The Deepest Night

by Shana Abe

  That part alone took up all of their first three days.

  Then the wounded began to arrive.

  Truck after truck pulled up the drive, spilling out broken soldiers. Men on stretchers, men with crutches or canes, men wrapped in so many bandages they might have been living mummies, blots of scarlet bleeding through.

  The war had truly come to us at last.

  “Miss Jones,” barked a voice at my back, and I started, turning about.

  Mrs. Quinn, chief nurse of the newly christened Tranquility at Idylling Recovery Hospital, stood behind me in her wimple and somehow always spotless white frock, scowling. We’d met only two days ago, and it seemed she was always scowling—at me, at least.

  “Are you here to help, or are you rather more a tourist?”

  I forced a neutral tone. “To help, ma’am.”

  “Then do so. You may take this wheelchair to Nurse O’Donnell over there, and assist her with that young man.”

  Unlike me, Nurse O’Donnell (Call me Deirdre!) was a real nurse, probably in her late thirties. She had hazel eyes and a round face and a quick polished smile, which she directed at me as I walked up to join her at the back of the latest truck.

  “Emma!”

  “Eleanore,” I corrected her, but she wasn’t listening, focused instead on the wounded man trying to ease out of the truck on only one working leg. The other was encased from hip to toes in a plaster cast.

  “Lovely! Let’s have you escort this gentleman to the induction room, eh?”

  “Induction room” was the military’s term for the front parlor, which was by far the largest chamber on the main floor besides the dining room. It had been transformed from a hideous black-and-white room with a piano into a hideous black-and-white room with rows of beds and chairs and portable privacy curtains … and the piano, which had been pushed back against a wall, since it was too large to fit through any of the doorways. It seemed the duke had had the parlor constructed around it.

  “Here you go, then, sir, off with our Miss Ella. She’ll take fine care of you, get you settled in.”

  I offered a smile to the injured man, who offered a wan smile back.

  “Very kind of you, Emma-Eleanore-Ella,” he said, proving that at least someone had been paying attention.

  “My pleasure,” I replied. I rolled the wheelchair into position behind him, then leaned in close to help him sit.

  It was hard not to retch. Like a lot of the wounded, he stank, really stank, of something elusive yet familiar. Something that reminded me of the grimy butcher’s alley a block from the orphanage, green bottle flies swarming over skinned animals, hot rotting meat.

  I wheeled him into the manor.

  The days went on like that. Since I had no true nursing experience, I was relegated to the least important tasks, most of which involved cleaning things or fetching things or relaying messages from one part of the mansion to another. By the end of each day I retreated into my bedroom with a sense of weary, guilty relief.

  And no matter how I scrubbed, I could not rid myself of the dreadful meat smell. I tried scented soaps, borrowed perfume from Deirdre: no use. It was always there.

  By the eleventh day, I was beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have gone to Callander after all.

  Armand was busy with his new role as lord of the manor, but it seemed to me he was more of a specter haunting it than an actual person. We’d not spoken since the morning at the piano. Whenever I saw him now it was always from a distance, at the top of a flight of stairs or down long, gloomy hallways. He remained surrounded by others, the lone figure dressed in black or gray instead of khaki. They were all men with strict schedules and lives to save. I barely warranted a glance from any of them.

  I’d smoked to his bedchamber once since everyone else had arrived. Only once. I’d Turned to girl beside his bed and looked down at him sleeping, hoping he’d wake, hoping for some stupid reason that I wouldn’t have to put my hand on him for him to wake.

  I’d read somewhere that people always appeared peaceful in their sleep. All the cares and worries of the day slipped away, temporarily forgotten or buried beneath dreams.

  Armand did not look peaceful. He looked shadowed, stark. He looked much like the dragon-boy I’d glimpsed weeks ago in the forest, when he’d lit that lantern and offered me caviar and trouble.

  Out of curiosity, I leaned over him, inhaled; I smelled only soap and wine and him.

