Shoulder the Sky (19 page)

"Does he speak Welsh?" Matthew was finding more surprises than were comfortable. He should have known these things.

"Oh, certainly!" Kittredge raised his eyebrows. "He's no Englishman!"

Late that evening Matthew was sent for to the office of Dermot Sandwell, a senior cabinet minister with special responsibilities towards the intelligence departments.

"Come in, Reavley," he invited, waving an arm in the general direction of one of the large leather chairs in his office.

Sandwell's office was a beautiful room decorated in cool earth colours, and there were exquisite water colour paintings on the walls. Matthew had been here once or twice before, and knew they were scenes of South Africa, by the artist and humorist Edward Lear. He was always hoping for an opportunity to look at them more closely, but he had been here only on the gravest business, and from the expression now on Sandwell's abstemious face with its vivid blue eyes, this occasion was every bit as grim as the others. He was standing near the window towards Horse Guards Parade, the curtains drawn.

Matthew did not accept the invitation to be seated. "Good evening, sir," he acknowledged.

Sandwell regarded him closely. "How are you? You look tired. I believe you have a brother on the Western Front. Heard from him lately?"

"Yes, sir. He's quite well, thank you."

"Good. I suppose you're inundated with stuff at SIS? I imagine you know as well as we in the Cabinet do just how serious the situation is? Africa, Gallipoli." He winced as he said the second name. "The Balkans. There'll be an Italian front before long, I should think. France and Flanders are only part of it. I'm afraid the war is spreading across the world."

"Yes, sir." There was nothing for Matthew to say.

Sandwell jerked himself out of his thoughts and stared at his visitor with sudden intensity. "Reavley, what I am about to say to you must not be repeated to anyone. Do you understand me?"

Matthew was startled. Who could he be referring to? All his fears about Shearing came flooding back. Did someone else know about the Peacemaker, perhaps even in the Cabinet? Maybe he was not alone after all. Hope surged up inside him that Sandwell was going to say that he knew. The end was in sight!

"Yes, sir," he answered. "No one at all? Does that include Mr. Shearing?"

Sandwell turned away from the window, the light harsh on his face from the lamps on the wall, his body rigid. "Yes, that does include Mr. Shearing."

Matthew felt a coldness in spite of the mild April evening. "Yes, sir."

Sandwell drew in his breath slowly. "I have very good reason to believe that our enemies have turned one of our men in SIS against us. There is a traitor in your department. The evidence seems to be unarguable. Information has been passed which can have come from nowhere else."

Matthew's stomach turned cold. He asked the question he had to. Sandwell would have thought him a fool if he had not. "Why are you trusting me with this, sir?"

Sandwell smiled, touched by the momentary humour of it. "Because some of the information betrayed is material that you do not have access to. For the time being you can trust no one with anything that you alone are privy to, anything that comes from sources that only you have. Report directly to me, but don't jeopardize your safety or your position by hiding whatever will be learned anyway. We have to know who this man is, Reavley. The situation is desperate."

"Yes, sir," Matthew replied. "Of course."

"Thank you, Reavley. That's all. Be careful. When you have anything to report, let me know. I shall make myself available."

"Sir." Matthew went out into the corridor without realizing quite how shocked he was until he tripped on the stairs and nearly lost his balance. He grasped the banister only just in time to right himself.

Was it Shearing, or Chetwin? Or God help me both? It was reasonable to suppose that the Peacemaker would have gathered more disciples over the nine months since the outbreak of war: people who did not believe that violence was the answer to anything, whether from personal revulsion or ethical principle; people who believed they could not win against the power of Germany and Austro-Hungary; people whose businesses and fortunes were being ruined by the economic catastrophe of war and the sheer decimation of so much land; and people who were simply not prepared to lose any more young men they loved, no matter what the cause.

He went out into the evening air and the anonymity of the darkness. On Whitehall he caught a taxi home to his flat. He would collect his car tomorrow; it could remain where it was all night. He could not be bothered to drive. He would like to go to a bar or a club somewhere and have several stiff whiskies, but he dared not. His mind was bursting with fears and shadows, secrets he could not share, and which were too heavy to carry alone.

But there was no one to trust, absolutely no one at all. If he drank, and was vulnerable, forgot to watch and measure everything he said, then he must do it at home, and alone.

Several hours later, in a quiet house on Marchmont Street, the man Matthew referred to as 'the Peacemaker' stared out of an upstairs window at the street below. He saw a taxi draw up about twenty yards along and a figure get out. In the distance and from this height he was foreshortened, but even so, the Peacemaker recognized him. He was slender, about six feet tall, and he moved with an energy that marked him out from others on the footpath. He was dressed in a very ordinary suit, and wore a broad-brimmed hat, which hid his features. But the man waiting knew exactly what he looked like, he did not need to see the thick, dark hair or the powerful, starkly emotional face with its broad mouth and wide cheekbones.

A few moments later he heard the doorbell, and the servant answering it, then the quick footsteps up the stairs.

"Come in," he commanded as they reached the landing.

The door opened and the man stood on the threshold, anticipation bright in his eyes.

"Close the door," the Peacemaker directed.

The man obeyed. They both remained standing. Richard Mason was perhaps the best war correspondent to emerge from this hideous conflict. His writing was lucid, concise, the force in it coming from simple language, a brilliant intellectual grasp of what was happening driven by a passionate anger at human suffering. Time and time again he saw the detail that brought a vast event into the grasp of the reader, making the experience immediate enough to hurt as does the death of one man, rather than overwhelm as does the destruction of a thousand. He gave the enormity of it a human face.

"I want you to go to Gallipoli," the Peacemaker said quietly. "The news is bad. They say the casualties are terrible. One observation pilot reported that the landing at Helles Beach was so fearful he looked down and saw the sea red with blood."

