We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [13]
Matthew rose also and grasped it, holding it hard for a moment. He was tempted to ask who he was, and how he knew so much, but he was already certain he would receive no answer but the same tired, enigmatic smile. Then he let it go and walked the man to the door.
Afterward, alone again, he stood in his silent flat, looking at the familiar, rather worn furniture, his favorite painting of cows on the wall, his shelves of books. In a few days he would know the identity of the Peacemaker at last. This time he would not know it through deduction, with its potential for error; he would have certain knowledge. How fitting that in the end the Peacemaker should be betrayed by his own, a man choosing compromise rather than dominion, honor rather than power, a hard peace that might last.
Tomorrow morning Matthew would go to Shearing and tell him the news, then leave immediately for the Western Front and Ypres. He must be there when Schenckendorff came through. This really was the beginning of the end.
He thought of his mother and father driving along the Hauxton Road to tell him about the treaty nearly four and a half years ago, on that last golden summer when the world had seemed so unbreakably innocent. In spite of himself, his eyes filled with tears.
CHAPTER
TWO
Across London, in Marchmont Street, the man Matthew thought of as the Peacemaker was standing in his upstairs sitting room with the lights out and the curtains wide open, staring down at the street. There was very little he could see, even though his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, really no more than the occasional gleam of hooded headlamps on the glistening wet road as now and then a car passed by.
It was nearly the end of the struggle. There was just one more big hand to play, and then it was over. Peace was inevitable now—of a kind, but nothing like the peace the world could have had if his plans had succeeded in 1914. He had seen the horror of the Boer War at the turn of the century. The slaughter, the waste, and the shame of it had never left him. He had sworn that such things would never happen again if there was anything he could do to prevent them—any price at all he could pay.
He had tried. God knew, he had done everything in his power, sacrificing the time and substance of his life for the cause. And yet war had still broken out, and continued for four long, ruinous years. He and his cousin Manfred von Schenckendorff had almost prevented it four and a half years ago. They had been days away from success when John Reavley, a retired Member of Parliament and sometime inventor from a Cambridgeshire village, had stumbled on the treaty and understood what it meant. In his narrow-minded patriotism, he had stolen it. The Peacemaker had learned what had happened and had him killed before he could show it to anyone, but despite all his efforts he had failed to retrieve the treaty. The one copy he had was insufficient to take to the king in the hope that he would sign it, and avoid the coming conflagration.
Then there had been the idiotic assassination in Sarajevo, and Europe had hurtled toward war. Estimates of the dead and lost—those crippled, maimed, or damaged in heart and mind—amounted to more than thirty-five million. The futile, blind idiocy of it boiled inside him with a rage so intense it caused him physical pain.
He had done everything he could, and failed. Now, if he did not succeed in forcing the Allied powers to create a just peace, it would all happen again. A handful of years and a new war would foment like a disease incubating in the body, and a new generation would be slaughtered just as this one had been.
He had tried persuasion, but was not listened to. President Wilson had no concept of European politics, and no understanding of history. He wanted to dismantle Germany’s heavy industry, destroy her army and navy, shatter the heart of her people, and weigh them down with debt that could never be repaid. He could not see the damage that would do to all of Europe, perhaps to