‘I have a little girl, Mère Dolle.’
‘You miss her?’
‘I did not expect to miss her. I have spent very little time with her because medicine always came first.’
‘It was Bach with me . . . or Beethoven. I have been blessed because I gave them up to the Saviour and He has given them back to me. Your sacrifice will not go unnoticed, Madame.’
‘My husband died in France in 1916. He didn’t even know about her.’
‘He does now.’
‘You really believe that?’
‘Bien sûr, madame.’
The strange conversation came to an end as Mère Dolle finished her soup and straightened her back. ‘Why don’t you have a . . .’ she began. Rose was never to know what she had wanted her to have . . . a bath . . . a rest . . . a walk in the Convent gardens?
‘We have two more field ambulances coming in, doctor.’ An ambulatory patient had come in to the ward. ‘Doctor Mutton wants you in theatre if you’re not doing nothing.’
Dr Mouton was an elderly French doctor who headed the medical team at the convent. Like Mère Dolle, he seemed possessed of extraordinary strength. Rose only learned much later that his shame that so many French troops at the Front had mutinied on May 4th had caused him to come out of retirement, leaving his gardens to the weeds he had fought assiduously and successfully for five years. He spoke no English and Rose was only beginning, thanks to Mère Dolle, to really learn any French, but with the nun’s help the two doctors understood one another well enough.
At 3 o’clock the next morning Rose fell fully dressed on to her bed and slept. She had been on her feet for twenty-five hours. When she awoke she found that she was dressed in a cool white broderie anglaise nightgown and that she was inside the crisp white sheets. Even her hair was brushed.
‘Can I come in, doctor?’
‘Come in, nurse.’
‘Look at this,’ said the girl, pointing to the plain white china as if Rose might not recognize the object that sat in the middle of it. ‘It’s an egg. We’ve got one each.’
Rose did not look at the egg, welcome stranger though it was. She looked instead at the round cheery face of Nurse Jeanette McDonald. The eyes were twinkling – had she stolen the eggs? – and the perpetual dimples in her cheeks were dancing with suppressed laughter.
‘How did I get undressed?’
‘Ach, that was me and Mother Dolly. She was worried aboot you, you being such a wee bit thing, and there is nothing of you. Mind you, my mither aye said it was the skinny ones had the strength. You’ve had twelve hours. Everything’s quiet and there are smells coming oot of the kitchen . . . I can hardly wait for my dinner. It’s the garlic, doctor. Did you ever use fancy things in your cooking? I never used onything but a wee bit salt myself, but Sister Anthony Joseph says add an onion, a tomato and garlic and you have a meal fit for a king. Roll on the end of the war. Wait till Glasgow tastes my mince!’
‘Have you a big family waiting for you, nurse?’
The cheery face clouded for a moment and then the sun shone again. ‘Not really, no. My mither sort of just gave up and died when wee Jimmy got killed at Verdun. Five boys, and every one deid. No fair, is it, doctor, but two of them was married with bairns and I’ll cook the new mince for them.’
‘The young German, nurse?’
‘We’ve had to send him up to the big hospital at Le Tréport; the arm has to come off if we want to save his life. I doubt he’ll even survive the trip. The road’s no’ there at all now. Well, I’ll leave you tae get dressed. Mother Dolly told me tae watch you eat every bite.’ She walked to the door as Rosie slipped out of the bed. ‘We’re going to have a bit sing-song for the laddies the nicht. Have you heard her play a polka? She’s fabulous, she can even play “Loch Lomond”. You hum it, Mother Dolly’ll play it.’
The door closed behind her and, apart from the clack of her heels as she walked quickly along the polished corridor, there was a welcome silence. Rosie hurried to dress. When had Nurse McDonald rested, or Mère Dolle or, even more importantly, Doctor Mouton?
The wards were quiet apart from the moaning of wounded men for whom they did not have enough painkilling medicines. A young nun was washing the floor. The Mother Superior obviously believed in the old dictum that cleanliness is nearest to godliness. In Rose’s book it was certainly nearest to ‘good chance of survival’.
