quartet muffled their conversation.
“Sorry,” Gus said.
“You’re right, though.” Walter smiled, allowing his feeling of sanguinity to show a little. “The tone is arrogant, combative, and scornful-but he proposes peace talks.”
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
Walter held up a warning hand. “Let me tell you something very frankly. Powerful men close to the kaiser who are against peace have supported this proposal cynically, merely to look good in the eyes of your president, feeling sure the Allies will reject it anyway.”
“Let’s hope they’re wrong!”
“Amen to that.”
“When will they send the letter?”
“They’re still arguing about the wording. When that is agreed, the letter will be handed to the American ambassador here in Berlin, with a request that he pass it to the Allied governments.” This diplomatic game of pass-the-parcel was necessary because enemy governments had no official means of communication.
“I’d better go to London,” Gus said. “Perhaps I can do something to prepare for its reception.”
“I thought you might say that. I have a request.”
“After what you’ve done to help me? Anything!”
“It’s strictly personal.”
“No problem.”
“It requires me to let you into a secret.”
Gus smiled. “Intriguing!”
“I would like you to take a letter from me to Lady Maud Fitzherbert.”
“Ah.” Gus looked thoughtful. He knew there could be only one reason for Walter to be writing secretly to Maud. “I see the need for discretion. But that’s okay.”
“If your belongings are searched when you are leaving Germany or entering England, you will have to say that it is a love letter from an American man in Germany to his fiancee in London. The letter gives no names or addresses.”
“All right.”
“Thank you,” Walter said fervently. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me.”
There was a shooting party at Ty Gwyn on Saturday, December 2. Earl Fitzherbert and Princess Bea were delayed in London, so Fitz’s friend Bing Westhampton acted as host, and Lady Maud as hostess.
Before the war, Maud had loved such parties. Women did not shoot, of course, but she liked the house full of guests, the picnic lunch at which the ladies joined the men, and the blazing fires and hearty food they all came home to at night. But she found herself unable to enjoy such pleasure when soldiers were suffering in the trenches. She told herself that one couldn’t spend one’s whole life being miserable, even in wartime; but it did not work. She pasted on her brightest smile, and encouraged everyone to eat and drink heartily, but when she heard the shotguns she could only think of the battlefields. Lavish food was left untouched on her plate, and glasses of Fitz’s priceless old wines were taken away untasted.
She hated to be at leisure, these days, because all she did was think about Walter. Was he alive or dead? The battle of the Somme was over, at last. Fitz said the Germans had lost half a million men. Was Walter one of them? Or was he lying in a hospital somewhere, maimed?
Perhaps he was celebrating victory. The newspapers could not quite conceal the fact that the British army’s major effort for 1916 had gained a paltry seven miles of territory. The Germans might feel entitled to congratulate themselves. Even Fitz was saying, quietly and in private, that Britain’s best hope now was that the Americans might join in. Was Walter lounging in a brothel in Berlin, with a bottle of schnapps in one hand and a pretty blond fraulein in the other? I’d rather he was wounded, she thought, then she felt ashamed of herself.
Gus Dewar was among the guests at Ty Gwyn, and at teatime he sought Maud out. All the men wore plus fours, tweed trousers buttoned just below the knee, and the tall American looked particularly foolish in them. He held a cup of tea precariously in one hand as he crossed the crowded morning room to where she sat.
She suppressed a sigh. When a single man approached her he usually had romance on his mind, and she had to fight him off without admitting she was married, which was sometimes difficult. Nowadays, so many eligible upper- class bachelors had been killed in the war that the most unprepossessing men fancied their chances with her: younger sons of bankrupt barons, weedy clergymen with bad breath, even homosexuals looking for a woman to give them respectability.
Not that Gus Dewar was such a poor prospect. He was not handsome, nor did he have the easy grace of such men as Walter and Fitz, but he had a sharp mind and high ideals, and he shared Maud’s passionate interest in world affairs. And the combination of his slight awkwardness, physical and social, with a certain blunt honesty somehow amounted to a kind of charm. If she had been single he might even have had a chance.
He folded his long legs beside her on a yellow silk sofa. “Such a pleasure to be at Ty Gwyn again,” he said.
“You were here shortly before the war,” Maud recalled. She would never forget that weekend in January 1914, when the king had come to stay and there had been a terrible disaster at the Aberowen pit. What she remembered most vividly-she was ashamed to realize-was kissing Walter. She wished she could kiss him now. What fools they had been to do no more than kiss! She wished now that they had made love, and she had got pregnant, so that they were obliged to marry in undignified haste, and had been sent away to live in perpetual social disgrace somewhere frightful like Rhodesia or Bengal. All the considerations that had inhibited them-parents, society, career-seemed trivial by comparison with the awful possibility that Walter might be killed and she would never see him again. “How can men be so stupid as to go to war?” she said to Gus. “And to continue fighting when the dreadful cost in men’s lives has long ago dwarfed any conceivable gain?”
He said: “President Wilson believes the two sides should consider peace without victory.”
She was relieved that he did not want to tell her what fine eyes she had, or some such rubbish. “I agree with the president,” she said. “The British army has already lost a million men. The Somme alone cost us four hundred thousand casualties.”
“But what do the British people think?”
Maud considered. “Most of the newspapers are still pretending the Somme was a great victory. Any attempt at a realistic assessment is labeled unpatriotic. I’m sure Lord Northcliffe would really rather live under a military dictatorship. But most of our people know we’re not making much progress.”
“The Germans may be about to propose peace talks.”
“Oh, I hope you’re right.”
“I believe a formal approach may be made soon.”
Maud stared at him. “Pardon me,” she said. “I assumed you were making polite conversation. But you’re not.” She felt excited. Peace talks? Could it happen?
“No, I’m not making conversation,” Gus said. “I know you have friends in the Liberal government.”
“It’s not really a Liberal government anymore,” she said. “It’s a coalition, with several Conservative ministers in the cabinet.”
“Excuse me, I misspoke. I did know about the coalition. All the same, Asquith is still prime minister, and he is a Liberal, and I know you are close to many leading Liberals.”
“Yes.”
“So I’ve come here to ask your opinion as to how the German proposal might be received.”
She considered carefully. She knew who Gus represented. The president of the United States was asking her this question. She had better be exact. As it happened, she had a key item of information. “Ten days ago the cabinet discussed a paper by Lord Lansdowne, a former Conservative foreign secretary, arguing that we cannot win the war.”
Gus lit up. “Really? I had no idea.”
“Of course you didn’t. It was secret. However, there have been rumors, and Northcliffe has been fulminating against what he calls defeatist talk of negotiated peace.”
Gus said eagerly: “And how was Lansdowne’s paper received?”
