The Woman at the Front

by Lecia Cornwall

  He looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time. There was no flirtation in his eyes, no mirth. There was something else there, something akin to terror, or guilt. Her breath caught in her throat. “Louis?”

  He forced a grin. “Come now, let’s not be serious,” he said brightly, sounding more like Lady Fanny. “As you said, there’s a war on. We owe it to ourselves to enjoy every day, just in case—” He paused and the grin faded again, and he glanced at the nurses busy changing the sheets on Greaves’s empty bed across the ward. He swallowed hard. “God,” he muttered.

  “Were you afraid?” she asked him. “When you were shot down?”

  He studied her for a long moment before replying. “Do you want to know if my life flashed before my eyes as I tumbled out of the sky, if I felt like a hero, if I called out my mother’s name, pissed myself?”

  She held his eyes. “Yes.”

  He looked toward the door. “Where the devil is Fanny with that champagne?”

  “Louis,” she said softly.

  He turned his attention back to her. “You really do want to know, don’t you? Then yes, I was afraid. Only a fool isn’t afraid here. Death is everywhere, and you only get so many lucky breaks. Did you know pilots in the Royal Flying Corps have a life expectancy of less than eighteen hours of flying time? My time was up weeks ago—months ago. Yes, I was afraid. I heard my leg break. Do you know what that’s like, hearing your own bones breaking?”

  She shook her head.

  “And no, I didn’t call out for my mother. Oddly, the last thought I had before I passed out was of a wolfhound I once had named Beowulf. He was old, and he died when I was eleven. I called him Bo, and oh, how I loved him! He was the last thing to go through my mind when I crashed. I’ve wondered about that ever since—was a dog the love of my life? Wouldn’t it make more sense that I’d feel regret for my misspent youth and all the times I disobeyed my parents, chose the wild road over the safe, dutiful one? Instead, I thought of Bo. I didn’t think that I should be married by now, should have left the requisite heir and spare to take my place, strapping sons who’d honor my family history better than I’ve done. I thought of a dog. Does that surprise you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it bloody well surprised me. I don’t regret it, you know—not choosing the safe path. Not a minute of it, especially if I’m to die young.” He caught her hand, breathing hard. “Don’t do it, El. Don’t be dutiful. Take your chance while you can. Do something daring, break the mold. Be a doctor if you want, but do it on your terms. Don’t let anyone tell you how, or say no. Not Bellford, or my mother. Not even me.”

  She bit her lip. “I didn’t think when Sergeant MacLeod asked me to help. I didn’t consider you, or my father, or anyone. What if I’m not being compassionate, but selfish?”

  “Edward once told me it was pigheadedness that made you want to be a doctor. It’s not pigheadedness, though. This is what you truly want, isn’t it?”

  She wondered if her brother was jealous, if he regretted that he hadn’t studied harder and passed the exam. It had made her feel guilty at times. She recalled Edward’s silence after the test, and her own, sure she’d done poorly, and her father’s fury with his son when the results were posted. She’d vowed at that moment that she’d become the best doctor she could be. “Yes. This is what I’ve always wanted,” she murmured now.

  “Then is that truly why you came? Not for me?”

  She felt a blush rising from under her prim collar. “Yes, for you—and for other reasons. I hoped that . . .” She swallowed. “I didn’t expect they’d ask me to help. If David hadn’t had to go—”

  Louis chuckled. “David? Not ‘Captain Blair,’ or ‘that surgeon chap’? Have you made a conquest, El? And here I am telling you to go and do something daring. What a fool I am! Or is it simply an affaire du cœur? I never would have thought that you’d . . .” He stopped.

  She raised her chin. “That I’d what?”

  “Oh, don’t poker up, El. It’s just that you’ve always been so serious, so . . . so . . . dutiful, and good.”

  “You say it as if it’s a bad thing.”

  “Not at all. Blair is probably right for you. Edward always said you’d marry a man just like your dear papa, a country doctor or a sober man of the church, someone older, widowed, with seven motherless brats to raise. A sober, teetotal, church-on-Sunday sort—a vicar, perhaps. We had a wager, in fact.”

