IT WAS EASY ENOUGH FOR Tess Nancarrow to dismiss the soldier’s questions. By tomorrow morning, this would be nothing more than the wisp of a fever dream for the boy. The fairy muttered evilly to itself as it dragged its way out of the ward. Tess’s spoon was made of cold iron, and she’d put all the weight she could into those stamps, leaving her no doubt that she’d made a permanent impression on the interloper. The malicious of the Small Folk were glutted on death and pain this close to the front, and that had clearly emboldened this one into following its prey rather than staying with its kin and feeding on the easy meals of human blood and misery that scattered No Man’s Land.
She could’ve killed it—she knew how—but this was the better way. Better to let the fairy go back to its kin, tell its tale, and remind all that the hospital was to be left alone. Still, it seemed a small good, when this fairy and much worse would still be free to feed on and terrorize all the poor boys out there, but that was just this war all over. Tess could keep this fairy from making a second meal of this private tonight, but she couldn’t stop it from swallowing some man’s sanity on the line tomorrow. She could help patch up the private’s leg, but once he was healed, there was nothing she could do to keep him from getting shot to pieces by a machine gun after he was sent back to his unit.
“What was all that fuss in the corner, Nancarrow?” Sister Price asked, blinking wearily as she updated the night logs. Not a drop of magic in this one, Tess knew, but a harder worker one couldn’t ask for.
“I saw a rat trying to trouble Private Shearer,” Tess said. All the wards had rat troubles—all except hers. A small piece of witchery kept rodents out. A small kindness. She wished that she could’ve offered it to all the wards, but that was well beyond her abilities. Choices—everything here came down to choices.
Just being here had been a hard choice. Tess had a midwife’s hands—she’d been at the trade since she was eighteen, and in almost twenty years, she’d never lost a mother, and no baby that fell breathing into her hands had lost that breath. The rest of her gift was good enough that many of her neighbors would ask her to come to call before they resorted to the doctor, but it was mothers and babies that she could perform miracles for. She’d thought to sit at home while Hugh was gone, tending the babies (not babies anymore, perhaps, their youngest having just turned nine) and minding her own work—but then her cousin Alan had died. The telegram hadn’t given details, nor the letter written by his lieutenant, but she’d smelled the gangrene on it—the rot that had taken his life, for his gift was in fishing and the sea, not blood—and had known that if she’d been by his bed, he would’ve lived.
So, she’d gone and volunteered. Oh, they’d been glad to have her—a relief in the sight of the professional nurses from the delicate girls who dreamed of mopping the brows of officers, had never emptied a bedpan, and nearly fainted at the sight of a man’s nethers. And if the war had taught her a few new things about the horrors that could be wreaked on a healthy body, well, she’d seen a few battles in the birthing room and had stood her ground well.
She made her rounds among the ward beds, checking bandages, fetching and emptying bedpans, adjusting blankets tossed aside by sleeping men. As she went, she drew away gangrene, lowered fevers, encouraged flesh to knit together faster. In this ward alone, there were no fleas, no flies, no maggots, no rats scurrying between the rows of camp beds. She’d established her rule early, and the nasty Small Folk (excepting tonight’s unwelcome visitor—and she was sure that it wouldn’t be back anytime soon) knew enough to avoid Ward 12 and the hospital tents as a whole lest she catch them. There were those she’d encouraged—nothing made life easier than a Brownie to tidy used bandages faster, or a water sprite to ward off dysentery—but they were few in number. The benevolent Folk were creatures of habit, preferring to live in old houses and older villages. A hospital that hadn’t even existed two years before, made up of hastily cobbled-together huts and tents, occupied by a constantly shifting population of doctors, nurses, orderlies, and patients? She was amazed that she saw any of the kindly Folk at all.
Her shift ended at six a.m. and she headed for the tent that she shared with four other volunteers, all of them rolling out of bed and heading wearily toward the mess tent. Her head was clogged with exhaustion, but she followed her before-bed habits:
A loud prayer to God, watching with love from above.
