An Unmarked Grave

by Charles Todd

  The staff was waiting for our supplies, and I was busy for hours working with the latest influx of wounded. It was shortly before moonrise when the last of the men had been examined and a decision had been made about their treatment.

  Dr. Hicks, straightening his back, then arching it, as if it ached, said, “Go on to bed, Sister. We’ve done all we can. I’ll rouse Dr. Timmons and Sister Clery. They can take over.”

  He was right, we had done what we could do. And that was saying a good bit. I said good night and trudged out into the darkness, wondering if the time would ever come when I could say with any confidence that I had had enough sleep while I was in France. Certainly since Eastbourne and even Longleigh House, I had not.

  I made a detour to wash up before going to bed, entering the empty line of latrines and basins, listening to the sound of my footsteps echoing on the thin boards that kept our feet out of the foul mud below. A single candle in a dish gave me enough light to see the bucket standing under the water lorry, and I filled it just enough to take out my handkerchief and wash my face and hands. Water was precious, but so was cleanliness, when dealing with patients.

  I had closed my eyes to splash water over my face. It smelled strongly of brine and faintly of petrol, but it was cool enough to feel the fresh morning air on my wet skin. I leaned my head back to bathe my throat.

  Just as I did, an arm came round my neck from behind, hard enough to choke off my breath, and I had a flash of thought-that this was how Private Wilson had been found hanging-before I reacted. I wasn’t about to be choked into unconsciousness and then a rope pulled around my neck. Private Wilson had been taken unawares. I was as well, but I had a little history to guide me. I hadn’t grown up in an Army post without learning something about self-defense. Subalterns had vied to show off-and show me tricks sure to protect me.

  As the candle sputtered, my booted foot kicked out at the water bucket, connecting with such force that it went bouncing and clanging down the boards. My hands went not to claw uselessly at the arm of my attacker and the heavy fabric of his uniform sleeve, but at his vulnerable sides, digging in my nails and raking upward, finding the soft skin beneath his tunic and shirt. It caught him by surprise. As he twisted to protect himself, I tramped down on his instep with my other boot. And these weren’t the pretty shoes of a London season; they were designed to survive the Front.

  He relaxed his arm briefly, swearing and jerking back in pain. I spun out of his grip, and as soon as I could fill my lungs with air again, I screamed. Furious, he shoved me toward the lorry, and I stumbled as I tried to keep my balance, hurting my wrist as I went down.

  He reached for me again, pulling me up, trying to get a hand over my mouth, no longer hoping to make my death look like suicide. Now he was intent on simple murder. I cried out again before he succeeded in cutting it short.

  There are only a handful of women this close to the front lines, and my first scream brought men racing from every direction. By my second, they were converging on us. My assailant flung me against the offside wheel of the water lorry with some force. I threw up my hands just in time to protect my head and face. He ducked beneath the lorry and disappeared into the shadows on the far side.

  By the time the first orderly reached me, I’d scrambled to my feet, alone and furiously angry in my turn.

  I could have tried to pass off the attack as female fears and an overwrought imagination in the shadowy, poorly lit latrines.

  Perhaps it would have been better that way. But my hair was tumbling down my back, the side of my face where I’d scraped it on something was already an angry red in the light of the torches blinding me, and the strap of my apron had been torn off the bib. There was no disguising the fact that I’d been in trouble.

  Their first thought was an attempt at rape. And why should they even consider murder?

  Dr. Hicks was pushing the other men aside, leaning forward to get a better look at me. He swore as he took in the damage.

  “Are you hurt anywhere else?” he demanded, his face like a thundercloud.

  “My wrist-I think it banged into the pump as I broke away. Nothing a cold compress won’t help.” In spite of the effort I’d made to get myself under control, even I could hear the shock in my voice. Nor could I do much about the fact that I must have looked like a thundercloud myself.

