Angels in the Gloom wwi-3 Read online

  Should he write and tell her that he had been wounded and was at home for a while? Would she care or worry if she did not hear from him? Or would he be presuming on her kindness? He liked her very much. There was a gentleness and wry honesty in her letters he found himself thinking of more often than he would care to tell her.

  In the end he asked Hannah for pen and paper and wrote a brief letter. After she had posted it, he wondered if he had been too terse, and rather silly to think Isobel would be concerned anyway.

  He thought of the dugout where he had slept and where most of his belongings were, the books he loved best, and the portrait of Dante. That was where he wrote the almost daily letters he had to, to tell of a death, or a serious injury . . . presumably someone had done that for him, to tell Hannah? He had not thought of it until now. It would have been one of the easy ones to write, because he was still alive.

  Who was doing it now that he was not there? Would they have got another chaplain? But he would not know the men, or their families! He would not know the rivalries, the debts of kindness, the weaknesses, and the strengths. He himself should be there! But not yet. He still had time to watch the slow spring at least begin.

  The next day he got up for a little while. He knew if he didn’t, he would begin to lose the use of his muscles. The fever was gone; it was just a matter of his wounds healing and his gaining strength again.

  It also meant he was well enough to receive visitors outside the family. The squire was already dealt with; however, the local minister was not, and he arrived in the middle of the afternoon. Hannah showed him in to the sitting room where Joseph was sitting quietly, the dog at his feet, tail thumping on the floor now and then as Joseph spoke to him. Hannah shot them both a quick glance of apology.

  Hallam Kerr, a man in his forties, was of medium height and build with straight hair parted in the middle. His manner was full of enthusiasm, rather like a school sports master at the beginning of a match, but there were lines of anxiety in his face and something faintly dated in his dress.

  “Ah! Captain Reavley! Congratulations!” He thrust out his hand, then as if feeling that Joseph might attempt to get up, he snatched it back again. “Please, please don’t stand, my dear fellow. I simply came to see if there is anything I can do for you. And of course to say how immensely proud we all are. It’s superb to have a holder of the Military Cross in the village—and for the church as a whole! Shows that we men of God are fighters, too, what?”

  Joseph’s heart sank. There was an eagerness in the man’s eyes as if the war were all somehow magnificent. That was the moment Joseph realized how alien he felt here at home. What could he say to this man without betraying all that was true? “Well . . . I suppose you could put it like that. . . .” he began.

  “Very modest,” Kerr said. “I’m proud to meet you, Captain.” He sat in the chair opposite Joseph’s, leaning forward earnestly. “I envy you. It must be superb to be part of such a fine, brave body of men—helping, encouraging, keeping the word of God alive among them.”

  Joseph remembered the young men with lost limbs, lost sight, terrified, bleeding to death. Their conduct was heroic, certainly; it took the ultimate courage, going into the darkness alone. But there was nothing glorious in the circumstances. He was choked with the desire to weep just at the overwhelming return of memory. He looked at Kerr’s idiotic face and wanted to run away. He had no desire to be cruel. The man could not help his blinding ignorance. He might in his own way be doing his best, but his every eager word was an insult to the reality of pain.

  “I wish I could have gone,” Kerr continued. “Too old,” he said ruefully. “And health not up to it. Damn shame.”

  “There’ll be plenty of people in hospital you can help,” Joseph pointed out, then instantly wished he had not. The last thing on earth crippled men wanted was platitudes about God or the nobility of sacrifice.

  The light went out of Kerr’s face. “Yes, I realize that, of course,” he said awkwardly. “But that’s not the same as being with our boys in action, braving the gunfire and standing by them in their hour of peril.”

  Joseph thought of real fear and its pathetic indignity, those who wept, or soiled themselves with terror. They desperately needed compassion and the willingness to forget as if it had never happened, the passionate, driving urgency to love, to reach out a hand in the bitterness of extremity, and never, ever let go. These easy words were a denial of honesty.

  “We’re bored most of the time,” he said flatly. “And tired, and cold and fed up with the mud and the lice. The whole trench network is infested with rats, hundreds of thousands of them, as big as cats. They eat the dead.” He saw Kerr blanch and recoil, and it satisfied something of the anger inside him. “We get used to them,” he said a fraction more gently. “Believe me, you’re needed here as well. And there will be plenty of widows to comfort who will require all your strength.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose that is true,” Kerr admitted. “There is need for great faith, great faith indeed. And if there is anything I can do for you, please let Mrs. MacAllister know.” He looked sideways, as if Hannah had been standing in the doorway.

  Joseph was ashamed of himself now for having been so crushing. The man spoke from ignorance, not ill will. He wanted to help. It was not his fault he did not know how. “It was very good of you to come by,” he said. “You must have a lot to do with so many men away. I don’t suppose you even have a curate, do you?”

  Kerr’s expression lightened. “No, no, I don’t. Poor fellow felt obliged to go and do his duty. Went to the East End of London, actually, where they had no one. Had a game leg, no good for the army.” He rose to his feet. “I don’t want to tire you. I’m sure you need all the rest you can get—to grow strong again and go back into the fray, what?”

