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Authors: Anne Perry

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“We have to tell Judith,” Joseph said, watching his face for his reaction. “Apart from keeping the house locked if she’s ever in it alone, she has a right to know. And Hannah . . . but perhaps not yet.”

Matthew was silent. There was another flare of lightning far away, and then thunder off in the distance to the south.

Joseph was about to repeat what he had said, but finally Matthew spoke.

“I suppose we must, but let me do it.”

Joseph did not argue. If Matthew imagined Judith would allow him to evade any of the issues, then he did not know his sister as well as Joseph did.

         

When they reached St. Giles it started to rain again. They were both glad to leave the car and use getting soaked as an excuse to avoid immediate conversation. It was emotional enough saying goodbye to Hannah as Albert put her luggage into the Ford. She did not want anyone to go to the station with her.

“I’d rather not!” she said quickly. “If I’m going to burst into tears, at least let me do it here, not on the platform!”

No one argued with her. Perhaps they preferred it this way, too. She hugged each of them, not able to find words, or a steady voice to say anything. Then, holding her head so high she all but tripped on the step—even though it had been there all her life—she followed Albert out to the car. Joseph, Matthew, and Judith stood in the doorway watching her until the car was out of sight. Then Joseph walked over the grass to close the gate.

         

“I know what you’re going to say,” Judith retorted defensively when they were sitting in the dining room after dinner, Henry asleep on the floor. It was barely dark outside and clear again, the storm long since passed.

“I don’t think you do.” Matthew set his coffee cup down and regarded her gravely.

She looked at Joseph. “Shouldn’t you be the one doing this?” she challenged, anger hard in her voice and her eyes. “Why aren’t you telling me what to do? Haven’t you the stomach for it? Or do you know it’s a waste of time? You’re a priest! It’s cowardly not even to try! Father always tried!”

It was an accusation that he was not Father, not wise enough, not patient or persistent enough. He knew it already. It was a deep ache inside him and, as with her, an anger, because no one had equipped him to do this. John Reavley had gone leaving a task half done and no one to replace him, as if he did not care.

“Judith . . . ,” Matthew began.

“I know!” She swung round to face him, cutting across his words. “The house is Joseph’s, but I can live here as long as he doesn’t need it, and he doesn’t. We’ve already discussed that. But I can’t go on wasting my time. That’s a condition. I’ve either got to get married or find something useful to do, preferably something that pays me enough to at least feed and clothe myself.” Her eyes were red-rimmed, full of tears. “Why haven’t you the courage to say that to me? Father would have! And I don’t need a gardener, a cook, a manservant, and a housemaid to look after me.” She stared at him furiously. “I worked that out for myself.” She flicked a glance sideways at Joseph, contempt in it.

Joseph felt the sting, but he had no defense. It was true.

“Actually, I wasn’t going to say anything of the sort,” Matthew said to her tartly. “Joseph told me you were perfectly aware of the situation. I was going to tell you why Father was coming to see me on the day he was killed, and what we have learned since then. I would rather have protected you from it, but I don’t think we can afford to do that, and Joseph thinks you have a right to know anyway.”

Apology flashed across her face, then fear. She bit her lip. “Know what?” she said huskily.

Briefly Matthew told her about John Reavley’s call on the telephone, admitting that he was uncertain now of the exact words. “And when we were at the funeral, someone searched the house,” he finished. “That is why Joseph and I were late into the dining room.”

“Well, where is it?” she said, looking at one, then the other, her anger added to by confusion and the beginning of sick, urgent fear.

“We don’t know,” Matthew answered. “We’ve looked everywhere we can think of. I even tried the laundry, the gun room, and the apple shed this morning, but we haven’t found anything.”

“Then who has it?” She turned to Joseph. “It is real, isn’t it?”

It was a question he was not prepared to face. It challenged too much of the belief in his father, and he refused to be without that. “Yes, it’s real,” he said with biting certainty. He saw the doubt in her eyes, her struggle to believe and understand it, far more than he was willing to admit. “We went to the stretch of road where it happened,” he said in harsh, measured words, like incisions. “We saw where the car began to swerve, and where it finally plowed over the verge and into the trees. . . .”

Matthew started to speak but stopped, blinking rapidly. He turned away.

