Shoulder the Sky (26 page)

Matthew felt a sudden leap of hope. "Could you work on something to help in the war at sea?" he asked. "Our losses are mounting men and ships, supplies we need desperately if we are to survive."

Corcoran did not rush into speech; he studied Matthew's face, the intensity in him, the measure of his words. "Is that why you're here?" he said softly. "You didn't come just because you're in Cambridge, did you?"

"No. I've been sent by my chief in SIS," Matthew answered. "The matter is so secret nothing is to be put on paper. He doesn't want you to come to London, and he won't be seen here. You are to trust no one. All the work you do is to be divided up among your men in such a way that no one person can deduce what the whole project will be."

Corcoran nodded very slowly. "I see," he said at last. "What is it? I assume you can tell me that much?"

"Something to improve the accuracy of depth charges or torpedoes," Matthew told him. "At the moment it's a case of dropping a cluster and hoping you've outguessed the U-boat commander. If you're lucky one of them will go off in the right place, at the right depth, and damage him." He leaned forward. "But if we could invent something that would attach the depth charge to the U-boat, or perhaps even detonate it at a certain distance, then we'd have so much advantage they'd lose too many

U-boats to make it worth their while any more." He did not add how vital it was to keep some control of the sea lanes. Like every Englishman, Corcoran knew that, never more so than now.

He sat in silence so long Matthew grew impatient, wondering if his request were somehow foolish, or out of place in a way he had not considered.

"Magnetism," Corcoran said finally. "Somehow the answer will lie in that. Of course, the Germans will work that out too, and we will have to think of a way to foil any guards against it that they use, but it must be able to be done. We must find the way, before they do! If they think of something first and can attach it to torpedoes before we do, then we are beaten." Despite his words, the energy in his face belied any sense of despair. He was accepting a challenge, and the fire of it already burned in him. "We need a budget," he went on. "I know everything does, but this is priority. I will come up with some specifications, things we have to have, who I recommend to work on the project. I need some figures from the Admiralty, but that shouldn't be difficult.. ."

Matthew took the papers out of his inside pocket and passed them across. "That may be most of what you want. But there are two conditions."

Corcoran was startled. "You said the work must be positioned out so no one knows the whole. What is the other?"

"You report to Calder Shearing and him only. It's top secret -no one else, not even Churchill, or Hall. Do you accept that?"

Corcoran looked at him quickly, a flash of appreciation in his eyes, then he bent to examine the pages. It was several minutes before he finished them. "Yes," he said decisively. "I have ideas already. Perhaps we can accomplish something to make history, Matthew."

His belief was not a blind optimism but a faith rooted in possibility and endeavour. Looking at his face, the burning intelligence and the self-knowledge, Matthew found his own hope soaring. "I'll see you get the budget," he promised.

He was prevented from pursuing it any further, although there was little more to say, because Orla Corcoran came into the room and Matthew stood to greet her. She was slender, very elegant,

her hair still dark. Conversation turned to other things. Orla was keen to hear of news from London; she had not been for nearly three months.

"There seems to be so much to do here," she said ruefully when they were seated at the dinner table. "Of course, the most important thing in the area is the Establishment, but we have factories as well, and hospitals, and various organizations to look after people. We all try to pretend, but nobody's life is as it used to be. Everyone's got somebody they care about, either on the Western Front, or at Gallipoli. We're all terrified to listen to the news, and when the mail comes in I see the village women's faces, and I know what they're dreading."

"I know," Matthew said with a strange guilt for his own part in spoiling the plans of the men who would have made peace, with dishonour, and prevented all this. He did not doubt that he was right, only he had. not imagined at the time that the cost of it would feel like this, the individual loss over and over again, in a million homes throughout the land.

But then if the Peacemaker's plan had succeeded, what would have happened to France? A German province, occupied by the Kaiser's army, betrayed by Britain, whom it had trusted? And that would have been only the beginning. The rest of the world would have fallen after, like so many bloodied dominoes treason, collaboration, betrayals multiplied a thousand times, secret trials, executions, more graves.

No this price was terrible, but it was not the worst.

The conversation went on about familiar things. As the evening deepened they spoke less of the present and more of happy things of the past, times remembered before the war.

Matthew left a little after eleven, and by midnight he was home at St. Giles, to sleep well for the first time in weeks with the silence of the country around him, the wind in the elms, and the starlight beyond.

In the house in Marchmont Street the Peacemaker was also speaking of Cambridgeshire, in fact specifically of the Scientific Establishment there. The man opposite him was young, his face sharp, full of passion and intelligence.

"Of course I can get in," he said earnestly. "My qualifications are excellent."

"Don't be too eager," the Peacemaker warned. He was standing by the mantelpiece, looking at the younger man where he sat in the armchair, elbows on his knees, staring up. There was great confidence in him, extraordinary for one so untried in the professional world. He had a first class honours degree in mathematics and engineering. He knew precisely what he wanted to achieve, and he had no doubt he would succeed. It was faintly unnerving to see someone with such blindness to the vagaries of fate.

"Every good inventor is eager," the young man responded. "If you don't believe in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?"

The Peacemaker was irritated with the man for his arrogance, and with himself for allowing a form of words to be twisted against him.

"A man who knows his own worth is not eager to be accepted at less," he said coolly. "Insist upon a reward that meets your wishes, whether it's in money, honours, opportunities, or colleagues with whom you work. They must believe in you. Your opportunity may not come quickly."

