We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [91]
Judith was beside him. It was one of the few places they could be certain of not being overheard. She was more desperate than ever to find the truth of who had murdered Sarah Price, partly because she knew all these people in the regiment—and particularly in the Casualty Clearing Station—and felt the pain of suspicion tearing apart the few certainties they had after years of hardship and the loss of half the people they knew. Yet even more urgent was her need to clear Schenckendorff from suspicion so they could take him to London and expose the Peacemaker.
That was the burden that crushed him now.
He looked at Judith, her face calm and pale in the harsh light. He saw very clearly the weariness in her, the depth of emotion, the intense vulnerability in her eyes and mouth. And yet he knew her courage also. If he wished her ever to speak to him in the time ahead, whatever it held for them, then he could not build it on such a vast lie as silence over his alliance with the Peacemaker. He had already carried it almost too far to forgive. Once Schenckendorff was cleared and they left Ypres, it would be too late.
He had thought how he would do it, which words he could use to begin, but now that he was faced with it they all sounded trite and self-serving. They had talked about Schenckendorff, and a silence had settled between them that at least for her seemed comfortable. If he said nothing now it would become a lie, one from which he might never be able to return.
“Judith…”
She turned to look at him, waiting for him to speak.
There was no alternative to honesty; he would make it brief and perhaps brutal, like a quick knife thrust.
“I used to believe in the same ideals as Sandwell does, or did in the beginning,” he told her.
It was a moment before she realized the meaning of what he had said. Then, very slowly, a light of astonished disbelief filled her face, and after it, pain. “You knew,” she said, her voice husky. “When?” She swallowed. “Always?”
“Yes. I always knew it was Sandwell. I didn’t know that he had killed. I should have. I could see that the power was taking him over, the desperation to stop the slaughter at any cost. What is one life here or there, quickly, when tens of thousands are dying slowly and hideously every day?” He waited for her answer as if it were a verdict on him—hope or despair.
He saw the flicker of uncertainty, as if, for a moment at least, she had understood.
She frowned. Her words came very slowly, with intense thought behind them. “If that is a serious question, I think the difference may be in small acts, one by one, when you can refuse to do the violent thing, the irreparable thing. But then that might also be cowardice, mightn’t it? And to say that he should have asked us isn’t really honest, either, because we couldn’t have given an answer that had any meaning. Most of us had no idea what the alternatives were. We hadn’t seen war. We wouldn’t have known what we were being asked to choose.”
“So what were we supposed to do?” he asked, surprised that she had addressed the problem with pity rather than rage. “Just let Europe stagger blindly into a holocaust rather than try everything possible to stop it?”
This time she did not hesitate. “Yes. Rather than sell our honor, yes, he should have argued, pleaded—perhaps uselessly—but not tried to sell us without our knowledge.” She stared across the cratered land in the broadening light. Now the waste of it was easier to see. The mist no longer softened the outlines or hid the corpses. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Trying to make a nation of Englishmen do what they don’t want to is like trying to herd cats into a barn. You can’t do it. There’s always some awkward cuss who’s going to go the other way, or stop and demand to know why. It isn’t practical, Richard; it never was. Some of us might buy peace at that price, but you’d never get us all to.”
He was watching the