We Shall Not Sleep (26 page)

"I know," she said quickly, but she looked at him for only an instant, then away again. "I didn't ask you, Joseph. No one wants to talk about it, but you keep on asking. I'm ... I'm so sorry for Sarah Price I don't think I could ever find words for how much I... feel for her. But I can't undo any of it. Nor have I any idea at all who did it." She was stacking bottles and dishes, and her fingers were clumsy. A dish slipped out of her hands. He lunged forward to catch it, but he was no more skilled than she, and actually knocked it farther away until it crashed on the floor and broke in half.

He felt ridiculous. "I'm sorry," he apologized.

She gasped, then blinked several times rapidly, tears in her eyes. Then she started to laugh. It was a sharp sound growing higher and more desperate until she couldn't stop.

He kicked the broken dish out of the way with his foot so no one would tread on it, then put both arms around her and held her as her laughter turned to weeping. Her whole body shook, her slender shoulders relaxing against him for several minutes. The softness of her hair touched his cheek. He would never forget the feel of her: the stiff cotton of her gray uniform dress, the smell of antiseptic and blood and soap.

Then she pulled away and sniffed, turning aside with sudden strength so as to keep her face from him. "I'm sorry. This is completely feeble. I won't do it again."

"We all need—" he began, not knowing how he was going to finish.

"Don't make excuses for me, Joseph!" she said huskily, reaching for a handkerchief and blowing her nose fiercely. "Pity doesn't help anyone. It's self-indulgent and a complete waste of the time in which we could be doing something useful. These men need nursing, not weeping over. There'll be plenty of time later... if there's any point then. I've taken twice as long cleaning this up as I should have anyway." She yanked her apron straight and turned away to continue working.

He had no idea why the distance was widening between them, as if the friendship that was so immeasurably precious had been tarnished by some act he could not remember committing. And it mattered. It was more a part of him than all the turmoil of these last days of war playing themselves out around them: the violence and fear, comradeship, hope of peace and dread of the unknown. They all spoke of going home, and yet all but the most naive knew that the homes they had left no longer existed as they had known them.

Lizzie had been a friend: candid and funny and gentle, and yet always keeping her own honesty a clean and separate thing, brave enough to stand apart from him and generous enough to remain beside him, sharing the darkness as well as the light.

He knew now, watching her straight back as she walked out of the tent flap, that he had loved Eleanor because he had wanted to, promised to. But he had never liked her as he did Lizzie, and the best lovers were surely friends as well? He loved the women who stayed at home and preserved all that they treasured, whose sacrifice was in ways as great, but he could never explain to them what the front line had been like. No one could.

He must not let Lizzie go. He strode out of the tent into the darkness and saw her figure ahead of him, pale for a moment as she passed by the light of an open flap, and then dark again in the shadow.

He ran to catch up with her. If she were angry or confused that he was so determined to clear Schenckendorff, he must explain to her why he had no choice.

"Lizzie!" he called, breaking into a run.

She slowed but did not stop.

He caught up with her. Without thinking he took her arm, then felt her stiffen. Even that slight pulling away hurt him. It created a distance he did not want. "Lizzie, it's far more than simply for justice that we have to prove Schenckendorff s innocence." He kept his voice low so that in the darkness it would not carry even to the closest tents, or anyone standing just outside in the shadows where he could not see. He had to tell her, explain the importance, the urgency.

"It doesn't—" she started.

"Yes, it does," he cut in. "To me. My parents were murdered just before the war."

"I know." Her voice was gentle. "In a car crash. That is, I didn't know it was murder. But—"

"It was. My father had discovered a plot to stop the war with an Anglo-German alliance to betray France, then form a new empire to divide up most of the world." There was no need, and no time, for details. He felt her stiffen with surprise. "It was led by a man whose identity we spent all the war trying to discover, because he never gave up plotting to make the plan still work, if he could only end the war, even if it was by Britain losing. He tried all sorts of ways. We know at least some of them—destroying morale, sabotage of our scientific inventions, which was why he had Theo killed—other ways of corruption and mutiny as well." Joseph stopped when he heard Lizzie gasp, then plunged on as he knew he must. "Many people were murdered, including General Cullingford, because he worked out this man's identity—we named him 'the Peacemaker.' Now he is trying to affect the terms of the armistice, and if
we don't stop him, he could succeed. He has immense power."

