Angels in the Gloom

by Anne Perry

  Corcoran’s face was soft, his eyes gentle. “My dear Joseph, it is not about me, or about you. It is about England, and the war. Morven will not harm anyone until he has the final answers. I am safe until then.”

  “And you are sure you will judge that correctly?” Joseph challenged. “To the hour? To the minute?”

  “Are you returning to Ypres, Joseph?”

  “Don’t evade the subject.”

  “I’m not. Are you going?”

  “Yes.” He was surprised that he did not even hesitate. “Yes, I am.”

  “And might you be killed?” Corcoran asked.

  “Yes,” Joseph said quietly. “But more probably not. I won’t run any unnecessary risks.”

  Corcoran smiled for the first time. “Rubbish! You will go out into no-man’s-land just as you have always done. And if you die Hannah will mourn for you, and her children will, and Matthew, and Judith. And so shall I. But I shan’t tell you that you cannot go. You must do your duty as you see it, Joseph. And so must I. But it matters to me immensely that you cared enough to come and try to prevent me. The fact that it is utterly wrong, and against all you believe yourself, is a mark of your affection I shall not forget. Now please allow me to wish you good night, before I become too tired to keep my feelings under control, and embarrass us both.”

  Joseph was defeated and he knew it. Corcoran’s argument was unanswerable. There was nothing for him to do but say good night and go out to find Archie. He did so with a heavy heart, but as much grace as he could manage.

  Archie was due to leave on the early train next day. There was no more time left for Hannah to waste. It was late. They were both tired, but if she missed her chance to ask for the truth now, there might be no other time. When he left, she would miss him in every way: his voice, his touch, his laughter, the light in his face, the smell of his skin. But more important, this might be her last chance of knowing the man inside the shell, the thing that was unique and eternal.

  She sat on the bed and watched him move his small case to where he could pack it in the morning. She must speak now. Tomorrow he could avoid her; the children might interrupt; there would be any number of reasons and excuses.

  “Abby called to see me a few weeks ago,” she began. “You know Paul was killed in France.”

  He looked up. “If you told me, I’d forgotten. I’m sorry. How was she?” There was pity in his face and a kind of crumpled sadness, as if he were seeing Abby in her, or perhaps her in Abby.

  “Full of regret,” she answered. She hated doing this! It was not too late to leave it, not try to force him to tell her. Let him have a last evening at home in peace. Leave the war until tomorrow.

  He did not understand. “Regret? You mean grief?”

  She steeled herself. “No, I did mean regret. There was so much she didn’t know about him, about his life, what he cared about, what he felt. Now it’s too late.”

  “You never know all that people care about,” he said, pushing the case away behind the wardrobe back where he could not see it.

  She forced herself to continue.

  “A friend of his came by and told her all sorts of things about him,” she said. “In France, what a good officer he was, what a good friend. That was when she realized that this man knew her husband far better than she did.”

  “I’m sorry. But there’s nothing you can do to help her. There’s no point in thinking about it.”

  Was he misunderstanding her on purpose?

  “No. But I can help myself!”

  There was a closed look in his face, touched with anger. “What are you talking about? No, don’t bother explaining. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” she insisted. She was sitting still in the bed. He was less than a couple of yards away, and it could have been miles. “You never tell me what your life is like at sea. I don’t know anything about the men you serve with, who you like, who you don’t, or why.” She gulped and went on, speaking too quickly now, and aware of it. “I don’t know what you do every day, but far more than that, I don’t know what hurts you, or frightens you, or makes you laugh.” She could see the surprise in his eyes, and the defense already. “Archie, I need to know!” she insisted. “I want to! Please—it isn’t really a kindness to shut me out. I know you’re doing it to protect me, and probably because you don’t want to talk about it anyway. You want to keep a place where war can’t intrude, somewhere clean and separate.”

  He was staring at her. “For God’s sake, Hannah! Can’t we just have a pleasant evening? I have to go tomorrow.”

