The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (140 page)

An officer of fusiliers had said that it must be a battery getting rid of its shells, in order to avoid having to lug them about.

‘Bit rough on the Huns,’ another man had remarked, and there had been a general murmur of agreement.

The shelling had lasted until the clock in the café struck eleven, when it had abruptly ceased. The silence which followed was palpable.

Sitting there in the crisp autumn sunshine, Adam had been conscious only of a vast anticlimax. The same feeling was mirrored in the faces around him. There was no cheering, and no hurrahs.

‘That’s it, then,’ someone had said.

Then everyone had gone back to their coffee.

And yet, in the hours that followed, word had filtered through that all over England, towns and villages were going wild.

‘Well,
let
them,’ Winsloe said bitterly. ‘Leave the celebrations to the people back home. They don’t know the reality.’

But what reality? thought Adam as he slowed to make way for a farmer’s wagon which had lurched out from a side track. London, the influenza, Cairngowrie, Belle – it had all been a dream. He’d never really left the Front.

Although, of course, that was just another illusion. He was no longer in uniform; no longer with his unit. He was with the GRC.

Like Winsloe, he’d wangled his way back to the Front by arguing his intimate knowledge of the region and familiarity with the vagaries of military record-keeping, to land a position in Graves Registration.

So here he was, scarcely ten days after Belle had stepped onto the train at Stranraer, helping to sweep an area from Ypres to Bailleul twelve miles to the south-west: shuttling between basic accommodations in shattered hamlets, where they had to compete with returning farmers and a trickle of grieving relatives, and GRC headquarters in an elegant château just outside Saint-Omer, twenty-five miles to the west.

The task sounded simple enough. Survey the terrain with the aid of mud-spattered (sometimes blood-spattered) records; disinter what could be found; deliver to sorting stations or cemeteries – themselves often bleak, muddy sites still marked out with ropes, where men struggled to erect ranks of wooden crosses in the autumn gales – so that the ‘travelling garden parties’, as they were affectionately known, might do what they could to prettify things with turf and shrubs before the War ended, and the trickle of mourners swelled to a flood.

‘We’re putting on a show, d’you see,’ an official had told Adam on his first day. ‘Scurrying about, turning mud into gardens, before the visitors arrive.’

They had to find their way through a land largely without roads; past pulverized bridges, and hamlets that had long since ceased to be anything more than marks on a map. The terrain was like a moonscape: riven by abandoned trenches, bristling with thickets of barbed wire, pitted with mine craters, and studded with shell casings. Sometimes they came across pockets of still-lethal gas, and had to beat a hasty retreat. Sometimes they stumbled on unexploded shells protruding from the mud, and had to summon one of the detonation parties which toured the region, touching off discarded ammunition.

It was hard, exhausting, dangerous work. Which suited Adam perfectly. This was why he’d left Cairngowrie. To bury himself in something all-consuming. Something that would stop him thinking.

Winsloe, however, was becoming a problem. He was drinking too much, and talked constantly of his wife. He was also acquiring a reputation for recklessness.

‘Got a death wish, that one,’ an ex-sergeant had confided to Adam only the day before. ‘You watch out, sir. See that package in his greatcoat pocket that he keeps pawing? That’s a revolver, you mark my words. If a live shell don’t get him, he’ll blow out his bloody brains one of these days. No, sir, you watch yerself. Me? I wouldn’t go with him for a pension.’

But the ex-sergeant was wrong, Adam was sure of it. Poor Winsloe was the sort who never did more than talk.

They drove through la Clytte, then Dranoutre, where they picked up a party of diggers. Half a mile north-east of the village of Bailleul, Adam turned left onto a track, and pulled up. According to his notes, there should be two clusters of temporary interments about a thousand yards apart, between a strongpoint from the previous year’s defences, and a pair of old machine-gun emplacements.

He cut the engine, and the stillness descended. It was so intense that it made his ears throb. He sat for a moment, taking it in, while the men in the back jumped out and stood in the sunshine, chatting in low voices as they lit cigarettes.

‘If only she’d waited,’ Winsloe said bitterly.

Adam shut his eyes.

‘No faith. That’s women. They tell you they love you, then they trample all over you.’

Adam thought about Belle – who had never, it occurred to him now, actually told him that she loved him. And if she’d ‘trampled all over him’, as Winsloe put it, it had only been by mistake.

