lights, the laughter, the music, they pretended it did not matter.
He paid for her drink and another for himself, and they walked over to one of the few free tables.
“I went back to Cambridgeshire,” he explained. “My brother was wounded rather badly and they sent him home.”
Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry.” She said it instantly, without time to consider loyalties or causes. “How is he?”
The girl in the blue dress was singing again, a sad, angry little song with downward-falling notes.
“Better than many, I suppose,” Matthew answered. He could be reasonably dispassionate about other people—one had to be—but seeing Joseph gray-faced and obviously in appalling pain had shaken him more deeply than he had been prepared for. It brought back the memory of his parents’ broken bodies after the car crash. The police had called it an accident and nothing public had ever suggested otherwise.
To talk about numbers of losses was one thing; to see the blood and the pain in real people was quite different. He understood very well why soldiers ran away rather than take cold steel in their hands and plunge it into another human being. The fact that that other man was German was irrelevant. He was flesh and bone, capable of exactly the same emotions as themselves. Perhaps for some the nightmares would never entirely go. He did not want to be the kind of man for whom they would. He was intensely grateful that his job had never required him to meet his enemy face to face and exercise the violence of death. He did not delude himself that he was somehow absolved from the results of any victory he might win, and of course he was not; he was merely spared from the sight and the memory of it.
Detta was looking at him curiously. He caught in her eyes an unguarded moment of compassion.
“He’s a chaplain,” he said quickly, to explain that Joseph was not a soldier. Although since he was Protestant, not Catholic, perhaps in her eyes that would be even worse. He found himself smiling at the lunacy of it; it was that or rage, or tears. “A shell ripped his leg open and smashed his arm pretty badly, but the doctor says he’ll not lose it.”
She winced. “I suppose he’s in considerable pain,” she said gently.
“Yes.” He needed to go on; the next thing had to be said, but he hated it. “The casualties are heavy at the moment. He was out over no-man’s-land carrying back a pretty badly wounded soldier, someone from our own village—not that that makes any difference, I suppose. We’re desperately short of ammunition. We’re having to ration it, so many bullets per man. They’re being shot at, and they can’t shoot back. We’re buying stuff from America, but it’s being sabotaged at sea, and when it gets here it’s no bloody use!” There was more anger in his voice than he had meant there to be, and his hand on the table next to his glass was clenched tight. He must think clearly. He was here to do a job, not to indulge his fury.
“Sabotaged?” She affected surprise, her dark eyes wide. “The Americans would never do that, surely?”
“At sea,” he corrected her.
“At sea? How?” She did not disguise her interest.
That made it easier. Now they were playing the game again, threading the lies in with the truth, testing each other, tying the knots of emotion tighter and tighter.
“Smoke bombs,” he answered. “Pack them in the hold, along with the shells, and set them to go off when the ship’s at sea. It looks like fire. Then, of course, the captain has no choice but to flood the holds, and the shells are damaged. Not all of them, and there’s no way to tell which. From the outside they look perfectly all right. We’re so desperate for munitions, we can’t afford to turn them down.”
“How do you know they’re smoke bombs?” she asked. “Do you find them?”
“We know they’re being put there,” he answered. “We have men in several of the American East Coast ports.” He was not sure whether to go on. Was that enough? Might she realize what he was doing if he added any more?
“Then why don’t you stop it?” she said curiously, her faintly uneven brows giving her a quizzical look. “You can’t be squeamish! Or are you afraid of upsetting the Americans?”
He gave her a sidelong, incredulous look. “Of course we aren’t squeamish! What about? Taking out one or two saboteurs? Showing them up to the Americans? We can do it without causing a diplomatic incident. It’s just too soon to act. We know who they are. If we take them out now, they’ll only be replaced by others that we don’t know. Far better to wait, and trace the whole organization, then we can get rid of all of them.”
“How can you do that?” She turned her hands up and smiled broadly. “Sorry! Shouldn’t have asked. I’m Irish —you’d hardly tell me.” There was laughter in her eyes. And then she did laugh. He had realized weeks ago that the hunt, the battle, was part of her life. The legends of Celtic conquest and mysticism, the heroes of the past with their love and their loss woven together inextricably, were part of her identity. If she won this struggle, she would have to find a new one. She needed to seek the unattainable, to voyage beyond the known. Her crusades fed her dreams, and starved her heart.
If she were more realistic, if the fire in her burned under control, he might like her just as much, but the magic that enchanted him would be gone, and the vulnerability that made her so very human.
“If it were a secret I wouldn’t tell you, even if you were English,” he replied, smiling at her as she winced at the insult. “But it’s only the obvious,” he went on. “Just what you would do yourself: Follow the flow of money. If we get agents into the banking system at all the right points, we can prove to the Americans exactly what is happening. And the other thing, of course, is to put pressure at the right places, at exactly the right time, and turn one of their agents. Or should I say one of yours?”
She shook her head. “Not ours! I’m strictly for freedom of my own land from British oppression, that’s all.”
He did not challenge her. He might get into an argument in which he would say too much and give away more of his purpose than he could afford, or too little, and make his reason for being with her obvious. Nor did he want to quarrel with her. He smiled. “All right, not yours,” he conceded. “German.”
The girl in blue was singing again, this time “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” with its injunction to “smile, smile, smile.”
Detta looked at her glass, twisting it slowly in her fingers. “Do you think you can turn people’s loyalties?” she asked with a lift of doubt. “How would you know if you had, and they weren’t just feeding you the information their masters wanted you to have? Even taking back bits and pieces about you?” She lifted her eyes quickly to meet his, bright and dark, full of a hidden laughter that was always on the edge of sadness.
He smiled back, a wall of humor against reality. “I don’t.”
She gave an elegant shrug. Her shoulders were beautiful. He had no idea whether she was conscious of it or not.
“There are ways,” he added, aware that he had not said enough. “You measure one against another, advance information against what actually happens. But it’s pretty hard to turn people. You must have powerful information to do it, and unless they’re stupid, they know the risks. Their own people will kill them if they’re caught.”
She looked away across the room. “Part of the price. I can’t imagine betraying your own like that. I’d rather die.”
He said nothing. The Irish did not kill their traitors easily; more often they made examples of them by breaking their knees. Many a man never walked again. But this was not the time to tell her how much he knew about that.
“Probably spies for money rather than passion,” he said instead.
She did not answer. She was staring somewhere into the hollowness and hurts of her own mind.
“It’s nasty to turn someone,” he went on quietly. “But then if you see what’s happening in the trenches, that’s also pretty nasty. We need ammunition we can rely on.” He thought of Joseph, and allowed the pain to show in his face. He knew she was watching him.
“I can’t imagine you related to a priest,” she said softly. “Actually I’m not sure I can imagine an English priest at all. You haven’t the fire or the mysticism for it.”
“Is that what it takes?” He let the slight banter back into his voice.
“Isn’t it?” she countered.
“There’s not much room for mysticism when men are cold and frightened, squatting in the mud with the rats, or dying in crushing pain—armless, legless, their guts torn out. You need the reality of human pity and human love. It’s about all there is left.”
She reached up and for a moment it was as if she were going to touch his face, then she changed her mind
