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Chaplain?" Prentice responded. "And he won't! In a week or two he'll be home in England, warm and safe!"
    "So will you!" Joseph told him. "Only you'll have all your fingers." And he turned to help Wil Sloan get Corliss to his feet and out to the ambulance in the rain.
    Matthew Reavley drove along the open road in the April sunshine. He was heading south from London towards the outskirts of Brighton and he had a sense of exhilaration to be out of the city and, at last, after nine months of frustration and failure, to be on the brink of a real step forward.
    The events of the previous summer, even before the outbreak of war, had altered his life irrevocably. At the end of June, on the same day as the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Matthew's parents had been killed in a car crash, which at first had seemed simply an accident. On the previous evening John Reavley had called his son Matthew on the telephone and said that he had found a document that outlined a plan that, if carried out, would ruin England's honour, and change the history of the world. It was in bringing the document from his home in St. Giles to Matthew in London that the accident had happened.
    But when Matthew and Joseph had examined their father's possessions, taken from the wreck, there was no document. Nor was it in the shattered car. They had searched the house and found nothing even resembling such a thing.
    The car crash had proved to be a careful and deliberate murder, although the police had never known that. John Reavley had also warned Matthew, in their last brief conversation, that the conspiracy touched even as high as the Royal Family, and he could trust no one.
    Matthew and Joseph, seven years his senior, had uncovered the painful and ultimately tragic truth of what had happened. They had found the document where John Reavley had hidden it, and what it contained was far worse than he had painted it. Even as Matthew sped between the hedgerows, with their new leaves translucent green, a soft veil of rain misting the copse of woodland in the distance, he remembered the numbing horror with which he and Joseph had read the paper. The proposal was beyond anything they had imagined: a treaty between Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V, agreeing that England should abandon France and Belgium to the German conquering army, in return for which England and Germany together would form an empire to divide the world between them. Most of Europe would fall to Germany, who would then help Britain to keep its present empire and add to it the old colonies of the Americas, including the entire United States. It was a betrayal almost inconceivable.
    And yet it would have avoided the slaughter that was now staining the battlefields of Europe, a carnage that looked set to continue if Kitchener raised a million more men to go voluntarily into that hell of pain and destruction.
    The brothers knew who had killed John and Alys Reavley, and why. The young man himself was now dead, as was his brother,
    but the instigator of it all, almost certainly the man who had believed he could convince King George to sign the treaty, was still unknown, and free to continue in whatever way he could to further the creation of his empire of subjugation and dishonourable peace.
    Joseph was serving in Flanders and had no opportunity to pursue 'the Peacemaker', as they had called him. Hannah, Joseph and Matthew's elder sister, had moved back to the family home in St. Giles, with her three children. Her husband, Archie, was in the Royal Navy and at sea most of the time. Hannah had been the closest to their mother, and in many ways was trying to take her place in the village, close to the familiar lanes and fields of her childhood, the families she knew, the routines of domestic care and the small duties and kindnesses that were the fabric of life.
    Matthew himself had naturally continued in his career in the Secret Intelligence Service, which his father had so