A Lesson in Secrets_ A Maisie Dobbs Novel - Jacqueline Winspear [91]
Maisie nodded again, and waited a moment before putting forward her next question. “And were the books—the three written during the war—so controversial that they would have led to his dismissal?”
“He tendered his resignation to follow other pursuits, one of which was to found a college to promote peace, as you know.”
Maisie reached for her lemonade again, taking one or two sips before she pressed Henderson. “But do you think it might have come to it that Dr. Liddicote felt he had to leave, given that feelings were running high regarding his work?”
As Henderson looked down at his hands, the folds of skin on his face seemed to concertina into a soft place for his chin to rest. He sighed and looked up at Maisie. “If you’re asking whether he was pushed or whether he fell, let us simply say that he fell, but there was a heavy hand at his back.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Indeed.”
“And if—in confidence, I assure you—you had to make a considered guess regarding the three books at the heart of this controversy, would you say that they could have been written by someone else?”
Henderson sighed again. “How I hate the feeling of being cornered. Makes me feel a bit like I’ve been ambushed.”
“I’m sorry, Professor Henderson. I beg your pardon, it was just that I wondered, in your opinion, whether—”
“The answer is yes, Miss Dobbs. Greville Liddicote had a very pedestrian writing style, whether we are talking about the task of composing an academic paper or the art of storytelling. Those books, especially the first, were not written by an author with a pedestrian style.”
“I see. So Greville Liddicote did not leave his teaching position simply because of what he wrote, but because you did not believe he had written it.”
“I think I’ve said more than enough, Miss Dobbs.” Henderson reached for a bell on his desk. “More lemonade before you depart?”
Maisie declined, and Henderson accompanied her to the door, at which point she decided to press her luck. “You’ve been so generous with your time, Professor Henderson, I wonder if I might put just one more question to you?”
“Well, if it’s not—”
“There’s talk that Dr. Liddicote’s book caused what amounted to a mutiny in the war, that the book went around the soldiers and the effect of the story caught on like fire in a tinderbox—I’ve heard they just put down their weapons and started walking off the battlefield. Do you know if there’s any truth to the story? Certainly Dr. Roth was affected by reading the book while in the German trenches.”
Henderson seemed tired as he answered; his voice had deepened, and he spoke slowly. “Miss Dobbs, no one will ever know about the subject of mutiny in a time of war—well, not for years, in any case. There will be rumor, conjecture, a word from an old soldier here or there, but those stories will be quashed, they will die a quiet death, and any official reports kept under lock and key, so it will be generations before any truths are known about such things. I am an old man now, but in my time I have seen all sorts of books taken from circulation on the instructions of ‘official sources,’ so I know what I’m talking about. There were rumors of a mutiny—there are some who maintain that it was just a few men here and there, and a few on the other side. And there are those who say they saw what happened—a full-scale mutiny involving hundreds of soldiers from both sides. All it took was for the book to be thrown into no-man’s-land for a German soldier to find and the effects of the story multiplied. It is believed in some quarters that more than just one or two men were executed, and that there was something of a massacre—all because men in uniform were touched by a story of innocents on the battlefield. I suppose, if there is a grain of truth in the stories, the book touched a nerve regarding the futility of the whole mess. But that is only my opinion. Of course, it makes one man shine out, in my opinion.”
“And who is that?”
“Dunstan Headley. He lost