The Woman at the Front

by Lecia Cornwall

  “The burn could still be a source of infection if we’re not careful,” David added.

  “Aren’t the best doctors at the base hospitals? Perhaps I should go to Paris. Wouldn’t I be better off there?”

  David gritted his teeth at the man’s haughty tone, at the plummy sound of privilege and the kind of wealth that could buy anything.

  David’s own father had been a senior lecturer in history at Cambridge. He’d inherited a modest windfall from an uncle and had invested it wisely until he had enough money to raise his sons like gentlemen, to help Patrick emigrate and buy the ranch and to pay for medical school for David. Even so, they’d never be gentlemanly enough for aristocrats like Chastaine. He held the flier’s eyes without deference. Here in France, at war, social rank mattered less—and David’s military rank of captain and his position as surgeon trumped Chastaine’s lieutenancy. “If you want a second opinion, you might perhaps ask Dr. Atherton to—”

  “No,” Chastaine said quickly. “Not Eleanor.”

  The easy use of her Christian name irritated David, but he nodded. “She is your physician. She should at least be consulted.”

  Chastaine frowned. “My mother sent her—I had no idea she was a real doctor. I thought she was nothing more than a glorified nanny, a nursemaid. She’s not the girl I remember. You couldn’t say boo to her as a child.”

  “And now you’re surprised she’s a doctor?”

  “I heard she’d made it through medical school, graduated. Her brother told me. I suppose everyone expected that she’d simply find a husband and marry and give it all up. Will she find one now? A woman who can do that”—he glanced pointedly at Findlay—“without blushing or even turning a hair? This is awkward for me, you understand. What must the other chaps in here think of all this? Eleanor is what they used to call an ‘original’ in the old days, a woman out of place, different, an embarrassment.”

  “An embarrassment?” David asked. “She saved a man’s life!”

  “Not my life!” Chastaine snapped. “I didn’t ask her to come here. She’s my mother’s creature, sent to spy on me, to drag me home where I’ll be kept safely under my mother’s manicured thumb. Well, what if I don’t want to go? What if I don’t want to be a bloody viscount?” He glared at David, waiting for a reaction, for agreement, perhaps, but David remained silent. “I need a cigarette. Do you have one by any chance?”

  David shook his head. He had cigarettes in his pocket he shared with other patients, but he didn’t want to oblige Chastaine, not after all he’d said about Eleanor.

  Chastaine rolled his eyes in frustration and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “How long did you say I’d be trussed up like this?”

  “Probably another fortnight.” He heard the telltale sounds of Matron Connolly coming along the ward, the starched crackle of her pristine uniform, her crisp, quick footsteps. He looked up, noted that her face was set as usual in proper hospital creases. She leaned over Findlay, picked up his wrist, and took his pulse.

  “Let him sleep. He’s doing fine,” David said.

  “I intend to keep a close eye on him. I hope she didn’t do him any harm.”

  “Dr. Atherton saved his life. The one who did the harm was the person who wound the bandages too tightly in the first place,” David said pointedly. The matron’s lips pinched tight rather than offer a word of apology or praise.

  “Send someone to get me if Captain Findlay’s condition changes, but I think we’ll see only improvement now,” he said to the nurse. He ignored Chastaine completely and walked away, whistling as he left the ward, on his way to meet Eleanor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Eleanor scrubbed the stain out of her blouse in the small basin in the guest hut she occupied. She gazed at her reflection in the small mirror above the washstand. Her cheeks were as pink as the water.

  She’d saved a life.

  She’d broken the colonel’s strictest rule by helping a patient other than Louis, and he’d been furious. Perhaps justifiably so, but what else was she to do? If she’d waited for someone else . . . She squeezed the water out of her blouse. She was a doctor. She’d reacted to an emergency the way she’d been trained to, the only ethical way possible. It had been the right thing to do.

  But if anyone understood inflexible rules and regulations and etiquette, it was she—and the colonel still had the power to send her home for disobeying his directive, and where would that leave her? The countess was a civilian, and this was war, and her ladyship’s influence would only go so far. If Eleanor failed, made her look foolish, she’d withdraw her support, perhaps even censure her career instead of helping her rise as a doctor.

