Shoulder the Sky (9 page)

"Good morning, Uncle Owen," he said almost challengingly. "As you can observe, I have been assaulted. You don't seem to have much discipline over your troops."

Cullingford had intended not to be annoyed by him, and already he had lost. He could feel his temper tighten. "I see men injured far more seriously every day, Eldon. If you don't know the casualty figures, wounded and dead, then you are not doing your job. If you need medical attention, then go and get it. If you are looking for sympathy, mine is already taken up by soldiers who have had their arms and legs blown off, or their bellies torn open. It seems as if your worst injury is a chipped tooth."

"I assume your soldiers were wounded by enemy fire?" Prentice said stiffly. "I was assaulted by an ambulance driver! An American, for heaven's sake!"

"Yes, we have a few American volunteers," Cullingford agreed. "They are here at their own expense, living in pretty rough conditions, they eat army rations and sleep when and where they can. I think it is one of the highest forms of nobility I have seen. They give everything, and ask little in return."

Prentice hesitated, uncertain for a moment how to answer. Cullingford's reply had taken the impetus out of his fury. "I suppose you have no power to exert any kind of discipline over them," he said finally.

"Never needed to," Cullingford replied straight away, a very tiny smile on his lips.

"Well, you need to now!" Prentice said in sudden fury. "The man has an ungovernable temper. He went berserk. Lost any kind of control."

"Who else did he attack?" Cullingford enquired.

The blood rushed up Prentice's uninjured cheek. "No one, but there was hardly anyone else there! It was only the chaplain who prevented him from killing me, and he wasn't in any hurry. Not much of a chaplain, if you ask me."

"I didn't ask you," Cullingford snapped. "You're not a child any more, Eldon, to come running to your parents if someone picks a quarrel with you. Deal with your own problems. No one admires a sneak. I thought seven years at Wellington would have taught you that. And in Flanders I am not your uncle, I am the general in charge of this corps. I have one hundred and thirty thousand men, many dead or wounded, replacements to find, food and munitions to transport and, please God, some way to hold the line against the enemy. I haven't time to attend to your squabbles with an ambulance driver. Don't come to me with it again."

Prentice was livid, but he forced himself to relax his body, shifting his weight to stand more elegantly, as if he were perfectly at ease. "Actually what I came for, Uncle Owen, "was to ask you to give me a letter of authority to go forward to the front lines, or anywhere else I need to, to get the best story. I know correspondents are a bit limited, and pretty well any officer can arrest them, even the damned chaplain, who probably doesn't know a gun from a golf club. This one actually threatened me!"

"No," Cullingford said without needing even to consider it. "You have exactly the same privileges and limitations as all other correspondents." He was not going to be twisted by family loyalties into giving Prentice an advantage. Abigail should not expect it. The boy had lost his father a few years ago, but he was thirty-three, and indulgence would not help him. At the time of his father's death that had made him unusual; now to keep a father into adulthood at all was a privilege far too many would not have.

"I imagine you know Captain Reavley," Prentice said without making any move to go.

"You're mistaken," Cullingford replied. "I've met him a couple of times. Two divisions is over a hundred and thirty thousand men. I know very few of them personally, and those I do are the fighting officers and the senior staff officers concerned with transport and replacements."

There was a very slight smile on Prentice's face, no more than a sheen of satisfaction. "I was thinking of a more personal basis," he answered. "He must be related to your VAD driver, isn't he? Reavley's not such a common name, and I thought I detected a faint resemblance."

Cullingford felt a sudden wave of heat wash over him. There was really very little likeness that he could see between Judith and Joseph Reavley. He was dark and she was fair, her face was so much sorter than his, so feminine. Perhaps there was something similar in the directness of the eyes, an angle to the head and a way of smiling, rather than the structure of bones.

Prentice was watching him. He must answer. He was conscious of guilt, and being desperately vulnerable. He was not used to having emotions he could not control, or defend.

"They are brother and sister," he answered, keeping his voice level, not so casual as to seem forced. "If you think that means he is around here any more than his duties require, you have very little grasp of the army, or the nature of war."

