The Wild Rose

by Jennifer Donnelly

  The next day, he asked Henry the gardener if Willie might help hoe weeds between the plants.

  “What if he throws a wobbly? Hacks me plants to bits?” Henry asked unhappily.

  “He won’t, Henry. I know he won’t,” Sid said.

  He knew no such thing. In fact, he half expected Willie to try to hack him to bits, but Willie didn’t. Sid sat in a chair at the edge of the garden, watching Willie as anxiously as a new mother watches her darling infant take its first steps. And Willie did marvelously. He hoed the weeds, carefully hilled the soil around the base of the plants, and then helped Henry harvest the berries.

  When, at the end of the day, Henry complimented him, Willie simply said, “Me dad had an allotment. I used to help him with it.” It was the most he had said since he’d arrived.

  They’d had setbacks, of course. A thunderstorm had sent Willie diving under a bench, and it had taken Sid and Henry two hours to coax him out again. A backfiring motorcycle sent him running inside, howling in fear, and he’d refused to go out again for three whole days. But there was more progress now than there were setbacks. With Willie and with others, too. With Stanley, who, Sid had discovered, liked to knead bread, for the repetitious motion calmed him. He now helped Mrs. Culver, the hospital’s cook, with her baking. And Miles, who refused to stop playing an imaginary piano until Sid bought him a real one, and who now played Brahms, Chopin, and Schubert for the other patients.

  But not with Stephen. Poor, mad Stephen, who’d arrived at the hospital six months ago with red, raw marks around his neck from trying to hang himself.

  Stephen was Sid’s greatest challenge. Sid had worked with him day in and day out, trying everything he could think of. When nothing had had any effect, he’d hit upon the idea of writing to Stephen’s father, to ask about his life at home. His father had written back, telling him all about their farm and their fields and livestock, and Bella, their huge workhorse, an ornery creature that had only ever been tractable for Stephen.

  Immediately Sid had thought of Hannibal—Wickersham Hall’s own plow horse, a very large and very cross animal, whom only Henry could handle, and even Henry had trouble with him. Sid had asked Henry if he could leave Hannibal in the pasture a little longer tonight, instead of putting him in his stall, for Hannibal was better behaved outside and Sid needed him in an amenable mood. He planned to coax Hannibal to the fence with some carrots, then to place Stephen’s hand on the horse’s withers.

  As he reached Stephen’s room, he paused and took a deep breath—to calm himself. He was excited, but he didn’t want to betray his excitement to Stephen or Hannibal, in case he spooked either of them. He thought his plan might actually work, that Hannibal might offer a way to break through to Stephen. Then again, Hannibal, the little bleeder, might just kick them both straight into the next county.

  Sid hurried across the meadow that separated the hospital from the house where he was now living—the Brambles, the caretaker’s cottage on Wickersham Hall’s grounds.

  It was dark. India would certainly scold him for missing his tea—again. He hadn’t meant to be so late, but he’d had a breakthrough with Stephen and he’d lost track of the time. He was so excited, so happy about it, that he couldn’t wait to tell India. She was concerned about Stephen. She asked for him, or visited him herself, nearly every day.

  Sid saw her now, his wife, as he drew closer to the cottage, through the mullioned windows of the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, reading. He stopped for a moment and stood still in the darkness, watching her. Just as he had once, long ago, outside her flat in Bloomsbury. Before she was his wife. Before their children were born. Before he’d ever imagined that he could know the kind of happiness she’d given him.

  She was leaning her head on one hand, turning the pages of whatever she was reading with the other—the Lancet, no doubt. She was a new doctor when he’d first met her, a woman dedicated and driven to improve the health of her patients, and she hadn’t changed. She’d only grown more dedicated as the years passed.

  Wickersham Hall had been her idea. When the first injured men started coming home, she’d volunteered to care for them at Barts Hospital, in London. She’d soon seen that a busy city hospital could not address the long-term needs of wounded veterans, and that something more was needed. She’d written him.

