“I’ll go,” Eleanor said, putting down her untouched cup of tea and hurrying over.
It was the youngest casualty on the ward, the one they had nicknamed “Le Bébé.” None of them could understand how he’d managed to lie his way into the army, and now here he lay, head swathed in bandages, dark eyes feverish and unfocussed.
“Hush.” Eleanor took his hand and bent close to him in the darkness. “Are you in pain?” She spoke in French, but he seemed not to understand, his gaze directed somewhere over her left shoulder.
“Dites ma mere…” he began, then gasped, his fingers clutching hers before suddenly loosening forever.
“Yes, I’ll tell her,” she said softly, though she knew he could no longer hear her. She could guess what he’d wanted her to tell his mother. I love you. I’m sorry. Don’t grieve for me. They were all pretty much the same, and Eleanor was doubtful whether they would do much to soothe the pain of the woman who heard of her son’s death. But Eleanor would say the words anyway if she got the chance. She’d promised.
She laid his hands on top of the blanket then reached forward to close his eyes.
VAD Hurst came up behind her. “Dead?”
“Yes.”
“Poor boy. We’d better see to him, I suppose. Pity, I was just about to get the dressing trolleys ready for the morning.”
To an outsider, it might have sounded a little heartless, but Eleanor knew that death was commonplace here. The only way to deal with the demands of those who were still living was to be as organized and as well-prepared as possible.
“You do that,” she said. “I’ll be fine on my own.”
“Sure?”
Eleanor nodded. “Yes. The trolleys do need to be done.”
“I’ll come and help you as soon as I can.”
But in the end, another patient needed Hurst’s attention, so Eleanor sponged the corpse down by herself, a task that took some time as he’d fouled himself on dying. When he was clean, she dressed him in a nightshirt and then, feeling physically and emotionally drained, she went to the desk and wrote on a piece of paper.
Name: Georges Simon.
Next came the age. She hesitated before finally writing nineteen. The boy was dead. It would be pointless not to keep up the pretense now, and besides, she had no way of discovering his true age.
She finished off by writing the time and the date and the fact that the death had been witnessed by VADs Eleanor Martin and Lucy Hurst.
Finally, she signed the paper and took it back across the ward, pinning it carefully to the corpse’s chest.
“All done?” VAD Hurst had finished with her patient.
“Yes. I’ll go and fetch an orderly.”
“Poor boy,” Hurst said again, turning away. “I’ll get these trolleys finished. We could do with some more dressings fetching from stores. D’you think you could mention it to Jenkins or whoever it is on duty tonight?”
“All right.”
Jenkins was the only orderly available, so it fell to Eleanor to carry the other end of the sheet-covered stretcher from the ward to the cellar, which served as a mortuary. After they’d deposited their load, she told Jenkins about the bandages.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll see to it.” When she didn’t immediately leave the room, he looked at her. “You staying in here?”
She nodded. “Just for a moment or two to pay my respects.”
But after he’d left, she stood alone in the cold, shadowy cloisters looking down at the young boy’s body, and she realized she didn’t know how to pay her respects.
Prayer was the traditional way, but over the years, she’d become distrustful of religion, attending church only because she had no choice. She couldn’t believe in God, yet as she stared down at Georges Simon’s face, younger still without the aging pain to contort his features, Eleanor longed to believe in something. To believe unquestioningly—as her father’s parishioners believed—would be such a comfort. But she couldn’t. She knew Georges Simon, and all he’d been in life had now ceased to exist in death.
There was a sound behind her. She turned quickly, brushing tears from her eyes. A dark figure stood in the doorway. For one terrifying moment she thought it was her father—that she’d somehow conjured him up with her thoughts. But then she saw it was the priest, Edwards. She’d conjured him up instead.
“He’s dead?” he asked, coming into the room, seeming determined to haunt her.
She gave the briefest of nods. “Yes.” Then she walked quickly past him, making her escape, back to the sanctuary of work.