Mason's face was pale and his hands by his sides were clenched. He had seen war before, in South Africa. He would have given everything he possessed to prevent such slaughter and human misery happening again, but now, as then, he was helpless to do anything but watch. The Boer War, with its civilian casualties, its concentration camps, its legacy of bitterness and destruction, had made him long for peace at any price, as a drowning man longs for air.

It had brought him together with the Peacemaker, and a few others who hungered in the same fierce and passionate way, in an attempt first to prevent this great engulfing conflict, and when that had failed, at least to make it as short as possible. God above knew how many men would die if it continued. He had seen the trenches, and the slaughter of tens of thousands of young men -and he had heard of the nightmare hell of gas.

"What about the Western Front?" he asked. "The Germans are breaking through at Ypres. They'll be to the French border soon,

and then Paris. What will be the point of Gallipoli if France surrenders?"

"I've got a man right there where the gas attack took place," the Peacemaker replied. "He's young and keen. He'll write a good piece. He actually saw it, and the casualties afterwards. As of the moment, the Ypres Salient is still holding."

"For how long?" Mason said bitterly. "We're bent to breaking, right from Ypres to Verdun and beyond. Austria and Germany have got eight million men mobilized, the French have got only four and a half, and we've got barely seven hundred thousand! Now we have the Turks against us as well."

"I don't know," the Peacemaker admitted. "But the story's in Gallipoli now. If it fails, eventually Churchill will have to go. It may even bring down the government."

Mason stiffened, his eyes widening. There was a sudden flare of hope in him.

The Peacemaker smiled bleakly. "It's only a beginning," he warned. "And we'll pay for it in blood and tears long before it's over. But go out there and find the truth, then write it! I'll see it's published. I have editors in the small papers who have the courage to print an honest report, not the censored rubbish the rest of us get. People are being deceived. There is no choice without knowledge. Truth is the only freedom."

"Yes, it is," Mason said quietly. "But I wish to God sometimes I didn't have to see it in order to write it."

"I'm sure," the Peacemaker agreed. "It isn't cheap. Like everything else of value, it comes at a high price, sometimes everything we've got."

Mason did not argue. If he had to, he was willing to pay.

Chapter Six

Judith was on the deck of the transport steamer on the way back across the Channel. She stared into the luminous shadows over the sea and thought about Mrs. Prentice. If she were anything like Eldon, Judith would find it extremely difficult to be gentle with her or offer her any kindness to conceal how he had been disliked, and worse than that, held in contempt. It would cost her all the self-control she possessed to think only of the engulfing sense of loss any woman must feel for her son.

Judith had never had a child, but she had watched many men die since coming to the Front, and she could still feel the raw pain of her loss for her parents. There had been moments in the house when she had expected to hear her mother's quiet footsteps, or her father's voice talking to the dog. She had half-listened for the car to come back, the old yellow Lanchester, which was now so much mangled metal in some scrap yard, probably still stained with their blood. Surely the thought of that would help her say something to Mrs. Prentice that would be real between them?

The wind smelled salt in her face, and the slap of the water was swift, rhythmic. They were moving quickly. Surely the moonlight would catch the white line of the chalk cliffs of Dover soon.

What if Mrs. Prentice were like the general? Judith could picture his face very clearly, every expression, as if she had known him for years, whereas actually it was only a couple of months. Would Mrs.

Prentice have the same gravity, and the sudden smile, and eyes that looked into your thoughts, but so seldom betrayed their own, but when they did it was as overwhelming as touch?

She heard the soldiers laughing, and then footsteps as one of them came closer. She turned, happy not to be distracted.

"You a nurse, miss?" he asked.

"No, I'm an ambulance driver." Driving the general was not really her job, and they did not need to know about it. Anyway, she would rather not hear their opinion of him, even in the tone of voice on this dark, windy deck where faces were only pale blurs against the spring night.

There was a moment's appreciative silence, then they praised her, teased her and roared with laughter, exuberant with the joy of going home, to see family again, wondering what would have changed, saying anything to break the tension.

The boat landed around dawn and Judith went straight to the railway station for the London train. It was crowded, noisy, slow, like all troop trains, but by nine o'clock she was in London, broad sunshine already warming the pavements.

It was busier and shabbier than she had remembered. There were more cars and fewer horses. She refused to think of the dead horses around Ypres, limbs shattered, carcasses sometimes split wide open, but in spite of her will to blank it out, she remembered Cullingford's eyes when he saw them. In his cavalry days his life had depended on a good horse, and the trust never died.

She bought a newspaper and looked at it quickly, mostly just the headlines, and a few of the lead articles. The war news was first, of course. Most of it concerned the Western Front or the Dardanelles, but there was a little about East Africa.

The facts were there, at least some of them, but it was the words that fascinated her, the talk of courage, honour and sacrifice, soldiers fighting for the right. And, of course, implicit all through was the conviction of ultimate victory. Casualties were given they had to be but the report was nothing like the reality she knew. No one wrote of terror and dirt and pain. It was as if they had gone smiling into the night, clean and dignified.

It was probably necessary. Too much truth and one would scream oneself into paralysis and be no use to anyone. The only way to go on was to think whatever you had to, believe whatever you could, and take it five minutes at a time, then the next, and the next, help what you could reach.

She did not go immediately to the Prentice house. First Judith needed to find a hotel and take a bath, a luxury she had not enjoyed for a long time. She filled the tub as high as she dared, then climbed in and sank up to her chin in the steaming water. She let her mind become totally empty, thinking of nothing at all but the smooth, rippling heat over her skin. She put in soap bubbles and let them seep through her fingers and fall in dollops on her body, stretching her legs up, then down again. It was a big tub, an expensive bathroom, and she drowned her senses in every exquisite moment of it.