We Shall Not Sleep

by Anne Perry

  It cost Joseph such an effort of will to keep silent that he could feel the blood throbbing in his temples. He wanted to beat Onslow until he lay senseless.

  Lizzie struggled to force the words through her lips. “I was the woman, sir. I have no idea who it was who raped me. Had I known, I would have reported it…”

  Onslow looked taken aback, but it did not alter the anger in him. His face was red, his eyes bright and hard. “Then your accusation now is pointless, and too late, Mrs. Blaine.” He stood up and walked around the table toward her, looking her up and down as though to see whether she was injured.

  Joseph was trembling, the sweat hot and then cold on his skin.

  “It has every point!” Lizzie’s voice was choked with tears. “It happened more than a month ago, before Colonel Schenckendorff was anywhere near here. It could not possibly have been him.”

  It took a moment for the full import to strike Onslow. He froze. “You mean you have allowed us to accuse and imprison an innocent man while you said nothing?” he shouted at her.

  “I…I hoped he would be proved innocent in some other way,” she whispered. “I—”

  “You hoped?” he demanded incredulously, his eyebrows arched high. “You hoped?” he repeated. “If you had spoken at the time we would have investigated then, when the trail was fresh. At the very least we would have known there was a rapist loose in the clearing station, and women would have taken the proper precautions for safety. Sarah Price would still be alive, and we would not have wasted weeks questioning and accusing and finally locking up the wrong man! Have you any concept of what you have—”

  “Yes!” she cried out, tears running down her face. “Yes, of course I know. Why do you think I came to you now? But I don’t know who it was—”

  “You should have come—”

  Joseph lunged forward and hit Onslow, hard, throwing all his weight behind the blow. The major staggered backward, crashing into the canvas, losing his balance and falling sideways onto the floor.

  “Joseph! No!” Lizzie shouted, throwing herself at him and clinging to him so he could not strike again, and they both lurched to a standstill.

  Onslow blinked and lay still for several seconds before raising himself onto an elbow. He drew in his breath and shook his head. Then very slowly he clambered to his feet, still half leaning against the wall.

  Joseph was so angry that if Onslow had turned to Lizzie and spoken he would have hit him again, even though the realization was beginning to sink in that he had struck a superior officer and could find himself court-martialed—possibly even dishonorably discharged.

  Onslow was staring at him. He might want to apologize, try to explain, but nothing could excuse what Onslow had done to Lizzie, and Joseph would not yield. He was a chaplain, not a career soldier, and Lizzie was more important to him than any calling. He stared back without wavering.

  Lizzie, too, must have been desperate to think of something to say. She looked from one to the other, her face ashen.

  Onslow straightened his tunic and brushed himself down. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Blaine,” he said quietly. “I am quite sure you feel your omission more than sufficiently. I should not have mentioned it. I cannot imagine the suffering you have already endured, and the insensitivity of some people’s remarks. I apologize that I added to them.”

  “You were right to blame me, sir,” she said, her voice trembling. “I thought perhaps it might have been my own fault, that somehow I had unintentionally allowed someone to believe I held a regard for him that I didn’t. We…we all tend to think that somehow we were stupid, careless…but I have no idea who it was. I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, and I don’t know. It’s too late now to say who was here then, I realize that. I was so ashamed…I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. I’m sorry.”

  Joseph waited for Onslow to agree, but instead he turned to Joseph, his face already beginning to swell from the blow. “You should watch your temper, Chaplain. Not every senior officer may appreciate your remarkable service to the men here, or realize that to charge you with assault at such a time, when the morale of the whole unit is so fragile, would not be in the army’s best interest. You are very fortunate that I do.” He put his hand to his cheek and touched it gingerly. “If anyone inquires, I shall say that I fell. You would be wise to be quite unaware of the whole incident.”

  “Yes, sir.” Joseph was suddenly embarrassed. Onslow was a better man than he had given him credit for—simply out of his depth with the subject of rape. And like most people, he disliked intensely having made a very public stand on an issue, and then being proved wrong. “Thank you,” he added.

  “Thank your record with the Cambridgeshires, Captain Reavley,” Onslow replied. “You are loved by the men. I think if I were to charge you I would lose their support completely. I’m not fool enough for that.”

  There was a certain pain in his voice, a knowledge of having been a fool in other things. He stood awkwardly, beginning to realize that he had been hit very hard indeed. “Now I have to make certain that Schenckendorff is released from this accusation, and that everyone knows that he could not be guilty. I don’t want him attacked—again.”

  He turned to Lizzie. “I regret that I shall have to tell them why, Mrs. Blaine, because if I do not, they may not believe me, and someone will take a private vengeance on him. I will not mention your name, but it is possible someone may guess. There is no alternative. I cannot allow the man to be murdered in an accident”—he emphasized the word—“because I am not believed.”

  “I understand,” she said hoarsely. “That would be almost as bad as his being hanged. Thank you, sir.”

  Onslow nodded.

  Joseph and Lizzie turned and went back out into the rain.

