The Woman at the Front

by Lecia Cornwall

  She followed the chaplain as she wondered where Sergeant MacLeod was now. She hoped he was safe and had found some breakfast.

  She might never see him again, but she suspected—knew—that she’d carry the memory of him for a very long time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  By the time Fraser MacLeod arrived back at the frontline aid post it was late afternoon, and nearly dark yet again. He’d found a ride with the lads in the quartermaster’s wagon, and he came bearing supplies, mail, and a tin of cake that one of the nursing sisters at 46/CCS had kindly sent along.

  The aid post occupied the cellar of a ruined bakery a few hundred yards behind the forward trenches, where the wounded could reach it easily. It had been a snug billet for the winter, with the old bake oven providing heat and the bombproof thick stone walls.

  Fraser climbed off the wagon and swung his pack over his shoulder. He winced as it rubbed at the raw places on his neck and back where the straps of the stretcher bit deep day after day. Out of habit, he paused for a moment to listen to the sound of guns, much closer here, and for the cries of wounded men calling for help, but the gunfire was intermittent and half-hearted. He’d have enough time for a meal and perhaps a few hours’ sleep before he had to take his team of bearers forward to support the men going out on night raids.

  He let the quartermaster’s detail go ahead of him down the narrow stairs into the cellar, carrying tin pails of food for the medical officer, orderlies, and bearers inside. It was cold now, but they’d reheat it on the small stove—not that it would make it any more palatable.

  Corporal Max Chilcott, another bearer, looked up and grinned as Fraser appeared in the doorway. “Look who’s back, and just in time for supper! Good to see you—not that you missed anything—it’s been quiet.” He sent a dour sideways look at the soldier carrying the rations. “Did you bring anything good to eat by chance, Fraser?”

  “Cake from Sister MacKinnon,” Fraser said, and he watched the corporal’s eyes light up as he put the tin on the table. “There’s mail and a few boxes of supplies in the wagon.”

  Two of the other bearers went out to fetch it, and Fraser stood next to the warm bread oven, holding out his battered hands to the heat radiating from the bricks.

  Captain Nathaniel Duncan, the regimental medical officer, was sitting at a small table with some of the bearers and orderlies, playing cards by candlelight to save the kerosene. The cots and treatment tables along the walls were empty save for a few medics, who were using them to catch some sleep. Fred Hammond was snoring like a tank driving through porridge, but no one minded. Sleep was too precious to wake him from.

  “Welcome back, Sergeant,” Captain Duncan said, glancing up from his cards. “The Germans apparently knew you were away, since they’ve not bothered to fire a shot at us in two days. I daresay we’re in for it now you’re here again.”

  “Any rumors of a spring offensive? Did Bellford say anything?” Chilcott asked, taking a cigarette from behind his ear and passing it to Fraser.

  “Not to me. It’s quiet on the line, though there’s some shelling farther south, near Bapaume.” Fraser lit the fag and took a drag.

  “And your patient?” the MO asked.

  “Guthrie was alive when I left him,” Fraser said. “They did an amputation at 46/CCS and asked me to accompany him to Calais, which I did.”

  “You’re a lucky lad, as usual,” Chilcott said without resentment.

  “Oh, there were plenty of nurses and orderlies who could have gone, but Reverend Strong knew Captain Duncan would be wanting an update when I got back here.”

  “Still, all the way to Calais! It’s not Paris, but how’s the big city?” Chilcott asked.

  Fraser shook his head. “I didn’t see more than the train station. The chaplain asked me to bring back a consignment of supplies, and they were at the station, ready and waiting. I took one train out, the next one back.”

  He should tell them about the marvelous curiosity that was Eleanor Atherton, lady doctor, but he didn’t. He found he wanted to keep her to himself, not answer questions about whether she was pretty, or willing, or prudish. Besides, he wasn’t likely to see her again, so what was the point of mentioning her?

  “The lads on the line will be glad to hear Guthrie is alive and on his way home to Blighty,” Duncan said. “I’ll spread the word. Did you get any rest?”

