Deadly Anniversaries

by Marcia Muller

  As the new southern gate came into view (presented four or five years before by the Maharaja of Patiala, a man of such excellent manners that he’d refrained from bursting into laughter when he laid eyes upon the Pavilion) I noticed a grocer’s lorry idling nearby, with several men off-loading crates and canvas-draped trays. Some kind of an event, no doubt. Which gave me an idea.

  I stood out of the drizzle to watch for a bit, until I had my man: late fifties, neither labourer nor giver-of-commands, but clearly regarded as an authority both by those doing the off-loading and by the man in charge of the event itself. When the lorry had finished and the sleek-haired figure in the good suit had trailed after the supplies, fussing all the time, the man I’d been watching stepped under the portico to light a cigarette. I moved over to join him.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Oh heavens, don’t let me interrupt your hard-earned break. I was hoping the rain would let up and I could have a wander through the gardens.”

  “Might not be for a bit, miss,” he said.

  “Looks like they’re having a party.”

  “Mayor’s got a dinner of some kind. Daughter’s engagement, I think they said.”

  “A fine place for it.”

  “That it is.”

  “You know, I should ask—have you worked here for a while? That is, I don’t suppose you were here when it was the Indian hospital, were you?”

  His reply told me I’d judged his amused and proprietary expression correctly: “That I was, miss. Started in the garden here the month the Clock Tower was finished, in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Eighteen eighty-seven that was,” he provided, a nod to my youth. “Since then I’ve done pretty much every job there is.”

  “Oh good! I’m looking for some of the nurses who were here at that time. Writing an article on, er, women in wartime, you know?” It was an excuse that matched my appearance and my educated accent, and gave him a reason to indulge in airing his memories.

  “And a fine lot they were, too,” he said. “Though in truth, the girls weren’t here for more than a few weeks.”

  “No?”

  “Some idiocy in the papers. The Mail, it was, had a picture of some of ’em next to a patient here, stirred up talk about white girls nursing brown men. So they got the younger girls out of here as soon as they could, and even the married ones they replaced with men by the summer.”

  Clearly, I’d had other things on my mind that spring than the innuendo campaigns of the sensational press.

  “Having spent some time as a VAD myself, I can’t say the colour of the patient’s skin made much of a difference to me. In any event, perhaps you remember one or two of the older ones, who stayed on?”

  “You want Mrs Straub,” he said promptly. Perhaps too promptly?

  “Do I?”

  “Well, not sure want is the word, but if you can get on her good side, she can tell you anything you need to know.”

  “A bit of a dragon, I take it?”

  “Tigress, maybe. She can be...protective.” The twinkle in his eyes suggested that he’d like to watch me get anything out of the woman.

  “Since I have no interest in stirring up any tabloid rubbish, I’m sure we shall get on just fine. Any idea where I might find her?”

  “Last I heard she was at the Victoria in Lewes.”

  “Lovely. And have you any suggestions? For ‘getting on her good side’?”

  “Not a one,” he said, with no sign of regret.

  “Then I shall have to try honesty,” I replied. “Thank you for your help, and perhaps you could lift a glass to my luck, later tonight.” So saying, I pressed a coin into his palm and opened up my umbrella.

  I figured that “Victoria” meant the Lewes hospital rather than the tearoom, and so it proved. She was even on duty. Unfortunately, the judgment of tigress proved all too apt.

  Beryl Straub: sturdy, scrubbed, and stern, fixed me with an iron gaze through steel spectacle frames, and waited for me to convince her of my need.

  Mrs Straub was the Victoria’s head nurse. I had sat in a cool, damp office waiting for her to return from her duties in the wards, and had been greeted by a shake of the hand and the news that she could only spare me five minutes.

  “Then I won’t waste any of your time. I was told that you were a nurse at the Pavilion when it first began to take in the Indian soldiers.”

  “December 1914, that’s right.”

  “One of those early patients came to me recently with a problem.”

  “Yes?”

  “Anik Singh, is his name.” She did not react. Why would she, after all these years? “I don’t imagine you remember him, he was blown—”

  “He was in a trench when a shell went off. Among the first intake of patients. I remember him.”

  “Ah, good. He’s fine, by the way. A minor limp, is all.”

  She waited.

  “The problem isn’t about him, but his brother. Manvir Singh was wounded in March, 1915, in the battle of Neuve Chapelle. He arrived in Brighton a week or so later. A field postcard was sent home indicating that he’d been wounded and was being cared for. Then in late June or early July, a death notice was sent out, and his family assumed that he had lost a slow and lingering fight. However, recently they have had...a further communication. Anonymous, unfortunately. It suggested that Manvir recovered, for a time—that he was conscious and active before his eventual death.”

  She waited.

  “I know his wounds had become infected before he reached Brighton, and infections have a way of coming back. Or he could have needed surgery, and failed to survive that. But the family wishes to know. And I thought you might perhaps be able to help.”

  “With...?”

  I studied her face. It revealed nothing, very determinedly.

