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Authors: Anne Perry

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BOOK: No Graves As Yet
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“What is it you think will happen?” Joseph asked firmly.

“Darkness,” Sebastian answered. “Complacency without the vision to see, or the courage to act. And it takes courage! You have to see beyond the obvious, the comfortable morality everyone else agrees with, and understand that at times, terrible times, the end justifies the means.” His voice dropped. “Even when the cost is high. Otherwise they’ll lead us blindly down the path to a war like nothing we’ve ever even imagined before.” His words were cutting, and without the slightest hesitation. “It won’t be a few cavalry charges here and there, a few brave men killed or injured. It’ll be everyone—the ordinary man in the street sucked into endless mind- and body-breaking bombardment by even bigger guns. It’ll be hunger and fear and hatred until that’s all we know.” He squinted a little as the sun blazed level with the treetops to the west and painted fire on the top of the walls of Trinity and Caius. “Think of the towns and villages you know—St. Giles, Haslingfield, Grantchester, all the rest—with black on every window, no marriages, no christenings, only deaths.” His voice dropped and was filled with a hurting tenderness. “Think of the countryside, the fields with no men to plant them or to reap. Think of the woods in April with no one to see the blossom. Schoolboys won’t dream of this.” He gestured toward the rooftops. “Only of carrying guns. Their only ambition will be to kill and to survive.”

He turned to face Joseph again, his eyes clear as seawater in the long light. “Isn’t it worth any price to save us from that? Isn’t it what human beings are here for, to nourish and protect what we’ve been given, and add to it before we pass it on? Look at it!” he demanded. “Don’t you love it almost more than you can bear?”

Joseph did not need to look to know his answer. “Yes, I do,” he said with the same depth of absolute knowledge. “It is the ultimate sanity of life. In the end, it is all there is to hold on to.”

Sebastian winced, his face looking suddenly bruised and hollow. “I’m sorry,” he said in a whisper. He moved his hand as if to touch Joseph’s arm, then withdrew. “But this is a universal sanity, isn’t it? Bigger than any one of us, a purpose, a healing for mankind?” His voice was urgent, begging for assurance.

“Yes, it is,” Joseph agreed gently. He meant it more profoundly than he had imagined he would, but as had happened so many times in their friendship, Sebastian put it in exactly the words that framed his own belief. “And yes, it is the duty of those who have seen it and become part of it to protect it with all our power.”

Sebastian smiled very slightly and turned away as they started back again. “But you don’t fear war, do you, sir? I mean real, literal war.”

“I would fear it horribly if I considered it a real danger,” Joseph assured him. “But I don’t think it is. We’ve had many wars before, and we’ve lost many men. We’ve faced invasion more than once and beaten it off. It hasn’t broken us irreparably; if anything, it’s made us stronger.”

“Not this time,” Sebastian said bitterly. “If it happens, it’ll be pure, blind destruction.”

Joseph looked sideways at him. He could see in Sebastian’s face the love for all that was precious and vulnerable, all that could be broken by the unthinking. There was a pain in him that was naked in this strange, fierce light of dusk, which cast such black shadows.

Time and again they had talked of all manner of things, no boundaries of time or place had held them: the men half human, half divine in the epic legends of Egypt and Babylon; the God of the Old Testament, who was the creator of worlds, yet spoke face-to-face with Moses, as one man talks with another. They had basked in the lean, golden classicism of Greece, the teeming magnificence of Rome, the intricate glories of Byzantium, the sophistication of Persia. All had been the furniture of their dreams. Wherever Joseph had led, Sebastian had followed eagerly, grasping after each new experience with insatiable joy.

The light was almost gone. The color burned only on the horizon, the shadows dense on the Backs. The water was pale and polished like old silver, indigo under the bridges.

“We could disappear into the ruins of time if there’s war,” Sebastian resumed. “In a thousand years’ time, scholars from cultures we haven’t even imagined, young and curious, could dig up what’s left of us, and from a few shards, scraps of writing, try to work out what we were really like. And get it wrong,” he added bitterly.