Judith stared at Joseph, waiting for him to justify what he was telling her.

“Once we understood what had happened, it was quite clear,” Joseph continued. “Someone had used a kind of barb, tied to a rope . . . the end of it was still knotted around a sapling trunk . . . and stretched it across the road deliberately. The marks were there in the tarmacadam.”

He saw the incredulity in her face. “But that’s murder!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, it is.”

She started to shake her head, and he thought for a moment she was not going to get her breath. He put out his hand, and she gripped it so hard it bruised the flesh.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “You are going to do something, aren’t you?”

“Of course!” Matthew jerked up his head. “Of course we are. But we don’t know where to start yet. We can’t find the document, and we don’t know what’s in it.”

“Where did he get it?” she said, trying to steady her voice and sound in control. “Whoever gave it to him would know what it was about.”

Matthew gave a gesture of helplessness. “No idea! It could be almost anything: government corruption, a financial scandal, even a royal scandal, for that matter. It might be political or diplomatic. It could be some dishonorable solution to the Irish Question.”

“There is no solution to the Irish Question, honorable or not,” she replied with an edge of hysteria to her voice. “But Father still kept up with quite a few of his old parliamentary colleagues. Maybe one of them gave it to him?”

Matthew leaned forward a little. “Did he? Do you know anyone he was in touch with recently? He’d only had it a few hours when he called me.”

“Are you certain?” Joseph asked. “If you are, then that would mean he got it on the Saturday before he died. But if he thought about it a while before calling you, it could have been Friday, or even Thursday.”

“Let’s start with Saturday,” Matthew directed, looking back to Judith. “Do you know what he did on Saturday? Was he here? Did he go out, or did anyone come to see him?”

“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I was in and out myself. I can hardly remember now. Albert was supposed to be doing something in the orchard. The only one who would know would be . . . Mother.” She swallowed and took a ragged breath. She was still clinging onto Joseph’s hand, her knuckles white with the strength of her grip. “But you can’t let it go! You’re going to do something? If you aren’t, then I will! They can’t get away with it!”

“Yes, of course I am,” Matthew assured her. “Nobody’s going to get away with it! But Father said it was a conspiracy. That means several people are involved, and we have no idea whom.”

“But . . . ,” she started, then stopped. Her voice dropped very low. “I was going to say it couldn’t be anyone we know, but that’s not true, is it? The opposite is! It had to have been someone who trusted him, or they wouldn’t have given him the document in the first place.”

He did not answer.

Her rage and misery exploded. “You are in the Secret Intelligence Service! Isn’t this the sort of thing you do? What damn use are you if you can’t catch the people who killed our family?” She glared at Joseph. “And if you tell me to forgive them, I swear to God I’ll hit you!”

“You won’t have to,” he promised. “I wouldn’t tell you to do something I can’t do myself.”

She searched his face as if seeing him more clearly than ever before. “I’ve never heard you say that in the past, no matter how hard it’s been.” She leaned forward and buried her head in his shoulder. “Joe! What’s happening to us? How can this be?”

He put his arms around her. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know.”

Matthew rubbed his eyes, pushing his hair back savagely. “Of course I’m going to do something!” he repeated. “That’s why he was bringing it to me.” There was pride and anger in his voice. His face was pinched with loss of what was irretrievable now. He was still struggling to be reasonable. “If it were something the police could deal with, he’d have taken it to them.” He looked at Joseph. “We dare not trust anyone,” he warned them both. “Judith, you must make sure the house is locked every night, and anytime you and the servants are all out—just as a precaution. I don’t think they’ll come back, because they’ve already looked here, and they know we haven’t got it. But if you’d rather go and stay—”

“With a friend? No, I wouldn’t!” she said quickly.

“Judith . . .”

“If I change my mind, I’ll go to the Mannings’,” she snapped. “I’ll say I’m lonely. They’ll understand. I promise! Just don’t push me. I’ll do what I want.”

“There’s a novelty!” Matthew said with a sudden, bleary smile, as if he needed to break the taut thread of tension.

She looked at him sharply, then her face softened and her eyes filled with tears.

“I’ll find them,” he promised, his voice choking. “Not only because they killed Mother and Father, but to stop them doing whatever it was in the document—if we can.”

