An Unwilling Accomplice

by Charles Todd

  “Very kind of you, Sister. Kind indeed. I could use a little something. Mostly tea that doesn’t taste as if it were strained through a stocking.”

  Despite my worry, I had to smile. The tea on troop trains was usually strong enough to march into battle on its own.

  “I’ll be in to join you directly,” I promised and turned back to the clerk. I waited until the orderly was out of hearing to make my request. Then I was escorted into an inner room where the manager must work, for the desk was cluttered with papers and accounts and what appeared to be Official Orders regarding military guests.

  The operator was sympathetic when I told her I needed to find my poor brother, who had gone out the night before with friends from the Army and not returned. “He’s not accustomed to drinking so much,” I added for good measure. “And I’m afraid he may have been taken ill.” Commiserating with me, she connected me with each of the long list of hospitals turn by turn, and none of them recognized the name of the sergeant or a description of his wounds.

  It was clear there was no patient anywhere within the city of London who was my mislaid “brother.” Then where was the man and what had become of him?

  He could very well still be out celebrating with his erstwhile friends.

  I was beginning to feel something was very wrong.

  After putting in a call to the police stations closest to the hotel, I gave up and reluctantly allowed the manager to return to his office. Then I turned and walked through to the dining room for the second time that morning.

  The orderly—I discovered that his name was Grimsley—had just finished his breakfast, as hearty as the hotel had been able to provide, and charged it to the sergeant’s room.

  I sat down across from him and asked the server if I could have another pot of tea.

  Grimsley was saying, “I didn’t intend to take so long, Sister, but they were very busy and I had to wait to be served.”

  Judging from his accent, he’d grown up in Lancashire.

  “We have a small problem, and I’d hoped I could work it out before telling you about it. But I can’t.”

  “I’ll help in any way I can, Sister,” he offered. “Don’t tell me he smuggled strong drink into his room and is drunk as a lord?”

  “Would it were that simple,” I said. Taking a deep breath, I added, “When I went into Sergeant Wilkins’s room to help him dress and to change the outer bandages, I found he was gone. There’s nothing in his bed but the bandages he’d removed and his extra pillows. I don’t know where he is.”

  “You’ve lost him?” Grimsley asked, staring at me incredulously.

  “It appears that I have,” I said as my tea arrived.

  Grimsley sat back in his chair. “Miss—Sister. Are you telling me that a man who was just decorated for gallantry under fire has deserted?”

  To hear it put into words was as shocking to me as it was to the orderly.

  But what else could it be but desertion? I didn’t want to believe it.

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t have said—but then he lied to me, didn’t he? He lied about his friends.”

  He must have done. They weren’t hanging about when I left to dine with Simon, and they weren’t there when I opened the door at nine o’clock to look in.

  Had I heard the soft breathing? Or had I simply expected to hear it, and thought I had? Suddenly I couldn’t be sure.

  I sat there, trying to think. I poured my cup of tea, and then stared into its depths, as if to find the answer floating in the golden liquid.

  “Tell me what happened, Sister,” Grimsley was saying.

  I began with our return from Buckingham Palace. I didn’t spare myself. I told him that I’d felt rather sorry for the sergeant, no family there to support him. That was no excuse for what came next, allowing him to spend the evening with friends. Or to pretend to. But I’d checked his room twice.

  The question now was how long had he been gone? How long had he planned for this moment? Because if he’d left behind his bandages and his splints, then he’d been closer to recovering and returning to France than I’d been led to believe.

  Had he been standing behind the door when I’d thought it was locked? Was that the soft breathing I’d heard? Or had he left while I was dining with Simon?

  And that brought me back to the horrifying possibility that the man had deserted while he had the chance, knowing he’d have a night’s head start.

  But he wasn’t that well, surely! He must have had some help.

  Grimsley was saying, “He’s been slow to heal. I can’t think how he’d taken off his bandages.”

  I’d been accustomed to men trying to convince me of a faster recovery than was humanly possible, in order for them to be cleared for a return to France and their men. As well, there had been a handful who had tried to make their recovery seem slower than the general run of wounds, in order to delay their inevitable return. I couldn’t call them cowards, I’d never reported them as malingerers. I knew all too well what it was like in France. And so I’d said nothing, hoping that when the time came, when they could put it off no longer, they would step up and do their duty. And most of them had.

  Sergeant Wilkins might have lied to the doctors. Talked about pain that wasn’t there, showed a weakness that had already strengthened. As a rule, clinic doctors had more patients than they could manage. It was the Sisters who took up the slack, leaving the doctors free to deal with the more severely wounded, those who were still in danger.

  If anyone knew what was going on with the sergeant, it would be his nurse in Shrewsbury.

  But she would have to wait.

  Like it or not, I had to report Sergeant Wilkins as missing. There was nothing else I could do. To the Nursing Service, and to the Army.

  “Give him another hour to show up,” Grimsley was saying. “He might have a change of heart in the cold light of morning.”

  I finished my tea. “All right. We’ll wait in his room, shall we?”

  I paid for my tea and we took the lift back up the stairs. As we went I told Grimsley that I’d called hospitals and even two police stations, and he shook his head.

