We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [90]
Still, that was uncomplicated compared with trying to find faith and keep your own inner strength clean of lies to cover your despair, or the confusion that threatened to drown every shard of light. How did he manage to cling to any idea of a God who loved, whose plan made sense, and who had even the faintest idea what it was like to be human?
She heard the tent flap pull open with a surge of relief simply that there would be someone else there, a voice other than her own.
It was Lizzie. Her face was white, her dark hair pulled loose from half its pins and curling untidily. She closed the flap behind her and came over to Judith, glancing at the man in the bed moving restlessly in his pain.
“Can you help him?” Judith asked.
“No,” Lizzie answered quickly. “He just has to get through it alone. I expect Joseph will come and sit with him again, if he has time. There are so many…” She bit the inside of her lip, avoiding Judith’s eyes. “And he has to get Schenckendorff back to London.”
Judith was startled, and then the moment after knew that she should not have been. Of course Joseph would trust Lizzie. He had no idea of the burden that it laid on her.
Lizzie rushed on, not allowing herself time to hesitate. “We don’t seem to be having any success finding out who killed Sarah. I’m going to go to Jacobson in the morning and tell him the truth, all of it that I know.” Her voice wavered and she swallowed. “But I have to tell Joseph myself first. He should hear it from me, not from someone else, gossip and half a story. I—”
“Not yet,” Judith interrupted. “At least wait until tomorrow. We might still…”
Lizzie looked at her levelly, blue eyes bright with the grief burning inside her. “So you can find something in a day? We’ve been trying everything we know since it happened. I’ll go as soon as I can find Joseph alone again. I’m only telling you because you’ll have to help him…I think. He…” She could not bring herself to say it.
“He loves you, and he’ll feel like hell,” Judith finished for her. “Wait. Just another day. Please!”
Lizzie hesitated, hope fighting against reason.
“A day,” Judith insisted. “There are no plans to send Schenckendorff out yet. Jacobson’s still trying to find a witness who can tell a straight story. There have been so many lies; he has to find a clear thread. Please…then we’ll tell Joseph, I promise. But don’t, please don’t until you have to.”
“A day,” Lizzie said wearily. “Then I must. I know what it means. What will anything that’s left be worth if I don’t?”
Judith admired her passionately. It was like looking at a man about to go over the top into the gunfire, and she was keeping him balanced on the parapet. But she could not let go of hope, not for a few hours more.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Ever since Matthew had told Mason about the Peacemaker from his family’s point of view, from the murder of John and Alys Reavley right up through the struggle to get Schenckendorff back to London, Mason had been tormented by the weight of his lie to Judith, albeit by silence. He had hidden his own part in it because he had seen confession now as a self-indulgence for which there was no time or emotional energy. They needed his practical help, not his admission to a complicity that would render him useless in their estimation.
Now he was standing on the fire step behind one of the old parapets, staring across no-man’s-land as the morning light picked out the ruts and pools in the gleaming mud, the paths between the old craters a tangled web between the wreckage. There was a faint mist over it, shining silver as the sun struck it. It hid most of the smaller mounds—bodies of men and horses