‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What in the world do I have to offer your assassins?’
She chose the word deliberately – for impact, yes – but he only smiled. She wasn’t quite sure if she was being patronized or applauded. Both, probably.
He said, ‘Well, you can teach them to rough-house at close quarters. Those were two of the major’s finest, and you disabled them both in short order. Sometimes a soldier’s not best placed to see what’s needed. He looks for the military solution, the big guns. They need to unlearn that, and improvise with whatever comes to hand. As you did last night. Fighting from weakness is an art these men have to acquire, and they might best learn it from a woman.
‘More than that, though,’ he went on, lifting a hand again to stifle her, ‘you can teach them to be confident in themselves. Lamed and twisted as they are, we can only do so much. The colonel can patch their bodies, and the major can train them up. I can work on their minds. Much as it pains me to admit it, though, that’s not the last requirement. These boys have souls. I’m sorry for the word, it comes with too much baggage, but it’s the best I can manage, the closest to what I need to say. We’re asking them to do something tremendous, and they need every possible weapon in their armoury if they’re to stand any chance of achieving it. I do believe that you can help. I’ve seen what a difference you’ve made already, and not only to the men on your own corridor.’
He meant Michael again, of course. He wasn’t seriously suggesting that she should sleep with a whole platoon of men, of course not – though she’d like to accuse him of it, just to hear his laugh, and then his comeback – but he was asking her to make a commitment to them. For the benefit of their morale indeed: to make them feel better about going off to their deaths, and to help them do it better.
She said, ‘You do realize that I’m totally opposed to your whole project here? That I stand with Colonel Treadgold? I want to make these men well and healthy, I want to restore them, not send them off to destroy themselves.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That’s what I want from you: that restoration of spirit. You can make them feel like men again, it’s a gift you have. You don’t see it, perhaps, but I do. Even when you’re only passing cake and pouring tea, you lift their souls.’
‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly confused, ‘any woman would do that. Any female company. Men really are that shallow, at that age.’
‘I think not. Well, yes, they are, of course – but I’m seeing you do more than others can. Matron doesn’t lighten their hearts, other sisters don’t send them away feeling as though they could bend iron bars with their teeth. You do it without even realizing the effect you have – and all this even when you were feeling like death yourself. I think your husband must have been a very lucky man.’
He knew about Peter, he knew about Michael. He knew about her. You know too much, Aesculapius. Knew too much, saw far too much and understood what he was seeing, which wasn’t fair at all. He was probably never shallow. He was probably never young.
She could suddenly not bear to sit under the gaze of those knowing eyes any longer. She’d come here on a mission, and felt that she had failed it: or rather, that it had been doomed from the start, a non-runner.
She said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I—’
She didn’t have the words, apparently, for what she didn’t think; but she was on her feet already, and that surely should be clear enough.
He said, ‘Take your time. Let the idea settle. None of us is in too much hurry here. Think about what we do, think about what you can do. For us, for the war effort. Give me a decision when you’re ready.’
She was technically an officer. That meant he was probably technically her superior, and could give her an order. And was not doing that, would not do it; was making it clear that he wanted her as a volunteer or not at all.
And of course she would not, could not volunteer, what was he thinking? She was on the other side, firmly with the colonel against everything the two majors stood for.
Except the war, of course, winning the war. But even so. Not this way. No.
She nodded meaninglessly, and blundered out of there. Even if he’d wanted her only for her prizefighting skills – oh, Peter, and was this what his tuition was worth in the end, not to save her life after all but to land her in a maze of her own making? – she would have felt a fraud, because it really wasn’t she who reduced the two men, it was the house. Or Peter, or some combination of the two. Not her, not really. She didn’t think.
He didn’t see everything, then. He hadn’t seen that.
It was something to cling to, perhaps.
Not enough, perhaps. If the floor felt a little yielding beneath her feet as she walked away, that wasn’t Peter up to his old vertiginous tricks, trying to trip her into falling with him. Nor the house, trying to hurl her after him. Only her own dazed state, startled and confused and uncertain on her feet.
Ruth set her back decidedly to Aesculapius and all that he implied. Marched away down the corridor, or tried to. What he had said came with her, sitting in her head like something dirty, like someone self-consciously dirty, leaning forward as they sat, not to leave their grime on the antimacassar.
The men respond to you. Of course they did, they were men. Young men, boys. She’d been saying no more than the truth, when she said that they would respond that way to any woman.
Well, all right. Any woman except Matron, perhaps. Matron would daunt them. Ruth didn’t do that. But nor did Judith, she was sure, nor any of the other women here. There wasn’t anything different about her. Nothing genuine, for Major Dorian to be seeing. It wasn’t as though boys had flocked about her particularly, wasps to the honeypot, when she was younger. Peter had been her first love, first and only.
Until now. Did that make a difference, was there a difference in her? Well, yes, of course. Michael made her feel . . . extraordinarily different. That must show, however discreet she tried to be. Perhaps the men picked up on that, responded to it. Wasps to the honeypot. Yes.
