Silence for the Dead (13 page)

She frowned. “To the village, I assume, unless she got another position.”

“The village?”

“Yes. Bascombe. The village on the mainland, at the other end of the bridge. You would have passed through it on your way here.” Her gaze narrowed. “Why do you ask that?”

“Because she left some belongings behind. A locket and a few other things. I thought perhaps she might want them. I'd like to write and ask her, if that's allowed.”

Again Matron considered. “Very well. I'll have Nurse Fellows give you the address we have in the records. The post goes in the morning.”

It wasn't much, but it was something. And before she could speak again, I was off, my steps taking me down the corridor and away from Portis House as fast as I could go.

J
uly had almost arrived, and true high summer was beginning. To me, the season was usually marked by humid, smoggy London days, clothes that stuck to my skin as I worked, sheets I had to dampen with water so I could sleep in my airless room at night, the smells of smoke and dirt and motorcar fumes like lingering gas attacks. I had never spent summer out of the city.

The air was fresh here, blowing over the marshes in a warm exhale tinged with earth and salt. I unpinned my cap, untied my apron, and dropped them on one of the chairs in the garden as I went through the garden gate.

Past the back of the house and the gentle rise of the hills were hunched clumps of low trees, bordering the marshes themselves. I pushed on, farther than I had ever gone while supervising the men at exercise. Long grass, each blade as wide as my thumb, brushed at my skirts with a silvery shushing sound matched by the persistent whistle of the wind in my ears and punctuated by the calls of birds. I leaned my body into the climb up the slope, feeling my legs stretch in their cotton stockings, the pull of the muscles on the backs of my calves. My feet in Maisey Ravell's practical leather boots sank into the soft earth. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades, not the slick sweat of fear but the honest sweat of effort, dried quickly by the summer wind.

I had to lift my skirts as I climbed. I should have been cursing my uniform, with its fussy blouse and petticoat, but I was growing used to it. I had never worn a corset—it seemed a pointless extravagance to me, and I had no desire to look like an old biddy—and the uniform, mercifully, did not require one. After several days of hard work in it, I had to admit that it was easy to move in, easy to bend and stretch in, sturdily sewn with minimum fuss. What had seemed prudish a few days earlier I now realized covered everything no matter what difficult position I found myself in. It was nice to know you could help a man vomit into a pitcher on the floor without showing him your calves or giving him a look down your blouse.

So I pushed myself along now, skirts rustling in the grass, beginning to enjoy the blood pumping in my body despite how tired I was. By the time I reached the top of the rise, my cheeks were hot and I felt damp sweat under my pinned-up braids.

From here I could see the thicket of trees, clustered like a crowd of commuters on a busy train platform, that were solid land's last gasp before the marshes began their march to the sea. The grass grew thicker there, tangled with brush and undergrowth, uncut by any visible path. Beyond the trees, the marshes stretched like patchwork, mossy and silvery, their colors strange even in the workaday summer sunlight. They faded into an impenetrable horizon that must be the sea, though I saw no sign of any boat or mast in the long moments I searched for them.

I turned back to the house. It looked different from here; it was so large I'd only ever seen pieces of it, like the portico on that first day in the fog. There was something both magnificent and ominous about it from here. It stood alone, showing its wealth and outright splendor, spreading its wings against the tremendous expanse of the marsh and the horizon, as if flung down by a giant hand. It was a massive, wide square of pure stone, dwarfing its ornamental gardens in shadow, its windows staring indifferently at the sky and the sea.

I walked along the rise, unwilling to descend just yet. My hour was likely up soon, but the sun was shining, and this far from the house I could almost feel the ghosts and the devils falling away. The house was just a house from here, after all. I should have been amazed at the quiet and the loneliness, or even horrified, being a London girl; the emptiness here was entirely new to me. But I'd always craved solitude, even on a crowded factory floor. Solitude was safe.

There was movement in one of the upper windows of the house. Someone was watching me.

For a second my eyes wanted to see a shirtless man, but no. It was a dark-haired man in the pale shirt of Portis House, sitting on a familiar window seat in an unmistakable pose. Even from here, I knew Jack Yates.

