Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [167]
“Yes, you did,” she replied. “You pressed her relentlessly, tearing away Chancellor’s reasoning, painting word pictures of greed and ruin in Africa, the ultimate immorality of the destruction of a whole race of people….”
“You know that’s true!” he challenged her. “That is what will happen. You, of all people, know as well as I do what will happen to the Mashona and the Matabele when Rhodes settles there. Nothing can make them obey Lobengula’s laws! It’s laughable … at least it would be if it were not so bloody tragic.”
“Yes I do know that, but that is not the point!”
“Isn’t it? I think it’s precisely the point!”
She turned to face him. “It is not your beliefs I challenged. I wouldn’t even if I didn’t share them. You are entitled to believe as you will….”
His eyebrows rose and his eyes widened, but she ignored him. Sarcasm was beneath the passions and the seriousness of her argument.
“It is the methods you used. You attacked Chancellor where he was vulnerable.”
“Of course,” he retorted with surprise. “What would you have me do, attack him where he is best defended? Give him a sporting chance? This is not a game, with chips to be won or lost at the end. This is life, with misery and destruction the price of losing.”
She was quite sure of what she meant. She faced him without a flicker.
“And the destruction of Susannah, pressing her heart and her loyalties until they broke, and broke her with them, was it a fair price?”
“For God’s sake, Nobby! I didn’t know he was going to kill her!” he protested, his face aghast. “You surely cannot imagine I did. You know me better than that!”
“I don’t imagine you knew it,” she continued, the ache of misery inside her temporarily subsiding under the force of her certainty. “I think you didn’t particularly care.”
“Of course I care!” His face was white to the lips. “I wouldn’t have had it this way. I didn’t have options.”
“You did not have to press her till she had no way out but to choose between her loyalty to the husband she loved or to her own integrity.”
“That’s a luxury. The stakes are too high.”
“Central Africa, against the turmoil and death of one woman?”
“Yes … if you like. Ten million people against one.”
“I don’t like. What about five million against twenty?”
“Yes … of course.” There was no wavering in his eyes.
“One million against a hundred? Half a million against a thousand?”
“Don’t be absurd!”
“When does it even out, Peter? When does it stop being worth it? When the numbers are the same? Who decides? Who counts?”
“Stop it, Nobby! You are being ridiculous!” He was angry now. There was no apology in him, no sense that he had to defend himself. “We are talking about one person and a whole race. There is no counting to be done. Look, you want the same things for Africa that I do. Why are we quarreling?” He put his hands up as if to touch her.
She stepped back.
“You don’t know, do you?” she said with slow understanding, and a sadness that tore at her emotions and left her reason like a shining, solitary light. “It is not what you want I cannot tolerate, it is what you are prepared to do to attain it, and what that doing makes of you. You spoke of the end and the means as if they were separate. They are not.”
“I love you, Nobby….”
“I love you also, Peter….”
Again he made a move towards her, and again she stepped back, only a few inches, but the gesture was unmistakable.
“But there is a gulf between what you believe is acceptable and what I believe, and it is one I cannot cross.”
“But if we love each other,” he argued, his face pinched with urgency and incomprehension, “that is enough.”
“No it isn’t.” There was finality in her voice, even a bitter irony. “You counted on Susannah’s love of honor, her integrity, to be greater than her love for Chancellor … and you were right. Why is it you do not expect mine to be also?”
“I do. It’s just that …”
She laughed, a funny, jerky sound, harshly aware of the irony. “It’s just that, like Linus Chancellor, you never thought I could disagree with you.