Silence for the Dead (29 page)

“Any higher and I may die.”

I pulled the fabric from his hands and wrenched the entire nightgown off over my head, dropping it to the floor in one motion. And then I was on the bed with him, on his lap, my legs wrapped around his waist, and we were kissing again, and his hands were traveling everywhere on me. I wanted them everywhere at once. His skin was beautiful in the dimmed, lazy morning light, and I felt the muscles move in his back, the bones of his shoulder blades. His hands cupped my breasts and I laid my cheek on his shoulder, reveling in the sensation of it, the scent of his skin.

He lifted my head a little and kissed his way up the side of my neck, under my ear. He was very, very good at this, I was noticing. “Jack,” I whispered, “I'm nervous. You're going to have to be gentle with me.”

His teeth scraped my earlobe, and if I hadn't already been sitting, I would have dissolved into a heap of wet lust. Well, perhaps not exactly
gentle.
“I mean it,” I said. “I didn't think I would ever do this, so I haven't practiced.”

“That makes no sense,” he pointed out. Before I could argue, he tenderly nipped the skin behind my ear, and when I shivered and moaned, he slid his hands under me and pulled me even closer, wrapping my legs more tightly around his waist. “I think you'll be very good at it,” he said into my ear, and then he pulled away and looked at me. I thought I was about to die. “But you know,” he said, “if it makes you feel better, there's a way that we—well, that you can be on top.”

I stared at him. “There
is
?”

He watched as the possibilities struck me, and the smile he gave me was slow and nothing if not wicked. “Oh,” he said. “This is going to be fun.”

T
he ambulances arrived before supper. We were ready, all of us: the sick prepared for evacuation, the staff and the able-bodied patients standing under the front portico, waiting. Nina and I had even emptied Matron's safe and the cabinet of the men's belongings, putting all of it in a box that now sat between us. A second box contained some of Matron's most important files. When Matron was well, she would want them.

This time, when the ambulances pulled up, we had no argument. Paulus helped the attendants load the sick as the sun stayed high in the clear sky of the long summer day.

An ambulance attendant balked when he saw our boxes. “No one said anything about this,” he said. “Are you sure it's important?”

“I'm sure,” I said.

“If it's so important,” another attendant broke in, “just come back for it. This place isn't going anywhere.”

I glanced at Nina, and then at the others. We were all thinking the same thing. Jack's blue eyes were dark. Even Paulus looked a little pale.

“We won't be back,” I assured the attendant. “Load the boxes.”

We pulled away in a convoy down the long, muddy drive. I didn't look back as the house receded behind me. And even though I couldn't see them, I knew none of the others looked back either.

•   •   •

I
n the end, we lost four patients.

It was the likely outcome of influenza. Everyone knew that.
I
knew that. Twenty-one had fallen sick. That seventeen had recovered was a good ratio.
We've seen waves of it over the last year,
the doctor at the hospital in Newcastle on Tyne told me.
It's different strains, I think. This one was not particularly bad.

Four men buried. Not particularly bad.

George Naylor, with the gap in his teeth, was one of them, his weakened constitution having done him in. The ones who didn't die were sick, or weak, for weeks. Matron had a constitution of iron and was one of the first to recover; Boney, ever her faithful servant, followed shortly after, sitting up in bed with flushed cheeks and trying to give orders before passing out into sleep. I nodded at her and told her I'd do everything she said. She never remembered what she'd told me, anyway.

Martha was one of the sickest. We thought, for a long time, that she wouldn't make it. But Martha had always been stronger than her fragile body appeared.

Matron had Nina and me sit at her bedside. Even in sickness, she knew everything, absolutely everything. “Paperwork,” she told us. “Each man must have a transfer form.” There was separate paperwork for the men who had died, arrangements to be made to send their bodies back to their families or, if their families refused, to have them buried.

Matron was concerned about Douglas West, Archie Childress, and Captain Mabry, whose flesh wound required only a bandage and a pair of crutches. The hospital had discharged Mabry as quickly as they could, claiming it needed beds. We'd put the three of them in temporary housing under the supposed care of Paulus Vries.

“I do hope he is maintaining their routine,” Matron fretted. “Rest and routine are essential to their mental state.” Nina and I nodded, not bothering to tell her that Paulus's “care” translated to drinking in the pubs of Newcastle on Tyne and trying—with what success I had no idea, nor did I ask—to pick up girls, while West and Archie smoked cigars and played cards, gambling matchsticks back and forth.

