We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [76]
“What made you think of that now?” she said, puzzled by the intensity of his feelings. She had never heard that before. Was she so insensitive?
“Sarah,” he replied after a moment. “I guess I never really thought about…that sort of thing before. And don’t tell me he just killed her, as if being British was enough. Nobody said exactly what he really did to her, but I know there was a hell of a lot of blood. I can guess. He didn’t choose a woman because she was weaker…lots of the men are wounded and couldn’t have fought back.” His face was flushed. She could see the dark color in the occasional flashes of light. “I can see now that all the women feel…embarrassed, threatened,” he went on. “Some of them even blame her because it makes them feel that they can be safe by not doing whatever she did. Even if they are angry with all men, as if it were all our fault, when actually we’re just as…No, I guess it’s different.” He was fumbling for words, awkwardly, trying to be honest. “We’re scared of being blamed, not of it happening to us. But we’re scared that it could happen to the women we like. I’m not in love with you or anything, but I’d want to kill anyone who hurt you!” He very carefully did not look at her, even for an instant.
“Thank you,” she said gravely. She knew that he had been at least a little in love with her a year ago, but of course she did not ever want him to know that she had seen it in his eyes, his hesitation, the things he had not said. “I would like to think you’d hate them. But nothing’s going to happen to me. Not that sort of thing, anyway.”
“You reckon that German did it?”
She hated the thought of lying to him. “I don’t know. I’m not totally sure. Do you think so?”
“Not really,” he admitted. “War kind of uncovers lots of things you didn’t know were there. Maybe whoever killed Sarah didn’t have anyone to stop them, and they simply lost it…so bad that all the fury and the pain they’d ever felt just boiled up to the top, and by the time they got their wits back again it was too late.”
She could not think of an answer. She turned the idea over and over in her mind.
“I’ve had men tell me about fear,” he went on. “Men who wanted to be brave and charge over the trench wall and attack, but their legs just wouldn’t move. They’d soil themselves from plain physical terror. They’d have died rather than do that, but they just couldn’t control it. Their bodies betrayed them, not their minds or their hearts.” He turned toward her. “Could rage or humiliation be like that, too, d’you reckon? Maybe if you felt so helpless, so…so put down, laughed at, not as good as the rest of the guys, that you just lashed out where you could. Anything to get back to where you were in control of something, that actually you didn’t see that you’d lost it for real?”
They were within a couple of miles of the trenches. The sky had cleared; a thin moon shed light on the wet road.
“Do you know who did it, Wil?” she asked quietly. “I think you should tell the truth.”
“No, I don’t.” There was no hesitation or wavering in his voice. “But I think quite a few of the men could have. The urge to have a woman can be pretty powerful, and Sarah didn’t mind using how…how pretty she was. Put her down a bit, and she could get her own back by making you awful uncomfortable. I’m not saying that makes anything right, it doesn’t,” he added quickly. “But if you know you could die, or get so shot up you might as well be dead ’cause no woman’s ever going to look at you, or maybe you’ve been injured so you can’t anyway, then you might look at things differently.”
“He didn’t just rape her, Wil,” she said softly. “He butchered her, and left her lying on the rubbish as if she were waste as well, along with the amputated limbs! That’s more than even the worst frustration anyone can feel. It’s hate.”
He sat very still, letting out his breath slowly. “Jesus! I didn’t know that…” He was breathing hard, and for a moment he sounded as if he was going