  And Louis—Louis had been shocked by her actions, stunned. What if he was so upset that he felt moved to ask the colonel to dismiss her at once, send her away? She couldn’t insist that he accompany her back to England. She’d leave alone like a naughty schoolgirl, dismissed and chastened.

  She could imagine the bland, silent resignation in her father’s face when she returned. And her mother—there’d be triumph in her eyes. “Now will you settle down and be a proper woman?”

  “But I saved someone’s life,” she whispered to the empty little room. “Isn’t that more important?”

  She needed a chance to walk. She donned a clean blouse, buttoned it to the neck, and added her thick cardigan over that. It was early March, and still cold. At home there’d be snowdrops, ewes heavy with new lambs, the scent of spring in the air. She looked longingly at the small wood that lay on the southern edge of the CCS, but Sergeant MacLeod had warned her not to leave the confines of the station, which left only the network of boardwalks and paths between the tents.

  The CCS was a collection of about forty tents, each housing a ward for sick, or wounded, or officers. There were tents to accommodate nurses, VADs, orderlies, and medical officers. The largest tents served as triage and reception, and housed the operating theater. Another provided a quiet moribund ward for hopeless cases. Buildings that were once farm sheds, barns, and stables now served as the kitchen, storerooms, and the washhouse. Purpose-built huts functioned as the commandant’s quarters, guest accommodations, and Matron Connolly’s billet. Everything was stitched together by a network of duckboard walkways and gravel paths. She listened to the sound of boots on the boards, the hale and healthy hurrying along and the slower pace of ambulatory patients limping or making their way on crutches. The wind drummed a tattoo on the walls of the tents, and the endless lines of laundry snapped like gunshots. Voices carried easily through thin canvas walls—cries of pain, laughter, the quiet buzz of conversation.

  And above it all was the unending crump of the guns.

  She followed one walkway, then another, until she came to the road that ran along the front of the CCS. To the northwest was Arras. To the southeast lay the village of Bapaume and the front lines. She stared across the road at an empty field, brown and dry and fallow. Well, not entirely empty—one lonely corner was filled with makeshift crosses. Many of the mounds were black and raw, the soil fresh-turned and unused to the harsh glare of daylight. She wondered what had grown here before the war had planted this sorrowful crop. She let the cold wind chill her as she stared at the small cemetery. She began to count the crosses. Dozens, and more were planted every day to mark the dead. How many men lived for each man who died?

  She’d saved Captain Findlay, kept the hungry ground from claiming one more.

  How many more can I save? a small voice asked.

  None. Well, only Louis, and only if she was allowed to stay—if she agreed to obey the rules, to do as she was told. For now, it was the only way to get what she wanted, be a doctor. Not here, of course, but someday, somewhere else.

  She turned away and walked back along the duckboard high street, between the tents, then circled the route again, thinking. Was it worth it, to keep her hands folded demurely, her eyes down, to do no
thing if another soldier began to choke? How many could she save later, at home, if she waited, held her tongue, did as she was told now? Could that number ever make up for the dead here? Was she capable of doing as she was told, instead of what her heart and mind and skills demanded of her? She’d never been one to sit and wait and blindly obey. But now, if she followed the rules set out for her by Colonel Bellford and the countess, there’d be rewards in the future, the chance to practice medicine, to save other lives elsewhere.

  That would be enough, surely. It had to be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  David found Eleanor standing outside in the cold, staring down the road toward Arras, and for a moment he thought that perhaps Colonel Bellford had insisted she leave after all, or that she was considering doing so on her own. He watched her, thought her lucky to be a civilian, to be able to come and go as she pleased, to choose to go home, while he was trapped here in uniform and by duty for the duration.

  But she wasn’t dressed for travel. She was gazing at the cemetery, her face thoughtful and grim. She wasn’t leaving. At least, not of her own accord.

  “Good evening,” he said, approaching her and following her gaze with his own.

  She turned in surprise, her hand curled in the thick collar of the god-awful cardigan she was wearing. “Good evening,” she said, echoing him.

