We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [92]
She turned to meet his eyes, searching, trying to read into the depth of his mind to see if the final honesty was there inside him.
He answered impulsively, and yet he was absolutely certain that the very best of himself meant it. “I’ll come to London with you, and tell Lloyd George all I know, and that will back up everything Schenckendorff says. He will have to believe us.”
She stiffened with instant fear. “You’d be admitting to treason,” she said in a whisper. “Don’t you know that?”
“Yes.” Said aloud like that, it brought a chill he had not fully realized before, but it did not alter his certainty that this was what he had to do. It was a payment he owed, and it was the only way she would ever look at him with the shining honesty that she did now, with the possibility of the kind of love that he could not turn away from, even if his life were the price. He would be clean; he would have given all he could to pay for his mistake.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
He was sure. He did not know if he would still have the courage when he was alone, and knew that his name would go down in history not as Britain’s greatest, bravest, and most articulate war correspondent, but as a man who had betrayed his own country for a flawed ideal. If he faltered later it would be because of fear crowding in; weakness, not a change in belief. “Yes, I am sure,” he said firmly. “I love you. More than anything else I want to be the man who can live up to your dreams, and your courage to pay what they cost.”
She gave a little nod. It was a very small, very certain gesture, and then she smiled. Then she touched his face and leaned forward and kissed him, long and tenderly. For those moments he felt an infinite happiness he thought it would be impossible ever to forget.
Later in the morning, when Judith found Joseph in his bunker having just finished more letters, she knew that he saw the happiness in her immediately, and that he also probably recognized it as what it was. But she had no intention of telling him that Mason had always known the Peacemaker, or—at this point—that he was willing to come to London with them and tell the prime minister so. They still needed Schenckendorff; otherwise they could not expect to be believed against a man as powerful as Dermot Sandwell. Alone, Mason might be written off as a lunatic, a man too shocked by his experiences at war to have retained his balance of mind.
And Schenckendorff had not brought any papers with him. It would have been impossible to keep them after capture, even if he had dared to take the risk of removing them from Berlin.
The only written proof was the treaty John Reavley had hidden in the house in St. Giles.
“We’ve got to think,” she said to Joseph. “Have you made a list of all the people it still could be, so we can concentrate on them and eliminate them? It’s the first of November. We can’t have much longer or they’ll have ended the war and we’ll be too late anyway. Jacobson must be working on it all the time. He’s out there like a dog worrying a bone. And Hampton is, too.”
She sat down on the cot, and he turned himself around on the box to face her. He looked tired, and there was an unhappiness under the surface courage that twisted her inside to see. She knew it was because a gulf had opened between Lizzie and himself, and he could not understand it.
Judith ached to be able to reach out and help, tell him that it was because Lizzie loved him intensely, not because she didn’t. But would he be able to bear the knowledge of what had happened to her, and that she was now carrying the rapist’s child? She did not know. He had been so desperately hurt by Eleanor’s death, and