Queen's Nurse

by Jane Arbor

  Upon some the night’s terror had crept slowly enough to give them time to salvage a few oddly assorted possessions; others it had engulfed suddenly and mercilessly, forcing them to abandon all but their lives to it. And for all any of them had with which to start afresh, they appeared equally empty-handed.

  A mother had a bundle of children’s clothes in one hand, a new electric kettle in the other; a sleepy toddler had a finger crooked around the trunk of a toy elephant; a boy carried a cage of ferrets; a pathetically dignified old lady, an umbrella. All, later, would have stories to tell, might even find something to joke about in their plight. But for the moment they were silent and bewildered, their thoughts turned in upon the torment of the dark hours behind them. It was difficult, Jess found, to offer them any but the wordless, practical sympathy of finding them dry clothing, of feeding their children, of attending their bruises and of drugging their shocked systems into the sleep they could not otherwise find.

  The police had sent up blankets and canned meat and biscuits from the civil defense store in the village, and there were many ready helpers besides Jess. But still, as hour by hour the huddled groups came in, the resources of Quintains were taxed to the utmost, and of all the crowding impressions of the night one of the most vivid for Jess was Mrs. Seacombe’s handling of each unlooked-for crisis. She was everywhere—comforting a whimpering baby, directing the arrangement of bedding, carrying trays, helping Jess to do a dressing. This, Jess realized, was the quiet, unobtrusive authority she wielded every day for the smooth running of Muir’s household. But it was as if in this night’s work she had found the deeper satisfaction still of merging her own great sorrow in the common anguish about her.

  Jess could hear no news of Liane. Those people she asked either shook their heads or raised a momentary hope by saying they had seen the girl, only to admit later that that had been yesterday or last week. There were others—for all her promise to Muir—whom she could not bring herself to question while there were pitiful, as yet unexplained gaps in their own families. Sadly she came to realize that this thing had the vastness of war, grinding the individual tragedy down to no more than one poignant item in the whole. This was Muir’s tragedy, if Liane was not found. And though he might share it with any one of the sad people here, it would remain his own to come through—alone.

  Before midnight the telephone exchange at Starmouth went dead, breaking their last link with normality. Later they would learn the measure of the thing they shared with thousands—the devastation of two hundred miles of coast, the public services broken down one by one, town by town rendered uninhabitable, farm by farm ruined. But for the moment the silent telephone only emphasized their isolation from the world. As she put down the receiver for the last time Jess was thinking that if light and water supplies should go next—what then?

  Petra Tempton-Burney was there with her mother, who was less plaintive than usual, as if the touch of real danger upon her shoulders had taught her the value of having Petra to depend upon. Thanks to Petra’s prompt action they had got away early in a neighbor’s car and all the houses around had been warned in time. Petra had managed to bring her dogs with her and told Jess she had carried crates of protesting hens to a loft under the bungalow roof. Now, having seen her mother to safety, her whole concern was for all the other livestock—the cats and dogs and pet birds—which might have had to be abandoned when their owners had been driven from their homes.

  Her own dogs had been shut into a stable for the night, and she sat fondling Liane’s puppy, who, frightened by the many strange faces about him was whimpering for comfort. “They’ll let me go back, won’t they?” she begged Jess. “Any animals that are there will be terrified, but they’ll have to be fed and watered, and I could take charge of all that, if I were allowed to.”

  But Jess, of course, could not suggest when anyone would be able to return to the coast though, no less than Petra, she was haunted by thoughts of the helpless, desolate animals left behind.

  In order to distract Petra she took her into the kitchen to join the workers who were cutting sandwiches and preparing cocoa by the jugful. Before she left, Jess saw Petra joined by Jane Bretton, who had come to help when her husband had gone with Muir down to the coast. She and Petra made a team for making sandwiches, but Jess noticed that very soon Petra was having to suppress her impatience of Jane’s inept efforts to keep up with the work of her own swift, expert knife.

  When Jess went back an hour later Jane had gone.