  “Yes, I expect so,” Joseph agreed. What else could he do?

  After Kerr had departed, Hannah came into the room. “What did you say to him?” she demanded. “The poor man looked even more lost than usual.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joseph apologized. He drew in his breath to explain to her, then realized that he couldn’t. She knew no more of the reality than Kerr did, and it would be unfair to try to force her to see it. She had her own burdens, and they were sufficient. He smiled at her warmly. “I’ll be nicer to him next time, I promise.”

  “Don’t push him into the water, Joe. He can’t swim.”

  He knew exactly what she meant. It was a touch of the old Hannah back again, from before the war, before the world changed, and youth had to grow wise and brave and die before its time. He hated the Peacemaker for the murders he had committed, and made other people commit, for the loss of John and Alys Reavley, and the betrayal of Sebastian. But he could understand the dream of avoiding war and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands across the battlefields of Europe, the ruin of a generation, the grief of millions. It was the price that choked him—the price in honor. Was betrayal ever right, even if it saved a million lives? Ten million?

  Perhaps every one of them was loved as much by somebody as John and Alys Reavley had been by him.

  He closed his eyes and drifted off into a half-sleep, aware of his arm throbbing, and his leg, and longing for the time he could turn on his side without pain.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Calder Shearing looked up from his desk as Matthew Reavley came into his office. “How is your brother?” he asked.

  “Lucky to keep his arm,” Matthew replied. “He’ll be several weeks before he’s fit to go back. Thank you, sir.”

  “I suppose he will go back?” Shearing questioned him. He knew something of Joseph and had a deep respect for him rooted in his extraordinary actions a year ago.

  “His conscience would crucify him if he didn’t.” Matthew sat down as Shearing indicated the chair.

  Under his heavy, black brows, Shearing’s expression was bleak. “The sabotage is getting worse,” he said grimly, all pretense at courtesy abandoned. “How
much longer before we can act?” There was an edge of desperation in his voice. “We’re being bled to death!”

  “I know. . . .” Matthew began.

  “Do you? The French are being massacred at Verdun. Last month the Seventy-second Division at Samogneux was reduced from twenty-six thousand men to ten thousand. The Russian Front is unspeakable. Sturmer, a creature of Rasputin’s, has replaced Goremykin as prime minister.” His face tightened. “Our people there estimate that a quarter of the entire working age population is dead, captured, or in the army. The harvest has failed and they are facing starvation. We are fighting in Italy, Turkey, the Balkans, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, and more than half of Africa.”

  Matthew deemed it pointless to declare that they had finally succeeded in extricating themselves from the disaster of Gallipoli, and without losing a single man. The actual evacuation had been a military masterpiece, though nothing could make up for the fiasco of the attempted invasion that had cost the lives of over a quarter of a million men. On the worst days the reconnaissance aircraft had reported the sea red with blood.

  Shearing was staring at him. His eyes were shadowed with exhaustion and a deep, corroding knowledge. His emotion dominated the austere room in which there was nothing of his home, his past, or the man he was outside these walls.

  Matthew was compelled to offer all the brief information he could about his own specific task. “The fact that they are putting smoke bombs in the holds of the ships, in among the munitions, so the captains have no choice but to flood the holds, can be deduced easily enough; it doesn’t need any explanation,” he said. “To trace the money to pay for the bombs themselves and the agents who plant them, all the way from Berlin to America, needs several people. We can fabricate bank clerks, officials, and so on, suggest bribery and betrayal, a degree of carelessness, but it all has to be verifiable.”

  “I know that!” Shearing snapped. “You’ve got men—do it!”

  He was referring to Detta Hannassey, the Irish double agent the Germans were using to test whether their vital naval code had been broken. It was Matthew’s job to convince her, and them, that it had not. Otherwise they would change the code and Britain would lose one of the very few advantages it maintained. All communication from Berlin to their men in the neutral United States hung in the balance. “I am doing it. I can’t just lay it out in front of her. I have to wait until she asks, or something happens to make it natural to talk about it. I’ve got a story about someone turned from their side to ours, but I need a cover to make it believable.”

  Shearing kept his impatience under control with a visible effort. “How long?”

  “Three weeks,” Matthew estimated. “Two if I’m lucky. If I rush it, she’ll know exactly what I’m doing.”

  Shearing’s face was pale.

  “How is our status in Washington?” Matthew asked drily. He had little hope of change. Even rumor of a Japanese base in Baja California and all the violence and chaos in Mexico under Pancho Villa had made no real difference.

  Anger and self-mockery lit Shearing’s eyes. “About equal with that of the Germans,” he said sourly. “President Wilson is still aspiring to be the arbiter of peace in Europe. Teach the Old World how it’s done.”

  Matthew would have used an expletive had he not been in his superior’s office. “What will it take to make him change?”

  “If I knew that, I’d damn well do it!” Shearing told him. “Work hard, Reavley. It can’t be long before they take the next step up and start actually sinking the munitions ships. It only takes an incendiary bomb instead of smoke.”

  Matthew was cold. “Yes, sir, I know.”

