemed frozen. Then Lizzie pushed Judith away and put her hands up over her face, the heels of her palms pushing into her eyes. “That isn’t the worst of it.” Her voice broke. She was shaking so badly, her teeth chattered together. “I’m pregnant.”
It was obscene. “You can’t know!” Judith told her. “It’s too soon! Maybe…”
“I am! It was over a month ago.”
“Over…then it was before Matthew came here! You knew it couldn’t have been him, either! Would you have let them hang him?”
“No…no, of course I wouldn’t. If you hadn’t been able to prove it wasn’t him, I’d have told.” Lizzie looked up, her eyes swimming with tears. “Do you have to tell Joseph? He…he’ll never have me—not now.”
Judith felt bruised inside by pity. It was like a great swelling pain that drowned out everything else. She understood perfectly. Had it been she who had been invaded, soiled, terrified in such an unforgettable way so that her very core was no longer secret and safe, no longer even her own, she would not have wanted the man she loved ever to know it. She would have nursed it herself, angry, confused, and terribly, desperately alone.
Then she was furious. Rage scalded up inside her that any woman should be so brutalized and made to feel ashamed, as if it were her fault, so that she dared not even report the crime. It was not only the things the men said—far from it. It was what the women said every bit as much. Fear for themselves made their blame ruthless.
If it had happened to her, she could have said she ran the ambulance off the road, or fell with a stretcher—anything to explain the cuts or bruises so no one ever knew what had happened inside her. In time they would have healed, and she might have forgotten—at least on the surface.
But what if she were pregnant? There would be no forgetting that! Unmarried, with child. Lizzie had not even any family. What was the use of winning the war here if a woman dared not report being raped, and was left to bear the rapist’s child alone?
Jacobson was not a bad man, not crude or violent, and yet when he had questioned Judith he had accused her of lying. He had assumed her a victim who would not admit it, and she had been outraged by it, even though it was not true. What would he assume of Lizzie? Would he even begin to understand why she had hidden this?
She bent down and took Lizzie’s hands, only lightly, just to touch, not imprison. “Don’t tell anyone yet,” she said gently. “We may find a better way. Don’t do anything. I won’t leave you alone in this, now or later.”
Even as she said the words she had no idea what she was going to do. No one else would know now, but in another two or three months it would be obvious. What would she say to Joseph then? She remembered his grief over Eleanor’s death, and that of their child. He had seemed to be numb with it, as if his heart were paralyzed. After all the other losses, how could he endure this? It had appeared that he and Lizzie were on the brink of happiness at last, and it had been snatched from them and broken into too many pieces even to find them, let alone mend it.
The grief was like watching someone you love fight for breath, struggle, and lose. She did not know what to do but kneel down and hold Lizzie close to her and let the moments pass by.
She did not even think how long it was before Lizzie finally pulled away and stood up. She said nothing. Her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. Then she shook herself impatiently. There was no time for weeping now.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice cracking. She turned and climbed up the steps past the sacking and into the cold air outside.
Judith knew that she had to tell Matthew alone. Joseph would need to know one day, but not yet, maybe not for a long time. Perhaps it would be better when they were all home, the Peacemaker was exposed, and the old wounds of loss were beginning to heal. Lizzie might not bear the child. With all the fears and the violence of war, the physical deprivations, she might miscarry. Most women did not consider themselves secure in a pregnancy until after the first two or three months. She might even have the luxury of not having to tell Joseph at all. Certainly it did not have to be now.
All this turned over in her mind as she searched for the opportunity to speak to Matthew when she could be certain they’d be alone and uninterrupted.
She found him asleep in the bunker, at a time when she knew Joseph had briefly gone forward toward the front line to help the stretcher-bearers. Despite the desperate need to prove Schenckendorff innocent, that was a duty he could not abandon. They were his men from the farms and villages around St. Giles. Some were critically wounded and might die. You could never tell; a man who appeared to have no more than a piece of shrapnel through the flesh might be so weak from exhaustion that the shock and loss of blood killed him, or the cold. Sometimes there were other wounds, masked by lesser injuries that had torn the skin and produced more obvious lacerated flesh.
She went down the steps into the dark. Knowing where the lamp was, she lit it with difficulty, then set it on the table Joseph used for writing letters of condolence, as well as love letters for those who found the words awkward or were clumsy with the pen, or too wounded to hold it at all.
Matthew was asleep, curled over uncomfortably on the narrow cot. He did not even stir. His fair hair was longer than a soldier’s should be, but then he was used to a different kind of battle. This was not his arena. He had to outthink, outwit, and out-imagine, not struggle through the mud with rifle and bayonet, food, water, and ammunition on his back.
She touched him gently, and when he did not respond, more firmly. He grunted, still deeply asleep. But there was no time to allow him to rest. This would not wait on comfort, not even on need. “Matthew!”
He opened his eyes and focused with difficulty. He searched her face for grief. When he didn’t see it, he breathed out slowly. He had been afraid she had come to say Joseph was hurt, or even killed. It was the fear all of them lived with, all the time. It was your first thought with every startled awakening.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I have to speak to you while I know Joseph is away.”