“I’m glad you said
we
.” She answered his smile now. “Tell me what I can do.”

“When there is anything, I will,” he said. “I promise. But call me if there’s anything at all! Or Joseph—just to talk if you want. You must do that!”

“Stop telling me what to do!” But there was relief in her voice. A shred of safety had returned, something familiar, even if it was a restriction to fight against. “But of course I will.” She reached out to touch him. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER
THREE

Joseph found his first day back at St. John’s even more difficult than he had anticipated. The ancient beauty of the buildings, mellow brick with castellated front and stone-trimmed windows, soothed his mind. Its calm was indestructible, its dignity timeless. His rooms closed around him like well-fitting armor. He looked with pleasure at the light reflected unevenly on the old glass of the bookcases, knowing intimately every volume within, the thoughts and dreams of great men down the ages. On the wall between the windows overlooking the quadrangle were paintings of Florence and Verona. He remembered choosing them to keep in his heart those streets worn smooth by the footsteps of his heroes. And of course there was the bust of Dante on the shelf, that genius of poetry, imagination, the art of the story, and above all the understanding of the nature of good and evil.

He had been away for long enough for an amount of work to have collected, and the concentration needed to catch up was also a kind of healing. The languages of the Bible were subtle and different from modern speech. Their very nature necessitated that they refer to everyday things common to all mankind: seed time and harvest, the water of physical and spiritual life. The rhythms had time to repeat themselves and let the meaning sink deep into the mind; the flavor and the music of it removed him from the present, and so from his own reality.

It was friends who brought him the sharp reminder of loss. He saw the sympathy in their eyes, the uncertainty whether to speak of it or not, what to say that was not clumsy. Every student seemed to know at least of the deaths, if not the details.

The master, Aidan Thyer, had been very considerate, asking Joseph if he was sure he was ready to come back so soon. He was valued, of course, and irreplaceable, but nevertheless he must take more time if he needed it.

Joseph answered him that he did not. Everything had been done that was required, and his responsibilities to work were a blessing, not a burden. He thanked him and promised to take his first tutorial the following morning.

It was difficult picking up the threads after an absence of almost two weeks, and it required all his effort of mind to make an acceptable job of it. He was exhausted by the end of the day, and happy after dinner to leave the dining hall, the stained-glass windows scattered with the coats of arms of benefactors dating back to the early 1500s, the magnificent timbered ceiling with its carved hammer beams touched with gold, the oak-paneled walls carved in linen-fold, and above all its chattering, well-meaning people. He longed to escape toward the river.

He started across the narrow arch of the Bridge of Sighs with its stone fretwork like frozen lace, a windowed passageway to the fields beyond. He would walk across the smooth grass of the Backs, stretching all the way from Magdalene Bridge past St. John’s, Trinity, Gonville and Caius, Clare, and King’s College Chapel toward Queen’s and the Mathematical Bridge. Perhaps he would go as far as the millpond beyond, and over the causeway to Lammas Land. It was still warm. The long, slow sunset and twilight would last another hour and a half yet, perhaps more.

He was on the slow rise of the bridge, glancing out through the open lattice at the reflections on the water below, when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see a young man in his early twenties. His face was beautiful, strong-boned, clear-eyed, his brown hair bleached gold across the top by the long summer.

“Sebastian!” Joseph said with pleasure.

“Dr. Reavley! I . . .” Sebastian Allard stopped, his fair skin a little flushed with consciousness of his inadequacy to say anything that matched the situation, and perhaps also that he had missed the funeral. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how bad I feel.”

“You don’t have to,” Joseph said quickly. “I would far rather talk about something else.”

Sebastian hesitated, indecision clear in his half-turned shoulder.

Joseph did not want to press him, yet he felt Sebastian had something to say, and he could not rebuff him. Their families had lived in neighboring villages for years, and it was Joseph who had seen the promise in young Sebastian and encouraged him to pursue it. He had been his mentor for the last year while they had both been at St. John’s. It had become one of those friendships that blossomed so naturally he could not believe there was ever a possibility it would not have happened.

“I’m going for a walk along the Backs,” Joseph said. “If you want to join me, you are welcome.” He smiled and began to turn away, so as not to place an obligation on the younger man, as if it were a request.