‘Nurse, nurse, give me something, can’t you?’
It was not the first time the mistake had been made and it would not be the last. Rose walked across to the patient and looked first at him and then at his chart.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said gently. ‘There is nothing I can do for you. Your wound is healing nicely.’
‘Get the Froggie doctor. He’ll give me something.’
Rose tried not to let her distaste show on her face. ‘Doctor Mouton is not on the wards at the moment.’
‘Get him then . . .’
‘Glad to hear you are almost back to normal, corporal.’
Rosie had not heard the dressing-gowned figure enter the ward.
‘I’m Captain Drummond,’ he said, ‘and you must be Doctor Nesbitt. What an honour to meet you when I’m awake, doctor.’
Rose laughed and took the hand held out to her. Captain Drummond had been unconscious the last time she had seen him.
‘A woman doctor! No bloody wonder I’m still lying here.’
‘Mind your tongue if you don’t want to be put on a charge, corporal. It’s thanks to Doctor Nesbitt that you’re even alive.’
‘Thank you, but that’s not quite true,’ said Rose as they moved away from the bed. ‘The corporal’s wound is minor compared to some of the injuries, your own for instance. Who gave you permission to get out of bed?’ She was a doctor, and as a doctor found it easy to speak naturally to this gaunt young man whose voice and manner told her that he was just such another as Kier.
‘I dreamed I was at the Usher Hall with my best girl who looked very like you, if I may be so bold, doctor, and an angel was playing Bach.’
‘It wasn’t an angel – or maybe it was: it was Mère Dolle.’
‘The old nun? My God, what a waste!’
‘She would not agree with you, captain.’
‘Andrew, call me Andrew.’
She smiled. ‘Back to bed, Captain Drummond.’ Oh, Kier, what a lot you taught me, she found herself thinking, or is it just that I now wear a mask labelled doctor and no one can believe in the lassie from the slums who is still underneath? Or is she still there? Have several years of marriage to a gentleman turned me into a lady?
Captain Drummond was not so easily put off by the young doctor’s sternness. He had himself wheeled into the recreation room at the convent where the concert for the invalids was being held and even against Doctor Mouton’s wishes, took a turn on the piano. He did not have Mère Dolle’s classical training nor Kier’s delicate touch, but he could certainly thump out the rousing choruses the soldiers wanted to hear.
‘You will open your wound, Captain Drummond.’
He looked up at her from the piano stool; he was laughing, but the eyes were strained with denied pain.
‘If a beautiful Scottish doctor was to say, “Go to bed at once, Andrew”, I would probably obey.’
‘Captain Drummond,’ she began, and then she too laughed and capitulated. ‘Andrew, you must give your stitches a chance to heal.’
He got up slowly. ‘Has anyone ever told you that you are very beautiful? I can’t call you doctor . . . I won’t.’ He stood demanding an answer.
‘Rose. And yes, my husband, quite often.’
He looked down at her ringless hands.
‘I left them for my daughter, just in case; they were heirlooms.’
‘Your husband?’
‘Good night, Captain Drummond.’ She turned as if to leave him there in the middle of the corridor.
‘I’m sorry, Rose. You know you can’t abandon me, but I promi
se not to ask any more. It’s just so strange. I have a feeling that there is so much to know and so little time left. I was aware of you, you know, through the pain and the anaesthetic . . .’
She interrupted. ‘Medical school. Lesson No. 24. Your male patients will all “be aware” of you.’
‘Not Corporal Dempsey,’ he teased and she had to join in his laughter. When had anyone ever made her laugh so easily?
Thus began two of the happiest months Rose had ever known. When the horrors of daily life became almost too much to bear, there was Andrew with his ready smile and his humour. It was not that he did not take life seriously. He did, but he had an amazing capacity for finding humour in the strangest situations, and he could explain it in his execrable schoolboy French well enough to raise a smile from even Doctor Mouton.
