We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [75]
It was a crushing thought Judith could not tolerate. Joseph had endured enough pain with the loss of Eleanor and their child. Lizzie knew that, and it would hurt her to have to reject him, but you could not accept someone out of pity; that would be the worst of all.
She filled the pail with cold water that was too stale to drink but good enough for a floor, then carried it back to the Operating tent. She opened the flap and banged the pail down. Lizzie looked up at her. Her dark hair was coming out of its pins, and her skin was almost drained of color. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
Judith was pinched by the loneliness in Lizzie’s face. She looked as if she was managing not to weep only by exercising the most rigid self-control. She opened her mouth to ask again, but Lizzie took the pail and turned away, and Judith felt clumsy.
“You’ll need more,” she said aloud. “As soon as you’ve used that, I’ll fetch another one.”
Lizzie did not answer, as if she could not trust herself to speak.
Judith spent the rest of the day on an ambulance run taking men who had arrived after the murder to the next hospital along the line. Wil Sloan rode with her. He, too, was unusually somber. There was no time for her to say much on the way south with the injured men, but on the way back he sat beside her as dusk mantled the fields and hid some of the scarring of the land. They moved in their own small, noisy world, their headlamps picking out only occasional ruined buildings, skeletons of walls and windows jagged and partial against the darkening sky.
“Are you still thinking about going home?” she asked him after a violent jolt on the road where she had hit an unexpected crater.
“Oh, probably. Sooner or later,” he replied. “Longer I leave it, harder it’ll be. I suppose.”
She glanced sideways but could not see his face in the dim light. “I didn’t mean will you go, I meant are you still worrying about it,” she corrected. “Don’t. They’ll be proud of you. They’ll have forgotten about your quarrel. It’s history. The whole world’s different now.” She said it firmly, trying to think only of the positive, and convince him.
“You reckon?” He looked straight ahead.
“Of course! You were one of the first to come, long before the rest of America. You nailed your colors to the mast. You should remember that.”
He frowned.
“Naval term,” she explained, negotiating the next crater, but only at the last minute and throwing him off balance so that he grasped at the dashboard. “Means attaching them to the mast so you can’t pull them down and surrender, no matter what.”
He smiled. She heard the amusement in his voice. “I know that! Just because I came from the Midwest doesn’t mean I know nothing about history, even if I’m a thousand miles from the sea.”
“Sorry.”
He rode in silence for a while, so obviously deep in thought she did not interrupt him.
“Do you reckon someone lost his temper with Sarah ’cause she flirted with him, then wouldn’t come across?” he asked as they veered around a corner and straightened up again.
She realized the question was serious, deeper than she had thought. He had fled his hometown originally because of a stupid quarrel in which he had lashed out and hurt a man far more than he had intended to. He had stowed away in a railcar and gone east until he reached the coast, then taken a ship to England to join the ambulance service as a volunteer.
“Wil? Was your fight a lot worse than you’re telling me? You said he was all right, just bruised and maybe a broken jaw.”
“He was.” Wil was still looking forward, as if his seeing the road would somehow make them safer. “I was lucky. I should stop kidding myself, Judith. I could have killed