Chapter Eleven
FORTUNATELY FOR DIRK, his luck changed for the better after he’d been released by the French.
Back in the village after two days in his stinking, makeshift prison with virtually nothing to eat, he had a tip off that one of the British journalists at GHQ had suddenly taken ill. Losing no time, Dirk packed his things and got straight on a train, arriving at Amiens before there was a possibility of a replacement turning up on the scene. Then, using a combination of natural charm and impressive tales of his brush with death on The Sussex, he managed to inveigle his way into the group on a temporary basis.
“I rather think it was the fact that you didn’t turn toward the Hun after your experience with the Frogs that decided it,” Beacham of the Daily Post told him.
“That was my own stupid fault.” Dirk grinned. “I was green as hell; I deserved all I got.”
Beacham smirked at him. “When are you Yanks going to join the fray, anyway?”
“Not a moment too soon, as far as I’m concerned,” Dirk said. “But you know what politicians are like.”
“Slow off the mark, you mean? Well, they’re certainly fanatical about red tape and regulations. I suppose it makes them feel as if they’re in control of things when really—” Beacham broke off, pulling up his serge sleeve to look at his watch. “We generally partake of a little sherry at this hour, old man. Care to join us?”
“All right, thanks,” he said and followed the other man out of the room. Dirk was actually itching to start work after the frustration of his enforced false start, but it was too late to get anything done that day, so he might as well be sociable and get to know the others. They’d all been here awhile after all; he could learn a lot from them. And later on, before he went to sleep, he would write to Eleanor again. What was she doing right at this moment? Getting bossed around by the formidable Sister Palmer? Listening to one of Kit’s stories?
“Loreson?”
Dirk suddenly became aware that Beacham had been trying to get his attention for some time and clapped an apologetic hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Sorry, I was miles away.”
“That was obvious, old chap,” Beacham told him wryly. “I hope she’s as lovely as your expression suggested, but if you take my advice, you’ll put her from your mind when you’re out there. A sniper’s bullet isn’t awfully fussy, you know. It’ll pick off a correspondent every bit as happily as a corporal.”
Eleanor and Kit were working on the same shifts again, and this evening they were eating in the refectory together. With its dim lighting, arches, and pillars, it looked a lot like the morgue, but Eleanor successfully managed to put this unhappy thought from her mind. It had been a long shift, with no time to eat so much as a snack, and she was hungry.
Kit had worked just as hard, yet she was pushing her food around her plate, playing with it rather than really eating. Since this wasn’t entirely unusual for her, Eleanor didn’t think too much about it, running the events of the day through her mind as she ate. Until Kit mentioned Dirk’s name.
“Don’t you think it’s odd the way Dirk hasn’t written to us?” Kit said. “After the way you saved his life and everything?”
Oh dear. Eleanor’s appetite deserted her. Why hadn’t she told Kit about the letter straight away? It would have been so much easier. Now she would either have to explain her silence or lie, and neither course of action was very satisfactory.
A rickety wooden trolley squeaked its way across the stone floor as a flushed-faced VAD came to collect empty dishes.
“Goodness, Soames,” Kit called to her, momentarily distracted, “can’t you get Jenkins to apply his oilcan to that wheel? It really is a bit much!”
Tell her, Eleanor urged herself. Go on, tell her.
As the trolley squeaked away, Kit finally noticed Eleanor’s discomfort. “What on earth’s the matter?” she asked. “You look frightfully churned up about something.”
Eleanor licked her lips, coming to a decision to tell Kit the truth, but before she could do so, the other girl guessed.
“Goodness, he’s written to you, hasn’t he?”
Eleanor sighed. “Yes, last week. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. You were on duty and then…” She sighed again. “No, it wasn’t really that. You weren’t around when the letter came, it’s true, but…” She broke off, took a deep breath and plunged on. “Actually, I don’t think I’m very good at friendships. My instinct is to keep things to myself.”
