realize that nobody’s listening—not with their hearts or their guts, or willing to pay the price for it. It’s up to us.”
“Yes,” Mason said. “I know that.”
“Of course you do.” The Peacemaker pushed his hands through his hair. “Go back to your writing. You have a gift. We may need it. Stay with your newspaper. If we can’t prevent it and the worst happens, get them to send you everywhere! Every battlefield, every advance or retreat, every town or city that’s captured, or where there are negotiations for peace. Become the most brilliant, the most widely read war correspondent in Europe . . . in the world. Do you understand?”
“Oh, yes,” Mason said with a soft hiss of breath between his teeth. “Of course I understand.”
“Good. Then you’d better go, but keep in touch.”
Mason turned and walked slowly to the door and out of it. His footsteps barely sounded on the stairs.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
In Cambridge, Joseph felt that he was achieving something, but it was all a matter of exclusion. He was no nearer to knowing what had happened, as opposed to what had not. And if Inspector Perth had made progress, he was keeping it to himself. The tension was increasing with every day. Joseph was determined to continue in whatever way he could to discover more about Sebastian and who had had reason to hate or to fear him.
An opportunity came to him when he was discussing a problem of interpretation with Elwyn, who was finding a particular passage of translation difficult.
They had walked from the lecture rooms together, and rather than go inside had chosen to cross the bridge to the Backs. It was a quiet afternoon. As they turned on the gravel path to go toward the shade, bees drifted lazily among the spires of delphiniums and late pinks by the wall of the covered walk. Bertie was rolling on the warm earth in between the snapdragons.
Elwyn was still showing signs of the shock and grief of loss. Joseph knew better than others how one can temporarily forget a cataclysm in one’s life, then remember it again with surprise and the renewal of pain. Sometimes one floated in a kind of unreality, as if the disaster were all imagination and in a little while would disappear and life be as it was before. One was tired without knowing why; concentration slipped from the grasp and slithered away.
It was not surprising that Elwyn was wandering off the point again, unable to keep his mind in control.
“I ought to get back to the master’s house,” he said anxiously. “Mother may be alone.”
“You can’t protect her from everything,” Joseph told him.
Elwyn’s eyes opened abruptly, then his lips tightened and color flooded his face. He looked away. “I’ve got to. You don’t understand how she felt about Sebastian. She’ll get over this anger, then she’ll be all right. It’s just that —” He stopped, staring ahead at the flat, bright water.
Joseph finished the sentence for him. “If she knew who did it, and saw them punished, her anger would be satisfied.”
“I suppose so,” Elwyn conceded, but there was no conviction in his voice.
Joseph broached the subject he least wanted to. “But perhaps not?”
Elwyn said nothing.
“Why?” Joseph persisted. “Because to do so would force her to see something in Sebastian that she would not wish to?”
The misery in Elwyn’s face was unmistakable. “Everyone sees a different side of people. Mother doesn’t have any idea what Sebastian was like away from home, or even in it, really.”
Joseph felt intrusive, and certain that he, too, wanted to keep his illusions intact, but that was a luxury he could no longer afford. He was being offered a chance to learn, and he dared not turn away from it.
“Did she know about Flora Whickham?” he asked.
Elwyn stiffened, for an instant holding his breath. Then he let it out in a sigh. “He told you?”
“No. I discovered for myself, largely by accident.”
Elwyn swung around. “Don’t tell Mother! She wouldn’t understand. Flora’s a nice girl, but she’s . . .”
“A barmaid.”
Elwyn gave a rueful smile. “Yes, but what I was going to say was that she’s a pacifist, I mean a real one, and Mother wouldn’t begin to understand that.” There was confusion and distaste in his face, and a hurt too tender to probe. He looked away again toward the river, shielding his eyes from Joseph’s gaze. “Actually, neither do I. If you love something, belong to it and believe in it, how can you not fight to save it? What kind of a man wouldn’t?”
Perhaps he suspected Joseph of that same incomprehensible betrayal. If he did, there would be some truth in it. But then Joseph had read of the Boer War, and his imagination could re-create the unreachable pain, the horror that could not be eased or explained and never, with all the arguments on earth, be justified.
“He was not a coward,” Joseph said aloud. “He would fight for what he believed in.”
“Probably.” There was no certainty in Elwyn’s voice or his face.
“Who else knew about Flora?” Joseph asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Regina Coopersmith?” Joseph asked.
Elwyn froze. “God! I hope not!”
“But you’re not certain?”
“No. But I don’t really know Regina well. I suppose”— he chewed his lip and looked awkwardly at Joseph—“I don’t know women very well. I would feel dreadful, but maybe—” He did not finish.
There were a few moments of silence as they walked side by side over the grass and onto the path under the trees.
“Sebastian had a row with Dr. Beecher,” Elwyn went on.
“When?” Joseph felt a sinking inside himself.
“A couple of days before he died.”
“Do you know what it was about?”
“No, I don’t.” He turned to face Joseph. “I thought it was odd, actually, because Dr. Beecher was pretty decent to him.”
“Wasn’t he to everyone?”
“Of course. I meant more than to the rest of us.”
Joseph was puzzled. He remembered Beecher’s dislike of Sebastian. “In what way?” he asked. He had meant to be casual, but he heard the harder edge in his voice, and Elwyn must have heard it also.
Elwyn hesitated, uncomfortable. He shuffled his feet on the gravel of the path and sighed. “We all behave badly sometimes—come to a lecture late, turn in sloppy work. You know how it is?”
“I do.”
“Well, usually you get disciplined for it—ticked off and made to look an ass in front of the others, or get privileges revoked, or something like that. Well, Dr. Beecher was easier on Sebastian than on most of us. Sebastian sort of took advantage, as if he knew Dr. Beecher wouldn’t do anything. He could be an arrogant sod at times. He believed in his own image. . . .” He stopped. Guilt was naked in his face, the stoop of his shoulders, the fidgeting of his right foot as it scuffed the stones. He had said only what was true, but convention decreed that one spoke no ill of the dead. His mother would have seen it as betrayal. “I never thought he liked Sebastian very much,” he finished awkwardly.
“But he favored him?” Joseph pressed.
Elwyn stared at the ground. “It makes no sense to me, because it isn’t a favor in the long run. You’ve got to have discipline or you have nothing. And other people get fed up if you keep on getting away with things.”
“Did other people notice?” Joseph asked.
“Of course. I think that’s what the row was about with Beecher, a day or two before Sebastian’s death.”
“Why didn’t you mention it before?”
Elwyn stared at him. “Because I can’t see Dr. Beecher shooting Sebastian for being arrogant and taking advantage of him. Those things are irritating as hell, but you don’t kill someone for them!”