Rose always spent her free time in the convent garden. She would love to have been allowed to kneel down and work in the soil with the two nuns who seemed to spend their lives weeding and hoeing, but they would not allow it. It would not be suitable, but Madame Médecin was welcome to sit there and watch while they worked. Captain Drummond found her there and often they would sit saying nothing, but allowing the peace of the garden to wash away the stress of the moment. Rose no longer noticed the constant roll of guns from just over the fields; it was Andrew who told her that the war was relentlessly coming closer and closer.
‘We are going to have to evacuate our walking wounded, Rose. We’re smack in the way of a German retreat. Our lads will follow them but . . .’
She wanted to cry out, ‘No,’ but she said nothing for she could not tell him what she felt. How could she say that her first thought had been that she would miss him, Andrew Drummond? For the first time ever, she had thought of herself before her patients. Then she laughed, a wry little laugh. Andrew was a patient still.
‘I will travel with my patients then.’
‘I’m trying to decide what would be safer for you. The nuns will stay, and Monsieur Mouton and those who cannot be transported. I doubt that they will be in any real danger from a retreating army. Mother Superior will be happy to hide you and Miss McDonald in the cloisters.’
‘That’s a very funny thought, Andrew. Wee Rosie Nesbitt from the Hilltown in Dundee hiding in a convent.’
He turned to her then. ‘Oh, Rose, I always felt there was so litle time. There’s so much I want to know about you . . . important things like, “Do you like Christmas pudding with custard or brandy sauce?” ’
‘I hate Christmas pudding.’
‘Do you prefer Bach to Beethoven?’
‘I’m a Mozart lover.’
‘Do you like John Buchan?’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘Shame on you! He’s an exciting Scottish writer.’
‘I haven’t read a real book in . . . a hundred years.’
‘I have some Sassoon in my kit.’
Rose smiled. ‘I’ve read him.’ She looked at his anxious face and laughed. ‘I liked the poems. Is that what you wanted me to say?’
‘There, you see; we’ve got lots in common, apart from Christmas pudding . . . and I would find myself with no appetite anyway with you at the table.’
She moved as if to get up, but he grasped her hand and pulled her down.
‘It’s too soon, Andrew . . .’
‘It’s too late, Rose; for me it was too late when I saw your lovely face through the mists of ether or whatever it was that put me out.’ He saw tears start in her eyes and impetuously kissed first one and then the other and she sat unmoving, but trembling, and the tears slipped down her cheeks. ‘What is it, Rose? Your husband? The professional oath? Asclepius, ancient God of healing, is that it? He said doctors can’t be kissed by their patients?’
‘Hippocrates. He was a doctor.’ Rose looked up at him, at his gaunt face almost wavering before her as she tried to stem the tears. There was a strange but pleasant feeling in the pit of her stomach, she felt as light as a feather. A defeated army was approaching rapidly and she could not fear, she could not worry, because of this young man. She forgot Kier; she forgot Robin. ‘Oh, Andrew,’ she said and leaned towards him, and in a second she was in his arms and kissing him as she had never kissed Kier.
They did not hear the two soldiers approach. The voice that spoke was educated and apologetic.
‘How charming. I am so sorry to put an end to this idyll . . . for the moment, of course, captain.’
Rose and Andrew looked up at the two soldiers. Rose was still dazed from the enormity of what had just happened to her, and it was a few moments before she realized that the men were German.
‘You are the senior officer here, captain. I am Major Heinrich Von Kesserling of the German Army. I regret that we find ourselves in need of some supplies.’
Then Rose noticed that both men held guns and that the weapons were pointing at them. She clutched Andrew’s arm protectively.
‘You are in no danger, nurse. I have some men who will be grateful for your help perhaps.’
‘This lady is a doctor, major, and you must speak to Mother Superior if you need supplies. We are merely guests here.’
‘Then we must find this lady, captain. You will take us to her?’
It was couched as a question, but with two guns trained on them there was nothing they could do. The second German soldier said something and the officer answered angrily. Andrew too spoke in German.
‘What is it? What is he saying?’
‘Nothing,’ said Andrew shortly. ‘Uncouth fool!’
