Chapter 41: The Unconquerable Will and Study of Revenge

POPERINGHE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

April 1918

Young appeared in the drive right after Laura had had the quickest wash of her life, and flung on a clean uniform. In the meantime, Jones had hustled Freddie up to his own room. When Laura paused to look in on them, her brother was sitting on Jones’s bed with his boots off, his shoulders tense. “Malnourished,” said Jones, eyeing him. “In fact I don’t know what the hell he’s been living on. Look at his teeth.”

Laura didn’t answer. She didn’t think Freddie even knew where he was. He sat very still. She crossed the room, knelt. He raised his eyes to her face. A hint of trust there, a question under the confusion. How, after all this, could she possibly leave him?

Jones seemed to follow her thought. “If Borden says she’ll do a thing, she’ll do it,” he said, from behind her. “She meant this. Do it and she’ll get you both out.”

She thought he was right. But she was still afraid to go. As though, if she let her brother out of her sight for one more instant, it would snap the last thread that bound them to their past, and to each other. She felt Jones’s hand on her elbow. He drew her to her feet. Looked her in the face. “I’ll take care of him, Laura,” he said.

He was impatient, unsentimental. He gave her brother his bed. He’d taken a terrible risk, gone against his own judgment, used his own blood to save Winter’s life. And then, when Winter threw their trust back in their faces, he hadn’t said a word. She said, “Why, Stephen?”

He shrugged a little.

She waited.

“I would like you to go home,” he said at last. “And I want to hear you laugh one day. Go on, Iven.”

Laura put a hand on Freddie’s stiff shoulder. He glanced up, but he didn’t speak. Then she went.

---

· · ·Young waited outside the car, looking boyish in the soft spring night, his ears absurd, the adolescent slope of his shoulders concealed by his uniform. To his credit, only a little disappointment crossed his face when he saw Laura loping along at Pim’s heels.

They got in the car and sped off. “Are you all right, Mrs. Shaw?” Young asked. “Such a dreadful ordeal. Your heroism, stopping the spy—”

Pim didn’t answer, but when she smiled and touched his hand, he fell stammeringly silent. Then Pim said, “I just wish I’d recalled sooner what that man said.”

What did he say, Pim?The question penetrated the fog of Laura’s tired mind. Something didn’t add up.

“Something that rascal said to you?” said Young, echoing Laura’s thought. “Oh, lord, when I think of him—so sly—there beside you and you unsuspecting, and the gun might easily have—”

He swallowed and fell silent. Pim had put her hand over his again. There was again that strange distress, not quite love, in Young’s face. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m all right. I must only see the general. So kind of him, to take a moment.”

“Well,” said Young with disarming frankness, “it’s got everyone on the jump—spy on our doorstep, very nearly assassinated a general. And the Germans attacking—it’s really dreadful up there now, Ypres all to pieces with the shelling. And they had to pull back from the Ridge. It was indefensible, you know.”

Pim had known that, as had Laura, but the color briefly left her face anyway. Her son had died taking the Ridge. Her eyes and Laura’s met, just briefly, in the darkness.

---

· · ·Poperinghe was in a ferment greater than Laura had ever seen. Cars, lorries, horses. Bicycles and motorcycles and people on foot. Telephones, messengers, men calling news. Troops going up, the wounded coming back. The noise of shelling, drumroll-fast, the whole sky stabbed through with wild light.

The car drew up in front of HQ. Young spoke to some men, turned back to them. “My uncle’s with the prisoner now,” he said. “You can wait to speak to him. Or…there is some hope that, in your presence, perhaps, when he learns what you shall reveal, he might be induced to say…”

Pim had gone just briefly still. “All right,” she said.

His voice a little hoarse. “If—you are sure, Mrs. Shaw?”

Pim said, “I’m sure.” She took his arm to escort her into the building. “I’m quite brave, you know.”

“Oh,” said Young fervently, “I know.”

They would see Winter. Laura didn’t know how to feel. He may have owed a debt to her brother, but he’d been a loyal German in the end. Seen a chance to kill a general, and taken it. It was only luck, and Pim, that had thwarted him. Perhaps it was right that she’d be there. If she could tell him somehow that Freddie was all right. For her brother’s sake.

Reason pricked her, told her that didn’t explain Faland’s presence outside the château or Winter’s gaze locked on hers.

Perhaps she’d never know.

