“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.”
He muttered that word again. It really was getting to be a habit.
“He loved you, Imogen,” he said. “If his eyes could have spoken to you for a little longer, if he had known that they would let you live, what would he have told you?”
“Oh.” She gulped.
“Don’t evade the question,” he said. “What would he have told you to do?”
Somehow he compelled honesty—an honesty that penetrated the layer upon layer of guilt in which she had wrapped herself ever since that most dreadful of moments in that most dreadful of places.
“He would have t-t-told me to be h-h-happy,” she said, her voice thin and high again, as it had been the night before last.
“If he could somehow be aware of the past eight or more years,” he said, “and how you have lived them and how you intend to live the rest of your life, how would he feel, Imogen?”
She looked at him again. “Oh, this is unfair, Percy,” she cried. “No one else has dared ask this of me—not the physician, not any of my fellow Survivors. No one.”
“I am neither the physician nor any of those six men,” he said. “And I dare ask the question. How would he feel? You know the answer. You knew him to the depths of his being. You loved him.”
“He would have been dreadfully upset,” she said. She drew her upper lip between her teeth and bit into it, but she could not prevent the hot tears from welling into her eyes and spilling over onto her cheeks. “But how can I let myself live on, Percy? To smile and laugh, to enjoy myself, to love again, to make love? I am afraid I will forget him. I am terrified that I will forget him.”
“Imogen,” he said, “someone would have to cut into your head and remove your brain and smash it to pieces. And even then your heart and your very bones would remember.”
She fumbled for a handkerchief, but he took a few steps closer and pressed his own large one into her hand. She held it to her eyes.