by Charles Todd
Dedication
This year we all lost furry friends, once-forgotten kitties who made life joyful for those who took them in and found how much love they had to give.
CHARLIE turned out to be a girl, but she didn’t mind being Charlie.
SUZIE, who left no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was a she.
CU TEE, a tuxedo kitty whose purr could be heard all over the room.
And then there were those kitties who preferred to be in the wild, but who came to dinner and let you know how grateful they were.
GROUCHO and ROSIE, who have no known grave, but left paw prints on the heart all the same.
And there were four little ones who didn’t make it. Two who had names and two who left us before they could be named, but were loved too.
TINY BASH, Ziggy’s feisty black kitten.
MING, the sweet little Siamese, who joined her smaller sister all too soon.
Finally, for VERDI, wherever you may be . . .
AND for Chelsea Marie: Congratulations on your graduation, and best wishes for a bright, bright future.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Authors’ Note
About the Author
Also by Charles Todd
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
December 1918
The war had ended, but not the suffering.
While the war raged, the wounded had been desperate to rejoin their companies, to fight beside men they’d had to leave behind. We’d had to be on guard against the tricks they used to prove they were up to returning to the Front. They were remarkably clever at it. Those who’d been given their Blighty ticket were often too ill to think beyond whether they would live through the night. But I knew from experience that once they began to recover, their thoughts flew back to France, to the fighting, where they felt they ought to be. That need often helped them heal. Now, with peace, there were no comrades to return to.
For others—like the patients I worked with—their war had finished in quite a different sense.
I spent December in a base hospital in France, tending to the wounded who hadn’t yet been ticketed for England. Many of them had been brought in during the last ten days of the war. Serious wounds that we now had time to deal with here. Most were amputees, fighting infection as well as the loss of a limb. There were gas cases too, burns, and more than a few damaged faces.
As Christmas approached, a good many of the patients in the wards had lost even the incentive to recover. Too often they feared being a burden on their families, to be pitied by wives and sweethearts, to be told that the position they’d held before the war, whether as a tenant farmer or a bank manager, had already been taken by someone else. Someone whole. There were no shaving mirrors for those with burns or damaged jaws, but they already knew how terrifyingly hideous they were—they only had to look at the man in the next bed. And the amputees told us over and over again that they would rather be dead than live without a limb.
No conquering heroes, these men. No victory parades for them. Our patients were the ultimate reality of war. And a suicide watch was maintained twenty-four hours of the day.
Sadly there were other men just like them in hospitals spread across northern France and in clinics in England.
Many were still in pain, often requiring more surgery and not fit to travel. I dealt mainly with the amputees, whose stumps ached in the night or who felt a phantom limb—the lost leg or arm or foot, which itched and burned and throbbed. They were often desperate to find relief. The doctors could explain it away as damaged nerves that hadn’t yet realized the limb was gone. These struggled to read signals that no longer existed, remembering what had once been there. For the men experiencing such symptoms, it was bad enough that the limb was lost. The fact that it still tormented them was unbearable.
This was the detritus that war left behind, those who would have no place in the nation they had fought to protect.
I did my best to cheer them up, and I held their hands when they wept over letters from home. Well-meant letters, to be sure, but only serving to point up that families were already seeing their loved ones differently. One in particular had begun, We are trying to do something about the stairs so that you can have your old room again, but we don’t quite know where to start. Perhaps you can ask the other men in your ward how their families are coping. And the rector has promised to call often to keep your spirits up.
I came to know the Welsh patients particularly well, for they had enlisted out of the collieries in the valleys, and they already knew all too well that they couldn’t go down into the pit again, that the heavy work they’d done at the coal face before the war was physically beyond them now. Most of them had only rudimentary education. They’d followed their fathers and brothers into the pit as soon as they could, to bring in more income. Their worried families, asking how they were to live with no prospects of work, lowered the men’s spirits even more. I spent a good many of my hours on duty trying to find a way to cheer them. But after a while even I could see that cheerfulness was beyond men who had lost hope.
Two of them had been the sole support of their mothers and sisters, after a pit disaster had taken their fathers and brothers. Their pensions wouldn’t go far. Their Army pay, sent home every month, had barely been enough.
My first night in the ward, we had nearly lost Private Evans, a tall, slim man with dark hair and darker eyes, whose left leg and right arm had become so infected that they had had to be taken off. He’d needed several more surgeries after that, and had of course been given morphine for the pain. Apparently he’d managed somehow to hoard a little, enough to take all at once after the last bed check by the night nurse. He nearly managed to kill himself.