She was turned toward him, and there was no doubt in her voice. "How can you? You said you don't even know who he is!"

"Schenckendorff does," he answered simply. "He has been his ally since the beginning, but now he realizes that the Peacemaker will try to enforce terms that will enable the whole thing to start again. Germany will rise from defeat in a short time, and a new Anglo-German Empire will become possible. He will never give up trying. Schenckendorff has seen the horror of this, and he will come to London with us—even if he is hanged for his part—rather than see his country dragged into such destruction again."

Her voice was thick with emotion, so intense she could barely force the words. "You have to get him there, Joseph, whatever it costs, absolutely anything, you must stop this ... Peacemaker... from letting this happen again!"

"I know." Without thinking he put up his hand and touched the stray wisps of dark hair that crossed her brow. "We'll do everything we can. But Jacobson is convinced that Schenckendorff killed Sarah Price, and we haven't yet worked out any way to make him doubt it enough to let us take Schenckendorff out of here. Tomorrow, or the next day, Jacobson will charge him and send him back for trial. There's nothing you can do. I just needed you to know why it matters so much."

"I understand," she whispered. Then she pulled away from him and walked quickly to the nearest tent flap. She went in without looking back.

Judith was alone in one of the Treatment tents, watching the man whose leg had been amputated. She felt helpless, inadequate to ease his pain or offer any comfort that was real. How on earth did Joseph manage to do this day after day and not make things even worse by talking rubbish, promising hope that did not exist, saying it would get better when they all knew that nothing would heal the loss? Driving an ambulance was so much simpler. She had nothing to contend with but an inanimate machine, shortages of parts and fuel, filthy weather, cratered roads, the constant danger of being shot or blown apart. And of course, the knowledge that she might not get the injured men to help before it was too late.

Still, that was uncomplicated compared with trying to find faith and keep your own inner strength clean of lies to cover your despair, or the confusion that threatened to drown every shard of light. How did he manage to cling to any idea of a God who loved, whose plan made sense, and who had even the faintest idea what it was like to be human?

She heard the tent flap pull open with a surge of relief simply that there would be someone else there, a voice other than her own.

It was Lizzie. Her face was white, her dark hair pulled loose from half its pins and curling untidily. She closed the flap behind her and came over to Judith, glancing at the man in the bed moving restlessly in his pain.

"Can you help him?" Judith asked.

"No," Lizzie answered quickly. "He just has to get through it alone. I expect Joseph will come and sit with him again, if he has time. There are so many..." She bit the inside of her lip, avoiding Judith s eyes. "And he has to get Schenckendorff back to London."

Judith was startled, and then the moment after knew that she should not have been. Of course Joseph would trust Lizzie. He had no idea of the burden that it laid on her.

Lizzie rushed on, not allowing herself time to hesitate. "We don't seem to be having any success finding out who killed Sarah. I'm going to go to Jacobson in the morning and tell him the truth, all of it that I know." Her voice wavered and she swallowed. "But I have to tell Joseph myself first. He should hear it from me, not from someone else, gossip and half a story. I—"

"Not yet," Judith interrupted. "At least wait until tomorrow. We might still..."

Lizzie looked at her levelly, blue eyes bright with the grief burning inside her. "So you can find something in a day? We've been trying everything we know since it happened. I'll go as soon as I can find Joseph alone again. I'm only telling you because you'll have to help him... I think. He ..." She could not bring herself to say it.

"He loves you, and he'll feel like hell," Judith finished for her. 'Wait. Just another day. Please!"

Lizzie hesitated, hope fighting against reason.