Except that to Aesculapius, at least, Michael was a symptom, not the cause: one more wasp, evidence of attraction. Nothing else in her was new, except . . .
Except. Yes.
She came to this house, and it haunted her. Whether or not she brought her own ghost with her. This was where it happened, and it didn’t seem to happen much to others.
Well, Cook said that she wasn’t alone, at least. He had known this before, this hauntedness, in other people and himself. And then there was Flight Lieutenant Barker, something dreadful had most certainly happened to him. So it was the house, not her. Not just her. But not everyone, that too. Not Michael. Something in her, then – her depth of loss, perhaps, or the way she had craved death, or both together if they could ever be separated, if they weren’t in fact the same thing anyway – had drawn whatever it was, the spirit of the house, to weave its spells around her. And something in her was drawing the patients too, as though she had a spark that others lacked; and that was either a monstrous coincidence, or else deep down it was somehow the same thing.
Or Aesculapius was playing mind games with her, perhaps, planting seeds to see what came of them, what fruited. Of course he would do that, it was his profession and his purpose here.
She shook her head sharply, and took the stairs at a trot. Heading straight for Major Black’s terrain – uninterrupted, she was sure: he’d be avoiding her, the coward – and so through to her own corridor and her own task.
The ballroom was empty, as expected; and what must have been the supper room, that too. The main hall, not a soul about. The corridor beyond, lecture rooms and suchlike, their doors standing wide and the rooms all empty. Except that here was one, Herr Braun’s workroom, and the door was closed but the room wasn’t empty beyond it, Ruth could hear that. Above the sound of her own clicking heels, she could hear strange noises, some violent disturbance, the crash of falling furniture and softer thudding sounds, as it might be a body cras
hing into a wall, again and again, as though men were fighting and blundering about in there.
She hesitated only a moment, before she opened the door.
And stood on the threshold, staring; and hesitated only a moment more, before she screamed.
FOURTEEN
Screamed and screamed, and could apparently not stop screaming.
Nor move: neither to go in and help, nor to run away.
Not all horror happens in the dark, or in a rising fog. Life is not always kind that way.
Ruth had windows at her back, all along the corridor; in Herr Braun’s workroom the electric lamps were blazing, unshaded. Good tailors always want extra light to work their tiny stitches.
She could see all too clearly what had been done in here. She would have welcomed a little veiling shadow.
She couldn’t remember his first name. He was Herr Braun in her head, with labels like dog tags hung around his neck: refugee and Jewish and gardener, internee and tutor and tailor, any or all of those, with a query over friend. She had thought he might become one. She had thought she might pursue that. Then she had thought again, when she realized quite how dedicated he was to Major Black’s pursuits. There was a grim devotion beneath his urbanity that was cold at best. She wasn’t sure how close she wanted to place herself to that. Nor whether she would ever want to debate it with him.
Now – well, now there would be no debating, and she didn’t want to go anywhere near him, even if she could have managed it. Her feet wouldn’t shift from where they were planted like stone; and he, he would be the devil to catch. He was careering unpredictably all about his wide room, slamming into walls and stumbling over fallen sticks of furniture. Never quite falling, though he made no obvious effort to save himself. Fear somehow kept him on his feet, as pain must keep him moving.
Ruth screamed on his behalf, because he could not.
His head was thrown back, too cruelly lit. If Ruth had thought him gaunt before, he was utterly fleshless now, as though his last trace of comfort had melted in the furnace of extremity. He could be nothing now except the bare man, skin and bone quite unrelieved.
The tailor, at his fitting.
His eyelids glittered in the light, where scores of pinheads held them closed. His narrow lips the same, except that it was needles that held those: the curved needles he would use on leather, a long rank of them, in and out.
She wondered – distantly, almost dimly, as though she could not quite see, or not quite think – why he did not try to pull them out, why he just cannoned off walls in his agony and made no effort to help himself.
Then she saw how he held his hands up before him, blind and begging. She saw how needles erupted from every fingertip, and no, he would not be using those hands in a hurry. Not for anything, perhaps not ever again.
Horribly, there was no blood on face or hands: only the fine cold steel piercing and piercing, sewing his dry flesh together. Blood would have been a mercy, hiding the worst of it, and there was no mercy here.
She screamed for him, until her throat was raw; and might perhaps have told herself that she was only trying to summon the help they both so obviously needed, because she could not fetch it, because she could not leave him even if she could not get close. Her simple presence was something, she might have thought, something at least. Not a comfort, exactly, but a gesture. Like sitting at the bedside of the dying, long after they had lost all awareness. A gift, given in ignorance to the dark.
If she were accustomed to being dishonest with herself, she might have thought such things.
As it was, she only stood and screamed, until at last people came.
Competent people, who could take care of things: of Herr Braun, and of her. Matron, who might have slapped her if Judith hadn’t reached her first, hadn’t put her arms around Ruth’s shoulders and spoken unheard things until at last the imperative of screaming wore away, and she could stop. Could be quiet, could gulp and sob in the blessing of other people’s noise.
