We Shall Not Sleep (33 page)

"Sometimes," he said with a slight smile.

She smiled back at him. "I still don't know who did it."

"Do you know if Cavan was in the Evacuation tent when he said he was?"

"No, I don't."

"Allie Robinson said he was, but she was lying, to cover for him, he told her.

"That was stupid," she said drily. "She can't have been there herself. I saw her at about four o'clock, or shortly after, and she'd been in the Admissions tent for some time."

"No, she was in Evacuation," he corrected her. "She was seen there by Benbow, and Eames as well."

She shook her head. "I saw her, and she was covered in blood. She must have been in Admissions. She was perfectly clean apart from a few spots on her skirt at about half past three, and by the time any of the wounded get to Evacuation they're bandaged and fit to go, or they wouldn't be there. You only get soaked in blood like that either in Admissions or in lying wounded, waiting for operations." Then suddenly her eyes widened and she stared at him, aghast.

He could not believe it. It was hideous, terrible, but he knew exactly what she was thinking. The images raced through his mind also, increasing, growing clearer and more real. The hatred was there, the sense of morality, and the belief that the meaning of life was falling apart. It was not only in violence and death on every side, but then finally at the core, the very fount of creation, the reason that redeemed all else and gave hope for newness, cleanness in the world again.

Men were dead or damaged everywhere, the flower of a generation. No one could count the number of women who would live alone, and childless. A new, harsher order had taken over, and it was terrifying. Women, the keepers of sanity, had themselves cast it aside. There was a way in which that was the ultimate betrayal, the end of hope itself.

That was why the bayonet had been used—woman punishing the suicide of womanhood. How had he not even guessed at it? Sarah's playing with Cavan and then flirting with the German prisoners was the final, unbearable offense, committed while British men were only yards away, bleeding to an agonizing death, awake and hideously aware of all of it.

Erica was still staring at him, but there was no struggle left in her eyes. She knew it was true. "I'm sorry," she said gravely. "I didn't see it, either, and I should have. I was so sure it was a man. I thought it was Benbow. I saw certain ... certain things he did, a way he looked at some of the women, especially Moira Jessop. That isn't evidence, and I misjudged him. I even thought of warning her not to tease him. I would have wronged him, wouldn't I?" She gave a bleak grimace of self-criticism.

Joseph did not answer. It was all past, and it would not help. He needed to find Onslow, and Jacobson, too. Jacobson deserved to know. They would have to arrest Allie Robinson and release all the rest of the men kept here, sending the wounded home and the few able-bodied back to the fighting. The station itself would be moved forward to where it was still needed.

"A woman?" Onslow said slowly, as if the very word were a new concept to him, let alone the idea.

Patiently, allowing the horror to fill his words, Joseph explained to him the passion of betrayal that he believed Allie had seen: the ultimate obscenity of a woman like Sarah threatening to defile the very source of life, of
nurture, of every hope to make everything clean and new.

"If there is no home to go back to, no one to love, to forgive and to start again, what was the pain all for?" he finished.

"Can we prove it?" Onslow asked, his voice hushed.

"Not easily, but I think so," Joseph answered. "We must certainly try.

Onslow wiped his hand over his brow. "Come on, then. We'd better go and find her." His hand went automatically
to
the revolver at his belt, reassuring himself that it was there.

Joseph did not tell him that it was unnecessary. He did not know.

Allie Robinson was in the Operating tent. Cavan was busy suturing a lacerated foot. He barely looked up.

Allie saw Joseph's face, and Onslow just behind him. She stiffened, her eyes wide.

Onslow walked forward slowly, moving a little toward the operating table so he cut her off from it, placing himself between her and the soldier whose foot was being stitched.

She saw the finality in his expression. She stepped back, closer to the table with the instruments on it, scalpel, forceps, needles, clamps.

"Don't do that," Onslow said quietly. "It's all over, Miss Robinson. Don't make it worse."

