Shoulder the Sky Read online

  “Good!” she called back. “End of the line!”

  Grudgingly he obeyed, to still another burst of clapping and catcalls.

  Joseph and his guide reached a group of soldiers sitting on the grass eating rough bread and tinned bully beef. A Dixie can of tea hung over a smoldering fire.

  One of them looked up. “Wot yer got there, Blue? Reinforcements from Blighty?”

  There was a guffaw of laughter again from the half dozen men.

  “Only if yer feelin’ like the last rites,” Blue replied, sitting cross-legged in a spare patch without too many small stones. “Sit down, mate,” he invited Joseph.

  “Bleedin’ ’ell!” one of the men said, his eyes widening as he realized Joseph was a chaplain. “Are things that bad?”

  Another man crossed himself elaborately. “Here we are stuck on the edge of being wiped out, and what do the Pommies send us? One bloody preacher! You going to bury the lot of us then? Or are you the real thing?”

  Joseph blushed. “The real thing?”

  “Part the waters and we can walk to the other side!”

  There was more laughter.

  “No use,” Blue said cheerfully. “We don’t want to be on the other side, dumbo!”

  “Speak for yourself, mate! I’d love to be on the other side!” He turned to Joseph. “What are you here for, Rev? Maybe you can turn the stones to bread?”

  “How about turning the water to wine?” another suggested.

  “Actually I’m no use at all,” Joseph said candidly. “I need you to help me.”

  “Too right, you do!” three of them replied in chorus.

  “What’s yer problem, sport?” another asked, squinting a little at him. “Apart from that yer here, o’ course. We all got that one.” He grinned, showing a gap tooth at the front.

  “You couldn’t wait to get ’ere, yer stupid bastard!” the man next to him pointed out. “ ‘We gotter go!’ yer kept sayin’—‘We gotter go!’ ”

  The first man lifted his hand dismissively. “Well, we have gotter.”

  “So what d’yer want then, mate?” Blue faced Joseph, his wide eyes curious.

  “I’m looking for a Major Mynott, General Hamilton’s ADC,” Joseph replied. “He has important information about a traitor.” He used the word intentionally, since he knew it would burn their emotions. They were young men who had heard the need of their mother country, dropped what they were doing and come from the other side of the world, in their thousands, to shed their blood in France and on these hell-raked beaches. Surely to them there would be no uglier word?

  “So you’re not a holy Joe for real?” A flicker of disappointment crossed Blue’s eyes. “You’re a spy, or whatever they’re called.”

  Joseph smiled with a little grimace. “Actually I’m very much a holy Joe. My name’s Joseph Reavley, and I’m a chaplain on the Western Front. I was home on leave and the intelligence officer who was supposed to come was called away since the Germans just sank the Lusitania. Over eleven hundred civilians were drowned, men, women, and children. I was on leave from the Ypres Salient, where my regiment is, so he asked me to come in his place. I need to be back in time to return to Flanders in ten days.”

  Blue let out a low whistle, his eyes round. “Well, I’ll be . . . ! So you’re a dinkum priest! What’s Flanders like, sport? Is the gas as bad as they say?”

  “Yes. Whatever they say, it’s as bad. Can you help me find Mynott?”

  “ ’Course we can, eh?” He looked around the group, and everyone replied with vigorous agreement. “Mind it feels in the air like there’s going to be another raid up the hill soon,” he added. “Maybe we’d better start asking now. If Mynott’s the geezer I think he is, he’s a real scrapper. He’ll be up there with the men.”

  “Best not waste time,” they agreed. “C’mon then, mate.”

  They rose to their feet carefully, ever mindful of Turkish snipers on the escarpments above the beach.

  It was not as warm as Joseph had expected, and the terrain was appalling: rock and clay, open hillsides, gullies with trees and—incredibly—wildflowers. Everywhere there were smells of earth, latrines, creosol, tobacco, cordite, and the sharp fragrance of wild thyme. As in Flanders there were dead bodies no one had had the chance to bury, and clouds of flies, black, blue, and green ones. Joseph did not have to be told that dysentery and similar diseases were almost as big a danger as the Turkish guns.