  He was a small man, his dark hair already liberally sprinkled with gray, and his kind face was lined, as if the war had aged him. He looked at me with sadness. “It won’t go well with him. Not after receiving yon medal. They’ll come down hard on him.”

  “We aren’t sure he’s deserted,” I reminded the orderly.

  “If he’s not drunk somewhere, Sister, and he’s not been run down by a cabbie, then where is he? And why haven’t his friends arrived, shamefaced, trying to explain how it was they lost him? After all his promises?”

  He was right. And I couldn’t quite convince myself that the worst had happened. It seemed so appallingly awful.

  Grimsley waited while I unlocked the door, and we went into the room. He regarded the bandages in the bed, looked in the wardrobe and at the abandoned invalid chair, and then sighed.

  “What about you, Sister? What will they do to you, if he doesn’t show his face in the next hour?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t considered that,” I said slowly. “I was too busy worrying about Sergeant Wilkins.”

  “Yes, well, I think you should start worrying about yourself.”

  I sat down in one of the two chairs, and Grimsley went to the window to stand looking out at the gray day. We waited in silence. I could almost hear the ticking of my little watch, pinned to my apron.

  Time seemed to drag at first. And then it seemed to fly, and the hour was up.

  Sergeant Wilkins hadn’t come back.

  I wished with all my heart that Simon was here, but he was not.

  The train to Shrewsbury would be leaving in forty-five minutes. We had no choice, Grimsley and I, but to make an official report. To tell the Army Medical Service and the Army itself that I had misplaced their patient.

  And then I would have to report my own negligence.

  Was it negligence?
It would most certainly be seen that way.

  But even if I hadn’t given him permission to celebrate with a few friends, he could have left at any time during the night, and I’d not have been any the wiser.

  Still. I’d given him a very good head start. And that meant that Sergeant Wilkins could be anywhere by now. The longer we waited, the longer it would take to find him.

  “Do you think he’s planning to meet us at the station—the train?” I asked.

  Grimsley shook his head. “If he was planning that, he’d have left you a note. For fear you’d be hasty in reporting him missing.”

  There was nothing for it. I rose. “We must make—I must make my report. Will you accompany me to confirm my statements? Or you could wait here. In case.”

  Grimsley shook his head. “To what purpose? He’s gone, Sister. And we’ve got to make the best of it.”

  We. It was kind of him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE NEXT TWO days were very unpleasant. I’d known they would be.

  The Army was furious. What’s more, they would have to tell the Palace what had transpired, and that was beyond belief in their view. Men weren’t given decorations like his lightly.

  Soldiers did desert. Sad to say. But I’d been responsible for the welfare of this man and for his safe return to Shrewsbury in the company of Grimsley.

  I sat through meeting after meeting with increasingly senior officers of the Medical Service and then the Army itself.

  I didn’t bring my father’s name into the proceedings. It would have been unfair. He had nothing to do with the sergeant. This was my problem and mine alone. And so I listened to the anger and the accusations and the disbelief.

  Someone went round to the hotel to look at room 212. I had left instructions for it to be held for one more night, and so whoever it was examined the bandages and the splints, then I was asked if I had aided the sergeant’s escape in any way. If I had been a party to it.

  Someone had canceled the sergeant’s breakfast order. Was it me? To delay discovery? For that matter, why hadn’t I summoned the Military Foot Police at once? Why had I wasted time telephoning hospitals and police stations? Having a second pot of tea? Continuing to wait in room 212 for another hour? Had Wilkins left his bandages behind because he knew I’d meet him later to replace them?

  I explained as calmly as I could that I’d never met Sergeant Wilkins before I accompanied him to Buckingham Palace, and therefore I had no reason to help him desert.

  But the Army couldn’t quite believe that a man so wounded had simply walked out of his hotel room. Besides, he’d asked for me, I hadn’t been selected at random.

  The staff had been questioned—but no one had seen the sergeant leaving. Officers and men were as common as flies, many of them had been wounded. No one took any notice of them. When asked if anyone had walked out using a cane, the answer was disbelief.

  As the staff put it, canes were even commoner than flies.

  “You couldn’t turn around twice without seeing a dozen,” one of the maids said. “Not to mention crutches and invalid chairs. How were we to know to look out for one in particular?”

  I had been seen at dinner with Simon. And that was the nail in my coffin, so to speak. After all, I’d been on duty. I shouldn’t have been dining with anyone, even an old family friend. I was forced to give his name, dragging Simon into the picture. I was asked if he’d helped smuggle Sergeant Wilkins out of the hotel.

  In the end, unable to prove that I’d had any part in the man’s disappearance, the Army considered my fate and turned me over to the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service on a charge of dereliction of duty.

  The Matron who interviewed me had no sympathy for me, suggesting that I had succumbed to the blandishments of a family friend rather than strictly attend to my duty. It didn’t matter that I’d looked in on Sergeant Wilkins. I had brought disgrace on the Service I’d served so long, and with the potential of scandal breaking over the desertion of a hero, there was no pity for me.