There were a few moments of silence, then he heard the footsteps quickly and lightly on the bridge after him, and he and Sebastian emerged into the sunlight, almost side by side. The air was still warm, and the smell of cut grass drifted on the slight breeze. The river was flat calm, barely disturbed by three or four punts along the stretch past St. John’s and Trinity. In the nearest one a young man in gray flannel trousers and a white shirt stood leaning on the pole with effortless grace, his back to the sun, casting his features into shadow and making an aureole around his head.

A girl with red hair sat in the back looking up at him and laughing. Her muslin dress looked primrose-colored in the fading glow, but in the daylight it could have been ivory, or even white. Her skin was amber where she had defied convention and allowed the long, hot season to touch her with its fire. She was eating from a basket of cherries and dropping the stones into the water one after another.

The young man waved and called out a greeting.

Joseph waved back, and Sebastian answered as well.

“He’s a good fellow,” Sebastian said a moment later. “He’s at Caius, reading physics. All terribly practical.” He sounded as if he were about to say something more, then he pushed his hands into his pockets and walked silently on the grass.

Joseph felt no need for speech. The slight splash of punt poles and the current of the river slurping against their wooden sides, the occasional burst of laughter, were a wordless communication. Even grief could not entirely mar its timeless peace.

“We have to protect this!” Sebastian said suddenly and with fierce emotion. His voice was thick, his shoulders tense as he half turned to stare across the shining water at the buildings beyond. “All of it! The ideas, the beauty, the knowledge . . . the freedom to think.” He drew in his breath. “To discover the things of the mind. We are accountable to humanity for what we have. To the future.”

Joseph was startled. He had been letting himself sink into a sort of vacancy of thought, where emotion was sufficient to carry him. There was a glory here like the best music, filling everything. Now he was jerked back by Sebastian’s words. He deserved a considered answer, and it was apparent from the passion in his face that he needed one.

“You mean Cambridge specifically? What do you think endangers it?” Joseph asked, puzzled by the heat in him. “It’s been here for over half a millennium, and it seems to be growing stronger rather than weaker.”

Sebastian’s eyes were grave. His fair skin had been caught by the sun, and in the burning amber light now he looked almost made of gold. “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to read the news,” he answered. “Or the inclination, for that matter.” He turned his head away, not wanting to intrude into Joseph’s feelings, or else hiding his own.

“Not much,” Joseph agreed. “But I know about the assassinations in Sarajevo, and that Vienna is unhappy about it. They want some sort of reparation from the Serbs. I suppose it was to be expected.”

“If you occupy somebody else’s country, it is to be expected that they won’t like it!” Sebastian responded savagely. “All sorts of things come to be
expected
.” He repeated the word with sarcastic emphasis. “Strike and counterstrike, revenge for this or that—justice, from the other point of view. Isn’t it the responsibility of thinking men to stop the cycle and reach for something better?” He swung his arms wide, gesturing toward the exquisite buildings on the farther bank, their western facades glowing pale in the light, the shadows deepening to the east. “Isn’t that what all this is for, to teach us something better than ‘you hurt me, so I’ll hurt you back’? Aren’t we supposed to be leading the way toward a higher morality?”

There could be no argument. It was the aim not only of philosophy, but of Christianity as well, and Sebastian knew Joseph would not deny that.

“Yes,” he agreed. He sought the supreme comfort of reason. “But there have always been conquests, injustices, and rebellions—or revolutions, if you prefer. They have never endangered the heart of learning.”

Sebastian stopped. A burst of laughter came up from the river where two punts almost collided as young men drinking champagne tried to reach across and touch glasses in a toast. One of the boys nearly overbalanced and was perilously close to falling in. His companion grasped him by the back of his shirt, and all he lost was his straw boater, which floated for a moment or two on the shining surface before someone from the other punt caught it on the end of his pole. He presented it to its owner, who took it, dripping wet, and put it back on his head, to shouts of approval and a loud and hilarious guffaw.

It was so good-natured, a celebration of life, that Joseph found himself smiling. The sun was warm on his face, and the smells of the earth and grass were sweet.

“It’s not easy to imagine, is it?” Sebastian replied.

