Shoulder the Sky wwi-2 Read online

  That had been followed by the murder of Harry Beecher, Joseph’s oldest and dearest friend. Reisenburg, too, had been killed, but they had no idea by whom.

  And on August 4th Britain had been plunged into war.

  Who was the Peacemaker? A man with allies who had access to the German royal court, almost certainly to the kaiser himself, and who also had private and personal access to King George V. No one would conceive of such a plan, let alone put it into action, without knowing both men. He was also quite obviously politically astute, had a soaring and utterly ruthless imagination, and yet in his own way a passionate morality.

  He and his disciples had desperately wanted the treaty document back because there was neither time nor opportunity to redraft it and get the kaiser to sign it again before offering it to the king, but also it was imperative it did not fall into the hands of anyone who would make it public.

  When they had discovered it was gone, they must have known it was Reisenburg who had taken it, but not in time to follow him. If they had, they would have taken it from him and killed him then. Similarly they could not have seen him pass it to John Reavley, or again they would have acted at the time.

  And yet they had instructed Sebastian to kill John Reavley the very next day; therefore they had to have known that he had it, and that he would be driving down that particular stretch of road that morning.

  The Peacemaker could only be someone who knew John Reavley personally, and also knew that his second son worked in London in the Intelligence Services, and would be the obvious person to whom to take the document.

  Who had contacted Sebastian Allard with information and instructions, in the few hours of the afternoon or evening after Reisenburg had given John Reavley the document, and knew that he had set out the next day to London?

  Sebastian was dead, as was his brother, Elwyn. Their father, Gerald, was drowned even deeper in the brandy bottle, and their mother, Mary, was broken by the fury and shame of the scandal. She had changed her name and left Cambridgeshire with its unbearable past behind her. She had not adopted any family name, either on her parents’ side, or Gerald’s, but something totally unconnected. It had taken Matthew this long to find her where she worked as a voluntary aide in a military hospital outside Brighton.

  It was early afternoon when he parked in the gravel space outside the entrance and climbed out, grateful to stretch his legs after the two-hour drive. He went up the steps and in the hallway inquired if he could speak with Mrs. Allan, and was directed to one of the wards. He passed a young man, looking no more than twenty, sitting in a wheelchair. The way the rug fell over his lap made it apparent he had only one leg.

  Matthew did not want to look at it. He was twisted with pity, guilty for being able to stride out easily himself, and he was in a hurry. He was acutely aware that Joseph would have felt the same, and would have stopped. It often surprised him how much he missed Joseph. Since he had lived in London and Joseph in Cambridge, he had not expected to.

  “Good afternoon,” he said with a smile. “Am I heading the right way for Ward Three?”

  “Yes, sir,” the man assured him with a sudden light in his face. He looked at Matthew’s uniform but saw no regimental insignia on it. “Straight ahead.”

  “Thanks,” Matthew acknowledged, and went the rest of the way and through the door. He saw Mary as soon as he was inside. She was wearing a gray skirt and blouse with a white apron over it, rather than the fashionable unrelieved black silk of mourning that he had last seen her in, but she was still gaunt-faced, her body almost fleshless, shoulders high and thin, backbone like a ramrod. She took no notice of him, concentrating on her task of rolling bandages. She was probably used to people coming and going in the ward.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Allan,” he said quietly, using her new name in order not to embarrass her. “Can you spare me a few minutes of your time?”

  She stopped, her hands motionless, the bandage in the air. Very slowly she turned, but he knew that she had already recognized his voice. Her angular features were pinched with fear and her dark eyes shadowed. She stared at him without speaking.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Allan,” he repeated her new name to let her know he had no intention of ripping away the mask she had so carefully constructed. There was such tragedy between them, wounds for which healing could not be imagined. Both his parents were dead at her son’s hands, both her sons were guilty of murder and suicide, and the scandal had destroyed everything she cared about, and it was his brother who had exposed it. She had no dreams left, and the emptiness was there as she looked at him.

