We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [123]
Inside the ambulance as it set off again, Joseph sat with Lizzie, absorbed in quiet conversation. Matthew sat opposite Schenckendorff, clearly searching for something to say, but all conversation seemed trivial compared with the enormity of the truth.
At lunchtime they stopped for necessities and to eat some of their rations. They had pulled in at the side of the road, leaving the engine running in case it was reluctant to start again. All of them were aware of its frailty. They looked for clean water to drink, and found nothing. There was no time to light a candle and heat any. Thirst would have to wait.
Matthew and Schenckendorff walked back together from the semi-privacy of a clump of trees, picking their way through rough grass. The land was flat, cut by canals where once there had been straight lines of trees. It was more orderly than England; it looked man-made. Someone had created these avenues and dikes, these farmhouses with their stone walls dipping down into water. In Cambridgeshire, even in the fen country where there was water everywhere and it was as flat as a table, the paths were winding and the rivers seeped in all directions, as though taking as long as possible to reach the sea. Invaders had been lost there since the last stand of the Saxons against the Normans in 1066. They were a people who fought to the last ditch and dike, to the last island and quicksand, the final stand.
Schenckendorff was limping badly. He should not have been walking on that foot. It must hurt like hell, but he had never complained. Matthew found himself hoping intensely that it would not be damaged permanently. He waited for him to catch up so they could walk side by side.
“Where are you from?” he asked conversationally.
“Heidelberg,” Schenckendorff replied. “It’s a very old city, steep, overlooking the Rhine.” He smiled slightly. “It’s nothing like this.” He left the wealth of comparison unsaid, but Matthew guessed at what might be racing through his mind.
Schenckendorff glanced at him and saw it in his eyes. “And you are from Cambridgeshire,” he said as if it were all some easy exchange—two men passing the time of day. “Flat like this, but far more eccentric, more full of individual oddities that go back to your Domesday Book and before. Nobody has ever forced you to change them. You are very stubborn.” He gave a little shrug. “It used to annoy me. Now I have changed my mind. I think perhaps it is good. We found some kind of identity in being different, something to stand on and believe it worth paying the greatest price to save. If you give up the right to be different, maybe sooner or later you give up the right to think at all, and then perhaps you are dead anyway. You haven’t had your life taken from you, you gave it up yourself—for nothing.”
Matthew stopped in the rough grass by the edge of the road, staring at him.
Schenckendorff smiled. “You were wondering if I would change my mind when I got to London. I know. You all are. You would be foolish if it had not at least crossed your mind. You must take every possibility into account. I won’t change. The cost of the peace I thought of is too high, and I am not sure now that it is peace at all.” His face shadowed. “I think it might be the beginning of a slow death. Life, real, growing, passionate life, is not peaceful. Learning hurts, and has costs. My onetime friend Sandwell misunderstood that, and he lost sight of the purpose of it all.”
Matthew waited.
“Individuals matter,” Schenckendorff said quietly. “Moments of joy, a man’s victory over the darkness within himself, a perception of beauty, whether it is of the eye or the mind. I think we had better get back into the ambulance. Your remarkable sister is waiting to leave.”
Some of these same thoughts crossed Joseph’s mind, but he was preoccupied with Lizzie. As a child he had watched his mother endure the same distress, but she had been in her own home, secure and deeply loved, and the children she was carrying were wanted.
For Lizzie it was in every way different.