by Anne Perry
It could not continue like this for many more days. Tension was mounting not only with overcrowding of men critically injured, and the growing expectation of peace, but above all with the endless questions by Jacobson stirring up suspicion and anger over all kinds of old loves and betrayals, fears of violation too deep to name or face. Beyond the question of who could have been guilty, the speculation of rape was more divisive than anyone had imagined.
Judith found that people she had known since the earliest years of the war, and beside whom she had fought illness, disaster, and grief, held views she could not accept. Even Cavan surprised her. She admired him intensely for his courage, both physical and moral. After the stand in the trenches for which he had been put up for the V.C., and then the murder of Major Northrup, she had risked the firing squad herself last year to help him escape. The other men involved in the crime had all gone, but Cavan had chosen to remain and face trial. That decision had infuriated her, yet he had refused to be swayed. She had known it was born of supreme honor to duty, and she never forgot it in him.
Now he stood at the operating table having just amputated a man’s shattered foot. He was exhausted; there was blood on his white coat and up both his sleeves. It was even splattered on the pale skin of his face, which was hollowed about the eyes by exhaustion.
“Thank you,” he told Bream, the orderly. He looked at Gwen Williams, the nurse who had assisted him. “Call me if he gets feverish, but I think that should be all right.”
Judith had remained to help after bringing the man in. Cavan had already complimented her for getting him there alive. “I’ll fetch you some water,” she said, turning to go outside.
“Yer can’t go alone!” Bream waved sharply as Judith reached the tent flap. “I’ll get it, after I’ve taken ’im to Resuscitation.” He gestured at the unconscious patient.
“It’s only fifty yards away,” Judith countered. “I’ll be perfectly safe.”
Bream opened his mouth to protest. He was about twenty. A London clerk before the war, he was too flat-footed to make the infantry.
“For goodness’ sake!” Gwen cut across him. “Nothing’s going to happen to her.”
“It can ’appen to anyone!” Bream replied, his eyes wide. “Well, any woman. We’ve got a madman ’round ’ere, and no one knows ’oo ’e is.”
“It won’t happen to anyone,” Gwen contradicted, shaking her head irritably. “Some women invite disaster of one sort or another. If you behave with sense, don’t lead people on and behave like a—I’m sorry, like a tart—then people won’t get the wrong idea.”
“The right idea being what?” Judith asked with brittle civility. She had thought she liked Gwen. Suddenly she didn’t. They were strangers in culture and belief, allies only by force of extraordinary circumstance.
Gwen stared as if she, too, was seeing the other woman clearly for the first time. “I’m surprised that the chaplain’s sister should need anyone to tell her the right way to behave,” she said coldly.
“We weren’t talking about my behavior, or Sarah’s,” Judith pointed out. “We were talking about whoever it was who killed her—which, as you put it so pithily, was the wrong idea.”
“Judith, let it be,” Cavan said wearily. “It’s over. It’s a tragedy that we can’t undo, like pretty well every other bloody useless death here. Some wretched man forgot that you are only allowed to kill the enemy who’s wearing a different uniform from you and carrying a gun at the time. An enemy who’s wearing a dress and whose weapon is her tongue has to be treated differently. Someone forgot that, or simply stopped caring.”
Judith stared at him. She had thought she knew him as well as it was possible to know almost anyone. She had seen his superb courage under fire, his tireless, selfless work, never giving up on anyone no matter how mutilated or ill. She had seen him share his food, sit up all night to watch and comfort men, seen him encourage young doctors afraid to try tasks that seemed impossible, or offer solace and refrain from blame when they failed. And yet he was speaking of this horror as if it were simply one more foreseeable tragedy. He even had some pity for the man.
