Elizabeth George - A Great Deliverance

In two short minutes he had become not the cheek-turning, sincere minister of God that had long been his guise, but a maniacal stranger who could have killed, without impunity, anyone seeking to harm his wife. He was shaken to the core, even more so when he considered that, in protecting her from enemies, he couldn’t think of how he was going to protect Nell from herself.

Except she’s not Nell, he thought.

She was finished eating, had been fi nished, in fact, for several minutes and lay back against the pillows. They were stained with her blood. He got to his feet.

“Jo-”

“I’m going to get something for the cuts. I’ll just be a moment.”

He tried not to see the gruesome condition of the bathroom as he rooted in the cupboard. The tub looked and smelled as if they had been butchering livestock in it. Blood was everywhere, in every crevice and crack. His hands weakened as he grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He felt faint.

“Jonah?”

He took several deep breaths and went back to the bedroom. “Delayed reaction.” He tried to smile, clutched the bottle so tightly he thought it might break in his hands, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Mostly surface cuts,” he said conversationally. “We’ll see what it looks like in the morning. If they’re bad, we’ll go to hospital then. How does that sound?”

He didn’t wait for a response. Rather, he washed the abrasions with the chemical and continued speaking determinedly. “I thought we might go to Penzance this weekend, darling. It would be good to get away for a few days, don’t you think so? I was talking to one of the kids about a hotel down there that she’d stayed at as a child. If it’s still there, it should be wonderful. A view of St. Michael’s Mount. I thought we’d take the train down and hire a car when we got there. Or bicycles. Would you like to hire bicycles, Nell?”

He felt her hand on his cheek. At the touch, his heart swelled, and he knew he was horribly close to tears. “Jo,” she whispered. “Nell’s dead.”

“Don’t say that!” he returned fi ercely.

“I’ve done terrible things. I can’t bear for you to know. I thought I was safe from them, that I’d run from them right into forever.”

“No!” He continued mindlessly, passionately to see to her wounds.

“I love you, Jonah.”

That stopped him. His face sank into his hands. “What do I call you?” he whispered. “I don’t even know who you are!”

“Jo, Jonah, my love, my only love-”

Her voice was a torment he could barely endure, and when she reached out for him, he was broken and ran from the room, slamming the door firmly, and irrevocably, behind him.

He stumbled to a chair, hearing his own breathing tear at the air, feeling wedges of panic drive themselves into his stomach and groin. He sat, staring unseeing at the material objects that comprised their home, and desperately pushed away from him the one piece of information that was at the core of his terror.

Three weeks ago, the police sergeant had said. He had lied to her, an immediate response rising from the horror of her incomprehensible allegation. He had not been in London with his wife at that time but rather at a four-day conference in Exeter, followed by two additional days of fundraisers for Testament House. Nell was supposed to have gone with him but at the last moment had begged off with flu. So she said. Had she been ill? Or had she seen it as an opportunity to travel to York-shire?

“No!” The word came out involuntarily, from between his teeth. Despising himself for even considering the question for a moment, Jonah willed his breathing to calm, willed his muscles to relax.

He reached for his guitar, not to play it but to reaffirm its reality and to reestablish the meaning it had in his life, for he had been sitting on the back stairs of Testament House, in the semi-darkness, playing strains of the music he loved when she first spoke to him.

“That’s so nice. D’you think anyone could learn?” She came to crouch next to him on the step, her eyes on his fingers as they moved expertly among the strings, and she smiled, a child’s smile, lit with pleasure.

It had been simple to teach her to play, for she was a natural mimic: something seen or heard was never forgotten. Now she played as often to him as he did to her, not with his assurance or passion but with a melancholy sweetness that long ago should have told him what he didn’t want to face now.

He stood abruptly. To assure himself, he opened book after book and saw the name, Nell Graham , written in each volume in her neat script. To show ownership, he wondered, or to convince herself?

“No!”

He picked up a photograph album from the bottom shelf and hugged it to his chest. It was a document of Nell, a verification of the fact that she was real, that she had no other life but the one she shared with him. He didn’t even need to open the album to know what lay within its pages: a pictorial history of the love they shared, of the memories that were an integral part of the tapestry of their lives being woven together. In a park, on a trail, dreaming quietly at dawn, laughing at the antics of birds on the beach. All of these bore testimony, were illustrations of Nell’s life and the things she loved.

His eyes drifted, for more assurance, to her plants in the window. The African violets had always reminded him the most of her. The beautiful flowers poised themselves delicately, precariously, at the tips of their stalks. The heavy green leaves protected and surrounded them. They were plants that looked as if they could never survive in the rigours of the London weather, but in spite of their appearance, they were deceptive plants really, plants of remarkable strength.

Looking at them, he knew at last and fought fruitlessly to deny it. Tears, long in coming, broke the surface and a sob escaped him. He made his way back to the chair, fell into it, and wept inconsolably.

It was then that he heard the knocking at the door.

“Go away!” he sobbed.

The knocking persisted.

“Go away!”

There was no other sound. The knocking continued. Like the voice of his conscience. It would never end.

“Damn you, go away!” he screamed and threw himself at the door. He fl ung it open.

A woman stood there. She wore a neat black suit and a white silk blouse with a froth of lace at her throat. She carried a black shoulder bag and a leatherbound book. But it was her face that riveted his attention. It was calm, clear-eyed, and masked by tenderness. She might have been a missionary. She might have been a vision. But she extended her hand and made it clear that she was real.

“My name is Helen Clyde,” she said quietly.

Lynley chose a corner. Candles fl ickered some distance away, but where he was darkness shrouded the church. The building smelled vaguely of incense, but more strongly of age, of guttering candles, of the burnt ends of matches, of dust. It was utterly peaceful. Even the doves, who had been stirred into momentary rustling upon his approach, had fallen back into stillness, and no night wind made tree branches creak and scratch against the windows.

He was alone. His only companions were the youths and maidens, entwined Grecian urn-like in a soundless eternal dance of truth and beauty on the doors of the Elizabethan confessionals nearby.

His heart felt heavy and sore. It was an old story, a Roman legend from the fi fth century, but as real at this moment as it had been to Shakespeare when he used it as the foundation for his drama. The Prince of Tyre went to Antioch, pursuing a riddle and marriage to a princess. But he came away with nothing, fl eeing for his life.

Lynley knelt. He thought about prayer, but nothing came.