“Why?” He sat up slowly, swinging his legs over the side. He was fully dressed, apart from his boots, as they all were. It was too cold for anything else. “What’s happened? Do you know something?”
There was no point in trying to soften it. She sat on the one chair. “Schenckendorff can’t be guilty,” she told him. “There was at least one rape before he even got here. Apparently it was sufficiently like Sarah’s that it pretty well had to be the same person. Less violent, of course, because she’s still alive, just bruised pretty badly. Maybe Sarah fought more, which I suppose is stupid. Or perhaps he’s just getting worse. The first was over a month ago.”
He blinked. “Are you sure? It wasn’t reported. Why is she speaking out now? It won’t be to clear Schenckendorff; it could be to protect somebody else who might have come recently.” His mouth pulled down at the corners. “Obviously not me. We’ve stirred up something of a hornet’s nest by starting asking questions again. I’ve pushed one or two people pretty hard. So has Joe.”
“It’s the truth,” she sai
d softly. Even now, knowing the necessity, she hated having to tell him. If she could, she would have protected Lizzie against anyone at all knowing.
His eyes widened in sudden, chilling horror. “Judith?”
“No!” she said instantly. “Not me! For God’s sake, Matthew! Do you think I’d have let you be blamed if it were?” She sighed, swallowing hard. “It’s Lizzie Blaine.”
His shoulders hunched. He put his hand up to push his hair back and rubbed his eyes hard, as if they hurt. He swore with deep, wrenching anger. “Does Joseph know?” he said at last, looking back up at her.
“No. That’s why I’m telling you now, while he’s away,” she explained. “She doesn’t want him to, in case…in case it’s more than he can bear. She loves him, and she’s terrified it will turn him from her, or that what was love will become pity…especially since she’s discovered that she’s pregnant.”
He shook his head slowly.
“Judith, he’s going to have to know! You can’t…she’s not going to lie about it, is she?” He tried to keep the emotion out of his voice, and failed.
“No, I don’t think she’d do that, although I couldn’t blame her if she did. How could she love the child, knowing how it was conceived? She’s going to need a lot of help, Matthew.” She stared at him, needing to see that he understood. “All that we can give her. I don’t think she’s got anyone else. First her husband is murdered, now this! And if she loses Joseph it’s going to hurt like hell. But after Eleanor and the baby, then Mother and Father, and all the other friends since, can Joseph take this as well?” She wanted him to reassure her, tell her that Joseph would be all right, that he would accept it and be strong. Perhaps if he tried hard enough he could even make Lizzie believe it.
He sat still on the edge of the cot, struggling for the answer. Finally he sat up a little straighter. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we can’t tell him, I’m certain of that. Not yet. She doesn’t need his pain to deal with as well as her own. In fact, maybe she doesn’t need to know that you’ve told me. Do whatever you think is right on that. Just let me know.”
She nodded, uncertain what the answer would be, but glad to have the freedom to judge for herself.
“But we know for certain now that Schenckendorff’s innocent,” he went on. “Which doesn’t mean he’s everything he says he is regarding the Peacemaker, but there’s no way we can prove it until we get to London. We have to assume he is and get him there. I’d rather make an almighty fool of myself by trying and being proved wrong than be a coward who could have caught the Peacemaker but hadn’t the guts to put it to the test. What we’ll lose as fools will be personal, and relatively little, compared with what Europe will lose if we were right and did nothing.”
“And we need to find whoever did kill Sarah Price,” she added. “He’s still around.”
“The police can do that,” he replied.
She looked at him, frowning. “I don’t think that’s enough for Lizzie,” she answered. “If it were me, I’d want to be sure he was put away. Not for revenge, but so I was absolutely positive he wouldn’t ever come after me again.”
He raised his eyes, wide with horror. “God Almighty! I never even thought of that. Poor Lizzie.” He reached across suddenly and put his hand on Judith’s. “We will find him, I promise you.”
After Judith had gone, Matthew remained on the edge of the cot for several minutes. The oil lamp flickered on the table, lighting the earth walls boarded up to keep them from collapsing inward, the bookcase hastily knocked together out of packing cases and filled with Joseph’s books, and the copy of Dante’s portrait from his study at St. John’s. How would he bear knowing that Lizzie had been another victim of the rapist? Matthew hugged the thought of it inside him like a wound too deep to let go, in case it bled away all the strength he had.
He and Judith could work all they liked, every hour, without sleep, but he knew they would find it hard to learn anything sufficient to stop Jacobson from shipping Schenckendorff out. Matthew had promised to do it because he wanted to, and to comfort her, not because he really believed it was possible. He could not tell Joseph anything. His brother would know he was being lied to, at least partially; he would work out some of the truth and then worry out the rest. They needed help other than his, but who else had the kind of mind that could detect and deduce, and was not bound by the loyalties or debts that crippled everyone else?