A whispered prayer to the older gods, who still watched, and not always kindly, so were best approached rarely and then from the side.
A quick check of the four primrose buds sewn to a sachet pinned to her chemise. One for each of her babies, and blooming still, which meant they continued to thrive under the watch of her Mam and Father. Two prayers of thanks for that.
A longer check of the thistle sewn in its own little silk bag—not a rich bloom, but alive. That meant somewhere along the line, her husband’s heart still beat. Two more prayers of thanks as she tucked that one back. Aunt Betts had crafted these for her, and sometimes Tess wished she could spend all day staring at that thistle, as if will and wishes alone could keep Hugh alive.
But that was a silly thing, and Tess Nancarrow was far from a silly woman, so she finished her prayers and went to sleep.
A NEW DOCTOR HAD ARRIVED with the last shipment of supplies, and was apparently handsome enough that two of Tess’s tentmates had half fallen in love with him at first sight. The full accounting of this was relayed to her over dinner, at great length, by Lizzie and May, who were nice enough girls but as foolish as a pair of half-grown goats. Finally, Tess appealed to the higher opinion of the three Australian nurses, who were closer enough to her own age that she could trust their assessment.
“Oh, he’s fine enough to look at,” Sister Jemma Weaver confirmed. “But icy. Even comparing to the rest of your British boys. Margaret Carey told me that when he looked at her, she felt like a mouse in an anatomy class.”
“That certainly doesn’t sound promising for the girls’ romances.”
“You never know,” Jemma said. “If all they want to do is look and dream, he’s probably a perfect choice. But if they wanted something real rather than a fine marble figure…” The woman gave a confidential grin. Jemma had a fiancé in khaki herself, and Tess had heard a few tales of their engagement on a moonlit tour of the Sphynx down in the Gallipoli theater. “Well, you know my preference would be an Aussie.”
“Fine enough figures, I’ve heard,” Tess replied blandly. “Even if they might have feet of clay.”
That prompted some good laughter from the Australian sisters, and a bit of pouting from Lizzie and May, who had missed a few of the nuances of the conversation and were only aware that their new god was being somehow maligned.
One woman at the table said absolutely nothing but scowled in a way that reminded Tess rather sharply of Matron Johnson, for all that there was at least thirty years’ gap between them and a bitter dislike besides. Vera was another of the VADs, but a whole species apart from Lizzie and May. Morose and beautiful, with all the passionate commitment of a Catholic saint, she’d actually been reading literature at one of the women’s colleges before the war broke out. She nursed every boy with a ferocious care, as if that would somehow keep her brother alive somewhere in Ypres. As prickly as a hedgehog, she’d butted heads with all of the other VADs and half the nurses, and Tess knew that even a hint of misbehavior would’ve been used by the Matron to send her back to England to be someone else’s pestilence.
For all that, Tess had an affection for Vera, and sat next to her at meals and listened sympathetically when the girl was in a speaking mood. Matron Laura Johnson had been trying to make the girl quit and pack her way home by giving her the worst and nastiest assignments—currently, Vera had been on duty in the venereal-disease ward for almost two months—which Tess could’ve told her was absolutely the wrong approach. You never got a donkey out of a ditch by pulling harder. The more Vera was aware that she was being tested, the more she gritted her teeth and stood
her ground. Tess felt a certain vague sympathy for Vera’s parents—the girl must’ve been a trial to toilet-train—but felt an appreciation for her nonetheless. Grit had to be admired, even in its most abrasive forms.
Vera chose that moment to break her silence.
“Three men died yesterday. I laid them out and wrote letters to their parents and wives. There’s a man on my ward who will lose his sight because of gonorrhea, which is the most unbelievable foolishness, yet the ward is packed to the brim with men who are invaliding themselves and saving the Germans the trouble. And yet we’re sitting here discussing a pretty new doctor?”
Tess sighed and took another drink of tea as VADs and nurses alike fixed Vera with pointed looks of dislike and then shifted away, starting up smaller conversations, leaving Vera and Tess in a small bubble of censure.