And yet, he did feel trampled. The pain was far worse than it had been with Celia: a physical ache in his chest that never left him. It was why he’d come to Flanders.

But
why
had she left? What was that self-destructive spark which now and then seemed to flare up inside her and scorch everything to destruction?

He knew that it had to do with what she’d told him about Traherne, but he didn’t understand exactly how. And he’d lied when he’d said that it didn’t matter. What he should have said was that he could foresee a time when it would not.

‘I begged her to stay,’ Winsloe said resentfully. ‘I begged her.’

So did I, thought Adam. He regretted that now. Perhaps after all he was not so different from poor Winsloe: endlessly going over things he couldn’t solve, endlessly angry. Although whether he was angry with Belle or with himself, he couldn’t tell.

He was just so bloody sick of thinking about it all the time.

So it was as well to be here, poring over a map spread on the dashboard, instead of home at Cairngowrie. Max and Maud were better off without him. And as Traherne had been called away to London on business, he was unlikely to cause trouble – although if he did, Adam had left instructions with Maud and his lawyers to wire him at once.

‘I bet she’s celebrating,’ muttered Winsloe, fingering his greatcoat pocket. ‘I bet she’s
happy
.’

‘Winsloe,’ said Adam with his eyes on the map, ‘what’s the point in talking about it?’

Winsloe ignored him. ‘They’re all whores,’ he muttered.

Adam raised his head and shot him a look.

Winsloe glared at him defiantly. He was a wiry redhead with a pinched face, and pale eyelashes which distantly evoked a grown-up Max; although Max, reflected Adam, had more backbone than poor Winsloe ever would.

‘Whores the lot of them,’ said Winsloe. ‘It’s in their nature. Even the young ones.’

‘Now you know that’s not true,’ Adam said wearily. ‘What about your daughter? What’s her name, Alice? How can a twelve-year-old be a whore?’

At the mention of his daughter, Winsloe’s face crumpled. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said, and his voice broke. ‘Just – leave me
alone
.’ With an ungainly sob he flung open the door and jumped down, and stumbled off across the moonscape.

With the nagging sense that he could have done more, Adam let him go.

In the rear-view mirror he saw the men exchanging sidelong glances and raising their eyebrows. Time to give them something to do. He got out, slamming the door behind him, and spread the map on the bonnet as he called them over.

‘Right,’ he said, as if nothing had happened. ‘We’ve got three in this shell crater, by the northernmost Vickers emplacement. Baker, Thomas and Pardue, off you go. I’ll catch up with Winsloe and find this lot to the east, at the trench intersection.’

Baker and Thomas picked up their shovels, but Pardue hesitated. He was the ex-sergeant who’d warned Adam about Winslow the day before. ‘Want me to go with you, sir?’ he said in a low voice.

‘No,’ Adam said shortly. ‘Thanks, but I think I can find him on my own.’

Looking grim, Pardue shouldered his shovel and headed off.

When the men had gone, Adam gave Winsloe five minutes to pull himself together, then started after him.

At least, he thought as he negotiated a tangle of barbed wire, he’s heading in the right direction. According to the map, the remains were buried between Sugar and East strongpoints, just to the north of the intersection of four communication trenches.

It was barely seven hundred yards from the lorry, but the ground was so uneven that it soon dropped out of sight. Adam mounted a low ridge – and there below him was Winsloe, cowering on his knees at the bottom of a shell crater.

The crater was a big one, some twenty feet deep and perhaps thirty feet across, and Adam couldn’t see his face, but he could hear his ragged breathing and see his shoulders shuddering.

Adam felt a flash of pity, swiftly superseded by impatience. Not now, Winsloe, he thought.

Then he saw what the other man was holding in his hand, and an icy wave washed over him.

Winsloe had unbuttoned the pocket of his greatcoat, and had taken out what he’d been carrying around for days. A Mills bomb. He was holding it in one hand like a cricket ball, while with the other he gave it oddly tentative little pats. Clearly he was nerving himself to remove the pin.

So Pardue had been right, and Adam had been wrong. Winsloe did not lack backbone. No-one could say that of a man who meant to blow himself up with a grenade.

Feeling bizarrely as if he were intruding, Adam cleared his throat.

Winslow’s head jerked up, and he gave Adam an unfocused stare.