  Everyone seemed to be there in the darkness behind the ring of torchlight. Sisters, orderlies, ambulatory patients, ambulance drivers. I quickly scanned their faces searching for-what? A stranger amongst them, anyone who could fit Matron’s description of the man who’d come looking for Sister Burrows. But of course there was no one who by any stretch of my imagination could have attacked me. There was only genuine concern for me. And by coming so quickly to my aid, they had unwittingly allowed my assailant to escape.

  Dr. Hicks seemed to realize that in the same moment. He half turned to the orderlies and ambulance drivers, saying grimly, “Don’t stand there-start searching the aid station. Top to bottom. Find out who did this!”

  That done, Dr. Hicks marched me off to the surgery tent to bathe and dress my face, then find a compress for my wrist where a bruise was fast turning to an ugly red.

  “Did you see who it was, Sister Crawford? Can you give us any description?”

  “I tried. But he came from behind, out of the shadows, and I think the candle went over as he reached for me. I didn’t even know he was there until he put his arm around my throat.” I didn’t add that his other hand had been locked in the palm of the hand suffocating me, bringing all his strength to bear on cutting off my air. He had known what he was doing, there was no doubt in my mind about that.

  “Did you mark him in any way?”

  “Not where it could be seen. There was no chance,” I said as he tilted my head to look at my throat. “I couldn’t have reached his face, I was nearly sure of that, but where I dug my nails into his sides, there must be marks.”

  “You kept your head,” he said, nodding in approval, “but sooner or later the shock will catch up with you.”

  “He must have lined up with the walking wounded, then slipped away when no one was looking.”

  “Yes, that chest wound-we were so busy. It must have been then.”

  The soldier had been dying from blood loss when he was brought in, and somehow, miraculously, Dr. Hicks had found the source of the bleeding and stopped it. The boy-he seemed no older than that on the stretcher-was sent straight back to the Base Hospital, with a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. We’d all applauded when Dr. Hicks had stepped back and nodded, his hands and arms covered in blood. I wouldn’t have believed it possible if I hadn’t watched it for myself.

  In that moment of success, someone could have stepped out of line, walked to the latrines, and waited for me. He must have seen me clearly as I sorted the cases, but I’d been too busy to see him.

  “I’ll strip every man in here if I have to. You were damn-very fortunate,” the doctor was saying to me as he considered the marks on my neck. “I won’t have this sort of thing on my watch.”

  And he stormed out to do just exactly that.

  But of course he didn’t find my attacker or anyone with a mark on him that would correspond to my struggle.

  Soon after that, he came back to escort me to my quarters, saying only, “He’s not here. Mind you, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. Or that he won’t come back. If not for you, then for one of the other sisters. And I’ll see that word is passed. This won’t be tolerated.”

  He stood outside my tent until I was inside, and I found it comforting, despite my certainty that there wouldn’t be a repeat attack. At least not while the guard of the entire station was up.

  I didn’t fall sleep for a long while. My body was still tense, the feel of that arm choking me still too fresh. Every little sound in the darkness seemed overly loud and menacing, even though I told myself to ignore it.

  Where, I thought, lying there, was the “cousin” who had been sent to keep me sa
fe?

  Wherever he was, he’d nearly been too late.

  Another search was made at first light, but there was no sign of my attacker. Dr. Hicks excused me from my morning shift, but I went to him and asked him to let me work. As frightening as the experience had been, I knew that I was safer and less likely to dwell on what had happened if I kept busy.

  Everyone was sympathetic, and I noticed that someone was always within call, wherever I went.

  But what to tell my father? And if Simon got any inkling of what had occurred, he’d be in France before the day was out, still bleeding or not.

  In the end, I decided to say nothing to them. For all I knew, it had indeed been an attempt at rape, not murder.

  I was walking across to my quarters that night when I heard Dr. Hicks just behind me say sharply, “Who the devil are you?”

  I turned to see him challenging someone who was only a black silhouette against the faint light of the distant shelling.