  “You will return to your lodgings and remain there until we have made a decision about the disposition of your case,” Matron said. “It can be argued that your record thus far has been impeccable and that you have served your country well. We will of course take that into account. But I warn you not to hold out any hope. If I have my way, you will be made an Example, Sister Crawford. This man was in your sole charge. If you had done your duty, he would be back in Shrewsbury now, and none of this would have occurred. Your negligence gave him his opportunity. And that is the heart of the matter.”

  I listened in dismay. Sergeant Wilkins could have left at any time of the night. Short of sleeping in the chair in his room, there was no way I could have foreseen what was to happen. Or stopped it.

  But that didn’t matter.

  “It isn’t the fault of Sergeant-Major Brandon,” I said. “He wasn’t told what my orders were. I made the decision to dine with him. He simply asked if I were free. And I said that I was, as long as we didn’t leave the hotel.”

  “You are at least honest, Sister Crawford. I will make a note of your confession.”

  It wasn’t a confession. It was a statement of fact. But I said nothing. The Service had been embarrassed. And it was my fault.

  It was important for the Service to be seen as above reproach. Women alone attending strange men on a battlefield or in hospital wards must be above reproach. We were nursing Sisters, and we had Standards.

  I accepted my fate without argument. For one thing it wouldn’t have done a bit of good to argue. Matron had decided this case as soon as it had come before her. Nothing I could say would move her from that. All she wanted right now was to prevent any hint of scandal. And if that meant dismissing me, she was prepared to go that far.

  My heart sank. It was my fault. I’d been the person responsible for Sergeant Wilkins. There was no getting around that. I was responsible.

  I left Matron’s office and walked down the corridor, blindly finding my way to the main door and out into the street. Those I passed studiously ignored me. They wouldn’t know what I’d done, but they would already have a very good idea that I was in trouble, and no one wanted to look at me or offer any signs of sympathy. I couldn’t fault them.

  In the street, I took a deep breath to hold back the tears that were burning my eyes and making them water. I walked for a while, aimlessly, taking this street and then that. After a time I came to the river, staring down into the gray water. It was still raining, had been for days now, as if to lower my spirits even further. Raindrops dimpled the swelling tide below where I stood, and I could feel the shoulders of my coat now, damp and heavy.

  Turning, I found a cabbie, and went to Mrs. Hennessey’s house. I wanted more than anything to go to Somerset, to lick my wounds safely at home. But I’d been told to stay in London, and I would do as I’d been told. This time. For the last time?

  Slipping into the house, I made my way upstairs, opened the door to our flat—and walked straight into Diana, who was just taking off her own coat and hanging it up.

  “Bess! What luck! I didn’t know you’d be on leave at the same time. How good it is to see you.”

  She came to me and hugged me, and that simple gesture of friendship nearly broke my heart.

  There had been no kindness for the past few days.

  But Diana was bubbling with news, and I listened, hiding my own feelings as best I could. I really didn’t want to have to tell her what had happened. It was too soon and my feelings were too close to the surface, too raw.

  She asked if I’d go out to dine with her. She was famished, she said, and even the food that was available was better than what she’d been eating. So she claimed, but I knew she was simply restless this first night of leave. I’d felt that way too many times myself not to understand.

  I told her I was too tired, and of course she thought I’d also just come in from France. Disappointed, she nodded, then said, “Tomorrow night. Promi
se?”

  I was saved from answering by Mrs. Hennessey. Happy to have two of her young lodgers home at one time, she’d come up to ask us to have dinner with her.

  “Such as it is,” she confided apologetically. “But there are eggs and a little bread, and I have the last of the jam dear Mrs. Crawford gave me in the spring. We must use it while it’s still good.”

  Neither of us could say no to that, and so we followed her downstairs.

  By the time I came up again to go to bed, I was feeling as if the past few days were a burden on my back pressing me straight down into my pillows.

  I didn’t expect to sleep, but I was too tired not to.

  The next morning the sun was shining, but I didn’t feel any brighter.

  Simon was waiting for me downstairs. It was Mrs. Hennessey who came to fetch me.

  “He’s looking terribly grim, Bess. I do hope there’s nothing wrong in Somerset.”

  “He’s probably taking time away from whatever he’s been asked to do to look in on me,” I said. “Could I borrow your sitting room for a few minutes? I don’t like to keep him standing in the entry, if he’s tired.”

  Simon Brandon had once saved Mrs. Hennessey’s life. At least that was her version of what had happened, and she treated him like a favored nephew now. But he still wasn’t allowed up the sacrosanct stairs to my own parlor. Such as it was.

  “But of course, my dear. I have a short errand to attend to. You’ll have a chance to visit.”

  True to her word, she fetched her purse and her shawl, showed us into her sitting room, and was on her way with a happy smile.

  Simon, looking after her, said, “She doesn’t know.” It wasn’t a question

  “I haven’t told anyone. Diana is here. I didn’t want her to know either.”

  “This is the very devil,” he said, beginning to pace. I thought the room must feel too confining for him, but I said nothing. I didn’t want to go outside to his motorcar for this conversation.

  “I am to blame, Simon. Officially, he was my responsibility. Sergeant Wilkins.”