by Charles Todd
“The truth, Sister, is that I’ve lived in the cellar of that farmhouse for weeks now. Someone caught me foraging and took a shot at me. I didn’t know the password, see? That’s the wound you dressed. I wasn’t wounded in the line, I simply disappeared in the dark, taking another man back to the aid station. He died before I could get him there, his blood all over my hands. And I thought, ‘Here’s Providence providing.’ So I took my chance. I couldn’t outrun another patrol, not with this hip. But the motorcar was Providence all over again. I blessed my luck, and I’d have had it too.”
He’d come into the barn for my kit, to find something to help his wound and give him a chance. He couldn’t have held out much longer in the ruined farmhouse, but there were chickens, and surely eggs, and he must have found something to keep body and soul together before he was shot.
It was an interesting dilemma.
I found it increasingly difficult to believe he had killed the Major or Private Wilson. He wasn’t cunning enough to waylay me or set up an accidental death for Nurse Saunders. But what to do with him?
And what if I was wrong?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WE HADN’T GONE two miles when a shout went up, followed by the appearance seemingly out of nowhere of a patrol. I heard Hugh Morton groan, and Trelawney spoke swiftly, hardly moving his lips, “What do we do? Sister?”
“Stop the motorcar. Have your papers ready. Private Morris, I hope your disks save you now. There’s nothing more I can do.”
We waited, listening to the shelling, to the sound of a motorcycle runner heading forward to the Front, to barked commands by officers steadying their men in the line.
The company quick marched toward us, and by the time they reached the motorcar, I had taken out my papers from the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and had them ready. Trelawney had produced his own, and Hugh Morton, his face pale but set, held his false identity disks in one hand.
The Sergeant in charge of the patrol went over our papers carefully, then looked at the disks that Hugh Morton presented.
Turning to me, he asked, “He’s wounded?”
“Yes. As you can see. I was taking him back to be looked at. An ambulance couldn’t be spared for one patient.”
He insisted on seeing the bandaged wound, then frowned, as if something about Hugh Morton registered in his memory. I prayed his hadn’t been the patrol that had fired on the Welshman when he was foraging. Deserters and looters got short shrift from the Army.
After what seemed like an interminable wait, the Sergeant nodded and told us where to find our next destination.
Trelawney thanked him and moved off under the Sergeant’s eye. And he continued to watch us out of sight, as if worried about our presence here in the midst of troop movements. Our own guns were replying to the German artillery, the noise deafening.
We reached the aid station and I presented my credentials to the young, harassed sister in charge.
Supplies were being stowed, and the few patients with trench foot, gassed lungs, and minor wounds were being sent back by ambulance to clear the station for the major wounds to come.
I could see Hugh Morton—Private Morris—being sent to join the queue, and I asked Trelawney to keep an eye on him until I’d thought of a way to prevent it.
But I needn’t have worried. Sister Wharton was anxious about the pending attack and how prepared she was to deal with it. In the end I decided to leave her to handle the influx of wounded on her own, with her staff to help her, rather than become the Senior Nursing Sister in her place. I’d learned my own strengths in her shoes, and I knew from the brief conversation I had with her that she would cope very well and be the stronger for it, knowing she had.
We were all so young, I thought as we drove away, the men who came to us and the sisters who treated them. I had seen and done things that my grandmother would have wondered at, but I had also discovered that courage was the ability to face what had to be faced, when it was impossible to run away.
At a rear hospital, I asked one of the doctors to have a look at Private Morris’s wound.
He examined it, nodded, and said, “Well done, Sister. I’ve given him something for the pain. Let him rest for an hour or two, and we’ll send him on to Rouen.”
I thanked him, dealt with my patient, asked Trelawney to sit with him—receiving a thunderous frown for my trouble—then started toward the wards. At that moment a courier came through, on his way to HQ. Stopping by the sister in charge of sorting patients, he showed her his wrist. She examined it briefly and pointed to a bench where others were waiting for attention. He argued with her, but she shook her head and moved on to the next man in her line.
The courier looked around, spotted me, and walked toward me. Where his goggles had been were two pale circles around hazel eyes. The rest of his face appeared to have black measles, it was so splotched from hunching over his machine as he sped cross-country.
“Sister? I spun out in the mud and I think I’ve sprained my wrist. Will you have a look at it? I’m overdue as it is—I can’t wait with that lot.”
I glanced across at Sister Henry. She was busy with the line. “Come this way,” I said, and took him a little apart, where I examined his wrist—it was painful but not broken—and taped it so that he could be gone. “But you must promise to see to it as soon as you can,” I admonished him.
“I promise, Sister. Thank you.”
He was about to turn away when I seized the opportunity. “Could I add a message to your pouch?”
“Hurry! I can’t wait.”
There was paper and pen in my valise. I wrote my father’s name and rank on the outside of the envelope, and inside simply scribbled a single word: Nothing.
It would reassure and disappoint him at the same time.
The messenger gingerly drew his gauntlets on over the tape, adjusted his goggles, and walked away to where he’d left his machine.