  Later, Joseph walked alone around the old supply trench, remembering the men he had known who were gone, so many of them dead. He thought of them in the good times, the jokes, the sharing, the long stories about home, the letters, the dreams for the future. Had they loved him as much as Onslow thought? He had loved them, and watched them die. Had he been any help in this nightmare?

  What help was he now to Lizzie, whom he loved? He thought he had learned to deal with death, even with mutilation, which was sometimes even harder. But there was an element in rape that was different, a violation not just of the body but of the inner core unique to a woman. If it had been somebody else, possibly even Judith, he would not feel so wounded within himself. There would not be the horror, the…he had been going to use the word revulsion in his mind. Part of him wanted to run away from all of it, the whole issue—even from Lizzie, as if she had been spoiled for him.

  But she had done nothing wrong, and he knew that. She was a victim, brutalized by a violent man, randomly—unless there was something in her vitality, a moment’s kindness misunderstood, possibly even something as stupid as a passing resemblance to someone else he knew, that had sparked his act? It could have been anything.

  But even if she had allowed a moment’s carelessness, or worse, she was still a victim. If he turned away from her because that man had touched her, known her, was it not totally selfish, nothing to do with anything but his own feelings, not love at all? He would make her a victim again, doubly so, by rejecting her as if she were unclean.

  He knew with complete, sickening finality that to do so would not only devastate her, but also destroy the bedrock of the faith that had sustained him throughout the war. It had made endurable the endless boredom, the sudden blood-red agony, the nights in no-man’s-land with men caught on the wires and torn apart by bullets, left hanging there, bleeding to death. He had sat cradling in his arms the broken bodies of those he had loved. He had seen them starving, freezing to death, drowned in mud, gagging and vomiting up their own lungs from poison gas, and he had not turned away, not said he could not bear it.

  Was he now going to turn away from Lizzie because he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, passionately, intimately, and he could not bear
that she had been raped? If what had happened to her could kill his ability to love, then he had learned nothing, and there was no hope for any of the wounded, the damaged, the millions who would come home changed forever. And who was not damaged, in some way perhaps more hidden, more inward to the soul?

  He must overcome it. To fail at this bitter test was to lose it all. He leaned against the trench wall, his clasped hands resting on the clay.

  “Father, help me to do what I cannot do alone.” In the silence of the wilderness and the miles of the dead, he asked again and again, until finally a kind of peace settled over him and a stillness blossomed inside, growing stronger than the pain.

  “It doesn’t happen without something starting him off,” Matthew said a couple of hours later as he and Joseph sat on a pile of sandbags that had collapsed from an old parapet. It was one of the few places they could expect to be alone. Time was growing desperately short, not only to find the rapist before he struck again, but because the war news that poured in every day made it obvious that the armistice was no more than a couple of weeks away—perhaps not even that. If they were to unmask the Peacemaker in time to prevent his taking a primary part in the final negotiations, then they must begin the journey to the coast within a day or two.

  Despite his resolve, Joseph’s emotions were so raw, he was unsure how well he could control them. Subtlety was needed, not violence, even in words. A careless comment or accusation, an implied threat, could damage their investigation. He was sharply aware of it, but still he could feel the pain taking over inside him, and he was afraid it would slip out of his control.

  Most likely to snap his frail mastery were the men he knew well but who were still lying to him, or to themselves, through old loyalties to those they had fought beside and whose most intimate griefs they knew, perhaps even shared.

  He made an intense effort. He must make his mind dominate his emotions. Think! There were facts that remained unaltered by what Lizzie had told him. The only men who were not accounted for at the time Sarah had been killed were Cavan, Benbow, and Wil Sloan. Surely it must be Benbow. And yet the impossible did happen; people changed beyond imagination. Nothing could be assumed. It was not only illogical to do so, it was morally unjust.

  “A man to whom something has happened that has changed his life,” he said aloud.

  “Or at least his pattern of behavior,” Matthew replied. “The violence toward women has to have begun very recently, or he’d have been caught before.”

  “I suppose so,” Joseph said slowly. “The change could come slowly, as it has for everyone, and perhaps the thought of going home has made him realize how deep it is.”

  Matthew looked puzzled.

  “Take Judith, for example,” Joseph tried to explain. “She isn’t the only one, but can you imagine how an average man would feel faced with a wife like her?”

  “I know she’s my sister, but I always thought she was beautiful,” Matthew replied. “And rather fun. Awkward—but you get used to that. Underneath it she’s pretty decent, if you’re being serious. And you are, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Very. She’s also bright and articulate, and she’s got more courage than most men I know. She’s a better driver, and can mend an engine with almost anything that comes to hand. She’s steady under fire, can give first aid to the wounded or the dying. She’d probably shoot a man if she had to, and I can’t imagine her fainting or having a fit of the vapors like our aunts and grandmothers.”

  “I know. We’ve all changed,” Matthew agreed.

  “Do you know it, really?” Joseph pressed. “I think I’m only beginning to see how much. Are we going to be able to deal with it with some courage and grace?”

  Far over their heads a reconnaissance plane circled slowly and banked hard, swinging off to the east, looking like a dragonfly over an endless marsh of zigzag ditches in the mud. “It isn’t that sudden, Joe,” Matthew pointed out.

