The storm had left the air cooler and, even though it was late, Peter lit a fire.
‘It is good we are on our own at last.’ He stretched out on the sofa, relieved everyone else had gone to bed early. There was something wrong with Mary, had been for days now, and he had a feeling it wasn’t only the grief. Perhaps now she would tell him what it was. ‘Your family is … how to say?’ He lifted his stockinged feet to warm them against the flames.
‘Hard work.’ Mary sat down next to him, resting her arm along the high back of the sofa. She stroked his blond hair; it felt soft, thick under her fingers. ‘I think Ellen and Jean have exhausted themselves with their quarrelling.’
They exhaust everyone around them, Peter thought, acknowledging how lucky he was to be with Mary. He didn’t know how Ted managed to be so tolerant of Ellen. He seemed a steady man despite going through so much during the war. ‘Ted is a good man.’
‘Yes.’
‘He has much patience with Ellen.’ He felt her hand still on his head and wondered if he’d said the wrong thing.
‘Yes,’ Mary said after a beat, ‘he does.’
Peter took a long suck at his pipe and blew a stream of sweet-smelling smoke into the air. ‘Families can be sometimes difficult.’
‘Yes.’ She snuggled down, fitting her cheek into the slight hollow between his shoulder and chest. ‘Do you miss your own family, your home, Peter?’
He didn’t answer immediately. He thought about his father and brothers, all taciturn men, only Werner still alive, left to work the farm. ‘No.’ In the few short months he knew Mary’s brother he’d grown closer to him than his own. ‘No, but over the last few nights I have had recollections of days before the war,’ he admitted. ‘The pattern of the lines on the ice when I and my brothers skated on a local pond; long summer days, working on the farm.’ His voice was pensive. ‘Sitting by the Elbe, the water high on the banks, high over the boulders on the river bed; the mornings of autumn, harvesting, the cold winters and warm fires in our home. My work as a doctor.’ He didn’t mention his short marriage, the wife who left him for another man.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mary said. ‘I’ve neglected you. With Tom and everything else that’s happening—’
‘No.’ He stopped her words with gentle kisses. ‘You have not,’ he whispered against her mouth. ‘I do think of home. But since the war, since the Soviets … Saxony is not a world I know anymore. There is nothing there for me now. I miss what there was, but it is not the same. And I do not miss that as much as I missed you all those years. We are family now?’
‘We are,’ she said. But Peter knew there would always be a space where Tom should be.
‘It was a good funeral … one he deserved.’ Peter said. He’d grown to admire her brother’s quiet ways. ‘Tom was well liked, I think.’
‘I wonder if everyone would have thought so well of him if they’d found out he was with Gwyneth’s Iori in prison. If they’d known he was a conscientious objector during the war?’ And if they’d known that he had killed a man, despite his beliefs, she added silently.
‘It would make no difference. They knew him as a worthy man. They are good people. After all, they show no quarrel with me, they have accepted me, and I was called the enemy.’ The recollection of the four hostile men in the pub flashed through his mind. He wouldn’t tell her.
They sat together, listening to the whistle of air through the sticks of wood in the fireplace, watching the changing patterns of the flames. For the first time in days Peter let the muscles in his shoulders relax.
‘Peter?’
He felt the warmth of her hand through his shirt. He rested his chin on top of her head. ‘Hmm?’
‘I have to tell you something.’
There was a slight hesitation in her voice that alerted him. ‘Of course, Liebling.’
‘It’s about Tom.’ She sat up, looking into his face. ‘And Frank Shuttleworth.’
‘Ja?’ Peter shifted, rubbed the side of his nose, reluctant to look at her. Gott in Himmel, how much longer would that bastard haunt them? Would the spectre of her former boyfriend always be there? ‘I am listening, mein Herz.’
‘We’ve never talked, you and me, about what Frank did to me?’
‘I did not want to make you remember … to upset you.’ God forgive your cowardice, Peter Schormann.
‘He raped me, Peter. On that canal bank, Frank Shuttleworth raped me.’
He flinched.
‘And to stop him, to save me, someone threw him in the river and let him drown.’
Peter couldn’t take his eyes from her. Did she know?
‘The reason we moved down here was to get Tom away from Ashford, because I believed it was Tom. But he refused to talk about it. He said we should try to forget everything.’
‘He was right, Liebling.’ Peter lowered his head, willed her to let it go, let the past stay where it should be, in the past.
But she wouldn’t be put off now. ‘Then, one day, we did talk about it and we realised … at least I thought we realised…’ Mary rubbed her temples. ‘That Patrick’s constantly hinting that it was Tom who’d murdered him was to take attention from himself. He killed Frank.’ She pressed her lips into a thin line. ‘Or so I believed.’
Mary touched his cheek, moved his face so he had to look at her. ‘The other day Gwyneth showed me a letter Tom wrote to her after Iori died.’ She squeezed her eyes closed. ‘He doesn’t actually say… admit … he did it but I could tell that’s what he meant.’ She looked steadily at him. ‘He always told me it wasn’t him. Now I know it was. It couldn’t have been anyone else. Oh, Peter, I thought Tom was incapable of killing anyone. I thought I knew him.’
Peter held her, rocked her in in his arms. Shame burned so deep inside him it hurt. But still he didn’t speak.
Tom wasn’t capable, he thought. But I was. I did that. For you. For us. He closed his eyes. And now I am too much of a coward to tell you.
Dead or not, Frank Shuttleworth still had the power to destroy them.