The Woman at the Front

by Lecia Cornwall

  David nodded. It really was impossible to say no.

  He rose to his feet. Perhaps he should offer to help unload the supplies, but the chaplain had the faithful Private Gibbons to help. He saw Gibbons now, wheeling a laden cart away from the ambulance, which for now held nothing more menacing than crates and bundles.

  Then he saw the rangy and ragged form of Sergeant Fraser MacLeod leap out of the back—now there was another good man, nearly as good as the chaplain. The stretcher bearer’s heroic deeds seemed just as endless, his determination to save others almost as saintly.

  Then MacLeod reached for something in the back of the vehicle, and it turned out to be someone—a woman. MacLeod swung her to earth in a graceful arc, and she caught her hat as she landed and held it against the wind. She was clad in one of those dreadfully boxy suits women favored, half military, half sober mourning wear. There wasn’t a single feminine detail about women these days, nothing to tempt or entice a man away from his duty, distract him with thoughts of sex. She half turned, and David grimaced. Gack—the damned getup was even worse than the terrible habit-like uniforms the VADs wore. Then she lifted her chin and he saw her face, nothing more than a distant impression of wide eyes and a prim mouth. She had lace at her collar, and long tendrils of red hair crept out from under her ugly hat. He wondered who she was, why she’d come to 46/CCS. Possibly a visitor, or perhaps she was a do-gooder from some committee or other sent to bring comfort and cheer, or order, or better morals to the troops. She was probably traveling with crates full of badly knitted mittens and mufflers to hand out to the men.

  But he doubted MacLeod would be so solicitous if that was the case. Like most soldiers who’d seen the worst of this war, he had no patience for the uninformed and clumsy interference of do-gooders who scurried back across the Channel as soon as their curiosity was satisfied.

  David watched as she followed the sergeant over to an orderly, who grinned at her besottedly until the sergeant barked at him and he twitched to attention. Pretty, then? A pretty face would be a tonic indeed, a pleasant change from the grim-faced matron.

  “Who’s that?” he asked Tom Gibbons as he passed.

  “Who?” The young man gave David his usual guileless smile.

  “The woman you brought, Tom, the one who just got out of the ambulance you were in.”

  “Oh. That’s Miss Atherton. She’s a doctor,” Gibbons said, and continued on.

  David stared after him for a moment in surprise, then hurried to catch up to the private. “A doctor? She’s not—she’s not here to replace Carrington, is she?” Geoffrey Carrington, captain and surgeon, had died when a shell hit the ambulance he was in. They’d been waiting three weeks for a replacement.

  “She’s here to visit someone,” Gibbons said.

  Private Gibbons was a simple and good-hearted lad. Everyone liked him. He did as he was told, he worked hard, and he was as dim as the moon on a cloudy night.

  “Who is she visiting?” David asked.

  “Lieutenant Chastaine,” Gibbons said. “The pilot with the broken leg.”

  “Is she his sister, his maiden aunt, his grandmother?”

  Gibbons gave him another goofy grin. “I dunno, Captain. Sergeant MacLeod found her at the station, and she needed a ride. Reverend Strong said it was all right with him, so it was all right with me. Colonel Bellford won’t like her.”

  “Won’t he?” David asked. “Is she pretty?”

  Gibbons blushed. “I wouldn’t know that, Captain.”

  David sighed and let the lad get on with his task, turning to watch the young woman disappear through the flap of the officers’ ward. “Lucky Chastaine,” he murmured.

  He put his empty pipe in his pocket and went to find the chaplain.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Louis Chastaine scowled at his broken leg, bandaged, splinted, and hanging in a sling, and attached to pulleys and wires and a pole at the end of his bed. The apparatus reminded him of the rigging of his airplane, the wood and wire contraption that had carried him into the heavens above the battlefield, giving him a bird’s-eye view of the world below.

  The plane was nothing but a pile of ash now, and he was lucky to be alive.

