We Shall Not Sleep (27 page)

This time she did not hesitate. "Yes. Rather than sell our honor, yes, he should have argued, pleaded—perhaps uselessly—but not tried to sell us without our knowledge." She stared across the cratered land in the broadening light. Now the waste of it was easier to see. The mist no longer softened the outlines or hid the corpses. "It wouldn't have worked anyway. Trying to make a nation of Englishmen do what they don't want to is like trying to herd cats into a barn. You can't do it. There's always some awkward cuss who's going to go the other way, or stop and demand to know why. It isn't practical, Richard; it never was. Some of us might buy peace at that price, but you'd never get us all to."

He was watching the light on her face, not on the land. "I know," he admitted. "At least I do now. There'll always be someone like John Reavley, and Joseph, and perhaps tens of thousands of others just as willing to die for their dreams. I'm not sure how practical they are, but I'm beginning to believe that they hold the one hope we have of surviving into a future that is still worth keeping, worth having paid this much to have."

She turned to meet his eyes, searching, trying to read into the depth of
his mind to see if the final honesty was there inside him.

He answered impulsively, and yet he was absolutely certain that the very best of himself meant it. "I'll come to London with you, and tell Lloyd George all I know, and that will back up everything Schenckendorff says. He will have to believe us."

She stiffened with instant fear. "You'd be admitting to treason," she said in a whisper. "Don't you know that?"

"Yes." Said aloud like that, it brought a chill he had not fully realized before, but it did not alter his certainty that this was what he had to do. It was a payment he owed, and it was the only way she would ever look at him with the shining honesty that she did now, with the possibility of the kind of love that he could not turn away from, even if his life were the price. He would be clean; he would have given all he could to pay for his mistake.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

He was sure. He did not know if he would still have the courage when he was alone, and knew that his name would go down in history not as Britain's greatest, bravest, and most articulate war correspondent, but as a man who had betrayed his own country for a flawed ideal. If he faltered later it would be because of fear crowding in; weakness, not a change in belief. "Yes, I am sure," he said firmly. "I love you. More than anything else I want to be the man who can live up to your dreams, and your courage to pay what they cost."

She gave a little nod. It was a very small, very certain gesture, and then she smiled. Then she touched his face and leaned forward and kissed him, long and tenderly. For those moments he felt an infinite happiness he thought it would be impossible ever to forget.

Later in the morning, when Judith found Joseph in his bunker having just finished more letters, she knew that he saw the happiness in her immediately, and that he also probably recognized it as what it was. But she had no intention of telling him that Mason had always known the Peacemaker, or—at this point—that he was willing to come to London with them and tell the prime minister so. They still needed Schenckendorff; otherwise they could not expect to be believed against a man as powerful as Dermot Sandwell. Alone, Mason might be written off as a lunatic, a man too shocked by his experiences at war to have retained his balance of mind.

And Schenckendorff had not brought any papers with him. It would have been impossible to keep them after capture, even if he had dared to take the risk of removing them from Berlin.

The only written proof was the treaty John Reavley had hidden in the house in St. Giles.

"We've got to think," she said to Joseph. "Have you made a list of all the people it still could be, so we can concentrate on them and eliminate them? It's the first of November. We can't have much longer or they'll have ended the war and we'll be too late anyway. Jacobson must be working on it all the time. He's out there like a dog worrying a bone. And Hampton is, too."

She sat down on the cot, and he turned himself around on the box to face her. He looked tired, and there was an unhappiness under the surface courage that twisted her inside to see. She knew it was because a gulf had opened between Lizzie and himself, and he could not understand it.

Judith ached to be able to reach out and help, tell him that it was because Lizzie loved him intensely, not because she didn't. But would he be able to bear the knowledge of what had happened to her, and that she was now carrying the rapist's child? She did not know. He had been so desperately hurt by Eleanor's death, and the scars had taken years to heal. Might this new blow even rock his faith? And wasn't that the foundation of his strength?