“English would become a dead language, lost, like Aramaic or Etruscan,” Sebastian went on with quiet misery. “No more wit of Oscar Wilde, or grandeur of Shakespeare, no more thunder of Milton, music of Keats, or . . . God knows how many more . . . and worst of all, the future culled. All that this generation might do. We have to prevent that—whatever it costs!”

“It is impossible to care too much,” Joseph said gently. “It is all infinitely precious.” He must bring back reason, ground this fear in the lasting realities.

“There is nothing you or I can do to affect the quarrels of Austria and Serbia,” he went on. “There will always be fighting somewhere, from time to time. And as inventions like telephones and wireless get better, we will know of them sooner. A hundred years ago it would have taken weeks for us to learn about it, if we did at all. And by that time it would all have been over. Now we read about it the day after, so we feel it to be more immediate, but it’s only a perception. Hold on to the certainties that endure.”

Sebastian looked at him, his back to the last of the light, so Joseph could not make out his expression. His voice was rough-edged. “You don’t think this is different? A hundred years ago we were nearly conquered by Napoleon.”

Joseph realized he had made a tactical error in choosing a hundred years as an example. “Yes, but we weren’t,” he said confidently. “No French soldier set foot in England, except as a prisoner.”

“As you said, sir, things have changed in a hundred years,” Sebastian pointed out. “We have steamships, airplanes, guns that can shoot further and destroy more than ever before. A west wind won’t keep the navies of Europe locked in harbor now.”

“You’re allowing your fears to run away with your reason,” Joseph chided him. “We have had far more desperate times, but we have always prevailed. And we have grown stronger since the Napoleonic Wars, not weaker. You must have faith in us . . . and in God.”

Sebastian gave a little grunt, ironic and dismissive, as if there were some deeper fear he could not explain, one that Joseph seemed to refuse or to be incapable of understanding. “Why?” he said bitterly. “The Israelites were the chosen people, and where are they now? We study their language as a curiosity. It matters only because it is the language of Christ, whom they denied and crucified. If the Bible didn’t speak of Him, we wouldn’t care about Hebrew. We can’t say that of English. Why should anyone remember it if we were conquered? For Shakespeare? We don’t remember the language of Aristotle, Homer, Aeschylus. It’s taught in the best schools, to the privileged few, as a relic of a great civilization of the past.” His voice choked with sudden, uncontrollable anger and his face was twisted with pain. “I don’t want to become a relic! I want people a thousand years from now to speak the same tongue that I do, to love the same beauty, to understand my dreams and how they mattered to me. I want to write something, or even do something, that preserves the soul of who we are.”

The last of the light was now only a pale wash low across the horizon. “War changes us, even if we win.” He turned away from Joseph, as if to hide a nakedness within. “Too many of us become barbarians of the heart. Have you any idea how many could die? How many of those left would be consumed by hate, all over Europe? Everything that was good in them eaten away by the things they had seen and, worse, the things they had been forced to do?”

“It won’t happen!” Joseph responded, and the moment the words were gone from his lips he wondered if they were true. “If you can’t have faith in people, the leaders of nations, then have faith that God will not allow the world to plunge into the kind of destruction you are thinking of,” he said. “What purpose of His could it serve?”

Sebastian’s lip curled in a tiny smile. “I’ve no idea! I don’t know the purposes of God! Do you, sir?” The softness of his voice, and the
sir
on the end, robbed it of offense.

“To save the souls of men,” Joseph replied without hesitation.

“And what does that mean?” Sebastian turned back to face him. “Do you suppose He sees it the same way I do?” Again the smile touched his lips, this time self-mocking.

Joseph was obliged to smile in answer, although the sadness jolted him as if the fading of the light were in some terrible way a permanent thing. “Not necessarily,” he conceded. “But He is more likely to be right.”

Sebastian did not reply, and they walked slowly along the grass as the breeze rose a little. All the punts were gone to their moorings, and the spires of stone in the arched top of the Bridge of Sighs were barely darker than the sky beyond.

