by Anne Perry
“Yes?”
“We’ll make it.” He was smiling. “You, of all people, are not going to fall at the last fence.”
“Why not? It can happen.”
“There are three of you!” His smile was broader now, a kind of happiness in him.
“There are six of us,” she corrected him, slightly puzzled.
“Three Reavleys! That should be enough to take on the world, let alone the odd corner of Belgium,” he retorted.
She glanced at him and saw the laughter under the surface, and also the tenderness in his face, even in the pale, shifting reflections of light from the road. He was not mocking her; he wanted to mean it, wanted to hope.
The first stop came after about five hours. They were in flat country, farther from the fighting, but this land had been occupied by enemy troops, and the roads had been heavily bombed. One small river had spread wide, flooding the area behind the broken bridge and the scattered debris that had blocked it. There was nothing to do but go around the waterlogged fields, which took them extra miles and cost precious time and petrol. That meant they now needed to get more fuel. They dare not run too low.
They stopped at the next village, and Judith made the request from a mechanic attempting to mend a battered van. She was in uniform and felt consumed with guilt when the few cans were given willingly. They had assumed that her passengers were wounded men being taken to the nearest port for passage to England. One man asked her if the railway line had been bombed—was that why they had come this way? He looked surprised that this sort of difficulty should crop up so late in the war.
“By zeppelin still?” he said questioningly. “Stupid! They’ll lose now whatever they do. It’s nearly over.” His voice choked. He was elderly with a heavy, ugly face and gentle eyes.
“Very nearly,” she agreed. She wanted to tell him the truth—he did not deserve any more lies—but she dared not. “No more bombs that I know of,” she equivocated. “Just too many people, thousands of them everywhere. It’s all clogged up, and we need to be quick.”
“Badly wounded?” he asked sympathetically.
That lie might catch up with them. “Some wounded,” she said, praying he would believe her. “Some pretty urgent dispatches. Kill two birds with one stone.” Then suddenly she wondered if he was familiar with the phrase, or might wildly misunderstand her. “Two jobs in one,” she explained.
He smiled, bringing sudden light to his heavy features. “I know. We say much the same. Good luck.”
More broken bridges drove them farther north, where the Belgians had opened the dikes and let the sea fight the invader where they could not. The armies marching in had found a different kind of ruin, one they could hardly equal.
A gray dawn saw them creeping forward through shattered villages. The houses were gutted by fire and bomb blast, some little more than mounds of rubble scarred black, perhaps a chimney breast still standing, or here and there a door frame. The fields around them were barren, the men who would have worked them dead or too mutilated to labor anymore. The bones of animals shone pale, picked clean by scavengers.
They saw a group of buildings half in ruins. It had once been a thriving farm with barn, cow byre, pigsties, and henhouses.
They stopped and asked for breakfast, willing to pay for it.
An old woman came out of what was left of her house. She saw the two women in V.A.D. uniform and recognized it immediately, her gaunt, sagging face lightening.
“What you need?” she said in thickly accented English.
Judith smiled at her. She could see from her worn, broken-nailed hands, and the pallor of her skin under the weathering, that she had almost nothing, and yet for British soldiers she was willing to part with it.
“Water so we can make some tea,” Judith replied. “And if you have bread of any kind.” She was suddenly uncertain whether an offer of payment would be welcome or considered an insult.
The woman was waiting, as if she expected to be asked for more.
Joseph came up beside her. “We have a little jam,” he said to the woman. “Army ration, not very good, but we would be happy if you would share it with us. Tea, bread, and jam. It could be worse.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” the woman said happily, nodding. “Bread is not much good, either, but with jam, will be fine. Yes, yes.”
“Thank you,” Judith murmured to Joseph as the woman hurried off to fetch what bread she had.
“I liberated a few tins,” he said. “With Barshey’s help.”
“You didn’t tell him—”
“Just told him I needed it. He didn’t ask why. Got me a couple of tins of Maconachie’s as well. Won’t last long, but it’s something.”
“You pinched army stores!” She rolled her eyes. “There’s hope for you yet!”
He did not answer, and suddenly she wondered if she had hurt him. It was something she would have said before the war, before she knew him so very well, understanding what he did and why, knowing the hurt he did not show, the pity he knew better than to display because it did not help. She had always admired him but found him distant and a little intimidating. He was the eldest, she the youngest. He conformed, she rebelled. Except that was far too facile a judgment. He also rebelled, in his own way. Hannah was the only one who really conformed. And yet she was going to find the changes of war the hardest of all, because the old ways that she had loved and that had been natural to her were gone forever.
No one could conform now, or be comfortable: There was no standard left with which to conform.
“I’m sorry,” she said aloud. She did not know how to retreat without making it worse.
He smiled at her. There was warmth in it, even amusement. “It’s all right. You can’t think of everything.”
“What?” she was confused.
“Jam,” he replied, laughing at her. “You liberated the petrol and the spark plugs—ever practical. I have the jam.” And he turned and walked back to the ambulance. There was a very slight swagger in his step.
