The Daughters of Eden Trilogy

by Michelle Paver

  At the mention of his daughter, Winsloe’s face crumpled. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said, and his voice broke. ‘Just – leave me alone.’ With an ungainly sob he flung open the door and jumped down, and stumbled off across the moonscape.

  With the nagging sense that he could have done more, Adam let him go.

  In the rear-view mirror he saw the men exchanging sidelong glances and raising their eyebrows. Time to give them something to do. He got out, slamming the door behind him, and spread the map on the bonnet as he called them over.

  ‘Right,’ he said, as if nothing had happened. ‘We’ve got three in this shell crater, by the northernmost Vickers emplacement. Baker, Thomas and Pardue, off you go. I’ll catch up with Winsloe and find this lot to the east, at the trench intersection.’

  Baker and Thomas picked up their shovels, but Pardue hesitated. He was the ex-sergeant who’d warned Adam about Winslow the day before. ‘Want me to go with you, sir?’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘No,’ Adam said shortly. ‘Thanks, but I think I can find him on my own.’

  Looking grim, Pardue shouldered his shovel and headed off.

  When the men had gone, Adam gave Winsloe five minutes to pull himself together, then started after him.

  At least, he thought as he negotiated a tangle of barbed wire, he’s heading in the right direction. According to the map, the remains were buried between Sugar and East strongpoints, just to the north of the intersection of four communication trenches.

  It was barely seven hundred yards from the lorry, but the ground was so uneven that it soon dropped out of sight. Adam mounted a low ridge – and there below him was Winsloe, cowering on his knees at the bottom of a shell crater.

  The crater was a big one, some twenty feet deep and perhaps thirty feet across, and Adam couldn’t see his face, but he could hear his ragged breathing and see his shoulders shuddering.

  Adam felt a flash of pity, swiftly superseded by impatience. Not now, Winsloe, he thought.

  Then he saw what the other man was holding in his hand, and an icy wave washed over him.

  Winsloe had unbuttoned the pocket of his greatcoat, and had taken out what he’d been carrying around for days. A Mills bomb. He was holding it in one hand like a cricket ball, while with the other he gave it oddly tentative little pats. Clearly he was nerving himself to remove the pin.

  So Pardue had been right, and Adam had been wrong. Winsloe did not lack backbone. No-one could say that of a man who meant to blow himself up with a grenade.

  Feeling bizarrely as if he were intruding, Adam cleared his throat.

  Winslow’s head jerked up, and he gave Adam an unfocused stare.

  ‘That,’ said Adam levelly, ‘would be a pretty selfish thing to do. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Go away,’ said Winsloe. His voice was flat and emotionless: quite unlike his usual whine. He meant to go through with it.

  ‘I can’t quite believe,’ said Adam as he started down the crater, ‘that all this time you’ve been carrying that thing around with you. Sitting for days in a lorry with a number five grenade stuffed in your pocket. My God, Winsloe—’

  ‘Go away,’ Winsloe said again.

  ‘Come off it, old man,’ said Adam, disentangling the sleeve of his greatcoat from a length of barbed wire and sliding another foot or so in the mud. ‘We’ve got enough remains to deal with already, without having to scrape up yours as well. Now give that thing to me and let’s go and have a drink.’

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ muttered Winsloe. ‘I can’t go on any more.’

  ‘What about your daughter? What about Alice? She’s still a child. She needs you.’

  Winsloe waved his free hand, as if to ward off an imaginary daughter.

  Adam reached the bottom of the crater and stood with his hands at his sides. The mud was knee deep. He could feel it seeping over his boot-tops. ‘For God’s sake, man,’ he said in a low voice, ‘nobody said one has to be happy. One just has to get on with living. Just get through. That’s what I do.’

  ‘Get out of here,’ snarled Winsloe. ‘I don’t want to take you with me.’

  ‘Good, because I don’t want to go.’

  Winsloe pulled out the pin. ‘I said, get out!’

  ‘No,’ said Adam.

  Before Winsloe could dodge out of his reach, he grabbed the bomb and threw it as high as he could over the lip of the crater.

