driver! An American, for heaven’s sake!”
“Yes, we have a few American volunteers,” Cullingford agreed. “They are here at their own expense, living in pretty rough conditions, they eat army rations and sleep when and where they can. They work like dogs. Some even get killed helping others. I think it is one of the highest forms of nobility I have seen. They give everything, and ask little in return.”
Prentice hesitated, uncertain for a moment how to answer. It had taken the impetus out of his fury. “I suppose you have no power to exert any kind of discipline over them,” he said finally.
“Never needed to,” Cullingford replied straightaway, a tiny smile on his lips.
“Well, you need to now!” Prentice said in sudden fury. “The man has an ungovernable temper. He went berserk. Lost any kind of control.”
“Who else did he attack?” Cullingford inquired.
The blood rushed up Prentice’s uninjured cheek. “No one, but there was hardly anyone else there! It was only the chaplain who prevented him from killing me, and he wasn’t in any hurry. Not much of a chaplain, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Cullingford snapped. “You’re not a child anymore, Eldon, to come running to your parents if someone picks a quarrel with you. Deal with your own problems. No one admires a sneak. I thought seven years at Wellington would have taught you that. And in Flanders I am not your uncle, I am the general in charge of this corps. I have one hundred and thirty thousand men, many dead or wounded, replacements to find, food and munitions to transport, and, please God, some way to hold the line against the enemy. I haven’t time to attend to your squabbles with an ambulance driver. Don’t come to me with it again.”
Prentice was livid, but he forced himself to relax his body, shifting his weight to stand more elegantly, as if he were perfectly at ease. “Actually what I came for, Uncle Owen, was to ask you to give me a letter of authority to go forward to the front lines, or anywhere else I need to, to get the best story. I know correspondents are a bit limited, and pretty well any officer can arrest them, even the damned chaplain, who probably doesn’t know a gun from a golf club. This one actually threatened me!”
“No,” Cullingford said without needing even to consider it. “You have exactly the same privileges and limitations as all other correspondents.” He was not going to be twisted by family loyalties into giving Prentice an advantage. Abigail should not expect it. The boy had lost his father a few years ago, but he was thirty-three, and indulgence would not help him.
“I imagine you know Captain Reavley,” Prentice said without making any move to go.
“You’re mistaken,” Cullingford replied. “I’ve met him a couple of times. Two divisions is over a hundred and thirty thousand men. I know very few of them personally, and those I do are the fighting officers and the senior staff officers concerned with transport and replacements.”
There was a slight smile on Prentice’s face, no more than a sheen of satisfaction. “I was thinking of a more personal basis,” he answered. “He must be related to your VAD driver, isn’t he? Reavley’s not such a common name, and I thought I detected a faint resemblance.”
Cullingford felt a sudden wave of heat wash over him. There was really very little likeness that he could see between Judith and Joseph Reavley. He was dark and she was fair, her face was so much softer than his, so feminine. Perhaps there was something similar in the directness of the eyes, an angle to the head, and a way of smiling, rather than the structure of bones.
Prentice was watching him. He must answer. He was conscious of guilt, and being desperately vulnerable. He was not used to having emotions he could not control, or defend.
“They are brother and sister,” he answered, keeping his voice level, not so casual as to seem forced. “If you think that means he is around here any more than his duties require, you have very little grasp of the army, or the nature of war.”
“She’s beautiful,” Prentice observed. “In a kind of way. Very much a woman. If she were my sister, driving a middle-aged man around, I’d be over here pretty often—out of concern for her.” He shifted his weight to his other foot, and smiled a fraction more. “In fact, since she’s a volunteer, and could do or not do whatever she wanted, I’d make sure she didn’t get into that sort of position.”
Cullingford felt the heat rise up his face, and was furious with himself for not being able to hide it. He knew it was burningly visible because Prentice recognized it immediately. The triumph was brilliant in his eyes.