"Worse?" she said, as if he had asked her a question. "What could be worse? We've destroyed everything. What we haven't killed or maimed, we've defiled beyond help. There isn't anything left to win or lose. Our civilization is dead. Nothing is clean or modest or gentle as it used to be. It's all strident, dirty. We've forgotten who we are, and when you do that, there's nothing worth having at all. It's all dirt and blood." She took another step back.

"Miss Robinson!" Onslow said loudly, his voice high with alarm.

But it was too late. She swung around and grasped the scalpel, looked at him for an instant, then plunged it into her chest. She was a good nurse; she had seen lots of men torn open by shrapnel. She knew exactly where to strike. The blood gushed out scarlet. She crumpled to the floor and did not move again.

The soldier on the table fainted.

Cavan went as white as his coat and gagged, holding his hands over his mouth, the needle dangling by its thread.

Onslow sighed. "I'm so sorry," he said quietly. "I should have stopped that. Not that it would have helped, really."

Joseph bent and straightened her out, removing the scalpel. The blood was still pouring, but it would stop soon. She was already dead. He felt sad and helpless.

"Poor creature," he said quietly. "And it won't change anything. We'll still have to find a way to heal."

CHAPTER TEN

Now they must race for the coast. There were only days to get Schenckendorff to London. Judith and Lizzie were volunteers, and could leave without difficulty. Mason could do as he chose. Matthew was due to return to London. Only Joseph was regular army, and for him to leave would be desertion.

"You have to," Matthew said simply.

"I'll tell Colonel Hook—" Joseph began.

"You can't!" Matthew's expression left no room for argument or negotiation. "We're this close, Joseph." He held up his hand, fingers and thumb half an inch apart. "The Peacemaker has eyes and ears everywhere. Hook has the power to stop us all. We can't take the chance."

"Colonel Hook!" Joseph was incredulous. They were all crammed into his bunker, which was so narrow they could not sit without touching one another. Only Schenckendorff was missing. Joseph looked at Mason, having to twist around to do it.

Mason's face was bleak. "Anyone," he said simply. "I don't know who else believes the Peacemaker, or I'd tell you. We have to just leave. Fill cans with as much petrol as we can get hold of, as much food, and go. We could still lose it all."

Joseph gave in. It was legally desertion, and it felt like it: no goodbyes, no explanation. But it was his men he cared about, and if Hook explained to them, news of it could reach the Peacemaker in hours.

He sighed and nodded. Matthew resumed making plans.

Judith wanted to say goodbye to many people, particularly Cavan and, above all, Wil Sloan, but she, too, was aware of the danger. However she did it, or whatever she said, someone would notice and say something. Word would be passed around before they were more than a few miles away. For her, as for Joseph, any risk, however small, was too much. No one else could know how ruthless the Peacemaker was, or how far his knowledge and his alliances had spread.

So she said nothing and felt disloyal as, shivering in the dark, she drove the ambulance out of the Casualty Clearing Station onto the mud track to pick Joseph and Matthew up. They were supporting Schenckendorff between them, as he was still unable to put his weight on his injured foot. A few yards farther on they were joined by Lizzie and Mason, climbing in the back of the ambulance hastily and closing the doors as Judith accelerated and made for the road.

Mason came forward and sat beside her. He alone was of no immediate use in the back, where Lizzie was swallowing her occasional morning nausea and attending to Schenckendorff s injured foot. Joseph and Matthew were talking quietly about a route back through Belgium, and then across the channel. Time was short. It was already the third of November; a cease-fire could be declared within days. Matthew had a little money, but where to find further supplies was a far greater problem than paying for them. Food and petrol were too scarce to be. had simply for the right price.

Judith drove steadily, with concentration. She worried not only about fuel but also about spare parts if they should have any sort of breakdown, not to mention accident. The ambulance was on its last legs anyway. Once away from the army lines with their supply stores, there would be nowhere to get oil or any of the parts she might need. She had had no compunction about taking with her all that she could, begging, borrowing, or removing without the owners consent three new spark plugs. Had she been able to explain the urgency, she was quite sure they would have been given willingly.