  Winsloe gave a howl of outrage. The bomb caught on a tree stump jutting from the crater’s edge, and stuck there . . .

  Except, thought Adam with a jolt, that it isn’t a tree stump, it’s a shell . . .

  Time seemed to slow as he grabbed Winsloe by the sleeve and forced him to take cover. A shell, he thought as they lay face down in the mud. Jesus Christ, I hope it isn’t—

  There was no time for fear. He didn’t even hear the explosion. Something simply clicked in his ear. Then a flash – a blast of heat and suffocating fumes – and a vast upheaval of mud.

  Then – nothing.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Flanders, 23rd November 1918

  Number Thirty-Eight Hospital was one of a cluster around Saint-Omer which treated the wounded who came in by train from Ypres, as well as those on the branch line from Armentières, via Bailleul.

  The hospital had been established in the second year of the War, in a château a couple of miles north of the city. This was not one of the elegant, slender-turreted châteaux from a Perrault fairy tale, but a plain, squat medieval affair with slitted windows and yard-thick walls for repelling invaders. But it was cool in summer and warm in winter, and had withstood four years of war better than most.

  It was a mixed hospital, which meant that it housed wards for ‘walkers’ and for several grades of the more seriously wounded, as well as three ‘nervous’ wards for those awaiting transit to the specialist facilities around Boulogne. Many of the patients in these wards were deaf-mutes, stammerers, or afflicted by uncontrollable tremors; many more had been designated ‘NYDN’, or Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous – that being the catch-all phrase devised by the authorities the previous year to avoid the stigma of shell shock.

  Dr McGarry, who ran the hospital, did not believe in shell shock. ‘There’s a fine yellow line,’ he was fond of saying, ‘between honourable breakdown and sheer blue funk.’

  Dr Hughes, one of his junior associates, was not so sure. Neither was Belle. She found it hard to believe that any of the patients she encountered were acting, particularly the amnesiacs, whom she saw most frequently, since they were the ones she was asked to photograph – either here or at one of the other hospitals near Hazebrouck or Bailleul.

  This afternoon, her last subject was a likeable young man with jug ears and a scar which cut a shiny red swath across his forehead and down behind one ear. He was cheerful and talkative, and appeared perfectly normal, apart from the fact that he didn’t know his own name, and couldn’t remember anything beyond his thirteenth birthday. Since he’d been found wandering naked on a battlefield over a month before, nobody knew who he was.

  ‘It’s really most odd,’ he said as he entered Belle’s little studio in the north tower and took the chair she indicated. ‘Everyone tells me I’m nineteen, and sure enough, that’s what I see in the looking-glass: a nineteen-year-old stranger. But how can I believe it when I know, I absolutely know, that I’m only thirteen?’

  ‘It sounds extremely confusing,’ said Belle, adjusting the tripod. ‘Would you mind turning a little to the right?’

  The young man did as she asked, but then turned back again, so that she could only see his profile. ‘Would you believe it?’ he said. ‘I mean, if you were thirteen, and someone told you that in fact you were really grown up?’

  Belle thought of Cornelius Traherne. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Could you turn just a little more to your right?’

  Again he did as he was told, and then twisted back. For some reason he seemed to be reluctant to face the camera full on.

  Belle noti
ced that his hands were clenched on either side of his thighs. ‘Does the camera remind you of a gun?’ she asked quietly.

  He looked startled. ‘I don’t think so. Although now that you mention it, I – I do find it rather scary. Which is a bit rum, I suppose.’

  ‘Try turning the chair round, and leaning your arms on the back.’

  The young man tried it. Immediately his shoulders loosened and his fists unclenched. ‘Much better,’ he said. ‘But why d’you want me to face forward, anyway?’

  Belle smiled. ‘I want your ears to show.’

  His face fell. ‘Oh, do they have to? The fellows at school will rag me most awfully.’

  ‘Sorry, but the point isn’t to take the most flattering picture, it’s to capture who you are. And I’m afraid that with you, the ears are part of it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘They might help someone to recognize you. Which would be worth it, wouldn’t it?’

