We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [118]
The meal was anything but easy. They ate in the farmhouse kitchen. It was the one room in the house the woman had taken the care and labor to repair. She had even found odd tiles from somewhere to replace the shattered ones in the floor. There was hot water, clean from the well in the yard, and it made the tea impossibly fragrant after the sour water they were used to. But the bread was coarse and nearly black, and without butter. It needed Joseph’s tin of army jam to make it palatable at all. It did not go far among seven of them. Even so they saved the hardest and driest of the crusts for the scrawny dog that lay on the tiles watching them, eyes following every mouthful.
They all knew the story they had to tell. Mason was better being himself. It was always possible that his face might even be recognized. His reports were famous all over the world, occasionally with a picture of him at the top of his column in most of the newspapers. Matthew and Joseph were in uniform; Joseph in particular needed no explanation. Judith and Lizzie similarly—their purpose was universal. Schenckendorff was the difficulty. Matthew had found a V.A.D. uniform that fit him and simply taken it; to request it would have needed explaining, which would in turn have raised further questions he could not answer. But despite his injured foot, Schenckendorff’s posture was that of an officer. He was born and bred to it, and he did not know how to abandon it in a few days. His accent was slight, but it was distinctive.
Far more than that, as Judith sat at the old wooden table eating the black bread and smelling the pure scent of the tea, she was aware of the dismay in him, perhaps even the guilt. There had once been men in this house. The evidence of them was still here in the carefully carved, slightly irregular wooden bowls on the dresser, which was itself handmade to fit exactly into the space available for it. There was a low nursing chair in the other corner, as a mother might use holding a baby when she had other children at her knees. There was a handmade wooden engine on one of the shelves. No doubt there were other artifacts outside where once men had milked cows, dug the earth, harvested.
She saw Schenckendorff’s eyes take it all in as hers had, and the grief in his face. He was eating more and more slowly, as if to accept this gift of hospitality choked him. Was it pity, or the guilt of having deceived the farm woman? She would never have given it to him if she had known he was German. Still, Joseph had said often that Germany was every bit as devastated as Belgium or France. That had been true when he had gone through the lines last year. How much worse must it be now?
The old woman was talking to Mason, her attention momentarily absorbed.
“You must eat it,” Judith whispered to Schenckendorff.
He turned a little to look at her. There were shadows around his eyes and a pallor to his skin that must have been caused by more than the pain of his foot, which Lizzie had assured her was improving. Was it because it had been his own people who had wasted this land, just as now the Allies would be wasting his, and the people he loved?
He swallowed with difficulty and took another mouthful.
She reached for the pot and poured him the last of the tea. He needed it more than the others. Everywhere around them was ruin and loss. More lay ahead, and he would see all of it: a land that smelled of death.
Was he thinking of the old treaty that had never been ratified? He and the Peacemaker had tried so hard to prevent all this. Would betrayal and dominion really have been so very much worse? Did this old woman who gave them black bread and tea made with clean water care who made the laws in Brussels, or who collected the taxes, if her husband and her sons were home and safe, and her land bore its harvest, her cattle their milk? No one had asked her what she thought or wanted.
Was that what was going through Schenckendorff’s mind now: not guilt at the ruin but guilt that he and the Peacemaker