Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [118]
“What can I do for you, Captain Reavley?” he said with barely concealed impatience. “I really know nothing of use to military intelligence. As you may have noticed, it is something we have very little of around here.”
“We don’t have any to spare in Ypres either,” Joseph replied. “But this is to do with something that happened before the war, in Germany, and I’ve been told that you are familiar with the details.”
“I was in Germany before the war,” Mynott agreed, frowning. The sky was fading at his back, the color bleached out, silver bars of light on the water interspersed with pools of shadow, the vast horizon melting into the night.
“You knew a man named Ivor Chetwin,” Joseph went on, forcing his concentration back to the present. They were on a long escarpment where the ground was too hard to dig more than a few inches. How anyone, even a madman, had thought soldiers could storm up these hills in the face of shells, mortars, and machine-gun fire was beyond imagination.
“Not very well,” Mynott answered. “Met him perhaps half a dozen times.”
“He was betrothed to Princess Adelheid von Gantzau.”
“Yes.” Mynott’s expression was guarded.
“Can you tell me something about her father?” Joseph asked. “He and Chetwin were close, I believe, and Gantzau was a friend of the kaiser.”
“Do you suspect Chetwin of something?” Mynott was blank.
“I can’t tell you. Please, the matter is of the greatest importance.”
Mynott regarded Joseph with curiosity and it was quite a long time before he answered. “I don’t know what you have been told,” he said slowly, seeming to pick his words with deliberate care. “But most of the story is true. Gantzau was a friend of the German royal family, and certainly he knew Schenckendorff and many of the others like him who had political ambitions and strong ideas.” He winced slightly as he moved and the pain in his arm shot through him. “But in Europe before the war all sorts of people knew each other. I knew many of them myself. After all, our king and the kaiser are first cousins. Don’t read anything into that.”
“And Reisenburg?” Joseph asked.
“Yes. Why?”
“Chetwin knew Reisenburg? Are you sure?”
Mynott squinted at him. “You said it as if you want the answer to be no, but you’re afraid it’s yes.”
Someone walked past them in the dark. The smell of tobacco smoke was sharp in the air, and crushed wild thyme where their boots trod on it. He passed, not much more than a shadow. There was sporadic gunfire. Were it not for the starlight over the sea, and the sharp slope of the hill, Joseph could have imagined himself back in Ypres.
“I need to know,” he said aloud.
Mynott caught the urgency in his voice. “Look, Captain, Chetwin fell in love with Adelheid. She was young, beautiful, and full of life. He was older, but he was vigorous and highly intelligent. Her family were reasonably happy about it.”
“I heard he was engaged to marry her?” Joseph asked.
“Do you want the story, Captain, or just the end?” Mynott said testily.
Joseph apologized.
Someone coughed a few yards below them on the hill, and the smell of smoke drifted up in the air. Seabirds were circling high overhead, riding the currents of warmer air in the very last light.
Mynott resumed the tale. “The affair became serious, and indiscreet. Adelheid was with child. That was the point at which the family insisted Chetwin marry her. It grew unpleasant.” Mynott shrugged, but Joseph could see only the faintest movement in the near darkness. “Chetwin refused.”
“He refused?” Joseph was horrified, not only for the dishonor of such an act, but because it made no sense of the information Matthew had given him. “What did Gantzau do?” He leaned forward. “Why did Chetwin refuse? Surely he didn’t doubt the child was his?” The situation seemed uglier with every new fact.
Mynott’s voice was tired and strained with pain.
“I don’t know. But he told me that Adelheid did not want to marry him, and he believed there had been someone else she cared for far more, but who couldn