sure.”
“With Corcoran working on it personally?”
Iliffe looked unhappy.
Joseph waited. There was a keen edge of intelligence in Iliffe’s face. He understood the reasoning, and guessed the personal gain and loss.
“If Morven works on it, perhaps,” he answered. “Corcoran alone, no.” He offered no apology and no prevarication.
“What can you tell me about Morven?” Joseph asked.
“Intellectually? He’s outstanding. Almost in Blaine’s category.”
“And in other ways?”
Iliffe looked at Lizzie, but she allowed him to answer without adding anything herself.
“Grew up in working-class Lancashire,” Iliffe said. “Grammar school, Manchester University. Opened up a new world to him. Don’t know if you can understand that, Mr. Reavley. Sorry, I don’t know your rank. . . .”
“Captain, but it’s irrelevant. Yes, I can understand it. I lectured in Biblical languages in Cambridge before the war. I had many students with a similar background, some were even brilliant, in their own field.” He ignored the pain inside him as he said that.
Iliffe saw it. “Gone to the trenches?” he asked.
“Many of them, yes. It’s not exactly a war-exempt skill.”
“Then you know the impact of ideas on a boy from a narrow, working-class town suddenly in a ferment of social, political, and philosophical ideas, realizing he’s got a dazzling mind and the whole world is out there, and his for the conquering. Morven’s an idealist. At least he was a year ago. I think some of the dreams have been tempered a bit by reality since then. One grows up. Are you thinking he’s a German sympathizer?”
“Are you?” Joseph countered.
Lizzie looked from one to the other of them, but she did not interrupt.
“No, frankly,” Iliffe replied. “But a socialist, possibly. Even an internationalist of sorts. I can’t see him killing Blaine.” He glanced at Lizzie. “Sorry,” he apologized gently. He turned back to Joseph. “But then I can’t see anyone doing that, and obviously someone did. Does your pastoral experience teach you how to recognize violence like that behind the everyday faces, Reverend?”
“No,” Joseph said simply. “We all have the darkness. Some act on it; most of us don’t. I can’t tell who will, or who already has.”
“Pity,” Iliffe said drily. “I was hoping you had all the answers. I’m damn sure I don’t.”
Outside on the way home again Lizzie said very little. Joseph apologized once more for having asked her to drive him on such a journey.
“Don’t.” She shook her head. “In an obscure sort of way it makes me feel better to think I’m doing something. It isn’t right to carry on with my life as if Theo were going to come back one day. I was his wife. I loved him. . . . I ought to be trying to find out who killed him, and prevent them from killing his work as well.”
He looked at her face, concentrated on the dark road and the bright path of the headlights. He could see only her profile, lips smiling, and tears on her cheek.
He did not say anything and they drove home in an oddly companionable silence.
The next day was Sunday. Archie had come home late the previous evening for a short leave, but he made the effort to get up and they all went to church together, dressed in their best clothes. Archie and Joseph both wore uniforms and Hannah walked between them, her head high with pride. They spoke to everyone they knew, assuring them they were well, asking in return but never mentioning other members of families. One could not be certain from day to day who was critically injured, posted missing in action, or even newly dead. There was kindness in it, sensitivity to pain and fear, and the knowledge that the blow could come at any moment. There was so much that could not be said, or the dam would break.
Joseph saw Ben Morven in a pew to their left, and caught his eyes on Hannah, watching her with a bright gentleness that betrayed more than he could have known. Once he saw Hannah look back at him, and then away again quickly, blushing.
The submerged tension in the air was crackling. Everyone practiced Sunday-best behavior, but the anger and suspicion were there, conspicuous in the tight lips, the whispers, and the silences.
Joseph wondered if Ben could possibly have killed Theo Blaine. Perhaps in a fistfight? He was young and strong and passionate in his loves and his dreams. But not in the dark, ripping his throat out with a garden fork! Could he?
That was absurdly naIve. Idealism had crucified men, burned them at the stake, broken them on the wheel. Of course he could. It was hypocrisy that made the hand fail, cowardice, apathy, all the half-hearted emotions. Ben Morven was not half-hearted, right or wrong.
Kerr’s sermon was unusually effective, and Joseph caught his anxious glance two or three times. However much he would prefer to avoid it, he must speak to the minister. He waited behind after everyone else had left.
Kerr was standing at the church door, moving uncomfortably from one foot to the other. His hair was slicked back with its exact center parting, a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead in the warmth of the sun.
“The suspicion is tearing us apart,” he said before Joseph had time to speak. “All sorts of stupid whispers are going around the village. Old feuds we all thought were settled years ago are being opened up again. Anybody gets a letter from a stranger, an overseas stamp on it, and the stories begin. That wretched inspector talks to everyone and either someone says he suspects that person, or they’re telling stories about someone else, trying to plant suspicion.”
“It’s bad,” Joseph agreed somberly. “I came just to commend you on your sermon, but . . .”
Pleasure lit Kerr’s face, and Joseph suddenly realized, with surprise and a degree of guilt, that Kerr admired him intensely. He cared what Joseph thought. His impatience or indifference would wound with real pain, perhaps lasting.
“But perhaps we should think a little about this,” he added. “It’s a very serious problem.”
Now Kerr was surprised. He had not expected help, and that too made Joseph aware of a streak of unkindness in himself. He had had the time, simply not the inclination. If he were going to stay here, then he should face the villagers’ needs, not simply use them as an excuse not to go back to the trenches.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Kerr was saying. “I can’t decide whether it would be better to speak about it generally, without making anyone feel singled out, or to go to each one I know is guilty, and tackle it unequivocally.” He was talking too quickly. “Sometimes an oblique approach is better. It allows people to deny it and at the same time do something about it.” He looked at Joseph hopefully.
They smiled at the Teversham family as they huddled together along the path.
“It’s a good point,” Joseph conceded. “You touched on it today. I didn’t realize at the time quite how bad it had become.”
Kerr nodded. He began to look less tense and he stood still at last as if he were easy in front of his own church. “Of course the difficulty is that if you speak of something in a sermon, so often the people you mean it for are quite sure it is directed at everyone but them,” he said.
Joseph put his hands in his pockets. It was a curiously valuable sense of freedom to be rid of the sling at last, even though he tended to carry his arm bent a little. “Then you will have to speak to people as you become aware of their behavior,” he said decisively.
Kerr gulped.
Joseph smiled at him, but it was an expression of sympathy, devoid of judgment. “Rotten,” he agreed. “But there are ways of doing it. Have you considered asking their help?”
“Help?” Kerr said incredulously, sure he had misheard. “From the ones creating the most damage?”
“Exactly. Tell them how much pain and fear it’s causing, but attribute it to someone else. Think how they can then agree with you and save their pride, and at the same time crush what’s happening.”
“I see! Yes. Yes, I think . . .” He gulped again. “That might work.” He smiled. “Rather well.”
“It’s somewhere to start,” Joseph said encouragingly. “And you are quite right, it must be addressed, and there isn’t really anyone else who has the moral authority.”
Kerr squared his shoulders. “Thank you, Captain Reavley. You really are a very great help. There is something
