No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [110]
Slowly the plan had moved from a dream, lightly touched on, into a wish, and finally a reality. He still felt a little like a man who had created a unicorn in his imagination, only to walk into his garden one day and find one grazing there, milk-white, with cloven hooves and silver horn—a living and breathing animal.
“We haven’t found a second copy,” the Peacemaker answered grimly. “At least not yet. I’ve done a certain amount to discredit John Reavley. I wish it hadn’t been necessary.” He looked sharply at Mason as he saw the alarm in his eyes. “Nothing overt!” he snapped. “We need to give it time for the dust to settle.” His mouth pinched unhappily, a shadow in his eyes. “Sometimes the sacrifice is heavy,” he said softly. “But if he had understood, I think he would have paid it willingly. He was not an arrogant man, certainly not greedy, and not a fool, but he was simplistic. He believed what he wanted to, and there is no use arguing with a man like that. A pity. We could have used him otherwise.”
Mason felt a heaviness settle on him, too, an ache of regret inside him. But he had seen the devastation of war and human cruelty in the Balkans only a year ago, between Turkey and Bulgaria, and the memory of it still soaked his nightmares in horror and he woke trembling and drenched in sweat.
Before that, as a younger man he had gone east and reported the eyewitness accounts of the Japanese sinking of the entire Russian fleet in 1905. Thousands of men were buried in steel coffins under the trackless water, nothing remaining but the stunned loss, the grief of families from half a continent.
Earlier still, on the first foreign assignment of his career, he had watched the farmers on the veldt in Africa, the pitiable dispossessed, wending their slow way across the endless open plains. He had watched the women and children die.
None of it must happen again, Richard Mason vowed to himself. One should not permit such things to happen to other human beings. “A statesman has to think of individuals,” he said.
“We have other things to consider,” the Peacemaker said. “Without the document war may be inevitable. We must do what we can to make sure that it is quick and clean. There are many possibilities, and I have plans in place, at least on the home front. We can still have tremendous effect.”
“I imagine it will be brief,” Mason concurred. “Especially if Schlieffen’s plan works. But it will be bloody. Thousands will be slaughtered.” He used the word bitterly and deliberately.
The Peacemaker’s smile was thin. “Then it is even more important that we ensure it is as short as possible. I have been giving it a great deal of thought over the last few days—since the document was taken, in fact.” A sudden fury gripped him, clenching his body and draining the blood from his face until his skin was pallid and his eyes glittered. “Damn Reavley!” his voice choked on the name. “Damn him to hell! If he’d just kept out of it, we could have prevented this! Tens of thousands of lives are going to be lost! For what?” He flung his hand out, fingers spread wide enough to have played over an octave with ease. “It didn’t have to happen!” He gulped in air and carefully steadied himself, breathing in and out several times until his color returned and his shoulders relaxed.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t bear to think of the ruin of a way of life that is the culmination of millennia of civilization—all unnecessary! How many widows will there be? How many orphans? How many mothers waiting for their sons who will never come home from a war they didn’t ask for and didn’t want?”
“I know,” Mason said almost under his breath. “Why do you think I’m doing this? It’s like drinking poison, but the only alternative is a slow journey into hell from which we won’t come back.”
“You’re right,” the Peacemaker responded, turning toward the light streaming in through the window. “I know! I’m heartsick that we came so close and lost it