At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [55]
Matthew did not answer. Either Thyer was far from the Peacemaker in his philosophy, or his mask was impenetrable. Matthew was driven back again to consider Dermot Sandwell, or Shearing. He had excluded Sandwell once, because evidence had made it seem impossible, but everything within him recoiled from believing it was Shearing.
And yet in his own way the Peacemaker had begun as an idealist. It was not his ultimate aim—peace—that was intolerable, it was the means he was prepared to use, even from the beginning, to obtain it: a betrayal of France and eventually of America, and dominion, in the cause of an enforced peace, that would extend across half the world. Was that better or worse than war?
“Could there be someone behind Wheatcroft’s accusation against Corracher?” he asked aloud.
“Of course there could,” Thyer replied. “But I have no idea who. I can make some highly discreet inquiries, if you wish?”
How much was there to gain, or to lose? Matthew had committed himself already. “Thank you,” he said. “Yes. But be careful, they will think nothing of killing you, should they feel you threaten them.”
Thyer gave the ghost of a smile. “War is full of death,” he said very softly. “It is an occupational hazard.”
Since he was already close, Matthew took the local train to Selbourne St. Giles and spent the night in the old family home with Hannah. It was her husband Archie MacAllister, who had commanded the Cormorant at the Battle of Jutland, where Matthew had killed Patrick Hannassey, just before the burning ship had gone down. Several times he had drifted in and out of consciousness before being picked up. He still woke in the night fighting for breath, beating his way out of a darkness that threatened to crush his lungs, his face, everything in him that longed for life.
It had given him a new closeness to Archie and an understanding of both the horror and the comradeship of the men who faced the real violence of the war, not just the crushing fear of defeat that came from knowing the casualty figures better than most people. He saw reports that the public did not, and knew the shortages, the ever-shifting political alliances and the new threats internationally. He read the reports from agents in Europe and the rest of the Empire.
Before the Battle of Jutland he had only imagined the numbing horror that Joseph saw every day in the trenches. He had had no experience of the exhilaration and the horror of battle, no idea what it did to the mind and body to watch another human being—a man with whom you had shared jokes, food, the long tension of waiting—broken to a bleeding, unrecognizable pulp at your feet. He had never even imagined physical pain of that degree, the indescribable noise, the smell of blood and burning flesh.
After supper he sat quietly with Hannah in the soft summer dusk and watched the last light fade beyond the elms. The fields lay wide and quiet. The garden was overgrown. She had not had time to pull weeds, or to prune, and there were no young men to hire. They were either dead or in France, or like Archie, at sea. There were no delivery boys anymore, hardly any men in shops or banks or even on the land, only those too old to fight, or too ill. Women did the work now, in hospitals, factories, and farms, and they had no time for private gardens. They drove buses, cycled all over the place delivering things. He saw dozens of them on the country roads or out in the fields.
Hannah knew that Matthew’s visit was not simply for pleasure. “The Peacemaker again?” she asked with a twisted little smile. She knitted automatically as she sat, the needles almost soundless in her hands.
He had