He looked back at her very directly. His blue eyes did not waver in the slightest, but there was regret in them now, and a very faint color in his cheeks. “We can’t teach a man to tear another man apart with a bayonet, then expect him to control his temper when he feels someone made a fool of him,” he said grimly. “When fear has reduced you to nothing in your own eyes, the contempt for yourself doesn’t heal just because someone says the war is over. Some of our men have a sanity so deep nothing can break it, but that’s not true for all.” He shook his head, his lips tight. “People can lose their belief in anything. When they see the good die hideously, some of them find they have nothing left to cling to. Let Bream get the water. Don’t go out alone. It’s arrogant to think your virtue will protect you.” He turned to Gwen Williams. “Or you,” he added coldly.
“You didn’t know Sarah,” Gwen retaliated, her cheeks pink. “She led men on. She flirted and she teased.” Her voice grew sharper. “I’m not saying she deserved it—of course she didn’t, no one does. But she did behave badly—stupidly. Nothing like this has ever happened before, or to anyone else, and that should tell you something.”
Bream shuddered. “It tells me we didn’t never ’ave German prisoners before,” he said firmly. “Leastways, not so many we couldn’t keep ’em locked up. Yer wrong, Doctor, it weren’t any of our boys who did it to poor Miss Price. They may be a bit loud at times, even a bit free with their ’ands now an’ then, but nothing more’n that. They’re gettin’ ready to go ’ome, an’ no one knows who’ll make it even now. This close, it’s kind o’ scary to think yer could still end up staying ’ere in the mud forever.”
“Nobody stays in the mud forever, Bream,” Judith told him gently. “At least…” She gave a sudden wide smile. “At least in a sense we all do, and when it comes to it, I don’t see that Flanders mud is any better or worse than London mud, or Cambridgeshire mud, for that matter. The point is, the part of you that matters goes on to eternity anyway.”
Bream was staring at her as if she had suddenly changed into a totally different animal in front of him.
Cavan smiled also, lighting his face with sudden warmth. “Chaplain’s sister, Bream. You’ll have to excuse her. She’s probably been preached at since she was born. Prayers over the porridge, no doubt.”
“Actually maths,” she corrected him.
“Prayers over the maths?” Cavan asked in disbelief.
“Maths over the porridge!” she explained. “My father was a mathematician. Don’t ask me where Joseph got religion from. I have no idea.”
Gwen looked from one to the other of them with a sense of somehow having been made light of, but she knew there was no use pursuing it. She turned somberly to Judith. “You can mock all you like, but there is a very wicked man around here who was stirred to violence by something that Sarah Price was foolish enough to do, and she paid a fearful, terrible price for it. Whether he was German or British, he’s still out there. But if you behave decently, you will be perfectly safe. I’ll prove it. I’ll go and fetch the water for Dr. Cavan.” And without waiting for anyone to argue with her, she marched out of the tent and into the darkness beyond.
Judith did not hesitate. She went straight after her, catching up within half a dozen yards.
“You don’t need to!” Gwen said loudly.
“I prefer to.” Judith kept pace with her along the boards with difficulty, her feet slipping on the wet wood and clattering loudly. “Do you really think Sarah brought this on herself? Did you see anyone bother her before? I mean, was she having a romance with anyone?”
Gwen glanced sideways at her once, then kept on walking. “I have no idea. I know how she was generally rather loose in her manner, which is foolish as well as vulgar. I suppose I should have spoken to her about it, but I thought she’d just ignore me and get angry. I was wrong, wasn’t I.” There w
as a sharp acknowledgment of guilt in her voice.
Without warning Judith’s anger evaporated and was replaced by pity. Gwen was not an easy person, always arguing; very few people actually liked her. Most treated her with tolerance and a general sharing, because that was what everyone did; it was a habit for survival. “No,” she said gently, falling into step beside her. “She might easily have become worse just to spite you. Maybe we all should have said something.”
“I saw her every day,” Gwen argued. “It was more obvious to me.” Her voice was so low, Judith could only just hear her above the squelch of the mud as they stepped beyond the boards onto the earth. They were now far enough from the fighting that the sound of guns was only a rumble in the distance. Curiously, as the battle moved ahead of them she felt not relief but a sense of being left behind, no longer of the most use she could be.
