A Nightingale in Winter

by Margaret K Johnson

  “I don’t care if I never see your face again!”

  “Miss Martin?”

  “You’ve ruined your stepbrother’s life.”

  “Miss Martin, please talk to me. I’m a Roman Catholic priest. Nothing can be so terrible that it’s impossible for you to tell me about it.”

  “Ruined it! Do you hear?”

  “I’m going to fetch the doctor.”

  “No. No, please…please don’t.”

  “Ah, you’ve come back.” Edwards was smiling at her. “You looked as if you’d seen a ghost. I was most concerned.”

  A ghost. Her stepmother’s mouth stretching itself into snarled words of banishment.

  “I think perhaps I did…”

  Long hours alone in her room coping with the terror and the loneliness and the physical pain. When at last she’d ventured downstairs, it was to discover that her stepmother had left, taking her stepbrother with her.

  “These are terrible times for us all, Miss Martin. Really, the most terrible of times imaginable. Times that stretch the faith and endurance of us all to their absolute limits.” Edwards was squatting on the ground next to her in front of the swath of bodies. “To survive, it seems necessary not to try too hard to find answers. I’m not at all certain that there are any answers. The situation simply…is.” He looked at her. “I know you dislike me, Miss Martin, but as yet I don’t know why.”

  Eleanor’s ears became receptive again. She heard the moans and the cries of a hundred men bleeding into the earth. One man looked at her, his eyes entreating her to leave her own private hell in order to help him with his.

  “I don’t dislike you,” she said, wishing with all her heart that he were Dirk; longing for him to be here with her with all her heart.

  “Then you dislike what I stand for. You dislike the Cloth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you are an atheist?”

  No. She feared God, equating him to her father. But she was not indifferent to Him.

  “I try not to think about religion,” she said, and Edwards nodded.

  “That’s a shame, I think. It can be such a comfort.”

  Comfort. God hadn’t been there to comfort her all those years ago. Nobody had. Not even her father.

  “They’ve left,” he told her. “Charlotte has gone, and she’s taken Reginald with her. We shall tell everyone they are dead. We shall wait a few weeks, and then we shall tell them they have both been killed in a freak accident abroad. This is what they shall believe. But we will both know that you drove them away. You. You alone are to blame.”

  “Miss Martin? You look weak again. I’ll fetch you a glass of water.”

  It was her fault; they all thought so. Something about her behavior toward her stepbrother was incorrect and led him to believe…what he’d believed. She was wicked, she was evil, and she fully deserved the punishment of her father’s hatred and the utter, utter loneliness of living every minute of every hour with the consequences of her actions. The sheer terror she felt every time she entered her father’s church that she would be struck down by a thunderbolt.

  Edwards was back, holding out a glass of water to her.

  “Miss Martin, I’m afraid I have a burial now,” he apologized, still looking at her with concern. “The relatives are here…Will you be all right?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I’ll be all right.”

  Still he hovered. “I’ll check up on you later on, if you don’t mind?”

  “All right.”

  “Will you go to your tent to rest now?”

  “When I’ve finished here.” One of the wounded was struggling to get her attention, his voice a dry rasp in his parched throat.

  “Good.”

  The priest finally went on his way. She took the cup of water he’d fetched for her over to the soldier and helped him to drink a little. Suddenly, there was a chorus of requests for a drink, and she had to go and fill a pail from a tap and dip the little cup in time and time again.

  “Thank you, Sister.”

  “God bless you, nurse.”

  “Smile for us, Sister, smile…”

  Somewhere amongst the horizontal ranks of the casualties, someone began to sing softly.

  “There’s a long, long trail a-winding, into the land of my dreams…”

  It was beautiful and unbearably wistful, and Eleanor’s eyes were not the only ones to fill with tears.

  “Where the nightingales are singing, and a white moon beams…”

  Nightingales. Eleanor stood and closed her eyes, wishing that somehow she could telegraph her need to Dirk, and that he would pick up on her thoughts and come to her.