  “I assume you have some reason, Captain Reavley,” she replied without expression in her voice.

  “Maybe we could walk outside?” he suggested, glancing toward the door which opened onto a terrace and then the lawn where he could see at least half a dozen young men in chairs of one sort or another.

  “If it is necessary,” she answered. She did not betray any interest in what he wanted, nor did she ask how any of his family were, although she must have known Joseph and Judith were both in Flanders, because it had been general knowledge in the area before she had left it.

  He led the way, their footsteps hard on the wooden floor of the ward. He was aware of at least two men lying silently in beds watching them as they went.

  Outside the air was mild and still, sheltered by the high walls covered with roses and honeysuckle, not yet in full leaf. The sky above was milky blue.

  “What is it you wish?” she asked, stopping well short of any of the other occupants of the garden.

  He had given a great deal of thought to what he would say to her, but nothing had ever been free from the desperate pain of the past. There was no clean or kind way of phrasing it. Perhaps simple was the best.

  He had decided to tell her as much of the truth as he dared. She was owed that much, she had lost more than any of them, and he saw no added danger in it.

  “Sebastian did not act alone,” he began. “Someone taught him ideas and beliefs, then told him what to do. He obeyed, thinking it would avert war. That person, apart from individual guilt for death in your family and mine, is also still free to commit treason and sabotage of England, and to help Germany in any way he can. Their motives don’t matter, they must still be prevented. I cannot ask official help in this because I don’t know whom I can trust.”

  The faintest, most bitter humor touched her face for an instant, then vanished, her black eyebrows rising so slightly it could have been only a trick of the light. “And you imagine you can trust me?”

  “I’ve told you little you don’t already know,” he replied. “Added to which, I’m at a dead end. I cannot believe that you have any kinder feelings toward this man than I do.”

  The emotion was nowhere in her face except her eyes, suddenly sprung to smoldering life. “I would kill him if I could,” she replied. “I would like to do it with my own hands, and watch him go. I would like to see the knowledge in him, and the pain. I would make sure that he went slowly, and that he knew who I was.”

  The implacable hate in her frightened him, but he did not doubt her words. He found his mouth dry. Could he ever hate like that? He had lost his parents, and the grief might never completely leave him, but their deaths had been swift and honorable. Both her sons, the passion and the hope of her life, had been turned into murderers, and died by suicide. And yet neither of them had been evil, he knew that as clearly as he saw the sunlight on the grass. They had been deceived and destroyed by others, and in the end, crucified by shame.

  “Unfortunately I haven’t yet found him,” he said to her with a gentleness he was amazed that he could feel for her. She looked like some mythical fury rather than an ordinary twentieth-century woman standing on the lawn of a Brighton hospital. But then surely myth survived because it was a distillation of human truth? “You can help me,” he added.

  “How?” she asked, looking at the wheelchair-bound soldiers, not at him.

 
; “Who contacted Sebastian the afternoon before the crash in which my parents died? In any way, telephone, letter, personally, anything at all.”

  “How excruciatingly delicate of you, Captain Reavley.” There was a hint of mockery in her voice. “You mean the day before Sebastian killed your mother and father!”

  “Yes. The morning would have been too early, anything from lunchtime onward.”

  She considered for a moment or two before answering. “He had two or three letters in the early afternoon delivery. One telephone call, I remember. No one visited, but he did go out. I have no idea whom he could have met then.”

  “Did the letters come through the post?”

  “Of course they came through the post! What were you imagining? Letters by pigeon? Or a liveried footman dropping something off in a carriage?”

  “A message by hand,” he replied. “It is simple enough to put something in a letter box, but it wouldn’t have a franked stamp on it.”

  She let out her breath in a sigh. “Do you really think this is going to help you find him? Or that it will bring any kind of justice if you do? You won’t be able to prove anything. You will look ridiculous, and he will walk away. You’ll be fortunate if he doesn’t ruin you for slander.”

