‘I should have heeded that warning,’ Jonathan said to Rachel. ‘I should have fled. Better to have been called a coward outright, perhaps, than to have carried on, and been a part of what came later. To this day I cannot abide the smell of rum… The smell of it returns me there, to that night, and it’s like a nightmare I can’t wake up from.’ Jonathan’s face was colourless in the wan light of the day; beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. For a while Rachel feared he might faint, but he did not; he stayed hunched in his chair. Rachel swallowed, struggling for something to say.
‘I have heard it said that war changes a man; that he is forced to address his own true nature, his own essence, by the extremity of his situation…’
‘War changes a man, it is true. For the most part, it changes him from being a person to being meat. Meat and offal, to be left lying for flies and stray dogs to consume.’ He glanced up at her. ‘You flinch at this, Mrs Weekes? It is the truth, and you wanted to hear it.’
‘I know I did. And I do. The truth is important, for nothing festers like a falsehood, this much I know.’ She watched him as she said this, in case it would have some effect on him, but there was nothing. Only his dark, pained eyes in his pale face, and the sense of a vast tide of feeling pent up behind both, causing chaos there.
‘Some things are worse than falsehood, I think. Some falsehoods can be kind,’ he murmured.
‘You carry a great weight of experience inside you. A great weight of bad memory.’
‘So great I can never be rid of it, and it taints everything I have done or will ever do since. I can do no right, now; not after the wrongs I have done. After Badajoz… after Badajoz I did a kind thing. A good thing, I think, though many lies were woven around it. It was the last thing I did in that war, my last action in it, and with it I hoped somehow to begin to make amends. But I can’t think of it without thinking of everything else, of what compelled me to do it. Every single thing I have done since the war is tainted by the things I did during the war. Do you see?’ Suddenly, he clasped his head in his hands as if it hurt him. ‘I could give everything I owned to a poor man in the street, and it would not be generosity. It would be a symptom of my guilt, my disease.’
‘In war a man is compelled to fight, and to kill. It is duty, sir, not sin,’ Rachel ventured.
‘Compelled to kill, yes. To kill in battle, when under attack, or in the defence of others. Would that that was all I did, during those years.’
‘You mean to say you killed when you should not have? You killed… innocents?’ she whispered.
Jonathan’s eyes bored into hers, and when he spoke his voice was as cold and sharp as a blade.
‘I have seen and done things that would send you screaming from this room, Mrs Weekes.’ Rachel’s heart beat faster; nervous tension made it hard to breathe.
‘In war-’
‘On the march towards the Spanish border in the autumn of 1808, after we had allowed the French to leave the field, defeated and weakened, or so we thought, they fled before us, destroying everything in their path. All food, all water supplies, all shelter. We came to a village where every last soul had been put to the sword, for the crime of having us come to their aid. A young girl… a young girl, not more than fourteen or fifteen lay in the middle of the street. Her face was comely, even in death. She had been crushed beneath a vast stone that they’d placed on her chest so that she could neither breathe nor move as they ravaged her. Who knows how many times – the lower parts of her body were a ruin. Nearby lay the corpses of a man and woman, and of smaller children, three or four of them. Her parents and siblings, it seemed, who had been made to watch this most brutal spectacle before being slain themselves.’ He paused and swallowed convulsively, and Rachel fought to keep her horror from showing.
‘A while later, two or three miles from the village, we came upon a French infantryman who’d been left behind by his comrades. He was wounded in both legs – not severely, but he’d grown too weak to carry on. But he had a good deal of life left in him. He lived a good long while.’ Jonathan gazed at Rachel, and now his eyes were quite empty. ‘There was a man amongst our foot, an Irishman called McInerney. The raped maiden had borne a likeness to his daughter, he said. The wounded Frenchman lived long enough to plead for mercy as McInerney took off his skin, a strip at a time. A good many of us watched him, including myself; we did nothing to hinder him. But this bloody revenge did nothing to slake the men’s anger. If anything we grew angrier still. That beast part had awoken in each one of us, and every vile thing we did and saw from then on only made it stronger. That is what war does to men, Mrs Weekes. That is what it did to me.’
‘Enough!’ Rachel gasped. Her hands flew to cover her mouth. She’d been trying to show no reaction but this was too much, and the room was spinning. Jonathan gave her a pitying look.
‘Now you wish you hadn’t urged me to speak. I should apologise, because you had no idea what you were asking, but I cannot. I live with these things. This is what I know the world to be, and if you understand that, then you will understand why I want no part of it.’
There was a pause in which neither one of them spoke. Rachel struggled to compose herself.
‘Don’t cry, Mrs Weekes,’ Jonathan said quietly. He reached out as if to cover her hand with his, but she snatched it away and saw him retreat, turning in on himself again.
‘Forgive me… it is only that…’ She shook her head, helplessly.
‘It is only that I repel you now, more than when we first met, though my room stank of death that time – one of Starling’s little pranks – and I near killed you.’
‘No! It is only that… when the fight is to stay in command of oneself, the slightest kindness from another can… can be the ruin of composure. Is it not so?’ She blotted her eyes and looked up to find the ghost of a smile on Jonathan’s face.
‘And you wonder why I baulk from telling it all to you. You wonder why I baulk from that kindness,’ he said bitterly.
‘I’m quite all right, Mr Alleyn. Only unaccustomed to hearing… such things.’ She took a deep breath. Jonathan had sunk back in his chair and was gnawing at his lip again. ‘You need to rest. You need to sleep, sir,’ she said.
‘You have some measure, now, of what I see when I close my eyes,’ he replied.
‘Perhaps a tonic of some kind… a sleeping draught?’ Jonathan shook his head.