“Did he say anything to you about going over the top?”
“Didn’t listen to ’im. Told ’im to go to hell, actually.” He smiled.
“Looks like he did, an’ all!” Whoopy said with a grin. “I’d have told him sooner, if I’d have known he’d go an’ do it!”
“Not in front of the chaplain!” Lanty shook his head, looking at Joseph apologetically.
Joseph thanked them and went on searching. No one was very eager to help, and he felt their irritation that he was spending his time trying to find out something which they saw as irrelevant.
“He’s dead,” Major Harvester said tersely, his strong, bony face showing his weariness. “So are many better men. Do what you have to, Captain Reavley. Say all the right things, you can even be sorry, if you feel it’s your duty, but after that, get back to our own men. That’s what you’re here for. Prentice was a damned nuisance. He got under everybody’s feet. Well, it looks like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often. I don’t suppose he’ll be the last war correspondent to be killed.”
“I would just like to know how he got so far forward,” Joseph persisted. “He wasn’t supposed to be up there.”
Harvester’s face hardened. “Are you saying someone was to blame, Captain?”
“No, sir,” Joseph denied quickly. He was not ready yet to tell Harvester the truth. “I don’t doubt Prentice himself was to blame. I’d like to be able to prove it, if anyone asks.”
Harvester relaxed. “You have a point. Sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion. But I’ve still no idea how he got past the second trench, let alone the fire trench.”
Nor could Joseph find any sentry for that night willing to say they had recognized Prentice among the figures going over the top. In the brief flares, one man with a rifle in his hands looked much like another. And it was perfectly obvious that none of them cared. They were not insubordinate enough to tell him to leave it alone and attend to the living, but their smoldering anger was clear enough.
But someone had killed Prentice deliberately. It had not been accident or misfortune of war, but murder, and the wrongness of that was one certainty in the chaos and loss that Joseph could do something about. The difficulty of it, the fact that no one else cared, even his personal contempt for Prentice, if anything, sharpened his resolve.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Major Hadrian asked once more if there was anything he could do, then, tight-lipped and unhappy, he closed the door and left Cullingford and Judith Reavley alone in the room. Since the arrival of the British Army the small chateau, really what in England would have been called the manor house, had been used as divisional headquarters. It was late April, five days since the gas attack, and the situation was increasingly serious. The men in the trenches knew only their own stretch of a thousand yards or so, a platoon, a brigade, but Judith had driven Cullingford around the entire area, and she had seen how few men there were, how short they were of ammunition and the difficulty of getting it up to the front lines, along with everything else. The roads were jammed with troops, horses, refugees, ambulances, even wagons and dogcarts with household goods, terrified women and children seeing a lifetime in ruins.
Cullingford stood in front of the window. The rain drifted in silver sheets across the land, spattering against the glass one minute, the sun making prisms of it the next. The pale light showed the fine lines in his face and the weariness around his eyes and mouth. He stood upright, a little stiffly, but then he always did. It was not only habit, it was part of his inner defense. He had come so close to breaking it: Once he had knelt and spoken to a gassed man, and stayed with him while he died, talking quietly, telling him it was bad, but they would win. He had had no idea whether it was true or not. The other time it had been an injured horse that had moved him beyond his power to hide. He had been in the cavalry in his youth. The loyalty of an animal touched him where he could not allow the emotion of a man to reach.
He knew she had seen his tiredness, the times when he was too vulnerable to hide the fear of failure, the pain of guilt for other men’s deaths, and the fact that he had no more knowledge than the rest of them about what to do to prevent more slaughter, even final defeat. But he had to pretend, their faith depended on it. That was the job of leadership, to endure being thought callous; to defend your mistakes, even when you know them to be mistakes.
They had never spoken of it. If they shattered the illusion of separateness with something as tangible as words, then it would have to be faced, and there was neither time nor strength for that.
“Miss Reavley,” he said quietly, without turning toward her. “You told me that your father was killed just before the outbreak of war, and you implied that there was a conspiracy behind it, of great depth and dishonor. You said it was political rather than financial, and that if it had succeeded it would have altered Europe, perhaps even the world. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. The loss . . .” He did not finish the sentence, it was too painful, too intrusive. “Were you exaggerating?” He asked only to dispel the last possible uncertainty.
She had told him only the barest outline, and then in such broken sentences she was surprised he had remembered so much. They had been stuck at Hellfire Corner, the engine had stalled and darkness was closing in. It had taken her a quarter of an hour in the rain, under sporadic fire, to change and re-gap the spark plugs and jury-rig the commutator to get them as far as Ploegsteert, where they could get proper parts to replace the old ones.
Afterward, when they sat drinking hot tea with rum in it, hands shaking, uniforms soaked and crusted with mud, she had realized just how close she had come to being killed. Heavy artillery fire had landed less than twenty feet away, sending earth and stones whining through the air, clanging against the car, and shrapnel landing within inches of them both.
He had said nothing, treating her as if she were a soldier like himself, and expected to remain calm. His absence of special treatment was the highest compliment he could have paid her. She knew it was not indifference; the warmth in his eyes made that thought ridiculous.
It was after that, when they could relax for half an hour, before she went to see to the car, and he to receive Hadrian’s report on the other sectors, that she had told him about the fatal car crash, the missing document. She had not told him what it had said—that was too dangerous to repeat—nor that Matthew was still looking for the brilliant and terrible mind that had conceived it.
He turned around to face her at last. There was humor in his eyes, but it was only on the surface. “You were very circumspect, but I believe that you know a great deal more than the few details you spoke of,” he said drily. But he was watching her, trying to gauge her pain and how far he must probe into it, and what harm that would do. “You said your father had been a member of Parliament. He would not lightly speak of England’s dishonor, or a conspiracy that would alter the world.”
“No.” She stood very still. How profoundly everything she knew had changed in that time, less than a year. Last spring she had been in St. Giles, aimless, discontented, fretting against the bounds of a society basking in a golden peace she did not yet know to treasure. She had taken for granted the comfort of physical safety, clean linen, the smell of furniture polish, fresh milk, domestic duties, the boredom of the known.
Now it was like a lost world, a dream in the mind shattered on waking, the loneliness of being grown-up, separate, driven by duty and reality, looking back with longing when a moment of peace allowed.
He deserved honesty. “It was real,” she said. “I imagine it still is. My brother Matthew is certain we inflicted only a temporary defeat. It is another war, different weapons from this, only a few people who know they’re fighting it, the rest of us to be moved around like herds of animals, but it’s a shadow of this one. Except I think that’s not true, it is the real one, and we are the reflection cast, the unreality, pulled by it, not pulling.”
“Eldon spoke of a new order.” He was looking at her intently now. “He seemed to imagine he would have a place in it. He had a passion in him, as if he were a disciple rather than an adventurer, and certainly not simply a tool of someone else’s cause. What political conspiracy could inspire that in him, Miss Reavley?”
“Peace,” she replied quietly.
He was startled. “Peace!”
“At the cost of surrendering France and Belgium in return for German military help to regain our lost colonies, like America.”
“God Almighty!” He was ashen. “Are you sure?”