  “You had a wager about me?” she repeated, suddenly cold. She stared into Louis’s handsome, careless face.

  “It was all in fun, of course. Don’t be cross. I bet on you marrying someone much more interesting than that. Blair’s a surgeon, so I suppose if you marry him, I win.” He winked at her. “There’s something of the dash about the good captain. Edward and I had a wager about your going to medical school, too. He said you wouldn’t go, or if you did you’d run home in tears before the first week was out. Everyone thought so. But I bet you’d stick to it, and I won. Of course, we didn’t think—” She drew a sharp breath and he stopped. “Uh-oh. Have I said too much? It was all in fun, of course.”

  Fun? They’d wagered on her, mocked her? “Didn’t think what?” she said through wooden lips, prompting him to continue.

  He looked sheepish. “We didn’t think your father would even allow you to go to medical school, or that you’d really be brave enough to do it. But you did. You really did.”

  Guilt rose in her throat. Was Edward so bitter, so resentful? She choked the emotion down, swallowed it, as she pinned Louis to his pillow with an angry glare. “I’ll have you know I graduated near the top of my class!”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “Don’t take on at me! You’re rather a marvel, aren’t you? I had no idea.” He turned serious again. “Don’t settle, then, El. Take the best life has to offer. Do your damnedest to thwart your father’s expectations, and Edward’s, and my mother’s. God, I hope Blair knows how magnificent you are, and that he’s worthy of you.” He regarded her with a new interest in his eyes. There was no flirtation, no laughter. He took her hand. “Have you ever even been kissed?”

  She thought of David’s farewell kiss. “Yes, of course I have.”

  He caught her chin in his hand and made her look at him. “No, I mean really kissed, properly, with passion and desire, the way a man kisses a woman he wants to bed.” His voice had turned husky, dropped to an intimate purr. “I’ve wondered for weeks what it would be like to kiss you like that.” He took her hand and drew her toward him. For a moment she was mesmerized, caught in that seductive, heavy-lidded blue gaze. Her lips rippled. But he wouldn’t mean it. She drew back, freeing her hand from his. “El?” he asked, waiting, so sure she’d come back.

  She took a breath and shook her head. “I think—”

  The curtain surrounding his bed flew open, and Eleanor jumped back.

  Lady Frances Parfitt stood there with a look of glee on her face, holding two bottles of champagne aloft. “Darling—look! Two more bottles! A farmer had them hidden in his barn. I had to pay the earth for them.” She nestled the dusty bottles in the bed beside Louis and sat next to him, taking the kisses that might have been Eleanor’s. The duke’s daughter had barely even glanced at Eleanor, but Louis cast her a single look over Fanny’s frivolous feathered hat—robin’s-egg blue today. Was there regret in his eyes, or relief? He turned his attention to his visitor before Eleanor could decide, his familiar look of dissipation and mirth back in place.

  “Good job, Fanny, darling! If I were a cavalry officer, I could use my sword to open them, but alas, I am a mere flier!” he drawled. Never serious, never afraid, Eleanor thought.

  “Did you bring any more caviar?” he asked, and Eleanor realized she was superfluous at a party just for two.

  She slipped away from the low intimacy of Louis’s voice and the fairy chime of Fanny’s answering giggle, lea
ving them together without a single regret.

  Don’t do it, El. Don’t be dutiful. Take your chance while you can. Do something daring, break the mold.

  She paused to check on one of the new patients, a man with a wound in his jaw, and beckoned to the nursing sister on duty. “This patient requires morphine, sister.” She adjusted his bandages, murmured to him, and made him more comfortable. He couldn’t speak, but the gratitude in his eyes was worth a dozen of Louis Chastaine’s kisses.

  She looked around the ward at the other patients.

  Yes, this was what she wanted.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Miss Atherton is interfering with the function of this hospital. It is confusing my nurses and disrupting protocol,” Matron Connolly said.