  “Findlay’s doing well. I looked in on him just now.”

  She regarded him for a moment, her expression carefully blank.

  “I wasn’t checking up on your work. Just rounds.”

  She nodded. “And Louis? Lieutenant Chastaine?”

  “Chafing to be released like a lapdog on a leash,” he quipped, but she lowered her eyes.

  “He’s never liked to be stuck in one place.”

  “He mentioned he knew you as a girl, that you have a brother. Do you have a history with the dashing lieutenant?” He strove for an insouciant tone, as if he was merely curious. It must have come out more sharply than he intended, because she looked up at him and scanned his face, gauging his interest, or perhaps his right to ask, before she answered. She looked away, scanning the burial ground once again.

  “No. Edward and Louis are close friends. I was just Edward’s sister, a mere girl, and not welcome on their adventures, though I did try. I was a terrible tagalong. They called me pest, pulled my hair, and threw mud on my frocks.”

  “How unchivalrous.”

  “They weren’t officers then, just boys.”

  They still were, he suspected. At least that was true of Louis Chastaine.

  The wind was turning cold enough to sting, and he pointed to the lighted refectory tent. “Shall we go in out of the cold and find out what there is for supper? I predict stew. Not that I’m some kind of mystic. It’s usually stew on Wednesdays.”

  “I should check on Louis—Lieutenant Chastaine—first. Would you mind?”

  David gritted his teeth and forced a smile. She wished to see if Chastaine had gotten over the shock of watching her perform an emergency medical procedure. He could have dissuaded her, convinced her to eat first, forget about Chastaine, but he didn’t bother. Perhaps it would do her good to let her see her hero as he truly was, pettish and shallow, spoiled. It would certainly cast him in a better light. “As you wish. It isn’t medically necessary, of course.”

  He wondered if he should offer his arm, but she stayed an arm’s length away, her hands in the pockets of her bulky cardigan. “I know. It’s just that Louis—Lieutenant Chastaine—is anxious to be out of bed, and his mother—”

  David gave her a lazy grin. “His mother? I assumed he was old enough to sign up and come to war on his own. Did he take a wrong turn on his way to buy sweets and end up here by mistake?”

  She sent him a sharp look. “Her ladyship is simply concerned. Louis’s older brother died last fall. He’s his father’s heir now—Viscount Somerton. He’ll be the Earl of Kirkswell someday.”

  “God save England,” David murmured. He held the door of the officers’ tent for her to enter.

  In the winter twilight, the officers’ ward was lit by a row of lanterns hung down the center of the tent and warmed by a small stove.

  The patients regarded Eleanor with a new kind of interest as she entered, less flirtatious or dismissive now, more careful and respectful since she’d saved Findlay. Her actions had had the opposite effect to the one that Chastaine feared—his fellow officers envied him all the more for his association with the fearless lady doctor.

  “Good evening, Miss Atherton,” one man greeted her with admiration in his eyes as they passed his bed—a lieutenant with a chest wound, awaiting transportation. She nodded politely but didn’t stop.

  “The heroine returns,” Louis Chastaine said dryly as they arrived at his bedside. He flicked a bored glance at David, who stood back and waited.

  “Hello, Louis. How are you? I wanted to check on your leg,” she said, her color high, her voice almost breathless. She peeled back the sheet that covered the splint to expose Somerton’s leg, a long, muscular, manly limb sparkling with golden hairs. There was a small silver scar from an old injury just below the upper ring of the splint. The leg was stretched out straight between two iron bars that ran from the ring to the frame attached to the bed. A linen cradle held the leg, while ties kept it from flexing or moving. The heel was pressed to the frame so the muscles of the calf were properly stretched. David had helped Bellford set the shattered bones, had made the pilot as whole as they could. There was still a danger of bone fragments, of course. They’d cause him pain unless they were removed later—not here, of course, but in some plush, private hospital in England, attended by the finest orthopedic surgeons an earl’s money could buy.