  They’d pulled him out of the burning wreckage in the nick of time and gotten him to an aid post. But that was nearly three weeks ago. Since then, he’d been trapped in this narrow, lumpy, beastly bed, barely able to move. In fact, he’d been warned not to move at all, or his dancing days—never mind his walking days, or even possibly all his days—would be over. His backside ached from lying in the same position for so long. He’d read all the bloody newspapers and well-thumbed copies of Country Life that the VADs—those Very Adorable Darlings—handed round with beguiling smiles, every single issue months out of date. Worse, his mother was prominently featured in almost every issue, photographed doing good works for the war effort. She’d turned Chesscroft into a hospital, and he wondered if some weedy infantry captain was sleeping in his bed, enjoying the clean Yorkshire air and the splendid views of the dales.

  There was an article about Cyril’s funeral as well, which he refused to look at.

  And if he tired of Country Life, his godfather, Colonel Sir Hugo Ferris, had sent him the gift of a leather-bound set of Dickens’s works to pass the time.

  Louis hated Dickens. Jack London was more to his taste.

  His mother had sent him books as well, of course, which he’d promptly donated unread to the CCS’s fledgling library to be inflicted on other poor sods. They were dull improving tomes, full of lectures on masculine morals, fortitude, obedience, and the responsibilities of the upper classes to set an example for the lower classes. She meant them as a crash course for the next earl, the younger son never expected to inherit the title and the fortune and the ancestral pile. They should load the guns with those books, Louis thought, and fire them at the Germans. The enemy would laugh themselves to death, bringing the war to a swift and amusing conclusion. Of course, Louis would be dead of boredom himself by then. He flipped listlessly through the latest issue of Country Life, nearly two months old and featuring photographs of his mother donating a motorcycle to the local regiment and digging potatoes in the victory vegetable garden that had replaced part of the rose garden at Chesscroft. Poor Binns—the old gardener loved the roses so. It must have been a blow to him to see them plowed under for turnips and tatties.

  He tossed the magazine aside and looked around the officers’ ward for someone to talk to. He’d had Jack Charring-Sandford to natter to for a few days, but Jack been quickly shipped off back to Blighty, his left eye lost to shrapnel. He remembered Charlie Peckerill from Cambridge, but Charlie had been drugged to the gills with morphine while he was here and still screamed for more, insisting that his left foot was in flaming agony. The worst of it was that Charlie’s left foot and the whole rest of his leg had been taken off at the hip. The poor bugger had been a champion sprinter before the war, a good dancer, and a damn fine cricketer. The ladies loved him. Would they still? Charlie’s dancing days were most definitely over. Louis tried not to consider the possibility that he’d not dance again, either, or even walk without a limp.

  And good old Bumpy, Lord Anthony Bixby, the son and heir of the Earl of Hareton, had been here. He’d always been good for a laugh. He was a silver-tongued devil with women, charmed duchesses old and young, shop girls prim and cheeky, and the lovely Lady Arianne Cowper-Martin, the belle of her coming-out season. But Bumpy had seen a dozen men in his command take a direct hit as he was speaking with them. They’d simply vaporized, vanished before his eyes, as if they’d never existed at all, and suddenly he was talking to himself. He’d stood there, stiff as a statue, covered with blood and bits of bone, unable to speak or move. The lucky charm one of his men wore, a wooden four-leaf clover, had been blown off the man’s neck and embedded itself in Bumpy’s cheek. They’d carried him out of the trench, cleaned him of
f, and put him to bed, stiff as a pole. He hadn’t spoken a word since, and he hadn’t recognized Louis. They’d taken Bumpy away with the other shell-shock cases, and Louis supposed he was likely locked away somewhere safe and quiet with doctors poking at him day and night and examining the odd scar of a four-leaf clover on his cheek.

  The rest of the poor bastards in the bell tent that served as the officers’ ward—and there were only four of them at the moment, all recovering from surgery or drugged insensible against pain—weren’t inclined to conversation. Louis understood well enough. Too much on their minds, too many bad memories, too much bloody shame or guilt or simple horror at what had happened to them. The silence was wearing, and it left too much time for Louis to think about the accident that had put him here, to analyze it, to relive it in horrifying detail, from the sight of the bullet holes appearing in his propeller to the first puff of smoke to the sudden hard punch as the next bullet pierced the fuselage and buried itself in his thigh. The plane went down like a dead swallow, heading straight toward a trench full of Frenchies. He’d seen their open mouths, the horror on their faces as they waved him off even as they tried to flee the certain death plummeting toward them. Louis had been so busy trying to control his airplane that he hadn’t noticed the pain in his leg. He remembered the sudden flare of flame, orange against the gray sky, and the way it chewed hungrily at the canvas wings, reaching for him.

