Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [69]
“Will we make it?”
He smiled, but he did not answer her.
“It’s about morale, isn’t it? If we think we’ll lose, then we will.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed.
She looked away from him and concentrated on her food for a while. She could imagine the recruiting station if they heard the sort of things Prentice had apparently told Belinda.
“That isn’t all,” she said at last, her voice subdued, catching in her throat. “Prentice isn’t just dead—someone murdered him.” She ignored his response. “It wasn’t obvious. He went over the top—nobody knows what made him do such a stupid thing, or what he went for, except bravado, but Joseph was the one who found his body in no-man’s-land, and brought him back.”
Matthew was appalled. His knife slipped out of his fingers onto his plate with a clatter. “What the hell was Joseph doing out there? He’s a chaplain, for God’s sake!”
“I know.” Now at least she was on sure ground, filled with one moral certainty, and a hot, sweet pride. “But he takes that as part of his job—searching for people and bringing them back. Sometimes they’re alive, but it matters to recover even dead bodies.” She saw the reflection in his face of her own emotions. “But Prentice hadn’t been shot, he’d been drowned in one of the craters still full of water. And Joseph worked out that there were no Germans anywhere near them at the time. It had to have been one of our own men. He was pretty rotten to a few people. . . .”
“Enough to kill over?” He was incredulous.
She looked away. “Lots of people are dying, every day. Unless you really care about someone personally, you have to get used to it, or you’d go mad. This is . . . different.”
He reached out his hand as if to touch her, then changed his mind. It was not something he did naturally; this was born of a sudden, urgent understanding. “Are you afraid it could be the general?” he said very gently.
Lies would not do. “I don’t know,” she admitted, looking up at him. “And even if he didn’t, I’m not sure he wouldn’t be blamed for it. Not everyone likes generals.”
He laughed outright: a short, bitter bark of sound. He did not need words to encompass the confusion of anger and fear, torn loyalties felt by the vast mass of people who knew only what they read, and the pain of losses, the day-and-night struggle between pride and terror for those they loved trapped and fighting in a horror they could only imagine. It was natural to blame someone.
He refilled his glass again, and she felt another flicker of worry brush her, as if someone had opened an outside door onto the cold again. “Matthew, have you learned anything more about the Peacemaker?” she asked, taking the bottle from him and adding a little to her own glass, even though she had barely touched it. “I wish we could be more help to you. We’re doing nothing. . . .”
“There’s nothing you can do,” he said quickly, his face softening. “It’s enough that you do your own job.”
She searched his face, his eyes. “You know something, don’t you,” she pressed. The darkness, the tension in him frightened her. “Do you know who it is, Matthew?”
“No. I think it could be Ivor Chetwin, but I need a lot more proof.”
“Ivor Chetwin? But . . . but doesn’t he work in Intelligence?” She was horrified, the betrayal could reach anywhere. “Matthew, please—”
“I am careful,” he said quickly. “And I don’t know that it is him. It could be lots of people. I’ve been working on how he contacted Sebastian to tell him what to do. It isn’t the sort of thing you say in a letter, or explain over the telephone. It had to have been a fairly lengthy and persuasive conversation, in person somewhere. And it has to have been that afternoon. There wasn’t any other time.”
“Well, where did Sebastian go?” she reasoned. “Can’t we find out?”
“I’m trying to.”
“Be careful! We don’t know who the Peacemaker is, but he knows us! Don’t forget that! He’ll be expecting you to come after him.” She gulped, suddenly aware of how frightened she was. “Matthew . . .”
“I’m being careful,” he repeated. “Don’t gulp