“Everyone could see how she behaved,” she replied. “It’s not your responsibility.”
Gwen shot her a quick glance. Then they reached the water supply, and she began to fill the pail she had brought. “Not your brother’s keeper? Your brother wouldn’t agree with that,” she said wryly. “Do me the kindness to be honest, Judith. Apart from the cruelty of it, lying won’t work because I know what you really think. You don’t often hide it.”
Judith was chastened. She had not realized that her dislike of Gwen was so apparent, or that she was quite so free with her own opinions. A little tact, a little kindness would have been better. “I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, and the moment after, wondered if that sounded dishonest, too. Then Gwen smiled at her, and she knew it was accepted, at least for now.
It was three days since the murder of Sarah Price and they did not appear to be any closer to knowing who had killed her. Suspicion grew, often absurdly. There were brief outbreaks of anger and violence, but no more German prisoners had been seriously hurt. News of the fighting came every day. The British were advancing on Lille; the Belgians had occupied Zeebrugge and stormed Bruges. Someone said that the British forces in Syria had entered Homs and were headed for Aleppo. Everything was closing for a German surrender, but it hadn’t happened yet. The hope itself was a kind of strange, exciting, disturbing thought, so very close and yet so many men were still dying every day, sometimes hundreds of them.
Judith heard many other arguments over Sarah Price, some like those in the operating theater, others quite different. Some young men, knowing their own innocence, were hurt when nurses were afraid of them.
The fighting was so heavy on the third night, all ambulance crews were needed. Judith and Wil Sloan drove beyond Menin to pick up badly wounded. It was cloudy, but there was no rain, and after a while the sky cleared, moonlight showing the devastated landscape and shattered buildings. Tree stumps were gaunt, motionless, but looking as if they writhed, pointing half-amputated limbs upward, reaching toward some help that never came. The lights showed rutted tracks swimming with water, glistening pale on the craters, punctuated by the black silhouettes of broken guns, wheels, even an occasional foundered tank, its giant caterpillar tracks high in the air. Judith knew there were also bodies drifting to the surface, but you could not tell their mud-caked outlines from the banks and paths.
“I guess even the Badlands are going to look good after this,” Wil said with a half smile. “Main Street will be pretty wholesome.”
“I’m sure it will,” she agreed. “’Specially on a sunny day.”
He was silent for some time. She looked at him and in the light of the star shells saw a somberness in his face. When he had first come late in 1915 he had been very young, barely twenty. It was some time before he told her that he was actually running away from his hometown, even from America altogether, after an ugly incident in which he had lost his temper and beaten a man.
Now the world was different, and Wil himself looked so much older. He had not put on weight—no one did on army rations—but his leanness had turned to muscle, and there was a grave maturity in his face. He had not lost his midwestern accent, but he had picked up a great many very English expressions that he had begun using with humor. They were now so much a part of his nature, he no longer noticed them himself.
“I’ll miss you,” he said suddenly.
“For a little while,” she conceded, not certain what else to say.
“Home won’t be the same as when I left,” he went on. He bit his lip. “Some of that’s good. Maybe they’ll have other things to think about than what a fool I was.”
“You still worried about it?” she asked with surprise. “Come on, Wil! That was years ago. The whole world’s grown sadder and wiser since then.”
“You don’t know small-town people,” he retorted. “They can hold a grudge for generations.”
“Of course I know small-town people,” she said with a laugh. “How big do you think Selborne St. Giles is? Everybody’s related to everybody else, and has been for a thousand years! If you go into the shop in the morning they can probably tell you what you had for breakfast. They can certainly tell you who’s quarreling with whom, and what about.”
He smiled; it was a wide and unusually charming expression. “Perhaps I’ll stay in England. Do you think I can?”
“Certainly, and welcome. But don’t you want to go home?” She looked away from the road for a moment, then hit a deep rut and concentrated again. “Are you really that scared of it, Wil?”
