He stared at her solemnly, trying to work out whether she was treating him like a child or a man.
She gave him time, without pushing either way.
“Yes,” he nodded, accepting. “But I will join the Royal Navy when I can.”
“Good,” she said lying in her teeth, and still avoiding Hannah’s gaze. “As an officer, I hope?”
He grinned suddenly. “You mean concentrate on my schoolwork and do all the exams and everything,” he said knowingly.
“Something like that,” she agreed.
After the children had gone to bed, Judith and Hannah walked up the garden in the dusk. Appleton had gone to work on the land. Food was more important than flowers. Mrs. Appleton had gone with him, over in Cherry Hinton direction. Not far away, but too far to come back here to cook or clean. The weeds were high in the spring warmth and the long daylight hours.
“I can’t keep it up,” Hannah said, looking at it miserably. “Even the raspberries are overgrown. The children help a bit, but it isn’t enough. There’s always so much to do. There are fifteen families in the village now who’ve lost someone, either on the Western Front, or at sea. We heard about Billy Abbot just yesterday. His ship went down in the North Atlantic, with all hands.”
Judith said nothing. She knew Hannah was thinking about Archie, but neither of them wanted to say so. There were some things it was better not to put into words, the silence helped to keep at least the surface of control. There was work that had to be done, children who needed to feel at least some faith in survival. As long as you did not give in to terror, neither would they. You had to be busy, to smile, if you must cry, then cry alone. Perhaps the women with children were lucky. They gave you a reason to force yourself to be your best, always. The act became a habit.
It was Hannah who broached the subject of the Peacemaker.
“Matthew won’t tell me anything about his search for the man who killed Mother and Father,” she said as they stood at the end of the lawn and looked west toward the last echoes of light in the sky. “Has he given up?”
“No.” Now a lie seemed like a betrayal, and she was not in a mind to be able to deal in the loneliness of deceit. “He’s trying to find out who Sebastian Allard spoke to the evening before.”
“Why? Oh . . . you mean the Peacemaker . . . what a ridiculous name for him! The murderer must have told him what to do?”
“Probably not himself,” Judith replied. “He wouldn’t risk that. He has to be someone well known, very highly placed, and someone Father knew already, and trusted. He will have sent someone else to persuade Sebastian what to do. It couldn’t have been easy. You don’t just walk up to someone and say ‘By the way, I’d like you to murder one of my friends tomorrow. It has to be tomorrow because the whole thing has become rather urgent. Will you do that for me?’ You’d have to give him all sorts of reasons, and persuade him. Sebastian was a passionate pacifist. It will have taken some time to argue him into believing it was the only way to preserve peace in Europe.”
Hannah was silent for several minutes. The last shreds of light from the west, no more than a luminescence in the air, caught her cheekbones and brow and the curve of her mouth, softening the anxiety and making her look as young as she had a year ago.
“I talk to Nan Fardell quite a bit. Her husband’s in the navy, too. She lives in Haslingfield.” She hesitated a moment. “Nan said she saw Sebastian in Madingley the afternoon before . . . he was with a girl. They seemed to be very close, talking earnestly, having an argument, which they made up before they parted.” Hannah frowned. “She mentioned it because she knew he was engaged and she thought it was a bit shabby. She assumed he was trying to break it off with this girl, and she wouldn’t let him, so he gave in, and apparently they parted in agreement. Nan said she was rather beautiful, nearly as tall as he was. I expect the Peacemaker’s a man, but does the person who gave Sebastian his instructions have to be a man as well?” She turned to Judith. “He doesn’t, does he? Lots of idealists who really get things done are women. They were in the past, and they are now. What about Beatrice Webb, or even more, Rosa Luxemburg? Nan said this woman was very unusual, she had remarkable eyes, pale blue and very bright.”
Judith’s mind whirled. It could be! It was a cold thought, and she had not the faintest idea who the woman was, or how to find her, and trace her back to the Peacemaker. But it was a beginning, or it might be. “I suppose Nan Fardell doesn’t know who she is?”
“No idea at all. I asked her, just out of curiosity. She’s never seen her before. Do you think it could have been she who gave Sebastian the order to . . .” She did not finish the sentence.
Judith shivered. “Yes, it could. It’s possible. Matthew thinks the Peacemaker could be Ivor Chetwin, which is a horrible thought.”
“It has to be someone we know,” Hannah said quietly. “It’s all horrible. Let’s go inside. It’s getting cold.”
They turned and walked together slowly, not needing or wanting to discuss it anymore, but in Judith’s mind was a photograph of an unusually tall girl with light, clear eyes, and she was standing next to Eldon Prentice.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Days and nights continued their routine of alternating violence and boredom. Joseph helped with digging and shoring up in the trenches, carrying food, helping the wounded or dying, writing letters for people, often just listening when men needed to talk. They swapped stories, the longer and more fantastic the better. They made bad jokes and sang music hall songs with bawdy army lyrics to them, and laughed too loudly, too close to tears.
Little Belgian boys came by selling English newspapers, and they read voraciously to see what was happening at home. Joseph conducted the mandatory church parades, and tried to think of something to say that made sense.
But all the time at the back of his mind was the question of why Eldon Prentice had been in no-man’s-land, and who had thrust his head under the water and held it there until he was dead. The thought was horrible, filling him with a revulsion quite different from the gut-turning pity of other deaths. There was a moral dimension to it he could grasp, a personal evil rather than the vast, mindless insanity around them all.
Nobody wanted to talk about it. To everyone else it was the one death that did not matter. Prentice had had a letter from General Cullingford giving him permission to come and go pretty well as he pleased, and he had used it freely. There was an impulsive feeling that he had got what he deserved. Grief was saved for other men, like Chicken Hagger, and now Bibby Nunn, caught by sniper fire.
Mail delivery was one of the best times of the day. Letters from home were the lifeline to the world that mattered, to love and sanity, the precious heart of what was worth dying for. For each man it was a little different, a different face, a different house that was familiar, but they shared them with the half dozen or so men who were their “family” here.
As chaplain, Joseph was uniquely alone. He was an officer, and apart. He belonged to everyone and no one. The nearest he had to a family was Sam. With Sam he could share Matthew’s letters, even if they referred to the Peacemaker.
One witheringly cold night in January, he and Sam had crouched together on the fire-step in the trench known as Shaftesbury Avenue, the wind whining in the wires across no-man’s-land, ice cracking on the mud, duckboards slick with it underfoot. Joseph had told Sam about his parents’ deaths, and a brief outline of the Peacemaker’s conspiracy, enough for Sam to understand at least the anger and the passion that drove him to seek the men who would still bring such betrayal to pass, if he could.
He could see Sam’s face in his memory, sharply outlined for a moment in the glare of star shells.
The smile on his lips, the heaven and hell of irony in him. He had said nothing, simply put out his freezing hand and touched Joseph for a moment.
Now Joseph sat alone with the sheets of paper, the sun warming him in the stillness of the afternoon. Tucky Nunn and Barshey Gee were asleep a few yards away, faces at ease, their youth achingly apparent. Tucky half smiled, perhaps home again in dreams.
Further along Reg Varcoe sat bare-chested, holding a match to the seams of his tunic. In the distance