Major Black, who could organize men to take charge of Herr Braun: to grip his wrists and shoulders and frogmarch him away to Colonel Treadgold, to the promise of anaesthesia and absence.
Matron lingered long enough to be sure of Ruth. ‘Done with the hysterics, then? Hmph. Good enough. I’d send you to your bed, only that I can’t imagine anywhere worse for you right now. Don’t worry about your ward, I’ll see to that. You get yourself cleaned up, then find something to do, make yourself useful. Don’t make me be ashamed of you, you’re better than that.’
And then she was off, chasing strays away, patients and staff both. Ruth saw Michael but too far away, too many others with him, they couldn’t even share a snatched glance. Besides, that wasn’t safe now. What Aesculapius had seen, so might others see it too. Perhaps they already had. Judith’s shoulder, there to be wept on, there to be leaned on – was that for comfort or for confidences, consolation or confession?
Ruth straightened slowly, shook her head, shook herself free of her friend’s embrace.
‘She’s right.’ Her voice sounded hoarse and painful, even to herself. But that was good, a reason not to speak much. A reason for people to give extra weight to what she said. ‘I need to be busy, not sobbing all over you. My boys won’t listen to me again, if I don’t show them a stronger face than this.’
‘Ruth, what – where are you going? What’s going on, who did that to Herr Braun? And where are you going . . .?’
‘To theatre,’ she called back, over her shoulder. ‘To assist the colonel, to undo all of that.’
She had found him; she had a claim.
She could make the case with even more dishonesty – I found him, and I called until help came – but she didn’t need to do that. None of the surgery nurses really wanted to be there. They were only too willing to make room for her when she came in scrubbed and ready, to let her be the one who stood close beside the colonel, far too close now to little Herr Braun.
Unconscious and stripped, he seemed smaller than ever, and what had been done to him more cruel.
‘Well,’ Colonel Treadgold rumbled. ‘This doesn’t seem so bad, actually.’
The anaesthetist – Captain Folsom, she remembered – made a choking noise, as if he had accidentally breathed in a lungful of his own gases.
‘No, I’m serious. I wanted him out for the count, but that’s mostly for the man’s own comfort, and to keep him quiet while we examine him. Don’t let him go too deep, there’s no need. Unless these pins are hiding worse damage than they seem, to his eyes or his tongue – but there’s no blood, d’you see? I do believe he’s just been . . . sewn up. As it were. Major Dorian will have more work than we do, piecing his mind together afterwards. Unless I radically miss my guess, we have the easy part today.’
Indeed, after a little while, after the first careful extractions, he sent the other nurses away. He and Ruth could manage quite easily, sliding needles and pins one by one from slack skin and collecting them scrupulously in a kidney dish. By unspoken consent they freed Herr Braun’s eyes first. The colonel spent a little time checking each eye, to be sure they were no worse than scratched by so much sharpness, going in or coming out; he spent longer on the eyelids, above and below.
‘See, they’re like stamp paper, perforated so close and so often the skin’s ready to tear at a touch.’ Indeed, they were ragged already. ‘He’s lucky, he’ll keep his sight, I think, unless there’s some deeper hurt I’m missing. We won’t know that until he wakes and can tell us how he sees. But I may need to rebuild his lids.’
Lids and lips and fingertips, like many another of his patients. That couldn’t be significant, surely? It must just be a coincidence. Happy chance, that the right man was on hand to repair the damage. If Herr Braun stayed, if they kept him here. Major Dorian might feel that it would be better for him to be moved somewhere else. Anywhere else. Might well feel that.
Might well be right.
They worked on, mostly in silence. Ungagging Herr Braun, u
nstitching his mouth one needle after another, checking his tongue and not talking, because there were only questions – who? and how? and why? – which nobody wanted actually to ask, for fear of whatever answers might emerge. It was better just to work, to deal with what lay under their hands, the next immediate need. The next immediate needle. The pins had been easier with fingers, pinching the heads between her nails, but they both used forceps for the needles. Grip the eye of it, grip and twist and slowly, slowly draw it loose. One down, one done, one fewer still to do.
But there were many, so many. His lips were ruined; his fingers – well. He would sew no more uniforms, never set a pin in cloth again. Never hold a needle. Never want to, more than likely. She hoped he might find peace in a garden somewhere. Somewhere else. Though he would need to work in gloves.
At last, ‘That’s all we can do for now,’ the colonel said, stepping away from the table. ‘What more he needs must wait on his waking, but no need to hurry him into that. Sleep is the best healer. Give him something, would you, Folsom, to keep him under until morning? Then have the orderlies take him to a room. On his own, I think, for now. Sister Taylor, with me if you would, if you’re free . . .?’
She was free, entirely. She was also exhausted. The effort of fine-focused work, the need to be so terribly careful not to let steel points do any further damage on their way out, the need above all to keep the gates of her mind locked tight against the battering of horror while she held the thing itself in her sight and under her hand . . . She had never felt so drained.
And yet she went with him, of course she did. He was her superior officer, or else her boss, or both. Also, she thought, he was a man in need.
Whether she had what he needed, that would be another question.
House of Doors Page 23