  “We didn’t stand a chance out there, Sister. Not a chance…” a soldier said close by, and she opened her eyes again, bending over him.

  “Shh…I know, I know,” she said, while somewhere in her mind the window to the past opened a little further. What if it hadn’t been her fault after all? What if she hadn’t been to blame? These men thought she was a good person. Dirk thought she was a good person. Perhaps, after all, she had been a victim, just as all these men were victims.

  “There’s a long, long night of waiting, until my dreams come true…”

  The beautiful clarity of the voice was trembling now, and Eleanor found she was weeping, holding the hands of the soldier lying on the ground before her, because the song was so beautiful and the prospect of being free from blame was too painful to contemplate.

  “We were walking, Sister. Walking. Those were the orders, so we had to obey them. Never mind the wire not being cut as was planned. Never mind our bloody barrage not finding its mark. Walking straight into their guns. Walking. It was like a dream. Like sleepwalking.”

  For as long as Eleanor could remember, she’d locked the memories away and denied their existence. Even now, she could only bear to think of the aftermath rather than the actual event itself. She couldn’t even bring herself to give it a name. To do so would be to make it too real.

  And perhaps it wasn’t real at all anyway? Perhaps she’d invented the whole thing, willfully, with her over-vivid imagination.

  “D’you know what the worst thing is, Sister?” the soldier asked her.

  Her throat felt parched. “What?” she croaked.

  “The powerlessness of everything. Having other people deciding your fate. You put your trust in them, and then they betray you. Where were the generals who came up with the plans when the music was there to be faced, eh? Gone, that’s bloody where! I wanted to die out there, Sister, truly I did. Anything but to have to go out there and face that again…”

  Once she’d wanted to die too. Anything but have to face up to what had happened. But ironically, the war had saved her, given her a purpose in life, an escape route. The hospital had become her home, the staff and patients her adopted family.

  The soldier’s eyes were closed now. He was asleep, or else he’d given up. Eleanor got to her feet, her eyes automatically scanning the sea of bodies for anyone else that might need her.

  And that was when she saw Leo Cartwright. He was lying down on the ground amongst the injured, and he was staring at her.

  “Private Cartwright!” she said, a surprised hand going up to her throat.

  He smiled at her. “VAD Martin. Eleanor. You can’t believe how good it is to see you.”

  As she watched, Leo sat up just as if he wasn’t wounded at all—the only upright figure in the midst of an ocean of khaki and red, peeling the field dressing from his neck and dropping it on the ground.

  Then he spoke. “Come on, Eleanor,” he said, holding out his hand for her, just as her stepbrother had done many years before. “Let’s get away from here. You need a break, and there’s so much I want to talk to you about. Come.”

  A terrible suspicion was growing in Dirk’s mind.

  Nobody would tell him anything concrete; nobody seemed to know anything concrete. But soldier after bewildered soldier spoke of confusion and of plans that had gone hopeless
ly wrong. There was talk of the number of casualties being phenomenal, yet even this was unconfirmed. And so Dirk had decided to see for himself. He was en route to Casualty Clearing Station Number Six.

  Are you sure you aren’t just using this as an excuse to see Eleanor? a little voice inside his head asked as he was jolted along in a Canadian field ambulance. So what if I am? answered another voice, and as this voice caused his conscience to rankle a bit, he ignored it and concentrated on questioning the ambulance driver.

  “So, you say you’ve done this trip a lot of times since the battle started?”

  “Pal, I’ve lost count of how many times. At first, it was just going in full and coming out empty: full, empty, over and over. Now they’ve finally got some hospital trains in service, so I’m full on the way there and full on the way back. Can’t remember what sleep is, I can’t. Still, all I have to do is drive, when all’s said and done. It’s those doctors and nurses you ought to be interviewing. They’re saints, they are.”