  “You underestimate me, Mrs. Allan. I didn’t have anything so straightforward in mind.”

  She stared at him. It was not hope in her eyes, making them so alive, but it was a flicker of something better than the dead anger before. “There was a telephone call, from Aidan Thyer, and then half an hour after that, he went out.”

  Aidan Thyer. He was master of St. John’s College in Cambridge, a position of extraordinary, almost unique influence. Many young men’s dreams and ambitions had been molded by whoever had been master of their college in their first formative years as adults, away from home, beginning to taste the wild new freedoms of intellectual adventure. He could remember his own master, the brilliance of his mind, the dreams he had started, worlds he had opened for his students. Who better to teach Sebastian to be an idealist who would kill for peace?

  If it were Thyer, it would hit Joseph profoundly. But pain had nothing to do with truth.

  “Nothing between?” he asked aloud. “No one to the door, even at the back? No deliveries, no tradesmen?”

  “No,” she answered.

  Was she being careful, or trying to avoid an answer that would hurt so deeply? But it had to be someone John Reavley had known, and presumably trusted. It had to be someone close enough and with the intellectual and moral power to have influenced Sebastian to kill two people he had known for years, the parents of the man who had tutored and helped him even before going up to university and even more afterward.

  “Did he say anything about where he was going?”

  “No. Do you think it was Aidan Thyer?” Her voice was crowded with disbelief. After Sebastian’s death she had stayed in Thyer’s house! He had witnessed her grief, and appeared to do all he could to help.

  “I don’t know,” he replied truthfully. “There are lots of possible explanations. But it is at least somewhere to begin. Someone told him what to do, and where my father would be.”

  “Why could it not have been at any time?” she asked, frowning slightly. “Why only in the afternoon of the day before? Why did he do it? Your brother was Sebastian’s closest friend.”

  “I know. It had nothing to do with Joseph. It was political.” That was as close to the truth as he would come.

  “That’s absurd!” she retorted. “Your father used to be a member of Parliament, I know, but he didn’t stand for any convictions Sebastian was against. He didn’t stand for anything out of the ordinary. There were scores of men like him, maybe even hundreds.” It was possibly not intended to be rude, but her tone was dismissive and she made no effort to hide it.

  Matthew pictured his father’s mild, ascetic face with its incisive intelligence, and the honesty that was so clear it was sometimes almost childlike. Yes, there were many men who believed as he had, but he himself was unique! No one could fill the emptiness his death had created. Suddenly it was almost impossible not to snap back at Mary’s callous remark. It required all his self-control to answer civilly.

  “And had any of those hundreds been the ones to learn the information he had, and had the courage to act on it,” he said carefully, “then they would have been the ones killed.” He deliberately avoided using the word “murdered.”

  Her face pulled tight and she turned away. “What information?”

  “Political. I can’t tell you more than that.”

  “Then go and talk to Aidan Thyer,” she told him. “There’s nothing I can do to help you.” And without waiting for him to say anything more, or to wish him good-bye, she turned and walked back toward the door leading inside, a stiff-backed figure, every other passion consumed in grief, oddly dignified, and yet completely without grace.

  Matthew remained outside, and went back to the car along the grass and around the footpath.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  “I don’t know,” Sam said wearily, pushing his hair back and unintentionally smearing mud over his brow. “It’s such a bloody mess it’s impossible to tell for sure. Looks like one of the props came loose and some of the wall collapsed. But what made it happen could be any of a dozen things. How much of his hand has he lost?”

