We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [78]
Mason was waiting. There was an urgency and a gentleness in his eyes that she had not seen before. He was waiting for her to speak, wanting to understand.
“I talked to him quite a lot.” She started with the truth. “I was helping one of the nurses. Before he was accused, of course. His foot was pretty badly injured, but apparently he could stand on it. I’ve seen men do extraordinary things when they were so terribly wounded you wouldn’t have expected them to live, let alone crawl for miles or fight. There just…wasn’t any anger in him. You must have to be terribly angry to rape and then kill.”
He studied her face. She felt increasingly self-conscious but did not look away. She had to force emotion away from herself, crush the hope inside, in case he saw it and understood. Friendship was everything. She would give him that, but love was far too dangerous, too consuming of reason, judgment, the courage or purpose to go on after it was betrayed.
“What are you going to do about it?” he asked finally.
That was not at all what she had expected him to say. She had been waiting for an argument as to why she should leave the matter to the police. She looked for mockery in him, and saw none.
“Try to find out who is lying to protect someone else, before they take Schenckendorff away,” she answered. “Everybody’s afraid, and there are…loyalties, debts that seem bigger than blame for a crime. We all want to resolve it in whatever way is least painful to us.” She thought of Wil as she said it. She was still aching with surprise at the depths of himself he had trusted her with. She had been blind to much of him beyond his easy, smiling face, his good humor, the way she could rely on him always being there. How many other people had she not bothered to understand?
“We’ve faced so much together, we think we know one another,” she went on. “But we don’t. We know the duties, the courage, and the personal habits. We probably wouldn’t even recognize one another on the street in civilian life, when you can wear what you want, choose your work—or at least some of it—make whatever friends you like. Here friendship is the one sure sanity. Do you think it’ll last, afterward?” The answer to that mattered more than almost anything else. She had not even dared ask it before. She should have asked Joseph or Wil, not Mason. What sort of answer did she expect? Perhaps the loneliness was what all of them were afraid of, after this was all over. And for her it was even worse than many others. She could never go back to the life she had once expected, to domestic happiness like her sister’s or her mother’s, no matter how much she loved anyone, even Mason. And would any man love the kind of woman she had become? War had released her. She was something better or worse, but forever different.
“Some friendships will always last.” Mason did not waver from her gaze when he said it. “The good ones. Sometimes we’ll want to forget all this, but at other times we’ll need to remember, because we’ve seen things other people can’t even imagine. Who else would we share it with? We can’t tell anyone.” She stared at him. “We’ll need somebody who understands why we laugh and cry when we do,” he went on. “Why we look at a tree in bloom and can’t take our eyes off it. Why cruelty to a horse makes us want to beat the person who did it until they can’t stand. And why we sometimes feel guilty to be alive and whole when so many of the best men we knew are here under the mud, and will never