Chapter 15 Cornered

Commandant Ashwell heard her out for the second time in a fortnight, and this time she did it standing at the barred window with her back to the room, which Milly had come to understand was how the Commandant listened when she had already decided and was looking for the words. "You have a document of eight pages," Ashwell said. "You have a witness who will deny everything and a clerk who is frightened of his own shadow. You have the copy of a dead man's summary, which a court will call hearsay. You have a photograph with a name on the back. And you propose to lay all of it before the inspector on the sixteenth, three days after six men have been given the names of dead soldiers at Vallencourt." "Yes," Milly said. "Then you will not be at Vallencourt on the fourteenth," Ashwell said, and turned. "You will be here, with me, and you will let the market deliver its names, and when the inspector comes you will give him a document that describes a crime which has already happened. That is how these things are done, if they are done at all. You do not catch a thief by standing in front of him. You catch him by standing in front of the man who judges him, with the goods still warm in his hands." "And the six men who buy the names? They will be gone by the sixteenth." "They will be gone in any case," Ashwell said. "A man who buys a name buys it precisely because a name is a thing that can be carried away. You will not catch the buyers, Miss Passmore. You may catch the seller, and the seller is the only one who matters, because the seller is the one who will do it again next month, at another station, with other men's graves." It was good sense, and Milly knew it was good sense, and she agreed to it, and then the afternoon came, and with the afternoon came the order that made her understand that the market had heard about Commandant Ashwell's plan before Milly had finished explaining it. The order was for the column, and it came down through the usual channels from the railhead, and it concerned her by name. Ambulance Number Seven, driven by M. Passmore, was reassigned for the winter to the base hospital at the coast, in recognition of her long service and in the interests of the service. She was to report at Marlefield on the fourteenth of October with her kit, and proceed by the evening train. It was a kindness on paper. It was, in fact, a removal, and both Milly and the Commandant knew it, standing in the counting-house with the order in Ashwell's hand. "They want you out of the district before the fourteenth," Ashwell said. "They want me out of the district before the sixteenth," Milly said. "So that when the inspector comes there is nobody here who has been keeping an account." Ashwell folded the order and put it in the drawer of her desk, which meant she had not yet decided to obey it and had not yet decided to disobey it, and that was as much protection as a Commandant of volunteers could offer a driver in the last week of a bad season. The near-accident came that evening. Milly was coming back from the Warren with an empty ambulance in the last of the light, and there was a lorry ahead of her on the Brolincourt road, a big one, loaded, and it was going slowly, and she was content to stay behind it. Then, on the long straight before the crossroads, the lorry slowed further, and slowed, and stopped, and as Milly braked, the lorry began to roll backward down the slight grade toward her, without lights, without a horn, without any of the small courtesies that separate a mistake from a murder. She had nowhere to go. The road had a ditch on the left and a bank on the right, and the reversing lorry filled the whole width of it, and for a long half-second Milly did the only thing there was to do, which was to put the Ford at the bank and let it take the impact and hope. The front wing crumpled against the chalk with a scream of metal, and the lorry went on past her on its way to the crossroads with its driver's face averted, and Milly sat behind the wheel with her hands shaking and her engine dead and her heart going like a hammer. When she got the Ford started, and looked at the wing, and looked at the road, she found that the lorry had not stopped at all. It had gone on toward the railhead, and there was no number on the back that she could read, and no one to ask, and nothing in the world to prove that anything had happened except a crumpled wing and the fact that she was alive. She drove home slowly and told nobody but Hilda. "He knows," Hilda said. "He knows about the plan and he knows about the inspector and he has bought you a ticket out of the district, and when the ticket did not work he tried the road. What are you going to do?" "I am going to be at Vallencourt on the fourteenth," Milly said. "The Commandant says no." "The Commandant says no to the fourteenth, and the Commandant is right about the sixteenth, and there is only one of me. So I will obey her, Hilda. I will report at Marlefield on the fourteenth with my kit, as the order says." She looked at the crumpled wing of Number Seven. "The order says Marlefield. It does not say how I am to get there, or which road I am to take, or how long I am to wait before I take it." She went to the counting-house the next morning and stood in front of the Commandant's desk and told her the truth, which was that she intended to obey the order and report at Marlefield on the fourteenth, and also to spend the hours before she reported on the road to Vallencourt, because the delivery was on that road and she was, whatever else she was, a person who had promised a dying man something. She expected to be forbidden. The Commandant looked at her for a while, and then wrote a line on a slip of paper and handed it across the desk. "That is a pass for Number Seven to proceed to Marlefield by the western road," Ashwell said. "The western road passes within a mile of Vallencourt. I am not sending you there, and I am not forbidding you. I am giving you a road, because a road is a thing that exists, and it is not the place of a Commandant to pretend that a road does not exist." "And the colonel?" "The colonel comes at eleven," Ashwell said. "I have written to him myself. If there is anything at that house at eleven, I intend that he should see it. If there is a girl on that road at eleven, she should not be alone." She was not alone. Denbigh came up from the coast on the morning of the fourteenth, on the last day his shoulder would allow him to pretend that it was better, and Hilda took the seat beside Milly without being asked, and Marchbanks, who knew nothing of any of it and would have refused to know if he had, repaired Number Seven's wing in the night and told her, gruffly, not to break the machine again, because there were not six of them. Hilda looked at her for a long moment, and then she began, slowly, to smile. "Vallencourt is on the road to Marlefield," she said. "Vallencourt is a mile off the road to Marlefield," Milly said. "A mile is nothing. A mile is an hour." "And the delivery is at night." "The delivery is at night," Milly said. "And I am a driver with a transfer order and an ambulance that has nowhere else to be." ---