We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [102]
Would that help? Would it ease anything?
Lizzie was waiting for him to look at her, to say something. He realized with shock that she was not certain he believed her. Incredibly, she was afraid he could think it was a lie constructed to cover some moral lapse of her own.
What could he say? Words were so clumsy, inadequate to express any of the desperate emotion inside him. She needed to be believed. She could hardly care now that he loved her. The thought that the creature who had murdered Sarah Price had also been violently intimate with Lizzie, leaving his seed inside to grow and become her child, left him seared with horror. But he must think of her, not himself.
“Joseph?” Her voice was shaking. The terror in her was so consuming, he could feel it in the room. “Will you come with me to Onslow?”
He must say something, the right thing. There was only this one chance; he could never take back a mistake. He reached out and touched the tips of her fingers with his own. It was the lightest possible brush of skin on skin.
“We’ll find another way to clear Schenckendorff…,” he began, and knew immediately that it was not true. There was no more time.
She shook her head, a tiny movement as if her muscles were locked. “I’ve waited as long as I can. I have to do it. You know it’s right. Don’t make it harder. I just had to tell you myself before I did it.” She stood up; then her body swayed for a moment until she regained her balance. “I couldn’t live with anything else, and neither could you.” She turned very slowly and walked to the door.
Joseph was too late to stand up, but he was not sure that his legs would hold him anyway. He knew she was right; Schenckendorff had come through the lines to surrender himself and betray the Peacemaker, with all that that cost him, because his honor demanded it. If she allowed him to hang for a crime she knew he had not committed, it would poison the rest of her life—and Joseph’s, too, if he colluded in such an act of cowardice.
And yet every part of him wanted to protect her. His mind screamed at him to find another way, any way, but not this. Please God, let there be something else they could do! But even as he prayed he knew there was not, and he was wasting time protesting while he allowed her to go to Onslow alone. He should be with her, beside her. What it cost him was irrelevant.
He stood up and parted the sacking, climbing the steps, his legs as heavy as if he were struggling through the thick mud of no-man’s-land. He went outside and followed after her, knowing which way she would have gone. He caught up with her as she opened the door to the hut where Onslow had made his office, and they went in together.
Onslow was sitting behind a table with half a dozen sheets of paper on it. He looked surprised to see them, and somewhat irritated. He addressed Joseph first. “Yes, Chaplain. Please don’t waste your time and mine asking me to delay charging the German, or with any more theories as to who else could be guilty. You are not serving your men, or your regiment’s honor.”
“Sir—” Joseph began.
“We need this wretched business to be over and put as far from our minds as possible,” Onslow said tartly, cutting across him, his hand up as if to silence him physically. “You should write to the poor girl’s family, if you have not done so already, then turn your attention to the living. There are more than enough wounded who need your help…your undivided help, Captain Reavley.” He still had done no more than glance at Lizzie.
Now she stepped forward. Joseph could see something of what it cost her to stand so stiffly to attention, shoulders squared.
“Captain Reavley came only to support me in what I have to tell you, Major Onslow,” she said clearly. “He knew nothing of it