Angels in the Gloom (10 page)

Hannah jammed the flowers into the vase. Why was Hallam Kerr so useless? If religion wasn’t any help now, what point was there in it? Was it really no more than a nice social habit, a reason for the village to meet and keep up the pretense that everything would be all right one day? Kerr was just as lost as the rest of them, perhaps even more so.

Was Joseph as empty and useless as that, too? She did not think so. It was not just because he was her brother. There was an inner strength to him; a place within him where his faith was real, and strong enough to bear up others. He was needed here at home. He should stay to help people like Betty, Mrs. Gee, and God alone knew how many more before this was finished.

“All we can do is keep going, and help each other,” she said aloud. “The vicar is just another cross to bear.”

Betty sniffed and gave a choking little laugh. “He wouldn’t like to be referred to like that,” she said, searching for a handkerchief to blow her nose.

“I know,” Hannah admitted. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it.”

By the time Betty went, Hannah was almost finished with the flowers she had, and thinking they needed a little greenery to fill them out. Then Lizzie Blaine came in with some catkin branches and budding willow. She was a dark-haired woman with a hot temper and bright blue eyes. Her husband was one of the scientists at the Establishment.

“Thank you.” Hannah accepted the additions with satisfaction. They gave bulk and variety to the yellow.

Lizzie smiled. “I’ve always liked branches. They don’t seem to know how to make an ugly shape.”

“You’re right!” Hannah agreed with surprise. “Even the knobbly bits look good.” She glanced at Lizzie again. There seemed to be a hidden excitement in her, as if she knew of something good that would happen, just beyond the sight of the rest of them. Would it be intrusive to ask what it was? “You look well,” she said pleasantly.

“I like Sundays,” Lizzie replied, then gave a little shrug. “Theo doesn’t usually work on Sunday, although he has once or twice lately. They’re doing something critically important at the Establishment.

He doesn’t say anything, of course, but I know from the way he walks how alive he feels. It is as if his mind is racing on the brink of solving the final problems and finishing whatever it is. Please God, it will be something that will make a real difference to the war. Perhaps it will even be over soon. What do you think?“ Her eyes were bright, her cheeks a little flushed. ”The men would come home. We could start to rebuild things again…“ Her face tightened suddenly; perhaps she was remembering those who would not come back.

Hannah had no idea if Lizzie had other family far less safe than her scientist husband, perhaps brothers or friends. “I can’t think of anything better to pray for,” she said softly. “And it would be right to pray for it, for everyone. We could all start again, making things instead of smashing them. And the Germans could, too, of course.”

Lizzie nodded quickly, afraid to think of such a thing too long, and tempt fortune with words. Then she turned and walked away swiftly and almost soundlessly up the stone aisle and out of the door into the wind and sun.

Hannah finished the last of the vases and put them each in the right place, then went out as well. She almost bumped into Mrs. Nunn coming up along the path through the graves.

“Hello, Mrs. MacAllister,” the older woman said with a smile. “Where’s the chaplain?” She also spoke of Joseph by his occupation, because to her that was who he was. She had sons and nephews in the regiment at Ypres, and they wrote to him of Joseph often. “Tell him Oi was asking after him, will you please?”

“Of course,” Hannah said quickly. “He’s recovering quite well, but it will be a few weeks before he can think about going back.”

A shadow crossed Mrs. Nunn’s face. “But he will, won’t he? Oi mean, he’ll be alroight?” She was echoing Mrs. Gee’s words.

Hannah hesitated. She was overwhelmed by the power of her longing that he should stay. They needed Joseph’s faith here to lean on if they were to survive. Kerr was useless. More loss, loneliness, and pain lay ahead. She thought of Betty Townsend and Mrs. Nunn. They were only two of hundreds. “I don’t know,” she answered. “He’s thirty-seven, and he was pretty badly injured. They may not send him back.”