  Hungry? he’d asked me that night in the forest, watching me with that dark dragon look.

  Hungry?

  I realized, unsettled, that I was. A flicker, a small stirring of my blood. Nothing like what I’d felt with Jesse, but … I was.

  I stood there a while longer with my insides roiling and that flicker growing, growing, my hand hovering above his shoulder.

  In the end, I didn’t touch him. I left him to whatever dreams may have lulled him.

  As I said, we hadn’t spoken in some time. Even so, I don’t know why I was surprised at what happened next. Looking back, I can see that it was absolutely inevitable.

  The man with the cast was named Gavin Raikes. He was nineteen years old and in the process of dying inch by excruciating inch. Everyone now, not just me, could smell it.

  “No,” he kept saying, staring up wildly from his bed at his doctor, at Deirdre. At me. “No, no, no, I won’t let you! I won’t let you, I say. Keep away from me!”

  “This is just the cast now,” Deirdre was trying to tell him. “The cast, that’s all. It must come off. Be a good lad and let Dr. Newcastle take it off.”

  “I won’t let—”

  “Raikes,” warned the doctor, very stern, “if you don’t calm down, you won’t like what comes next. We must have a look—”

  “No!”

  Gavin began thrashing about and within seconds a couple of soldiers were on him, grabbing him by the shoulders and ankles, pinning him down.

  “Quickly,” said the doctor to Deirdre, and like they’d done it a hundred times before—perhaps they had—they moved over the man, wielding saws, hammers, something that looked like a long metal claw.

  I stood ready with clean linens across my arms because that’s what I’d been told to do. Although as soon as the plaster cracked apart, all five of us, even the doctor, gagged and tipped back.

  There wasn’t much left of his leg. What there was was shredded, melted, sickly gross green. I looked away before I did something awful, like heave down Deirdre’s skirts.

  Before I knew it, everyone else had recovered, was busy moving again, and Deirdre swiveled about and deposited something in my arms: a section of the plaster with a saw still attached, all of it slimy with decomposed flesh.

  And something else. Small somethings, wiggling through the slime. Squirming.

  I had seen maggots before. At Moor Gate there had been a boy—I hadn’t known his name—who’d been kept alone in his cell for so long that when they finally brought him out he’d been a papery skeleton, with big red sores on his lips and his hair mostly missing because he’d been tearing it out and eating it. Eating even his eyelashes and eyebrows.

  I’d been pressed up against a hallway wall when they’d passed (that’s what you were supposed to do: press yourself thin against a wall when the guards came, hope hope hope they weren’t coming for you), a pair of men half dragging the boy down the corridor because his paper skeleton legs either couldn’t or wouldn’t work right any longer. They kept buckling, and it made the guards angry. They’d yelled at him and he’d giggled back at them. I’d reckoned then that he must have been actually barmy, because every patient at Moor Gate knew not to anger the guards. Not to make eye contact. Not to speak to them, not to plead.

  Not to laugh at them.

  The boy wasn’t really laughing, but the guards didn’t care. He was
so young, probably only around eight. Maybe he hadn’t been at the Institute long enough to learn the rules, but anyway, one of the guards made a sudden movement and there was the sound of snapping twigs and the boy screamed, because the man had broken three of his ribs.

  Three. I remembered that, because three weeks later I saw that boy again, but on a stretcher in the hall. They’d pulled a sheet over him but it wasn’t long enough to cover his face, and I’d crept close enough to confirm that he was slack and dead, and there were maggots crawling all along the sores around his mouth. Crawling out from the black-toothed, swollen-tongued inside of his mouth.

  Little white wormy squirmy—

  “Nooo,” Gavin wailed as I staggered back a few paces. Then, to my horror, he spotted me between the doctor and one of the soldiers. He held my eyes and cried out, “Miss! Miss! For God’s sake, help me, please, please, get them off!”

