No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [161]
“Did he care about it so much?” he asked aloud, remembering his own conversation with Sebastian, only a few yards from here. It had been intense, there would be no question of that, but was it fears and dreams or a will to do anything? Flora had spoken of doing. “Was it really more than words?”
She stared at the grass in the fading light, and her voice was very low. “It were a passion in him,” she said. “In the end it were the most important thing in his loife . . . keep the peace, look after all this beauty what’s come to us from the past. He was terrified o’ war—not just the foighting an’ bombing.” She lifted her head a little and gazed across the shining river at the towers of the intricate, immeasurably lovely buildings and the limpid sky beyond. “The power to break an’ smash an’ burn, but the killing o’ the spirit most o’ all. When we’ve broke civilization, what have we got left inside us? The strength an’ the dreams to start over again? No, we haven’t. In smashing up all we got left o’ what’s wise, an’ lovely, an’ speaks to what’s holy inside us, we break ourselves, too. We get to be savages, but without the excuses that savages have for it.”
He heard Sebastian’s words echoed in hers, exactly as if it had been he again, walking silent-footed in this exquisite evening.
She turned to face him. “Do you understand?” she said urgently. It seemed to matter to her that he did.
For that reason he needed to answer her honestly. “That depends upon what you are prepared to do to avoid war.”
“Does it?” she demanded. “Ain’t it worth anything at all?”
“Did Sebastian think so?”
“Yes! Oi . . .” She seemed troubled, looking away from him. “What d’you mean, it depends? What could be worse’n that? He told me about some of the things in the Boer War.” She shuddered almost convulsively, hugging her arms around herself. “The concentration camps, what happened to some o’ the women an’ children,” she said in a whisper. “If you do that to people, what is there left for you when you come home, even if you won?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed, finding himself cold as well. “But I’ve come to the point where I can’t believe that appeasement is the answer. Few sane people want to fight, but perhaps we have to.”
“Oi think mebbe that was what scared him.” She stood still on the grass. They were opposite Trinity; St. John’s was dark against the sunset, and there was only a tiny sliver of light on the water under the bridge. “He was terrible upset over something the last few days. He couldn’t sleep; Oi think he was afraid to. It was as if he had a pain inside him that were so deep he weren’t never free of it. After that shooting in Serbia ’e were so close to despair that Oi was scared for him . . . Oi mean real scared! It was as if for ’im there were nothing out there but darkness. Oi tried to comfort him, but Oi din’t manage.” She looked back at Joseph, her eyes full of grief. “Is it a wicked thing to say . . . sometimes Oi’m almost glad he din’t live to see this . . . ’cos we’re going to war, aren’t we? All of us.”
“I think so,” he said quietly. It seemed a ridiculous conversation with the tremendous sunset dying on the horizon, the evening air full of the perfume of grass, no sound but the murmur of leaves and a whirl of starlings thrown up against the translucent blue of the sky. Surely this was the very soul of peace, generations mounting to this pinnacle of civilization. How could it ever be broken?
“He tried so hard!” There were tears of anger and pity in her voice. “He belonged to a very big sort o’ club fighting for peace, all over the world. An’ he would have done anything for ’em.”
Something tugged at his mind. “Oh? Who were they?”
She shook her head quickly. “Oi dunno. He wouldn’t tell me. But they had big ideas he was terribly excited about, that would stop the war that’s coming now.” She knotted her hands together, her head bowed. “Oi’m glad he din’t have to see this! His dreams was so big, an’ so good, he couldn’t bear