We Shall Not Sleep (3 page)

He stopped, his feet covered in mud. He was not ready to go into the tent yet. He needed a short break before finding the next man to talk to, to try to comfort, or if not that, then at least to help him to a drink of water or turn him onto his other side for a little ease.

He had not faced it until this moment that Lizzie meant so much to him, far more than friendship, more than laughter or comfort or someone to trust. The thought that she might not write again was a loneliness he was not equipped to endure. It was pointless to evade it, even if it were possible. He loved her.

Joseph's brother, Matthew Reavley, was sitting in a bare, impersonal London office opposite Calder Shearing, his superior in the Secret Intelligence Service.

"A month," Shearing said, pulling his mouth into a tight line. "Possibly a week or two longer, if the Germans hold out around Ypres, but not much more. Prisoners are pouring third repetition across the lines, sometimes ten thousand a day. There's still hard fighting in Menin, Courtrai—and Verdun, of course. Casualty figures are bad on both sides." He did not need to look at the names on the map. As Matthew was well aware, he knew them all better than the furniture of his own house or the neglected garden behind it.

"Talks by early November?" Matthew asked. "Cease-fire?"

"Probably," Shearing replied. "But we're not ready. We're still arguing with Wilson and the French."

His voice was raw with emotion and barely suppressed anger. This had been the most devastating war in history. It had spread to almost every corner of the world. Thirty-five million people were missing, dead, or injured; a continent spread with ruin. The balance of power was altered forever, the old rule swept away. The kaiser was toppled, the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbling. In Russia a revolution had occurred, even more terrible than that which had swept the Bourbon monarchy from France. America had emerged as a new world power.

"Wilson's Fourteen Points," Matthew said grimly.

It was a vexed subject. President Woodrow Wilson of the United States was in effect the chief arbiter between the opposing forces, and as far back as January he had laid out his principles upon which peace should be negotiated.

Shearing's strong hand clenched on the desk between the two men. "Don't argue it, Reavley. Not now."

"He has no grasp of history," Matthew said yet again. "If we force his terms on Germany, it will lay the foundation for another war just as bloody as this!"

"I know!" Shearing snapped, the muscles of his face tightening. "We all know it, but the man doesn't listen to us. He has the mind of a country schoolmaster and the soul of an army mule. But what matters is that he has the power of a nation that didn't join the war until close to the end, when the rest of us were already on our knees. He rescued us, and, very politely, he doesn't intend to let us forget it."

"If it was a European country schoolmaster it wouldn't matter," Matthew said drily, leaning back in his chair. He had grown comfortable in Shearing's room only lately, now that he understood why there was nothing personal in it. "He would at least grasp the reasons for our ancient quarrels, and know that we can't be forced to get over them by common sense, especially an outsider's idea of what is sensible."

"I know!" Shearing repeated sharply. "Dermot Sandwell has tried pointing out that if we destroy Germany's heavy industry with punitive restrictions, we will cripple the economy of the whole continent. Germany in violent recession could create a vacuum, which would suck in all of us, in time. Five or six years from now we could have an economic depression unlike anything we've seen before."

"Is Sandwell right?" Matthew asked with a sudden chill.

"God knows," Shearing replied. "Probably. And yet if we don't prevent them from rearming we'll be back where we started, and deserve to be." He smiled. It was very brief, but there was warmth in it, even a momentary revelation of something very close to friendship. "I suppose you still don't know who your 'Peacemaker' is?"

Matthew took a deep breath, startled by the sense of defeat in himself. The failure hurt more deeply than he had expected. "No," he admitted.

"I'm sorry," Shearing said quietly. "I suppose if I could help, you would have said so?"

Shearing was an intense man who never spoke of himself. Matthew had learned from someone else of the tragic and heroic history of Shearing's family. Only then had he finally trusted Shearing and understood his fierce loyalty to his adopted country. Not a trace of his original accent remained. His English was not only correct—it was completely colloquial. Nothing except the darkness of his eyes and an occasional sadness in his smile gave him away. Many times before that, Matthew had feared Shearing himself was the Peacemaker. There was a gleam of humor in the man's eyes as he looked back at Matthew now. Perhaps he knew it, too, or guessed it.