  Bellford looked up at the career military nurse. She stood in the middle of his office, precisely halfway between the door and his desk, as if there were an X painted on the floor to mark the place. Her uniform was spotless, her scrubbed hands clasped at her waist under her red capelet. Sarah Connolly reminded him of portraits he’d seen of Queen Victoria, or even the present consort, Queen Mary, their spines as stiff as iron, their faces haughty, smug, and tightly closed. Any secrets, softness, or femininity were locked away deep inside their dour bodies, the key lost.

  “She has my permission to assist us if casualties get heavy. As a doctor.”

  The nurse’s pale eyes popped. “She cannot serve as a doctor here! It’s strictly against the rules. What would the director of Army Medicine say?”

  And who would tell him? But there was no need to ask the question aloud. The answer was clear enough. The matron grew taller before his eyes, a starched pillar of indignation.

  He set his pen down. “In ordinary circumstances I would agree, Matron. But we’re woefully short of qualified doctors, and woefully long on wounded. We must find a way to provide proper care.”

  “But she’s a woman!”

  “I am aware of that,” he said tiredly. “She’s also a qualified physician.”

  “Colonel, I have been a nurse in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service for sixteen years. I have served here since the very start of this war. I was at Mons, Ypres, the Somme, and Arras. I have seen the toll the war takes on young women who are gently raised and unprepared. How many eager members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry or VADs thought themselves brave and capable, only to collapse at the things they’re forced to witness, to cope with, to endure? So few of them can hold a man’s hand and calm his fears while there are bombs falling. So many of them can’t bear to look into the half-gone face of a dying man and offer a smile of reassurance. They do more harm than good, and then they scurry back home again with all their hopes and good intentions shattered, their time and ours wasted.”

  Matron Connolly felt she knew best how to run a hospital, and perhaps she did. There was no doubt that she’d be a commander if she were a man. She managed her nurses and volunteers with military strictness and discipline, but without kindness or tolerance for human frailties like fear, exhaustion, or inexperience. She cared for her patients the same way, with excellent care, but no coddling—they were men, and this was war. Everyone, wounded beyond bearing or not, must do their part to keep order.

  As commander and surgeon, he appreciated her insistence on the highest standards of cleanliness, organization, and care, of course. But in war, there was also a need to remain flexible and adaptable and to seek victory in unlikely places.

  Like making use of Eleanor Atherton.

  He looked at his chief nurse and saw the conviction in her eyes, the justification. Why was it that women were hardest on one another, harder even than men at times?

  “I’m afraid there’s simply no choice in the matter, Matron. Dr. Atherton was pressed into service during that last crisis, and she acquitted herself well. With Captain Blair away, we need another doctor. There is a shortage of medical officers.”

  “But a woman—a very young woman, a civilian—”

  “I think it would be a far more serious breach of our duties if we were unable to provide care to our wounded men, don’t you agree?”

  The matron’s sharp glare didn’t soften one whit. “There are rules for a reason. Her inexperience might kill someone.”

  “Or she may save lives.”

  He was tired. He didn’t disagree with her arguments, and yet . . . “Thank you, Matron. I will make note of your concerns.”

  “Not concerns, sir—objections,” she said, not moving an inch. His irritation grew, making heat prickle under the tight collar of his tunic. He got to his feet.

  “My decision stands. If there is a situation like the one yesterday, where we are overwhelmed with wounded men, I expect you to work with Dr. Atherton, to support her medical orders, is that clear?”

  She hesitated, her lips so tightly pursed there was a white ring around them. “Colonel, I—”

  “Dismissed,” he said, and she turned on her heel and was gone.

