At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [85]
“When? Now? Just bewilderment and exhaustion,” Joseph replied. “Tomorrow morning, or next time I see someone I love, or an act of total unselfishness, or courage more than I could manage myself? Then yes, I believe there’s something wiser and better than I am, and infinitely greater. Do I know where I’m going? No. Do you?”
“I’m not sure if anywhere I wish to go exists,” Mason replied.
“Then build it,” Joseph replied. “If you survive, of course,” he added with a smile.
“Is that what you tell your men when they’re dying?” Mason would not give up.
“If it’s what’s needed. Usually it isn’t. Just being there, talking about anything, so they’re not alone.”
“Saying what they need to hear.” Mason turned the words over, still looking at Joseph steadily. “Because you’ve nothing else to say? Charging the guns, obediently, like the Light Brigade at Balaclava, because you don’t know what else to do? Following orders, Chaplain? Aren’t you supposed to be leading?”
Joseph saw the rage and pain in him, the knowledge of darkness closing in, not just at Passchendaele, but everywhere.
“I think the most I can do is keep going,” Joseph told him.
Mason was silent for a long time. “Thank you at least for honesty,” he said at last. “I don’t know how you can survive on that—it isn’t enough.”
“As long as there’s somebody you can touch in the darkness, it has to be enough,” Joseph told him.
Mason did not answer. Slowly he drank the rest of his tea.
Joseph finished his also. He meant what he had said. The fact that he too needed more, just a glimmer of hope that one day there would be an answer he could understand, was none of Mason’s business.
“Yes?” the Peacemaker said urgently as Mason sat in the chair opposite him in the upstairs room in Marchmont Street. “I know all about the losses. It’s the epitome of all we sought so desperately to prevent. I would have given everything I’ve ever had, my own life if it would have helped, to prevent this. Even you don’t have words to describe the horror or the futility of it. What about this trial for mutiny and murder? They have twelve men arrested, you say?”
“Yes.” Mason looked up. He was haggard. His heavy black hair made his skin look even more pallid, almost bloodless, and there was a consuming grief in his eyes as if no passion would ever burn them alive again. The Peacemaker was concerned for him. Could a war correspondent suffer battle fatigue?
“The twelve men with the best motives, apparently, for wanting Major Northrup dead,” Mason answered. “Or—I should say more accurately—removed from command. And since those above him either didn’t know how incompetent he was, or didn’t care, death seems to have been the only way. I imagine, since he was a general’s son, it was beyond the power of Colonel Hook to remove him. The thing is, Captain Cavan, the surgeon up for the V.C., is one of them.”
“Perfect.” The Peacemaker breathed the word like a sigh. “It is so absolutely farcical we couldn’t have created anything more likely to make even the sanest and most blindly loyal of men rebel against this suicidal injustice.” He felt he was on the brink of something that could be used to turn the tide at last.
“There’s word that General Northrup will try to get the charge lessened to one of insubordination, and that Northrup’s death was more of an accident than intentional murder,” Mason warned.
“Really!” The Peacemaker felt a sudden chill. “Why?”
Mason sighed. “Because to prove intent they must prove motive. Doing that will automatically expose Major Northrup’s disastrous incompetence. His father does not want that. And believe me, the men are all loyal to the mutineers. If the charge is kept at murder, they’ll make damned certain Major Northrup is exposed.”
“And does the general know this?” The Peacemaker was fascinated. It opened up possibilities of further mutiny he had hardly dared hope for.
“Yes, of course he does,” Mason replied.
“This is very good,”