We Shall Not Sleep (21 page)

"That was the last time I saw her," Benbow added. "With the German. They were still there when I went off duty. She went back inside with him." He tried hard to keep the contempt out of his eyes and his voice, but it was too deep within him, and she could not help recognizing it.

"At about quarter past four?" she asked aloud.

He blinked, knowing what she had read in him, daring her to make an issue of it. "Yes."

She swallowed hard. She understood, and part of her agreed. Pity for any wounded man, British or German, was one thing. To flirt as if nothing stood between you, no years of slaughter, was different. Respect, yes, even honor—but not laughter and teasing, as if the dead did not matter.

She thanked him and left without meeting his eyes again.

She found Lizzie coming out of one of the Treatment tents. Her face was pale, and there was an urgency about her that made it plain that she had learned something.

"What is it?" Judith demanded. Then she realized that Lizzie was suffering some acute distress, struggling within herself to make a decision. "What is it?" she repeated more gently. "At least tell me!"

Lizzie took her arm, steering her away from the half-open flap and out into the wind. She walked some distance until they were clearly alone before she spoke.

"I know what happened, but I don't know what to do about it," she said almost under her breath, even though there was no one within fifty feet of them.

"Does it clear Matthew?" That was the only thing Judith cared about.

"Yes..."

"Then we'll tell Jacobson, and—"

"No," Lizzie cut across her. "And Punch Fuller isn't likely to ever change his story."

"Yes, he will! Joseph—"

"Be quiet and listen," Lizzie said firmly. There was a charge of emotion in her voice so intense, Judith stopped.

"Hodges's friend was blown to bits beside him," Lizzie went on. "He was only fourteen; Hodges is just fifteen. He was sort of an older brother to him. It must have been a howitzer." She gulped and swallowed. "Or something like that. Hodges lost control and ran in blind horror and panic. He went all the way from where they were, very near the front line, back to where Matthew saw Punch Fuller catch up with him. Punch knifed him himself, to make him a genuine injury, and then carried him into the Casualty Clearing Station as if he'd come from the front line."

Judith nodded. She understood profoundly.

"He'll stick to that story to save the boy's life," Lizzie went on quietly. "If the truth gets out he'll be shot as a coward. He's only a child, for heaven's sake. The other boy was his best friend, and he feels responsible, and guilty as hell for surviving, and now for running, too. He knows Punch saved his life, and he'll die rather than betray him as well. And he does look on himself as a traitor. He's terrified and so ashamed he's not sure if he even wants to survive."

Judith was numb. "How do you know all this?" she said hoarsely. "If Punch wouldn't tell you, and Hodges wouldn't betray him ... ?"

"Some I guessed," Lizzie answered with a sigh. Her face was very white. "His wound is superficial. And it's obviously a bayonet. A German soldier would have stabbed him in the chest or the stomach, not the leg where it really does little harm. It's not self-inflicted, but it's not battle-inflicted, either. I worked it out, and then I asked him. I didn't let him lie, and I think in a way he didn't want to. His mother's probably not much older than I am. He shouldn't even be here!” There was a sudden fury in her voice so violent that her body was trembling. "If you tell that story they'll court-martial him, then shoot him. And if you don't, they'll hang Matthew, I know that!"

Judith drew in her breath and let it out again. "We have to do something. Perhaps Joseph can—"

"They won't believe him," Lizzie said reasonably. "He's Matthew's brother. They won't believe you, either. But if I go to Jacobson, he might believe me. I can't make Punch Fuller say anything, but if Jacob-son wants to catch whoever really did it, he'll let Matthew go. This could prove it wasn't him."

Judith nodded. It was a risk, appalling, cruel, inescapable, but to do nothing was worse.

Jacobson agreed. Lizzie's story corresponded exactly to what Matthew had described, and he understood enough of the terror and the grief to see how it could have happened. Such things must have occurred many times before. He did not explain, he simply let Matthew go. He questioned Eames, Benbow, Cavan, and several others again. What little evidence he had pointed toward Schenckendorff. He had no choice but to arrest the man.

Joseph, Judith, and Matthew sat huddled together in Joseph's bunker. Outside, the rain fell steadily, dripping down the steps. The star shells were too far away to light the sky, and the flash of muzzles was invisible beyond the slight rise in the land.