  Petra reported with a wry smile, “She said she simply must get some sleep or she would be a rag in the morning and wouldn’t be fit for a thing.”

  “What does she think the rest of us are going to be fit for?” queried Jess tiredly.

  “I don’t know. I said, ‘All right. Go home’—because she wasn’t being much help, anyway. But then she went on to say something that really made me lose my temper—”

  “I don’t believe that’s possible, Petra!”

  “It is, and I did,” Petra assured her, wide-eyed. “She said that the whole thing was tiresome, because when Mr. Forester rang up and told Edgar to be ready to go out with the rescue parties, she and Edgar had just been about to sit down to a celebration dinner—only the two of them, but with champagne. And at that I flared up and said it was a pity, wasn’t it, that the floods had been timed to spoil her cozy dinner party. It didn’t matter, did it, about the houses, and the frightened children and the people and the animals. I don’t know all I said after that, but I went on for quite a time!”

  “What did Jane say when you had stopped?”

  “She said she would not have such impertinence from a chit like me, and she swept off.”

  “You’ve made an enemy for life, Petra. But I suppose that doesn’t matter as, soon, you won’t be here.”

  “It wouldn’t matter anyway, because they won’t be here either.”

  “The Brettons are leaving?” asked Jess in surprise.

  “Yes. Edgar has been left an estate in Worcestershire by his rich uncle, and he has given Mr. Forester notice. That was what they were celebrating, you see.”

  Jess heard the news without emotion. At any other time she would have been relieved to be free of more of Jane Bretton’s unpredictable malice, but against the background of the night’s tragedy it appeared only as a personal pinprick about which she could not care very much.

  As there had been no fresh arrivals for some time, Jess persuaded Petra to return to her mother and to try to get some sleep. She could not sleep herself. She was too alert, .with every nerve tingling. But she went to find a chair and a blanket to wrap herself in, because when Mrs. Seacombe had reluctantly agreed to go and he down for an hour, she had made Jess promise to get some rest, too.

  As the house quietened, so the unabated roar of the gale seemed to grow in volume. To Jess it was as if her whole nervous system had become an ear that was listening to it, striving to hear through it in search of the peace that must surely lie behind it somewhere. But it shrieked on, and somewhere out in it was Muir certainly and perhaps Liane, too.

  Liane—Where was Liane? Vaguely in Jess’s thoughts a thread of conviction was beginning to run—that in the girl’s disappearance there was something more mysterious than either she or Muir had guessed when they had concluded that she must have broken her promise to Jess and had gone out to The Warrens again. She might have done. But if she had, why had no one seen her in either her own village or in Cranemouth on her way?

  Somewhere, Jess felt, their reasoning from the facts they had, had gone wrong. But where? And if Liane had not been trapped by the pitiless onrush of the flood, where was she, and why had she not come home?

  A child nearby stirred in its sleep, woke with a startled whimper and went on crying until everyone in the room who had managed to drop off was awakened. There were some bewildered murmurs, but nobody grumbled as they flexed their stiff limbs and prepared to face the grim prospects of the day before them.

  Jess s
uggested that tea would be a good idea and went to the kitchen to prepare some. While she was waiting for the kettles to boil, she began to tackle some of the dishes that had been left when the last tired worker had gone to get some rest. But she had only just stacked the cups and plates in the sink and turned a steaming tap upon them when she was joined by the Quintains kitchen maid, a new girl named Ethel, who was little more than a child.

  “Oh, nurse,” she protested, “that’s my work, really. I ought to have got it done, but Mrs. Seacombe said I must leave it and go to bed, and I could finish it in the morning. Is it morning, nurse? It’s still dark, and I haven’t got a clock. Cook usually calls me, but I was awake, so I got up.”

  “Yes, it’s morning, though the night has been so strange that I’ve never felt quite sure that morning would come,” admitted Jess. She dried her hands and relinquished her place at the sink. “If you’ll carry on then, Ethel, someone will be along to help you presently, and meanwhile I’ll make some tea. You’d like a cup, wouldn’t you?”