  A seal of approval on his visit! Dirk smiled, knowing full well that he would have been en route to see Eleanor anyway, seal of approval or no seal of approval.

  “Come on, Eleanor,” Leo was saying. “We don’t want to disturb all these gentlemen with our chatter, do we?”

  He took her by the hand as if he were leading her out onto a balcony at a dance, as if the “gentlemen” were dancing or playing billiards instead of dying on the bare earth.

  “I can’t just walk away from my work,” Eleanor protested, although in fact the sister had told her to rest, and she knew no objection would be made to her going for a walk. The plain truth was, she didn’t want to go anywhere with Leo Cartwright. She may have been able to stifle her instincts about the man for a while, but now, combined as they were with the terrifying images from her past in her mind, those instincts were back in force.

  “What a glorious day it is,” Leo was saying. “Early Summer in France. Très jolie, as they say here. Burgeoning buds and swelling sap. At least, where the bombs haven’t put paid to nature’s instincts.”

  As he led her away from the marquees toward a group of trees, Eleanor remembered what Julian Montague had said about Leo Cartwright. “I can’t quite like the man, Sister, even though he saved my life.”

  Eleanor stopped walking. “I’m sorry, Private Cartwright, but I really must go back,” she said, trying to sound firm. “There’s so very much work to be done, and so very few of us to do it.”

  Leo stopped to look at her, his expression crestfallen. “Oh, surely, Eleanor, you can spare me five minutes of your time? I was so very upset, you know, when you didn’t come to see me before I was discharged.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “You’re busy, I understand. But the thing is, you can make up for it now, can’t you? I can tell you all about England. I’ve been there recently, you see. Summer’s getting on rather better there, of course, with no shells to halt its progress.” He walked on, taking them into the trees. “Your father’s garden was looking especially good, I thought,” he added.

  The mention of her father caused her legs to stumble.

  “You…saw my father?” she asked tremulously.

  He smiled at her. “Yes. I hope you don’t mind? I have to admit, I was curious, after you denied any knowledge of Pryce. He was so insistent that he knew you, you see. So, when I happened to find myself in that part of the world, I decided to find out for myself. I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know your father is very well. And very interested to hear how his daughter was getting on, of course.”

  They were within the group of trees now, his features in shadow now. He turned her to face him, taking hold of her other hand. “I thought your father a highly intelligent man, most interesting. We discussed the war. At first, that is. Yes.” He nodded to himself. “Then we spoke of you, and, of course, then he was even more interesting to me. You know, it’s a funny thing, but I just knew, straight away, as soon as I met you that you were different. I got such a strong sense that you were concealing something, and when you denied knowing Pryce, that feeling was confirmed.”

  Eleanor dropped her eyes, her face flaming. If only she hadn’t lied that day when Pryce had confronted her. It had been a reaction born of panic, and one she deeply regretted now. If she’d only smiled and agreed that she was indeed from Hertfordshire, and commented on what a coincidence it was, then Leo would never have thought of going to visit her father. Why had he gone? What did he want? For it was dawning on her that he did want something from her; there was a hunger on his face. His eyes had an uncomfortable intensity about them.

  “How is my father?” she asked, trying to make the conversation normal again.

  Leo Cartwright’s eyebrows lifted. “He seemed very well to me,” he said. “Talkative fellow, isn’t he? So very keen to discuss you.” He smiled, and it turned into a laugh. “There I was, thinking I was the one with all the dark secrets, and it turns out that you have almost as many as I do myself.”

  “What did he say?” she whispered, and he took her hand again, lifting it to his lips.

  “Please don’t look so worried, my dear. He didn’t say anything to make me feel badly toward you. The very opposite, in fact. When I heard about you deliberately seducing your stepbrother, I couldn’t have been more pleased. I had already formed a strong attachment toward you, but when I heard about your past, it really made me want to make sure you never left my side again. We’re two of a kind, me and you.”

