Shoulder the Sky (22 page)

She searched his face, his eyes. "You know something, don't you?" she pressed. The darkness, the tension in him frightened her. "Do you know who it is, Matthew?"

"No. I think it could be Ivor Chetwin, but I need a lot more proof."

"Ivor Chetwin? But.. . but doesn't he work in Intelligence?" She was horrified; the betrayal could reach anywhere. "Matthew, please .. ."

"I am careful," he said quickly. "And I don't know that it is him. It could be lots of people. I've been working on how the Peacemaker contacted Sebastian to tell him what to do. It isn't the sort of thing you say in a letter, or explain over the telephone. It had to have been a fairly lengthy and persuasive conversation, in person somewhere. And it has to have been that afternoon. There wasn't any other time."

"Well, where did Sebastian go?" she reasoned. "Can't we find out?"

"I'm trying to."

"Be careful! We don't know who the Peacemaker is, but he knows us! Don't forget that! He'll be expecting you to come after him." She gulped, suddenly aware of how frightened she was. "Matthew .. ."

"I'm being careful," he repeated. "Don't gulp like that, you'll give yourself indigestion. If I'm paying for you to eat roast beef instead of corned beef and army biscuits, I'd rather you didn't ruin it by making yourself ill!"

She forced herself to smile, impatient with him, frustrated, aching to protect him and thoroughly afraid. "I'm going home tomorrow. I'd like to see Hannah for a day or so."

"Good idea. Rest for a while, at least. Now eat that before it's cold. Judith .. ."

"What?"

"Don't tell Hannah anything about all this or the journalist getting killed. She doesn't need to know. She has enough to do looking after three children, and coping with the losses in the village trying to help everyone keep up hope, and not be sick every time the postman arrives, dreading the telegram. They feel so helpless. That's a kind of suffering in itself

"I know. I won't tell her anything I don't have to," she promised. "I'll be quite happy not to talk about it, believe me."

But it was not as easy as she had expected. She took the train to Cambridge, and then a taxi to St. Giles. The village still looked just as it always had, until she noticed the blinds half drawn in the Nunns' house, and another house a few doors down. There were no errand boys, no children playing by the pond. An old man walked slowly on the grass, a black band around his arm. Judith saw Bessie Gee carrying a basket of shopping, and looked away because she could not face her. It was cowardly and she knew it, but she was not prepared to see what she must be feeling, not yet, anyway.

The taxi stopped at her own door. She paid the driver and got out. She had to ring the bell and wait until Hannah came.

"Just for a couple of days," Judith said with a smile. It was absurd, but she was overcome with emotion to be on the familiar step. It looked smaller, shabbier than she remembered, and impossibly precious. It was peopled with memories of sounds and smells of the past so strong they were the fabric of all life that had formed her, the woven threads of who she was. This is where she had loved, and grieved, where she had been safest, and in most danger.

"Of course!" Hannah said, her face lighting with pleasure so the anxieties of the moment slipped away. "It's wonderful to see you! Why didn't you tell me you were coming? I haven't got any decent food in!"

Judith hugged her and they clung together fiercely for minutes.

"I don't care!" she said, laughing at the triviality of it. "Anything's got to be better than army rations!"

"Are they awful?" Hannah said with sudden concern.

Judith remembered her promise to Matthew. "No, not bad," she claimed quickly. "I don't look starved, do I?"

Hannah's children came home from school, pleased to see her and a little shy, now that she was certainly part of the war. The conflict was not real to them, and yet it was the backdrop and the measuring stick of everything that happened.

"Do you think it'll go on long enough for me to join the navy, Aunt Judith?" Tom asked with a shadow of concern in his soft face. He was thirteen, his voice breaking, but no suggestion of down on his cheek yet. He was frightened in case he missed his chance of all that he thought of was heroic, and the test and goal of manhood.

For a moment Judith could see nothing but the men she knew who had been blown to pieces men like Charlie Gee, who had been boys like Tom only a few short years ago.