  When it was ready the girl came to the table to drink it. She stirred it and then glanced shyly at Jess. “Have they—I mean, is there any news of Miss Liane, nurse?”

  “Not yet, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh—!” The liquid brown eyes looking at Jess filled with tears. “And she was so sweet to me always! I loved her. And wasn’t she pretty?”

  “Yes, but you mustn’t let yourself think she won’t be found. It’s just that Mr. Forester can’t think where she could be and still be safe. But there must be news soon.”

  “Oh, I do hope so! I mean, I can’t bear to think that when she was telephoning yesterday might be the last time I’d ever see her—”

  Jess caught her breath. “When she was telephoning, Ethel? When was that?” she asked sharply.

  “Yesterday afternoon, nurse, not long after the dining room luncheon had been cleared. I’d been sent through to the hall to bring out an azalea plant for watering, and she was there then.”

  “Telephoning or answering it?” Did Muir know about this?

  “Answering it, because she said, ‘Hold on,’ and came to open the baize door for me to go through with the plant and she apologized—she was sweet like that—for hurrying me Out, but it was a London call, and she couldn’t hear very well when I clattered the pot.”

  A London call! And Liane had disappeared just afterward! Muir had said that she hadn’t been seen since she had lunched with Mrs. Seacombe, but surely he must know of as important a clue as this? In almost unbearable anxiety Jess urged, “You’ve told Mr. Forester this, of course?”

  “No, I—” The girl stopped, dismayed by Jess’s sharp-drawn exclamation. “I mean, Mr. Forester would have known, wouldn’t he?”

  “But he didn’t know, Ethel! If he’d known he would have acted upon it, because it is possible it could alter everything. But he couldn’t have known if you didn’t tell him. Oh, why on earth didn’t you, child?”

  Ethel’s lip quivered. “Nobody asked me, nurse! It was my afternoon out, and when I came back after supper, the people were coming in from Cranemouth. They were talking about Miss Liane in the kitchen, of course. But I never thought they didn’t know all about her up till the time she went out and didn’t come back. Oh, nurse, I haven’t done wrong, have I?”

  “Not wrong, Ethel. It must have been sheer mischance that, though everyone else about the house was questioned, no one questioned you. And you couldn’t be blamed for thinking you knew no more about Miss Liane’s movements than anyone else. But if only, if only you had mentioned it sooner!”

  “Does it—does it make such a difference then?”

  A difference! Jess was already quivering with the hope that it made all the difference. For the girl’s story of a London telephone call fitted in with her own rankling conviction that something about Liane’s disappearance had been misread. And now, in a flash of intuition she knew what it was. Liane had gone out only in a country coat and hatless, making it look as if she had not meant to go far. But supposing—just supposing, for hope’s sake!—that she had gone out, hurriedly and without leaving a message, upon the impulse of that London call she had taken. She might even have gone up to London just as she was. And that surely meant that she was safe?

  It was a slender chance, Jess knew. A chance, perhaps, into which only her wishful hope was reading something important. But she was convinced that Muir had had no conception that Liane might have gone up to London, or he would have said so. And as only Muir could suggest what friends there might have phoned her so urgently, Muir must learn Ethel’s news without delay.

  But how? No word had come back from him during the night, and Jess had no idea where he might be found. At ebb tide he could have tried to get a boat out to The Warrens in search of Liane, hopeless though such a task would be in darkness and in an ebb much higher than a normal flood tide. Or he might be engaged in rescue work or patrolling any part of a long coastline. But he must be told. And as, in this new, strange world of dead communications, only word of mouth could reach him, she must carry the message herself.

  She had no idea of the conditions down at the coast by now, but she must get there somehow, and when she went urgently to Mrs. Seacombe they both agreed that, if not Jess, someone must carry the news to Muir.