  He’d fought with the damned controls, made bargains with God and the devil and whoever else might be listening. The airplane had cleared the trench, heading instead for a field behind it and a burned-out farmhouse. All he could do was let the plane go where it would and watch as the ground rose up fast. The impact was bone jarring. He’d bitten his own tongue, which distracted from the fact that his leg shattered on impact. He’d had enough wit left to drag himself out of the inferno, one leg useless, blood pouring from his mouth, his left sleeve on fire. He lay on the ground in agony, wondering if he was actually dead. He saw feet rushing toward him but remembered nothing after that.

  He was lucky—the farmhouse turned out to be a British Regimental Aid Post, and the doctor was in.

  Sir Hugo, his godfather and a dear friend of his mother’s, had been by his bed two days later, when he woke here at 46/CCS. He informed Louis that he was a hero and would get a medal for the magnificent landing he’d managed, at least a Distinguished Service Order for gallantry. Then a lemon-faced nursing sister had informed Sir Hugo that he must go at once and let Louis rest. The doctor sternly informed Louis that he must lie still, that it was too dangerous to move him to a base hospital or home to England, and that he’d have to stay put and wait for his bones to knit and stabilize if he wanted to keep his leg. There was still a risk of infection, or of gas gangrene, or that the burns on his arms might cause problems.

  He could die.

  For once in his life, Louis did as he was told, afraid not of death itself, but of a slow, rotting, painful end.

  But after nearly three weeks, almost a month, the pain had lessened to a dull ache, and he was bored.

  He wished Sister Spofford would come through the ward. She was the prettiest nursing sister, with big blue eyes and a simpering lisp. She blushed easily when teased, which embarrassed her and amused him. He’d even settle for Sister Dane, who was as sharp as broken glass. She pursed her lips when she was angry or aroused. He’d once caught sight of a lock of blond hair that had slipped its pins and escaped from under her veil. He’d caught it in his fingers as she’d bent over him, stroked the lock gently for a moment, and grinned at her. She’d taken a soft, surprised breath, her eyes widening, her tight little mouth softening, the warm weight of her breast resting on his chest. It had been intensely erotic. She hadn’t pulled away. Well, not immediately. If he hadn’t been trussed like a goose, he would have caught her in his arms, pulled her under him and kissed her silly. Instead, she’d freed herself and scurried toward the door like a frightened mouse.

  He drummed his fingers on the coverlet. He wanted a drink and a cigarette. He wanted to scratch his desperately itchy, aching leg—or his balls. Christ help him if he found himself reduced to that for amusement. Perhaps Nurse Spofford would oblige . . . the very idea had him half hard.

  He heard voices by the door and looked up eagerly. But it was Matron Connolly who entered, her gimlet eyes roaming the room for anything out of place. Her gaze fell on him, and her brows rose with disapproval. Now there was a sight to wilt the stiffest pecker.

  He gritted his teeth and gave her his best heir-to-the-earldom grin as she marched toward him.

  “You have a visitor, Lieutenant,” she said, her tone cool and oh-so-efficient. She straightened his blankets with a sharp twitch and checked that his pajamas were buttoned. She pleated a knitted sock and put it over the naked toes of his splinted leg. She took a comb out of the drawer in the bedside table and fixed his hair as if he were a lad in short pants.

  “Ah, so it’s a lady, then,” he said. She wouldn’t fuss so if his visitor were male. “Or is it just a woman?” Oh, let it be a woman, a low, immoral chippy with warm hands and a clever mouth, and not some highborn, whey-faced do-good volunteer bringing sweeties and another stale edition of Country Life. Perhaps Edward Atherton had sent someone—good old Edward, his partner in crime, seduction, and misadventure—he’d know what was wanted.