  “Information about the young man’s death. About his final weeks. Perhaps about the anonymous correspondent.” Her face did not shift a hairbreadth, and yet I could have sworn there was a reaction, deep down.

  Time to wait her out. For thirty seconds, her mask held. Then a slight change of focus in her eyes betrayed that her thoughts had gone inward. Another thirty seconds...

  But she glanced at the clock, and stood. “I’m sorry, miss, I’m needed in—”

  I made my voice hard. “Mrs Straub, if I need to, I’m quite capable of digging through the hospital records to find the names of all the nurses on duty that spring, and harassing them for what they know. Manvir Singh gave his life for this country. His family deserves to know how.”

  Her hand continued to show me the door. However, in the hallway, she paused. “Miss—Russell, was it? My day ends at six o’clock. Come back then, and we shall talk further.”

  I was in the waiting room at six, but she did not appear. She was inside her office, the stop-and-start of her voice betraying a lengthy telephone call. Her assistant left at half past six. Shortly after, the office went silent.

  A long time later, the door opened. She looked older than she had earlier, and not simply because it was the end of a long working day. In her hand was a small piece of paper.

  “Miss Russell, there are some things that are not mine to disclose. My strong impulse is to turn you away. But since I know who you are and the resources you wield, I doubt that my refusal will keep you from, as you say, ‘digging.’ These are the five women who worked at the Pavilion from the time it opened until they were replaced the following summer. There was one other, but she died two years ago. I have not included VAD girls or the nurses who came and went.”

  She held out the page, but when I took hold of it, her fingers kept their grasp for a time. “I ask you, please, to treat these women with care. They may well still be troubled by their long, hard, noble wartime service. I urge you to think carefully before you proceed. Indeed, I can only hope you decide to go home and assure Mr Anik Singh
that his brother died with honour, in the service of his King.”

  She stepped back inside her office, shutting the door in my face.

  * * *

  Margaret Ainsley, Bristol

  Faith Prescott, London

  Rosemary Langdon, London

  Mary O’Connor, London

  Marguerite Winslow, Birmingham

  Unfortunately, there were no other details, be it street, telephone number, or even a husband’s name. Still, if the telephone directory didn’t lead me to them, they would all be old enough—and with luck, either propertied or educated enough—to be on city voting registries. And there was always a way to find registered nurses.

  I found a Brighton directory at the hospital’s front desk, and saw three entries for the name Ainsley. I checked my watch: too late to call on a strange woman? Not if I hurried. My map showed one address down among the slums—an unlikely home for a trained nurse—and another on the western edges of the city. The third was just half a mile up the London road. However, when the woman who answered the door said that yes, she was Mrs Ainsley, I knew I had the wrong place: she wasn’t even as old as I.

  “I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” I said, raising my voice over the sounds of raging children, “I’m looking for a Mrs Ainsley who nursed at the Pavilion during the War.”

  “That’s my mum,” she said, then turned to shout, “Reggie, if you don’t leave off tormenting your sister—”

  I stopped the closing door with my hand, and asked apologetically, “Would that be Mrs William or Mrs Arthur?”

  “Arthur, on Peakside Street.”

  Mrs Arthur Ainsley was also home, and also about to sit down to her dinner. She was a woman in her midforties, with just the kind of calm, comforting face one would want to have beside one’s hospital bed. However, when she heard my question, about an Indian soldier named Manvir Singh, the face closed up.

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Mrs Ainsley, please, his brother—”

  “I can’t. You have to go.”

  “Who’s there?” called a male voice.

  “It’s no one, dear, just a woman looking for a wrong address.”

  I looked at the closed door. The porch light went off.

  Well, that was interesting.

  Either the woman found the mere thought of that period of her life too disturbing to consider, or she knew something she didn’t want to tell me. However, I was not going to get anything from her tonight, not with Mr Ainsley in residence. Should I stick around and approach her in the morning—or move on to London and work my way through the three women located there?

  Considering the option of returning home to straggling invaders, an irritated housekeeper, and a client in need of explanations, it was not a difficult choice.

  My London club gave me a room and a set of telephone directories. Since showing up at doors was not practical here—the number of London listings attached to those three surnames being roughly equal to the entire population of Brighton—I also asked for one of the club’s modern rotary telephones. My ear already ached at the thought of how many hours I was going to spend with the earpiece pressed against it, hunting through all those men’s names in search of Faith Prescott, Rosemary Langdon, and (my heart sank) Mary O’Connor. Why, oh why did the Post Office not consider the woman in a partnership deserving of a separate entry?

  The Langdons did not take me long, the next morning. Unfortunately, they also did not give me a Rosemary, or indeed any woman who had nursed in Brighton during the War. I sent out for the more peripheral London directories, and skipped past the many (many) pages of O’Connors to start on Prescott. Where, to my amazement, my eye caught on the name Faith tucked in between an Edward and a Frederick. She might have been married ten years ago, but she appeared to be single, or widowed, now.

