At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [77]
“You lift. I’ll drive,” she replied. “Better that way. I can’t lift for toffee! Thanks.” She had the wood ready—broken pieces from a dead tree and a couple of lengths of old sacking.
“Go on then,” Wil directed. “One, two, three!”
The ambulance rocked and heaved level. Judith threw the wood and sacking in and it settled down again. She ran to the driver’s seat and scrambled in. Wil moved Culshaw out of the way, then cranked the handle and they moved forward at last.
“Right!” Wil yelled, jumping backward. “Let’s get them in again!”
She left the engine on, brake tight, and scrambled back to lift the stretchers in again to a cheer, and then to help Culshaw back into the seat.
She drove without incident the rest of the way. It seemed to take hours—but it was probably not more than forty-five minutes longer. A strange doctor, white-faced and obviously harassed, took the wounded in. The last man was already dead. Judith and Wil got back into the ambulance and started for the front again, this time with Wil in the front.
“We’ll get Cavan back,” he said when they were half a mile from the dressing station. “We’ll find a way. He can’t have been the one who shot Northrup. He must be covering for someone. It’ll come out.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, glancing sideways at him, although she could see nothing more than his outline in the dark.
“We’ve got to make it!” he said grimly. “If General Northrup could find out who the twelve most likely are, then we have to be able to find out why, as well. They’d never have done it without a hell of a good reason. We’ve got to find the people who’ll swear to it.”
“And take it to Northrup?” she asked. Her stomach knotted up with fear at the thought of it.
“You game?” Wil said, touching her arm for a moment.
She swallowed and felt her heart beating in her throat. “Of course.”
On the final trip of the night she found Joseph at the field dressing station. He helped her with the last stretcher. The man was already dead from his wounds. Defeat overwhelmed her, and a sense that everything was slipping out of the last trace of control that she had.
“If we could have taken him to Cavan’s dressing station he’d have been alive!” she said furiously, tears choking her. “But those men are bleeding to death because he’s locked up in some damn farmhouse waiting to go on trial and be shot over that idiot Northrup!” She stared at him defiantly. “Why couldn’t you leave your stupid conscience out of it and just keep your mouth shut? You didn’t have to tell Colonel Hook it was a kangaroo trial! You could just have said you didn’t know! Why can’t you ever leave well enough alone?”
Joseph looked so tired his skin was gray in the early daylight, the stubble dark on his chin. There was no light in his eyes at all.
“I had to tell him something close to the truth, or he could too easily find out I was lying,” he answered her.
“Don’t tell him anything at all!” she shouted back. “Why didn’t you just say you didn’t know? He can’t force you!”
Joseph looked down at the muddy boards they were standing on. “I thought if General Northrup knew it was at least a dozen men, a court-martial, not a private murder, he’d be so ashamed he’d let it drop rather than leave his son so disgraced. It would have been better for everyone. Otherwise he could just have found the worst enmity, the man he thought unjust, and blamed him. He isn’t going to let it go.”
“He isn’t now!” she retorted. “He’s charged Cavan, and we’ve got to take wounded men twice as far to get them treated—and they’re dying, Joseph! They’re dying, when they don’t have to!”
“I know….”
She felt guilty for attacking him when he was so obviously blaming himself anyway, but she was too angry and too frightened to stop. “We’ve got to save Cavan. What are we going to do?” She tried to moderate her voice a little, hearing the shrill edge to it. “Does Northrup really want it to come out that his son caused all those people’s deaths? If we can prove it, find