“But then perhaps the good chaplain doesn’t know that you’re married,” he said quietly. “And I don’t suppose for a moment that he’d connect Aunt Nerys’s previous tragedy with you. After all, her name was Mallory then, and it was more her husband’s name and poor young Sarah Whitstable whose names were spread all over the newspapers. They can be very cruel: Middle-aged man runs off with sixteen-year-old daughter of Tory peer; double suicide leap off cliffs at Beachy Head, or wherever it was. Bodies dashed to pieces on the rocks below. Poor Aunt Nerys! If she knew you were being driven around by a beautiful, hotheaded twenty-three-year-old, she’d start the nightmares all over again. But I’m sure Captain Reavley doesn’t know that!”
Cullingford felt the room swim around him, as if it had been rocked by heavy artillery fire. It was a physical blurring, even though it was created by an emotional shock. It was real, Prentice was blackmailing him! There was no smile on his face, no wavering in his bold, clear blue eyes. He meant it!
There was also no defense. Cullingford had never said or done anything even remotely improper with Judith. He had never touched her, not even called her by her Christian name. It was all in his imagination, in the momentary meeting of eyes, things that had not needed words: a great sweep of sky across the west, gilded by the fading sun, cloud-racks of searing beauty that hurt and healed with the same touch; understanding of laughter and pain; the knowledge when to be silent.
His guilt was deeper than acts, it was a betrayal of the heart. And yet the loneliness had been slowly killing him. He had protected Nerys at a cost to himself greater than he had realized before. Perhaps it was his fault, too, for allowing her to live in a world cocooned from reality, but he had left it too late to change it now. Nerys was at home, in another life. Judith was here, she was the one who had seen the grotesque ruin of no-man’s-land, the mud, the ice-rimmed craters with the limbs of dead men poking up as if in some last, desperate hold on life. He did not need to reach after impossible explanations for her, or speak with words that were too raw still to bear it.
“I only want a letter,” Prentice was talking again, unable to wait. “Just something to stop them hedging me in. I’m doing my job! And of course I’ll share anything I get with the other correspondents.” He put his good hand in his pocket, in a possibly unconscious imitation of Cullingford’s stance when he was at ease, moments he might have remembered before the war. “Thanks. It’ll help a lot.”
Cullingford would like to have thrown him out, possibly even physically, but he could not afford to. There was steel inside Prentice. He wanted to succeed. If he were prevented in a way he imagined unfair, he would bring down anyone he felt to blame. He would not care who else it hurt, but that it included Cullingford would please him. Cullingford had never liked him. He had tried, and failed. Perhaps he had not tried very hard; he was not a man to whom relationships were easy. Only Judith had crashed through his self-protection guard. She had put no artificial limits to her own feelings, no bounds at all to what she was prepared to know or to see. And then when she was hurt by it, her very hold on endurance, the courage to hope and purpose threatened, it was his strength she needed.
“I’ll give you a letter of authority,” he conceded, hating himself for such surrender. “But you can still be arrested if you get in anyone’s way.”
“I daresay that’ll do,” Prentice replied with the sharp relish of victory in his voice, making it high and a little abrupt. “At least for now. Thank you . . . Uncle Owen.”
Cullingford did not look at him. It was only when the letter was written and Prentice had put it rather awkwardly in his pocket with his one hand, and then gone out, that Cullingford realized that his muscles were clenched with the effort of self-control and the anger inside him was making him hold his breath.
Hadrian was standing in the doorway waiting for instructions. His face was watchful, his eyes unhappy. How well did he really know Prentice? Well enough to have believed blackmail of him?
“If Mr. Prentice comes again,” Cullingford told him, “I don’t want to see him. In fact, so help me God, if I never see him again it will suit me very well!”
Hadrian stared at him, his face dark with emotion. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “I’ll see to it.”
Cullingford turned away, suddenly embarrassed. He had not meant to reveal so much. “Will you tell Miss Reavley to get the car ready. I need to go to Zillebeke in half an hour.”
“Yes, sir,” Hadrian said.
