Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [120]
“I don’t know anything else about Chetwin,” Mynott said apologetically.
“No . . . no, I think that’s probably enough,” Joseph answered him. “We were wrong. It couldn’t be what we thought.”
“Does it matter a lot?”
“Yes. It matters a hell of a lot.” Of course Matthew would have to check that it was true, but Joseph believed it. The Peacemaker had intended to succeed. Setting up a double bluff like this, at the expense of a young German noblewoman’s life, was absurd, disgusting, and above all completely self-defeating. “Thank you. I’ll see if I can get a lift on the next ship going home again.”
“Well, there’s nothing going out tonight. You might as well get a little sleep,” Mynott observed. “Tomorrow look for a fellow called Richard Mason, war correspondent. He’s down to go either tomorrow or the next day. If you can find him, you can probably thumb a lift with him.”
“Thank you. I’ll do that.”
Joseph slept on the earth about fifty feet up. It was hard and cold and only exhaustion gave him any rest at all. Perhaps a few nights on the ship had made him soft?
He woke quite a while after dawn and looked down on the beach full of activity. Men were moving about as if on the scene of some busy factory yard, digging, carrying, piling up boxes and crates. The smell of smoke drifted up from cooking.
Joseph thanked the Australians with whom he had camped for the night.
“Hooray, mate!” Blue answered cheerfully. “Holy Joe! I like that!” He laughed till the tears filled his eyes.
“G’day, sport,” Flanagan called out. “Mind where you go!”
“You, too.” Joseph refused to think what their chances were. He would choose to believe they would be among the few who would survive. “Thank you,” he said again.
He set off along the ridge and down on the grass toward the level, in roughly the direction he had been told he might find the correspondent Richard Mason. Actually he was looking forward to it—he had seen his name on many of the best and most honest articles he had read. The man had an ability to catch the experience of a small group in all its passion and immediacy, and make it represent them all. There was something clean and unsentimental in his use of language, and yet the depth of his feeling was never in doubt.
It took him nearly two hours, by which time his feet were sore and he was horribly aware of the flies everywhere.
“Over there, mate,” a lanky Australian pointed. “That’s the Pommie writer feller.”
“Thank you,” Joseph said with profound relief. He could see only the man’s back. He wore a plain khaki-colored jacket and trousers and a wide-brimmed hat jammed on his head.
“Excuse me, are you Richard Mason?” Joseph asked when he reached him.
The man turned around slowly. He had an unusual face, with wide cheekbones and a broad, full-lipped mouth. It was a face of high intelligence, but far more striking was the brooding emotion in it, the sense of will. Joseph was certain he had found the right man; such features belonged to one who would write with blazing honesty.
“Yes,” Mason answered. “Who are you? A chaplain!” He looked surprised and very slightly amused.
“Joseph Reavley,” Joseph told him. “I had a mission out here, which I have completed. I understand you are shortly leaving for England. I need to return as soon as possible, and if there is room in your transport I would be grateful.”
Mason’s eyes flickered for a moment of puzzlement, then he looked beyond them both at the milling men on the beach and up the slope at the dugouts, the shallow trenches, the makeshift shelters of stones and boxes. Finally he looked back at Joseph. “Your mission is finished, you said?” His implication was clear.
Joseph regarded him levelly and a little coldly. “Yes, it is. I have only a few days more leave before I have to report back to my regiment at Ypres.”