Staring out over no-man's-land, Lizzie thought that of course Joseph would have to know. Soon her pregnancy would become obvious. Then she would either have to tell him or walk out of his life forever, without explanation, and that would surely hurt him even more.

Mason had described to her how Joseph had been in Gallipoli when he had first met him. He had tried to capture his compassion, his tireless work for the wounded no matter how exhausted he was himself, his steadiness in the unspeakable horror of it. He had said the sea was red with human blood.

Then he had told her about his long argument with Joseph in the open boat on the channel, after the U-boat had sunk their steamer and left them to find their way back to England as best they could. The others had died, leaving only Joseph, Mason, and one injured crewman. Joseph had been willing to die, if that was what it cost to prevent Mason from writing his story on Gallipoli and sabotaging morale for the recruitment needed to prevent surrender. Yes, Joseph could take disappointment, betrayal, even defeat, and survive them all.

Her eyes had moistened with tears of pride, and of happiness that Mason believed so well of Joseph. Still, she wanted to protect both Joseph and Lizzie as long as she could—and perhaps all the others here as well, except the one man who was guilty. It was the very last resort of all to tell Jacobson about the earlier rape.

Joseph was holding out a piece of paper to her with names and times and places on it. She took it and read.

"An awful lot of this doesn't make sense," she said at last. "For a start, I really don't believe it could possibly have been Major Morel. I know he's a bit odd, and I think he really would have led a mutiny last year." She glanced at Joseph's wry expression. "All right, he did. But I don't believe he would rape anybody. He's a rebel in his own way, and he'd fight for any cause he believed in, but violence against women isn't a cause."

"And Tiddly Wop Andrews?" Joseph asked. "He said Moira Jes-sop saw him in the supply tent the only time he wasn't with the walking wounded, but she says she wasn't there. Why would she lie?"

"I suppose she was somewhere she shouldn't have been," Judith answered. "Or she's already lied to protect someone else, and she can't go back on it. But I can't believe it's Tiddly Wop. We've known him for years! He's good looking, but he's as shy as ... as a choirboy."

"That's rubbish, Judith, and you know it," Joseph said gently. "He was shy at home. He's been on the battlefront for four years. He's not a boy anymore. He's twenty-six, and a soldier."

She was startled. "You don't believe it could be him, do you?"

His face was tight. "I don't want to, but we've all changed. The whole world's changed. Nobody is who they used to be." He looked at her earnestly. "It won't only be those of us who've been here who are changed, or on other fronts; it'll be the people at home, too. Read Hannah's letters between the lines. She hates some of what is new, but she knows she can't escape." He gave a slight shrug. "We don't look at anything the way we used to, socially or economically. The old rules of how to behave have been swept away. Distinctions in social class are blurred into each other more and more all the time. We've been forced to see the courage, intelligence, and moral value of men we used to barely even notice. They aren't going to go home and doff the cap anymore. We know, in a way we can never forget, that we are all equal when it comes to injury and death, human need, the will to live, above all the honor and the self-sacrifice to go over the top and give your life for your friends."

"I know," she said softly. "But I'm so afraid that once we've grown used to the silence and the comfort again, we'll sink back into the old bad things as well: the indifference, the malice, the inequalities, the stupid lies that we only believe because they're comfortable. Will we go back to ignorance of what real pain or real sorrow is, and complain about stupid little things again as if they mattered? Will we take offense over trivia, get greedy for more than we need, forget that we are more alike than any differences there are among us? Will we even remember to be grateful just to be alive and at home, able to see and hear and walk? Will we remember to look after those who can't see or hear? And those who are alone, and will always be alone?"

"I don't know. But I know what we'll deserve if we don't," he said softly. "If there is a God, a resurrection—and I have to believe there is—then when we meet those who paid, I want to be able to look in their faces and say that I honored their gift."

"So do I. If I can't, maybe that would be hell," she agreed. "And I still hope it wasn't Tiddly Wop, or Barshey Gee, or Major Morel."

