We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [28]
“Judith!” he said the moment they were out of the hearing of the wounded. “Something pretty awful has happened. Sarah Price has been killed.” He took her arm and held it, closing his hand to grip her as if afraid she might sway and overbalance.
“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. Death was still death, but it was somehow worse that Sarah had made it this far…only to be killed in what had to be the final weeks of the war. By this time next month it could all be over. “What happened? There’s not much falling this far back now.”
“Not shelling,” he said. “She was murdered.” He was frowning, his face furrowed with distress. “It was brutal. She was cut about with a bayonet, in the pit of the stomach, and then left out where the hospital waste is put.”
“You mean…” She stopped. She tried to picture Sarah Price lying in the mud behind the Operating tent where they disposed of blood-soaked bandages, old swabs, litter that could not possibly be reused, sodden clothes, and the mangled, amputated limbs of the worst injured. “Who did it?” She felt her stomach churn with horror, then a hot wave of fury. She had not particularly liked Sarah. She was trivial, made fun of things that were important, laughed too loudly, flirted in a silly way, showing off. But she was also kind, and generous, always willing to share any food she had, or pretend she had not heard a joke before and find it funny all over again. “Who did it?” Her voice rose sharply, and she pulled her arm away from his.
“We don’t know,” he replied. “One of the German prisoners, I expect.”
“I suppose it has to be,” she agreed. “Why aren’t they keeping them guarded properly?” But even as she said it, she remembered odd moments of rage breaking through what looked like banter taken a little too far, ugly comments that stayed in the mind, petty cruelties that betrayed an underlying contempt. Please heaven it was a German, but she was not certain. “What are they doing about it?” she went on.
“Sending for the police, I suppose,” he said with a slight shrug. “No one really knows. It must have happened sometime during the night. I hope no one gets it in the neck for not having guarded the prisoners. I reckon there are just too many of them for anyone to watch. And they came through the lines themselves, most of them. Poor devils are glad the war’s over, at least for them.” He gave a rueful gesture. “They might have thought we have more food than they do.”
She, too, found it impossible to think of them as enemies any longer, although she was disturbed by her sense of pity. They looked so desperately like their own men. More than once her mind had turned to the Peacemaker, and she had wondered what he was like. She had even thought that if she had known him as a man rather than a power behind the murder of too many people she had loved, she might have liked him. At the very least she would have understood his dreams. Was that a disloyalty to her dead parents, and to Owen Cullingford, whom she had also loved? Every one of the dead was precious to someone. It was contemptible to imagine that those dear to you, woven into your life so that the loss of them tore it apart, were really more valuable than all the uncountable others. It was an arrogance amounting to blasphemy.
What had happened to Sarah Price? It could as easily have happened to Judith herself, or any of the other women here. Now a hot drink was trivial, almost forgotten. Her wet skirt flapping about her legs, cold and heavy, was no more than a discomfort. She gave Cavan a smile of thanks, then walked over toward the Admissions tent and the extended tents put up to shelter the wounded Germans, as well as their own.
She was barely inside when she saw Joseph. He turned at the sound of her footsteps on the boards. She felt a sudden pinch of anxiety at how tired he looked. He would have to deal with the grief of this new loss, and the fear and blame