  The ambulance journey was a bumpy one, and Dirk pitied the poor guys lying injured in the back, because, even with the benefit of a seat, his body ached like hell. Not that he spent much time dwelling on his aches and pains. The sight that met his eyes at Casualty Clearing Station Number Six was beyond belief.

  “My God,” he said, climbing down from the ambulance and staring about him in horror. For although his companion had talked incessantly about how appalling conditions were, nothing he said could have prepared Dirk for the reality of the casualties lying on the ground like so much cargo on a dockside.

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Yes, but…” Dirk stood there, gazing around him, awe-struck.

  “I know, pal, I know.” The driver began to busy himself with his load of casualties, and Dirk pulled himself together sufficiently to ask whether he needed any help.

  “No, the orderlies will help. You get to your interviewing. God knows we need someone who’s prepared to tell the truth.”

  It was exactly the encouragement Dirk needed, and, thanking the Canadian once again, he hurried off, taking his notebook from his pocket as he went. Mindful of the risk of being ejected or of getting in the way, he first went to seek permission, finally receiving it from an extremely overworked and weary-looking doctor. Then he toured the wards, speaking only to those soldiers who were fit enough to talk and hearing from them over and over again the same stories of incompetence and hopelessness.

  The gnawing doubt in his belly quickly solidified into indigestible certainty. It had all gone horribly, horribly wrong. Nobody in their right mind could possibly relate the nightmare these broken men spoke of so eloquently with the victory he and his colleagues had described in their newspaper stories.

  He was sickened, sickened to his very soul. He wanted to crawl out of that tent and find somewhere to be alone so that he could curl up and weep in sheer despair. His hands felt sullied, as if through writing what he’d written, he somehow shared some of the responsibility for what had happened.

  “It’s a curious thing, love, isn’t it?” Leo was saying, his grip on her hand painful now. “You can’t imagine how very many girls have thought themselves to be in love with me. Pathetic, the lot of them, with their big cows’ eyes, pouting lips all over the place when I wanted to paint rather than be with them. I have to confess I made use of them all. And why not, when they were offering themselves to me on a plate? But I knew right from the start that you were different from them, and when your father told
me what had happened with your stepbrother, I was further convinced of it. We are people who know what we want, you and I, and conventions have little to do with it.”

  He was unhinged; surely, he must be. Surely nobody could have misread a few sheets of wrapping paper and some polite inquiries about his drawing to be a declaration of grand passion? It could be shell shock, of course. In her time as a VAD, she’d seen many good men go off the rails due to the horrors they’d witnessed on the Front. Although he had undoubtedly witnessed the same horrors as all those men, Leo Cartwright seemed different. She wished now with all her heart that she had insisted on returning to her tent to rest, that his talk of her father hadn’t distracted her and led her to end up alone in this wood with him. But it was too late for regrets. She was here, and she must deal with the situation.

  Leo was smiling, her hand clasped to his chest. “But you know, Eleanor, strangely, I find that now that I am indeed in love, some conventions have some relevance for me. Or at least, one convention in particular.” He looked down, seeming slightly embarrassed, and gave a nervous laugh. “Your father assumed I’d gone to see him to ask for your hand in marriage, you see, and, you know, it occurred to me while I was there, that I should like nothing better.”

  “Please, Private Cartwright,” Eleanor said, hoping to prevent him from speaking the words, but he reached out to place a silencing finger across her lips before going down on one knee.

  “Eleanor, my dear,” he said. “Will you do me the very great honor of marrying me?”

  Leaving the marquee, Dirk emerged into the daylight. But there was no escaping the casualties, for they lay all around him, row upon row of them.

  “I say,” said a voice. “Are you all right?”

  Looking round, Dirk saw a VAD he vaguely recognized from his first visit to Revigny. “It’s just…a little shocking, isn’t it?” he said, and she gave a grim nod.

  “Yes, it is. We nurses just have to keep our heads down and get on with it. There’s nothing else to be done. But listen, are you here to see anybody in particular?”