We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [133]
Matthew left, and it was Lizzie who sat beside him. She said nothing, simply held his hands. He had no idea where anyone else was, or what they were doing.
Finally his mind cleared and the vision of Monique’s bleeding, disfigured face faded from his vision. He began to think, to remember other people, other losses that were also what he grieved for, young men whose deaths would always be woven into his mind and his memory.
He had wanted to serve, to lessen the suffering, to give people the hope and the love of God in the darkest places they would pass through. He would have given his own life had it been asked, but it had not. He was barely even injured, except the once in 1916.
He had promised God in the beginning that he would keep faith, but he would not attempt to feel everyone’s grief. That he could not bear. It was too much to ask of anyone.
But in Gethsemane, that was exactly what Christ had asked—“Watch with me.” It was what He asked of everyone.
Joseph remembered all the men he had sat with in their pain, their fear, their loneliness, their acceptance of death. He had cared intensely. So often all he could do was simply be there. He could not ease their agony, take away their terror of mutilation, of failure, of the last unknown step of death. He could not promise victory, or offer any reasons for the horror of it, or explain why God allowed such hell to be.
He had crouched in the mud of no-man’s-land, freezing and sodden wet, smelled the stink of decaying flesh, of gas, of death, and all he could do was promise “I will not leave you.”
And in that moment it came to him with absolute certainty that what he wanted, needed, was to stay with Lizzie. He could do it, and love the child because it was hers, and because it needed to be loved, as everyone needs to be. He could give it the love his father had given him: wholeheartedly, generously, because he wanted to. He—or she—would never for an instant imagine that it was the product of violence or pain. The child would not be unwanted, so it would never feel pain more deeply than the growing pains all humans know, the finding of identity in the world.
He turned to Lizzie and smiled, then pulled his hands from hers, wincing as his lacerated skin was touched, then took hers again and held them gently, more firmly. “When we get home,” he said, “there’ll be a lot to do, a lot of people who’ll need help, and more courage than they may think they have now. There are those wounded not only in body, but in heart and hope as well. There’ll be disappointments, changes that are very difficult to accept. I expect there will be injustices and a great deal of loneliness. The bad things of war will be gone, but so will the good things: the friendships, the purpose, the knowledge of who you are and what you are doing, and that it matters.”
“I know,” she answered him. “I had planned to go on nursing…until…” She stopped, a slow color working up her cheeks. She was afraid of pity, and he saw it in her eyes.
How could he ask her to marry him without her fearing, even for an instant, that that was what it was—pity, not love?
“I would very much rather that you helped me,” he told her. “I am not sure that I can do it without you, and I am perfectly certain that I don’t wish to. But with you, and the child, I might make a reasonably good job of it. I’ve learned something about what a real ministry is.”
She looked at him, searching his eyes slowly, very carefully.
He smiled, knowing there was nothing in him that he needed to hide from her. She knew his weaknesses already, as he knew hers, and he knew that in the end they would bind them together, not apart.
“I think that would be a good idea,” she said at last. “We might make quite a passable job of it.”
Happiness opened up inside him like a great dawning light. He leaned forward and kissed her, and realized with surprise how long he had wanted to do that,