"I don't know," she answered, refusing to look at Hannah. "I don't think anybody knows at the moment. We just do our best. Take it a day at a time. Your job's here right now. A good soldier or sailor does the job he's given. Doesn't argue with his commander to pick and choose."

He stared at her solemnly, trying to work out whether she was treating him like a child or a man.

She gave him time, without pushing either way.

"Yes," he nodded, accepting. "But I will join the Royal Navy when I can."

"Good," she said, lying in her teeth, and still avoiding Hannah's gaze. "As an officer, I hope?"

He grinned suddenly. "You mean concentrate on my school-work and do all the exams and everything," he said knowingly.

"Something like that," she agreed.

After the children had gone to bed, Judith and Hannah walked up the garden in the dusk. Appleton had gone to work on the land. Food was more important than flowers. Mrs. Appleton had gone with him, over in Cherry Hinton direction not far away, but too far to come back here to cook or clean. The weeds were high in the spring warmth and the long daylight hours.

"I can't keep it up," Hannah said, looking at it miserably. "Even the raspberries are overgrown. The children help a bit, but it isn't enough. There's always so much to do. There are fifteen families in the village now who've lost someone, either on the Western Front, or at sea. We heard about Billy Abbot just yesterday. His ship went down in the North Atlantic, with all hands."

Judith said nothing. She knew Hannah was thinking about Archie, but neither of them wanted to say so. There were some things it was better not to put into words. The silence helped to keep at least the surface of control. There was work that had to be done, children who needed to feel some faith in survival. As long as you did not give in to terror, they would not either. You had to be busy, to smile; if you must cry, then cry alone. Perhaps the women with children were lucky. They gave you a reason to force yourself to be your best, always. The act became a habit.

It was Hannah who broached the subject of the Peacemaker.

"Matthew won't tell me anything about his search for the man who killed Mother and Father," she said as they stood at the end of the lawn and looked west towards the last echoes of light in the sky. "Has he given up?"

"No." Now a lie seemed like a betrayal, and she was not in a mind to be able to deal in the loneliness of deceit. "He's trying to find out who Sebastian Allard spoke to the evening before."

"Why? Oh .. . you mean the Peacemaker .. . what a ridiculous name for him! The murderer must have told him what to do."

"Probably not himself," Judith replied. "He wouldn't risk that. He has to be someone well known, very highly placed, and someone Father knew already, and trusted. He will have sent someone else to persuade Sebastian what to do. It couldn't have been easy. You don't just walk up to someone and say, "By the way, I'd like you to murder one of my friends tomorrow. It has to be tomorrow because the whole thing has become rather urgent. Will you do that for me?" You'd have to give him all sorts of reasons, and persuade him. Sebastian was a passionate pacifist. It will have taken some time to argue him into believing such a murder was the only way to preserve peace in Europe."

Hannah was silent for several minutes. The last shreds of light from the west, no more than a luminescence in the air, caught her cheekbones and brow and the curve of her mouth, softening the anxiety and making her look as young as she had a year ago.

"I talk to Nan Fardell quite a bit. Her husband's in the navy too. She lives in Haslingfield." She hesitated a moment. "Nan said she saw Sebastian by the pub in Madingley the afternoon before ... he was with a girl. They seemed to be very close, talking earnestly, having an argument, which they made up before they parted." Hannah frowned. "She mentioned it because she knew he was engaged and she thought it was a bit shabby. She assumed he was trying to break it off with this girl, and she wouldn't let him, so he gave in, and apparently they parted in agreement. Nan said she was rather beautiful, nearly as tall as he was. I expect the Peacemaker's a man, but does the person who gave Sebastian his instructions have to be a man as well?" She turned to Judith. "He doesn't, does he? Lots of idealists who really get things done are women. They were in the past, and they are now. What about Beatrice Webb, or even more, Rosa Luxemburg? Nan said this woman was very unusual. She had remarkable eyes, pale blue and very bright."