“No!” He hesitated. “Well, maybe. I never got to go back and say anything, and now they’ve got real heroes, men who fought, even some who died. Not from our town, but not far away.”
“Every town has someone who died,” she answered.
“I guess you Brits have some for every street, eh? I’m sorry.” His voice dropped. “I’m just not sure where I belong anymore.”
“Nobody is.” She realized how intensely she meant that. In St. Giles she had been something of a social misfit herself before the war, not content to marry suitably and become absorbed in home affairs as everyone else was. Well, that world no longer existed anyway. But what sort of world was it now? Women, old men, and children, with a million young men gone and near enough two million more injured or maimed who would need care. The jobs women had held over the last four years would, for the most part, have to be given back to the returning men. She would have to earn money. She couldn’t possibly expect Joseph to keep her. Anyway, it would bore her to death not to do anything. Wil Sloan was certainly not the only one who had no idea what to expect.
“There’s something vaguely comfortable about the place you are used to,” she added aloud. “Even if it’s plunging around in the mud being shot at.”
“Only a Brit could say something like that.” He stared straight ahead, his eyes very bright in the momentary headlights of an ambulance coming the other way. “And I will miss you,” he repeated.
She could think of nothing that sounded right to say in return, or that would tell him the affection she felt for him. There were friendships to miss that nothing could replace. There would never be anything else like this again, thank God, but those who survived it would share dreams and nightmares that no one else could know.
Joseph was standing outside the Resuscitation tent when he heard a movement behind him and turned to see Lizzie in the entrance. Despite the anxiety in her face, he felt a quickening of pleasure. He drew in breath to ask if she was looking for him, and then realized that she was almost certainly seeking a doctor. One of the patients must be in trouble for her to have left him.
“Can I get someone for you?” he asked instead. “I know where Cavan is.”
She looked disconcerted. “It’s not really…,” she started, and then, as if annoyed with herself, she straightened her shoulders and met his eyes more coolly. “It’s not really necessary,” she replied. “He’ll certainly be busy.” She turned away, ready to go back into the tent again.
“Can I help?” he said quickly—not because he thought he could, but because he could not let her go without s
ome response.
She hesitated, as though the decision was difficult for her. “Have you no one in greater need?” She seemed annoyed with herself, as if her question was foolish but amending it would only make the situation worse. “Private Fields is coming ’round. He isn’t going to be able to feel his leg. It’s still there, but he’s going to be frightened…”
“I’ll come,” he said, moving forward immediately and catching up with her so he was on her heels as she went back in. It must have been him she was looking for in the first place, or perhaps someone who knew Fields. Joseph could not place the name.
There were several beds occupied, but Lizzie went straight to the farthest over by the canvas wall at the other end. The boy on it was fair-skinned, sixteen at the most, and his left leg was heavily swathed in bandages. There were also cuts on both his arms, blood already seeping through the gauze. Joseph met Lizzie’s eyes questioningly. He had to know the truth, whatever he decided to say.
The gulf between them was no longer there. She understood as if they had spoken aloud everything they meant.
“Shrapnel through the flesh,” she said quietly. “It will heal. But he was in a lot of pain. They had to give him morphine. I’m not sure he would believe me that it’s still there.” She did not add that he would believe Joseph, but it was there in her certainty. He felt self-conscious, his face flushing at the compliment, even if it was not meant as such. She was thinking of the boy, not of him.
Lizzie looked down as the boy stirred, breathing more heavily, and his eyelids fluttered open. A wave of fear came over him as he registered the pain, and her presence. He wanted to speak and clearly did not know what to say.
“Hurts like hell, doesn’t it,” Joseph said very quietly, moving a step closer to the bed. “I got shrapnel in my leg in 1916. But it healed. Hardly ever aches now, only if the weather’s really cold and wet for a long time, and I get tired. I expect yours will be the same. Only you’re a lot younger than I am, so you might do better.”