  “He may not have had much chance until recently,” Joseph reasoned. “If he were at the front line, and not injured, he wouldn’t see anyone except the occasional ambulance driver. Maybe not even that.”

  “You mean this was his first opportunity?” Matthew asked. “Could be. Before then his violence was very properly turned toward the enemy.” He winced.

  Joseph knew what he was thinking, but there was no time now to dwell on the effect of war on young men. Certainly there was nothing they could do about it. “We have to find out what happened to someone that made his rage or sense of helplessness explode.” His memory reached back over the distress he had seen even in the last few years, the letters men had received from home about the loss of other members of their family or close friends. The grief was hard and deep-scouring. But it was deceit that tore men apart, wounding irreparably: the sweetheart who could not or would not wait, the children they barely knew, the babies born whom they might never see. Worst by far were the wives who betrayed.

  Matthew watched his brother’s eyes squint narrowly in a sudden burst of sun, dazzling where it caught the water in a series of craters, rippled by the east wind till the light danced. “Don’t you know, Chaplain, if you really think about it?” he asked quickly. “Who’s been cheated and left by a woman he loved, and should have been able to trust? Who’s been belittled or laughed at? Everyone’s been changed by what they’ve seen out here, even more by what they’ve done. Nobody is going to go home the same as they were before. Who has a wife that can’t accept that?”

  Joseph thought of them, one after the other, hearing again in his mind the tight, quiet voices of men for whom the gulf had become too great, whose friends were now strangers to whom they could no longer explain themselves, no longer share the laughter or the pain of the things that lay deepest. Perhaps it was the ultimate price of war, the change to the living more than the loss of the dead.

  “It’s Dante again,” he said aloud. “Rewarded not for what we do, but by it—and by what we see, and what we see others do?”

  Matthew said nothing.

  “The Inferno,” Joseph explained unnecessarily, wondering if some of Dante’s wasted landscape of hell might look a bit like this. Did the River Styx look like this slow-moving mud, filled with human remains from battles won and lost? That would symbolize despair very well. What about the forward lines now, all rage and noise, flame of gunfire and shattering destruction, the landscape of anger?

  What about the uniquely human sins of corruption and betrayal? How would they look? Probably perfectly ordinary, like a smiling face, only the eyes would be empty.

  “Everything we do changes us, becomes part of what we are,” he said. “Do you think we’ll ever get over this, Matthew? Will we recover and become human again, innocent enough to have hope, to value human life and believe in a God who loves us, one who has enough power to heal us, to affect anything that happens on earth? Or are we finally on the edge of the abyss, and falling?” The minute he had said it he wished he had not. It was selfish. Matthew was his younger brother, the one man above all others to whom he owed a better care than this, and some kind of protection from the darkness inside.

  “Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’ll try to think who had bad news of some sort about a month ago. Whoever was closest to him will have noticed something. Trouble is, I’m the chaplain. If I know of it as a confidence, there’s only a limited amount I can repeat.” He pushed his hand over his forehead and back through his hair. “What a bloody mess.”

  Joseph sat in his bunker alone trying to remember every private and wounding grief he had heard some man stammer out to him, looking for any kind of comfort, any sense of justice in his pain. There were dozens of them. More often than not it wasn’t the loss here—the friend crippled or killed—it was the betrayal of those at home, the wives or sweethearts who had grown tired of waiting. Would the women who had loved them accept what they had become, or would they be unable to cope with the memories? Would they even begin to understand the guilt of those who had survived when their fri
ends had not?

  Would the horror of killing an enemy soldier so much like a mirror image of yourself make any kind of sense? He was not there because he wanted to be, any more than you were. On a still night you could hear him talking with his friends, laughing, singing.

  No wonder you could not sleep. It was easy to see the petty problems of home—a blocked drain, a disobedient child, a spilled jug of milk—as nothing at all. Life was what mattered. Friends, a whole body, someone to watch with you through the night.

  Who had spoken of something bad enough to make him hate all women? He thought of the men betrayed or deserted and went through their names one by one, ticking off each as he remembered that they were dead, too badly injured, gone home already, or somewhere else far forward of here.

  Turner was the first of those left who seemed possible. His wife had left him for Turner’s own brother, who had escaped military service because of flat feet or something of the sort. Turner’s rage had been almost uncontrollable. Joseph had thought it was against the war in general and the Germans in particular. But perhaps in time it had bent instead toward women.

  And it seemed Culshaw was lying to protect him, again as one man did for his friend, perhaps not realizing there was anything more than a lapse of judgment and discipline.

  “Of course he’s bloody furious!” Culshaw had exploded. “His own brother! Flat feet or cross eyes or some damn thing! So he stays safe at home coining in the money on the black market while we’re out here in the rats and the filth getting shot at. Sometimes I don’t understand women at all. Have they got no honor, no sense of friendship, loyalty…anything?”

  “Women are no more all alike than men are,” Joseph had answered him. “Some men will sleep with anything that stays still long enough, and you know that as well as I do. Don’t you think their wives feel just as used and betrayed?”