  The Australians were unceasingly helpful, although while their ferocious lack of respect for British army regulations caused occasional setbacks, it also swept away some of the impediments of officialdom.

  At sundown the huge sweep of sky was stippled with mackerel clouds shot through with light. The Aegean Sea was a limpid satin blue beneath it, though still dotted with ships and struggling men.

  Joseph sat on a patch of stony ground a hundred feet or so above the beach, shivering a little with cold and exhaustion.

  For four hours he had scrambled over ridges and scree, floundering, tripping rather than falling into trenches that were little more than scrape holes in the earth. Once he had had to duck and run to avoid the raking fire of Turkish machine guns, before he had reached the place where he had been told Mynott would be.

  Apparently he had led a raid uphill, hoping to capture a Turkish position and take a few prisoners. It was hopelessly against the odds, and it had failed, but the attempt had improved morale greatly.

  Now Major Mynott sat opposite him on the thyme-scented earth, his arm wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage, his face gaunt. He was a man of medium height with a prominent nose and slightly hooded eyes that at the moment were shadowed with the horror of so much violence, disorder, and sudden death.

  “What can I do for you, Captain Reavley?” he said with barely concealed impatience. “I really know nothing of use to military intelligence. As you may have noticed, it is something we have very little of around here.”

  “We don’t have any to spare in Ypres either,” Joseph replied. “But this is to do with something that happened before the war, in Germany, and I’ve been told that you are familiar with the details.”

  “I was in Germany before the war,” Mynott agreed, frowning. The sky was fading at his back, the color bleached out, silver bars of light on the water interspersed with pools of shadow, the vast horizon melting into the night.

  “You knew a man named Ivor Chetwin,” Joseph went on, forcing his concentration back to the present. They were on a long escarpment where the ground was too hard to dig more than a few inches. How anyone, even a madman, had thought soldiers could storm up these hills in the face of shells, mortars, and machine-gun fire was beyond imagination.

  “Not very well,” Mynott answered. “Met him perhaps half a dozen times.”

  “He was betrothed to Princess Adelheid von Gantzau.”

  “Yes.” Mynott’s expression was guarded.

  “Can you tell me something about her father?” Joseph asked. “He and Chetwin were close, I believe, and Gantzau was a friend of the kaiser.”

  “Do you suspect Chetwin of something?” Mynott was blank.

  “I can’t tell you. Please, the matter is of the greatest importance.”

  Mynott regarded Joseph with curiosity and it was quite a long time before he answered. “I don’t know what you have been told,” he said slowly, seeming to pick his words with deliberate care. “But most of the story is true. Gantzau was a friend of the German royal family, and certainly he knew Schenckendorff and many of the others like him who had political ambitions and strong ideas.” He winced slightly as he moved and the pain in his arm shot through him. “But in Europe before the war all sorts of people knew each other. I knew many of them myself. After all, our king and the kaiser are first cousins. Don’t read anything into that.”

  “And Reisenburg?” Joseph asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Chetwin knew Reisenburg? Are you sure?”

  Mynott squinted at him. “You said it as if yo
u want the answer to be no, but you’re afraid it’s yes.”

  Someone walked past them in the dark. The smell of tobacco smoke was sharp in the air, and crushed wild thyme where their boots trod on it. He passed, not much more than a shadow. There was sporadic gunfire. Were it not for the starlight over the sea, and the sharp slope of the hill, Joseph could have imagined himself back in Ypres.

  “I need to know,” he said aloud.

  Mynott caught the urgency in his voice. “Look, Captain, Chetwin fell in love with Adelheid. She was young, beautiful, and full of life. He was older, but he was vigorous and highly intelligent. Her family were reasonably happy about it.”

  “I heard he was engaged to marry her?” Joseph asked.

  “Do you want the story, Captain, or just the end?” Mynott said testily.

  Joseph apologized.

