Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [17]
It was five days since they had last met, but he did not tell her he had been counting. He must not let her know it mattered so much, or she would be suspicious. Whatever he felt—and it was far more than he wanted to—it must never affect his judgment. He could not afford to forget for an instant that they were on opposite sides. She was an Irish Nationalist, with sympathy for Germany, and perhaps any other enemy of England. Only here, in the lights, the laughter, the music, they pretended it did not matter.
He paid for her drink and another for himself, and they walked over to one of the few free tables.
“I went back to Cambridgeshire,” he explained. “My brother was wounded rather badly and they sent him home.”
Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry.” She said it instantly, without time to consider loyalties or causes. “How is he?”
The girl in the blue dress was singing again, a sad, angry little song with downward-falling notes.
“Better than many, I suppose,” Matthew answered. He could be reasonably dispassionate about other people—one had to be—but seeing Joseph gray-faced and obviously in appalling pain had shaken him more deeply than he had been prepared for. It brought back the memory of his parents’ broken bodies after the car crash. The police had called it an accident and nothing public had ever suggested otherwise.
To talk about numbers of losses was one thing; to see the blood and the pain in real people was quite different. He understood very well why soldiers ran away rather than take cold steel in their hands and plunge it into another human being. The fact that that other man was German was irrelevant. He was flesh and bone, capable of exactly the same emotions as themselves. Perhaps for some the nightmares would never entirely go. He did not want to be the kind of man for whom they would. He was intensely grateful that his job had never required him to meet his enemy face to face and exercise the violence of death. He did not delude himself that he was somehow absolved from the results of any victory he might win, and of course he was not; he was merely spared from the sight and the memory of it.
Detta was looking at him curiously. He caught in her eyes an unguarded moment of compassion.
“He’s a chaplain,” he said quickly, to explain that Joseph was not a soldier. Although since he was Protestant, not Catholic, perhaps in her eyes that would be even worse. He found himself smiling at the lunacy of it; it was that or rage, or tears. “A shell ripped his leg open and smashed his arm pretty badly, but the doctor says he’ll not lose it.”
She winced. “I suppose he’s in considerable pain,” she said gently.
“Yes.” He needed to go on; the next thing had to be said, but he hated it. “The casualties are heavy at the moment. He was out over no-man’s-land carrying back a pretty badly wounded soldier, someone from our own village—not that that makes any difference, I suppose. We’re desperately short of ammunition. We’re having to ration it, so many bullets per man. They’re being shot at, and they can’t shoot back. We’re buying stuff from America, but it’s being sabotaged at sea, and when it gets here it’s no bloody use!” There was more anger in his voice than he had meant there to be, and his hand on the table next to his glass was clenched tight. He must think clearly. He was here to do a job, not to indulge his fury.
“Sabotaged?” She affected surprise, her dark eyes wide. “The Americans would never do that, surely?”
“At sea,” he corrected her.
“At sea? How?” She did not disguise her interest.
That made it easier. Now they were playing the game again, threading the lies in with the truth, testing each other, tying the knots of emotion tighter and tighter.
“Smoke bombs,” he answered. “Pack them in the hold, along with the shells, and set them to go off when the ship’s at sea. It looks like fire. Then, of course, the captain has no choice but to flood the holds, and the shells are damaged. Not all of them, and there’s no way to tell which. From the outside they