Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [55]
He reached the door he was looking for and rang the bell. He was shown upstairs by a manservant. Here again after a full year in which so much had happened, Mason felt self-conscious. The whole world was drawn in and seemed bent on slaughter, except the Americas. Only they remained the same, huge and aloof, blanketed in peace and prosperity while Europe drowned in its own blood.
Now he had returned to the Peacemaker’s house. Nothing had changed in the hallway or the landing. The walls were the same soft red. The same pictures were still hanging, landscape masterpieces of mountains and lakes, country by-roads, fields with great trees and quiet cows beneath them. There was even the same Chinese porcelain ginger jar on the stand at the top of the stairs.
The Peacemaker himself looked no different, either, except perhaps around the eyes. He was more tired, more guarded. Something of the fire was spent, but when Mason looked more closely he knew the determination was the same.
The Peacemaker held out his hand. “Good to see you, Mason. How are you? Tired, I imagine. Tea, or whisky? I have a good Glenmorangie if you’d like it.”
Mason declined. “But tea would be excellent.”
“Earl Grey?”
“Thank you.”
The Peacemaker gave instructions, adding the request for sandwiches as well, then returned, closing the door and inviting Mason to sit down. “I imagine Verdun was worse than you wrote in your dispatch?” he said quietly.
“Everything is worse than I write,” Mason answered. He knew roughly why the Peacemaker had summoned him. Russia, of course, but to do what? Mason believed in the same cause, with a passion even deeper and more consuming than before, but he was not prepared to bring it to pass in the same way. Watching the slaughter at Verdun until he could hear the guns in his dreams and taste blood, there was still no such thing as “peace at any price.” Some prices in their very nature made peace impossible, except in a way that could not last. He had said as much last year.
Was it conceivable that the Peacemaker had finally realized this himself?
Mason looked at the man opposite him with a kind of desperate hope. He had the intelligence, the power, and the vision to stop it! Personal feelings, likes and dislikes, even individual pride, were nothing compared with that gain, if it were possible.
“You can’t tell people what it’s really like,” he finished quietly. “The only pain of it we know is in the broken bodies that return, and the faces of the women who have lost their men.”
The Peacemaker sat motionless, his mouth drawn into a tight grip of pain. “We came close to stopping it, Mason,” he said softly, his voice thick with emotion. “We missed by hours! God knows what absurd chance made Reavley find that treaty, or what quixotic idiocy made him take it.” He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “But we have to deal with what we have now. That much of the past is irrelevant. It’s blood under the bridge,” he said with a bitter smile. “The situation is approaching a crisis. That is why I asked you to come.”
As the Peacemaker leaned forward, his face caught the light. “We are bogged down in France and Flanders, losing a thousand men a day! Gallipoli was a disaster. Italy may survive, but it hangs in the balance. The news from German East Africa is not good. Van Deventer is leading twelve hundred men to Kondoa Irangi, but the going is hard and they are being decimated by disease. In Mesopotamia our forces have still not lifted the siege of Kut and saved our men inside. The Tigris Corps’ casualties number about ten thousand men! That’s a quarter of Aylmer’s total force, which means it’s a loss all together of twenty-three thousand.”
Mason had not known the figures. They were far