  Someone coughed a few yards below them on the hill, and the smell of smoke drifted up in the air. Seabirds were circling high overhead, riding the currents of warmer air in the very last light.

  Mynott resumed the tale. “The affair became serious, and indiscreet. Adelheid was with child. That was the point at which the family insisted Chetwin marry her. It grew unpleasant.” Mynott shrugged, but Joseph could see only the faintest movement in the near darkness. “Chetwin refused.”

  “He refused?” Joseph was horrified, not only for the dishonor of such an act, but because it made no sense of the information Matthew had given him. “What did Gantzau do?” He leaned forward. “Why did Chetwin refuse? Surely he didn’t doubt the child was his?” The situation seemed uglier with every new fact.

  Mynott’s voice was tired and strained with pain.

  “I don’t know. But he told me that Adelheid did not want to marry him, and he believed there had been someone else she cared for far more, but who couldn’t or wouldn’t marry her.”

  “But he was engaged to marry her!” Joseph insisted. Surely Matthew could not be mistaken in so simple a fact?

  “Her parents insisted,” Mynott replied. “I don’t know whether the child was his or not. The parents thought it was and they forced him into an engagement.”

  “Forced?”

  “He would have been politically ruined if they made it known he had taken advantage of a noblewoman, twenty years younger than he, got her pregnant, and then abandoned her.” Mynott was impatient with Joseph and contemptuous of Chetwin. “It would ruin her, and her father would make damn sure it took him down, too.”

  That was easy enough to believe. “But he didn’t marry her!” Joseph pressed.

  “No. She miscarried the child. It was very bad. She bled to death.” Joseph could not see Mynott’s face in the darkness, but he could hear the pity rasping in his voice, and for a blinding moment all his own loss returned to him, as if the carefully nurtured skin had been ripped off his wound. It was as if Eleanor and his own child had died only yesterday. It seemed absurd to sit here in this harsh grass of Anzac Cove, where the earth and the sea were stained with the blood of thousands of men, and still feel such overwhelming sadness for individual losses from a past that seemed to have disappeared into a life that was like a dream from which one had permanently awoken.

  “What happened to Chetwin?” He forced himself back to the present.

  “He left Germany, and would be a damn fool ever to go back there,” Mynott answered. “Anyone near the court would string him up by the . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.

  “I see.”

  “Is that helpful?”

  “It . . . it proves the theory is wrong,” Joseph said with surprise, and a strange, dizzy sense of relief, which was absurd. They must find the Peacemaker, for John and Alys Reavley, for Sebastian, for Reisenburg, and now for Cullingford. He had not been beaten because the treaty was taken from him before it could be presented to the king. No one knew if the king would even have signed it! The Peacemaker would have other plans, and they needed desperately to know what they were. All kinds of sabotage, betrayal, and deceit were possible, and the very fact that he would murder Cullingford showed he was still powerful, and dangerous.

  But something in Joseph still shrank from finding it was a man he had liked. The face of evil should not be familiar, it should be strange, terrifying, unknown before the instant of confrontation.

  The Peacemaker was a man who would sell a nation of forty million people into oblivion, betray into bondage their history, their culture, their language, and everything they had created over a thousand years. French in all its wit, color, sophistication, and pride would become a dead language. And after France and Belgium, one by one the other nations would fall, subjugated to the iron control necessary to keep them obedient, afraid, and unable to move against the center.

  And England would be worse, not the betrayed but the betrayer! That was the ultimate sin.

  He stared out to sea where the rising moon barely glimmered on the faint ripples of the water. It was becoming difficult to see the black outlines of the ships, or the boats plying between them. Around him he could hear the clang of iron shovels on the rock in the earth as burial parties worked.

  The army had not been long here. Blood was still fresh. There were no rats like those at Ypres—at least he had not seen any. The latrines smelled much the same, but there was not the stench of corpses—so many of them weeks and months old. There you could hardly dig a trench or shore up a broken wall without slicing into a limb.