  He watched Eleanor stare at Chastaine’s leg, naked to the hip, the sheet barely keeping things polite, but David saw only clinical interest in her eyes. She examined the angry crosshatch of scars, long and red. She bent to sniff delicately, seeking putrefaction. In any other situation, the gesture might have been erotic, but her eyes were keen and decidedly unaroused as she followed the veins and vessels, looking for infection. “It’s healing well.”

  She avoided Chastaine’s eyes, though David knew she was here for the pilot’s forgiveness and to gauge how much damage she’d done by showing off her skills, acting like a doctor instead of an adoring and devoted nursemaid.

  Chastaine regarded Eleanor with a mulish expression, held his silence, denied her his blessing or understanding.

  “Then when can I get up?” Louis Chastaine demanded, just to be bloody-minded, to bully and disconcert her, since David had already given him the answer to that question.

  “Soon, I think. Perhaps in a week. No longer than two—”

  “I’ll run mad by then,” Chastaine snapped.

  She offered the kind of soothing smile a nanny gives a truculent infant. “We’ll check it every day, and if it can be sooner—”

  “Fuck,” Chastaine cursed, and Eleanor colored.

  The gas case across the ward cleared his throat. “I say, Captain Blair, one of the orderlies said there’s a chance of heavy rain tonight. Heard anything about it?”

  He meant bombardment, an attack in this sector, but he was doing his best to spare Eleanor’s delicate sensibilities with euphemisms in order to deflect Chastaine’s anger and his rough language by changing the subject.

  But Chastaine wouldn’t play along. “He means the Huns are coming,” he told her bluntly.

  “They might not,” David said quickly. “It’s just a rumor. It might be far from here, or not at all.”

  Eleanor looked at him with wide eyes. “A rumor? How will we know?”

  “Oh, if the Huns come a-knocking, you’ll know,” Chastaine said. “They wear hobnailed boots and use eighteen-pound shells to ring the bell. Are you afraid, El? You must be afraid of something.”

  She sent him a
fierce look. “Of course I’m afraid. Isn’t everyone?” She waited until Chastaine looked away first.

  “No cause to worry,” David said, loudly enough to soothe Eleanor and the entire ward, but her forthright gaze demanded honesty. “We’ll get as much warning as they can give us, especially if it’s our side attacking—um, advancing. They’ll want us ready to receive casualties. If it’s the enemy, the observers will tell us if there are warning signs, like troops moving up, or a heavy barrage, or trench raids.”

  Chastaine gave a bitter laugh. “Or gas. They’ll release that first. There’ll be no one left to sound a warning. It chokes, and burns, and blinds, and—“

  “Stop it! You’ll scare her,” the gas case said, his voice gruff, tight with his own fear, the terrible memory of his wounding.

  Eleanor looked so concerned that David resisted the urge to pat her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said instead. “The colonel will let us know, and we’ll move you back somewhere safe if necessary.”

  She met his eyes, her expression fierce. “I’m not afraid for myself—it’s the soldiers in the field, the ones in range of it all. And the stretcher bearers, like Sergeant MacLeod. Do you know him?” He nodded. “They’d be in the thick of it, wouldn’t they? Is there shelter for them?”

  “Don’t be daft, Eleanor. It’s their damned duty,” Chastaine snapped. “God, I hate being stuck down here like a bloody sitting duck.” He pointed up at the canvas ceiling of the tent. “From up in a plane, you can see the armies getting ready to attack, like insects marching. Trains bring up the biggest guns. They drag them through the mud with men and horses, and when they stop, lift the barrels, and aim them, you know which part of the line will get it. You can see frail little bodies pouring over the top of the trenches like roaches, running pell-mell for No Man’s Land, straight toward the damned guns. It’s all so pointless. You can watch them fall from up there. They lie in the mud, staring up at me in my plane. Or maybe they’re looking at heaven. I’ve often been tempted to look up myself, see if the sky has opened above me, if the angels are coming, but I don’t. I look at them. For an instant, their blood is red on the ground, but then the mud sucks it away, drinks it down like nectar to feed the killing field. Then they’re as gray and colorless as everything else. They don’t even look human anymore. There’s nothing to show for their sacrifice, just empty husks.”