Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [10]
“Sebastian did not act alone,” he began. “Someone taught him ideas and beliefs, then told him what to do. He obeyed, thinking it would avert war. That person, apart from individual guilt for death in your family and mine, is also still free to commit treason and sabotage of England, and to help Germany in any way he can. Their motives don’t matter, they must still be prevented. I cannot ask official help in this because I don’t know whom I can trust.”
The faintest, most bitter humor touched her face for an instant, then vanished, her black eyebrows rising so slightly it could have been only a trick of the light. “And you imagine you can trust me?”
“I’ve told you little you don’t already know,” he replied. “Added to which, I’m at a dead end. I cannot believe that you have any kinder feelings toward this man than I do.”
The emotion was nowhere in her face except her eyes, suddenly sprung to smoldering life. “I would kill him if I could,” she replied. “I would like to do it with my own hands, and watch him go. I would like to see the knowledge in him, and the pain. I would make sure that he went slowly, and that he knew who I was.”
The implacable hate in her frightened him, but he did not doubt her words. He found his mouth dry. Could he ever hate like that? He had lost his parents, and the grief might never completely leave him, but their deaths had been swift and honorable. Both her sons, the passion and the hope of her life, had been turned into murderers, and died by suicide. And yet neither of them had been evil, he knew that as clearly as he saw the sunlight on the grass. They had been deceived and destroyed by others, and in the end, crucified by shame.
“Unfortunately I haven’t yet found him,” he said to her with a gentleness he was amazed that he could feel for her. She looked like some mythical fury rather than an ordinary twentieth-century woman standing on the lawn of a Brighton hospital. But then surely myth survived because it was a distillation of human truth? “You can help me,” he added.
“How?” she asked, looking at the wheelchair-bound soldiers, not at him.
“Who contacted Sebastian the afternoon before the crash in which my parents died? In any way, telephone, letter, personally, anything at all.”
“How excruciatingly delicate of you, Captain Reavley.” There was a hint of mockery in her voice. “You mean the day before Sebastian killed your mother and father!”
“Yes. The morning would have been too early, anything from lunchtime onward.”
She considered for a moment or two before answering. “He had two or three letters in the early afternoon delivery. One telephone call, I remember. No one visited, but he did go out. I have no idea whom he could have met then.”
“Did the letters come through the post?”
“Of course they came through the post! What were you imagining? Letters by pigeon? Or a liveried footman dropping something off in a carriage?”
“A message by hand,” he replied. “It is simple enough to put something in a letter box, but it wouldn’t have a franked stamp on it.”
She let out her breath in a sigh. “Do you really think this is going to help you find him? Or that it will bring any kind of justice if you do? You won’t be able to prove anything. You will look ridiculous, and he will walk away. You’ll be fortunate if he doesn’t ruin you for slander.”
“You underestimate me, Mrs. Allan. I didn’t have anything so straightforward in mind.”
She stared at him. It was not hope in her eyes, making them so alive, but it was a flicker of something better than the dead anger before. “There was a telephone call, from Aidan Thyer, and then half an hour after that, he went out.”
Aidan Thyer. He was master of St. John’s College in Cambridge, a position of extraordinary, almost unique influence. Many young men’s dreams and ambitions had been molded by whoever had been master of their college in their first formative years as adults, away from home, beginning to taste the wild new freedoms of intellectual adventure. He could remember his own master, the brilliance of his mind,