Now they drove through the fine, dry night. The air became increasingly cold in the open front of the vehicle, and the wind from the north swirled around, creeping between folds of coats and scarves, numbing hands and whipping the blood in cheeks and brows.

Mason was used to it. He had spent the last four years in every kind of vehicle, on every battlefront from the deserts of Arabia to the arctic snows of Russia. As he sat here now moving along the ruined roads of Belgium on the last journey of his own battle, he had a smile on his face and seemed almost relaxed.

Judith looked sideways at him once or twice and saw the change in him. She was almost frighteningly happy to think that it was his feeling for her that had caused it. She wanted it to be so much that she could neither believe nor disbelieve it. And she felt guilty, because it would cost him a high and terrible price. In exposing the Peacemaker he would be confessing to his own part in the treason. Only now was she realizing the meaning of that. There was peace ahead, and justice that would finally call Dermot Sandwell to account for the betrayal of his countrymen and the murders of all those who had stood in his way.

And there was honor for Matthew and for Schenckendorff. Perhaps for Mason there would be at least the acceptance of a faith in life that he had denied before, even fought against. But there would be no future for him with Judith. The only future he could await was execution. That thought hurt her with a finality she had not expected.

She stared into the darkness ahead. The road was nearly dry. At the sides were occasional poplars. Many of them were little more than stumps, but now and then a few had branches, leafless like broken bones. Clear patches in the sky let the moonlight gleam fitfully, showing a landscape of craters and stretches of mud, and now and then the jagged walls of a bombed-out building. They passed a canal, its walls breached, the flooded water flat and pale and irregularly shaped as it seeped away into the fields, sometimes lapping right up to the raised edges of the road.

She would not have changed Mason or had him sink back into the cynicism of before. She remembered their quarrel at the court martial, the sense of futility that seemed to touch all his thoughts. It was not simply that he believed Josephs efforts were pointless, but that he found them foolish, in a way even contemptible because they were rooted in a refusal to face reality. He had thought both she and Joseph were cowards, clinging to faith in a God who did not exist because they lacked the courage to live alone in the universe.

Why had he changed? Yes, he was in love with her. But so was she in love with him. No matter how much you loved someone, you could not alter who you were in order to be comfortable with them. If you loved the right person it should make you stronger, braver, gentler, perhaps eventually wiser. It should never make you deny your intelligence or forsake your integrity. What were you worth if you would do that?

She looked sideways at him again, trying to read his face in the few moments she could spare from watching the road. His eyes were wide and dark, staring ahead of him, and there was a deep sadness in the curve of his mouth.

He must have been aware of her—because he turned and smiled.

"It isn't for me, is it, that you're doing this?" She asked it with something close to certainty, willing it to be so.

"No," he said without hesitation. "Because of you, perhaps, you and Joseph, but because I have to satisfy myself."

She felt something of the fear ease out of her, the knots loosen.

"Were you afraid it was for you?" he asked, and this time there was amusement in his voice. "That then you would owe me something?" He did not add that you cannot owe love; she knew he was thinking it, just as she was. She felt the heat in her face and was glad of the concealing darkness. There was only the occasional yellow glare of lamps as they passed some lone farmhouse still standing, or a group of people stopped temporarily and huddled around a fire, now and again car lights going the other way.

Perhaps at last they understood each other in the deepest things; the values that are woven into nature, the need to be at peace with who you are, together or alone.

As if the emotion were too strong, and the time too short, he moved away from it. "I know you've dressed Schenckendorff as a British VA.D., but you'd better not let him speak. He still sounds German to me. I'll wager any Belgian in the country knows German when he hears it. They have five years' hate to avenge. They aren't going to forget it. Does Joseph really think they will?"

"No," she said simply. "Have you got a better idea?"

"No, I haven't. But we'd better be right. We're going to have to stop for fuel sometime. We won't make it all the way to the coast on what we have. One mistake will be the last."