  “I need to know!” she said with rising desperation. She knew she was angering him, risking pushing him further away. They might even part with a quarrel! That would be unbearable. It could be for the last time. That thought beat in her mind, almost choking the words, her throat was so tight. “When you’re gone it’s as if you disappear!” she said hoarsely. “I know a part of you so well it’s as if we’d always been together, but there’s a whole world, terribly important, that I’m shut out of as if I couldn’t understand and don’t belong. But at the moment it’s the biggest part of you. It’s what you spend your life doing. It’s what makes you who you are, what you believe, what makes you real. I need to know it, Archie!”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said with patience that obviously cost him a tremendous effort, almost more than he possessed. “It’s ugly, Hannah. It would give you nightmares and your imagination would torture you. You can’t help! Just . . .”

  “I’m not trying to help you!” Her voice was rising in spite of her effort to keep it under control. “Can’t you see that I’m trying to help myself! And if I have to, help Tom. What if something happens to you, and Tom asks me what you were like? What am I going to say? I don’t know? He never told me? Do you think that will satisfy him, when his father’s gone and he can’t ask? Do you think it will satisfy me? We need to know, Archie. Maybe it will hurt, but that’s better than a lifetime of hating myself because I didn’t have the courage to face it.”

  “Tell you what?” he said wearily, sitting on the floor and crossing his legs as if he had given up. “What it feels like to live in a few square feet that’s never still, even when the sea’s calm? Do you want me to tell you how cold it is? The wind off the North Atlantic whips the skin from your flesh. How tired you get when you’ve only had a couple of hours’ sleep, and day and night blend into each other till you can’t think, can’t feel, can’t eat, and you feel sick? You know what it’s like to be exhausted. You’ve experienced it yourself with sick children, up every half hour, or more.”

  “It’s not the same,” she said, wondering if it was.

  “At sea you stare out at the ocean till you’re blind,” he went on, almost as if ignoring her. “You know every wave could hide a torpedo. One moment you are standing on the deck, pitching and sliding, and the next you’re deafened by the noise of tearing metal, and you know you could be pounded, broken, and suffocated by icy waters, dragged down into the darkness and never come up again. You imagine your lungs bursting, and pain obliterating everything else.”

  She sat frozen, her muscles locked and aching.

  He went on, his voice was softer, cut across with grief. “Shall I tell you about fire at sea? Or what it’s like to see a gun turret hit, and bodies of men you know cut to pieces, blood everywhere, human arms and legs lying on the deck? Or would it be enough if I just stick to the long days and nights of monotony while you wait, and wonder, cold, tired, eating sea rations, trying to work out how you’ll deal with the attack when it comes, how you’ll keep the men together, keep heart in them—be worthy of their trust in you that somehow you can get them out of it? And how you’ll live with it if you fail?”

  She blinked. “It’s horrible,” she whispered. “I don’t even know how to imagine it. But if that’s your life, then shutting me out of it would be even worse . . . maybe not straightaway, not now, but in time it would. It hurts to be shut out. A different kind of hur
t, but a real one.”

  “You don’t need it, Hannah!” He stood up easily, moving with grace in spite of his inner tiredness. The leave had not been long enough. But he had told her only about life at sea, and little enough of that. He had not told her about himself.

  “Yes, I do need it,” she argued. “Either I belong to you, or I don’t. If you shut me out, even if you’re right and I don’t have the strength or the courage to bear it, then . . .”

  “I didn’t say that!” he protested, turning to look at her angrily.

  She ignored him. “You meant it. And when Tom’s confused and hurt, when you’re not here, I have to try and explain to him why you won’t trust any of us.”

  “It’s not trust!” He was frustrated by her refusal to understand. “It’s to protect you from the nightmares I have! Can’t you see that? What’s the matter with you, Hannah?”