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· · ·Young took them to a cellar room with a strong door, a room that might have contained liquor, or town money, once upon a time. Now Winter was there, in a chair, with bruises on his face. Laura supposed they’d no time for gentle interrogations, not with an attack literally in progress. Rationally she knew that. But her every instinct rebelled at beating a wounded man. She crossed the room in three strides, her fingers finding the pulse beneath the cold sweat on Winter’s neck, turning so she could see the blood on his side where Jones’s painstaking work on his burst stitches had torn again. His eyes fixed instantly on her face.

She gave him the barest nod. I found him. He’s alive.

He closed his eyes.

“Miss Iven,” said a voice. Laura turned. The room was not empty. There were Young and Pim, of course, behind her. And Gage himself, standing, with an aide seated, and another man wearing the uniform of Military Intelligence. “So glad to see you again, my dear. Your charitable impulses do you credit.” A faint irritation in his well-bred voice; of course he didn’t want the prisoner comfortable. But he didn’t remonstrate with her. He’d turned to Pim, luminous even in the harsh light, and said, “Tell me now, Mrs. Shaw. What did this man admit to you? Hurry, hurry, I must go back up in a moment.”

Winter had raised his chin, and Gage obviously saw it; he turned his head, watching Winter’s reaction. But Winter surprised them all. His eyes were locked on Pim, but he spoke to Laura. His split lip cracked and began to bleed when he said, “Iven, take her out.”

Even as he said it, Laura heard a disturbance in the corridor. A crash, shouting. Then, strangely, someone laughing. Everyone in the room tensed. Sabotage? Laura wondered first, and Gage obviously had the same thought. “Edwards, Boyne, go see,” said the general, and the intelligence officer and the aide hurried to the doorway, peered down the corridor.

Then she happened to catch Pim’s eye, which was wild and cold and entirely unsurprised. “No,” said Winter, trying to rise.

But Pim had turned toward the door behind the two officers. She slammed it, and shot the bolt. Laura, startled, was slow to react when Pim pulled a pistol from her pocket, got behind the indignant general, and pressed the gun just behind his ear.

Everyone froze.

Gage, holding himself rigid, whispered, “Have you gone mad?”

“Pim?” whispered Laura.

Young stood frozen, his mouth a little open. “Penelope?”

“I warn you, young woman,” said Gage. “Stop this nonsense at once, or—”

“Or?” said Pim, in a low, terrible voice. “You’ll kill me, just like Jimmy?”

The air seemed to leave the room. Pim’s back was straight, and her eyes were cold, cold, cold. Was that madness, there in the glitter?

“Penelope?” said Young again. His voice was small and strained. “I told my uncle he shouldn’t have told you. He’s sorry now. He’s sorry. Put the gun down.”

Winter was rigid under Laura’s hands, his face salt-white. “Talk to her,” he whispered. “Don’t let her do this.”

“Pim,” said Laura again. But she didn’t have words, didn’t understand in the slightest the expression on Pim’s face.

Strangely, Young seemed to know better than Laura did. “I am sorry. It’s a—well, a hell of a thing to hear. I know that. You—maybe I’d have been unhappy too. Truly. But this isn’t right. Put the gun down. Please.”

“It’s not worth it,” said Winter to Pim.

“He’s not worth it,” echoed Laura, finding her tongue. “Pim—whatever the reason—it’s not…” She trailed off. The despair in Pim’s face was absolute, and it frightened her. Fearful sweat poured down Gage’s face.

“Maybe not,” said Pim, and pulled the trigger.

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· · ·It was loud and it was messy. The general lurched and sank down. Laura crossed the room and kept him from crashing to the floor. His gaze was already fixed, his body twitching.

Pim dropped the gun. There was noise in the corridor outside, shouting, banging. Young, standing rigid, had not reached for the bolt, had not opened the door. Christ only knew what they thought was going on inside.

Gage’s blood pooled on Laura’s skirt.

Pim’s breathing was hard and noisy in the confined space.

“You—” Young started, then stopped. He licked his lips. “Is this why—from the beginning?—to get to him?”

Pim nodded. “You can arrest me. It’s all right.”

Laura said, “Pim, you tried to shoot the general in the hospital, didn’t you?” Then she understood. “Winter stopped you.”

Passionately, Pim said, “I never meant for him to die for me. I’d have told everyone. But first I had to do this.”

“But why?” whispered Laura. “For God’s sake, Pim, why?”