The answer was clear even before the question was complete in his mind. It had to be Richard Mason. Judith might immeasurably prefer that they did not involve him, but circumstances had left them no choice. He stood up slowly, his back stiff from the hard cot and the cold, and put on his boots. It was two o’clock in the morning, but he could not wait until dawn.
Mason was going back and forth from the front line to the Casualty Clearing Station, writing dispatches about the work saving men critically injured in the last few weeks of the war. There was an irony to serving right to the eve of peace, and then losing sight or limbs when victory was perhaps no more than days away. And yet he had found little bitterness. Again and again he was humbled by the courage of men, and infuriated that the whole insane horror had ever happened.
Most of the officers who had lived in these bunkers for so long were now either injured or dead, or had gone forward with the regiment over no-man’s-land to the abandoned German trenches. He had seen them himself. Better than those of the British, they were deeper below the ground and drier, and many had electric lighting and something approaching comfort.
Of course the forward lines, covering the ground rapidly, had moved beyond them now as well, an army most often in the open, striving to keep rations and ammunitions circulating along the stretched supply lines.
He had gone to sleep forcing the fighting men out of his mind and thinking instead of Judith. He woke with a start to hear a man’s voice speaking his name urgently. A moment later there was a hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see the oil lamp on the table burning and Matthew Reavley sitting on the upturned ammunition box that served as a chair. There was stubble on his chin, and his eyes were red-rimmed, but he was very much awake.
Mason sat up slowly. “What is it?” he asked, fear fluttering inside him. “What’s happened?” He did not bother to ask how Matthew had found him; many people knew where he was.
“We need your help,” Matthew replied. “I need to explain why, so please just listen. If you don’t know, you won’t understand why we can’t trust anyone else. I wouldn’t trust you if I had any choice, but I don’t. I’ve watched you with Judith, and I can see how you feel about her. We have a very short time and we can’t do this alone.”
Mason had no idea what he was talking about. “Do what?”
“Find out beyond doubt who killed Sarah Price.”
“The German. Jacobson’s almost ready to charge him,” Mason responded, knowing even as he said it that there must be something far deeper that Matthew meant. “Is it an intelligence job?” Ironic if now that he had effectively left the Peacemaker’s side and it was too late, he might at last be trusted with information deeper than the obvious.
“I suppose it is,” Matthew answered. “But it’s also personal. Schenckendorff is innocent, at least of killing Sarah Price. I can’t tell you how I know, but I do. What I need you to know now is something quite different that started a long time ago.”
Mason felt a chill of apprehension and dismissed it as absurd. It could not have anything to do with him. “Yes?”
Matthew seemed still to be having difficulty finding the words, and Mason became aware of the intensity of his feelings.
“In 1914,” Matthew began, “my father found a copy of a treaty between England and Germany. It could have prevented the war, but at the cost of initially betraying France and Belgium, and eventually just about everybody.”
Mason felt the semi-darkness of the bunker sway around him and blur as if he were going to faint. He knew with a hideous certainty what was c
oming next, but to hear it from Matthew himself, laden with his personal loss, gave it a reality it had never had for him before. For the first time he was face-to-face with what he had allowed to be done.
“It was signed by the kaiser, but not yet by the king,” Matthew went on. “Father understood what it would mean, and he was bringing it to me in London when he and my mother were killed in a car crash. Joseph and I discovered quite quickly that it was actually murder. A young man, a student of Joseph’s of high but blind ideals, had been persuaded to sabotage the road they were traveling on. It cost him his own life, and eventually his brother’s as well.”
Mason’s mouth was dry, his throat tight. He could not have spoken even if he could have thought of anything to say.
“The man behind it,” Matthew went on, “we called ‘the Peacemaker,’ because we had no idea of his identity. He continued to campaign against Britain and the Allies even though the war—”
Mason started to protest but bit the words off, ending as if he had choked on his own breath.
Matthew had no idea of the turmoil inside him. He continued, lost in his own anger and grief. “He was always trying to bring the war to an end while both sides were still strong enough to ally together in an Anglo-German Empire that could dominate most of the world. It would be peace, but without any passion or individuality, any freedom to think and question, to be different, to dare new ideas, to complain against stupidity or injustice, to question or work or laugh aloud. It would be the peace of death.”
Again Mason drew breath to interrupt, but here in this bunker dug out of the Flanders earth where so many men had died hideously, all rational justification of such grandiose philosophical issues seemed not only vaguely obscene, but divorced from any kind of reality. It had once been the hope for a better, saner world, a way of avoiding all this wealth of loss. Now it looked like the arrogance of a lunatic, and as doomed as all madmen’s dreams.
“The Peacemaker went on murdering,” Matthew continued quietly. “General Cullingford; Augustus Tempany; indirectly Lizzie Blaine’s husband, Theo, one of the best scientists we ever had. Perhaps even worse than murder was the corruption, and you could call that murder of the soul. Except, of course, we have to allow it ourselves before we can be corrupted. We collude in our own destruction there.”