  The nightclub where Matthew had arranged to meet Detta was crowded with soldiers on leave. There was a hectic gaiety about them, as if it took all their energy of mind to absorb every sight and sound to remember in the days to come. Even the young women with them caught the mood—elegant, romantic, a little wild, as if they too knew that tonight was everything, and tomorrow might slip out of their hands.

  There were only three musicians on the small platform: a pianist; a slender, wispy-haired man with a saxophone; and a girl of about twenty in a long, blue dress. She was singing a haunting lyric from one of the popular music hall songs, but altered every now and then to be sadder, harsher, full of the reality of death. Her smoky voice added passion to it, belying the innocence of her face. Her hair was short, and she wore a band around it, over her brow.

  Matthew found a place at the bar and sat down.

  He had nearly half an hour to wait, and he was surprised and annoyed with himself at how tense he became. He listened to the music; all the tunes were familiar, from the madcap “Yacka Hula Hickey Dula,” popularized by Al Jolson, to the heartbreaking “Keep the Home Fires Burning.”

  He sipped his drink, spinning it out, watching couples dancing. It was natural that he should be anxious to see Detta in order to further his work convincing her that the code was unbroken, but his disappointment was personal. The emotion of the music, the fear in the eyes of the young men around him, made him overwhelmingly aware of loneliness, separation, clinging too hard to the present because the future was unbearable.

  Then he heard a slight commotion in the doorway, a momentary silence, and Detta came down the steps. She was not tall, but she walked as if she were, with a unique kind of slow grace, as if she would never stumble or grow tired. She was wearing a black dress, cut low at the bosom, a red rose at her waist. The skirt was lined in satin so it rustled very slightly as she moved. It made the flawless skin of her neck seem even whiter, and the cloud of her dark hair accentuated her eyes. One of her brows was a little different from the other, a blemish to perfect beauty that gave her a vulnerable, slightly humorous look.

  As happened every time he saw her, no matter how much he guarded against it, his pulse raced and his mouth went dry.

  At first she did not appear to have seen him, and he hesitated to stand up and draw her attention. But then she turned and smiled. Walking elegantly past the young men who had crowded toward her, she approached Matthew. As she seated herself, she spoke to the bartender first, as if that were what she had really come for, then turned to Matthew.

  “I haven’t seen you for a while,” she remarked casually. Her voice was low, and the soft Irish lilt gave it a unique music.

  It was five days since they had last met, but he did not tell her he had been counting. He must not let her know it mattered so much, or she would be suspicious. Whatever he felt—and it was far more than he wanted to—it must never affect his judgment. He could not afford to forget for an instant that they were on opposite sides. She was an Irish Nationalist, with sympathy for Germany, and perhaps any other enemy of England. Only here, in the lights, the laughter, the music, they pretended it did not matter.

  He paid for her drink and another for himself, and they walked over to one of the few free tables.

  “I went back to Cambridgeshire,” he explained. “My brother was wounded rather badly and they sent him home.”

  Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry.” She said it instantly, without time to consider loyalties or causes. “How is he?”

  The girl in the blue dress was singing again, a sad, angry little song with downward-falling notes.

  “Better than many, I suppose,” Matthew answered. He could be reasonably dispassionate about other people—one had to be—but seeing Joseph gray-faced and obviously in appalling pain had shaken him more deeply than he had been prepared for. It brought back the memory of his parents’ broken bodies after the car crash. The police had called it an accident and nothing public had ever suggested otherwise.

  To talk about numbers of losses was one thing; to see the blood and the pain in real people was quite different. He understood very well why soldiers ran away rather than take cold steel in their hands and plunge it into another human being. The fact that that other man was German was irrelevant. He was flesh and bone, capable of exactly the same emotions as themselve
s. Perhaps for some the nightmares would never entirely go. He did not want to be the kind of man for whom they would. He was intensely grateful that his job had never required him to meet his enemy face to face and exercise the violence of death. He did not delude himself that he was somehow absolved from the results of any victory he might win, and of course he was not; he was merely spared from the sight and the memory of it.

  Detta was looking at him curiously. He caught in her eyes an unguarded moment of compassion.

  “He’s a chaplain,” he said quickly, to explain that Joseph was not a soldier. Although since he was Protestant, not Catholic, perhaps in her eyes that would be even worse. He found himself smiling at the lunacy of it; it was that or rage, or tears. “A shell ripped his leg open and smashed his arm pretty badly, but the doctor says he’ll not lose it.”

  She winced. “I suppose he’s in considerable pain,” she said gently.

  “Yes.” He needed to go on; the next thing had to be said, but he hated it. “The casualties are heavy at the moment. He was out over no-man’s-land carrying back a pretty badly wounded soldier, someone from our own village—not that that makes any difference, I suppose. We’re desperately short of ammunition. We’re having to ration it, so many bullets per man. They’re being shot at, and they can’t shoot back. We’re buying stuff from America, but it’s being sabotaged at sea, and when it gets here it’s no bloody use!” There was more anger in his voice than he had meant there to be, and his hand on the table next to his glass was clenched tight. He must think clearly. He was here to do a job, not to indulge his fury.