I had no idea how long he'd been watching as I'd stood staring out to sea without cap or apron, oblivious, my skirt blowing against my legs. He lifted one hand now in salute, palm out, a silent greeting. I raised my own hand in return, held it there. We were locked together for a long moment, and I imagined my hand pressed to the glass of his window. Matron had been right. I should never have burdened him with my problems or sought comfort he was in no position to give. My first priority should have been his care. I'd been selfish, as always.

I lowered my hand, made myself look away. I turned my gaze to the deserted west wing, its dark windows, and then I froze.

A woman stood on the grass before the door to the isolation room. She wore a blouse and skirt, the hem lost in the long weeds, her hair tied back, hatless. In the shadow of the looming walls, I couldn't see her features clearly. But I could see that she stood with her hands at her sides, unmoving. And she was staring steadily at me.

My heart thumped in my chest. For a long moment I just stood there, my breath short, wondering what I was looking at. A woman? A ghost? I thought of the shirtless man I'd followed into the stairwell and I had the wild instinct to run. But my feet did nothing, rooted to the ground like clay.

Then she moved.

She turned with a slow, eerie calm and walked away, back toward the isolation room door and past it. Her skirt shifted as she passed, though in the tall grass I couldn't see her feet. She
moved
like a real woman. But then, the shirtless figure I'd seen had moved like a real man.

She turned the corner and disappeared around the side of Portis House. I stayed frozen for another long moment, but she didn't reappear. I should go back into the house, I knew. Even though it was improbable, likely impossible, that a woman had come so far alone with no transportation, I should report what I had just seen. Instead, I followed her.

The breeze died as I descended the rise toward the west wing, giving way to still, oppressive air before I reached the house. I stepped into the curve formed by the cup of the west wing's walls and my vision was dappled with shadow. Jack Yates's window had vanished from sight, and no one could see me here. The weeds smelled rank and without the breeze there was no sound, no soft shushing of grass, only the sound of my boots on the choked, soft earth.

I looked around me and realized where I was standing.

That spot outside the library, you know. That seems to be the spot they go to. The last one had stolen a blade.

I glanced down at my feet, as if expecting to see blood still beaded on the grass. For a second I could imagine it clearly: a patient in his Portis House whites standing here with a stolen knife. Shouts, orderlies running. The man raising the blade. When I had first heard it, it had seemed strange that men would supposedly be drawn to this place for such an impulse. Yet as I stood there myself, the loneliness was unmistakable, with the air of a place that was more toxic and sick than any other place in this vast madhouse.

The windows of the isolation room had been fitted with iron bars, and a heavy lock hung on the door, its keyhole staring vacantly at me. I tried to imagine being locked in there alone, far from the rest of the house, looking out at these hideous weeds. Would they tie a man up? Put him in a straitjacket?

I had to cup my hands to the glass of the window, between the bars, before I could see inside, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I saw a cot, a basin on a nightstand, a single wooden chair. The walls were stained; water had come in during a rainfall, perhaps. Dust littered the floor. This was the room's only window. A man would sit here and stare at nothing, see no one, count the stains on the wall, on the ceiling . . .

The men know. It's getting worse, too. Did you hear the last one screaming? Said he could see something from the window . . .

I pushed away. My skirt caught on something, and I looked down to see a weed growing along the wall, my skirt hooked on its sticky tendrils. I pulled myself free as other weeds scratched my legs. I was in the grip of something strange. I felt as if someone had slipped me a drug, something that made me see more than I wanted, as if I could peel up the edge of the visible world and glimpse what lay underneath. The woman watching me. This horrible, strangely awful room that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I took a step back. I saw my reflection in the window, and behind me something moved.

It was a figure. Tall, indistinct. A gleam of sunlight on metal, and then it was gone. Not my father. And yet—

He found you,
a voice said in my head—the same crazy, panicked voice I'd heard in the men's lav.
You broke the rules and he found you and you know what happens when he gets angry.

I whirled around. Nothing there. Only the hot, dead air and the sour smell of the weeds. And then another voice came, this one deeper, indescribable.
You coward.
I took a step and something hit me hard in the stomach.

I bent double, moaning low and terrified, and the impulse to scream was so overpowering I pressed my hands over my mouth as another mad sound escaped me. I breathed out in a hot rush of air. As impossible, as insane as the situation was, my brain still recognized what was happening. I was about to get a beating. I had to run.

I forced my legs to move, one step, and then another, pushing through wave after wave of panic.
Just move, move.
I staggered through the fetid grass and out of the shadows into the sunlight again, and then I dropped my hands and kept running.