  I shook my head, unable to look away, unable to say Sorry, I’m so sorry or to even part my lips at all, because if I did I was certain I was going to start screaming high and squeaky thin like that boy. The maggots writhed and the stench from the plaster shimmered up before me, bending the air into swirly shapes.

  I was about to faint.

  Someone new crossed in front of me. In the slow, syrupy suspension of the moment, she looked exactly like Chloe Pemington.

  Whoever it was, she approached the bed and blocked my view. A crashing noise reached me from a distance; I had dropped the plaster, spattering maggots and putrefied skin and pus on us both.

  A hand grasped my elbow. I was guided backward, one step, two, three, until I was across the room, near enough to the main doors that a blast of fresh air hit me, washing away the worst of the stench.

  I sucked it in—don’t faint do not faint do not faint—battling the big black spots in my vision until they gradually receded into pinpricks.

  “I will admit I thought you had asked Lord Armand to accept you here as a way to avoid the orphanage,” said the person holding my elbow. It was Mrs. Westcliffe, as fresh and smart as if she’d just stepped out from an audience with the king, maroon silk and matched pearls, not a hair out of place.

  I licked my lips and swallowed hard, testing myself, but it seemed the danger of heaving had passed, too.

  “Yes,” I rasped. “I know.”

  “But now, Eleanore … now that I see this …”

  All on their own, my lips glued shut again; I could not look at her. I glared up at the ceiling, down at my dress—my white nurse’s dress, as clean and new as anything I’d ever owned—and took in the spray of Gavin Raikes’ flesh across its front.

  It seemed all the maggots had fallen off.

  Mrs. Westcliffe’s voice gentled. “Child, it’s not too late. You need not stay.”

  “No, I do. I promised I would.”

  “A noble promise, indeed. But no one will think ill of you for deciding this is more than you bargained for.”

  I sucked in another lungful of air. “I’m staying.”

  “Very well. As you can see, at least you’ll have company. It seems Lady Chloe and Lady Sophia were inspired by your example. Both have volunteered to become nurses at Tranquility for the summer, too.”

  I stared. Good heavens, it was Chloe, beautiful as ever, holding Gavin’s hand and murmuring something mollifying as the doctor did his work. Sophia looked on with her arms hugged across her chest, hanging back from the crowd as I had done.

  “Since I was on my way here anyway, I offered to escort them. Yet this is my final day in Wessex until the autumn comes. Miss Jones, I want you to know that I sincerely wish you well. And I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  I definitely, definitely don’t.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Perhaps we’ll meet again,” Westcliffe said, and gave my elbow one last squeeze before moving off.

  “This is very hard, I know,” I heard Chloe saying. “But you’re a good man, a strong man. You’re going to be fine. Look at me, now. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Oh God, oh God, I wish I were dead. I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

  “No, of course not,” lied Lady Chloe, and smiled.

  Chapter 14

  Sophia was here now. Chloe was here now.

  So, naturally, dinner became an exercise in exquisitely mannered persecution.

  For evening meals the dining chamber was aglow with candlelight, twelve silver, twisty-armed candelabras stationed in a row down the center of the table, twelve more reflected back at us from the shiny black windows, countless dancing bright flames. There were vases of flowers dotting the table as well, along with salt cellars and frilled glass dishes holding rainbows of perfectly arranged hard, round candies that I was dying to taste but knew better than to try. They seemed like someone’s idea of cheerful decoration.

  At Iverson, Sophia had been at the far end of our table and her stepsister at another table entirely. But tonight Sophia sat directly across from me and Chloe was just two chairs to my left, a hapless young army fellow stuck between us. It was clear by the time the soup was served she’d already fixed stars in his eyes.

  To my right was yet another officer, but silver-haired and mustachioed, who’d granted me a nod and a grunt before getting down to the business of eating.

  Mrs. Westcliffe would not have approved of dining sans conversation, but I did. If only I could as easily avoid Sophia’s knowing gaze, and Chloe’s light, venomous chatter, which kept floating my way.