Rose walked beside him quickly through the gardens towards the convent. It was unreal, it could not be happening. A few minutes ago the gardens had been the most beautiful place in the world, and now they were contaminated, soiled. As if he sensed her thoughts, Andrew smiled down at her.
‘They won’t stay, Rose. They are anxious to get away. Our boys have licked them and now they are right behind the retreating glorious army. Isn’t that right, major?’
‘We will not impose on the good sisters’ hospitality longer than we need, captain. And please, captain, it is not wise to try to provoke. Not all my men have had my advantages. No doubt it is the same in the British Army: there are some with, how would you say, a nervous finger on the trigger? Ah, bon soir, ma soeur . . .’
Mère Dolle had come out of the Convent at their approach. She answered the officer in fluent German and then returned to English . . . ‘for the sake of Madame Médecin’ and she smiled at Rose.
‘This is a house of prayer and peace, major. I would ask you to put away those weapons.’
‘In good time, sister. I must inspect first. You understand?’
How did it happen? How did it happen? For the rest of her life Rose went over and over those few minutes. As Mère Dolle and Major Von Kesserling spoke, the other German soldier moved nearer to her. She made as if to move closer to the nun, and he followed. He grabbed her arm and said something, and then everything happened at once. The nun and the German officer turned and spoke in rapid German, and at the same time Andrew pushed the soldier as hard as he could. He was not strong; he had been badly wounded, and the blow was not severe. A light of madness was lit in the soldier’s eyes and he fired once and then turned the gun towards Rose. There was a second shot . . .
Major Von Kesserling put his gun away. ‘I regret, sister,’ he began but Rose heard no more. She was on the ground beside Andrew, desperately feeling for a pulse. The German soldier lay spreadeagled beside him.
Happiness is such an ephemeral substance. Rose knelt in helpless anguish on the dusty pathway. Mère Dolle knelt beside her and prayed the prayers for the dead, both English and German, and for the living who had to watch their happiness slip away.
*
Rose considered returning to Britain after Andrew’s death. For a while it seemed to her that everything she had ever touched was doomed to end in disaster. Had her education cost Frazer his life? Even old Wishy had not lived lo
ng enough to receive the free medical attention that he had claimed as his payment for the hours and hours of tuition he had given her. She stood in the garden beside the grave that held the mortal remains of Captain Andrew Drummond who had died, not in glorious battle, but because he had objected to what an uneducated lout had said about her.
I’m sorry, Andrew. We hadn’t time to . . . To do what? To learn from and to accept the lessons of the past . . . to fall in love?
Had he parents? If he had, should she write to them and tell them how their son had lost his life? Would they be proud of how and why he had died? Would they sit in a gracious drawing room somewhere and say, ‘We brought the boy up to be a gentleman and he never let us down’? Or would they scream and cry and rail against fate as she wanted to do?
She knelt down in the dust beside the grave. She was so tired, so very tired. The visiting American congressmen had been exhausting in their kindness, in their repeated reassurances that the war could last only a few more weeks. Were they right? She remembered the tall Southern one: she had liked his soft, warm voice. It had made her feel protected – easy to believe what he said.
‘Robin. I must get back to Robin, to Kier’s daughter. Kier. Oh, Kier, I wish I knew that you had my letter. She is so like you in so many ways.’
More regrets. He had died for her too, in a way.
Doctor Rose Nesbitt pulled herself to her feet. There were still patients to see and the Americans had brought supplies.
‘I have a dispensary now,’ said Rose and laughed. ‘At last I have a dispensary and there’s medicine in it.’
Mère Dolle was in the ward.
‘You look exhausted, doctor,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you finish your rounds and go to bed? Do you know the Americans left us a ham? Can you imagine? We shall have a feast, and then I shall go to the chapel and play for you . . . Bach, I think.’
‘Bach? Someone once told me that the angels play Bach’s music in heaven.’
‘A good choice. Go to bed, little doctor. I shall bring you food myself.’
Doctor Nesbitt was asleep when the nun arrived with the tray. Mère Dolle stood looking down at her, at her blonde hair tumbling in damp curls around her face. The skin was so white, and under the eyelids she could see the blue tracings of the veins.
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