‘That,’ said Adam levelly, ‘would be a pretty selfish thing to do. Don’t you think?’

‘Go away,’ said Winsloe. His voice was flat and emotionless: quite unlike his usual whine. He meant to go through with it.

‘I can’t quite believe,’ said Adam as he started down the crater, ‘that all this time you’ve been carrying that thing around with you. Sitting for days in a lorry with a number five grenade stuffed in your pocket. My God, Winsloe—’

‘Go away,’ Winsloe said again.

‘Come off it, old man,’ said Adam, disentangling the sleeve of his greatcoat from a length of barbed wire and sliding another foot or so in the mud. ‘We’ve got enough remains to deal with already, without having to scrape up yours as well. Now give that thing to me and let’s go and have a drink.’

‘I’ve had enough,’ muttered Winsloe. ‘I can’t go on any more.’

‘What about your daughter? What about Alice? She’s still a child. She needs you.’

Winsloe waved his free hand, as if to ward off an imaginary daughter.

Adam reached the bottom of the crater and stood with his hands at his sides. The mud was knee deep. He could feel it seeping over his boot-tops. ‘For God’s sake, man,’ he said in a low voice, ‘nobody said one has to be happy. One just has to get on with living. Just get through. That’s what I do.’

‘Get out of here,’ snarled Winsloe. ‘I don’t want to take you with me.’

‘Good, because I don’t want to go.’

Winsloe pulled out the pin. ‘I said, get out!’

‘No,’ said Adam.

Before Winsloe could dodge out of his reach, he grabbed the bomb and threw it as high as he could over the lip of the crater.

Winsloe gave a howl of outrage. The bomb caught on a tree stump jutting from the crater’s edge, and stuck there . . .

Except, thought Adam with a jolt, that it isn’t a tree stump, it’s a
shell
. . .

Time seemed to slow as he grabbed Winsloe by the sleeve and forced him to take cover. A shell, he thought as they lay face down in the mud. Jesus Christ, I hope it isn’t—

There was no time for fear. He didn’t even hear the explosion. Something simply clicked in his ear. Then a flash – a blast of heat and suffocating fumes – and a vast upheaval of mud.

Then – nothing.

Chapter Thirty-One

Flanders, 23rd November 1918

Number Thirty-Eight Hospital was one of a cluster around Saint-Omer which treated the wounded who came in by train from Ypres, as well as those on the branch line from Armentières, via Bailleul.

The hospital had been established in the second year of the War, in a château a couple of miles north of the city. This was not one of the elegant, slender-turreted châteaux from a Perrault fairy tale, but a plain, squat medieval affair with slitted windows and yard-thick walls for repelling invaders. But it was cool in summer and warm in winter, and had withstood four years of war better than most.

It was a mixed hospital, which meant that it housed wards for ‘walkers’ and for several grades of the more seriously wounded, as well as three ‘nervous’ wards for those awaiting transit to the specialist facilities around Boulogne. Many of the patients in these wards were deaf-mutes, stammerers, or afflicted by uncontrollable tremors; many more had been designated ‘NYDN’, or Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous – that being the catch-all phrase devised by the authorities the previous year to avoid the stigma of shell shock.

Dr McGarry, who ran the hospital, did not believe in shell shock. ‘There’s a fine yellow line,’ he was fond of saying, ‘between honourable breakdown and sheer blue funk.’

Dr Hughes, one of his junior associates, was not so sure. Neither was Belle. She found it hard to believe that any of the patients she encountered were acting, particularly the amnesiacs, whom she saw most frequently, since they were the ones she was asked to photograph – either here or at one of the other hospitals near Hazebrouck or Bailleul.

This afternoon, her last subject was a likeable young man with jug ears and a scar which cut a shiny red swath across his forehead and down behind one ear. He was cheerful and talkative, and appeared perfectly normal, apart from the fact that he didn’t know his own name, and couldn’t remember anything beyond his thirteenth birthday. Since he’d been found wandering naked on a battlefield over a month before, nobody knew who he was.

‘It’s really most odd,’ he said as he entered Belle’s little studio in the north tower and took the chair she indicated. ‘Everyone tells me I’m nineteen, and sure enough, that’s what I see in the looking-glass: a nineteen-year-old stranger. But how can I believe it when I know, I absolutely know, that I’m only thirteen?’