Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [86]
But he was alone. She was watching young lovers in front of them; in profile, she was unreadable to him. Their separate loyalties held them both too hard. To yield anything would be betrayal, and if they gave up that much of themselves, what had they left to give to anyone, let alone to each other?
Did the loneliness cut her as deeply to the bone as it did him? Or was that unreadable part of her, the Celtic dream with its plaintive music on the half note, its myths that stretched back through history to the fantastic, enough to feed her hunger?
He looked at the vitality in her face, the delicate curve of her neck, her shoulders a little too thin for perfection, and felt as if the impenetrable glass between them could never be broken.
Then she turned and he blanked his expression just in time to stop her reading his hurt. At least he thought it was in time.
“Don’t you feel for them, Matthew?” she asked, a pucker between her brows. “They have this moment, and they know that could be all. They’ve been snatched from hell for a few hours, and tomorrow or the day after, they go back. Perhaps they’ll never come home again. Can’t you see it on their faces, hear it on the edge of their laughter? It’s in the air, like the smell of a storm coming.”
He looked at her. She was beautiful, so alone, chasing a dream. What would happen if she ever caught it? Would she stop and hold it close, taste its sweetness and be happy? Or would she then create another dream to pursue, her heart as elusive, as unsettled as it was now? He feared the answer to that. Not that it mattered! The pursuit itself would always stand between them.
She reached out her hand and touched his cheek. She was smiling, but the pain behind her eyes was real. “I don’t understand you English,” she said huskily. “I’m sure there’s somebody fierce and wonderful behind that throw-away calm, I just can’t crack the shell. I want the curtain to go up on the play for a while, so I can laugh, or the pain inside me is going to burst.” And she turned and walked away across the foyer, as graceful as a reed in the wind.
He followed her, knowing irrefutably that they were already on the brink of a betrayal—of each other or themselves. If she won the battle of wits, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young soldiers might pay with their lives. He did not want to think what his victory would cost. The Irish were not kind to those who failed them.
Richard Mason found the streets of Paris surprisingly empty. Though it was late April, just after Easter, when he turned into the narrow Rue Oudry where he knew Trotsky lived, there seemed nothing of spring in the air. A breeze blew old newspapers and pamphlets along the pavement. There was no one sitting in the cafés and too many of the women he had seen were wearing black, even young ones who at any other time would have had a smile and a word for him.
Walking toward his destination he had noticed how many of the street clocks had stopped, and the statue of the Lion de Belfort had dirty straw sticking out of its mouth. All anyone could think of was the news from Verdun.
It was early evening as he approached Trotsky’s home. The Russian journalist worked on an émigré newspaper, scratching out a living, and as always pursuing his dreams for a revolution of social justice, a world where workers overthrew oppression and there was food and warmth for all.
Mason’s hands were sweating, and he found it hard to catch his breath. In the days since he had left London the Peacemaker’s words had beaten in his brain: “Kill him! If he will continue the war, kill him!”
Of course he could not do that tonight! All he had to do now was meet Trotsky again and make some evaluation of the man. But he would not have changed, would he? People like Trotsky never changed! There was a fire in him nothing would quench. He had been sentenced to exile to Siberia, escaped from Russia to Sèvres and then Paris. He had been poor to starvation, and a stranger in a foreign land. Still he wrote with the same passion as of old,