We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [84]
Mason was going back and forth from the front line to the Casualty Clearing Station, writing dispatches about the work saving men critically injured in the last few weeks of the war. There was an irony to serving right to the eve of peace, and then losing sight or limbs when victory was perhaps no more than days away. And yet he had found little bitterness. Again and again he was humbled by the courage of men, and infuriated that the whole insane horror had ever happened.
Most of the officers who had lived in these bunkers for so long were now either injured or dead, or had gone forward with the regiment over no-man’s-land to the abandoned German trenches. He had seen them himself. Better than those of the British, they were deeper below the ground and drier, and many had electric lighting and something approaching comfort.
Of course the forward lines, covering the ground rapidly, had moved beyond them now as well, an army most often in the open, striving to keep rations and ammunitions circulating along the stretched supply lines.
He had gone to sleep forcing the fighting men out of his mind and thinking instead of Judith. He woke with a start to hear a man’s voice speaking his name urgently. A moment later there was a hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see the oil lamp on the table burning and Matthew Reavley sitting on the upturned ammunition box that served as a chair. There was stubble on his chin, and his eyes were red-rimmed, but he was very much awake.
Mason sat up slowly. “What is it?” he asked, fear fluttering inside him. “What’s happened?” He did not bother to ask how Matthew had found him; many people knew where he was.
“We need your help,” Matthew replied. “I need to explain why, so please just listen. If you don’t know, you won’t understand why we can’t trust anyone else. I wouldn’t trust you if I had any choice, but I don’t. I’ve watched you with Judith, and I can see how you feel about her. We have a very short time and we can’t do this alone.”
Mason had no idea what he was talking about. “Do what?”
“Find out beyond doubt who killed Sarah Price.”
“The German. Jacobson’s almost ready to charge him,” Mason responded, knowing even as he said it that there must be something far deeper that Matthew meant. “Is it an intelligence job?” Ironic if now that he had effectively left the Peacemaker’s side and it was too late, he might at last be trusted with information deeper than the obvious.
“I suppose it is,” Matthew answered. “But it’s also personal. Schenckendorff is innocent, at least of killing Sarah Price. I can’t tell you how I know, but I do. What I need you to know now is something quite different that started a long time ago.”
Mason felt a chill of apprehension and dismissed it as absurd. It could not have anything to do with him. “Yes?”
Matthew seemed still to be having difficulty finding the words, and Mason became aware of the intensity of his feelings.
“In 1914,” Matthew began, “my father found a copy of a treaty between England and Germany. It could have prevented the war, but at the cost of initially betraying France and Belgium, and eventually just about everybody.”
Mason felt the semi-darkness of the bunker sway around him and blur as if he were going to faint. He knew with a hideous certainty what was coming next, but to hear it from Matthew himself, laden with his personal loss, gave it a reality it had never had for him before. For the first time he was face-to-face with what he had allowed to be done.
“It was signed by the kaiser, but not yet by the king,” Matthew went on. “Father understood what it would mean, and he was bringing it to me in London when he and my mother were killed in a car crash. Joseph and I discovered quite quickly