  “Some, on the train ride back,” he lied. He should have slept—he’d been here long enough to know to grab sleep whenever and wherever an opportunity presented itself, because there was no way to know when the next chance would come. Instead, he’d spent most of those precious hours watching Eleanor Atherton sleep. Even now, tired as he was, he couldn’t see it as wasted time. He remembered her pale face, the long copper lashes resting on her cheeks, the long locks of russet hair falling free from the hat that had gone askew after her fight with the soldiers. He grinned at that, even here in the cellar. Then he frowned.

  She’d probably had a joyful reunion with her wounded flier and had forgotten all about meeting a grubby Scottish sergeant on the train.

  “Sounds like a dull trip,” Chilcott said.

  “Aye,” he muttered.

  “You still look half dead, Sergeant,” Duncan said, assessing him with a medical eye. “Have something to eat, and sleep for a while. I’ll wake you if I need you.”

  Fraser took a tin cup and filled it with tepid and typical Irish stew from the pail on the stove. Duncan rose to join him, and Fraser filled a cup for him as well. “Ever work with a female doctor, Captain?”

  Duncan’s brows rose. “That’s an odd question. No. There were two in my class at university—well, not my class, since they trained separately from the men.”

  “Were ye in Edinburgh?” Fraser asked.

  “London,” Duncan replied. “Why? Did you hear something? They aren’t suggesting bringing over female doctors, are they? I know we’re short staffed, but they could never do the job—shouldn’t do the job.”

  “There was a hospital run by women in Paris,” Chilcott said, overhearing.

  Duncan frowned. “Aye, I’ve heard of it. And there are a couple of others here in France as well, at Royaumont and Wimereux. There’s even one in London, on Endell Street, staffed entirely by women. The War Office sanctioned it when female doctors wouldn’t take no for an answer when they tried to enlist. Mind you, they needed the beds, and the doctors, and I hear they do passable work there at least, safe behind the lines. Most of them go to the French when the War Office rejects them. Some even formed their own associations to fund themselves, and since the women were willing to supply everything from staff to medicines, the French readily agreed to let them. Saves them money, and in the end, the women aren’t their citizens, and therefore not their problem if there’s trouble. Daft system. I wonder if those women even realize how vulnerable they are. Why are you asking? What did you hear?” he asked Fraser again.

  “Nothing at all,” Fraser said, staring at the stodgy stew in his cup.

  Chilcott nudged Fraser with his elbow and jerked his head at Duncan. “Might be nice to have a woman as MO,” he teased. “Prettier than this bloke, and her stitches would leave less of a scar.” He mimed the act of sewing, his pinkie extended, his lips pursed sweetly.

  “It will never happen,” Duncan said. He frowned at the meal as well and set his cup aside. He took a chipped china mug and filled it with tea from the metal pot on the hob instead. It was thick and black as treacle from brewing all day, but hot and strong. “A woman could never face the horrors of the front,” Duncan said. “Can you imagine a woman shoving some poor bastard’s guts back into his belly while he curses her for a butcher? Or examining a man down with the clap? The poor lad would die of embarrassment, and she would faint dead away at the sight of it. No, a woman can’t be expected to manage the full duties of a male doctor, entering the trenches and billets of
ordinary soldiers. It would be an affront to their dignity—hers and his.”

  “Hear, hear!” Chilcott agreed around a spoonful of stew. He raised his cup and saluted the smiling photo of English music hall sweetheart Gertie Gitana, cut from a newspaper and nailed to the wall above the table. “Women have their place at home, waiting for us, pining, keeping the kettle hot and the fire stoked. There’s where I want to think of a woman, in her bood-whar, her perfumed hair in ribbons, dressed in lace and silk, waiting for me to come marching home.”

  Fraser tried to picture Eleanor Atherton at a makeshift aid post set up in a shell hole or an abandoned trench, tending patients under fire, risking death. In the past five months, they’d lost two MOs. He couldn’t picture her sitting at home in a boudoir, either. He remembered the look of clinical determination on her face as she had leaned over McKie, the gas patient on the platform in Calais, and the sturdy left hook she had planted in the eye of the soldier who’d dared to accost her.