  “Do you think Judith needs protecting?” she asked, controlling her feelings with an effort. This was the time when she must be strong. She had asked for the truth; there was no place for emotional manipulation.

  Archie was startled. “Judith? That’s different. She’s . . .” He stopped.

  “What?” she demanded, keeping her voice level with intense difficulty. “What is she that you think I’m not? Tell me!”

  Archie stared at her. His eyes were so tired they were red-rimmed. She knew he was sleeping little.

  “What is it?” she insisted. “You’re not protecting me. You’re shutting me out. I need to know you! Don’t you trust me to love you, even if you’re afraid sometimes?” The words were irretrievable. Her stomach churned with fear.

  He looked startled. “No, of course not!” He stopped. “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” she answered. “Do you imagine I expect you to be perfect? I don’t. I never did. That isn’t love; it’s vanity! And lack of faith in us! You really believe I’m not strong enough to hear about what you have to live through?”

  He leaned forward, intensely earnest. “I don’t want you to have to think about it, Hannah. Did you tell me how it felt to give birth? I heard you screaming, but I couldn’t share it.”

  She took a deep breath. “Then let me hear you scream sometimes,” she begged. “Or at least know what it’s for. I know you might get killed. I do know that! Then I’ll lose you, and for the children’s sake, I’ll have to go on by myself. And they’ll have to go on, too. But I want to have the real you now! I want to know what I will have lost.”

  He turned away from her. “You don’t understand what you’re asking. Joseph doesn’t tell you what it’s like in Flanders.”

  “I’m not married to Joseph.” That answer was simple, and it made all the difference in the world. “But I would listen if he did, if it helped him.”

  “And if he didn’t want to tell you?” he asked, still not looking at her. “What if I would rather have you just as you are, not knowing, not changed by it, not part of that life?”

  That hurt. Joseph had refused to tell her. She felt the sting of it like a hand slap. She had difficulty controlling the tears coming to her eyes. “I’m shut out, as I am from you, and I will have to live with it,” she said quietly. “I will be alone. Perhaps you have other people you want to share yourself with.”

  “Hannah! That’s not . . .” He sat down slowly on the bedroom chair, lowering his head so she could not see his face. “If you had any idea what it’s like, you wouldn’t say that.”

  “I don’t have any idea because you don’t tell me!” she retorted. She couldn’t and wouldn’t go back now. “I only have my imagination and my own nightmares. Is it any worse than reality?”

  He was speaking quietly now, almost as if in a way she had beaten him. “Yes, it is! You’ve never been as cold in your life as it is at sea. Your eyelashes freeze, the tears on your face are ice. It hurts to breathe. Your bones hurt with it. Land could be only a hundred miles away, but it might as well be beyond existence.”

  He lifted his head to look at her. “There’s nothing but you and the ocean, and the enemy. He might come over the horizon, a black silhouette against the sky, or he might heave up out of the water right in front of you. More likely you won’t know anything at all until the torpedo hits, and the deck under your feet erupts in fire and twisted metal and blood.”

  It was not the words—she had heard them before. It was the horror in his face, because he was letting himself relive it now. It was in his voice, his hands clenched on his knees, scars showing white against the wind-burned brown of his skin. A part of her wished she had not started this.

  “Do you hate it all the time?” She did not want to know the answer, but she had to ask.

  He was surprised.

  “No, of course I don’t. There’s laughter, and friendship. Some of the jokes are even funny. There’s immense courage.” He looked away from her again to hide the nakedness inside him. “Heroism you can’t bear. Men who keep going in blinding pain, dying . . . Hannah, you don’t want to hear this. You’ve never seen a human being blown to pieces, or worse, torn open and bleeding to death, but still conscious and knowing what’s happening to him. That was the way Billy Harwood died. I can still see his face when I close my eyes.” He gasped. “There was blood everywhere. We did everything we could, but we couldn’t stop it. There was just too much. You haven’t seen fire in a gun turret when there’s nowhere to escape to and they have to stand there and burn to death, and we watch them. A child shouts in the street, and I hear that again—men like torches in the night.”