Kit was listening quietly. “Jane and I tell each other absolutely everything. If she’d been in your position, she’d have positively brandished that letter at me, hoping I’d be insanely jealous.”
And are you? Eleanor wanted to ask. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it,” she said, thinking that she hadn’t told Kit about her nightmares either. She was having at least two a week now, sometimes more than that.
Kit seemed to brush her apology aside. “I wouldn’t have had a tantrum,” she said. “I am capable of accepting the fact that a handsome, charming, interesting, and highly eligible young man is more attracted to you than he is to me. Well, just about capable, anyway.” She smiled.
Eleanor flushed. “It’s only because of what happened on The Sussex,” she said. What had Dirk called her? His Angel of Mercy?
“Hmm,” said Kit skeptically. “Anyway, what did he have to say for himself?”
So, Eleanor told Kit all about Dirk’s adventure with the French. It was pleasant to share it all with someone else. She was glad she’d told Kit now, and even though she felt like a beginner in terms of being a friend, she was determined to try harder. She wasn’t sure she could extend that to talking about the nightmares, though. She didn’t want to even think of them, let alone speak of them to someone else.
“Actually, I had a bit of news myself today that I haven’t told you about,” Kit said. “Remember I told you about my brother’s plan to visit us soon? Well, he’s coming sometime next week. Probably Wednesday.”
Eleanor made herself smile. “That’s nice.”
Kit pulled a face. “Yes. I don’t know how he’s going to take the news that you’re no longer available, though.”
Eleanor blushed, even though she knew Kit was teasing her. “I shouldn’t think it will affect him in the least, since he has never met me,” she said with dignity, then realized that in so saying, she was obliquely concurring with Kit’s view that there was more than simple friendship between herself and Dirk. “Not that it’s the case,” she said quickly, digging herself further in. “I mean, Dirk and myself aren’t…”
Kit began to laugh.
“Oh, do leave me alone, Kit.” Eleanor was flustered, but after a while she had to smile herself. Kit was impossible, but life was certainly livelier with her around.
In the end, Arthur Ballantine’s proposed visit was postponed because of action on the Front. Kit was devastated and complained constantly, only rallying when a second letter arrived from him giving a revised date for his visit. But by then, Eleanor had too many other things to occupy her mind to worry much about it.
One morning, she was summoned to the matron’s office where, instead of the ticking off she fully expected to receive for she knew not what, she was asked if she would be prepared to help out in the operating theater for a few weeks as they were short-staffed. Even though Eleanor knew she wouldn’t have been asked had there been a qualified nurse available, she was thrilled. Kit, of course, couldn’t understand her enthusiasm at all; she would have been horrified if anyone had asked her to do it. But Eleanor was too excited by the prospect for it to be spoiled by her friend’s negative reaction.
Then another letter arrived from Dirk, and her heart lifted still further at the sight of the dark, scrawled handwriting on the envelope. She was pleased he had written again, and she hurried out to the courtyard garden as soon as she could to enjoy the luxury of reading it on her own.
Somewhere in the garden, a blackbird began to sing, and Eleanor sat on her bench with Dirk’s unopened letter on her lap, listening to the sound, a feeling of cautious happiness taking her by surprise. People here thought she was worth knowing—Kit, Dirk, even Sister Palmer in her own way, since, to her great surprise, it had been she who had recommended her as a suitable candidate for theater work.
The cat suddenly leapt out of the bushes and straight onto her lap. “Hello, there,” she said, smiling at him and stroking his silky body. The cat responded by curling himself up into a purring ball on her lap. She stroked him some more, and then finally she took Dirk’s letter from her pocket and ripped it open. She would reply to him once she’d read it, tell him all about her duties here and her excitement about being chosen to assist in theater.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS THREE FORTY-FIVE a.m. A thin, wet mist rose from the ground, filling the trench. Dirk and the other journalists had shared the officers’ breakfast of eggs and fried ham, washed down by tea made with condensed milk and rum. Neither the rum nor the condensed milk had adequately disguised the taste of smoke, but Dirk had managed not to give way to his instinct to spit the hot liquid out into the clay of the trench. This, after all, was what the men had to drink, and this was where they sat on these seats carved out of the same clay they’d burrowed in and fought over. He couldn’t insult what dignity they had left by rejecting any of it.