The other man's face became suddenly very serious. "I know what I'm there for," he answered. "I won't forget it. World peace, an empire in which the creators and inventors, the artists, writers, musicians are not harnessed to the wheels of war and its insane destruction, but to the betterment of mankind!" The timbre of his voice was urgent. "In peace, order and universal rule of law, we can build houses fit to live in, aeroplanes that can fly across continents and oceans without having to stop and refuel. We can conquer disease, perhaps even hunger and want. We will have the leisure to think, to develop great philosophy, write drama and poetry .. ."

The Peacemaker felt the warmth of his enthusiasm and it refreshed the weariness in him.

The young man's face hardened into a cold fury. "We can't send our greatest visionaries and poets to be slaughtered like animals in a senseless waste, killing young Germans who could also give fire and skill, art and science to the world if they weren't lying face down, bodies shattered, in the mud of some godforsaken shell hole." He rose to his feet, fists clenched. "I know what I'm here for, and I'll wait as long as it takes. You think you're using me to further your plans? You aren't! I'm using you, because I know what I do is right."

The Peacemaker smiled very faintly. "Shall we agree that we use each other? I shall exercise my influence to see that you are taken very seriously in the Establishment. Report to me seldom, and with the utmost discretion. Shanley Corcoran is a brilliant man. Earn his respect and his trust, and you will succeed when the time comes."

The younger man smiled back, his eyes bright, his shoulders straight. "I will," he promised.

Chapter Eight

The ambulance jolted over the rough road and Judith woke up and straightened in her seat. She had begged a lift from a lorry carrying supplies about thirty miles back in France, where the train had stopped. Now the familiar stench was in the air and she knew she was almost up to the lines. She looked out of the window and saw the flat country stretching out on every side, pale green poplars along the roads, here and there two or three dead and bare.

"Thought that'd wake yer," the driver said cheerfully. He was a man in his late thirties with a toothbrush moustache and a finger missing on his left hand. "Nose tell yer yer 'ome, eh?"

She smiled, pulling the corners of her mouth down. "Afraid so. It isn't exactly that you forget what it's like, but it has a renewed power when you've been away for a night or two," she agreed ruefully.

"Was Blighty good, then?" There was a suppressed emotion in his voice, things he dared not allow too close to the surface of his mind.

She hesitated only a moment. If there was no home to return to, no ideal to fight for, what was the meaning of all this? "Wonderful," she answered firmly. "Same old traffic jams in Piccadilly, same scandals in the newspapers, same things to talk about: weather, taxes, cricket. I even got home for a couple of nights.

The villages are just the same too: farmers complaining about the rain, as usual, too much or too little; women quarrelling over who's to arrange the flowers in church, but they always get done, and they're always gorgeous; someone's riding their bicycle too fast down the street; someone's dog barks. Yes, Blighty's just as it was, and I wouldn't change it, even at this price." Now she was intensely grave. "At least I'm pretty sure I wouldn't."

"Me neither," he answered, looking straight ahead at the road running like a ruler between the ditches. A windmill in the distance was the only break in the table like flatness of it. "Where yer want ter stop off then, love?" he asked.

"Poperinge," she answered without hesitation. "Or as near as you can get." She was going to find Cullingford, give him Mrs. Prentice's letter, and then take up her job as his driver again. She realized how eagerly she said it. She was sitting forward, already half prepared to get out, and they were still at least three miles away. She knew all these roads probably better than the driver beside her did.

He glanced at her. "Yer got a boyfriend here, 'ave yer?" he said with a grin.

She felt the heat wash up her face. He must wonder why she was pleased to be back when she had just been home. What other explanation could there be?

"Sort of," she answered. That was near enough the truth for him to believe her, and she did not want to be questioned more closely. There was no truth that she could tell, even to herself.

He laughed. "I bet he "sort of" thinks so too!" He took her all the way into Poperinge and she thanked him and got out in the square. In was a warm day, a few bright clouds sailing along the horizon, the sunlight gleaming on the cobbles. A couple of bicycles were parked against the tobacconist's shop window. Women were queuing at the bakery. She could hear the sound of voices from The Rat's Nest on the corner of the alley, and a snatch of song. She walked over, and as the group of a dozen or so soldiers saw her, they sang more loudly, clapping on the beat, and finishing with a rousing chorus of an extremely bawdy version of "Goodbye Dolly Gray'.

"Oo are yer lookin' fer, love?" one of them asked her hopefully. He looked about twenty, with bright blue eyes and a lopsided face.

"Ave a glass o' beer!" another called out. "Drink enough of it, an' yer'll forget this is a bleedin' slaughter 'ouse an' think if yer go round that corner you'll see a couple o' cows, an' a village pond wi' ducks on it, not some stinkin' crater full o' the corpses oyer mates."

Someone told him abruptly to shut up.

"It would take more than beer to do that for me," she answered with a quick smile. "I'm looking for General Cullingford. I'm his driver. At least I was till I went on a couple of days' leave. But I'm back now."

One of the men looked her up and down appreciatively, and muttered something under his breath. Someone jolted him hard, and he did not repeat it.

"Sorry, love," the first man said. "Looks like yer lost yer job. The general went out of 'ere yesterday evenin' wi' a new driver. Dressy little feller, 'e were, in a smart uniform an' a face like a schoolboy, but civil enough, an' could 'andle a car like 'e'd built it is self

It couldn't be so. She was stunned, as if she had driven into a wall and she was bruised to the bone. He wouldn't do that!

"Sorry, love. Looks like yer back ter ambulances, or whatever."

"What?" Judith looked at him as if she had not really seen him before. He was slim and dark, perhaps in his middle twenties, older than many of the men, and the insignia on his sleeve marked him as a corporal.

"What did you drive before you took the general?" he asked. "Ambulances?"

"Yes."

"Then yer'd best get back to 'em. As a volunteer yer can do wot yer like, I s'pose, but that's were yer needed most, if yer can drive."