On the spur of the moment, I went after him, calling, “You said HQ. Have you encountered a Colonel Prescott there?”
“No. Should I have?”
I shook my head. “I was just curious. I appear to have missed him at every turn.”
He nodded, started his machine with a roar, then cut back on the throttle. “Prescott, you say?”
“Yes, that’s right. A big man with startlingly pale eyes.”
“That sounds more like Major Carson.”
I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice. “Then perhaps my information was wrong. Where did you see him?”
He resettled his goggles. “Rouen. He’s returning to England. He stopped me to ask if I’d been given his orders.”
There was no time to rewrite the message for my father.
“Do you usually carry such orders?”
“These were especially cut. From Colonel Crawford, he said.”
I felt cold.
“Did you—were you asked if there were orders in your satchel for other officers?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact he did ask if there were any others. He was worried that his had been mislaid. But there weren’t. Not that time.” He gunned the motor, eager to be off now.
“I can’t explain,” I began, “but don’t look for Major Carson the next time you’re in Rouen. He’s—” I couldn’t think of a good reason to disparage the Major, except of course for the fact that he was dead and someone had assumed his identity. “He’s not in good odor at HQ. That could be the reason why his orders are not yet cut. Colonel Crawford could well wish him to cool his heels for a time.”
“How do you know this?” he asked, suddenly suspicious.
“I’m Colonel Crawford’s daughter. If you look in your pouch, you’ll see his direction on the letter I gave you.” I offered him my best smile. “Just—be careful, will you?”
He regarded me for a long moment, nodded, and then was gone in a roar.
I went to find Trelawney as quickly as I could.
“The man I’m looking
for. He’s in Rouen. We must leave as soon as we can.”
But there were already wounded coming in, strafing injuries from a low-flying aircraft as well as shrapnel from exploding shells. The guns were busy, and it was baptism by fire for the raw recruits facing death for the first time. I held one boy of seventeen while the doctor dug shrapnel out of his legs, and I pretended not to see when he wept with the pain.
I worked late into the night, and I rose early in the morning, before sunrise, as the long lines of ambulances and an overburdened lorry brought us more and more wounded. A hardened veteran, watching the long lines being sorted by one of the sisters, said, “There’ll be no one left in England over the age of sixteen.”
I worked long into the night again, and when I came off duty, Trelawney said, “Morton is gone. He slipped into one of the ambulances heading for Rouen.”
“Hardly unexpected.” I sighed, remembering my own predicament over proper passes. “If they don’t pick him up at the port, he’ll be very lucky.”
“Aye, that’s so.”
On the third day as the flood of wounded slowed to a trickle, I found time to tell the sister in charge that I would be leaving for Rouen, to complete my report. She thanked me for my assistance, and then said, “I’ve met one of your flatmates. Mary. She was with us for a few weeks, earlier on, then was sent home after falling ill with the influenza. They tell me it will return with a vengeance in the autumn. I pray every night that it can’t be true.”
I’d heard the same, but I said bracingly, “We’ve seen the worst of it, I’m sure. I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t had it.”
But even as I said the words, I remembered Mrs. Hennessey, Simon, and my parents.
We set out for Rouen an hour after lunch, working our way back through the quagmires that were roads, and then encountering a rainstorm that turned the mud into a morass. We took shelter for a time beneath a lone chimney standing by the road, at least breaking a little of the wind if not the rain.
Rouen was busy as we drove in late that night, and I had the credentials now to ask for a bed at the Base Hospital, one for me and one for my driver.
I sent Trelawney to search the port for the man calling himself Major Carson, and he was away for three hours before returning to report.
“If he’s here, I can’t find him. But that messenger, the one who told you about him—he was killed and his motorcycle taken. Just last night. The French police are conducting a house-by-house search for it. But I’ll lay you odds it’s already in Paris or points south.”
I didn’t think so. The killer’s destination wasn’t Paris; it was London. The motorcycle was most likely in the river, where it wouldn’t be found straightaway, allowing the hunt to go on. I felt a surge of anger mixed with sadness. I’d warned the courier. Either he hadn’t taken it seriously, or he’d come upon this man sooner than he’d expected.
Someone’s orders had been in his pouch. I could guess at that. Orders worth killing for.
But in whose name?
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that my letter might still be in the courier’s pouch, depending on his route. With my father’s direction scrawled hastily across the envelope.
If nothing else, it would surely tell the killer that I was once more in France.
I went down to the port, looking for any ship whose officers I recognized. There was no way of knowing if Major Carson, or whoever he claimed to be now, had already left for England sometime last night. Or if he had had to wait, as I did, for the next available transport.
Finally, in late afternoon, I spotted Captain Grayson. He saw me as well, throwing up a hand in silent greeting as he finished his business with the port master, and then coming forward to meet me.
“Hallo, Sister Crawford. I didn’t know you were back in France. On leave, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” I replied, smiling. “Any chance of space aboard the Merlin?”
“I should think that’s possible.”
“I have my driver with me. And a motorcar. Do you think there could be room for that as well?”