  He grinned. ‘That’s sort of the point of all this, isn’t it? I was forgetting. I seem to do that a lot these days.’

  Without being aware of it, he was now facing the camera full on. Belle took the picture. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That didn’t hurt, did it?’

  He shook himself and glanced down, as if to make sure that all his limbs were still there. ‘Phew. Glad that’s over. Do you do this all the time? Take pictures of fellows who don’t know who they are?’

  ‘Not all the time. Sometimes I take pictures of graves for relatives who can’t afford to visit; or of cemeteries for the GRC records. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said the young man, visibly impressed. ‘Well, I suppose I ought to be off, or Sister will be on the rampage.’

  ‘I hope you get better soon,’ said Belle.

  Again he grinned. ‘Oh, I think I shall. When I was picked up, I thought I was seven. Apparently it’s called shrinking amnesia. With a bit of luck, it’ll shrink some more, and I shall be back to nineteen.’

  Belle smiled. ‘I hope so.’

  She was packing up her camera after he’d gone when there was a knock at the door, and Dr Hughes looked in. ‘Finished for the day?’

  She nodded. ‘In a while the light will start to go. Best to shut up shop.’

  With his hands in the pockets of his white coat, he wandered over to the window and leaned against the wall. ‘Do you put away your kit every night?’

  ‘Every night,’ she replied as she started unscrewing the tripod. ‘Just in case they need the room while I’m off somewhere, and forget to tell me.’

  He smiled. ‘You’re beginning to learn the ways of the army.’

  ‘Just a little,’ she said wryly.

  Idly, he glanced at a stack of photographs in the tray on the shelf. ‘You’re awfully good at this, you know. This one on top, he’s a patient of mine. You’ve exactly caught the way he is. I mean, not only the way he looks, but his character.’

  She threw him a surprised glance. ‘Thank you. Actually it was my aunt’s idea that I should give this a try. When I came out here I thought I was going to be put to work planting shrubs.’

  ‘But you enjoy it, don’t you?’

  She thought about that. ‘Yes. I do. Very much. It makes a change, to be useful. And to have found something that I’m good at.’

  ‘Oh now, that can’t be so unusual for someone like you.’

  Something in his tone – a slight added warmth – put her on her guard. As she finished stowing the rest of her things, she felt him watching her.

  And yet she’d followed Sophie’s advice to the letter. ‘Clumpy shoes, shapeless tweeds, and no rouge. Some of these poor lads haven’t seen a woman in weeks, apart from a nurse. And be warned about the doctors. They’re worse than the patients.’

  Thinking of Sophie, Belle felt a pang of concern. It was time to get back to their billet. These days, it wasn’t fair to leave her alone for too long.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ said Dr Hughes, going pink and staring determinedly out of the window, ‘that you’d care to have dinner tonight?’

  Oh, bother, thought Belle.

  ‘Not just with me, of course,’ he added hastily. ‘There’s a group of us going along, and Sister Martin will be there, so it’ll be absolutely . . .’ His voice trailed off. His face had turned puce.

  He was such a nice man. Belle liked his tired eyes and his gentleness with patients. It was hardly his fault that he wasn’t Adam. But she wished that she’d spotted the signs sooner. ‘The thing is,’ she said carefully, ‘my aunt . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ he muttered. ‘I quite understand.’

  There was an awkward silence.

  Then he said, ‘I take it that there’s still no news of her husband?’

  Belle shook her head.

  ‘Ah. Well. I dare say he’ll turn up.’

  ‘He’s been missing for nearly two weeks,’ said Belle. ‘If he was alive, surely we’d have heard by now.’

  ‘Not necessarily. I don’t want to offer false hope, but . . . well, labels get lost, you know. Patients are sent to the wrong hospital. They get mixed up. Either because they’re unconscious and the records become jumbled, or, if they’re conscious, because they sometimes get . . . well, a little muddled.’

  Belle thought about that. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and meant it. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  He opened his mouth to say something more, then seemed to change his mind. Pressing his lips together in a smile, he pushed himself off the wall, and wandered out.

  Thinking about what he’d said, Belle stowed her things under a bench, then straightened up and looked about her. The light was failing fast, and as she hadn’t lit the lamp, a chill grey dusk was seeping into the room.