"Or Cavan," he added. "There's something odd about his story. I don't know what yet, and I wish I didn't have to find out, but I do."

"Cavan would never have killed anyone!" she said aghast. "Even you can't imagine that!"

"I don't," he replied. "But he's lying. I need to know why, unless we can solve it first."

"I will!" she said, standing up. "I'll go to it right now."

"Be careful!" he said with quick fear, standing as well. "You're not safe just because you're an ambulance driver, Judith."

She swiveled to face him, one hand holding back the sacking. "I know!"

Joseph started to look for Tiddly Wop Andrews. They were all finding the enforced idleness a strain, especially since they were held here in a sense captive and away from the last of the fighting. Most were torn between relief that now they would get home uninjured, and the sense of having let down their friends by not being there at the very end. They felt useless. Hours dragged by in small jobs that were largely no more than filling in time. There was no point at all in shoring up trenches; they would never be used again. Rifles had not been fired, so they did not need cleaning. It was still done, but it was a waste of time. The only thing that actually had value was helping the injured, but there was only so much that an unskilled man could do.

Tiddly Wop had been mending duckboards. There was no point— they would not need them much longer—but it was better than idleness. He put down the hammer as Joseph's shadow fell across him.

"What can I do for you, Chaplain?" he asked. "I really don't know anything more."

"Yes, you do," Joseph answered, squatting down on a pile of sandbags opposite him. "Where were you the night Sarah Price was killed, Tiddly? The truth."

"I was in the Evacuation tent," Tiddly Wop said doggedly. "I already told you that."

"Yes, you did. And Cully Teversham told me so, too. But Moira Jessop said you weren't, the first time I asked her. And she said the same thing to Jacobson."

Tiddly Wop looked unhappy. "Don't know why she'd say that."

"No, neither do I," Joseph agreed. "She said later that you might have been; they were all so busy she couldn't be sure. But that's not true, either. The Evacuation tent was actually pretty quiet. Between half past three and half past four there was no one in there at all. And that's the time that counts."

Tiddly Wop blinked. "Is it? Is that when ... when she was killed?"

"Yes. Didn't you know that?"

"No. I... I saw her earlier." Again he looked away. "She was pretty upset. I tried to make her feel a bit better." He mumbled the words as if he was embarrassed by them.

"What was she upset about?" Joseph persisted.

"Lots of things," Tiddly Wop answered, his voice thick with sadness.

"That's not an answer," Joseph told him. "This girl's dead, Tiddly. We need to know what happened to her, and why. Why may be the only way we catch the man who did it. I'm not going to repeat it if I don't have to. What was she upset about?"

"She was afraid of going home," Tiddly Wop said slowly, searching for the words he needed. "She knew things had changed. She'd only been out here a year or so, but she realized that it isn't ever going to be like it was before. So many young men are dead, and two or three times as many are injured, or crippled, or just different." He looked sad and puzzled. "And women aren't the way they used to be, either. She felt she wouldn't fit in anywhere, nobody would marry her, because even though she was pretty enough, she hadn't any... I don't know... she didn't think with all the women there are who are well bred, know how to behave, are charming and modest and good at domestic skills, that anybody'd choose her. And she'd got a bit of a reputation. She was nearly twenty-six. She flirted a good bit. She had a sort of a fling with Benbow, until he got too keen and she ended it. Then she ... I don't know ... made sure she could still attract men by flirting something rotten with the German prisoners. Safe, if you like. They can't do anything, poor sods. She just wanted to boost herself up a bit."

He looked earnestly at Joseph to see if he understood.

"I told her that was silly, but she knew that already. Makes people angry with her. She was pretty enough, more than most. I said to her not to sell herself cheap. I didn't go too far because I didn't want her to think I was after her, but I tried to get her to think well of herself." He searched Joseph's face anxiously.

Joseph saw the kindness in him, the sense of pity for a young woman afraid and foolish, probably like thousands of other women who saw what had once been an assured future disappearing as an army of young men melted into the earth and all the old patterns of behavior shifted.