Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [72]
“No idea at all. I asked her, just out of curiosity. She’s never seen her before. Do you think it could have been she who gave Sebastian the order to . . .” She did not finish the sentence.
Judith shivered. “Yes, it could. It’s possible. Matthew thinks the Peacemaker could be Ivor Chetwin, which is a horrible thought.”
“It has to be someone we know,” Hannah said quietly. “It’s all horrible. Let’s go inside. It’s getting cold.”
They turned and walked together slowly, not needing or wanting to discuss it anymore, but in Judith’s mind was a photograph of an unusually tall girl with light, clear eyes, and she was standing next to Eldon Prentice.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Days and nights continued their routine of alternating violence and boredom. Joseph helped with digging and shoring up in the trenches, carrying food, helping the wounded or dying, writing letters for people, often just listening when men needed to talk. They swapped stories, the longer and more fantastic the better. They made bad jokes and sang music hall songs with bawdy army lyrics to them, and laughed too loudly, too close to tears.
Little Belgian boys came by selling English newspapers, and they read voraciously to see what was happening at home. Joseph conducted the mandatory church parades, and tried to think of something to say that made sense.
But all the time at the back of his mind was the question of why Eldon Prentice had been in no-man’s-land, and who had thrust his head under the water and held it there until he was dead. The thought was horrible, filling him with a revulsion quite different from the gut-turning pity of other deaths. There was a moral dimension to it he could grasp, a personal evil rather than the vast, mindless insanity around them all.
Nobody wanted to talk about it. To everyone else it was the one death that did not matter. Prentice had had a letter from General Cullingford giving him permission to come and go pretty well as he pleased, and he had used it freely. There was an impulsive feeling that he had got what he deserved. Grief was saved for other men, like Chicken Hagger, and now Bibby Nunn, caught by sniper fire.
Mail delivery was one of the best times of the day. Letters from home were the lifeline to the world that mattered, to love and sanity, the precious heart of what was worth dying for. For each man it was a little different, a different face, a different house that was familiar, but they shared them with the half dozen or so men who were their “family” here.
As chaplain, Joseph was uniquely alone. He was an officer, and apart. He belonged to everyone and no one. The nearest he had to a family was Sam. With Sam he could share Matthew’s letters, even if they referred to the Peacemaker.
One witheringly cold night in January, he and Sam had crouched together on the fire-step in the trench known as Shaftesbury Avenue, the wind whining in the wires across no-man’s-land, ice cracking on the mud, duckboards slick with it underfoot. Joseph had told Sam about his parents’ deaths, and a brief outline of the Peacemaker’s conspiracy, enough for Sam to understand at least the anger and the passion that drove him to seek the men who would still bring such betrayal to pass, if he could.
He could see Sam’s face in his memory, sharply outlined for a moment in the glare of star shells.
The smile on his lips, the heaven and hell of irony in him. He had said nothing, simply put out his freezing hand and touched Joseph for a moment.
Now Joseph sat alone with the sheets of paper, the sun warming him in the stillness of the afternoon. Tucky Nunn and Barshey Gee were asleep a few yards away, faces at ease, their youth achingly apparent. Tucky half smiled, perhaps home again in dreams.
Further along Reg Varcoe sat bare-chested, holding a match to the seams of his tunic. In the distance someone was singing “Keep the Home Fires Burning.”
For a moment Joseph thought of home: grasses deep in the lanes, woods full of bluebells, may blossom in bud. In Northumberland