  “Are you grinning that way because you agree with me, Fraser?” Chilcott asked him, and Fraser sobered and looked up at Gertie Gitana again, then simply nodded.

  “Aye, she belongs at home, where she’s safe,” he muttered. He made his way toward a cot. He fell on it facedown and was asleep in minutes.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  March 6, 1918

  Eleanor’s days fell into a pattern. In the morning she would visit Louis after breakfast. The matron insisted that she not arrive before eight thirty, since the patients needed to be cared for, fed, shaved, and bathed before then, and she would be a distraction and an affront to their dignity and their expectations of privacy. She was just a visitor, in the matron’s opinion, which was the only one that mattered. The colonel may have given her permission to stay, but the matron made the rules where her presence on the officers’ ward was concerned, the only ward Eleanor was permitted to set foot in. She spent the early mornings pacing the floor of the small visitor’s hut they’d given her as accommodation, since the sounds of the war beyond the thin walls would not allow her to rest past dawn. She woke every time she heard the sound of footsteps on the duckboards. Surely running feet meant an emergency, and she itched to help. She heard the sound of ambulances arriving or departing, the motors chugging, the brakes squealing. There were shouted orders, calls for supplies, and worst of all, the cries of the wounded. She wasn’t used to enforced leisure, or to solitude. No one was actively rude to her, but the nurses and orderlies remained distant when she encountered them by chance. They were positively suspicious if they thought she was watching them, observing procedures or techniques. She learned to observe from the corner of her eye, to keep her tongue trapped firmly behind her teeth, and not to ask questions.

  When she did arrive to see Louis—usually at 8:31 a.m.—Matron Connolly crisply and briefly updated her on Lieutenant Chastaine’s condition. “His leg was examined this morning by Colonel Bellford, and the night sister checked the burns on his arm. He slept well, has eaten sufficiently, and performed his bodily functions in good order. There’s nothing of a medical nature for you to do, but perhaps you might read to him. I’ll ask one of the orderlies to bring you a chair.” There was nothing more to do until Colonel Bellford pronounced Louis fit to travel and released him to her care for the journey.

  When the matron left the ward, Eleanor still did her own check on the adjustment of the splint on Louis’s leg.

  “How much longer will I have to be here?” Louis asked her irritably one morning after she’d been there for nine days and he’d grown bored with the novelty of flirting with her and fell back to teasing her again. “My leg aches, and so does my backside, and I’m bored.”

  “Just another little while. A fortnight or so.” Eleanor looked at the case file and read Bellford’s minimal scrawled notes, which said little. “The colonel is very happy with your progress,” she told him encouragingly.

  “Blair said I was doing well,” Louis argued. Eleanor still hadn’t met Captain Blair. He was on night duty and did his rounds at dawn, and he was often away, on call to other CCS units, since surgeons were in short supply. Another man was due to arrive from England any day, but medical officers rushed back and forth to the locations where the fighting was heaviest and they were most needed. Since her arrival, it had been relatively quiet in forty-six’s sector.

  “You’re doing very well, but healing takes time,” she soothed.

  “Rub my shoulders, will you?” Louis demanded petulantly, and she obliged.

  “You’re a lucky chap, Chastaine,” Captain Findlay said from the bed next to Louis’s as she moved the pillow and began to massage Louis’s back. It no longer felt intimate or thrilling. He was tense and simply wanted the knots eased. He wasn’t used to sitting still—she couldn’t remember him ever walking when he could run, or sitting when he could climb. He liked speed, the thrill of wind in his hair, a dare, danger, and he’d had nearly five weeks of enforced rest. He sent a frustrated frown Findlay’s way now, and Findlay laughed. “You are, you know. I haven’t got lovely young ladies coming to care for me. How did you manage it?”