The patient in the bed next to him, a burly Sergeant from Chester who had lost a foot, noticed something was amiss, and shouted for Sister Grayson. She had come running, discovered what Private Evans had done, and sounded the alarm in time. We gave him an emetic, then pumped his stomach, working over him until nearly four in the morning before Dr. Herbert pronounced him out of the woods. But I saw his eyes as he lay exhausted in his bed, and I knew he would try again. There was a burning determination in their depths.
He was one of a number of patients who had come in together. They’d fought side by side until the first of November, eleven days before the Armistice, and during one advance, a concealed machine-gun nest set up to protect the German retreat had caught them in the open and taken out two entire companies. Most of the men had been killed outright or had died on the way to the aid station or the base hospital. These men were all that was left. One Captain and eight other ranks.
Captain Williams was worrying. His leg had been badly lacerated, and when gangrene set in in his foot, Dr. Childress, the surgeon, had had to take the leg to the knee. The Captain had fought all the way to the operating theatre, shouting and demanding that they carry him back to his bed.
“I’ll be damned if the Germans will have my leg as well,” he’d exclaimed as he was tied down on the table.
“You’ll die without the surgery. A slow, painful death,” the surgeon told hi
m.
“I don’t care. I’ll take my leg to the grave with me.”
I’d witnessed this battle, and I’d helped hold the ether mask over his face.
He hadn’t forgiven me for that. Nor Dr. Childress. When he’d returned to the ward after spending several days in Recovery, he lay in his bed with his eyes tight shut and refused to eat or speak or let anyone touch the stump.
It was Matron who told him he was setting a poor example for his men, for they needed him rather badly as they dealt with their own feelings about their lost limbs. He took that to heart, but it did little to change his own attitude toward the staff.
With Christmas barely two weeks away, the general mood of the hospital was bleak. The wards showed no interest in making decorations for the tree that one of the orderlies had brought in from a nearby wood. It wasn’t the traditional evergreen, just a small bare-limbed tree. Matron ordered it put up in the large room where men could sit during the day and learn how to cope with their injuries. But no one was in a festive mood, and it stood there for three days without any attempt to do anything with it. And so Matron asked the staff to take charge.
Easier said than done. One of the orderlies made a star for the top, cutting it out of flattened tins from the kitchen dustbin. Another had collected cartridge casings, to help the wards pass the time by making things from them. But there had been little interest in that either, and we used them like candles, with bits of boxes cut out and painted with whitewash to put around the bottoms like a cuff to hide the wire that bound the casings to the branches. By this time, more and more of our ambulatory and wheeled-chair patients found excuses to come to the room to follow our progress, although they made no effort to contribute. One of the ambulance drivers brought us small glass medicine bottles from Rouen, which we tied to the tree. Another brought us paper from Calais, which we fashioned into chains to loop around the branches. And then one of the patients from Scotland, who had lost both legs, used firewood to carve a rough and ready manger scene to put on the sheet we had draped around the base of the tree to simulate snow. An amputee from Cheshire made cards for the staff, which he passed around for patients to sign and hang on the tree. A doctor who had taken leave in Paris brought us chestnuts to string.
Although it was rather a funny little tree, Matron was quite pleased with our efforts and commended us, but we hadn’t done it for her.
The chaplain had arranged a special Christmas Eve service, and one of the orderlies volunteered the information that he could play carols on a piano, and one appeared—God knew from where—and was brought in to stand next to the tree. It was sadly out of tune but the orderly did what he could to improve it.
I went to one of the Welsh patients, Corporal Jones, and asked if he and the others of his company might sing for us during the service. Welsh choirs were famous for the extraordinary way they blended their voices, and I hoped this might make a difference in their spirits if they took part.
To my disappointment, the suggestion was met with a shake of the head.
“What’s there to sing about?” the Corporal asked. “Anyway, Evans is our best tenor, and I don’t see anyone persuading him to sing.”
Private Evans had been withdrawn since his attempt at suicide, and kept his face turned to the wall. He wasn’t the only one who had tried to end his suffering. One of the burn cases had stolen a scalpel and cut his wrists.
“Perhaps it’s what he needs most, a chance to think about someone other than himself.”
“Oh, yes? And how would you be knowing that?”
I took a deep breath. I felt like shaking the man, because this was our first Christmas after the war, and we couldn’t let it go without marking it somehow. It would be wrong not to try. But I said only, “Why don’t you at least speak to the others and see how they feel about it. Surely before the war you sang in Chapel at Christmas services? It might remind them why they fought for King and Country.”
“We don’t need reminders, Sister. We live with them every day when we see our missing limbs.”
“At least try, won’t you? Look around you at these wards. If you could give these men a little joy, would it be so difficult a thing to do?”
“For you I will ask,” he said. “But I wouldn’t raise my hopes too high if I were you.”
Later that afternoon when I saw him at tea, he told me the answer was still no.
