We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [61]
Judith breathed in and out slowly. “Why did you say that, Private Eames?” She did her best to sound patient.
He was silent for several moments.
“She was murdered, Private,” she prompted him.
He looked away from the candle at last, his eyes grave.
“I know that, miss, an’ I wouldn’t ’ave that ’appen to anyone. Wot they did to ’er was ’orrible. But she did tempt them something rotten. Told ’em all sorts o’ things as’d ’appen to their women when our boys got into Germany. I know she were just ignorant, miss, an’ she lost some of ’er friends, like all of us.” He looked across at her, the tea forgotten now. “But that in’t the way ter treat people as can’t fight back at yer.” He was struggling to find the words to explain it to her. He understood his own laws of honor, but they had never been set out for him; they were simply learned by things he had seen other people do.
“It’s all right, Private, I know it isn’t.” She felt a warmth in her stomach, as if she had swallowed the tea and it had blazed to life like a fire inside her. “Could it have been one of the Germans who got back at her?”
“I dunno, miss. I don’t think so.”
She thanked him, leaving him to brew his tea.
It was some time later that she found Benbow. He was a year or two younger, and quite clearly worried. She could draw nothing from him except an approximate agreement with what Eames had said. It surprised her. He seemed a strong man, a good soldier. He was not much more than nineteen, but he had been promoted from the ranks and had an easy confidence. The question troubled him, but he did not hesitate in his answer. “I wouldn’t like to say, miss, and perhaps be wrong.”
She had to be content with that, which she told Joseph at dusk when they stood in line with forty others to receive their rations. It was a clear evening, banners of clouds shredded out and streaming across the north with a sharp wind carrying the sound of heavy gunfire in the distance.
Joseph looked unhappy. “I’ve come across the same thing,” he said quietly. “No one wants to tell tales that could be misread, but they all want it to be over. I can’t help wondering if I would be any different if it wasn’t Matthew they were accusing. If it was somebody from London that I didn’t know, somebody who had sat out the war at home, as far as I could see, would I care?”
“Don’t say that!” she told him sharply. “Just because it—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “But that’s how some men see it. I was talking to Turner, who beat the German prisoner the other day. He’s got a brother-in-law who has bad eyesight, or flat feet, or something, and has spent the entire war at home sleeping in his own bed every night and making a fortune on the black market. I think Turner would see him shot in a trice.”
“We probably all would,” Judith agreed as they shuffled forward a few steps. “But we could live with it only if he was guilty, if it was one of us and not a German. What happens to make somebody who looks just like the rest of us suddenly go barking mad and do something like this? Why?”
Joseph did not answer. Ahead of them someone laughed loudly, then suddenly bit it off. There was silence. The click of ladles against a metal can was loud.
“I’m not sure what madness is,” Joseph said at last, keeping his voice so low that those next to them and behind could not hear. “Or maybe I mean that I don’t know what sanity is, or exactly how you keep hold of it.”
The remark frightened her: He had always been the one person who knew what he believed. But it was unfair to expect him to always hold up the light for everyone else. He must have his dark nights of the soul, too, moonless and starless like everyone else’s, or what use was he? Without knowledge of despair, was hope real or only an un-tasted thought?
“You might lose sight of what’s good,” she said firmly. “You don’t lose the memory of it or the certainty that it is what you want; that is sanity. You might have to kill, but you do it reluctantly, and without hate.”
He put his arm around her in a quick, silent hug.