I had little memory of the hours after that. I know I put on my cap and apron and helped with supper. I was a shell, functioning like an automaton on the outside, my brain rattling with wild terror on the inside. It was a familiar feeling, a reaction I could not control. It was a survival instinct born of many beatings, of the need to appear normal, not to let on. My mind was very good at this, at moving my hands and feet and working while the rest of me shut down. My life, for a short time, was happening to someone else, and so I got through one moment, and then another, and then another.

You coward.

My feelings were gone, gone.

It was only much later that I hid in the nurses' lav and got up the courage to take off my apron and unbutton my blouse. I stood before the dim mirror and ran my hand over my smooth, white stomach, looking for a bruise. I knew what they looked like, the bruises that came from a blow like that. My father had given me dozens of them.

There was nothing.

I had not known I was crying.

I wiped my tears and stared at my unblemished skin in the mirror for a long, long time.

“
T
here were four Gersbachs,” said Nathan the cook. “Two parents, a boy, and a girl. Kept to themselves, I hear.”

“How old were they?” I asked, spooning my stew. It was night again and I was back at the table in the kitchen, eating before my proper shift began. I sounded almost normal. I tried not to let the spoon clatter against the bowl. “The children?”

“Bammy's age.” Nathan jerked a nod at the kitchen boy, who was about sixteen. “Or so Bammy himself says. He's from the village.”

I looked at Bammy. “Did you know them?”

“'Course not.” He looked at his shoes. “They was rich.”

“Why are you asking?” Nathan said to me.

I turned and found him looking at me closely. Before my shift I had rebraided my hair, sponged myself off, tried to rest. It didn't matter that I was cracking up inside; I couldn't show weakness, not to these men. “What's it to you?” I said to Nathan, and was rewarded with an approving grin.

I turned back to the others. “But they were outsiders,” I said. “The Gersbachs.”

“Germans,” said Nathan.

“No,” I said. “Swiss.”

“Never.”

“They were Swiss,” Paulus Vries cut in. “She's right. Not everyone's a Hun, you simpleton.”

“And what the hell are you?” Nathan shot back at him.

“I'm South African. Did you think I was a Hun, too?”

“I don't know what the hell you are.” Nathan looked stubborn. He hadn't liked being wrong. “Maybe you're a spy.”

“I fought in German South-West Africa in 'fifteen,” Paulus said tightly. “I killed as many Huns as any man here. We buried them in the heat and left them there. The Germans ought to have no love for me.”

“All right,” I said. “Back to the Gersbachs. They came here and built this place. Then what? Where did they go?”

“They moved away,” said Paulus.

“They didn't,” Bammy broke in.

We all stared at him. “What's that supposed to mean?” said Nathan.

Bammy shrugged. He was gawky and painfully shy, but he was warming a little with newfound authority. “There was talk in the village, that's all. They built the house—we saw the trucks haul everything over the bridge for months. But no one saw them move out or drive away. There's only one way off here, and that's over the bridge. No one saw it.”

I thought of the figure I'd seen in the reflection in the window. I put my bowl down.

“Someone must have seen something.” This was Roger, who had been listening quietly until now. He looked uneasy. “What about the servants working here?”

“He fired them all,” Bammy said. “Mr. Gersbach. Said they were moving away, taking none of the staff along.”

“There you go, then,” Roger said. “They moved.”

Or he knew,
I thought.
He knew that, for whatever reason, they wouldn't need servants anymore.
“Perhaps they left in the middle of the night,” I said. “Maybe they had debts and had to get away.”

“You haven't lived in the village,” Bammy replied. “No one would miss an event like the Gersbachs' moving out, even at three in the morning.”

“Well, they must have done it,” said Paulus. “The place is empty. Their things are gone. They did it quiet, that's all.”

Bammy shrugged and dropped his gaze back to his shoes.

There was a moment of silence. I bit my lip, my courage deserting me. I was going onto another night shift, alone.
I saw a ghost today,
I wanted to say.
I saw another one last night. Please tell me I'm not the only one.
I felt fragile, and I didn't like it. I opened my mouth and took a breath, but it was Bammy who spoke first.

“They never left,” he said softly.

We all looked at him again. He lifted his gaze, defiant.