Mabry had been depressed and racked with guilt when he'd awoken. He'd been born to a sense of honor, and even though the blame rested with the ghosts of Portis House, he felt he'd violated his own tenets in the worst possible way. But Archie and West knew Portis House, they knew the truth, and they understood. They had been through a hell just as awful as Mabry's own. They never spoke of what had happened, and they never laid blame. In their way, they looked out for Mabry, one of their fellow soldiers.

In private, in the company of only his comrades, Mabry was able to sit quietly, to think, to read. To write letters. He said he'd finally had the chance to read Boswell's
Life of Johnson
, which Matron had refused to stock in the Portis House library.

And I spoke to him of a way to make amends. He was thoughtful, listening in silence until I finished. “That isn't a bad idea, Nurse Weekes,” he said. “I'll see what I can do.” If I hadn't known him, I wouldn't have noticed that he almost smiled.

“And what about Mr. Yates?” Matron asked when I visited her. “Why is he not boarded with the others?”

“He's been discharged,” I told her.

She thought about this for a moment. “It's just as well. But for God's sake, Nurse Weekes, fill out a discharge form.”

She insisted on calling me “Nurse Weekes,” even though I didn't wear a uniform. I had changed into my old skirt and blouse before evacuating Portis House, and now I wore my hair in a loose braid down my back or tied with a ribbon. I liked it. I was thinking of cutting it, which was supposed to be the new, scandalous fashion, but in the meantime I liked the feel of my long hair down my back.

Even Nina wore only her civilian dress, though she said it was because she was confused, not working at Portis House yet not exactly working anywhere else. I told Matron I'd left my uniform off because I was resigning. “I wasn't much of a nurse,” I said. “You know that.”

“You underestimate yourself,” she said, and then she flushed, as if the words had slipped out. “You had no training, of course. But a nurse has to have a certain amount of gumption. I hope you don't go off and get married like a ninny and do nothing with your life.”

“I want to marry Jack Yates,” I told her. We were alone, and I was helping her with her tea. “I think that disqualifies me from ninnyhood.”

“It most certainly does,” she agreed. She didn't seem surprised, and when I thought of all the times she had threatened to write me up for going to his room, I could see why.

“Besides,” I said carefully, taking the cup when she was finished with it and putting it on a tray, “you married.”

“Marrying doesn't make you a ninny,” she clarified, “and neither does motherhood. But both can certainly contribute to it.”

She said nothing about her son, and I didn't ask. There had been too much talk of death already.

It took three surgeries to put Roger's shoulder back together, and he'd never have the full use of it again. At first, he insisted he could still work as an orderly, which was a fiction so obvious no one knew how to reply to it. But when I visited a few days later, he had changed his mind.

“They let Mabry in to see me,” Roger told me. “I gave him a piece of my mind. I wasn't happy, I can tell you. He just let me go on and on, and he said he was sorry he shot me. And then he said he'd help, that he owed it to me because I saved his life.” Roger motioned me closer from his prone position on the bed. He was pale, but his cheeks were flushed with excitement. “Bloody rich, Mabry's family is. He says he'll tell his father it was an accident, and if I back him up, his father will give me a pension.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I said.

“Mabry's mad as a hatter,” Roger said matter-of-factly, “and his father knows it. But the story is that he was defending the rest of us from Creeton with that gun. His father will soften at that. I was angry before, but now I don't bloody care what the story is. A pension will do just fine for me.”

I smiled at him. “I'm glad,” I said. I was.

Creeton presented a different problem. As a mental patient who had proven himself a danger, he'd been kept in the hospital under guard. The police had come and gone; so had one doctor, and then another. I never learned what was said in those interviews, but I imagined Creeton claiming innocence, that he had blacked out, that he remembered nothing. I imagined him pointing out how docile he'd been, agreeing to have his hands tied, waiting calmly to be evacuated from Portis House. But no one trusted a madman, not truly, and the fact that he'd assaulted two nurses and a fellow patient—not to mention his very public suicide attempt—must have told against him. Creeton was moved out of Newcastle on Tyne; I heard he was reassigned to a higher-security mental hospital in Dorset.

Somersham recovered, as did MacInnes and Hodgkins. All were slated to be moved to another hospital, but MacInnes went home to his wife, the successful novelist. Somersham's family didn't want him back, but I quietly wrote Hodgkins's cousin and told her what had happened and that he was about to be transferred. She appeared within the week and took him home.

