We Shall Not Sleep (22 page)

Moira was still talking, rattling on about going home once all the wounded had been evacuated, what it would be like in peacetime again, which hospital she would find work at in England. Lizzie was obviously not listening to her.

Judith finished her tea and stood up. "Let's go and clean up the theater while there's a chance," she said to Lizzie. "I'll help you."

Lizzie rose a little stiffly. "Thanks, but don't you have to do maintenance or servicing on your ambulance?"

"Not yet," Judith said firmly. "The theater'll probably be needed first anyway." She led the way, and Lizzie caught up with her. It was a warm bright day with only a hint of chill in the air. At home, late October was one of Judith's favorite times of the year, with its rich, heart-aching beauty of wind-riven skies, stooks gold in the fields, wood smoke, blazing color in the leaves, bright berries. Here it was like a harvest aborted, the barren earth too full of blood to bear the fruits of summer.

The Operating tent was deserted, the surgeons and orderlies either with critical patients or taking a brief respite, snatching sleep or some kind of food.

As soon as the flap was closed, Judith turned to Lizzie. She had no time for subtlety. She liked Lizzie better and better each time she saw her, and she was perfectly sure that Joseph loved her, which mattered far more. Now she was also intensely grateful to her for her courage and decisiveness in going to Jacobson and getting Matthew released.

"What is it?" she asked bluntly. "Everyone else is thrilled that Jacobson has arrested a German, but you're not. Is there someone else you're afraid of?"

Lizzie
lifted her chin and stared back in surprise and complete denial. "No! If I knew anything like that, don't you think I'd have told you when they were blaming Matthew? I'd have grasped at any other answer rather than tell him about Hodges."

"Yes, of course. I'm sorry," Judith said immediately. "But something is wrong. Everybody else is relieved, and you look as if it's worse. What is it?" She was aware the instant she had said it that she was being intrusive. Nothing gave her the right or excuse to demand answers to what might be a very private grief.

Lizzie turned away and began to tidy up the theater, moving soiled dishes and swabs, picking up bandages and pieces of bloody cloth cut away from a wound. All this would have to be done before they could even consider cleaning the blood off the floor. "Perhaps you'd fetch some water," she asked, head still averted, watching what she was doing. "If you can find anything fit to use. I'll have this ready by the time you get back."

It was dismissal. She was not going to discuss the subject. She kept on picking up, tidying, folding. She did not meet Judith's eyes at all.

Judith obeyed because she recognized that she was not going to receive an answer, and pressing any further would make an enemy where she wanted a friend. She went looking for water. It did not have to be especially clean—it would only be swilled around the worst of the blood and mud on the floor. Nothing dropped could possibly be used again without sterilizing anyway.

She walked along the boards deep in thought. Why would Lizzie not confide in her? They had spoken openly before. Even if briefly, it had been honestly. The only answer that came to her was the one she least wanted to believe. Had Lizzie realized how deep Joseph's feelings were for her, but she could not return them? Perhaps she was still grieving for her husband, who had been murdered in the summer of 1916, and she could not yet love anyone else. Theo Blaine had been brilliant, one of the finest scientists of his generation. How could Joseph equal him in her estimation?

It was a crushing thought Judith could not tolerate. Joseph had endured enough pain with the loss of Eleanor and their child. Lizzie knew that, and it would hurt her to have to reject him, but you could not accept someone out of pity; that would be the worst of all.

She filled the pail with cold water that was too stale to drink but good enough for a floor, then carried it back to the Operating tent. She opened the flap and banged the pail down. Lizzie looked up at her. Her dark hair was coming out of its pins, and her skin was almost drained of color. "Thank you," she said quietly.

Judith was pinched by the loneliness in Lizzie's face. She looked as if she was managing not to weep only by exercising the most rigid self-control. She opened her mouth to ask again, but Lizzie took the pail and turned away, and Judith felt clumsy.

"You'll need more," she said aloud. "As soon as you've used that, I'll fetch another one."

Lizzie did not answer, as if she could not trust herself to speak.

Judith spent the rest of the day on an ambulance run taking men who had arrived after the murder to the next hospital along the line. Wil Sloan rode with her. He, too, was unusually somber. There was no time for her to say much on the way south with the injured men, but on the way back he sat beside her as dusk mantled the fields and hid some of the scarring of the land. They moved in their own small, noisy world, their headlamps picking out only occasional ruined buildings, skeletons of walls and windows jagged and partial against the darkening sky.