"There's no point in going to London without Schenckendorff," Judith said quietly.

"There's no point in going at all until we can tell the prime minister who the Peacemaker is!" Matthew answered bitterly.

"I could tell him," Judith said.

Joseph stared at her, his face incredulous in the yellow candlelight. "How do you know? And without Schenckendorff, why on earth would anyone believe you?"

"I would go to him with Father's copy of the treaty, which has the kaiser's signature on it, and put it in front of him," she answered. "Then I would tell him that the Englishman who had planned it, with his German cousin, was Dermot Sandwell. Colonel Schenckendorff couldn't come himself because he died after being injured coming through the lines."

Matthew's face went blank with surprise for an instant. Then it changed to anger and disbelief, and the struggle to understand.

"Schenckendorff's alive, and getting better," Joseph pointed out. "Except that they'll hang him for murder. Or more likely shoot him."

"Lloyd George won't know that." Judith was practical.

"It can't be Sandwell," Matthew said at last, his
voice
rough. "We ruled him out. And Lloyd George certainly wouldn't believe you. I understand your frustration, Judith, but you can't fling accusations around like that."

"It's not an accusation!" she said vehemently. "Schenckendorff told me it was Sandwell. When we ruled him out, we were wrong. He fooled us."

"You asked Schenckendorff, and he told you?" Joseph's voice rose sharply in amazement.

"It wasn't exactly as bare as that," she explained. "I told him Matthew had been arrested for the murder. I think he felt guilty because Matthew wouldn't even have been here if he hadn't come to meet Schenckendorff, at his request."

"For God's sake, Judith!" Matthew's fists were clenched, his back rigid. "The man was prepared to tyrannize half of Europe! He's not going to feel guilty that I've been wrongly accused of a crime because I came over to get him back to London."

"Guilt is about shabbiness of behavior, hypocrisy, not the enormity of the sin," she answered him. "Isn't it, Joseph?"

Joseph put his hand up in dismissal. "I've no idea, and it doesn't matter. We don't know whether Schenckendorff is telling the truth or not. For that matter, we don't even know for certain if he is who he says he is. It's not beyond the Peacemaker's ability to get him a false identity. Not that much identity is needed by prisoners coming through the lines."

Judith frowned. "Do you think, this close to the armistice, that he really has time to bother with us, even to get revenge?"

"Maybe it isn't so much trouble." Matthew looked at her, his face pinched with a fear he was struggling to hide. "Just a single act by one German who may be desperate and have little to lose. It was our father who ruined the Peacemaker's plans in the beginning. He won't have forgotten that, and I don't think he's a man to forgive. If you're losing, revenge may be the only sweet taste left."

Joseph gazed steadily at the broken duckboards on the floor, and the single piece of old matting over them. "Or perhaps Schenckendorff is completely genuine, and his realization of what the Peacemaker has become, the slow corrosion that power has worked on the morality he started with, perhaps when they were younger, and knew each other well—"

"That wouldn't account for his killing poor Sarah," Matthew interrupted. "If he did that, he deserves to hang for it." His voice was rough with emotion.

Judith knew it was for his own treatment of Sarah also, for the whole, helpless destructive path of violence and blindness that had ended alone in the dark beside the amputated limbs and human refuse of a battlefield hospital. It was no one's fault, and everyone's. The world had changed, and much of the brutality of that had altered forever the role of women, not only for themselves but in others' eyes as well. Nothing was safe and reliable anymore. Nothing could be trusted to be as it was before.

"What I was going to say is that he may be exactly what he says he is," Joseph explained. "But it won't have happened suddenly. The Peacemaker could have sensed his change of heart awhile ago, and struck first."

Matthew stared at him. "You mean instead of just having Schenckendorff shot, he set up this elaborate plan and had him blamed for Sarah's murder?" His face tightened. "Then there's someone else here who's the Peacemaker's man! He did it, and is making it look like Schenckendorff. God Almighty! What a revenge. A German officer and aristocrat, to be hanged for murder, when really he came through the lines at hideous cost
to
himself to commit the final act of honor to his principles rather than his leader." He pushed his hand through his hair. He sighed and caught in his breath. "That's our Peacemaker! What are we going to do?"