  “The new orderly,” the voice said. “I walked up. There wasn’t any transportation.”

  “Then you’ll damned well stay there until I can take a good look at your orders.”

  I knew that voice, didn’t I? But I couldn’t quite place it, for coming out of the darkness, half muffled by the big guns, I couldn’t quite make the connection. I needed more to jog my memory.

  “I’ll wait until you have sorted him out,” I told Dr. Hicks, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man’s face as they repaired to the small tent where the doctors kept their paperwork and whatever medicines we had under lock and key.

  But he said, “No. Wiser to go inside and leave me to deal with this.”

  Nodding, I did as I was told, and as soon as I was safely in my quarters, he was gone.

  The next morning Sister Clery said, “Have you met the new orderly?”

  “A glimpse, nothing more.”

  “Well, I can tell you he isn’t like the rest. Wait until you see for yourself.”

  “More to the point, is he good at his work?”

  “Wasted,” she said firmly. “Remember that hand that we thought might be turning septic? We had to take it off this morning, and Corporal Dugan was fighting us for all he was worth. Barclay held him for us until we could get the ether mask over his face-”

  I didn’t hear the rest. I had placed the voice now, as well as the way the man had been standing as he spoke to Dr. Hicks.

  What was Captain Barclay doing in France at a British aid station masquerading as an orderly?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I SAW HIM coming out of the canteen, a cup of tea in his hand, grimacing as he drank it without sugar or milk.

  I called, “You’re the new man, are you? Barclay?”

  “I’m never going to learn to like tea,” he said plaintively, approaching me.

  “Sorry. It’s all we have. There’s a shortage.”

  “So I’ve heard.” He glanced around, then said swiftly, “Bess. You don’t know me.” With that, he walked off.

  But wherever I was, it seemed that Captain Barclay-Barclay the orderly-was somewhere close by. He seemed oddly out of place to me in his khaki orderly’s tunic with the red cross on his sleeve. I’d seen him in his own uniform, and he wore it with an air that suited his rank. Still, everyone else took him in stride, and his attempts at rank-and-file humility were successful, although sometimes I caught a gleam in his eyes that belied them. Working with the wounded, to his credit he did the most menial task from emptying bloody basins to carrying away an amputated limb with the grim stoicism of a seasoned orderly. He’d been in the trenches, of course, he’d seen and dealt with worse, but it was not something anyone grew accustomed to, however hard the shell put up to keep one’s sanity in the face of such horrors.

  I couldn’t help but think in the dark hours of the night that he’d appeared right on the heels of the attack on me. And then I’d remind myself that the Colonel Sahib had sent him, and the Colonel Sahib was seldom wrong in his judgment of a man’s character.

  I could also see Dr. Gaines’s fine hand in all this. Captain Barclay had been pressing to return to his men, ready or not. This would be a lesson in a different kind of humility-forcing him to listen to his doctors.

  In a way his presence was comforting. In the first place it freed me to work without looking over my shoulder. In the second, I’d been concerned about someone hovering, in my way at every turn. But apparently he’d been ordered to keep his distance, close enough to protect me but without being underfoot. I’d have given much to discover why my parents had turned to Captain Barclay as the safest choice to watch over me. He was, as I knew only too well, a very persuasive man. Still, his wound helped him carry off his charade. That must have carried some weight.

  What little I learned about his “story” came in bits and pieces from others.

  He was Canadian, had joined the British Army because he had been living in Britain when war was declared, but he was rejected because of a leg injury that refused to heal properly-hence his limp-and so he’d become an orderly instead. (His time in the clinic had given him a good background to make that believable. He talked about his duties there with the ease of experience.) He wasn’t married (this from Sister Clery), and his father was in the merchant marine-which was close enough to the truth. I asked where he lived, and I was told he’d been an orderly at Longleigh House in Somerset, had served in Dover, on several patient transport ships (which had aggravated his bad leg), and was now with us.

