“Did you kill any, when you were being a soldier?” He glanced up from roasting sausages and, as it was so often, his expression was unreadable.
“Do you know, I don’t think I ever killed anybody at all, except doing surgery on them.” She stirred at the fire. “Some men I was angry at may have died eventually, because I put knife wounds in them, but that is a thing one can do nothing to prevent. There is altogether too much killing in this world, I think.”
“I have to agree with that.”
“That was the last thing of importance my father told me before they hanged him. That killing is the stupid answer, not the wise one. I have found it to be true.”
“You’ve never killed?” His eyes were sharp upon her, searching, weighing.
“Never that I know.” She looked at him, over the fire. “But I will tell you something that is not so pretty about me, Robert. That man, the first one who attacked me…I cut the tendon at his thumb. It does not mend, such a wound. He will not use his right hand again to hold a knife or for anything else. Not ever in his life. I am not a nice person, me.”
“Perhaps his next victim would disagree with you. There, you’ve set me one of your moral conundrums. Have a sausage while I think about it.” He held it out to her on the end of the stick so she could wrap bread around it and pull it off. This was as close as he would come to her.
He would not touch her. He had not spoken of a wife, but it was most probable he had one and was being faithful to her. She was a lucky woman, his wife.
She had learned Robert Fordham by heart in these days they had walked so far together. She knew the path of every wrinkle across his forehead. There was a curved, faint scar on his left hand from some fishhook he had treated carelessly. She knew, right to the center of her, how he moved. She could not breathe sometimes when he twisted to look behind them on the road, and his muscles danced like poetry.
This was the gift her memory held for her. She had Robert inside her now, even the lines of the palms of his hands. She would not forget him. “We will be in London tomorrow.”
“Before noon, if we keep up this pace. Were you planning to spend the night under a bridge?”
“There, or in an alley. I will not sleep much. My small business will take only a few days. Then I will leave quickly. A city is not kind to a woman alone and without money.”
“I’ll show you a place I know near Covent Garden. A safe place.”
How much she wished to stay with him in his safe place near the Covent Garden. She took a bite of her sausage and chewed. “It has allspice in it, this sausage. I find English cooking interesting at times. Robert…” She was glad it was dark. There are words one can say in the dark that cannot be said when it is light. “You may not come with me into London. Early tomorrow, when we enter London, I shall send you from me, on your journey to Somerset.”
“No, you won’t.”
She sighed. “You know, do you not, that I desire you.”
“Yes.”
“I was certain you did, for I have not been concealing this very cleverly. At first, I did not perfectly recognize what had happened to me, and later it became too confusing. It is not important, you understand.”
“I know.”
“This comes to me because you have saved my life, I think. And because of a man who was with me in France. I did not tell you about him.”
“No, you didn’t.”
She ate slowly, trying to find the right words. “He was a kind of madness that struck me because I was alone and friendless and in great danger. He changed me. He left me…I suppose you would say he left me ready for you. When you saved my life in that courageous way and are so handsome and strong, I fall into a foolishness.” She thought for a while. “I came to love him in a complicated way. I still do. But I find it is not any protection against desiring other men, which is awkward and humiliating. My mind is in a state of great turmoil. You must not pay too much attention to what my stupid body is doing.”
“I won’t.”
She waited a while before she said the next thing. “I have not wanted men before. Not even one. It is a grave moral weakness to desire two men. I had not known I was this sort of person.”
“You aren’t.” His words were clipped, dry, and unsentimental. “You haven’t done anything, so you aren’t that kind of person. Forget it.”
A smuggler would see things so simply. “That is an interesting philosophy and most likely true in its way. You must go away from me, Robert. You have fulfilled your commission to your conscience when I cross the London Bridge. I do not think I can stand much more of this.”
“I’m not going to touch you. And I’m large enough to fight you off if you forget yourself.”
She did not laugh, because that would only encourage him. “If I live to be very old, perhaps to a hundred or so, I may understand this thing that is between men and women. What I do know is that touching or not touching does not matter between us. We have gone beyond that. Tomorrow we make an end. It is also not good for you to be in this state, I think.”
“‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them…’”
“‘But not for love.’ I am less sure of that than I was a week or two ago when my life was inexpressibly simpler. I do not think one dies. One may well go insane, however.”
“I’ll take my chances.” He pulled his own sausage off the stick and folded it neatly in bread. He wasn’t laughing at her exactly, but there was an amused look behind his eyes. “I’ll see you settled safe in London. We’ve come this far together, what does an extra day matter?”
He made it sound sensible. Did he know in the least how easy it was for him to convince her of anything?
“It is at times like this that I miss my mother.” It was easy also to speak simple truths to him. It was a sign of how dangerous he was to her. “It has been six…no, five weeks now since she died. I keep thinking, ‘I shall tell her this,’ or ‘I shall ask her this,’ and then I remember I shall never see her again. Maman knew all there is to know about men. She was very wise. She would tell me not to stay near to you at all, not for one hour.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, Annique.”
She couldn’t help laughing, though her mouth still had sausages in it. “That is what he said to me. Almost exactly that. The man in France who was unkind to me and whom I loved in a way—he said that. You are a bit like him, did you know?”
The flames made his eyes glitter. “Am I?”
“It is that your bodies are alike. A little, anyway. He is even larger than you, I would say, and immensely strong. Though you are strong, too, of course. But you are different in spirit. He had no softness in him at all, not truly, not anywhere inside him, which is as it should be in a person in his position. He is older than you, too.”
“Older?” Robert stared at her, fascinated.
“He is very senior in his work. He must be eight or ten years older than you, I would think. He is fiercely determined, as well, though you are that yourself, a little, except that he does not go about it so nicely. Also he does not smell of fishes. That is from your sweater, you comprehend, which is a beautiful sweater and skillfully knitted but in need of washing—”
The bullet hissed by. It brushed her hair like an insect. Then the blast of sound slapped her skin.
Twenty-one
REFLEX THREW HER FLAT TO THE GROUND. SHE scrambled away. There were no trees. No brush. The field was flat and without shelter. No place to hide. Nothing but darkness to protect her. She heard Robert roll away from the light of the fire.
A man rose out of the black and silent fields, silhouetted against the stars. The first gun had missed. He tucked it into his belt and traded the second pistol to his right hand and raised it.