  If the Peacemaker’s plan had worked, all those men would still be alive. This hill would be empty of everything but wild irises and the purple-flowering Judas trees. There would be silence but for the lap of water, and perhaps the odd bleat of a goat or two.

  These men would be at home with their families in the far corners of the earth.

  But which was the greater madness, and which the sanity—to fight and die by the tens of thousands for what you believe, not knowing if you could win, or to surrender before the bloodshed, and save all the lives, the young and brave and so passionately innocent, to live out their days a conquered people, prisoners to someone else’s will?

  “I don’t know anything else about Chetwin,” Mynott said apologetically.

  “No . . . no, I think that’s probably enough,” Joseph answered him. “We were wrong. It couldn’t be what we thought.”

  “Does it matter a lot?”

  “Yes. It matters a hell of a lot.” Of course Matthew would have to check that it was true, but Joseph believed it. The Peacemaker had intended to succeed. Setting up a double bluff like this, at the expense of a young German noblewoman’s life, was absurd, disgusting, and above all completely self-defeating. “Thank you. I’ll see if I can get a lift on the next ship going home again.”

  “Well, there’s nothing going out tonight. You might as well get a little sleep,” Mynott observed. “Tomorrow look for a fellow called Richard Mason, war correspondent. He’s down to go either tomorrow or the next day. If you can find him, you can probably thumb a lift with him.”

  “Thank you. I’ll do that.”

  Joseph slept on the earth about fifty feet up. It was hard and cold and only exhaustion gave him any rest at all. Perhaps a few nights on the ship had made him soft?

  He woke quite a while after dawn and looked down on the beach full of activity. Men were moving about as if on the scene of some busy factory yard, digging, carrying, piling up boxes and crates. The smell of smoke drifted up from cooking.

  Joseph thanked the Australians with whom he had camped for the night.

  “Hooray, mate!” Blue answered cheerfully. “Holy Joe! I like that!” He laughed till the tears filled his eyes.

  “G’day, sport,” Flanagan called out. “Mind where you go!”

  “You, too.” Joseph refused to think what their chances were. He would choose to believe they would be among the few who would survive. “Thank you,” he said again.

  He set off along the ridge and down on the grass toward the level, in roughly the direction he had been told he might
find the correspondent Richard Mason. Actually he was looking forward to it—he had seen his name on many of the best and most honest articles he had read. The man had an ability to catch the experience of a small group in all its passion and immediacy, and make it represent them all. There was something clean and unsentimental in his use of language, and yet the depth of his feeling was never in doubt.

  It took him nearly two hours, by which time his feet were sore and he was horribly aware of the flies everywhere.

  “Over there, mate,” a lanky Australian pointed. “That’s the Pommie writer feller.”

  “Thank you,” Joseph said with profound relief. He could see only the man’s back. He wore a plain khaki-colored jacket and trousers and a wide-brimmed hat jammed on his head.

  “Excuse me, are you Richard Mason?” Joseph asked when he reached him.

  The man turned around slowly. He had an unusual face, with wide cheekbones and a broad, full-lipped mouth. It was a face of high intelligence, but far more striking was the brooding emotion in it, the sense of will. Joseph was certain he had found the right man; such features belonged to one who would write with blazing honesty.

  “Yes,” Mason answered. “Who are you? A chaplain!” He looked surprised and very slightly amused.

  “Joseph Reavley,” Joseph told him. “I had a mission out here, which I have completed. I understand you are shortly leaving for England. I need to return as soon as possible, and if there is room in your transport I would be grateful.”

  Mason’s eyes flickered for a moment of puzzlement, then he looked beyond them both at the milling men on the beach and up the slope at the dugouts, the shallow trenches, the makeshift shelters of stones and boxes. Finally he looked back at Joseph. “Your mission is finished, you said?” His implication was clear.

  Joseph regarded him levelly and a little coldly. “Yes, it is. I have only a few days more leave before I have to report back to my regiment at Ypres.”

  Mason colored faintly. “I’m sorry.” It was said frankly. His diction was perfect, a little sibilant, but there was a beauty in its exactness as if words were precious to him.