“I’ll tow it behind us if I must. Do you have time for a cup of tea? I’m dry as the desert. It was a stormy crossing, couldn’t search properly for periscopes or torpedo tracks because of the high seas. I never left the bridge.”
I went with him to a small café near the cathedral, and he drank his tea with gusto. We talked about France and the war, and then he told me that his brother had been killed in the North Atlantic. I remembered Joseph Grayson as a man with a kind smile and a quick wit, and said as much.
“Thank you,” the Captain replied, his voice husky. “I’m not accustomed to the fact that he’s gone. We were close.”
To change the subject, I asked if there were other passengers on board this crossing.
He shrugged. “God knows. They give me the count after we’ve been searched. There are quite a few wounded coming back with us. At least that’s the rumor. Not surprising. I could hear the guns as we came upriver.”
He paid for our tea and escorted me back to the Base Hospital before rejoining his ship. It would sail just after dark, and I promised to be on board before that time.
I had just walked through the gates of the hospital when someone called my name, and I turned quickly, unable to identify the voice.
It was Hugh Morton, drenched by the earlier rain, despair in his eyes.
“I don’t have the proper papers,” he told me. “Beside which, they’re determined to keep me here as well, not send me home. Wound’s not serious enough, they claim. I don’t know what to do. Rouen is bigger than I knew. I’d come over through Calais, not here. And I can’t speak the language.”
“What about your head injury performance?”
He smiled wryly. “I tried. They couldn’t find any wound on my head. That’s when they concluded I was feverish and would be admitted here.”
I said, “I’m leaving Rouen tonight. There’s nothing I can do.”
“You got me this far,” he reminded me.
“No. You left with the ambulances. As a hip wound.”
“I thought it best. How was I to know?”
I looked him over. “When did you eat last?”
“Two days ago.”
“Come along then.”
I walked back out the gates and took him to a restaurant where the food was not the best but was of enough provenance to trust it.
He ate cabbages and potatoes and what appeared to be minced chicken cooked in a sauce. There was a pudding, and he ate that as well. I refused to let him have wine, and he drank tea almost as thirstily as the Captain had done.
When he was finished, I took pity on him. He was a man who only wanted to go back to his father’s farm.
I said, “Look, even if I could get you to England, what then? As soon as you reach Wales—that’s to say, if you manage it without getting caught—the entire village will see that you’ve returned home. The next thing you know the Army will be there to take you up. They don’t turn the other way, Hugh Morton. They’ll search for you and in the end come for you. I don’t think you’ve considered that.”
“I have thought about it. I look enough like Llewellyn to pass as him. I could pretend to be one of the others, but Will and Llewellyn and I were alike as peas in a pod. Someone was always blaming the wrong one of us. And if anyone comes, I’ll just do my little mad bit, and they’ll turn away. They always do.”
“But he’s in hospital. And it isn’t much of a life for you.”
“Who has traveled across England to see him? Nobody. Which of my father’s neighbors will call me a liar?”
It was madness. The madness of desperation.
“Go back to your company, Private Morton. I’ll tell the Base Hospital how I found you wandering and confused. There won’t be charges to face.”
“Sister, I left my company to avenge my brother. It’s all I wanted—revenge for how Will was treated. But Will’s dead, the Major is dead. I’ve n
o more stomach for fighting. And I can do more good at home, helping my Da in the fields, than I ever could here.”
“I won’t be responsible if you’re caught. Do you understand that?”
“I do, Sister. I won’t even tell my father how I got home. What’s more, he won’t ask.”
“He may think you a coward for leaving France. None of your other brothers ran.”
“I doubt they would have stayed, given the choice. I doubt Will preferred to die in France, never seeing his son. Or Ross, drowning in the cold sea. Or David, when he looked down to find his leg gone.”
“All right. Go sit in the cathedral until dark. Meet me at the port gates. They’re taking wounded on board, and whatever I say to you at that time, you’ll do your part.”
“On my honor, Sister.”
But did a deserter have any honor to swear on?
I took him as far as the church, saw him safely ensconced by the organ loft stairs, and then walked away.
I wondered what my ancestress whose husband fought at Waterloo would have to say about what I was going to do.
I turned around and went back to the cathedral and found Hugh Morton where I’d left him.
“You will make me a promise,” I said.
“Anything, Sister.”
“If you survive this war, you will go to Cornwall and speak to your brother’s wife and see his son. Do you swear?”
“On my honor,” he said again. And this time I nodded.
I had left the cathedral and was making my way back to the Base Hospital when I happened to glance in a café window. Music was spilling out of the doorway, someone playing a plaintive tune on the piano, something about lost love and heartbreak.
And my own heart seemed to leap into my throat as the man sitting at a small table in the shadows of the doorway looked up at the very same moment.
He was wearing a British officer’s uniform, wearing it as if it were his, although it was a little tight across the shoulders, but his eyes were as cold as the winter sea. By comparison, Hugh Morton’s were as blue as a spring sky. And I’d last seen them shadowed by a muffler in the driver’s seat of a motorcar trying to kill me.