  I inserted my finger into the rotary, then stopped. She was probably at work; she might be the wrong Faith Prescott—but the address was only a brief Underground trip away. And the sky outside promised a fresh, sunny morning. Who needed husbands and anniversaries, anyway, when a woman had London and an interesting investigation stretched out before her? And tonight, by way of reward, I could simply take myself to dinner. I could even go to the cinema: Who was to stop me?

  The thought cheered me through the Underground and up a tidy street to the polished bell pull. I listened to its echo fade. The house was as trim as one might imagine from a nurse: scrubbed walk, polished windows, paint that was not fresh, but clean. The sort of house whose resident would use good quality stationery with the address printed thereon.

  I did not hear any sound from within, yet... Had the curtains shifted a fraction? I spoke aloud, as if to an ear pressed against the door.

  “Mrs Prescott? My name is Mary Russell. I was sent by Beryl Straub. Mrs Prescott, I have a couple of questions about your time at the Brighton Pavilion.” Nothing moved. “I can come back, if this isn’t a good time.” Silence, and yet, the sensation that there was someone inside. I waited—and after a minute came the hard quick clackclackclack of heels approaching down a hallway. The door came open.

  She was in her late thirties, brown-eyed and brown-haired, a streak of grey rising from her left temple. She wore trousers—though she looked the sort who would change to a skirt before leaving the house—and a heavy cardigan with too-long sleeves that covered her hands to the knuckles. She wore thick socks with the noisy Cuban-heeled shoes, and stood as if her feet were pinched.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I’m looking for a Mrs Faith Prescott?”

  “I am she.”

  “I wanted to ask you a few questions about the Indian Hospital in the Royal Pavilion, in early 1915.”

  A shadow seemed to pass over her face. Fear? Revulsion? Sadness? “Yes.”

  “You were there—is that correct? As a nurse on the wards?”

  “Only until June. 1915.”

  “Yes, I heard about the scandal-mongering newspaper. Pity, that. I remember how pressed most places were for nursing help—I was officially too young for anything beyond reading to the wounded and helping them write letters, but even I got pulled in to change dressings from time to time.” I gave her a wry smile, to cement this personal connection, then asked, “I wonder if I might come in, just for a bit? Save you from letting out all the heat.”

  She started to glance over her shoulder but caught the motion. I thought for a moment she would refuse, that she would shut the door in my face—but she seemed to brace herself and step back.

  As I followed her down the hall and into the parlour, I saw no indication that some other person had rapidly fled the scene. I did notice that the clack of her heels was nowhere near as emphatic as when she’d come towards the door. Which meant she’d wanted me to think the delay was due to her being at the back of the house, not that she’d been tiptoeing along the hall in stockinged feet and eyeing the stoop through a crack in the curtains.

  Either the woman was deeply frightened of visitors, or Beryl Straub had warned her I was coming.

  The room was quite warm, from morning sun and the remains of a small fire. I took off my coat and hat, chatting all the while—what a welcoming room (in fact, it was); that’s a charming desk (which my fingers itched to open in search of stationery); oh, you have children! (three, by the looks of the mantelpiece photos)—but to my interest, she neither removed her own warm sweater nor moved to play the proper hostess and take my coat. I draped the garment over the arm of a settee and sat down, making a brief but thorough survey of the framed photos before raising my friendly face to her.

  “How old are your children?”

  Even this question had no softening effect on her. If anything, it seemed to raise her maternal hackles before she replied with the most minimal possible information. “My children are sixteen, fourteen, and eight. And a half.”

  “You and yo
ur husband must be proud of them.”

  “My husband is dead.”

  “Oh, I am sorry,” I said.

  “He was killed in the War.”

  “That must have been hard, to be on your own with three small children.”

  “My father died when I was young, so my mother was free to come live with us. She still does, which means that I can work nights when I need to.” Her right hand came up to encircle her left wrist for a moment, then dropped away with a jerk.

  “So you’re still a nurse?”

  “I am. I was fortunate enough to get a position at Guy’s. I’ve been there now, oh, going on six years.”

  “You must have started there when your youngest was small.”

  Her face, which had started to relax as she told me about her mother and her professional life, closed sharply. “Bills to pay.”

  “Oh, of course, I was sympathising, is all.”

  “Miss Russell, I do have a number of tasks waiting for me.”

  “I’m so sorry! Thoughtless of me. Well, I have an acquaintance who is looking for information about his younger brother, who was transferred from the Front to the Pavilion hospital in March 1915. He died later that spring, but the family never received any details. Manvir Singh, was his name. Do you remember that patient?”

  The woman was holding herself so tight, I felt that a flick of the fingernail would cause her to shatter. “Half the patients were named Singh. It seemed.”

  “I imagine so.” I kicked myself for not making Mr Singh give me the photo of his brother. “This one would have been in his early thirties. He took three bullets in the battle of Neuve Chapelle. Might have lost some fingers.”

  She shot to her feet, her right hand clasping her left forearm so tightly, one would have thought she was trying to stop a spurting wound. “Miss Russell, there were so many wounded soldiers, so many horribly mutilated dying, gassed young men, I try not to remember any of them. Please, I have to ask you to go.”