A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,115

skin, a movement not only to stem the flow of the blood but also to block out the memory of what had happened to their lives that evening.

"I don't - "

"Not now, darling," he said. "You need to eat something first."

"Will we talk then?"

His eyes moved from her face. Slashes covered her hands, her arms, her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. At the sight, he felt such a burden of anguish that he wasn't sure he could answer her. But she was watching him, her beautiful eyes trusting, filled with love, waiting for his reply.

"Yes," he whispered. "We'll talk then."

She smiled tremulously, and he felt his heart wrench. He put the tray across her lap, but when she tried to spoon the soup, he saw that her weakness had become so pronounced that no effort would make it possible for her to feed herself. Gently, he took the spoon from her and began to help her eat, a slow process in which every bit swallowed seemed an individual act of triumph.

He wouldn't let her talk. He was too afraid of what she might say. Instead he soothed her with whispered words of love and encouragement and wondered who she was and what kind of terrible grief she had brought into his life.

They had been married for less than a year, but it seemed to him that they had always been together, that they had been meant for each other from the moment when his father brought her to Testament House from King's Cross Station - a solemn little waif of a girl who looked twelve years old. She's all eyes, he had thought when he saw her. But when she smiled, she was sunlight. He knew within the first few weeks that he loved her, but it took nearly ten years to make her his own.

During that time he had been ordained, had made his decision to be part of his father's work, had laboured like Jacob in pursuit of a Rachel he could never be certain of winning. Yet that thought had not discouraged him. Like a crusader, he had set on a quest, and Nell was his Grail. No one else would do.

Except she's not Nell, he thought. I don't know who she is. And the worst of it is, I'm not certain I want to know.

He had always seen himself as a man of action, one of courage, a man powered by the force of his inner convictions, yet still, intimately, a man of peace. All that had died tonight. The sight of her in the bath - mindlessly lacerating her flesh, staining the water with her blood - had demolished that carefully constructed facade in two short minutes: the time it had taken to pull her, frail and screaming, from the tub, to try frantically to stop the bleeding, to throw the shouting police officer from their flat.

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 finished, 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