  “Yes, you have a female visitor,” Matron said unhelpfully, stepping back and running a critical eye over him.

  “An orderly gave me a bath and shaved me this morning, Matron. I’m as presentable as possible,” he said in cold aristocratic tones, tired of being judged and prodded and primped. “Show my guest in at once.”

  Instead she took her time, calmly moving to check on the other patients and draw screens around their beds, providing them all with a modicum of privacy before she went to fetch his visitor. Louis chafed at the delay.

  Maybe it would be someone he knew and liked. Cynthia Meldrum, perhaps—he’d heard the lovely Cyn was serving as a VAD somewhere in France. Lady Anne Dear-oh-Dear Dearing would also be a welcome sight for sore eyes. He hoped it wasn’t his mother. She’d made it her cause to worry and fret over him, the new heir to the title, and he wouldn’t put it past her to rush here to badger and berate him. Or worse, fawn over him. Neither of them would enjoy that. They had a distant relationship. Cyril had been her favorite, while Louis had merely been the spare. But the Countess of Kirkswell would already have barged in, more than a match for even such a formidable dragon as Matron Connolly. Louis rolled his eyes heavenward and whispered a prayer. “Please, if there is a God, or even a benevolent devil, let it be anyone but my mother.”

  Anyone at all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Eleanor waited for the nursing sister to return. Would Louis be glad to see her? Surprised? What if he looked at her with disdain, or laughed at her the way he used to with Edward? At least she had no braids to pull. He’d never been quite as quick to tease her as Edward. In fact, he’d often drawn her brother away from tormenting her, citing other, more interesting things to do, as if she wasn’t worth the trouble of tormenting. It took a lot to make her cry, for she had learned that crying only made Edward crueler. Stone-faced, her stomach in knots, she’d watched them run away, leaving her behind, longing for another of Louis’s dazzling smiles, a crumb of attention or concern, or another gallantly bestowed handkerchief. He was Edward’s friend, not hers—but Edward wasn’t here, and she, Eleanor, was the friend he needed now.

  She took the interval to tuck the loose strands of her hair under her hat and straighten her collar and her skirt, making herself presentable. Perhaps Louis would look at her with male interest, see that she’d grown up to be an attractive, interesting, capable woman, and be intrigued. She gripped the handle of her doctor’s bag tighter. It wasn’t impossible—Fraser MacLeod had looked at her that way.

  But she was supposed to be thinking about Louis.

 
; Her patient.

  She’d been asked to wait outside the curtain that guarded the officers’ ward, in the supply area by the door of the bell tent. She looked at the shelves—nothing more than crates turned sideways to hold medical supplies, basins and buckets, piles of sheets and towels, and a small stove and the things necessary to make tea. Her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since Calais, hadn’t had anything to drink since the dreadful cup of tea with Sergeant MacLeod at Arras. And the sip of whisky he’d given her, of course.

  She heard the starched rustle of the nursing sister returning. She opened the curtain but did not immediately step aside to allow Eleanor through. “The lieutenant is ready to see you,” she said, her lips tight, her eyes traveling over Eleanor with clear disapproval, though she knew nothing about her yet. “I will remind you that our patients need quiet and rest. Decorum on your part is essential. You must refrain from crying, exclaiming, or fainting.”

  Eleanor’s lips parted. “Is he so bad off, then?”

  The woman didn’t reply to that, not when there were rules and regulations to impart, and she carried on with those. “There is a nursing sister on duty, seated at the desk at the end of this ward. She’s here to keep an eye on things and make sure everything is in order—and that they remain in order.” She swept Eleanor with another head-to-toe glance, as if she were disinfecting her.

  “I was given to understand that Lieutenant Chastaine is suffering from a broken femur—is that still the case?”

  The matron looked surprised. “Yes.”

  “Is there any reason to assume he is not stable enough to endure a visit from a . . . a family friend?”

  The matron clasped her hands at her waist. “No. There are burns on his hand and arm as well. Those are uncovered. Such wounds, mild as those are compared to the injuries suffered by others, often shock female visitors.”