Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [41]
He looked at the bodies. One was Chicken Hagger. There were tears in his tunic and his flesh, as much of it as he could see, and several bullet holes. He must have been caught on the wire. It was a horrible death, usually slow.
Barshey was watching him, but he did not say anything.
Joseph walked over to Prentice’s body. They had left him until last, possibly because the others were men they had known and cared about, almost family. Prentice was a stranger. This was nothing like a usual civilian death, shocking and unexpected. Nor was anybody looking for someone to blame, as with Sebastian Allard, and Harry Beecher in Cambridge last summer. Here it hardly even mattered how death had happened; there was nothing to learn from it, no questions to ask.
Even so, Prentice’s body was unusual in that there were no marks of violence on him at all. He had not been shot, or blown apart by explosive or shrapnel, he had simply drowned in the filthy water of a shell hole. There were no tears in his clothes, except from when Joseph had dragged him over stony ground. There was no blood at all.
Not that that made him unique. Other men had drowned. In the winter some had frozen to death.
All Joseph could do was lay him straight, clean the mud off his face, and tidy his hair. The fact that he had drowned had distorted his features, and the bruises from the beating Wil Sloan had given him were still dark and swollen, his lip cracked. But then no one was going to see him, unless it was decided to ship him home. That was a possibility, since he was not a soldier. Perhaps he had better wash him properly, even his hair. Today there was time for such gestures.
He fetched a bowl of water and rinsed out the mud and the rank smell from the shell crater. Barshey Gee helped him, holding another basin underneath so they did not slop the floor.
“What’s that?” he asked as Joseph put a towel around Prentice’s head and started to rub him dry.
“What?” Joseph saw nothing.
“You left mud on his neck,” Barshey replied, his voice was cold. Someone must have told him about the incident in the Casualty Clearing Station. They shouldn’t have done. It was a pain Barshey could have done without.
Joseph unwrapped the towel and looked. There were dark smudges at the back of Prentice’s neck, just below the fair gold hair. But he needed only a glance to see it was bruised skin, not mud. Another look showed him very similar marks on the right as well. They were roundish shapes, two on either side. He heard Barshey draw in his breath quickly, and looked up to meet his eyes. He did not need to say anything to know that the same thought was in his mind. Some-one had held Prentice down, keeping his face in the mud until it had filled his lungs.
“Could someone do that?” he asked, hoping for denial. “Wouldn’t he struggle? Throw them off?”
“Not if you had your weight on ’im,” Barshey answered, huskily, his eyes not moving from Joseph’s. “Knee in the middle of his back.”
Joseph rolled the body over, standing beside him to prevent him from falling onto the floor. He lifted the jacket and shirt and looked at the dead flesh of his lower back. The marks were there, just small, no more than abrasions, and little pinpricks of bleeding as if he had tried to free himself, and chafed the skin on fabric pressed hard against him.
Barshey swore quietly. “Here, Treffy. Come and look at this! Somebody held ’im down with ’is face in the mud, on purpose, till ’e drowned. Whoi the ’ell would anyone do that? Whoi not just shoot ’im?”
“Don’t know,” Treffy admitted, biting his thin lips. “Maybe ’e loikes to be personal. Or he was close to our lines, and wanted to be quiet?”
“What’s wrong with a bayonet?” Barshey demanded, his eyes angry and frightened. “That’s what they’re for.”
“Maybe ’e’d just lost a friend, or something?” Treffy suggested. “Just needed to do it with ’is ’ands. Best not tell anyone, don’t you think, Chaplain?”
“Yes,” Joseph agreed quickly, pulling Prentice’s tunic down and rolling him over again onto his