We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [115]
Judith drove steadily, with concentration. She worried not only about fuel but also about spare parts if they should have any sort of breakdown, not to mention accident. The ambulance was on its last legs anyway. Once away from the army lines with their supply stores, there would be nowhere to get oil or any of the parts she might need. She had had no compunction about taking with her all that she could, begging, borrowing, or removing without the owner’s consent three new spark plugs. Had she been able to explain the urgency, she was quite sure they would have been given willingly.
Now they drove through the fine, dry night. The air became increasingly cold in the open front of the vehicle, and the wind from the north swirled around, creeping between folds of coats and scarves, numbing hands and whipping the blood in cheeks and brows.
Mason was used to it. He had spent the last four years in every kind of vehicle, on every battlefront from the deserts of Arabia to the arctic snows of Russia. As he sat here now moving along the ruined roads of Belgium on the last journey of his own battle, he had a smile on his face and seemed almost relaxed.
Judith looked sideways at him once or twice and saw the change in him. She was almost frighteningly happy to think that it was his feeling for her that had caused it. She wanted it to be so much that she could neither believe nor disbelieve it. And she felt guilty, because it would cost him a high and terrible price. In exposing the Peacemaker he would be confessing to his own part in the treason. Only now was she realizing the meaning of that. There was peace ahead, and justice that would finally call Dermot Sandwell to account for the betrayal of his countrymen and the murders of all those who had stood in his way.
And there was honor for Matthew and for Schenckendorff. Perhaps for Mason there would be at least the acceptance of a faith in life that he had denied before, even fought against. But there would be no future for him with Judith. The only future he could await was execution. That thought hurt her with a finality she had not expected.
She stared into the darkness ahead. The road was nearly dry. At the sides were occasional poplars. Many of them were little more than stumps, but now and then a few had branches, leafless like broken bones. Clear patches in the sky let the moonlight gleam fitfully, showing a landscape of craters and stretches of mud, and now and then the jagged walls of a bombed-out building. They passed a canal, its walls breached, the flooded water flat and pale and irregularly shaped as it seeped away into the fields, sometimes lapping right up to the raised edges of the road.
She would not have changed Mason or had him sink back into the cynicism of before. She remembered their quarrel at the court-martial, the sense of futility that seemed to touch all his thoughts. It was not simply that he believed Joseph’s efforts were pointless, but that he found them foolish, in a way even contemptible because they were rooted in a refusal to face reality. He had thought both she and Joseph were cowards, clinging to faith in a God who did not exist because they lacked the courage to live alone in the universe.
Why had he changed? Yes, he was in love with her. But so was she in love with him. No matter how much you loved someone, you could not alter who you were in order to be comfortable with them. If you loved the right person it should make you stronger, braver, gentler, perhaps eventually wiser. It should never make you deny your intelligence or forsake your integrity. What were you worth if you would do that?
She looked sideways at him again, trying to read his face in the few moments she could spare from watching