         

Matthew returned to London, going first to his flat. It was exactly as he had left it, except that the maid had tidied it, but it felt different. It should have had the comfort of home. It was where he had lived for the last five years, ever since he had left university and begun working for the Intelligence Service. It was full of the books, drawings, and paintings he had collected. His favorite painting, hanging over the fire, was of cows in the corner of the field. For him their gentle rumination, calm eyes, and slow generosity seemed the ultimate sanity in the world. On the mantel was a silver vase his mother had given him one Christmas, and a Turkish dagger with a highly ornamental scabbard.

But the flat was oddly empty. He felt as if he were returning not to the present but to the past. When he had last sat in the worn leather armchair or eaten at this table, his family was whole, and he knew of no vanishing document that was at the heart of conspiracy, violence, and secrets that brought death. The world had not been exactly safe, but whatever dangers there were lay in places far distant, and only the periphery of them touched England, or Matthew himself.

         

He spent a long evening deep in thought. It was the first time he had been alone more than to sleep since he had walked across the grass at Fenner’s Field to break the news to Joseph. Questions crowded his mind.

John Reavley had called him on Saturday evening, not here at his flat, but at his office in the Intelligence Services. He had been working late, on the Irish problems, as usual. The Liberal government had been trying to pass a Home Rule bill to give Ireland autonomy since the middle of the previous century, and time after time the Protestants of Ulster had blocked it, refusing absolutely to be forcibly separated from Britain and placed in Catholic Ireland. They believed that both their religious freedom and their economic survival depended upon remaining free from such a forced integration, and ultimately subjection.

Government after government had fallen on the issue, and now Arquill’s personal Liberal Party required the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party in order to retain power.

Shearing, Matthew’s superior, shared the view of many others that there was a great deal of political maneuvering in London behind the mutiny of British troops stationed in the Curragh. When the men of Ulster, solidly backed by their women, had threatened armed rebellion against the Home Rule bill, the British troops had refused to take up arms against them. General Gough had resigned, with all his officers, whereupon Sir John French, chief of the General Staff in London, had resigned also, immediately followed by Sir John Seely, secretary for war in the Cabinet.

Little wonder Shearing and his men worked late. The situation threatened to become a crisis as grave as any in the last three hundred years.

Matthew had been in his office when the call came from John Reavley telling him of the document and that he was going to drive to London with it the following day, expecting to arrive between half past one and two o’clock. He would bring Alys with him, ostensibly for an afternoon in the city, but in order to make his trip unremarkable.

How had anyone else known that he even had the document, let alone that he was taking it to Matthew, and the time of his journey? If he came by car, the route was obvious. There was only one main road from St. Giles to London.

Matthew cast his mind back to that evening, the offices almost silent, hardly anyone there, just half a dozen men, perhaps a couple of clerks. He remembered standing at his desk with the telephone in his hand, the disbelief at what his father had said. Matthew had repeated what his father had said, to make certain he had heard correctly.

The cold ran through him. Was that it? In the quiet office someone had overheard him? That had been enough. Who? He tried to recall who else had been there, but one late night blended into another. He had heard footsteps, voices deliberately kept low so as not to disturb others. He might not have recognized them then; he certainly could not now.

But he could find out, discreetly. He could at least trace the possibly treasonous behavior among his own colleagues—when even a week ago he would have trusted them all without hesitation.

         

When he arrived in the morning everything was familiar: the cramped spaces, the echoing wooden floor, the black telephones, the dust motes in the air, the worn surfaces, and the harsh desk lamps, unnecessary now in the sunlight through the windows. Clerks bustled back and forth, shirtsleeves grimy from endless papers and ink, collars stiff and often a trifle crooked.

They wished him good morning and offered their condolences, shy and awkward and, for all he could see, intensely sincere. He thanked them and went to his own small room, where books were wedged into too small a case and papers were locked in drawers. The inkwell and blotting papers were just as usual, not quite straight on his desk, two pens lying beside them. The blotting paper was clean. He never left anything that might be decipherable.

He fished for his keys to unlock the top drawer. At first it did not slide in easily, but took a moment of fiddling. He bent to look more closely, and that was when he saw the finest of scratches on the metal around the keyhole. It had not been there when he left. So someone had searched here, too.

BOOK: No Graves As Yet
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