“My God, the paperwork,” Matron said as she sat up in her sickbed. “Where are my eyeglasses? It's enough to drive me to drink. What a mess. Why has Mr. Deighton not come?”

Nina and I exchanged a glance and evaded the question.

When I wasn't at the hospital, I was in the temporary flat I'd rented with Jack, two doors down from the room that housed Archie, West, and Mabry. He put Anna Gersbach in a third flat of her own. He'd taken our flat as “Mr. and Mrs. Yates,” looking the landlady in the eye and daring her to disagree. She didn't. “We'll fix that part later,” he told me when she was gone and we were alone, making my heart flip in my chest. “When we have time.” In the meantime, we were busy.

Jack wired his banker, told him he was sane again, and withdrew some funds. Then he wired his man of business, who'd been taking care of the farm Jack had inherited from his parents, and told him he'd be home within the month. “Make sure your books add up,” he'd put in the telegram. “I'm quite good at math.”

He kissed me, hired a car, and drove to Bascombe. He returned with Maisey Ravell and a stack of files she'd stolen from her father's study.

And then we dealt with Anna Gersbach and what had happened at Portis House.

There was no question about it: Anna had killed her father, which made her a murderer. But she was also a pawn who'd been given no chance to defend herself, whose home had been stolen and sold, who had never been allowed to mourn her brother or tell of how he had been so brutally murdered by the man she'd killed. She was also a girl who had been through too much, and was in mental distress, not quite in her right mind. As we spent more time with her, we could see that she couldn't make many decisions, that she relied on us for even the smallest things, that when we spoke of her case, she stopped listening, as if not hearing our words would make them go away.

Maisey moved into the flat with Anna, made certain she ate and washed, found her more clothes to wear. What they spoke of when they were alone together, whether Anna told Maisey of the pain she'd been hiding all those years, I did not know. But I thought, perhaps, they understood each other.

But there was no way to keep Anna free from what had happened. We had no choice. We went to the magistrate at Newcastle on Tyne and gave him everything—every file, every witness account. Everything but the ghosts.

The resulting scandal was so large even Matron heard of it. The story had already broken that England's Brave Jack had spent six months in a madhouse.
England's Former Hero Shell-Shocked
, read one headline, and most of the others followed suit. Then the second wave of stories washed over the country's newspapers:

SHOCKING SCANDAL AT MENTAL HOME.

DOUBLE MURDER LED TO SCANDALOUS COVER-UP.

FATHER-DAUGHTER MURDER W
AS SELF-DEFENSE.

“I WAS A VICTIM,” ANNA GERSBACH CLAIMS.

Anna was taken into custody by the magistrate to wait for the inquest. Reporters came to our flat in a steady stream, asking for interviews and shooting me very, very interested looks. Jack introduced me to all of them as Mrs. Yates and stared at them as he had the landlady. They were persistent, but he gave them nothing, not a single interview or quote, and they were all disappointed.

It was overwhelming, and our days were full. But at night we never spoke of any of it. At night we got in bed together and the world went away. We talked of nothing, or of everything. Or we did other things. I'd finally found something I was truly good at, if Jack's enthusiasm was anything to judge by. I'd grown achingly used to the feel of him, the smell of his sweat on my skin. And when we slept, it was the dreamless sleep of the exhausted.

In the dark, I told him everything and he told me everything. Those long nights, in the dark, we each understood the other. And then we slept.

Eventually, one by one, the men were removed from the hospital. Mr. Deighton was arrested while trying to flee to France. Maisey's father was arrested for fraud, as were the coroner he had bribed and the sexton who had cremated the Gersbachs for a fee, no questions asked. Dr. Thornton was investigated, though he could not be directly connected to the scandal; he hid, predictably, behind a bank of expensive lawyers. I never discovered what happened to Dr. Oliver.

And at last, the jury at Anna's inquest refused to indict her for reasons of self-defense, and Anna was freed. Portis House itself descended into a legal quagmire; supposedly it was Anna's to inherit, but the wheels of English law turned notoriously slowly. She could not sell it, even if she could find a buyer; she could do nothing with it, it seemed, but live in it, moving back in with her memories and ghosts.

She didn't return to the house. Instead, Anna and Maisey went off on a tour of the Continent together until the scandals died down. They never said where they got the money for the trip, but I knew. Captain Mabry was pleased. “I shot at her,” he told me. “It's the least I can do.”

Before they left, I had one last interview with Anna, alone. “I don't mean to distress you,” I said to her, “but there's something I want to ask.”

She looked at me with her curiously disconnected expression, as if she was watching a play.