  They were in Sam’s dugout, off the support trench. It was three steps down from the trench itself, a deep hole in the ground, duckboards on the floor, a sacking curtain over the door. It was typical of many officers’ quarters: a narrow cot, a wooden chair, and two tables, both made out of boxes. On a makeshift shelf beside the bed there were several books—a little poetry, some Greek legend, a couple of novels. There was a gramophone on one of the boxes, and inside the box about twenty records, mostly classical piano music, Liszt and Chopin, a little Beethoven, and some opera. Joseph knew them all by heart. There was also a photograph of Sam’s brother, younger, his face pinched with ill health.

  “Two middle fingers, I think,” Joseph replied. “If it doesn’t get infected he might keep the rest.”

  Sam had brewed tea in his Dixie can, which was carefully propped over a lighted candle. He had a packet of chocolate biscuits that had come out of a parcel from home. He poured the tea, half for Joseph, and divided the biscuits.

  “Thanks.” Joseph took it and bit into one of the biscuits. It was crisp and sweet. It almost made up for the taste of the tea made with brackish water and cooked in an all-purpose can. At least it was hot. “There was a new war correspondent there,” he went on. “Arrogant man. Scrubbed and ironed. Hasn’t the faintest idea what it’s like in a sap.” He had only been in one once himself, but he would never forget how he had felt. It had been all he could do to control himself from crying out as the walls seemed to close in on him, and from the sound of the dripping, the scurry of rodent feet. Every shell he heard could be the one that caved in the entrance and buried them under the earth to suffocate. He was used to the tap-tap sounds of Germans doing the same. One could hear them in dugouts, even like this. In ways the silence was worse; it could mean they were priming their fuses. The mines could blow any moment.

  Sam was watching him, his eyes questioning.

  There was no avoiding the truth. “He thought it might have been self-inflicted,” he admitted. “Somebody’s been telling him stories, and he was full of it.”

  Sam did not answer. His curious, ironic face reflected the thoughts he refused to speak; pity for men pushed beyond their limits and the knowledge that this could have been exactly such a thing, fear of punishment for the man, and that he would not be able to protect him; and weariness of the dirt, the exhaustion and the pain of it all. He smiled very slightly, a surprisingly sweet expression. “Thanks for trying.”

  Joseph took a second chocolate biscuit and finished his tea. “It’s not enough,” he said, standing up. “Watkins wasn’t going to charge him, but I’ll make absolutely sure. Corliss look
ed a bit shaky to me. I’ll go back to the field hospital and make sure he’s all right.”

  Sam nodded, gratitude in his eyes.

  Joseph smiled. “Maybe I’ll get a decent cup of tea,” he said lightly. “I’ve nothing better to do.”

  He walked as far as the first-aid post, passing Bert Dazely with the mail delivery for the men in the front trenches. He had a whole sheaf of letters in his hand and was grinning broadly, showing the gap in his front teeth.

  “Afternoon, Chaplain,” he said cheerfully. “Seen Charlie Gee up there? Oi got two for ’im. Oi reckon as that girl of ’is must wroite ’im every day.”

  “I think she does,” Joseph agreed with a momentary twinge of envy. Eleanor had died in childbirth two years ago, and in one terrible night he had lost his wife and his son. In an act of will, he forced it out of his mind. There were things to do today, things to keep the mind and the emotions busy. “I’ve been with Major Wetherall. I don’t know where Charlie is.”

  “Oi’ll find ’im,” Bert said happily, knowing he carried the most precious thing on the whole battlefield.

  Joseph had only a quarter of an hour to wait before an ambulance showed up, and since the driver had only two injured to carry, he was able to beg a lift back to the Casualty Clearing Station, which was in effect a small mobile hospital. They had just recently come into full use.

  He asked the first nurse he saw. She was a tall, striking-looking woman, but it was not until she spoke that he realized she was American.

  “Can I help you, Captain?”

  “Yes, please, nurse . . .” He hesitated.

  “Marie O’Day,” she told him.

  “Irish?” he said with surprise. He must have mistaken the accent.

  She smiled, and it lit her face. “No, my husband’s people were, way back. He drives one of the ambulances. Who are you looking for?”