We Shall Not Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page 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.
    Inside, the flat was cold. He put on the kettle and cut himself a couple of cheese sandwiches, piling on Hannah's homemade chutney brought back with him from his last visit to Cambridgeshire. She had wanted to give him more, offering him all sorts of things he knew she could not really spare.
    She was lonely, with Archie at sea almost all the time. They had grown much closer since the summer of 1916, when she had seen so much loss, and forced him to tell her far more of the truth of his life as a destroyer commander in the North Atlantic. Before that she had been happy not even to imagine it in any realistic detail.
    Matthew understood why, and he admired her for at last taking that great step forward. But she had hated most of the changes the war had brought. She had never wanted the rights—or the responsibilities that went with them—that so many women now were forced to accept, willingly or not. She was nothing like Judith, who had gone without hesitation to France to drive an ambulance. Hannah was happy with her children and the village. She had stepped into her mother's shoes, taking on the organization of village affairs, the knowledge of families' loyalties and needs, the constant small kindnesses that bind a community together and make it possible to survive shattering loss. The end of