  Very slowly she moved closer to him and knelt down. She could see there were tears on his face. He was right; she did not want to know this. Her imagination would build enough for her to have nightmares, waking or sleeping, from now on, but she had to.

  This was not the man she had first loved, who had gone to sea with pride and enjoyment in it, ambitious to succeed. This man was older, at once stronger and more vulnerable, a stranger in her husband’s skin, whom she wanted passionately to know. She needed to start again, assuming nothing. She reached out her hand and slid it over his very gently.

  “We sank an enemy ship a couple of weeks ago,” he went on. His voice was shaking, and Hannah could feel the locked muscles making his legs tremble, even though he was sitting.

  “It was at dusk. It was a good maneuver; partly luck, but mostly skill. We’d been shadowing each other for days. He fought hard, but we had the first shot and it damaged him badly.” He was looking beyond her, into his own vision. “The water was gray like lead, pitted dark by wind and rain. We fought for nearly two hours. We took some bad hits ourselves. Lost a dozen men, killed and wounded. The man next to me lost both his legs. Surgeon tried to save him, but it was too much.”

  He took a deep breath, searching her face, trying to read her emotions, what she thought of him, how much she was frightened or sickened.

  She wished she could think of something wise or generous to say, but her mind was empty of everything but the numb misery of it. He must not see the fear in her, the longing to deny it all.

  “We sank him just after sundown,” he went on, saying the words slowly and carefully. “We hit his magazine, and he went down with all hands. That’s the thing I dread more than anything else—being carried down inside, the water rushing in and I’m trapped, going down all the way into the darkness, with the sea above me, forever.” His breath was ragged.

  “They went down,” he said quietly. “All of them. We didn’t save a soul. There was no triumph, no victory, just silence. I lay awake all night seeing it again and again. When it comes to it, they were seamen, as we are. We probably would have liked them, if we’d met a few years ago, before all this.” He was looking at her again, waiting for the confusion at his feelings, the revulsion for what he had done.

  She blanked her mind. She must not show it, not even a glimmer, whatever it cost. There must be something to say, and she must think of it quickly.

  “You’re rig
ht; it isn’t easy,” she agreed. “It’s horrible. But we don’t have a choice. We go forward together, or we go forward alone. I don’t want to be ashamed of myself because I refused to look. But don’t tell Tom too much, just a little, if he asks. Tell him some of your men were killed. He’ll understand that was hard to take. Please don’t leave him out altogether. He loves you so much.”

  His voice caught and there were tears on his cheek. “I know.”

  She smiled, blinking hard. “So do I.” Please God, she would have the strength to go on meaning that, if it got worse, if she woke up with the horror of her imagination night after night when he was not there beside her. She would remember all the laughter, the hope, the tenderness between them, and picture the dark, icy water suffocating the life out of him as he struggled and beat against it, and was crushed and plunged to the bottom of the sea, to places no human being ever imagined. Her heart would go with him. At least she would not be cut off, separate and unknowing.

  “Hannah!” His voice cut through her thoughts.

  “Yes!” she said quickly. “I’m here.”

  He pulled her into his arms and held her.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  TWELVE

  Matthew had just returned from Cambridgeshire and a visitto the Scientific Establishment.

  “No, sir,” he said quietly.

  Shearing looked drawn. The usually smooth flesh of his cheeks was hollow and the web of fine lines around his eyes was cut deeper as if the skin had no life in it. “No hope?” he asked, looking up at Matthew.

  “No, sir. Not in any time we could put a name to.”

  There was a tension in the room already, as if tragedy were only waiting to be acknowledged. Matthew realized with surprise how afraid he was. For once he wished he were a fighting man where he could at least do something physical to make himself feel better. And perhaps knowing less would also be easier now, a single enemy in front of him to fight, rather than the darkness all around, massive and closing in.