abruptly. The tenderness vanished from her eyes. “So isn’t that the time when you need a priest most of all?” she countered. “To make sense of the senseless? Or don’t Protestant priests do that?”
“I don’t know. It sounds a bit like a retreat,” he said with more candor than he had intended. “Recite some comfortable piece of scripture and think you’ve solved the problem.”
“You’ve no magic in your heart,” she accused him, but she was looking at him with searching eyes now, gentle and surprised, as if she had seen something that had awoken a new emotion in her.
“Does magic help?” he asked with raised eyebrows.
“I think when you’re face to face with the devil, you’ll find out. I’ve a horrible fear that maybe it doesn’t after all. What then, Matthew? English courage, naked, without any pretty clothes and nice music?”
“Doesn’t have to be English,” he replied. “Any sort would do.”
She sat silent for a while, staring at the dancers on the floor. They were holding each other closely and moving as if the music carried them like a tide. There was sadness and anger in her face as she watched them.
“They know it, don’t they?” she said after a while. “You can see it in their eyes, hear it in the pitch of their voices, a bit high and with an edge. They could be dead in the Flanders mud this time next week.” The passion welled up in her, a rage and sorrow that spilled over in tears on her cheek. “It didn’t have to happen, you know!” she said fiercely. “You didn’t have to fight the Germans. It could all have been avoided, but one misguided idealist, an Englishman with an arrogant, narrow patriotism and blind to any vision for the world, stumbled onto the papers that would have stopped it. And because he didn’t understand that, he stole them and destroyed them.”
She blinked, but it did not stop the tears. “I’ve no idea who he is, or what happened to him, but Mother of God, if he can see what he’s done, he must be in the madhouse with guilt and grief. All these men, so young, all gone, sacrificed on the altar of stupidity. Don’t you despair of us sometimes?”
He didn’t hear her anymore. The words ran through him like fire, scorching with a pain he could not have imagined. She was talking about John Reavley and the treaty he had found, and for which the Peacemaker had had him murdered. The document had been in the gun room in St. Giles where he and Joseph had replaced it after reading it.
Only one other man beyond the family knew of it, and he had paid with his life.
The document was a conspiracy to create an Anglo-German empire of peace, prosperity, and domination, the cost of which was the betrayal of France and Belgium, and ultimately most of the world. It would be a dishonor that would cast a black pall over everything that England had ever been, or believed in. And how could Detta know that, unless she were part of it?
Detta was talking to him and the words were a meaningless jumble of sounds.
That she was involved with the Peacemaker was something he had not even considered. Her Irish nationalism he could understand. In her place he would have felt the same. He might have fought for Germany, if the reward were his own country’s independence, even if half of them did not want it. But this had to mean that she was close enough to the Peacemaker to be trusted with at least the core of the plan, the dream of it. There would be no need to tell her the name or the fate of the man who had foiled it. His death was regarded by everyone else as an accident and no one in the family had challenged that. The Peacemaker himself never knew that they had found the treaty, or understood its nature. John Reavley had said simply that he had found a document that would dishonor England and change the world.
Detta was an idealist. It could be dangerous to tell her more of murder than she needed to know. The Peacemaker took no risks.
Until now Matthew had had little idea of his identity, hard as he had sought. It was not Ivor Chetwin, John Reavley’s one-time friend; Matthew and Joseph had proved his innocence in Gallipoli. Nor, surely, was it Aidan Thyer; but then that had been only a passing thought because of his power in Cambridge as master of St. John’s. Matthew’s greatest fear had been that it was Calder Shearing himself, right at the heart of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Shearing was brilliant, charming, and elusive, and Matthew knew almost nothing about him outside those walls.
He had never even considered Patrick Hannassey. He had thought of him only as the cleverest and most dedicated fighter for Catholic Ireland’s freedom from British rule. Now he had to face the possibility—in fact the probability—that he was wrong.
Detta’s father!
She was looking at him, her odd eyebrow raised in bitter irony. “You didn’t know about that paper, did you.” It was a statement. “You thought it was all inevitable.”
“Given the political tides,” he said very quietly, “the alliances between Austria, Germany, and Russia—and ours with France and Belgium—yes, I thought there was no way to avoid it.”
“You aren’t asking me if I’m sure about it,” she pointed out.
“Would you say it if you weren’t?”
She avoided his gaze. “No. Is there a point where madness becomes so common we think it’s sanity?”
“I don’t know.” She was not going to say any more. He would not play the game of trying to make her. “Would you like to dance?” he asked. He wanted to forget about talking for a while. He simply wanted to hold her in his arms, feel the ease and grace of her movement, smell the perfume of her hair, and above all pretend for a few minutes that they were on the same side.
“Dance?” she asked, her voice rising. “Perhaps you do understand magic after all! What’s the difference between looking for a supernatural answer, and simply running away, Matthew?”
“Timing,” he answered. “At the moment I’m just running away.”
“Yes,” she agreed, laughter touching her eyes again, but only with self-mockery. “Yes, I’ll dance. What better is there to do?”
The following morning Matthew arrived at his office in a mood of optimism. This was dashed the moment he encountered Hoskins standing in the corridor, his thin face twisted with anxiety.
For a moment Matthew thought of avoiding asking him what was wrong, and simply going on to his own door, but he quickly resigned himself to reality. All bad news had to be faced.
“Good morning, Hoskins. What is it?”
“Morning, Reavley. Just another ship gone,” Hoskins replied miserably. “U-boats got it. It was carrying food and munitions. All hands lost.” Hoskins stood motionless apart from the slight tic in his left eyelid. “That’s the fourth this month.”
“I know,” Matthew said quietly. He could think of nothing else to say. There was no comfort to offer, and nothing to salvage.
“Shearing wants to see you,” Hoskins added. “I’d go there first, if I were you.”
Matthew acknowledged the message, left his coat in his office, and glanced at his desk to see if there were any overnight messages of urgency. There was nothing that Shearing needed to know, just the usual reports from his men in the eastern United States. Progress was slow.
He crossed the corridor and, after a brief knock, went into Shearing’s office.
Shearing looked up from his desk. There were hollows around his eyes, accentuating how dark they were. “What’s your progress with the Hannassey woman?” he asked.
There was a sour irony to the situation. Shearing knew of John and Alys Reavley’s deaths and Matthew’s belief that there was a conspiracy behind it, but because of John Reavley’s warning, Matthew had not told even his own superior in the Intelligence Services.
“Well?” Shearing barked.
Matthew could not tell him that Detta had in one wild explosion of anger let slip her knowledge of the Peacemaker’s conspiracy. It pounded in his mind as if it could drive out all other thoughts, and he composed his expression with difficulty. One realization flooded out every other. Surely Hannassey had to be the Peacemaker? It was someone who trusted Detta with his life. It could not be Shearing.
He cleared his throat. He was still standing more or less to attention in front of the desk. “I told her about the smoke bombs in the ships’ holds, sir,” he replied. “And that we have almost traced the money. We just need to turn one of their agents and we’ll be able to close it down.”
“I see. And how do you propose to convince her that you have done that?” Shearing’s expression was skeptical, his lips tightly compressed.