Joseph looked from Matthew to Judith, and back again. "What we set out to do: to find out for certain, beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, who killed Sarah Price. All we're working with now is people's stories of where they were, what they were doing, who else they saw or didn't see, and what kind of a person Sarah was."

He leaned forward a little, the candlelight gold on his cheek. "But all the time we're thinking of what we did to her."

Matthew turned toward him. "What do you know that we don't, Joe? There's a lot of talk about rape or mutilation, but if anyone knows, they aren't saying."

Judith winced. She had been refusing to think further. No one had imagined that the motive was anything other than sexual, but that was not the same as giving words to the act.

Joseph's eyes moved from one to the other of them gravely. "It's the violation of the inner person that is unbearable," he answered. "The complete loss of control of your own body and its passions and needs, the core of the way in which it belongs to you. In a woman it is if she is violated by someone else; in a man it is if his own body betrays him by degrading every decency he ought to hold and turning him into a creature outside the acceptance of his fellows. We're all afraid of it. We don't know how to stop it from touching the core of identity, of life. We run away from truth; we build lies that we can live with."

Judith stared at him. He was trying to say something bigger than she had even considered, a more painful idea. There was something in it that touched her own knowledge of passion and change, the freedom she had won here in slaughter, and was not sure how to deal with once her carefully outlined job was over. Without an ambulance ... a uniform ... who was she then?

"We need the truth," Joseph finished, his voice half an apology. "Whoever it hurts. It was somebody here. To find that we may also find a whole lot of other things we would very much rather not have known. Do you believe Schenckendorff s guilty?"

"I don't know," Matthew said.

"No." Judith had no hesitation. "I think somehow or other it's the Peacemaker."

Judith was not called out that night. She slept on a cot in one of the outer rooms of the hospital until four in the morning, when the first casualties came in. They were now some considerable distance from the fighting as it moved eastward toward the borders of Germany itself, and there were other casualty clearing stations far closer. This was just the excess that others could not treat.

She worked helping the orderlies, carrying stretchers, assisting those able to walk a little way the few steps from the ambulance to the waiting area, or from there into a theater.

By six o'clock the worst was over. She drank a hot mug of tea and ate a heel of bread, then she went to help the nurses. She had not their skill, but she could at least fetch and carry for them and do the simpler jobs. She was prepared to sit, with a calm face and a quiet
voice,
with those who were beyond all practical aid. She knew Joseph did it often enough. It was a small service, but no young man should face the final darkness alone, unnoticed, and with no one to say they cared.

By eight o'clock she was sharing rations with Lizzie and trying to think of what questions she could ask to strip bare the lies that were painting Schenckendorff as a murderer. She refused to accept that there were no loose ends anywhere, no one who knew something that would eventually unravel it all.

Moira Jessop joined them, sitting on an upturned empty box with her mug in both hands. "In a month's time we could all be home," she said cheerfully. "Eating proper food. Having a bath and sleeping in sheets. I'd love to be clean." She pulled an expression of complete disgust.

Lizzie gave a slight, bleak smile.

"What's the matter with you?" Moira asked cheerfully. "At least now we know it was a bloody Jerry who killed poor Sarah, and not one of us. We don't need to look sideways at each other anymore. Or walk around in fear, for that matter. And don't pretend half of us weren't!"

Lizzie swallowed hard, but with the dryness of the bread that was not surprising. "Half of us were afraid it would turn out to be someone we knew well, or really liked," she said, not looking at either of them.

"Were you?" Moira's eyes opened wider. "Who do you like, then?'

Lizzie shook her head. "I am speaking generally."

Judith looked at her, not just at her face but also the angle of her shoulders and body, the slightly awkward way she sat on the ammunition box, as if maintaining her balance with an effort. She didn't know that Schenckendorff was important; she probably hadn't even known his name before the evidence implicated him. Why was she not as relieved as everyone else? Surely she had not thought she knew something or suspected something about one of their own men? If so, how could she have allowed Matthew to be blamed, and said nothing? To whom could she possibly owe a loyalty like that?