“What?”

“Destruction . . . war,” Sebastian answered, looking away from the river and back at Joseph, his eyes dark with the weight of his thoughts.

Joseph hesitated. He had not realized Sebastian was so deeply troubled.

“You don’t think so?” Sebastian said. “You’re mourning a loss, sir, and I am truly sorry for it. But if we get drawn into a European war, every family in England will be mourning, not just for those we loved, but for the whole way of life we’ve cherished and nurtured for a thousand years. If we let that happen, we would be the true barbarians! And we would be to blame for more than the Goths or the Vandals who sacked Rome. They didn’t know any better. We do!” His voice was savage, almost on the point of tears.

Joseph was frightened by the note of hysteria in him. “There was revolution all over Europe in 1848,” he said gently, choosing his words with care and unarguable truth. “It didn’t destroy civilization. In fact, it didn’t even destroy the despotism it was supposed to.” This was reason, calm history of fact. “Everything went back to normal within a year.”

“You’re not saying that was good?” Sebastian challenged him, his eyes bright, assured at least of that. He knew Joseph far too well to suppose he did.

“No, of course not. I’m saying that the order of things is set in very deep foundations, and it will take far more than the assassination of an archduke and his duchess, brutal as it was, to cause any radical change.”

Sebastian bent and picked up a twig and hurled it toward the river, but it was too light and fell short. “Do you think so?”

“Yes,” Joseph replied with certainty. Private griefs might shake his personal world, tear out the heart of it, but the beauty and the reason of civilization continued, immeasurably greater than the individual.

Sebastian stared across the river, but unseeingly, his eyes clouded by his vision within. “That’s what Morel said, too, and Foubister. They think the world won’t ever change, or not more than an inch at a time. There are others, like Elwyn, who think that even if there is war, it will all be quick and noble, a rather more dramatic version of a good Rider Haggard story, or Anthony Hope. You know
The Prisoner of Zenda
and that sort of thing? All high honor and clean death at the point of a sword. Do you know much of the truth about the Boer War, sir? What we really did there?”

“A little,” Joseph acknowledged. He knew it had been ruthless, and there was a great deal for Britain to be ashamed of. But perhaps there was for the Boers, too. “That was Africa, though,” he said aloud. “And perhaps we’ve learned from it. Europe would be different. But there’s no reason to think there’ll be war, unless there’s more trouble in Ireland and we let it get completely out of hand.”

Sebastian said nothing.

“Sarajevo was the isolated act of a group of assassins,” Joseph went on. “Europe is hardly going to go to war over it. It was a crime, not an—”

Sebastian turned to him, his eyes astonishingly clear in the waning light. “Not an act of war?” he interrupted. “Are you sure, sir? I’m not. The kaiser restated his alliance with Austria-Hungary last Sunday, you know.”

The twilight breeze rippled faintly across the surface of the river. It was still warm, like a soft touch to the skin.

“And Serbia is on Russia’s back doorstep,” Sebastian continued. “If Austria demands too much reparation, they could get drawn in. And there’s always the old enmity between France and Germany. The men who fought the Franco-Prussian War are still alive, and still bitter.” He started to walk again, perhaps to avoid the group of students coming toward them across the grass. It was clear he did not want to be caught up in their conversation and interrupted in his infinitely more serious thoughts.

Joseph kept pace with him, moving into the shadow of the trees, their leaves whispering faintly above them. “There may be an unjust suppression of the Serbs,” he said, trying to return to the safety of reason. “And the people in general may be punished for the violent acts of a few, which is wrong—of course it is. But it is not the catastrophe for civilization that you are suggesting.” He, too, spread his hands to encompass the fading scene in front of them, with its sudden dashes of silver and blue on the water. “All this is safe.” He said it with unquestioning certainty. It was a thousand years of unbroken progress toward even greater humanity. “We shall still be here, learning, exploring, creating our own beauty, adding to the richness of mankind.”

Sebastian studied him, his face torn with conflicting rage and pity, almost tenderness. “You believe that, don’t you?” he said with incredulity verging on despair. Then he continued to walk again without waiting for the answer. Somehow the movement suggested a kind of dismissal.

BOOK: No Graves As Yet
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