"Are you still thinking about going home?" she asked him after a violent jolt on the road where she had hit an unexpected crater.

"Oh, probably. Sooner or later," he replied. "Longer I leave it, harder it'll be. I suppose."

She glanced sideways but could not see his face in the dim light. "I didn't mean will you go, I meant are you still worrying about it," she corrected. "Don’t. They’ll be proud of you. They'll have forgotten about your quarrel. It's history. The whole world's different now." She said it firmly, trying to think only of the positive, and convince him.

"You reckon?" He looked straight ahead.

"Of course! You were one of the first to come, long before the rest of America. You nailed your colors to the mast. You should remember that."

He frowned.

"Naval term," she explained, negotiating the next crater, but only at the last minute and throwing him off balance so that he grasped at the dashboard. "Means attaching them to the mast so you can't pull them down and surrender, no matter what."

He smiled. She heard the amusement in his voice. "I know that! Just because I came from the Midwest doesn't mean I know nothing about history, even if I'm a thousand miles from the sea." Sorry.

He rode in silence for a while, so obviously deep in thought she did not interrupt him.

"Do you reckon someone lost his temper with Sarah 'cause she flirted with him, then wouldn't come across?" he asked as they veered around a corner and straightened up again.

She realized the question was serious, deeper than she had thought. He had fled his hometown originally because of a stupid quarrel in which he had lashed out and hurt a man far more than he had intended to. He had stowed away in a railcar and gone east until he reached the coast, then taken a ship to England to join the ambulance service as a volunteer.

"Wil? Was your fight a lot worse than you're telling me? You said he was all right, just bruised and maybe a broken jaw."

"He was." Wil was still looking forward, as if his seeing the road would somehow make them safer. "I was lucky. I should stop kidding myself, Judith. I could have killed him. I lost my temper—I mean really lost it. I didn't know or care what I was doing. Maybe I would do it again?"

"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 to be sick.

"Wil?" As she turned to look at him, she veered wildly close to the edge of the road, sending the ambulance bucking and slewing across the craters. She pulled up sharply. "Sorry."

"I didn't do it, Judith.'" he said haltingly. "I just know that everybody's scared, not only the women." He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

"Do you know if anyone is lying to protect someone else?" she asked him. "Maybe someone they
owe
a really big debt, like having pulled them off the wire or carried them back from no-man's-land? That would be something you'd pay for the rest of your life, wouldn't it.'"

"Yes," he agreed. "That's why pretty well everyone's happy to think it's one of the Jerries."

"But what if it isn't?" she insisted. "We can't hang somebody who didn't do it because it's convenient. Surely to God we are better than that?"

"It isn't that easy," he replied. "Haven't you ever owed anybody something? Something so big you can hardly breathe for the weight of it. You have to pay debts like that. You have no choice."

"You know something, Wil!"

"I hear wounded men talk," he admitted. "You don't, because you're up here driving, but I spend a lot of time with some of them."

"What do you know? I'm not moving until you tell me."

"I can walk back from here better than you can."

"Wil!" she protested desperately.

"I know how some of the men feel," he answered. "That's all. I told you I don't know who did it. I don't. Hell, Judith, if I did I'd have said when they had your brother!"

"Yes. Yes, I know." She eased the engine into gear again and straightened the wheels on the rutted road. They still had more than a mile and a half to go.

When Judith pulled the ambulance in and parked it, Wil went to help the orderlies with the new wounded, and she began the usual maintenance of the vehicle. She was in the back tidying and cleaning the stretchers and sweeping the floor when she heard footsteps outside in the mud, and a moment later a shadow blocked the light at the door.

She looked up and saw a familiar silhouette that made her heart jolt and her stomach tighten far more than she wished. She wanted to be in control of her emotions, but as Wil had said, her body let her down. She was hot and cold at once, and her hands were clammy.

"Can I help you?" Mason asked.

"Not really, thank you. I'm just about finished," she said a trifle more coolly than she had intended. Although perhaps it was for the best. She did not want to hope, or imagine, that she could see in him a tenderness or a belief that was not there. "What's the news from the front? Where are we now?"

"About two miles from Tournai, the last I heard," he replied. "The fighting's still pretty heavy."

"Yes, I know. We're still getting quite a few of the casualties."

"I heard you found the man who murdered the nurse. It was one of the Germans."