"She's beautiful," Prentice observed, 'in a kind of way. Very much a woman. If she were my sister, driving a middle-aged man around, I'd be over here pretty often out of concern for her." He shifted his weight to his other foot, and smiled a fraction more. "In fact, since she's a volunteer, and could do or not do whatever she wanted, I'd make sure she didn't get into that sort of position."

Cullingford felt the heat rise up his face, and was furious with himself for not being able to hide it. He knew it was burningly visible because Prentice recognized it immediately. The triumph was brilliant in his eyes.

"But then perhaps the good chaplain doesn't know that you're married," he said quietly. "And I don't suppose for a moment that he'd connect Aunt Nerys's previous tragedy with you. After all, her name was Mallory then, and it was more her husband's name and poor young Sarah Whitstable's that were spread all over the newspapers. They can be very cruel: "Middle-aged man runs off with sixteen-year-old daughter of Tory peer"; "Double suicide leap off cliffs at Beachy Head", or wherever it was. "Bodies dashed to pieces on the rocks below." Poor Aunt Nerys! If she knew you were being driven around by a beautiful, hot-headed twenty-four-year-old she'd start the nightmares all over again. But I'm sure Captain Reavley doesn't know that!"

Cullingford felt the room swim around him, as if it had been rocked by heavy artillery fire. It was a physical blurring, even though it was created by an emotional shock. Prentice was blackmailing him! There was no smile on his face, no wavering in his bold, clear blue eyes. He meant it!

There was also no defence. Cullingford had never said or done anything even remotely improper with Judith. He had never touched her, not even called her by her Christian name. It was all in his imagination, in the momentary meeting of eyes, things that had not needed words: a shared appreciation of a great sweep of sky across the west, gilded by the fading sun, cloud-racks of searing beauty that hurt and healed with the same touch; understanding of laughter and pain; the knowledge when to be silent.

His guilt was deeper than acts: it was a betrayal of the heart. And yet the loneliness had been slowly killing him. He had protected Nerys at a cost to himself greater than he had realized before. Perhaps it was his fault too, for allowing her to live in a world cocooned from reality, but he had left it too late to change it now. Nerys was at home, in another life. Judith was here; she was the one who had seen the grotesque ruin of no man's land, the mud, the ice-rimmed craters with the limbs of dead men poking up as if in some last, desperate hold on life. He did not need to reach after impossible explanations for her, or speak with words that were too raw still to bear it.

"I only want a letter." Prentice was talking again, unable to wait. "Just something to stop them hedging me in. I'm doing my job! And, of course, I'll share anything I get with the other correspondents." He put his good hand in his pocket, in a possibly unconscious imitation of Cullingford's stance when he was at ease, moments he might have remembered before the war. "Thanks. It'll help a lot."

Cullingford would like to have thrown him out, possibly even physically, but he could not afford to. There was steel inside Prentice. He wanted to succeed. If he were prevented in a way he imagined unfair, he would bring down anyone he felt to blame. He would not care who else he hurt, but that it included Cullingford would please him. Cullingford had never liked him. He had tried, and failed. Perhaps he had not tried very hard he was not a man to whom relationships were easy. Only Judith had crashed through his self-protective guard. She had put no artificial limits to her own feelings, no bounds at all to what she was prepared to know or to see. And then when she was hurt by it, her very hold on endurance, the courage to hope and purpose threatened, it was his strength she needed.

"I'll give you a letter of authority," he conceded, hating himself for such surrender. "But you can still be arrested if you get in anyone's way."

"I dare say that'll do," Prentice replied with the sharp relish of victory in his voice, making it high and a little abrupt. "At least for now. Thank you .. . Uncle Owen."

Cullingford did not look at him. It was only when the letter was written and Prentice had put it rather awkwardly in his pocket with his one hand, and then gone out, that Cullingford realized that his muscles were clenched with the effort of self-control and the anger inside him was making him hold his breath.

