we do, then we are beaten.” His words were lethal, catastrophic, but the energy in his face belied any sense of despair. He was accepting a challenge, and the fire of it already burned in him. “We need a budget,” he went on. “I know everything does, but this is priority. I will come up with some specifications, things we have to have, who I recommend to work on the project. I need some figures from the Admiralty, but that shouldn’t be difficult . . .”
Matthew took the papers out of his inside pocket and passed them across. “That may be most of what you want. But there are two conditions.”
Corcoran was startled. “You said the work must be positioned out so no one knows the whole. What is the other?”
“You report to Calder Shearing and him only. It’s top secret—no one else, not even Churchill, or Hall. Do you accept that?”
Corcoran looked at him quickly, a flash of appreciation in his eyes, then he bent to examine the pages. It was several minutes before he finished them. “Yes,” he said decisively. “I have ideas already. Perhaps we can accomplish something to make history, Matthew.”
His belief was contagious, uplifting. It was not a blind optimism but a faith rooted in possibility and endeavor. Looking at his face, the burning intelligence and the self-knowledge, Matthew found his own hope soaring. “I’ll see you get the budget,” he promised.
He was prevented from pursuing it any further, although there was little more to say, because Orla Corcoran came into the room and Matthew stood to greet her. She was slender, very elegant, her hair still dark. Conversation turned to other things. Orla was keen to hear of news from London; she had not been for nearly three months.
“There seems to be so much to do here,” she said ruefully when they were seated at the dinner table. “Of course the most important thing in the area is the Establishment, but we have factories as well, and hospitals, and various organizations to look after people. We all try to pretend, but nobody’s life is as it used to be. Everyone’s got somebody they care about either on the Western Front, or at Gallipoli. We’re all terrified to listen to the news, and when the mail comes in I see the village women’s faces, and I know what they’re dreading.”
“I know,” he said with a strange guilt for his own part in spoiling the plans of the men who would have made peace, with dishonor, and prevented all this. He did not doubt that he was right, only he had not imagined at the time that the cost of it would feel like this, the individual loss over and over again, in a million homes throughout the land.
But then if the Peacemaker’s plan had succeeded, what would have happened to France? A German province, occupied by the kaiser’s army, betrayed by Britain whom it had trusted. And that would be only the beginning. The rest of the world would fall after, like so many bloodied dominoes, treason, collaboration, betrayals multiplied a thousand times, secret trials, executions, more graves.
No—this price was terrible, but it was not the worst.
The conversation went on about familiar things. As the evening deepened they spoke less of the present and more of happy things of the past, times remembered before the war.
Matthew left a little after eleven, and by midnight he was home at St. Giles, to sleep well for the first time in weeks with the silence of the country around him, the wind in the elms, and the starlight beyond.
In the house in Marchmont Street the Peacemaker was also speaking of Cambridgeshire, in fact specifically of the scientific Establishment there. The man opposite him was young, his face sharp, full of passion and intelligence.
“Of course I can get in,” he said earnestly. “My qualifications are excellent.”
“Don’t be too eager,” the Peacemaker warned. He was standing by the mantelpiece, looking at the younger man where he sat in the armchair, elbows on his knees, staring up. There was great confidence in him, extraordinary for one so untried in the professional world. He had a first-class honors degree in mathematics and engineering. He knew precisely what he wanted to achieve, and he had no doubt he would succeed. It was faintly unnerving to see someone with such blindness to the vagaries of fate.
“Every good inventor is eager,” the young man responded. “If you don’t believe in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?”
The Peacemaker was irritated with the man for his arrogance, and with himself for allowing a form of words to be twisted against him.
“A man who knows his own worth is not eager to be accepted at less,” he said coolly. “Insist upon a reward that meets your wishes, whether it’s in money, honors, opportunities, or colleagues with whom you work. They must believe in you. Your opportunity may not come quickly.”
The other man’s face became suddenly very serious. “I know what I’m there for,” he answered. “I won’t forget it. World peace, an empire in which the creators and inventors, the artists, writers, musicians are not harnessed to the wheels of war and its insane destruction, but to the betterment of mankind!” The timbre of his voice was urgent. “In peace, order, and universal rule of law, we can build houses fit to live in, airplanes that can fly across continents and oceans without having to stop and refuel. We can conquer disease, perhaps even hunger and want. We will have the leisure to think, to develop great philosophy, write drama and poetry. . . .”
The Peacemaker felt the warmth of his enthusiasm and it refreshed the weariness in him.
The young man’s face hardened into a cold fury. “We can’t send our greatest visionaries and poets to be slaughtered like animals in a senseless waste, killing young Germans who could also give fire and skill, art and science to the world—if they weren’t lying facedown, bodies shattered, in the mud of some godforsaken shell hole.” He rose to his feet, fists clenched. “I know what I’m here for, and I’ll wait as long as it takes. You think you’re using me to further your plans? You aren’t! I’m using you, because I know what I do is right.”
The Peacemaker smiled very faintly. “Shall we agree that we use each other? I shall exercise my influence to see that you are taken very seriously in the Establishment. Report to me seldom, and with the utmost discretion. Shanley Corcoran is a brilliant man. Earn his respect and his trust, and you will succeed—when the time comes.”
The younger man smiled back, his eyes bright, his shoulders straight. “I will,” he promised.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The ambulance jolted over the rough road and Judith woke up and straightened in her seat. She had begged a lift from a lorry carrying supplies about thirty miles back in France, where the train had stopped. Now the familiar stench was in the air and she knew she was almost up to the lines. She looked out of the window and saw the flat country stretching out on every side, pale green poplars along the roads, here and there two or three dead and bare.
“Thought that’d wake yer,” the driver said cheerfully. He was a man in his late thirties with a toothbrush mustache and a finger missing on his left hand. “Nose tell yer yer ’ome, eh?”
She smiled, pulling the corners of her mouth down. “Afraid so. It isn’t exactly that you forget what it’s like, but it has a renewed power when you’ve been away for a night or two,” she agreed ruefully.
“Was Blighty good, then?” There was a suppressed emotion in his voice, things he dared not allow too close to the surface of his mind.
She hesitated only a moment. If there was no home to return to, no ideal to fight for, what was the meaning of all this? “Wonderful,” she answered firmly. “Same old traffic jams in Piccadilly, same scandals in the newspapers, same things to talk about: weather, taxes, cricket. I even got home for a couple of nights. The villages are just the same, too: farmers complaining about the rain, as usual, too much or too little; women quarreling over who’s to arrange the flowers in church, but they always get done, and they’re always gorgeous; someone’s riding their bicycle too fast down the street; someone’s dog barks. Yes, Blighty’s just as it was, and I wouldn’t change it, even at this price.” Now she was intensely grave. “At least I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.”
“Me neither,” he answered, looking straight ahead at the road running like a ruler between the ditches. A windmill in the distance was the only break in the tablelike flatness of it. “Where yer want ter stop off then, love?” he asked.
“Poperinge,” she answered without hesitation. “Or as near as you can get.” She was going to find Cullingford, give him Mrs. Prentice’s letter, and then take up her job as his driver again. She realized how eagerly she said it. She was sitting forward, already half prepared to get out, and they were still at least three miles away. She knew