  “Perhaps if you were a pilot, old boy, instead of just an infantry officer. Women—ladies, matrons, even doctors like Eleanor—love fliers,” Louis said, basking in Findlay’s envy. “Isn’t that right, El?” He gave Eleanor a grin of his own now he had an audience, but she knew the flirtatious smile was more for Findlay’s benefit than for hers, a glorious moment of superiority for Louis. She’d come to realize that even when he was at his most charming, his heart remained untouched where she was concerned. She was a friend, and he treated her with familiar ease, though even that felt superficial. Only his frustration was real, his restlessness. Under his careful facade of charm and careless courage, she suspected there was much more. Perhaps he was in pain, or worried that he might not ever heal. She did her best to soothe that, but thus far he hadn’t allowed her to crack the hard surface he kept over his true emotions. She supposed she should be disappointed that her childhood hero had feet of clay after all. But strangely, she wasn’t. She had come to see Louis Chastaine as an interesting medical case, her brother’s friend, the son of her employer and benefactor, and a genuine pain in the backside. She wondered if he was as shallow as he pretended to be. Surely not—he’d won a medal for bravery, had endured and survived. Somewhere inside, she suspected, the real Louis Chastaine was a man worth knowing, worth admiring—or so she hoped.

  “Is that ‘Elle’ from the French for ‘she,’ perhaps? Is that a childhood nickname?” Findlay asked, still vying for her attention. He’d been at the CCS for two days. His arm was in a sling, and he had several broken ribs. His breathing was shallow, but his eyes brightened when she entered the ward each morning. He had a charming smile and bright green eyes under reddish-blond hair. He was another unrepentant flirt, like Louis. Captain Findlay grinned at the nurses and VADs, asked after their families, and promised to arrange to send them all kinds of treats when he got well again and was back in England. His compliments made them blush and smile and turned even the most professional nurses to putty. Louis competed outrageously with Findlay, and in the heady glow of such intense and charming masculine attention, how could any woman resist? The only woman immune to it was Matron Connolly. Nothing softened her icy demeanor.

  Eleanor found it exhausting, constantly trying to decipher the double meaning of their compliments and quips or the precise suggestion meant by a wink, a roguish grin, or a smirk.

  She found herself comparing them to Fraser MacLeod. His gaze had been forthright and direct, and he’d made her feel like a person, not a conquest. His admiration wasn’t given easily, she suspected, and would be hard won and honest when it came, and all the more precious. It surprised her that she longed for that, not for Louis’s meaningless compliments.

  She didn’t realize she was smiling blankly at Captain Findlay, lost in her own thoughts, until Louis grabbed her hand and sque
ezed it until she fixed her gaze on him.

  “Of course it’s a nickname. Elle, French for ‘she,’ woman.” He lowered his tone, made the last word a seductive purr. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and his thumb stroked her knuckles. Golly, it felt good. Could a man seduce a woman just by caressing her knuckles? “That makes me Lui, ‘him,’ l’homme, n’est-ce pas? Eleanor and Louis, Elle et Lui, Lui et Elle.”

  Eleanor and Louis. How often had she written that in her notebooks as a girl, dreaming of a moment like this? He didn’t mean a word of it. She searched his face, the lines around his mouth and eyes, the slight tension in his jaw, met the heavy-lidded eyes, wondering yet again what he was truly thinking, but Findlay laughed and broke the spell. “Elle et Lui—very clever. It would be hard to make such a charming play on my name. My parents christened me Lancelot.”

  “Ah, but in other company, perhaps, Lance?” Chastaine said and gave his comrade a wink. Findlay had the grace to blush. Perhaps Louis thought Eleanor was too innocent to understand the double meaning. She wasn’t. She’d faced a great deal of that kind of teasing in medical school, where her male classmates made sport of her just because she was young, female, and virginal. This jest was mild by comparison to some she’d endured. She turned away to pour a glass of water from the carafe on the bedside table.

  “Good heavens, you’re as pink as a June rose. We haven’t shocked you, have we, Eleanor?” Louis asked, touching a knuckle to her cheek. “Perhaps I’ve been in rough male company too long. Forgive me?” She glanced at him, wondering if he was sincere now, and if she’d even be able to tell. He sent her a wide-eyed, pleading look that made her heart flip in her breast. Her hand shook, and she spilled water on her sleeve. She could understand how a lass would give him anything just for that smile . . . Still, she raised her chin and gave him a sharp look.