"Yes. And if I think of anything, I still will," Matthew answered.

Shearing tidied the handwritten notes in front of him and locked them in his desk. It was an unnecessary measure since the room would be locked also, but it was his habit to be careful, even though the notes would not be decipherable to anyone else were they found. "Bring me more as soon as you have it."

"Yes, sir." Matthew stood up. "Good night, sir."

"Good night, Reavley."

Matthew returned to his office, locked away his own papers, and collected his mackintosh. Outside in the dark street, he turned left along the pavement and began to walk briskly. Getting home to his flat would take him about half an hour, by which time in the fine, cold drizzle he would be pretty wet. Still, it was better than looking for any kind of transport. Buses were crowded and irregular. Taxis were rare. Everyone was competing for the little petrol there was, and he could easily walk the distance. In fact, after sitting most of the day at a desk sifting information, he was glad of the strange sense of freedom the dark streets brought to him. They were crowded with other people also hurrying, their heads down, their collars high. The occasional gleam of car headlights shone on the wet surfaces: smooth tarmac or rough cobbles, the sharp edge of a curb.

He would have known the way blindfolded. He passed the tobacconist on the corner. The man's son had been killed at Gallipoli, and a younger son had lost an arm at Verdun. His daughter's husband had been blinded at Messines. The greengrocer's son was in the Royal Flying Corps. He was still fine, but his mother had been killed in a zeppelin raid here at home. And so it went. Everyone had lost someone, even if it was a lifelong friend rather than a relative.

He crossed the street, facing into the wind. The rain was heavier. The Peacemaker that Shearing had referred to was the code name Matthew and Joseph had given to the man who had conceived a wild plan to prevent the war entirely, back in the summer of 1914.

Matthew could remember walking across the sunlit cricket pitch that afternoon in Cambridge as if it were yesterday, and yet in a way it seemed like another lifetime. He could still see the cloudless sky and the white gleam of flannels and shirts. The women wore long, pale muslin dresses. Wide hats shaded their faces, and their long hair was elaborately dressed. It had been a golden afternoon that seemed as if it would go on forever.

And Matthew had shattered it, at least for his own family. He had come to tell Joseph that their parents, John and Alys Reavley, had been killed in a car crash on the

Hauxton Road

. That evening as they sat in the silent, strangely empty family home, the village constable had come to express his sympathy, mentioning quite casually the news that in Sarajevo the archduke and duchess of Austria had been assassinated by some Serbian madman.

John and Alys Reavley's deaths had proved to be murder also. John Reavley had found one of the two drafts of a proposed treaty between Kaiser Wilhelm and King Edward. It would allow Germany to invade England, France, and Belgium and absorb them into an expanding German Empire, and then in time take the rest of Europe as well. The kaiser's price was German help to regain the former British colony of the United States, and of course to keep the rest of the British Empire of India, Burma, Africa, Australasia, and various islands around the earth. It would in effect be an Anglo-German Empire greater than any the world had seen before. It might bring global peace, but at the cost of national honor and individual freedom.

John Reavley had been driving to London to tell Matthew about it; given his job, Matthew could bring it to the attention of the right people, making it impossible to carry through. And he had died because of it. But before he left Cambridge, he had hidden the treaty, and no matter how the Peacemaker's men had hunted for it, they had not found it. Matthew and Joseph had discovered it, on the eve of war. It was still in its hiding place in the barrel of
the unused punt gun in their home in Selborne St. Giles. Without both copies, the Peacemaker could not present it to be signed by the king, and there was no time left to get the kaiser's signature on another.

Once war had begun the Peacemaker had turned his efforts—and those of his followers—toward making peace again as soon as possible. In the early years his intent had been to sabotage the British recruitment, which was all still voluntary then. Later he had sabotaged the scientific inventions that might have saved thousands of lives at sea, both in the merchant and Royal Navy, and tens of thousands of tons of vital supplies of both food and munitions.