  Suddenly her spirits plunged.

  She hadn’t been lying when she’d said that she enjoyed what she was doing, but neither had she told the whole truth. She managed reasonably well when she was with patients, because then she had to concentrate on putting them at their ease, which meant forgetting about herself.

  It was when she stopped that things became hard. Ever since Ben had been posted missing, Sophie had tried everything to find him, but had consistently drawn a blank. Because he’d been on a mission for Special Services, she couldn’t even find out where he was when the ‘incident’ had occurred – or what the ‘incident’ had involved.

  Through the window the sky was darkening to indigo. An early star was beginning to show. Belle pulled up the chair and sat down, and thought of the long, peaceful twilights of Cairngowrie, and the glitter of moonlight on the waters of the loch.

  Despite all Sophie’s urging, she’d cut herself off completely from Scotland, not even writing to Maud to let her know where she was. Now, with Ben missing and Sophie fast losing hope, even to be thinking of it felt like an act of disloyalty. But she couldn’t help it. She missed Adam so much that it hurt.

  She and Sophie had been lucky with lodgings. One of the higher-ups in the Commission had heard that Sophie needed to be near HQ because of Ben, and had pulled strings, so they’d been given a pretty little eighteenth-century town house just off the main square in Saint-Omer.

  Belle got a lift into town from a doctor who was billeted a few streets away, and arrived just after six, to find the house quiet, and almost in darkness. The girl who ‘did’ for them told her that Sophie was in the drawing room, and that there hadn’t been any news of Ben.

  The drawing-room door was ajar, so Belle made no noise as she went in. It was a beautiful room, and surprisingly untouched by the War: furnished in a delicate Arcadian style, with a suite upholstered in silvery silk. Belle always thought that Sophie, with her cloudy hair and narrow, distinctive face, fitted in perfectly: like some kind of rational eighteenth-century ghost.

  This evening, though, she didn’t look particularly rational. She was sitting by the fire with her hair coming down and a pile of paperwork sliding off her knees, staring at her photograph of Ben in its leather travelling case. Belle could only see her face i
n profile, but the strain was evident. She’d lost weight, and rarely slept more than a few hours a night.

  Belle glanced at the photograph on the side table. It had been taken by her mother, and she was only now beginning to appreciate the skill which had gone into it. Her mother had taken it in the grounds of Fever Hill, in the soft shade beneath a guango tree. Ben was in shirtsleeves and riding breeches, with the inevitable horse standing beside him and resting its head peacefully on his shoulder. Ben himself was facing the camera, with his hands in his pockets and the beginnings of a smile just lifting one corner of his mouth. No problems for him in staring at the lens, thought Belle, thinking of her young amnesiac. If Ben had been facing a gun, he’d probably just have stared it down.

  God, I hope you’re all right, she told the photograph silently.

  Sophie felt her presence and turned, and composed her features into a smile. ‘I keep thinking about what I said at Newton Stewart,’ she said without preamble. ‘I said that I’d kill him. Do you remember?’

  Belle nodded.

  ‘I wish to goodness I hadn’t said that.’

  Her eyes strayed to the photograph, and then away, as if it hurt to look for too long.

  Belle pulled up a footstool and sat down beside her.

  ‘I keep wondering,’ said Sophie, ‘if it would feel different if we’d managed to have children. Would that make it easier, or worse?’

  Belle stayed silent.

  ‘What if he’s gone, Belle? What if we never learn anything more?’

  Belle said, ‘I was talking to Dr Hughes. He says that the wounded go missing all the time. Labels fall off. Names get mixed up in the records. Patients become muddled. When you think about it, it does make sense.’

  Sophie’s face cleared fractionally. ‘Yes. I suppose it does.’ She sounded as if she desperately wanted to believe it, but wasn’t good enough at self-deception to succeed.

  Belle took her hand. ‘Let’s go and have dinner.’

  Sophie sighed. ‘I’m not really—’

  ‘I know you’re not, but you still need to eat something.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll run upstairs and change. You put away your papers.’