Conversation during breakfast had been intermittent and of the one-liner variety. “We’re throwing some heavy stuff into their trenches.” Or, when a German shell exploded uncomfortably nearby, “I say, the manners of the Hun leave something to be desired, don’t they? You’d think they’d let a man finish his breakfast in peace.”
The British and their way of speaking! Still, he was able to recognize their banter for what it was: a means of controlling their mounting tension, as zero hour grew nearer.
After breakfast, the journalists bade the officers farewell and moved to a vantage point where they could observe the advance in safety. Conversation was impossible. The sound of the bombardment was now so loud it obscured everything else, and the whole horizon in front of them was lit up by one continuous dancing flame of jagged flashes from the bursting shells. The broken walls of villages and the shattered stumps of trees stood out as grim silhouettes against the blazing horizon. It didn’t seem possible that any Germans would be alive when the barrage came to an end.
Zero hour was three fifty a.m. Minutes beforehand, the barrage came to a sudden, shocking stop, and for a moment, it was so utterly silent that Dirk could hear the man next to him breathing. He thought of all the hundreds of men down below, waiting, packed like corralled cattle.
He made an attempt to put himself in their place, imagining himself down there as one of their number waiting for the seconds to tick by. What would he think about? Home? The big barn on his parents’ farm lit up by the pink of the sunset? His mother’s hurt but accepting face when he’d told her he was leaving? Would he reach out to shake the hand of his friend beside him and take refuge in banter and bravado? Or would he be swallowing back tears of fear?
It was frightening enough to be standing here on the safe vantage point. Try as he might, he knew he could never really imagine what it would be like to be down there waiting to go over the top.
Leo was one of the waiting multitudes. Baines was right behind him, so close Leo fancied he could smell the man’s fetid breath. In reality, he suspected the stench originated from sou
rces far worse than the yellow-toothed cavern that was Baines’ mouth. They’d all heard about the bodies left to decay in No Man’s Land.
Leo’s nose and mouth accepted the smell, feasted on it even. This was what he’d waited all these weeks for, and his memory was feverishly at work, storing away all the details of the experience for such a time when he could express them in paint. The coolness of the drizzle against his salt perspiration. The taste of their indigestible breakfast repeating itself from his gut. The pain in his ears from an intensity of noise such as he’d never imagined possible. The wet clay of the trench pressing in on him from both sides.
“Get down, man!” Lieutenant Montague’s yelled command came too late. The oversized soldier in front of Leo fell into the mud, almost toppling the lot of them like dominoes.
As he clawed at the sides of the trench to stop himself from falling, the afterglow of a Hun’s flare gun allowed Leo to see the dead soldier’s surprised expression and the perfect circle of red in the center of his forehead. Suddenly, the press of men behind him forced him to step forward, his boot landing square in the corpse’s chest, causing the useless lungs to emit a gasping sound as they disgorged blood. The flare went out, covering the dead soldier in a sheet of respectful darkness, but the image of those staring eyes was fixed inside Leo’s mind. Definitely something else to paint.
Behind him, Baines was snuffling, and almost clinically Leo looked inside himself to examine how he felt. What was the shape of his own fear? Although he might welcome all the sensations that were assailing his senses, he was also afraid.
How would his fear express itself, he wondered? Would he suddenly start to cry like Baines? Or would he be moved to mumble a prayer like some of the others? Standing there waiting in the creeping dawn, an image entered the quiet, listening space of his mind. Edie, waiting in the darkness to clasp his face between her warm, work-roughened hands.
A Nightingale in Winter Page 11