Refusing to accept defeat, once I’d finished with my other patients, I went to find Captain Williams. He was sitting by a window in the officers’ ward.
As I came down the aisle, his back was to me, and it wasn’t until I paused by the foot of his bed that he turned slightly, so that I saw his profile. He was an attractive man when he wasn’t scowling, and just now there was a sadness in his expression as he said, “I’ve done my exercises, Tomkins.”
“It isn’t Tomkins,” I said, and he moved in his chair so that he could see me.
“Still.”
“Actually, I’ve come to ask if you will help me persuade your men to sing for us on Christmas Eve.”
I had watched him deal with his own men after Matron’s talk with him, at times quietly reasoning with them, and at others barking orders as if on parade. His was still the voice of Authority, and they respected it.
He wanted no part of singing and said so bluntly.
I said, “Don’t tell me you’re the one Welshman who wasn’t born with a pleasing voice?”
He glared at me. And then he drew a breath and answered.
“What the he— what in God’s name is there to sing about, Sister? Look at your patients. The lot of them have already given everything but their lives for their country. They want only to be left in peace where no one will stare at them, where no one pities them. After all, peace is the meaning of the Season, is it not?”
An educated man, for his speech was very English, but when he was feeling strongly about something, it sometimes slipped into that rhythmic pattern of his birth.
“Is it so wrong to want to bring us all a little comfort? The war is over, yes, but none of us will be spending this Christmas at home. Perhaps you’ve been out of Wales so long that you don’t remember what it felt like to sing?”
He was angry now, and bitter. “I left Wales when they did. To fight for England.” He nearly spat the last word, as if he hated England and all she stood for.
I raised my eyebrows as if in surprise. “Well, then, Captain, I expect I shall just have to make other arrangements for the evening.”
“Do that,” he told me curtly.
And so I went to speak to Private Williams—no relation to the Captain, just as neither of the men called Jones were connected. This Williams had also been a miner in the valley. I had been told he was a tenor, and I hoped to convince him to sing a solo at the midnight service.
He didn’t want to sing either. “And I told Corporal Jones as much.”
I said, letting my disappointment show, “I had thought it might cheer Captain Williams. He’s been having a difficult time of it.”
“Has he now?” Private Williams asked, actually listening to me.
“We had to clean out another pocket of infection in that leg. It’s getting him down, I think.” True enough, but this was something many of the men in this hospital had gone through more than once.
“He was all right this morning.”
“Do you think he wants you to see how he feels? He’s still your officer, it’s his duty to care for you all and see to it that your spirits are kept up. How many times has his face been the first you see by your bed as you come out of the ether? How many times has he held your head as you were sick from it? And told you to buck up and face it like a man when you want to pity yourselves? Who is it who does these things for him?”
I don’t think it had occurred to him that Captain Williams was suffering too. He hid it well when his men were around. “It’s not my place to tell Captain what to do,” he answered me slowly.
“Then don’t. Tell hi
m you all wish to sing, and beg him to join you. I can’t believe he’ll refuse.”
In the end, somehow, we had four tenors, three baritones—including the Captain’s—and two bass voices. Even Private Evans refused to be left behind. And the music—without accompaniment—soared around us, filling the room with its power. From where I sat, I could see the faces of the audience, for a moment transfixed by something outside themselves. I felt like weeping in gratitude.
We carried the decorated tree to the wards afterward for those too ill to come to the service. The chaplain, Father Johnson, read from Luke and led us in prayer. And Matron surprised the men with a tot of rum in place of the traditional Christmas sherry.
Not very much like a Christmas any of us remembered from before the war, but it was better than we’d hoped for the spirits in our wards. Better still than a Christmas any of the men had enjoyed in the trenches these last four years.
After the wards were asleep, the Sisters gathered in Matron’s quarters for a small glass of sherry and her gratitude for all our efforts.
I thought surely Captain Williams was going to be difficult the next day, especially since I’d more or less tricked him into joining the choir. I encountered him in the passage leading to the dining room.
“A happy Christmas,” I said, smiling as I was about to pass him. “I hear there is a fine goose for dinner.”
“There is,” he said, and paused. “I’ve been a curmudgeon. I’m sorry.”
Surprised, I replied, “It hasn’t been the happiest of times for many of you.”
“No. It’s one thing to find courage on the battlefield. We’re brave because we don’t want others to know we’re afraid. But what we fear most is letting the side down.” He gestured to his missing leg. “This takes a very different kind of courage. I watched the faces of the men listening to us last night. They’ve lost their way. So have I. I was ashamed of what I’d said to you.”
It wasn’t a confession that he found it easy to make. Least of all to me, I thought. But I said only, “It was a gift you and your men gave us. We were grateful.”
