Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [50]
“Don’t work yourself into the grave,” he said, almost lightly, but there was a catch in his voice. Corcoran was more than a great man whom he admired intensely, he was a deeply loved friend, a link with the past and all that was precious in it. Memory stretched back into childhood so sweet it held a pain for all that had slipped away with John Reavley’s death, the war, the need to fight at such a hideous price for what they had once taken so lightly for granted. “We couldn’t do without you,” he added.
“Oh, come on!” Corcoran smiled suddenly. “It’s only work! Work is a challenge!” He held up his hand in a fist. “It’s what man was born for—work and love. That’s who we are, isn’t it? A life that doesn’t challenge you to give all you have is only half a life, unworthy of the possibilities of man. Your father would say that, and you know it.”
Matthew looked away, feeling suddenly stripped, and too vulnerable to meet Corcoran’s eyes. If he lost him, too, it would hurt more than he was prepared to face. He must think of something practical to divert the torrent of feeling that threatened to sweep away his balance.
“Shearing said to tell you that if there is anything you need, he’ll get it for you,” he said abruptly. “That might not be quite carte blanche, but it’s close.”
“It’ll do,” Corcoran assured him. “I’ll compile a list. Give me half an hour. I’ll get someone to take you around the place, show you the two or three things that you can be allowed to see—like the canteen and the lavatory! Not that I think for a moment you would understand the rest anyway. But it’s a protection for you as much as for us. Come with me, I’ll find someone.” He went to the door. “Lucas! Come, meet Matthew Reavley from Special Intelligence Services. Show him what you can for half an hour, then bring him back here. Be nice to him. He’s not only my friend; he’s the man who’ll bring us all the tools and funds we want!”
“Well, all there is,” Matthew amended, as he shook hands with Dacy Lucas.
Richard Mason left the nightmare of Verdun behind him, thinking as he rattled over the torn-up roads toward Ypres of what he could write in his report on the slaughter in the French army. Twelve days of incessant rain had made the landscape a sea of mud broken only by skeletonlike limbs of shattered trees and the occasional length of barbed wire.
The French had taken Dead Man’s Hill back from the Germans, a few thousand square yards of hell. The ground, like that of Ypres, was strewn with the blood and bones of both sides. Mason could not see them as essentially different. The rotting corpse of a German soldier did not smell the same as that of an English one, or French. But it was only to do with what they ate, nothing at all with what they believed or cared about, how much they loved, their dreams or their pain.
The whole thing was an obscene parody of what life should be, like something Hieronymus Bosch would have created as a vision of damnation.
The car hit a shell hole in the road and careered to one side, the driver righting it only with difficulty. Ypres was still ten miles away. Mason had not told the man why he wanted to come here. There would be nothing different to see. It was a struggle to make his reports in any way separate from one another, or one lot of dead men unique and identifiable, except to those who had known and loved them.
He was going because here he might see Judith Reavley again, even if only for an hour or two. He had encountered her twice since their first meeting at the Savoy in London nearly a year ago. Both times had been just behind the lines in Flanders.
Once she had been at the side of the road by her ambulance, changing the wheel where one of the tires had obviously burst. He had been in a staff car