Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [84]
Corcoran was startled. “You said the work must be positioned out so no one knows the whole. What is the other?”
“You report to Calder Shearing and him only. It’s top secret—no one else, not even Churchill, or Hall. Do you accept that?”
Corcoran looked at him quickly, a flash of appreciation in his eyes, then he bent to examine the pages. It was several minutes before he finished them. “Yes,” he said decisively. “I have ideas already. Perhaps we can accomplish something to make history, Matthew.”
His belief was contagious, uplifting. It was not a blind optimism but a faith rooted in possibility and endeavor. Looking at his face, the burning intelligence and the self-knowledge, Matthew found his own hope soaring. “I’ll see you get the budget,” he promised.
He was prevented from pursuing it any further, although there was little more to say, because Orla Corcoran came into the room and Matthew stood to greet her. She was slender, very elegant, her hair still dark. Conversation turned to other things. Orla was keen to hear of news from London; she had not been for nearly three months.
“There seems to be so much to do here,” she said ruefully when they were seated at the dinner table. “Of course the most important thing in the area is the Establishment, but we have factories as well, and hospitals, and various organizations to look after people. We all try to pretend, but nobody’s life is as it used to be. Everyone’s got somebody they care about either on the Western Front, or at Gallipoli. We’re all terrified to listen to the news, and when the mail comes in I see the village women’s faces, and I know what they’re dreading.”
“I know,” he said with a strange guilt for his own part in spoiling the plans of the men who would have made peace, with dishonor, and prevented all this. He did not doubt that he was right, only he had not imagined at the time that the cost of it would feel like this, the individual loss over and over again, in a million homes throughout the land.
But then if the Peacemaker’s plan had succeeded, what would have happened to France? A German province, occupied by the kaiser’s army, betrayed by Britain whom it had trusted. And that would be only the beginning. The rest of the world would fall after, like so many bloodied dominoes, treason, collaboration, betrayals multiplied a thousand times, secret trials, executions, more graves.
No—this price was terrible, but it was not the worst.
The conversation went on about familiar things. As the evening deepened they spoke less of the present and more of happy things of the past, times remembered before the war.
Matthew left a little after eleven, and by midnight he was home at St. Giles, to sleep well for the first time in weeks with the silence of the country around him, the wind in the elms, and the starlight beyond.
In the house in Marchmont Street the Peacemaker was also speaking of Cambridgeshire, in fact specifically of the scientific Establishment there. The man opposite him was young, his face sharp, full of passion and intelligence.
“Of course I can get in,” he said earnestly. “My qualifications are excellent.”
“Don’t be too eager,” the Peacemaker warned. He was standing by the mantelpiece, looking at the younger man where he sat in the armchair, elbows on his knees, staring up. There was great confidence in him, extraordinary for one so untried in the professional world. He had a first-class honors degree in mathematics and engineering. He knew precisely what he wanted to achieve, and he had no doubt he would succeed. It was faintly unnerving to see someone with such blindness to the vagaries of fate.
“Every good inventor is eager,” the young man responded. “If you don’t believe in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?”
The Peacemaker was irritated with the man for his arrogance, and with himself for allowing a form of words to be twisted against him.
“A man who knows his own worth is not eager to be accepted at