“They never left,” he repeated. “That's what you're thinking, isn't it? The sounds in the basement, in the lav. Everyone knows it, but no one wants to say. No one saw them because they never did move away. They're all buried here somewhere and their ghosts are haunting the place.”

I exhaled.

Nathan chewed his toothpick, uncomfortable. Roger had gone red in the face. It was Paulus who spoke. “Lad,” he said, “you've been listening to too many stories. It's just an old house that's falling apart.”

“But that's it,” Bammy protested. “It's not old at all. Why are there cracks in the walls? Why is the west wing falling down? Why is there mold in the men's lav? Why is it getting worse? No one has an answer to that, do they?”

“The air isn't good here,” Nathan said. “There's something about it. That I know. What do you think, Nurse?”

He was looking at me again. “It's strange,” I managed. “I suppose.”

Roger scraped his chair back and stood. “Well, you ladies can sit here and gossip about ghosts all you like, but I've a shift to start.” He glared at me from gimlet eyes. “So do you, Nurse.”

Of course. My watcher. There would be no love lost between Roger and me tonight. I gave him a hard look in return and stood.

It was a warm night, not a breath of wind to rattle the windows or sigh in the eaves. Through the panes of glass in the upstairs corridor I saw the garden unmoving, the clusters of trees still as soldiers. In a cloudless sky the stars had appeared, speckling the deep black canopy with small diamonds of light. I wondered whether the air smelled sweet, whether it was a perfect summer night for strolling and looking at the sky. The perfect night to do things I'd never have the time to do, with people I'd never be able to do them with.

The conversation in the kitchen dogged me as I sat at the narrow nurse's desk and pulled the linen lists from the drawer. The Gersbachs dogged me. Only one family had lived in this house. Only four people. And now I lived in their house, slept in their nursery, looked from the same windows they had looked from, ran my hands along the same stairway rails they had smoothed with their own palms. They were not just the absent owners of giant dining rooms and paintings gone from the walls. One heard about people disappearing, perhaps, but never entire families. Never entire families, just vanishing into the air.

And I had followed something into the stairwell the night before, felt it waiting for me in the dark at the bottom of the stairs. I had seen something in the library window, something that had hit me.

The need to talk to Jack Yates was like an itch. I wanted to confide to him what had happened to me, and—I admitted it—I just wanted to see him. But I was being watched, and tonight I would behave. Jack had to get well. That had to come first.

I slid aside the linen lists and drew out
Practical Nursing
, which I had slipped into the desk drawer earlier in the evening. I opened the book and looked at Florence Nightingale again. Florence would never have gone into a patient's room and started crying about her problems. She would never have seen things and started to crack up. I pulled my lamp closer to me on the desktop, turned to the chapter on sutures, and began to read.

Two hours later, it seemed as if the night would be a quiet one. The men slept without nightmares; Roger had disappeared to his other duties; and when I did my rounds, if Jack Yates was awake he made no sound. No moans came from the walls of the lav, and the drains sat undisturbed.

I studied until my eyes blurred. There was nothing for it; I would have to count linens soon. This was how Martha and Nina did night shift, then: a numbing repetition of making rounds and counting, with no company in the silence, nothing but the slurring thoughts in your head. Listening to one's own quiet, creaking footsteps in the corridor, shivering a little as the night wore on, looking out the darkened windows, trying not to think of sleep.

I caught my reflection in a window's darkened glass. My face had filled out just a little, the effect of a week of regular meals. It was a narrow face, heart shaped, the nose longish, the eyes dark and long lashed, perhaps, but overall unremarkable. The only feature that set my face apart was the lower lip, my mother's lower lip, which was soft and full, yet curled in almost a sensual sort of disdain. I had no control over the look of that lip, but men seemed to find in it an invitation, and it had enraged my father. I had paid, I thought, a very high price for such a small thing.

I slid my own face out of focus and looked past it to the garden, wondering what it would feel like to be out there, feeling the warm night air breathe gently across me.

I was cold. My shoulders rose instinctively, flexing upward. I put a hand to the back of my neck and rubbed it. The body grew cold at night on its own, but this was different. A distinct icy chill, on my neck and back, between my shoulder blades. A draft. Or—

“No,” I said softly to myself.

The word came out on a breath of frosted air.

Reflected in the glass, something moved behind me.

