We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [136]
“That’s not all,” Mason went on. “There’s only one thing we can do in the end, which is accuse him openly. He’ll be expecting that. It’s the last throw of the dice left, so to speak. He’ll be prepared for it. I don’t know whether he’ll try to say the Peacemaker is someone else.” He smiled with bitter amusement. “Possibly even me. He might do it well enough to confuse events for a while. Or he might deny that there was ever such a conspiracy at all. That’s why we need to have the original treaty that your father took in 1914.” He turned to Joseph. “You still have it in Cambridgeshire, don’t you?”
Matthew felt a moment of alarm. They were so close to the Peacemaker at last, but was it possible that there was a final twist and it was not Sandwell—and Mason’s slight, almost halfhearted jest was the truth? Was Mason himself the leader, and perhaps Sandwell and Schenckendorff followers? No, that was ridiculous. Mason was in love with Judith, deeply in love. He was not attempting to hide it now: This was the last time they would have together.
He looked at Joseph, wanting to know his thoughts, wishing he could speak to him alone.
Mason was waiting.
“Joe—” Matthew started.
“Yes,” Joseph cut in. “I know where it is.”
Too late. They were committed. Had Joseph thought of Mason’s possible complicity, or was his religious naïveté still too powerful for him to consider that the man Judith loved could yet betray them?
“Better not tell us where,” Matthew said aloud. “That way we can’t accidentally reveal it.”
Mason smiled. “Understood,” he said wryly. “Joseph should get the treaty and we’ll all meet somewhere in London. Perhaps Judith and I should travel together, and Matthew with Schenckendorff, and Lizzie with them to see to Schenckendorff’s foot. You take the ambulance. You can drive it, can’t you?” The last question was directed toward Matthew.
Matthew hesitated. He did not want Mason to direct what they did, and yet he could not think of a better alternative. If they stayed together, they were one target. They could not hope to convince Lloyd George without Schenckendorff, Mason, and the treaty. It had to be either he or Joseph who went to St. Giles to get the treaty from the gunroom. Judith didn’t know one end of a gun from the other, and the last thing he would allow was for Mason to go with her.
“Right,” he said decisively. “I’ll take the ambulance with Lizzie and Schenckendorff and I’ll meet you at my flat. Judith and Mason go by train to London. Joseph, take the train to Cambridge and then to St. Giles. We’ll wait for you in London. Telephone me, but not from St. Giles.”
Goodbyes were brief as they pulled up outside the railway station. Judith and Mason went to wait for the first train to London, Joseph to Cambridge.
As Joseph sat by the window—given a seat willingly because of his uniform—he watched the countryside slip past him. For a moment he could delude himself that nothing had changed. The soft slopes of the land rolled away to the horizon, dotted with occasional copses of trees. The late-harvest fields were stubble gold, one or two plowed ready for a winter crop, the earth dark and shining, black soil rich. The villages looked as they always had: many roofs steeply thatched; square church towers, Saxon solid; little streets winding. Here and there he saw the flash of light on a duck pond in the center of a green. The leaves were bronze where they remained. Most were already shed in copper-colored drifts on the ground.
He ached with a love for the ancient, familiar beauty of it. To come and go as he wished, here in these lanes and across this land, was what they had fought and died for. It was far from perfect, because people made mistakes, but there was a freedom here that had been learned and paid for over the centuries. It was the right—not only in law but also in practice—to disagree, to be different, inventive, sometimes