The color and light vanished from Mrs. Nunn’s expression. “Oh, Oi do hope that’s not true. What will moi boys do without him?” She shook her head a little, her face crumpled. “They don’t tell us much, you know, but it’s awful out there. Some o‘ them doi real hard. An’ none o‘ them come back loike they went. They need men loike your brother worse’n we need them. We’re safe in our own beds, an’ with food on the table in the morning, an‘ clean water to drink.” She looked very hard at Hannah. “Oi’d be out there for moi boys, if Oi could, an’ keep them safe here. What mother wouldn’t? But at least Oi knowed Captain Reavley were there for them. He’d be with ‘em in the worst, day or noight, winter or summer aloike.”

She smiled and her gaze was far away. “He were hurt getting moi boy Tucky back out o‘ no-man’s-land, you know? Saved his loife, the chaplain did.” She took a deep breath. “God speed him back, Oi pray. Oi’m sorry, Mrs. MacAllister, but the boys come first. They’re foighting for England, an’ we got to do our part.” Sniffing fiercely, she turned and picked her way back through the graves.

Hannah stood still on the path for a few moments longer. Then with her mind in increasing turmoil, she walked slowly toward the lych-gate and out into the street.

She walked more rapidly. She had been sure, listening to Betty Townsend, that Joseph should stay here. He was needed to help with their faith, grief, loneliness, and fear of change.

Then listening to Mrs. Nunn, seeing her tired, wounded face and the strength in her, the gratitude that Joseph was there with her boys, wanting him at home had become utterly selfish, the cry of a small, spoiled child.

But what about Joseph himself? Would his arm heal well enough for him to be able to go back? Perhaps it wouldn’t. He might have to stay. That would be the best answer of all. He would be here, safe, able to help her and the whole village, and honor would be satisfied. Was that selfish? If it were her sons out there, she would want the best chaplain for them: the one who was strong enough to keep faith; brave enough to try to rescue the wounded, whatever the cost; the one who would not look away and leave them to die alone.

She opened the front door and went into the familiar hall. Mrs. Appleton was in the kitchen; the smell of baking drifted through the house. The dining room door was open, the bunch of daffodils on the table reflected on its polished surface. She could smell their warm, heavy scent.

She found Joseph upstairs in his bed. His eyes were closed, but there was a book open upside down on his lap. It was one of those days when his arm was hurting more than usual; she could see it in the shadow on his face.

He must have heard her step, light as it was, because he opened his eyes.

“Hurts?” she asked with a half smile.

“Not much,” he answered.

“It might not get strong enough for you to go back?” She lifted her voice at the end, as if it were a question. “The vicar isn’t much good. There’d be a lot for you to do here. Everything’s changing, and we don’t know what’s right as easily as we used to.” She drew in her breath. “The vicar hasn’t the faintest idea what the men have been through, but you have.” Without meaning to, she was putting all the arguments at once. She could hear the urgency in her own voice, and knew she had said too much.

There was indecision in his face. He must feel the warmth around him, smell the clean cotton of the sheets, the flowers on the dresser, bright in the sunlight through the window. He must hear the sound of birdsong outside, and the wind in the branches, sweet off the fields.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. She was ashamed. His decision, whatever it was, would be hard enough. He was the one who would be cold, tired, hungry, perhaps injured in Flanders, not she. She was being unfair.

“I think Kerr will become better at it,” he said quietly. “With practice.”

“Yes, I expect he will,” she agreed, and went out again before she made any more mistakes, even if it was just to let him see her tears.

In the upper room in Marchmont Street the Peacemaker finished reading the letter on his desk and burned the pages one at a time. It was a letter from his cousin in Berlin, one of the few men in the world he trusted absolutely. It was wiser to leave nothing to chance. German plans for the United States were crucial to success in the war. If America could be persuaded to join the Allies, the forces against Germany would be vastly increased. The American army was small as yet, but their resources were virtually inexhaustible. They had coal and steel enough to supply the world, and food, of course. In time it would tip the balance of the war fatally against Germany.