From one of the rooms came a scream. I recognized the voice: Archie again. My hands were icy, my feet made of clay; I did not want to turn around, but at the second scream I was already moving.

There was nothing in the icy corridor behind me. I ran to Archie's door, never fast enough, pressing as if moving underwater. The air was cold and strangely heavy. Somewhere deep in the walls a pipe groaned, punctuated with a familiar
clang.
I gripped the jamb of Archie's door and propelled myself into the room, grabbed the brass foot of the bedstead, and pulled myself toward him.

He was arched again, just like the night before, his head thrown back and his mouth frozen in a rictus of terror. I took his shoulders and tried to shake him. “Archie!” He thrashed, his sinews twisting like leather under my hands.
This is last night,
I thought.
I am living it again.

He quieted for a moment, panting on the bed, staring at me in stark fear. “Archie,” I said as gently as I could, leaning over him. “Wake up. It's all right. Wake up.”

There was a second in which Archie—the real Archie—was in those eyes. And then something changed. His face contorted; his teeth gritted together. Then he launched himself upward, reached his hands around my neck, and squeezed.

I was too shocked to think. The pain was tremendous. “Archie,” I tried to say, but the word would not leave my throat.

He squeezed harder, pulled me toward him. “You coward,” he said to me.

I tried to shake my head, but could only gasp.

“
You are a coward,
”
he said again, his stutter gone, his voice deep and eerie. Wherever Archie had gone, it was far away from the man who was gripping my throat now. I began to struggle, my fingernails biting into the backs of his hands.

Spots danced in front of my eyes, but two incredibly strong hands, their backs lined with black tufts of hair, wrenched Archie's grip from me. Roger pressed Archie's arms down into the mattress and twisted to look back at me, where I had staggered away from the bed.

“Get the needles,” he said.
“Now.”

I wasted only a few seconds standing there, gasping for air, my hands on my neck, watching the small, wiry Roger pin down his patient. Archie was larger, longer limbed, and possessed of inhuman emotion that gave him strength; yet Roger bent over him and held, his forearms shaking, his face grim with deadly seriousness. It was only that Archie was weakened and underweight that kept him down, and still he thrashed and screamed, the nightmare still on him. I turned and ran from the room.

I thought the locked drawer wouldn't open; I nearly dropped the keys in my haste. Only when I pulled one of the hypodermics from its slot and felt its unfamiliar weight in my hand did I remember that I had never given an injection before. I fumbled with the needle, with the vial of liquid, and ran back to Archie's bedside.

Archie had stopped screaming, but he still struggled under Roger's grip. Sweat beaded on his reddened face and he stared at Roger with deadly hate. I approached the bed, readying the needle as I'd seen in
Practical Nursing
, trying to grip it properly between the fingers and the pad of the thumb. I jerked up the sleeve of Archie's pajama top, revealing his upper arm.

“Go ahead,” Roger grunted at me. “Quickly.”

I pressed the needle against Archie's skin. I swallowed. My throat was as raw as sandpaper, pain blooming at the base of my jaw and at the back of my neck. I pictured the book again, the ink diagrams, the words that ran through my head.

Quickly.

Somersham's vomiting. It had nothing to do with the drugs.
Part of his particular neurasthenia.

Quickly.

Captain Mabry's humiliation, Dr. Thornton's eloquent little lesson.
These men are not your friends.

Nurse Ravell, so frightened she'd run in the night. This had happened to her, too.

Quickly.

“For God's sake!” Roger nearly shouted. “I can't hold him.”

I jabbed the needle under Archie's skin and pushed the plunger home.

It was messy; Archie gave a yelp of pain. I wasn't fast enough, wasn't expert enough. In a matter of seconds, it made no difference. His body collapsed on itself, a dead weight. Roger let him go and stood, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

“Bloody hell,” he said. He looked at me. “You all right?”

I nodded. I was kneeling on the floor next to the bed, the emptied needle in my hand. I slumped down, my bottom landing hard on the backs of my calves, my arms dropping to my sides. I couldn't speak. I watched Archie's body on the bed, his head tilting senselessly to one side, his face slack.

“I'd strap him in,” Roger went on, “but he won't need it now. One of those doses and they sleep like babies. We won't hear another peep from him tonight.” He looked at me again. “You'll want some aspirin, then. Are you sure you're all right?”