Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [119]
“But he was engaged to marry her!” Joseph insisted. Surely Matthew could not be mistaken in so simple a fact?
“Her parents insisted,” Mynott replied. “I don’t know whether the child was his or not. The parents thought it was and they forced him into an engagement.”
“Forced?”
“He would have been politically ruined if they made it known he had taken advantage of a noblewoman, twenty years younger than he, got her pregnant, and then abandoned her.” Mynott was impatient with Joseph and contemptuous of Chetwin. “It would ruin her, and her father would make damn sure it took him down, too.”
That was easy enough to believe. “But he didn’t marry her!” Joseph pressed.
“No. She miscarried the child. It was very bad. She bled to death.” Joseph could not see Mynott’s face in the darkness, but he could hear the pity rasping in his voice, and for a blinding moment all his own loss returned to him, as if the carefully nurtured skin had been ripped off his wound. It was as if Eleanor and his own child had died only yesterday. It seemed absurd to sit here in this harsh grass of Anzac Cove, where the earth and the sea were stained with the blood of thousands of men, and still feel such overwhelming sadness for individual losses from a past that seemed to have disappeared into a life that was like a dream from which one had permanently awoken.
“What happened to Chetwin?” He forced himself back to the present.
“He left Germany, and would be a damn fool ever to go back there,” Mynott answered. “Anyone near the court would string him up by the . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.
“I see.”
“Is that helpful?”
“It . . . it proves the theory is wrong,” Joseph said with surprise, and a strange, dizzy sense of relief, which was absurd. They must find the Peacemaker, for John and Alys Reavley, for Sebastian, for Reisenburg, and now for Cullingford. He had not been beaten because the treaty was taken from him before it could be presented to the king. No one knew if the king would even have signed it! The Peacemaker would have other plans, and they needed desperately to know what they were. All kinds of sabotage, betrayal, and deceit were possible, and the very fact that he would murder Cullingford showed he was still powerful, and dangerous.
But something in Joseph still shrank from finding it was a man he had liked. The face of evil should not be familiar, it should be strange, terrifying, unknown before the instant of confrontation.
The Peacemaker was a man who would sell a nation of forty million people into oblivion, betray into bondage their history, their culture, their language, and everything they had created over a thousand years. French in all its wit, color, sophistication, and pride would become a dead language. And after France and Belgium, one by one the other nations would fall, subjugated to the iron control necessary to keep them obedient, afraid, and unable to move against the center.
And England would be worse, not the betrayed but the betrayer! That was the ultimate sin.
He stared out to sea where the rising moon barely glimmered on the faint ripples of the water. It was becoming difficult to see the black outlines of the ships, or the boats plying between them. Around him he could hear the clang of iron shovels on the rock in the earth as burial parties worked.
The army had not been long here. Blood was still fresh. There were no rats like those at Ypres—at least he had not seen any. The latrines smelled much the same, but there was not the stench of corpses—so many of them weeks and months old. There you could hardly dig a trench or shore up a broken wall without slicing into a limb.
If the Peacemaker’s plan had worked, all those men would still be alive. This hill would be empty of everything but wild irises and the purple-flowering Judas trees. There would be silence but for the lap of water, and perhaps the odd bleat of a goat or two.
These men would be at home with their families in the far corners of the earth.
But which was the greater madness, and which the sanity—to fight and