The meal was anything but easy. They ate in the farmhouse kitchen. It was the one room in the house the woman had taken the care and labor to repair. She had even found odd tiles from somewhere to replace the shattered ones in the floor. There was hot water, clean from the well in the yard, and it made the tea impossibly fragrant after the sour water they were used to. But the bread was coarse and nearly black, and without butter. It needed Joseph’s tin of army jam to make it palatable at all. It did not go far among seven of them. Even so they saved the hardest and driest of the crusts for the scrawny dog that lay on the tiles watching them, eyes following every mouthful.
They all knew the story they had to tell. Mason was better being himself. It was always possible that his face might even be recognized. His reports were famous all over the world, occasionally with a picture of him at the top of his column in most of the newspapers. Matthew and Joseph were in uniform; Joseph in particular needed no explanation. Judith and Lizzie similarly—their purpose was universal. Schenckendorff was the difficulty. Matthew had found a V.A.D. uniform that fit him and simply taken it; to request it would have needed explaining, which would in turn have raised further questions he could not answer. But despite his injured foot, Schenckendorff’s posture was that of an officer. He was born and bred to it, and he did not know how to abandon it in a few days. His accent was slight, but it was distinctive.
Far more than that, as Judith sat at the old wooden table eating the black bread and smelling the pure scent of the tea, she was aware of the dismay in him, perhaps even the guilt. There had once been men in this house. The evidence of them was still here in the carefully carved, slightly irregular wooden bowls on the dresser, which was itself handmade to fit exactly into the space available for it. There was a low nursing chair in the other corner, as a mother might use holding a baby when she had other children at her knees. There was a handmade wooden engine on one of the shelves. No doubt there were other artifacts outside where once men had m
ilked cows, dug the earth, harvested.
She saw Schenckendorff’s eyes take it all in as hers had, and the grief in his face. He was eating more and more slowly, as if to accept this gift of hospitality choked him. Was it pity, or the guilt of having deceived the farm woman? She would never have given it to him if she had known he was German. Still, Joseph had said often that Germany was every bit as devastated as Belgium or France. That had been true when he had gone through the lines last year. How much worse must it be now?
The old woman was talking to Mason, her attention momentarily absorbed.
“You must eat it,” Judith whispered to Schenckendorff.
He turned a little to look at her. There were shadows around his eyes and a pallor to his skin that must have been caused by more than the pain of his foot, which Lizzie had assured her was improving. Was it because it had been his own people who had wasted this land, just as now the Allies would be wasting his, and the people he loved?
He swallowed with difficulty and took another mouthful.
She reached for the pot and poured him the last of the tea. He needed it more than the others. Everywhere around them was ruin and loss. More lay ahead, and he would see all of it: a land that smelled of death.
Was he thinking of the old treaty that had never been ratified? He and the Peacemaker had tried so hard to prevent all this. Would betrayal and dominion really have been so very much worse? Did this old woman who gave them black bread and tea made with clean water care who made the laws in Brussels, or who collected the taxes, if her husband and her sons were home and safe, and her land bore its harvest, her cattle their milk? No one had asked her what she thought or wanted.
Was that what was going through Schenckendorff’s mind now: not guilt at the ruin but guilt that he and the Peacemaker had failed to prevent it all? When he looked at Matthew and Joseph, did he see the two men who, above all others, had foiled the treaty that might have arrested war? Were they heroes in his eyes? Or men whose patriotism was too small and too blind to allow them to see the whole of humanity and the future that could have saved them all?
She studied the slow way he ate, the courtesy in his manners, and the distance between the few words he said, brief communications only when necessary.
They finished as quickly as they could and thanked the woman, hurrying out with no time for extra words, all afraid in case something gave them away.
They pressed on westward, moving slowly because the roads were so badly cratered that they dare not go more than twenty or twenty-five miles an hour. It rained again, washing mud everywhere, soaking Judith and whoever sat beside her.
It grew dark about five o’clock. Heavier clouds rolled in from the north like gray smears across the sky, wind-drawn curtains of rain hiding the trees. Mason had gone back into the body of the ambulance; Joseph was beside his sister.
“How’s Schenckendorff?” she asked him.
“His foot hurts, but I don’t think it’s any worse,” he replied, hunching himself up a little and pulling his overcoat closer around him. “He’s not feverish, but he looks miserable. It must hurt. Wounds to the feet do.”
“Do you think that’s why he looks so unhappy?” She swerved to avoid a pothole filled with water that she had noticed only just in time. “Sorry,” she said automatically.
“Do you think he’s dreading getting to London?” he asked. “He’s bound to. In a way he’s riding to his own execution, even if it is his own choice.” His voice was low, muted with a kind of awe.
“I hadn’t even gotten that far,” she replied. “Although I suppose he has to be. Will they execute him, Joseph? He’s done no more than fight for his country, as we all have. You shoot a man for that during the war, while he’s armed, but you don’t execute him for it afterward. There’s no crime in it.” She refused to think about Mason’s situation. As the hours went by, that was becoming more and more difficult. It was not only that she loved him: his passion and subtlety; his energy of mind; the honesty that had driven him to act where so many others merely dreamed and bemoaned their own helplessness. As she at last faced the situation with a cool head, and the will to consider and believe other ideas, she realized that the moral issues were not so easy to sweep entirely to one side or the other.