“You know I’m right,” Vera said to Tess. “You all do. Yet—”
“Vera.” Tess put her cup down with regret. The new sugar stores had arrived with the doctor, and she’d been very much enjoying her tea. “I am not your momma or auntie to lecture you about your behavior. But you can be right and wrong at the same time. Everything you just said was right. But half your letters are in Greek proverbs, and you tell me you dearly love a philosophical discussion, so put that good brain to work for a moment and consider why it might also be right to discuss how the new doctor looks.”
This speech earned her an outraged glare, a huff of displeasure, and the sight of Vera storming out of the mess tent. So, a rather normal meal.
“Tess, you do absolutely baffle me,” Sister Poppy said from down the table. “That is the most ill-tempered and rude creature I’ve ever encountered, and you have done nothing but be a friend to her, and yet this is how she treats you.”
“It’s a bit like being a friend with a cat,” Tess replied. “If I don’t hold my cat at fault when she decides that she’s had enough of petting and nips my hand before running off, why should I do any differently to Vera?”
Judging by the expressions of the other women, Tess judged that most of them preferred dogs.
THE APOLOGY CAME ALMOST AT dinner time, with Vera coming up to Tess after their shifts were done, with a carefully studied air of nonchalance, and saying, “I suppose you’ll want to try to get a look at the new doctor. I just saw him leave the surgical tent, if you’ve half a mind to take a stroll.”
“Well, I certainly would like to compare my own view to secondhand reports,” Tess said, mopping at one rather persistent bloodstain on her cuff. “You must come along and restrain me if his beauty sends me quite off my head.”
Some grumbling for the show of it, but Vera fell in step beside Tess quite agreeably, clearly pleased that the afternoon’s row had been forgiven, and happy despite herself that she’d been invited. Internally, Tess was wondering about the likelihood of some new doctor being even half attractive enough to make up for all the fuss. And, bless her maddening heart, but when happy, Vera was the kind of beautiful that turned heads, to the point that today, Tess nearly found herself run down by an orderly completely distracted by Vera. Not that Tess was such an affront to the eyes, but a nurse’s uniform and cap seemed absolutely designed to hide what she prided herself on as a first-rate bosom, and she certainly knew what her mirror told her, which was that the dewy skin and glossy hair she’d had at eighteen had slunk out the door at some point—probably scared off by the teething screams of her oldest child, she imagined. Tess waved off the apologies of the orderly and pondered whether the hysterics of Lizzie and May in the VAD tent would be worth the amusement of a handsome doctor falling in love with Vera at first sight. Perhaps the distraction would be an incentive in itself. Playing with infatuation magic (no magic could craft love, but there was quite a bit that could be done with good old-fashioned hormones) was more in Cousin Dorothy’s expertise, but Tess wondered if it was worth the effort.
Then she set eyes on Doctor Clive Spall, and all her amusement evaporated.
“Ah, so that’s the cause of all of this,” she said. She knew how grim her tone was from the wide-eyed look that Vera gave her, but, well, it wasn’t as if she had expected to lay eyes on a Summerlord’s son in the middle of a hospital ward.
Human mother, of course, and she pitied that girl. Few left the bower of one of the greater of the Folk with all their wits intact. But someone had been prepared for his arrival, because he wore a glamour so old and moth-worn to hide his half-breed traits that Tess knew it had to have been put on him at birth. It made him look human—hiding ears that would do a tomcat proud—but was too threadbare to keep that otherworldly allure from leaking out. He’d never have lacked for girls in his bed or fellows willing to follow him, but glamour always soured. The girls would turn away from him after a night or three, the companionship of friends would always curdle to enmity. Tess read that easily enough in the set of his jaw and shoulders—a lifetime of disappointment in people leading to a preemptive strike, a refusal to allow more hurts. A reliance only on the self.
Not unlike Vera when it came down to it, perhaps, but Tess had no desire to take this bird under her wing. The fey were a bloodthirsty lot, and many of their scions inherited the taste.
