one that Joseph seemed to refuse or to be incapable of understanding. “Why?” he said bitterly. “The Israelites were the chosen people, and where are they now? We study their language as a curiosity. It matters only because it is the language of Christ, whom they denied and crucified. If the Bible didn’t speak of Him, we wouldn’t care about Hebrew. We can’t say that of English. Why should anyone remember it if we were conquered? For Shakespeare? We don’t remember the language of Aristotle, Homer, Aeschylus. It’s taught in the best schools, to the privileged few, as a relic of a great civilization of the past.” His voice choked with sudden, uncontrollable anger and his face was twisted with pain. “I don’t want to become a relic! I want people a thousand years from now to speak the same tongue that I do, to love the same beauty, to understand my dreams and how they mattered to me. I want to write something, or even do something, that preserves the soul of who we are.”
The last of the light was now only a pale wash low across the horizon. “War changes us, even if we win.” He turned away from Joseph, as if to hide a nakedness within. “Too many of us become barbarians of the heart. Have you any idea how many could die? How many of those left would be consumed by hate, all over Europe? Everything that was good in them eaten away by the things they had seen and, worse, the things they had been forced to do?”
“It won’t happen!” Joseph responded, and the moment the words were gone from his lips he wondered if they were true. “If you can’t have faith in people, the leaders of nations, then have faith that God will not allow the world to plunge into the kind of destruction you are thinking of,” he said. “What purpose of His could it serve?”
Sebastian’s lip curled in a tiny smile. “I’ve no idea! I don’t know the purposes of God! Do you, sir?” The softness of his voice, and the
“To save the souls of men,” Joseph replied without hesitation.
“And what does that mean?” Sebastian turned back to face him. “Do you suppose He sees it the same way I do?” Again the smile touched his lips, this time self-mocking.
Joseph was obliged to smile in answer, although the sadness jolted him as if the fading of the light were in some terrible way a permanent thing. “Not necessarily,” he conceded. “But He is more likely to be right.”
Sebastian did not reply, and they walked slowly along the grass as the breeze rose a little. All the punts were gone to their moorings, and the spires of stone in the arched top of the Bridge of Sighs were barely darker than the sky beyond.
Matthew returned to London, going first to his flat. It was exactly as he had left it, except that the maid had tidied it, but it felt different. It should have had the comfort of home. It was where he had lived for the last five years, ever since he had left university and begun working for the Intelligence Service. It was full of the books, drawings, and paintings he had collected. His favorite painting, hanging over the fire, was of cows in the corner of the field. For him their gentle rumination, calm eyes, and slow generosity seemed the ultimate sanity in the world. On the mantel was a silver vase his mother had given him one Christmas, and a Turkish dagger with a highly ornamental scabbard.
But the flat was oddly empty. He felt as if he were returning not to the present but to the past. When he had last sat in the worn leather armchair or eaten at this table, his family was whole, and he knew of no vanishing document that was at the heart of conspiracy, violence, and secrets that brought death. The world had not been exactly safe, but whatever dangers there were lay in places far distant, and only the periphery of them touched England, or Matthew himself.
He spent a long evening deep in thought. It was the first time he had been alone more than to sleep since he had walked across the grass at Fenner’s Field to break the news to Joseph. Questions crowded his mind.
John Reavley had called him on Saturday evening, not here at his flat, but at his office in the Intelligence Services. He had been working late, on the Irish problems, as usual. The Liberal government had been trying to pass a Home Rule bill to give Ireland autonomy since the middle of the previous century, and time after time the Protestants of Ulster had blocked it, refusing absolutely to be forcibly separated from Britain and placed in Catholic Ireland. They believed that both their religious freedom and their economic survival depended upon remaining free from such a forced integration, and ultimately subjection.
Government after government had fallen on the issue, and now Arquill’s personal Liberal Party required the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party in order to retain power.
Shearing, Matthew’s superior, shared the view of many others that there was a great deal of political maneuvering in London behind the mutiny of British troops stationed in the Curragh. When the men of Ulster, solidly backed by their women, had threatened armed rebellion against the Home Rule bill, the British troops had refused to take up arms against them. General Gough had resigned, with all his officers, whereupon Sir John French, chief of the General Staff in London, had resigned also, immediately followed by Sir John Seely, secretary for war in the Cabinet.
Little wonder Shearing and his men worked late. The situation threatened to become a crisis as grave as any in the last three hundred years.
Matthew had been in his office when the call came from John Reavley telling him of the document and that he was going to drive to London with it the following day, expecting to arrive between half past one and two o’clock. He would bring Alys with him, ostensibly for an afternoon in the city, but in order to make his trip unremarkable.
How had anyone else known that he even had the document, let alone that he was taking it to Matthew, and the time of his journey? If he came by car, the route was obvious. There was only one main road from St. Giles to London.
Matthew cast his mind back to that evening, the offices almost silent, hardly anyone there, just half a dozen men, perhaps a couple of clerks. He remembered standing at his desk with the telephone in his hand, the disbelief at what his father had said. Matthew had repeated what his father had said, to make certain he had heard correctly.
The cold ran through him. Was that it? In the quiet office someone had overheard him? That had been enough. Who? He tried to recall who else had been there, but one late night blended into another. He had heard footsteps, voices deliberately kept low so as not to disturb others. He might not have recognized them then; he certainly could not now.
But he could find out, discreetly. He could at least trace the possibly treasonous behavior among his own colleagues—when even a week ago he would have trusted them all without hesitation.
When he arrived in the morning everything was familiar: the cramped spaces, the echoing wooden floor, the black telephones, the dust motes in the air, the worn surfaces, and the harsh desk lamps, unnecessary now in the sunlight through the windows. Clerks bustled back and forth, shirtsleeves grimy from endless papers and ink, collars stiff and often a trifle crooked.
They wished him good morning and offered their condolences, shy and awkward and, for all he could see, intensely sincere. He thanked them and went to his own small room, where books were wedged into too small a case and papers were locked in drawers. The inkwell and blotting papers were just as usual, not quite straight on his desk, two pens lying beside them. The blotting paper was clean. He never left anything that might be decipherable.
He fished for his keys to unlock the top drawer. At first it did not slide in easily, but took a moment of fiddling. He bent to look more closely, and that was when he saw the finest of scratches on the metal around the keyhole. It had not been there when he left. So someone had searched here, too.
He sat down, his thoughts racing, clouded and skewed by guilt. There was no doubt left in him that it was his words overheard that had sent the assassin after John and Alys Reavley.
His desk was piled with more and more information on the Curragh Mutiny. It was Thursday, July 9, before Calder Shearing sent for him and Matthew reported to his office a little after four o’clock. Like all rooms in the Intelligence Service, it was sparsely furnished, nothing more than the necessities, and those as cheap as possible, but Shearing had added nothing of his own, no family pictures, no personal books or mementos. His papers and volumes for work were untidily stacked, but he knew the precise place of every one of them.
Shearing was not a tall man, but he had a presence more commanding than mere size. His black hair was receding considerably, but one barely noticed it because his brows were heavy and expressive and his eyes were