  “I’ll go,” urged Jess, knowing that she could not bear the suspense of not doing so. She had hoped Mrs. Seacombe might understand the significance of the telephone call from London, but with a touch of her subservient dignity Mrs. Seacombe said that of course she would not know what friends Miss Hart had in London, though Mr. Forester would. But how, she asked anxiously, did Jess mean to go?

  “I don’t know,” admitted Jess. “By car, I suppose, though there’s no telling how far a car can get by road. And I shall have to waste time going down to the village for mine.”

  “Can you drive anything, my dear?” asked Mrs. Seacombe. “If so, there’s that American army jeep of Mr. Forester’s—”

  Of course! The jeep Muir had mentioned last night. Jess had never driven any but a small private car, and the jeep probably had a left-hand drive as well as being strange in other ways. But to take it would save valuable time, so she had no choice.

  The gardeners and Muir’s indoor manservant had gone with him to help with the rescue work, so there was no one to help her. But Mrs. Seacombe went with her to open the garage and to stand by while Jess ran the engine and backed the jeep out.

  “Good luck, Jess, my dear,” she smiled tremulously. “It’s brave of you to go.”

  Jess shook her head. Brave? To make the only effort she could for Muir whom she loved, for Liane whom he loved.

  And Mrs. Seacombe could not have known that she stabbed straight at Jess’s heart when she went on, “Perhaps it’s not my place to say so, but I’d sometimes thought Mr. Forester would marry Miss Hart because he had a duty toward her and because in his position he needs a wife. It was only last night, when she was lost, that I realized how much, how very much he must care for her. In the way of—of love, I mean.”

  “Yes.” Jess stared at her gloved hands upon the steering wheel. It was on an impulse she could not resist that she asked, “Did you know that your son loved her, too?” Too late she realized the cruelty of having spoken of Peter in the past tense.

  But Mrs. Seacombe replied quietly, “Yes, I knew. I thought it my duty to Mr. Forester to try to keep them apart, and I never discussed it with Peter. But since—” she bit her lip to control its quivering “—since, I’ve reproached myself for cheating him of a little happiness he might have had. And I’ve wondered whether even Mr. Forester might have been willing to take his chance against her choosing my boy instead of him.” She paused, and when she spoke again it was as the housekeeper who knew her place. She said, “But, of course, that was only a wild dream of mine for Peter’s sake. Miss Hart would never have thought of him in that way, and it wouldn’t have been at all suitable if she had.”

  As if, thought Jess sadly
as she drove away, the heart took any count of suitability or listened to any argument but its own. Did the old always forget the wilful, passionate impulses their own youth must have known?

  It was growing light now, and she gained confidence as she began to get the feel of the jeep’s powerful engine. Except for the angrily skirling river, which ran almost level with the roadway at the bridge, the floods had not reached Crane-by-Sea, and the road which ran parallel with the creek down to Cranemouth was still passable.

  Her heart sank when the jeep’s lights, raking ahead, were reflected back from the first continuous sheet of water across the road. But when she reached it, it was only a few inches deep, and by changing gear and edging cautiously along, she was able to keep going, even when she was driving through a foot and more of water.

  She wondered if she could hope to keep going in the jeep until she reached the harbor, where she might hope to find Muir or to get some news of his whereabouts. But the tide, she calculated, was flowing hard again, and she was increasingly worried by the sputtering and checking of the engine as the jeep plunged on through water that deepened, yard by following yard.

  Now there were no landmarks, no discernible roads nor paths nor turnings—only a vast lake that lapped in angry ruffles at the doors and windows of Cranemouth’s abandoned houses, and nothing else in sight.

  Jess tried to concentrate on edging the car forward, though a panic of loneliness was sweeping over her, and she was dreading the moment when she might have to leave the jeep and step down into a depth at which she could guess now but which might hold unknown hazards ahead.

  The wind was chopping the water surface into waves that scurried and broke against the jeep and slid away in its wake until the biggest surge yet slapped high across the jeep’s hood, and Jess was already prepared for the last protesting sputter with which the engine died. This, she told herself resignedly as she drew almost unnecessarily upon the hand brake, was it.