We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [51]
“Yes. Nurse, or ambulance driver, or something,” Harper answered. “As I said, pretty vile. I daresay they’ll shoot the bastard when they find him. You were talking about the general difficulty of settling back into civvy life.”
Mason swallowed, feeling as if he had a stone in his chest. “What was her name, the V.A.D.?” He felt bruised and sick.
“Don’t know,” Harper replied. “Don’t think they said. Got to tell the poor girl’s family first anyway. Pretty rotten way to be killed.” He frowned. “You have family up there? I’m bloody sorry. I didn’t know.”
“No,” Mason said with a feeling of being bereaved. Judith was not family. She should have been.
“Still pretty rotten,” Harper responded. “Don’t think you can make a decent story out of it, one that should be told right now. But of course I can’t stop you going up there if you want to. Last throes of battle and all that.”
Barely listening to him, Mason made a pointless remark, wished Harper well, and went outside to inquire for any sort of transport that would take him toward Ypres. He was prepared to set out and walk if necessary.
Impatiently he asked two or three people for a lift; he was refused because ambulances were full or staff cars were going in the wrong direction. As dusk was mantling the ruin of the fields and woods, he set out on foot, leaving the broken town, bombed out and abandoned, fire-blackened skeletons against a lowering sky.
He passed columns of walking wounded, the German prisoners among them looking just as gaunt and shell-shocked as the British. It moved him to an intense pity, but he had no time for it to scorch his emotions. He must find Judith.
He moved from one first-aid post to another, using his press credentials. His name alone had earned a kind of respect, so people were more willing to help him. They wanted to talk, to ask what news he had and when he expected the war to end. Troop movements were no longer secret; they were reported in the newspapers, because it was one victory after another, as relentless as a tide coming in. He tried to answer the men who asked with the honesty they deserved, remembering that they had been here for long, desperate years and lost entire platoons of friends. Some were the last survivors of regiments raised from factories, neighborhoods, villages. They would go home to quiet streets and drawn blinds.
He did not tell them that he knew there was a strong German counterattack on the River Selle, or that Dunkirk was finally shelled by long-range guns. He did tell them that he had heard a rumor that there were peace demonstrations in Berlin.
Everywhere he asked if the ambulance crews included Judith Reavley. Many knew her, but events were moving too rapidly for certainty of anything anymore. A regiment that had been here a day or two ago was farther forward now, and ambulances went wherever they were needed.
“Could be in the Casualty Clearing Station that’s closed off,” one lance corporal told him grimly. “Been a murder there, so I heard. Don’t know why the hell there’s such a fuss. Been thirty million murders, last reckoning.”
Mason was shivering. “Who was killed?”
“Half Europe,” the lance corporal replied.
“In the Casualty Clearing Station?” Mason had no heart to banter. His chest was so tight, it was difficult to breathe. He thought of all the times he had seen Judith since their first encounter at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1915, at a meeting to help coordinate the women wanting to help the war effort, to sort the chaos into something useful. She was there because she was a V.A.D. on the Western Front and knew what they actually wanted. She had been wearing a blue satin dress that elegantly hugged the curves of her body. He could still see in his mind the way she had walked with the easy grace of one whose mind is so absorbed in her purpose, she cared not a jot what other people thought of her. She had barely glanced at him. Even then the passion in her face had captured him.
Later it was the vulnerability.