Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [107]
“We had one of the stupid arguments we had so often. He hated the army and everything to do with militarism, as he called it. He said there was a better way than violence, way of peace and government that would supersede petty nationalism, and that I was fast becoming an anachronism, and I’d see!” He was standing still, the pipe in his hand almost as if he were not quite sure what to do with it. The light reflected on the polished wood of the bowl. “I thought he was just bragging at the time, but looking back, I think he knew what he was saying.”
She turned to look at him, and he averted his eyes, even though in the twilight she could barely have read the expression in them. She knew it was shame, because he read Prentice so easily, the shallow and the vulnerable in him, the child that had needed to impress, and the man who had embraced an evil to do so, perhaps without recognizing it. She looked back at the trees against the sky, now little more than shadows in the afterglow.
“I saw photographs of him,” she said quietly. “At a regatta. You were there. He looked young and eager, sort of excited, as if everything good lay ahead of him. I suppose there are thousands of young men like that. People must look at those pictures now, and . . .” She could not go on. She was hurting both of them, and it was pointless.
He put out his hand and touched her arm, his fingers strong, a steadying grip, just for a moment, then withdrawn again.
“There was a young woman as well,” she said, to fill the silence.
“I don’t remember,” he answered.
“She was unusual, very tall,” she elaborated. “Dramatic eyes. They were pale, as if they might have been light blue or green.” Then a memory came back to her of Hannah using the same words.
She stopped abruptly and swung back to face him, her heart pounding. “I think I know how the instructions were given to Sebastian to murder my parents! It couldn’t have been a letter—you don’t put that sort of thing down on paper. Anyway, you’d have to be certain that Sebastian was going to do it. You could hardly wait for him to write back! It had to be a conversation. Matthew said he didn’t have a telephone call, except from Mr. Thyer at St. John’s, and that was only a few moments. But he did meet a young woman in one of the local pubs.” She was speaking more and more rapidly, her voice rising with excitement. “Hannah saw her! She was tall, with amazing light eyes! Of course it doesn’t have to be the same woman, but it could have been! She might have drawn Prentice into it as well!”
Cullingford was staring at her, amazed, vulnerable, strangely naked in the last shreds of the light no more than a warmth in the sky. “Yes,” he agreed gently. “Yes, it could. I’m going to London tomorrow. Just a couple of days. I’ll look into it. See who she was.”
She was surprised. He had said nothing about it before. She was startled how fiercely she would miss him, even for so short a time. She took the handkerchief out of her pocket and offered it back to him.
He laughed a little shakily. “Keep it,” he said, reaching out very gently to touch her cheek with his fingers. “Be here when I get back. Please?”
“Of course I will!” The words were awkward, her throat aching so savagely she could barely swallow.
He leaned forward and kissed her, softly, on the mouth, hesitating a moment, then more fully. Then he let her go and turned to walk toward the house, without looking back.
Cullingford was in London by half past eleven. First he went to see Abigail Prentice. It was a stiff, highly emotional meeting, neither of them able to bridge the gulf of pain between them.
“Hello, Owen,” she said with as much warmth as she could manage. There was an awkwardness in her that could not totally forgive him because he was a professional soldier, a man who had deliberately given his life to fighting, a thing she could not understand, and here he was, alive. Her son who fought with his mind and his beliefs, whose only weapon was the pen, had been drowned