Still later he had used propaganda again. The reports of failing morale, escalating casualties, the pointlessness of so many deaths for an ideal that had been flawed from the beginning were designed to undermine British resolve and productivity.

Matthew had wondered if the fearful explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had somehow been the Peacemaker's doing. It had happened on December 6 of the previous year. The French Canadian ship
Mont-Blanc,
carrying more than two and a half thousand tons of high explosives destined for the war effort, had struck a Norwegian ship in the narrows at the harbor entrance. Abandoned by her crew, the
Mont-Blanc,
rather than blowing up immediately as everyone had expected, drifted into the harbor itself until she rested against one of the piers. Then she exploded so violently that her every shred of shattered and burning debris fell on churches, houses, schools, factories, docks, and other ships. More than twelve thousand houses were damaged. Far more importantly, well over four thousand people were killed or injured. It was the biggest man-made explosion that had ever occurred. The devastation was bitter and lasting.

But of course it was the murders of people he knew and loved that hurt Matthew most sharply—his parents, the man who had stolen the treaty and brought it to England, Augustus Tempany, Owen Culling-ford, Theo Blaine. He knew that was foolish. No man or woman had more than one life to give, or to lose, but the death of someone whose face you know, whose voice is familiar, whose laughter and pain you have shared, wounds a different part of you, and reason doesn't help its healing. He remembered Shanley Corcoran with a unique stab of pain, because his end had been worse than merely death.

And of course he remembered Detta Hannassey, beautiful Detta who moved with such grace, and would now never walk with ease again. That was different, and perhaps the Peacemaker was not to blame, but that did not lessen the hurt.

Now, in October 1918, he still did not know who the Peacemaker was, and could only guess at what else he might have done that was outside their knowledge. There could be a hundred other schemes, a thousand.

He crossed the dark street. A taxi swept by, lights gleaming on black puddles, wheels spraying dirty water high. He leaped backward, hand up as if to ward it off, memory drenching him with sweat for those other times when the Peacemaker's men had twice so nearly killed him. Once had been in the street in what would have looked like an accident. He straightened his coat and went on, feeling foolish.

Of course he had spent more hours than he could count trying to find the Peacemaker's identity and stop him. He had suspected several people and one by one ruled them out, only to find his facts turned on their heads by contradictory information. Most painful, as well as most compromising, was that it could have been Calder Shearing. The evidence had piled up. It was only last year that Matthew finally knew his superior's innocence.

Matthew and Joseph had both believed it could be Aidan Thyer, master of St. John'sCollege, Cambridge. They still had Thyer under suspicion, as well as senior cabinet minister Dermot Sandwell, close to the heart of government.

Now it looked as if the war was going to end and they would never know. That would mean victory, peace, and a very personal failure. He had let his father down. John Reavley had never wanted his son to enter the intelligence service, had never liked the deviousness, the secrecy and lies it involved, the manipulation and betrayal inherent in its methods of gathering information.

Soldiers who fight face-to-face have a certain honor. They also endure a kind of physical horror that comes as close to hell as a human being can conceive. The suffering, not only of body but perhaps even more of mind, belongs in a realm outside the imagination of sane men. Matthew had heard it discussed, but even the words of poets—some of the most powerful ever written in the English language—could barely evoke it.

Men who returned on leave did not speak of it, not even his own brother. John Reavley would have been proud of Joseph—silently, joyously proud of him. Joseph had kept his word to his men throughout, swallowing his own pain and going forward again and again.

What would John Reavley have said of Matthew? Would he have understood now what vital work the Secret Intelligence Service did? How many lives it saved, silently, unknown and unrecognized?

He was only a couple of hundred yards from home now. Soon he would be able to take off his wet clothes and make himself a hot cup of tea. He would like to have had whisky, but it was becoming harder to get, and he would save it for later. There were shortages of just about everything: food, petrol, coal, clothes, paper, soap, and candles.