That was why America had to be kept occupied with the Mexican threat at its southern border, and possibly even with a Japanese base on the Pacific coast, just to the south in Baja California. Germany had brilliant men throughout the North American continent, agents who kept Berlin constantly in touch with every move of President Wilson and of the Congress, of public and private feeling in every state. With great skill and secrecy they moved money and guns into Mexico and judged the ambition and the violence in that turbulent country to an exactness.

The Santa Ysabel massacre was a piece of extraordinary good fortune, but with care it could be repeated on a scale large enough to keep America’s attention focused entirely on their own affairs, but not so large as to precipitate a full-scale invasion of Mexico.

Detta Hannassey was becoming more and more useful. No doubt her principal aim was to free Ireland, but she was a far better tool in helping Germany to keep control of the sabotage in America than he had thought she would be. She was resourceful, clever without arrogance, and she had sufficient sense of humor never to betray herself by posturing or losing her temper. She was not as dangerous as her father, and therefore in many ways a better weapon to use.

He took the poker and crushed the ashes of Manfred’s letter so there was nothing left.

The war at sea was the more urgent issue now. That could be won or lost on the invention being worked on in the Establishment in Cambridgeshire. He knew about its progress from the agent he had planted there over a year ago, a highly intelligent, eager man, as passionately against the war as he was himself. But he did not entirely trust him. Lately he had sensed a different mood in him, something more personal, a more particular emotion rather than the general horror against the destruction of war. It might be a weakness.

But it was Russia, that other giant not yet fully awake, that crowded his mind now. Europe had never conquered it with armies. Napoleon had tried, and it had been for him the beginning of the end. Now, a century later, it was a slow attrition eating away at the might of the German Empire, bleeding men and materials it would be far better to use toward the west, where victory could be complete and fruitful, the beginning of lasting peace and all that that meant.

What of Tsar Nicholas II, and his queen with her obsession with that unwashed lunatic, Rasputin? And the only heir to the throne a hemophiliac boy who bled at the slightest bruise! The whole vast, sweeping country was riddled by centuries of oppression and corruption, injustices crying out for retribution, factions fighting one another, hunger and war slaughtering people by the thousands. The whole rotten structure was ready to collapse, and there were men who longed to bring it about, men of passion and dreams only awaiting the chance.

Whatever it took, however much latitude he had to give him, whatever flattery or yielding it required, he must get Richard Mason back. He had the passion, the courage, the intelligence, and the supreme daring to pull together the pieces of the plan that was beginning to form in the Peacemaker’s mind. As yet it was just a vague shape—huge areas were missing yet—but so supreme, so sublimely daring it would change the tide of history, carry it forward not only to peace, but to a justice undreamed of before.

He strode over to his desk, opened it, and sat down to write.

CHAPTER FIVE

Joseph picked up a fresh newspaper and read a long article by Richard Mason, the man regarded by many as the best of the war correspondents. He was writing from the Balkans. It was vivid, immediate, and tragic in its evocation of courage and death. There was an anger in him at suffering that came through all the measured words.

Joseph remembered working beside him on the beach at Gallipoli. He thought of the cheerful Australian voices with their desperate jokes, their inventiveness, irreverence, and good-humored stoicism. He remembered the sinking ship afterward, the cold, and facing Mason in the open boat as the wind rose, and the terrible decision he had made. For all the rage he had felt, oddly enough he had not personally disliked Mason, even then.

He knew that Hannah wanted him to stay at home after he was better, but he had refused to consider the possibility seriously until now. He thought about the men he knew who were still in the trenches, men from the village and from Cambridge itself. Some of them he had taught at St. John’s. In his dreams he was there also. He still woke with surprise to find himself in the quiet, familiar room of his childhood, birdsong in the silence outside, no guns, no soldiers’ voices.

Could he stay? There was certainly plenty for a man of the church to do here, grief to comfort, confusion to try to ease, even anger and specific evil to fight against. He had been nearly two years at Ypres. No one would blame him if he said it was enough. He was thirty-seven, far older than the vast majority of the men. Even most of the officers below the rank of colonel were in their twenties, some even younger.