Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [110]
“Do you hate it all the time?” She did not want to know the answer, but she had to ask.
He was surprised.
“No, of course I don’t. There’s laughter, and friendship. Some of the jokes are even funny. There’s immense courage.” He looked away from her again to hide the nakedness inside him. “Heroism you can’t bear. Men who keep going in blinding pain, dying . . . Hannah, you don’t want to hear this. You’ve never seen a human being blown to pieces, or worse, torn open and bleeding to death, but still conscious and knowing what’s happening to him. That was the way Billy Harwood died. I can still see his face when I close my eyes.” He gasped. “There was blood everywhere. We did everything we could, but we couldn’t stop it. There was just too much. You haven’t seen fire in a gun turret when there’s nowhere to escape to and they have to stand there and burn to death, and we watch them. A child shouts in the street, and I hear that again—men like torches in the night.”
Very slowly she moved closer to him and knelt down. She could see there were tears on his face. He was right; she did not want to know this. Her imagination would build enough for her to have nightmares, waking or sleeping, from now on, but she had to.
This was not the man she had first loved, who had gone to sea with pride and enjoyment in it, ambitious to succeed. This man was older, at once stronger and more vulnerable, a stranger in her husband’s skin, whom she wanted passionately to know. She needed to start again, assuming nothing. She reached out her hand and slid it over his very gently.
“We sank an enemy ship a couple of weeks ago,” he went on. His voice was shaking, and Hannah could feel the locked muscles making his legs tremble, even though he was sitting.
“It was at dusk. It was a good maneuver; partly luck, but mostly skill. We’d been shadowing each other for days. He fought hard, but we had the first shot and it damaged him badly.” He was looking beyond her, into his own vision. “The water was gray like lead, pitted dark by wind and rain. We fought for nearly two hours. We took some bad hits ourselves. Lost a dozen men, killed and wounded. The man next to me lost both his legs. Surgeon tried to save him, but it was too much.”
He took a deep breath, searching her face, trying to read her emotions, what she thought of him, how much she was frightened or sickened.
She wished she could think of something wise or generous to say, but her mind was empty of everything but the numb misery of it. He must not see the fear in her, the longing to deny it all.
“We sank him just after sundown,” he went on, saying the words slowly and carefully. “We hit his magazine, and he went down with all hands. That’s the thing I dread more than anything else—being carried down inside, the water rushing in and I’m trapped, going down all the way into the darkness, with the sea above me, forever.” His breath was ragged.
“They went down,” he said quietly. “All of them. We didn’t save a soul. There was no triumph, no victory, just silence. I lay awake all night seeing it again and again. When it comes to it, they were seamen, as we are. We probably would have liked them, if we’d met a few years ago, before all this.” He was looking at her again, waiting for the confusion at his feelings, the revulsion for what he had done.
She blanked her mind. She must not show it, not even a glimmer, whatever it cost. There must be something to say, and she must think of it quickly.
“You’re right; it isn’t easy,” she agreed. “It’s horrible. But we don’t have a choice. We go forward together, or we go forward alone. I don’t want to be ashamed of myself because I refused to look. But don’t tell Tom too much, just a little, if he asks. Tell him some of your men were killed. He’ll understand that was hard to take. Please don’t leave him out altogether. He loves you so much.”
His voice caught