  My darling Sid,

  I’ve had the most marvelous idea today. I don’t want to sell Wickersham Hall anymore. I want to make it into a hospital—a hospital for those wounded in the war. A place where they can receive the very best of care, and stay, in comfort, for as long as is needed to make them whole again. It is a way to turn a sad, unhappy place into something useful and hopeful. I can’t think of a better way to honor the memory of my sister, and I know in my heart that this is what Maud would want. …

  That had been back in January of 1915. They’d been apart for months. After she’d received news of Maud’s death, India and the children had gone to London, so she could try to find out why her sister had taken her own life and also settle her affairs. Maud had left everything to India, and India, who had no use for Maud’s Oxford estate and couldn’t even bear to be in her London house, had decided to sell them. She thought she’d stay for two months, three at the most, then return to their home in Point Reyes, California.

  But things hadn’t quite worked out as they’d planned. War broke out. India had managed to sell Maud’s London town house, but it was more difficult to sell Wickersham Hall. People were anxious and uncertain and not eager to spend on large estates.

  With European navies engaged in battles and blockades, ocean travel became perilous. Sid cabled India shortly after Britain declared war on Germany and told her that under no circumstances were she and the children to travel back to the United States—not until the war was over. At that point, Sid, like most of the rest of the world, thought it would take a few months, possibly a year, for the fighting to end, but it had not. The Germans had taken Belgium, then France, and it looked as if Italy and Russia would fall, too. For a few months, the kaiser looked to be unstoppable. Sid realized that he might well invade England, and that his wife and children were in London, without him to protect them. He left his ranch in the hands of his capable foreman and began the long journey to Southampton. He didn’t tell India he was coming, for he knew she would worry. He simply showed up one day—having crossed America by train and the Atlantic Ocean by steamer—on Joe and Fiona’s doorstep.

  India was furious at him for coming. “Haven’t you heard that German U-boats are targeting civilian ships?” she angrily asked him, but she kissed him and hugged him and told him how very glad she was that he was there.

  By the time he arrived, she’d already made Maud’s estate into a hospital. She’d staffed it and supplied it herself. She already had a great deal of her own money, and Maud had left her another very large fortune. Joe and Fiona also contributed to the hospital’s upkeep. When India suggested that they leave London for the hospital, because she wanted to work there, Sid quickly agreed. London was not a good place for him. He had long ago been cleared of any wrongdoing regarding Gemma Dean’s death, a former girlfriend for whose murder he’d once been blamed, but that was not his only worry—there were those in the London underworld who undoubtedly remembered him—and not with great fondness. The sooner he left the city, the better.

  As they journeyed to Oxford on the train, he wondered how he would occupy himself while India was busy doctoring all day long. He had thought of enlisting when he arrived in England, but he knew he’d never be accepted—not with his dodgy leg and not with the scars on his back, the ones the screws had put there with a cat-o’-nine-tails when, as a young man, he’d done hard time. Those scars said prison loud and clear, and the recruiting sergeants were not terribly fond of ex-convicts.

  Sid hadn’t had to wonder how to make himself useful for long, however. Every spare pair of hands was needed at the hospital. He helped dig the hospital’s kitchen garden—an absolute n
ecessity in a time of rationing. He helped drive ice, crates of eggs, sacks of flour, and sides of meat from markets and shops and farms into the kitchen. He helped feed, wash, and dress the damaged bodies of soldiers and sailors and airmen, and as he did, he talked with them, to calm them and reassure them and try to lift their spirits, as well.

  Young, working-class lads—boys who were uncomfortable talking to educated medical men with their clipped accents and soft hands—heard Sid’s voice, still full of East London even after so many years away from it. They saw his rough worker’s hands, and they recognized him as one of their own. They trusted him, felt comfortable with him, and they talked to him. They told him about their lives, about their injuries, about their fears—things they would not tell their doctors.

  And Sid, to his great surprise, discovered that he liked the talking and the listening and that he was very good at it. His life, the part of it he’d spent in England, had been all about taking—taking money, and jewels, and many other things that hadn’t belonged to him. Now he was giving, and he found it the most rewarding thing he’d ever done.