  Bellford sank back into his chair. There’d be trouble, of course, and it would fall upon him like a bomb. He just hoped that Eleanor Atherton, and everyone else, was back in England when it hit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  March 11, 1918

  The farmhouse must once have been a fine place. Fraser looked at the damage the bombs and bullets had done, at the broken walls and splintered gates, and tried to imagine it whole again, a comfortable, prosperous home situated in green fields that came alive with wildflowers in the summer and turned golden with autumn’s kiss. He wondered where the farmer was now, and if he’d come back when the war ended, rebuild, and begin again. After so long, it was hard to remember peace, or even imagine it. Lately, he’d felt a constant yearning for it in his chest, a terrible tightness, after years of forcing himself to feel nothing, want nothing. Duncan’s death had brought it on, he told himself, regret at losing a good man, a good officer. But that was a lie. It was Eleanor Atherton’s presence that had unsettled him, made him long for something again, want it badly when he knew better. The future was a distant place he was not likely to reach. He’d seen too much suffering and death to believe that his turn wouldn’t come, that he wouldn’t die here. He’d held the hands of men who fought death, even knowing they couldn’t beat it, men who regretted leaving someone behind to mourn them, someone they’d made promises to, had sworn they’d come home to. It made dying all the worse. No, he’d learned that it was far better to empty your heart and your head of expectations and hope, not to plan for a future that might be snatched away in an instant by a bullet or a bomb or a slow and agonizing death.

  And yet Eleanor Atherton had made him imagine things he had no business thinking about. Not that any future of his could ever include a woman like Eleanor. They were from different worlds, worlds that had just happened to collide in war, a chance meeting. He might never see her again, but he’d not soon forget her. Would she be his last thought as he died, if—when—his luck ran out?

  He pushed the thought away and concentrated on assessing the place before him as a potential aid post.

  The farmhouse was near the road, so ambulances could get close. The stretcher bearers would appreciate that—their bodies ached from carrying men for long miles through mud and over broken ground. And the sick and walking wounded would find an aid post here easily. A stone fence still surrounded the yard, offering protection from wind and stray bullets.

  Fraser walked through the gates, nothing more than twisted scraps of metal hanging crookedly on posts riddled with bullet holes, and walked into the yard. The house resembled a dollhouse, three walls still upright, and the floors were still in place. The fourth wall was missing, exposing the rooms inside. He could see broken furniture, and weather-stained wallpaper still decorated the sitting room and the bedrooms. In the kitchen, the ruined stove was still in place, though the table and anything else made of wood had long
ago gone for firewood. Above the sink, there was a tattered, weather-stained calendar from a soap company. The faded picture showed a smiling lass with russet curls washing her hands in pure white froth while a kitten played with the rainbow bubbles coming off the soap.

  The lass reminded him of Eleanor Atherton, clean and pretty, and he smiled, feeling his face crack and stretch. The wind riffled the pages, and Fraser shook himself.

  Again he was wasting time on emotions he couldn’t afford. He had duties to see to. If Duncan hadn’t been wounded, or if they had anyone on the bearer team or at the aid post of higher rank, they’d be here checking the farm, but it had fallen to Fraser until a new MO arrived, and at the moment, he was glad of the distraction. He dragged his eyes away from the calendar and turned to trudge across the yard to the well and looked down into the deep hole. His reflection stared back at him. There was water, and that was good. It would have to be tested, hauled up by the bucketful, boiled, made clean.

  The entrance to the cellar yawned next to the kitchen, a black hole with broken stone steps that led down into the earth. The steps were steep and narrow, and they’d have trouble getting stretchers down, but they’d manage.

  “Hello?” he called before entering, and waited for a reply, just in case, but there was no answer.

  He descended the steps carefully and found himself in a storeroom with a mud floor. The ceiling was low, and he had to stoop slightly, but he was tall. Others, like Max, who was ten inches shorter than he was, would be able to stand upright. He let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The space was generous—three rooms. Shelves, empty now, had been cut into the chalky soil to store wine or apples or potatoes. The holes in the beams above probably held hooks once for hanging hams and dried beef. They’d need cots and benches and tables, supports to put stretchers on, a stove.

  What they needed most, of course, was a doctor.

  The space would do, he decided. It wasn’t cozy like the cellar of the bakery, but it would be a suitable place to set up if they needed to retreat. It was just two miles or so from the bakery, but the front lines had been static for so long that even when they did move, the change was more easily measured in inches than miles.