“It is hopeless, Vincent,” she said.
“Then tell him so.”
She drew a deep, audible breath and let it out. Vincent, she noticed irrelevantly, needed a haircut. His fair, wavy hair almost touched his shoulders. But when had he ever not needed a haircut? And why should it be cut? It made him look like an angel. His wide blue eyes only enhanced that impression.
“Send him here,” she said.
He got to his feet, and his dog stood beside him. But he hesitated. “We never ever offer one another unsolicited advice, Imogen, do we?” he said.
“No, we do not,” she said firmly, and he turned away. “But consider your advice solicited. What do you wish to say?”
He turned back. “I believe,” he said gently, “we all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else’s. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.”
And he left without another word. That was advice? She was not even sure what he had been trying to say. Except that it made perfect sense while she waited and pondered his words. Are we not all responsible just for our own selves? she thought. Why should we be responsible for anyone else? Would that not be just meddling interference?
The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.
And she remembered her relatively minor decision to dance again at the village assemblies.
She heard more footsteps. Firm, booted feet this time. Belligerent feet, perhaps. Again she did not turn her head. He stopped a short distance away. He did not sit down.
“Imogen,” he said softly.
She clasped her hands in her lap, lacing her fingers. She touched the tips of her thumbs together.
“You do not play fair,” he said.
“I am not involved in any game with you, Percy,” she said. “I cannot play either fairly or unfairly if I do not play at all.”
“You told me a story,” he said, “and left a hole in it so large and gaping that it would have made a crater in any highway wide enough to stretch right across the road. When I begged you to tell me the rest of it, you offered me a pebble with which to fill that great hole.”
“What I told you was a pebble?” She looked at him for the first time, anger sparking. She was shocked at what she saw. It was not quite a week since they’d last met, but his face looked drawn and pale with smudges beneath both eyes that suggested lack of sleep. The eyes themselves were fathomless.
The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.
“You shot him,” he said, “between the eyes, deliberately. I believe you. But why, Imogen? How did you get to him? Where did the gun come from? Why did you use it to kill him? Maybe I have done nothing to deserve answers except dare to love you, but tell me for that reason if not for any other. Help me to understand. Tell me the whole of it.”
She drew one breath and then another. “Over a number of days,” she said, “they were unable to break him. I have no idea how many days that was. They all ran together for me. They must have thought he carried information inside his head that was essential to them. Perhaps they were right—I do not even know. Finally they took me to him—four of them, all officers. There were two other men there too. He was chained upright to one wall. I scarcely recognized him.”
She lowered her head and touched the heels of her hands to her eyes for a moment.
“Oh, good God,” she thought he muttered.
“They told him what they were going to do,” she said. “They were going to take turns with me while he and the others watched. I have no idea why one of them set his pistol down on a table not far from where I stood. Contempt for a helpless woman, perhaps? Carelessness, perhaps? Or perhaps he was to go first and needed to divest himself of a few things. I picked it up and held them all at bay, their hands in the air. But the hopelessness of the situation was immediately apparent. If I shot one of them, the others would be upon me in an instant and nothing would have been accomplished. They would have raped me and he probably would have broken—maybe before it even started, maybe after one or two. He could not have lived with himself after, even if they had let him live, which is doubtful. If I forced one of them to free him, I could see that he would not be able to walk out of there. And even if I devised a way, there were dozens more soldiers in the building and hundreds, even thousands more outside. I do not believe it took me longer than a second to know what the only solution was. And Dicky knew it too. He was looking at me. Oh, God, he was smiling at me.”
She had to pause for a few moments to steady her breathing.
“And I knew what he was thinking and he knew what I was thinking—we could always do that. Yes, do it, he told me without speaking a word. Shoot me, Imogen. Do not waste your bullet on one of the French officers. And just before I did what he bade me do, his eyes said, Courage. And I did it. I shot him. I expected—he had expected—that I too would be dead moments later. It did not happen. Those very courteous . . . gentlemen, furious though they were, knew how to punish a woman, and it was not with rape. They let me go, even escorted me back to my own people. They left me to a living hell.”
She did not know how long the silence stretched.
“Leave now, Percy,” she said. “I am a bottomless well of darkness. And you are full of light, even if you do feel that you have wasted the past ten years of your life. Go and forget about me. Go and be happy.”