"A day," Judith insisted. "There are no plans to send Schenckendorff out yet. Jacobson's still trying to find a witness who can tell a straight story. There have been so many lies; he has to find a clear thread. Please ... then we'll tell Joseph, I promise. But don't, please don't until you have to."

"A day," Lizzie said wearily. "Then I must. I know what it means. What will anything that's left be worth if I don't?"

Judith admired her passionately. It was like looking at a man about to go over the top into the gunfire, and she was keeping him balanced on the parapet. But she could not let go of hope, not for a few hours more.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ever since Matthew had told Mason about the Peacemaker from his family's point of view, from the murder of John and Alys Reavley right up through the struggle to get Schenckendorff back to London, Mason had been tormented by the weight of his lie to Judith, albeit by silence. He had hidden his own part in it because he had seen confession now as a self-indulgence for which there was no time or emotional energy. They needed his practical help, not his admission to a complicity that would render him useless in their estimation.

Now he was standing on the fire step behind one of the old parapets, staring across no-man's-land as the morning light picked out the ruts and pools in the gleaming mud, the paths between the old craters a tangled web between the wreckage. There was a faint mist over it, shining silver as the sun struck it. It hid most of the smaller mounds— bodies of men and horses churned up by the shifting pattern of shell holes and seeping water. At this hour it was possible to imagine that sometime far in the future, it could be beautiful again.

Judith was beside him. It was one of the few places they could be certain of not being overheard. She was more desperate than ever to find the truth of
who had murdered Sarah Price, partly because she knew all these people in the regiment—and particularly in the Casualty Clearing Station—and felt the pain of suspicion tearing apart the few certainties they had after years of hardship and the loss of half the people they knew. Yet even more urgent was her need to clear Schenckendorff from suspicion so they could take him to London and expose the Peacemaker.

That was the burden that crushed him now.

He looked at Judith, her face calm and pale in the harsh light. He saw very clearly the weariness in her, the depth of emotion, the intense vulnerability in her eyes and mouth. And yet he knew her courage also. If he wished her ever to speak to him in the time ahead, whatever it held for them, then he could not build it on such a vast lie as silence over his alliance with the Peacemaker. He had already carried it almost too far to forgive. Once Schenckendorff was cleared and they left Ypres, it would be too late.

He had thought how he would do it, which words he could use to begin, but now that he was faced with it they all sounded trite and self-serving. They had talked about Schenckendorff, and a silence had settled between them that at least for her seemed comfortable. If he said nothing now it would become a lie, one from which he might never be able to return.

"Judith..."

She turned to look at him, waiting for him to speak.

There was no alternative to honesty; he would make it brief and perhaps brutal, like a quick knife thrust.

"I used to believe in the same ideals as Sandwell does, or did in the beginning," he told her.

It was a moment before she realized the meaning of what he had said. Then, very slowly, a light of astonished disbelief filled her face, and after it, pain. "You knew," she said, her voice husky. "When?" She swallowed. "Always?"

"Yes. I always knew it was Sandwell. I didn't know that he had killed. I should have. I could see that the power was taking him over, the desperation to stop the slaughter at any cost. What is one life here or there, quickly, when tens of thousands are dying slowly and hideously every day?" He waited for her answer as if it were a verdict on him—hope or despair.

He saw the flicker of uncertainty, as if, for a moment at least, she had understood.

She frowned. Her words came very slowly, with intense thought behind them. "If that is a serious question, I think the difference may be in small acts, one by one, when you can refuse to do the violent thing, the irreparable thing. But then that might also be cowardice, mightn't it? And to say that he should have asked us isn't really honest, either, because we couldn't have given an answer that had any meaning. Most of us had no idea what the alternatives were. We hadn't seen war. We wouldn't have known what we were being asked to choose."

"So what were we supposed to do?" he asked, surprised that she had addressed the problem with pity rather than rage. "Just let Europestagger blindly into a holocaust rather than try everything possible to stop it?"