Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [122]
Funnily enough, it was his smile that was like hers, the set of his teeth. The memory of her tore inside him. “Did she?” he responded.
“Oh, yes,” Hannassey’s smile widened, colder than the wind over the sea. “You were desperate to trick her into confirming what you guessed about the sabotage of your munition ships. You hoped that if she believed you knew it all anyway, she’d tell you the rest. She gave you nothing! But she learned from you what she needed.”
“Oh? And what was that?” Matthew heard the quiver in his own voice.
“That you’re desperate,” Hannassey replied wolfishly. “You know nothing, you’re guessing and fishing around for proof of anything at all.”
So Detta had told him what Matthew had wanted her to. She had believed the code intact. Then he felt an ice-cold fear for her. Without meaning to, he looked at Hannassey.
Hannassey saw the fear and understood it in a flash of revelation. “You did break it!” he said, his face bleached white. His voice choked in his throat as if he were gagging blood. He lurched forward, hands stretched out to grasp and crush, but the chain on his ankles held him. “Mother of God, do you know what they’ll do to her?” he cried. “They’ll break her knees! My beautiful Detta . . .” He stopped, looking up at Matthew, his eyes burning with hate.
Matthew froze. He knew she would be punished for failure, when at last they found out. He had thought it would be later, a long time, when there was so much lost one more person would not matter.
“She’ll be alive.” He whispered the words, emotion choking him. “My parents are dead, and God knows how many others. You too now, whether this ship goes down or not.” He had nothing more to say. He was sick with the thought of Detta mutilated, never to walk with that easy grace again.
He turned and left without looking back at Hannassey and his pain-twisted face. He heard the guards lock the brig door, but he said nothing to them.
Up in the signal house again he found himself jobs to do, anything to keep his mind busy. He went down to the transmitting station where the fire-control table was continuously recording the data for the range and bearing of whatever enemy ship was targeted. All around the walls were different electrical instruments for sending the information up to the guns, voice pipes and telephones. There were about twenty men there, each with his own job to do.
Up on the deck again he took the glasses and scanned the horizon, trying to force Detta from his mind.
The weather was calm, the swell slight. There was a haze over the water, the wind from the south too little to dispel it completely.
Everyone was looking for something to do to take their thoughts from the mounting tension. All the watertight doors were thoroughly examined, every piece of apparatus was tested and spare parts broken out to be handy if needed in an emergency. Was this going to be it, the big one at last? Perhaps by this time tomorrow it would be over. Trench warfare went on and on, a battle of slow wearing down, death month by month, a matter of who could survive the longest.
Here at sea the war could be lost in a day because without naval supremacy, Britain was finished.
The afternoon passed slowly, minute by minute. Matthew obeyed his occasional orders and waited, watching Ragland’s face, his self-controlled calm. What was he thinking? Did his stomach churn with fear, too, imagination of physical pain, of not being good enough, clever enough, quick enough, above all brave enough?
What about Archie on the bridge? In the final count it all depended on him. A hundred and twenty-seven men. Would he make the right decisions?
It was just short of four o’clock in the afternoon when they saw the smoke of gunfire on the horizon and after that, sighted the rest of the fleet spread across the sea to the east. Bugles and drums sounded the general march to call all hands to battle stations. Within minutes every station reported