She would still have fought, been blown to bits in Flanders, rather than live a life of guilt and regret under the domination of anyone else. But driving through the ruins of Belgium, passing graveyards filled with endless white crosses all the same, she could see that it was mistaken, but not monstrous, to have considered a different path.
Perhaps Joseph was also thinking about Mason, because he said nothing.
“I was wondering about guilt,” she said aloud. “Did you watch his face as he ate the bread today? He looked at her farm, and it almost choked him. Don’t you think he would have thought that it would still be standing if we hadn’t found the treaty, and there’d been no war?”
“There would still have been a war,” Joseph said quickly, staring ahead at the rain now beating on the windscreen in front of them. It was swishing around and blowing inside, bitterly cold. The headlamps shone yellow in the gathering gloom, shining on puddles on the rutted road, broken trees, and fallen debris at the sides. “It might have been months later, or even years, but it would have come.”
“Do you think so?”
“The balance of power was too precarious to last.” He spoke thoughtfully, feeling his way. “There were too many promises that could never have been kept, too many alliances weighing one against another. Germany might have conquered most of Europe in a military sense, but there would always be a resistance. Possibly it would gather strength in time. There’d be sabotage to anything vulnerable, such as railways, bridges, fuel supplies. They would need a vast occupying army and a network of secret informers and police for years, if not indefinitely. And there would be all the other ugly sides of oppression and government by force: betrayals, large-scale imprisonment, censorship of all communications, and probably limitation of travel, curfew after dark, suppression of all artistic or literary opinion that questioned anything.
“In Britain I daresay it would be even worse. It might descend to civil war before there was any kind of order. The death toll would be appalling. It would make our troubles in Ireland look small. Canada might accept British rule, but America never would. Whatever armies anyone sent, they’d fight to the end.”
He shook his head. “And the rise of socialism internationally was going to create revolution if we hadn’t each had to unite our own country against an enemy outside. The revolution in Russia was probably inevitable. Austria-Hungary was falling apart. Hungary would have demanded its independence sooner or later. If Princip hadn’t shot the archduke and duchess, something else would have sparked it off.”
“Do you suppose he sees it that way?” she said doubtfully. “He believed he could succeed, in the beginning.”
“Of course. We’re wiser now, and I daresay sadder.” He swiveled sideways to look at her. “Are you afraid Schenckendorff will change his mind when he gets to London?”
“Haven’t you thought of it?” she responded.
He hesitated.
She felt a surge of guilt. In her awareness of Schenckendorff’s feelings, and the threat he posed to them in Belgium, she had temporarily forgotten about Lizzie. She wondered how Joseph must be feeling watching her struggle to hide the nausea she suffered, especially in the mornings, and the emotions that both of them must be feeling. Confronting Allie Robinson had changed nothing about Lizzie’s rape or the reality of its effects. Of course they knew now that the rapist was not the person who had killed Sarah, but the relief of that can only have been short-lived. Everything else was just as it had been before.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it intensely. “It’s only a small part of everything, isn’t it.” That was not a question; it was an admission of truth. She was trying not to think of personal things, above all not about love, or the time after th
is was over and they could start living in peace, picking up daily routines again, and choice—and loneliness. There would be very few men left for anyone to marry, and those there were would not find her such an attractive prospect any more than she would them. It had been hard enough before when she was in her early twenties. Now, four and a half years later, it was going to be impossible.
Apart from the scarcity of available men, she would compare them all with Mason. At first they would bore her to tears; then she would begin to hate them, because they were there and alive, and he was not. They would be so flat and tame next to him.
It was easier to concentrate on getting Schenckendorff back to London to expose the Peacemaker, than to worry about food and petrol and how to mend the ambulance if it broke down, and how to make sure the Belgians didn’t guess who they were.
They drove on through the darkness. She was growing very tired. She was used to long hours driving, more often at night than during the day, and always in difficult conditions. However, her eyes felt gritty, and her head ached as if she were wearing a helmet that was heavy and too tight. They would have to stop soon or she would risk losing control, which could be lethal.
Within half an hour they found a ruined farmhouse. It was too badly shelled to live in, but a sheltered place within the old dairy was dry and out of the wind, and the men could make themselves places to rest. They had a meal of Maconachie’s and some army ration biscuits washed down with tea. It was all prepared by Joseph, since he was the only one used to such chores. Mason had seen army cooking done, of course, as had Schenckendorff, but neither had actually boiled water in a Dixie can over a flame, all balanced in a tin. It was more difficult than it looked and required a lot of patience.
Judith considered working on the engine, but knew she was exhausted enough to make mistakes. If something slipped from her clumsy fingers, was replaced crookedly, or was not tightened far enough, they could break down.
She was asleep within moments of lying down in the back of the ambulance, but she woke stiff and uncomfortable while it was still dark. She could hear Lizzie moving slightly on the other side, a couple of feet away, but she did not know if she was awake, too, or just stretching or turning in restlessness, dreaming of fear or loss.