  “ … so happy to be here, of course! To do my part. It’s the least one might expect of a girl in my position. After all, you boys are doing all the real work. Only a fool would imagine that a mere summer of volunteer nursing would compare to your sacrifice.”

  “Er,” said the man.

  “But I told Mamá I simply had to do something. I simply couldn’t spend the summer acting as if everything was normal. You know, attending dances and dinner parties and all those silly things. So I told her I was coming here to help, and no argument about it, if you please!”

  “That’s awfully kind of you, my lady.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing! Nothing at all! And naturally my little sister had to come along, too. She’s so adorable, simply has to follow wherever I go! Isn’t that adorable?”

  “Quite,” replied the man, practically melting in his chair.

  “But both of us followed Eleanore,” pointed out Sophia, smiling with exaggerated benevolence over her sauced turbot. “And that’s even more adorable, don’t you think?”

  “Who?” said the fellow.

  I concentrated on my own turbot, taking apart the fish flake by flake with my fork.

  Chloe murmured something, and the army man said, “Oh!” and shifted and darted me a look.

  “ … rather a wretched case, really.” She slanted closer to the man, ensuring that neither of us would miss a word. “I heard she had nowhere else to go. Poor dear, she’s just the most piteous creature. A charity girl, you know. It was either here or the streets for her.”

  “A shame,” said the man.

  Chloe shook her head sadly. “And she’s just so hopeless, you know? Of course, I don’t mean that in an unkind way!”

  “Of course not!”

  “It’s just … well, did you see what happened today? When I first arrived?”

  “No.”

  “She made a huge mess of things in the induction room. Couldn’t listen to anyone, couldn’t follow orders. Even at school, she was always the girl who couldn’t manage to get anything right.”

  “There’s always someone like that around,” whispered the man conspiratorially.

  “True,” Chloe agreed, pouty and ravishing, batting her comely brown lashes. “There’s always someone.”

  I leaned out of my chair, p
ried loose one of the decorative hard candies from its place, and popped it in my mouth.

  It tasted a lot less like sugar and a lot more like salt, but I kept eating it. It was either that or chuck it at Chloe.

  Across the table, Sophia only smiled.

  He watched her at dinner.

  He watched her all the time, he supposed, but dinner was easiest, because they were both stationary at the table, trapped for five full courses at least, and even though he could no longer seat her at his side—the chief nurse now had that honor; Lottie Clayworth, who seemed thoroughly happy to remain at Tranquility for the duration of the war, as long as she got to complain about it, had his other elbow—anyway, even though he could no longer have her next to him, Lora was still at the table, which was good enough.

  So he could watch her. Providing he was stealthy about it, he could do it for minutes at a time.

  Armand had perfected his stealth years ago. He knew all the tricks: how to keep his lashes down but his gaze up; how to smile without smiling; how to listen without reacting. How to walk without sound, to embrace the shadows. He even knew the trickiest trick of them all: how to shine in public so brightly no one noticed what he was really about, because all they saw was dazzle.

  He was especially good at that.

  Every evening, Armand and the officers and doctors and nurses gathered at the table to enjoy Cook’s best efforts. The conversation tended to be vague and genial and unequivocally impersonal. Charts, medicines, village life. Most of the men balked at discussing anything more serious with the women around. Had Mandy nothing else to consider, he’d be bored out of his skull.

  But he had her, just seven chairs down to his left. Eleanore Jones, who ate with such a tension about her he wondered that she didn’t crack apart into pieces, and even that was fascinating. Head down, unspeaking, quick small bites. Like someone was always about to snatch away her plate.

  He’d noticed how she winced at the electrical lights, so he’d banished them from the meals, relying upon candles instead. He’d told the colonel in charge of the hospital that he thought it best if they reserved the generator oil for the soldiers’ needs, which got him another Dashed good thinking, old chap from the military machine.