No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [51]
“There is no time,” he said in a hard, level voice. “Events will not wait. If you can’t see that, you’re a fool! We must use it within the next few days, or it will be too late.”
“One copy—”
“I have to have both! I can hardly offer him one!”
“I’ll get another,” the man offered.
The Peacemaker’s face was white. “You can’t!”
The other man straightened as if to leave immediately. “I’ll go back tonight.”
“It won’t help.” The Peacemaker held up his hand. “The kaiser is in a rage. You’ll get nothing. You might even lose what we have.” It was spoken with the unmistakable tone of a command.
The other man breathed in and out slowly several times, but he did not argue. There was anger in his face, and frustration, but it was not with the man known as the Peacemaker; it was with the circumstances he was forced to accept.
“You dealt with the other matter?” the Peacemaker asked, his voice little more than a whisper. There was pain in his face.
“Yes,” the man replied.
“How did he get hold of it, anyway?” the Peacemaker asked, sharp frown lines between his brows.
“He was the one who wrote it,” the other man answered.
“Wrote?” The demand was peremptory.
“Such things have to be written by hand,” the man explained. “It’s the law.”
“Damn!” the Peacemaker swore, just one word, but it carried a weight of passion, as if it were torn out of him with physical pain. He bent forward a little, his shoulders high, his muscles tight. “It shouldn’t have happened this way! We shouldn’t have let it! Reavley was a good man, the sort we need alive!”
“Can’t be helped,” the other explained with resignation.
“It should have been!” the Peacemaker grated, hard bitterness undisguised. “We’ve got to do better.”
The other man flinched a little. “We’ll try.”
Late on Saturday afternoon Matthew drove from London back to St. Giles. It had been an unpleasant day, not from any cause that he had expected, such as news from Ireland or the Balkans, but from an increasingly immediate domestic problem. A bomb had been found in a church in the heart of Westminster, with the fuse lit. Apparently it had been the work of a group of women who were agitating in increasingly violent ways to be given the right to vote.
Fortunately no one had been hurt, but the possibility of destruction was deeply disturbing. It had meant Matthew had been drawn from his investigation of Blunden and the political weapons that might have been used against him. Instead he had been busy all day with increasing the security in London itself, and had had to ask Shearing for permission to leave, which would not ordinarily have been the case on a weekend.
His sense of exhilaration as he drove out of the heat and enclosure of the city was like an escape from captivity. He felt almost intoxicated as the Sunbeam Talbot accelerated on the open road.
The weather was fine, another golden evening with great puffball clouds piling up in the east, with the sun blazing on them till they drifted like white galleons in the shimmering air, sails full set to the horizon. Beneath them the fields were already ripe with harvest.
The light deepened across the broader skies of the fenland, almost motionless in the amber of sunset.
Matthew drove into St. Giles, along the main street past the shining millpond, and turned along the road to the house. Mrs. Appleton met him at the front door and her face lit with pleasure.
“Oh, Mr. Matthew, it’s good you’re here. An’ you’ll be staying?” She stepped back to allow him in, just as Judith came down the stairs, having heard the crunch of car tires on the gravel.
Judith ran down the last couple of steps, Henry at her heels, his tail aloft. She threw her arms around Matthew, giving him a quick, fierce hug. Then she pulled back and looked at him more carefully.
“Yes, of course I’m staying,” he said to Mrs. Appleton over Judith’s shoulder. “At least until lunchtime tomorrow.”
“Is that all?” Judith demanded. “It’s Saturday evening now! Do they expect you to work all the time?”
He did not bother to argue. It was a discussion