Shoulder the Sky Read Online Free PDF

before she had left it.
    He led the way, their footsteps hard on the wooden floor of the ward. He was aware of at least two men lying silently in beds watching them as they went.
    Outside the air was mild and still, sheltered by the high walls covered with roses and honeysuckle, not yet in full leaf. The sky above was milky blue.
    "What is it you wish?" she asked, stopping well short of any of the other occupants of the garden.
    He had given a great deal of thought to what he would say to her, but nothing had ever been free from the pain of the past. There was no clean or kind way of phrasing it. Perhaps simple was the best.
    He had decided to tell her as much of the truth as he dared. She was owed that much; she had lost more than any of them, and he saw no added danger in it.
    "Sebastian did not act alone," he began. "Someone taught him ideas and beliefs, then told him what to do. He obeyed, thinking it would avert war. That person, apart from individual guilt for death in your family and mine, is also still free to commit treason and sabotage of England, and to help Germany in any way they can. Their motives don't matter, they must still be prevented. I cannot ask official help in this because I don't know whom I can trust."
    The faintest, most bitter humour touched her face for an instant, then vanished, her black eyebrows rising so slightly it could have been only a trick of the light. "And you imagine you can trust me?"
    "I've told you little you don't already know," he replied. "Added to which, I'm at a dead end. I cannot believe that you have any kinder feelings towards this man than I do."
    The emotion was nowhere in her face except her eyes, which suddenly sprang to smouldering life. "I would kill him if I could," she replied. "I would like to do it with my own hands, and watch him go. I would like to see the knowledge in him, and the pain. I would make sure that he went slowly, and that he knew who I was."
    The implacable hate in her frightened him, but he did not doubt her words. He found his mouth dry. Could he ever hate like that? He had lost his parents, and the grief might never completely leave him, but their deaths had been swift and honourable. Both her sons, the passion and the hope of her life, had been turned into murderers, and died by suicide. And yet neither of them had been evil he knew that as clearly as he saw the sunlight on the grass. They had been deceived and destroyed by others, and, in the end, crucified by shame.
    "Unfortunately I haven't yet found him," Matthew said to her with a gentleness that amazed him that he could feel for her. She looked like some mythical fury rather than an ordinary twentieth-century woman standing on the lawn of a Brighton hospital. But then surely myth survived because it was a distillation of human truth? "You can help me," he added.
    "How?" she asked, looking at the wheelchair-bound soldiers, not at him.
    "Who contacted Sebastian the afternoon before the crash in which my parents died? In any way telephone, letter, personally, anything at all."
    "How excruciatingly delicate of you, Captain Reavley." There was a hint of mockery in her voice. "You mean the day before Sebastian killed your mother and father!"
    "Yes. The morning would have been too early; anything from lunch time onwards."
    She considered for a moment or two before answering. "He had two or three letters in the early afternoon delivery. One telephone call, I remember. No one visited, but he did go out, and was troubled when he returned. I have no idea whom he could have met then."
    "Did the letters come through the post?"
    "Of course they came through the post! What were you imagining? Letters by pigeon? Or a liveried footman dropping something off in a carriage?"
    "A message by hand," he replied. "It is simple enough to put something through a letter box, but it wouldn't have a franked stamp on it."
    She let out her breath in a sigh. "Do you really think this is going to help you find him? Or that