Judith's mind whirled. It could be! It was a cold thought, and she had not the faintest idea who the woman was, or how to find her, and trace her back to the Peacemaker. But it was a beginning, or it might be. "I suppose Nan Fardell doesn't know who she is?"

"No idea at all. I asked her, just out of curiosity. She's never seen her before. Do you think it could have been she who gave Sebastian order to .. ." She did not finish the sentence.

Judith shivered. "Yes, it could. It's possible. Matthew thinks the Peacemaker could be Ivor Chetwin, which is a horrible thought."

"It has to be someone we know," Hannah said quietly. "It's all horrible. Let's go inside. It's getting cold."

They turned and walked together slowly, not needing or wanting to discuss it any more, but in Judith's mind was a photograph of an unusually tall girl with light, clear eyes, and she was standing next to Eldon Prentice.

Chapter Seven

Days and nights continued their routine of alternating violence and boredom. Joseph helped with digging and shoring up in the trenches, carrying food, helping wounded or dying, writing letters for people, often just listening when men needed to talk. They swapped stories, the longer and more fantastic the better. They made bad jokes and sang music-hall songs with bawdy army lyrics to them, and laughed too loudly, too close to tears.

Little Belgian boys came by, selling English newspapers, and the soldiers read voraciously to see what was happening at home. Joseph conducted the mandatory church parades, and tried to think of something to say that made sense.

But all the time at the back of his mind was the question of why Eldon Prentice had been in no man's land, and who had thrust his head under the water and held it there until he was dead. The thought was horrible, filling him with a revulsion quite different from the gut-turning pity of other deaths. There was a moral dimension to it he could grasp, a personal evil rather than the vast, mindless insanity around them all.

Nobody wanted to talk about it. To everyone else it was the one death that did not matter. Prentice had had a letter from General Cullingford giving him permission to come and go pretty well as he pleased, and he had used it freely. There was an impulsive feeling that he had got what he deserved. Grief was saved for other men, like Chicken Hagger, and now Bibby Nunn, caught by sniper fire.

Mail delivery was one of the best times of the day. Letters from home were the lifeline to the world that mattered, to love and sanity, the precious heart of what was worth dying for. For each man it was a little different a different face, a different house that was familiar but they shared them with the half-dozen or so men who were their 'household' here.

As chaplain, Joseph was uniquely alone. He was an officer, and apart. He belonged to everyone and no one. The nearest he had to a family was Sam. With Sam he could share Matthew's letters, even if they referred to the Peacemaker.

One witheringly cold night in January, he and Sam had crouched together on the fire-step in the trench known as Shaftesbury Avenue, the wind whining in the wires across no man's land, ice cracking on the mud, duckboards slick with it underfoot. Joseph had told Sam about his parents' deaths, and a brief outline of the Peacemaker's conspiracy, enough for Sam to understand, at least, the anger and the passion that drove him to seek the men who would still bring such betrayal to pass, if he could.

He could see Sam's face in his memory, sharply outlined for a moment in the glare of star shells: the smile on his lips, the heaven and hell of irony in him. He had said nothing, simply put out his freezing hand and touched Joseph for a moment.

Now Joseph sat alone with the sheets of paper, the sun warming him in the stillness of the afternoon. Tucky Nunn and Barshey Gee were asleep a few yards away, faces at ease, their youth achingly apparent. Tucky half smiled, perhaps home again in dreams.

Further along Reg Varcoe sat bare-chested, holding a match to the seams of his tunic. In the distance someone was singing "Keep the Home Fires Burning'.

For a moment Joseph thought of home: grasses deep in the lanes, woods full of bluebells, may blossom in bud. In Northumberland, where he used to walk with Harry Beecher, the hills would be alight with the burning gold of gorse, the perfume of it like honey and wine. Sometimes it helped to think of the sanities of life, at others it hurt too much. He missed Matthew he missed the easy conversation of trust, the knowledge of a bond that stretched back to childhood, a safety, before pain or failure were known.