Hadrian was standing in the doorway waiting for instructions. His face was watchful, his eyes unhappy. How well did he really know Prentice? Well enough to have believed blackmail of him?

"If Mr. Prentice comes again," Cullingford told him, "I don't want to see him. In fact, so help me God, if I never see him again it will suit me very well!"

Hadrian stared at him, his face dark with emotion. "Yes, sir," he said quietly. "I'll see to it."

Cullingford turned away, suddenly embarrassed. He had not meant to reveal so much. "Will you tell Miss Reavley to get the car ready? I need to go to Zillebeke in half an hour."

"Yes, sir," Hadrian said.

Sam Wetherall sat on the fire-step in the sun, a packet of Woodbines in his hand. It was nearly five o'clock. He was smiling, but the sharp, warm light picked out the crusted mud along the line of his jaw, and the deep weariness around his eyes.

"There was Barshey Gee sitting there cleaning his rifle," he said wryly, 'and holding this long philosophical discussion with the German captain, all very reasonable and patient, explaining to him how he was wrong. Apparently he'd been doing it for days. The German was lying with his head and shoulders sticking out of the ground about a foot below the top of the parapet."

"Days?" Joseph stared at him in horror.

Sam shrugged, grinning. "Oh, he was dead! No one had dared to climb over the top to dislodge him." He raised his eyebrows. "Which brings to mind, Jerry's awfully quiet this afternoon. Wonder what he's up to." He cocked his head a little sideways, listening.

"It's been quiet for a while." Joseph realized he had heard no sniper fire for more than an hour. That was not unusual when there was a Saxon or South German regiment opposite them. They, like some of the English regiments, were inclined to 'live and let live'. However, there were others who were far more belligerent, and there had recently been a change on the German side, so this quiet was unexpected.

Sam stood up, bending his head to keep it low, and moving over to Whoopy Teversham standing on sentry duty. "What can you see?" he asked.

Whoopy was concentrating on the periscope in his hands and did not look away. "Not much, sir. Word is this lot's pretty tough. Oi 'aven't seen a thing. Could be all asleep, from anything Oi can tell."

Sam took the periscope from him and stared through it, his shoulders hunched and tense. Slowly he swivelled it around to look right along their own lines, then across no man's land again. He gave it back to Whoopy and stepped down on to the duckboards.

"Wind's changed," he said with a shrug. "Blowing our way'

"I know that," Joseph answered ruefully. "Smells different."

Sam rolled his eyes. "You can tell one lot of dead men from another?"

"Of course I can," Joseph replied. "You don't have to carry a rifle to have a nose. And the latrines are behind us, not in front."

"The subtlety of it." Sam expressed mock admiration.

"Oi can't see the trenches!" Whoopy interrupted sharply, his voice touched with alarm. "There's a sort of cloud! Only it's on the ground, and Oi think it's coming this way. Bit to the north of us, up Polecappelle."

"What do you mean "cloud"?" Sam demanded, his voice edgy. "What sort of cloud?"

"Greenish-white," Whoopy replied. "It's koind of drifting over no man's land. Maybe it's camouflage, hoi ding a raiding party?" Now there was alarm in his voice as well, high-pitched and urgent. He swung round the butt of his rifle to clang on an empty shell case, and at the same moment gongs sounded along the trench to the north and west.

Men scrambled to their feet, seizing weapons, preparing for a wave of enemy troops over the top. Joseph saw Plugger Arnold with his odd boots, and Tucky Nunn and Barshey Gee, Charlie's brother. Then there was silence, a long breathless waiting.

He stood as well, crouching a little, back to the wall. An afternoon raid was unusual, but he knew what to expect. There would be a shout of warning, shots, shellfire, wounded men, some dead. He would be there to help carry those that might be saved. Trying to manoeuvre a stretcher in the short, narrow lengths of duckboard, around the jagged corners was ghastly. But they had been built precisely so an enemy could not get a long range of fire and decimate a score of men in one raking barrage. It was worth the sacrifice. Most of the wounded would be carried on their comrades' backs.