  “Ever think of medical school, Mr. Baxter?” India had asked him one day, as she watched him work his magic on yet another broken body, broken mind.

  “Nah, I hear it’s a doddle. Got better things to do, me,” he said, teasing her. “I’m getting a football team together. The lads are all mad for it. I figure it’ll get them all out and running around. Excuse me, luv, will you?” And then, a clipboard in hand, he’d tried to hurry off to the gymnasium, which had been set up in one of the stables, but before he could, India grabbed his sleeve, pulled him close, and whispered, “You’re a good man, Sid, and I love you.”

  He loved her, too. More than his life. And he thought now, as he looked at her, silhouetted in the warm light of the kitchen, that his heart would surely burst, it was so full of emotion.

  He went into the house, took off his jacket and boots and left them in the mudroom, then made his way into the kitchen.

  She looked up at him, smiling, happy to see him. “There’s rabbit stew on the stove. Mrs. Culver made it. She made biscuits, too.”

  “Ta, luv. Where are the children?”

  “In bed, you daft man. It’s after nine.”

  “Is it? I’d no idea.” Sid shoveled some of the stew onto a plate. As he did, he told her all about Stephen.

  He’d taken the lad to the pasture to see Hannibal, the workhorse. Hannibal, true to his ornery nature, had flattened his ears and stamped ominously the very second Sid had approached him, but before he could start snorting or kicking or any other horsely nonsense, he’d spotted Stephen. His eyes had widened and his ears had gone up. Sid didn’t know if horses were capable of curiosity, but at that moment, that’s how Hannibal had looked—curious.

  Stephen wouldn’t raise his eyes, he wouldn’t make direct contact with Hannibal, and yet he saw him. Sid knew he did; he could feel it. Stephen saw the horse with something inside of him—his heart, his soul maybe—Sid didn’t know. What he did know was that for the first time in six months, Stephen’s trembling had stopped.

  Hannibal trotted over to the fence, ignoring Sid, looking only at Stephen. For a few seconds, Sid’s heart was in his throat, so certain was he that Hannibal was going to open that huge mouth of his and take a chunk out of the lad; but he didn’t. He sniffed Stephen. He whickered and blew. Then he pushed his great velvety nose against Stephen’s cheek. Once, twice, three times. Until slowly, miraculously, Stephen raised his hand and placed it on Hannibal’s neck.

  The look on that lad’s face at that moment … well, it was something Sid would never forget as long as he lived. He’d seen that look before, on the faces of men coming home on furlough and embracing the wives and children, the ones they hadn’t seen for years and had often thought they’d never see again.

  Stephen was too young to have a wife or a child, but he’d had a horse once. Long ago. In another, better, lifetime.

  They stood that way, the boy and the horse, silent and still, for five, and then ten minutes, and then Stephen said, “He should be in his stall now. It’s damp out tonight.”

  “Right. Yes. He will be, Stephen. Straightaway. Henry’s coming for him,” Sid said, trying to keep his voice even.

  “Henry led Hannibal to the stables,” he said to India now, “and I took Stephen back to his room. I told him we’d go see the horse again tomorrow night. He didn’t say anything to that, but I saw that his trembling hadn’t come back.”

  “Sid, that’s wonderful news!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I’m so pleased to hear it!”

  “We’ve still a long, long way to go,” he said. “But it’s a start.” He grabbed a biscuit and sat down at the table across from her. As he did he saw that her eyes were red. “Can’t you put that away now?” he asked her. “Give medicine a rest for the night?”

  “It’s nothing,” India said. “Just a bit of eyestrain.”

  Sid glanced at the journal lying open in front of her. “The Lancet, is it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s a very disturbing report in it, about the new strain of influenza—the Spanish flu. It says that it’s killing thousands in America and has started moving into Europe. Soldiers on all the European fronts are being hit heavily, and now it’s supposedly started cropping up in Scotland and in some of the northern English cities.”

  “It’s bad?” Sid said, between bites of stew.