“I believe you might have the right of it after all, Vera,” she said, slanting a glance at the young woman. At least her blasted contrariness was finally doing her some good in life. A Summerlord’s son, however bastard and hybridized, promised no good for anyone. Far better for Vera to give him a wide berth. As for herself—well, who knew how much he was aware of his parentage. But she pressed her finger against the bloodstain on her cuff and traced a quick sign, and his gaze passed over her as if she wasn’t even there.
How much of that was from her small magics and how much was from the irritating tendency of a handsome man in his upper twenties to utterly dismiss a woman a decade his senior, who was to say, but in this case, a bit of caution was in order.
TESS’S CHILDREN HAD TAKEN TO sending her a weekly letter where all wrote messages to her. The latest post had brought quite a chronicle, with a squabble between her two middle children. The older had lent the younger money, but at a rate of interest. The younger had not understood what interest was, and had been outraged upon learning the particulars days later. Much back-and-forth followed, complicated by a Sunday sermon that had happened to mention a religious disapproval of usury. Tess’s oldest had attempted to keep the letter light, providing odd breaks from the squabbling into a horticultural discussion of the garden, while Tess’s youngest gloried in tattling on everyone. The letter was nine pages long, with tensions reaching a fever pitch on page seven, which had apparently been ripped in a sibling disagreement over epistolary honesty and then pasted together later.
Tess’s mother had provided a postscript to the incident, lamenting dryly that the Kaiser had seen fit to keep Tess from witnessing (and mediating) the controversy firsthand, and also relating that Tess’s father had discovered that his spanking prowess had not dimmed with the passage of years. Solomon’s justice had been meted out—the younger forced to pay the interest, the older banned from any future adventures in moneylending, the youngest scolded, and the eldest sternly told to wear a hat while gardening, due to sunburn.
Tess had brought the letter to the ward and read it to the convalescing men, who found it uproariously funny, and she had found herself prevailed upon to reread it several times over the next few days. On the latest performance of the letter, she found her audience increased by one, as Vera had come in to visit her. In the two months since Doctor Spall had arrived, Matron Johnson had transferred her from the venereal-disease ward to a hut filled with injured German POWs. It was awful, thankless work—the language barrier made communication utterly rudimentary, supplies were provided extremely begrudgingly, and Vera had confessed to Tess that she found it profoundly difficult to nurse men who only days before had been doing their best to fill the rest of the hospital.
At the conclusion of the reading, Tess joined Vera by the cart
of tea-things, where she was busily filling cups.
“It’s very good of you to lend a hand,” Tess said. “But you have a day off for a reason. Take a book and go have a picnic. You need some sun. It’s July and you look paler than you did back in February.”
“I might later,” Vera lied unconvincingly. At the other end of the ward, there was a loud shout—the women looked over just in time to see an orderly restrain a private from going for Doctor Spall’s throat. Judging that Corporal Brown had the situation well in hand, and that Sister Poppy Sadler was marching over with a glinted eye and a full syringe, Tess continued counting out biscuits.
“Doctor Spall doesn’t seem to have made friends with that man,” Vera noted, still looking at the fracas. With the doctor safely away, the orderly yanked down the patient’s pajama bottoms to give Sister Sadler a good spot to aim her needle, both ignoring the torrent of colorful invective that spewed from the man.
Tess made a noncommittal noise. As she’d expected, most of the hospital staff had gone off Doctor Spall within the first few weeks as the glamour soured. She’d taken care to watch from a distance, but he hadn’t seemed affected either by his universal adoration or the equally shared revulsion that had followed close on its heels—clearly, he’d been used to both. Tess had noticed that while his bedside manner was abysmally poor, he did at least show a pleasing devotion to his duties—checking all of his patients regularly, regardless of the cost to his own sleep or free hours, and seeming genuinely upset whenever his efforts were in vain.
“I really don’t care for him that much myself,” Vera added.
“Do you see much of him in the prisoners’ hut?” Tess asked.
The girl frowned, almost as if she was struggling to remember. Tess looked up, surprised. “Vera?”
Vera blinked and shook her head. “Oh, no. He’s never at the hut. Whenever we need a doctor, we’re to call in Captain Shealy.”
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