  Dr. Gaines again, I thought. And he’d also been responsible for my own return to France.

  Several evenings later, Dr. Hicks sent me to the Base Hospital for supplies-we’d been running short for three days, but he hadn’t been able to spare anyone. With a brief respite in the fighting-the guns were silent and lines of fresh troops were making their way to the Front to relieve those who’d endured a week of heavy shelling-we had only a trickle of new patients.

  We took with us three badly wounded men who were due to be sent back for more treatment, and Barclay was assigned to drive.

  It was a more or less uneventful journey, although once a nervous company of raw troops fired on us from a distance before their sergeant got them under control again, shouting at them in a Glaswegian accent that made half of what he was saying unintelligible.

  We delivered our patients and saw to it the instructions accompanying them were duly signed for, then collected the list of desperately needed medicines, bandages, needles, sutures, and so on that Dr. Hicks had requested. An hour later, the ambulance carefully stocked, I got into the seat beside Captain Barclay after he’d turned the crank.

  “Wait until we’re out of sight,” he said in a low voice, turning out of the racetrack and picking up the road to the Front.

  And so I waited. Last night the sun had set in a blaze of gold and red, sliding behind a bank of deep purple clouds. Now it was pitch-dark without the flickering light of the shelling, and the only way we could be certain we were on what passed as a road were the wide swaths of deep ruts left behind by the lorries. Our blacked-out headlamps were woefully inadequate, casting shadows that only made it harder to judge anything in time to avoid another bone-wrenching jolt. About two miles out we spotted the single chimney and broken wall of a farmhouse. It had become a marker of sorts, and we all knew to watch for it. The rest of the village was little more than rubble, with no way of judging where the streets had been, much less the houses or shops that once had lined them. How this single chimney and wall had survived God alone knew.

  The ambulance rocked and swayed over the debris, and I feared we would never extract it again just as Barclay turned off the motor and silence fell. I could have sworn I heard a cricket somewhere, it was so quiet.

  “All right,” he said, turning to me, his face a pale mask in the darkness and oddly sinister. “I’m sorry there was no chance to explain before this. I was told I didn’t know you. I suspected the Sergeant-Major’s touch there. Necessity or precaution or jealousy.
” The mask split into a white grin in the shadows.

  “How is Simon?” I asked anxiously.

  “I didn’t see him, to tell the truth.”

  And that worried me. Surely if he were well enough, Simon would have been consulted.

  “Then how did you become involved in this? What did they tell you? Dr. Gaines and my father?”

  “Dr. Gaines had been sent for. He must have told your father that I’d accompanied you to Nether Thornton and then to the Gorge.”

  “But you’d spoken to my father once. When I was sailing to France. You told him where to meet me.”

  “That was sheer luck. Bess, I called the War Office. They found him, wherever he was, and passed on my message. Apparently they thought I was the Sergeant-Major. The Colonel had a few words to say about that when we spoke again.”

  I could just imagine how annoyed my father was. The relationship with Simon was sacrosanct. He wouldn’t have appreciated Captain Barclay’s efforts, however well intentioned.

  “At any rate, your father asked if I was fit enough for duty and if I’d take on a hazardous assignment. I was to report directly to him. Or if I couldn’t reach him, then to your mother.”

  I’d told Simon about my companion on those journeys. Was it he who’d remembered?

  “What did they tell you? How did they explain that I might be in danger?”

  I still wasn’t prepared to trust this man.

  “The Colonel told me the truth. At least I had the feeling he did.”

  “What did they tell you?” I asked again, trying not to sound impatient.

  “That someone had been murdered and you were the only witness who could testify to that. The trouble was, the killer knew you, but you couldn’t identify him as easily. That you were in danger. Well, by God, they were right. I heard about what happened just before I got there, and if I get my hands on that-on whoever it is, I’ll kill him myself.” The grin had disappeared like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, and I could feel the tension in the man across from me, a deep-seated anger that was like a flare of warmth in the ambulance.