  “Very,” India replied. “It starts out as a typical flu. The patient becomes very ill, seems to rally, but then grows worse. Bleeding from the nose and eyes may occur, followed by a virulent pneumonia. It’s the pneumonia that’s actually killing people. And oddly enough it’s not the usual victims who are succumbing to it—babies and the elderly. It’s carrying off young, healthy men and women. The United States already has quarantines in place. I just pray it doesn’t hit the hospital. The men here have been through so much already.”

  She closed the journal then, and Sid saw that there was something underneath it. He recognized it. It was a photo album that had belonged to Maud. It contained pictures of Maud and India when they were children.

  “It’s not the Lancet that’s made your eyes red, it is, luv?” he said quietly.

  India looked down at the photo album. She shook her head. “No, it isn’t,” she said. “I shouldn’t have got it out, but I couldn’t help it. It’s her birthday today. Or rather, it would have been.”

  Sid reached across the table for her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry,” he said. She nodded and squeezed back.

  He remembered how shattered India had been when the letter arrived from Fiona telling them that Maud was dead. She’d cried in his arms, sobbing “Why, Sid? Why?” over and over again.

  She hadn’t accepted the coroner’s verdict on Maud’s death. She simply could not believe that her sister would take her own life. Other people, yes; Maud, never. When she’d arrived in London, she immediately went to see the officer who’d investigated Maud’s death. She asked the man—Arnold Barrett—for the mortuary photographs. He tried hard to talk her out of looking at them, but she would not be swayed. She steeled herself, made herself view them as a doctor, not a sister.

  Holding a magnifying glass over the photos, India had examined the puncture wounds inside Maud’s elbow. They had definitely been made by a hypodermic needle, but they were all fresh-looking wounds, not old.

  “Yes, of course they are,” Barrett said. “A hypodermic only holds so much and she’d injected herself several times, to make sure the dosage she received was lethal.”

  “But her lover, von Brandt … you told me that he said she was using morphine regularly. Someone who was an addict, who was getting and using morphine regularly, would have had old bruises where she’d injected the drug on previous occasions—not just fresh needle marks. There are no faded bruises anywhere on her. No old, scabbed punctures. And furthermore, Detective Inspector, my sister hated needles. She hated blood. She nearly fainted at my medical
school graduation because she thought there were cadavers on the premises. How could she, of all people, have injected herself repeatedly?”

  “Drug addiction forces its victims to do things neither they nor anyone else ever thought them capable of,” Barrett said. “And hadn’t Miss Selwyn Jones had a past history of visiting Limehouse opium dens?”

  “At one point in her life, yes,” India said. “But my sister was not an addict. Not at the time of her death. She doesn’t look overly thin in these pictures, as addicts do. No one who’d seen her or been with her in the last few weeks of her life—except for von Brandt—ever described anything that matched the behavior of a drug addict.” India had paused for a few seconds, and then she’d said, “I want you to reopen the case, Detective Inspector. My sister did not kill herself. I am certain of that. Which means someone else did kill her.”

  Barrett had leaned forward in his chair and in a kindly voice told her that he could not possibly do what she was asking.

  “I’m afraid there simply isn’t enough to warrant a reopening of the case,” he told her. “I know that she was your sister, and that this is terribly hard for you to accept, but if you go home now and think it over, I believe you will see, as I do, that your suspicions sound, well … a little bit mad.”

  India had bristled at that.

  “Hear me out … listen to me … think carefully about what I’m about to ask you: Who on earth would have wanted to kill your sister?”

  “What about the man she was seeing … Max von Brandt?” India asked.

  Barrett had shaken his head. “If anything, I believe Miss Selwyn Jones might have wanted to kill him,” he said. “I interviewed von Brandt. The very next day. I’ve been at this for thirty years, and I can tell you that he was genuinely and deeply upset. Furthermore, he had corroboration for all of his movements leading up to her death. He was seen with Miss Selwyn Jones leaving his hotel. The cabdriver who took them to your sister’s home backed up von Brandt’s story one hundred percent. At no time did Mr. von Brandt attempt to conceal his movements. Are these the actions of a criminal trying to cover his tracks, Doctor?”