Maggie Bright

by Tracy Groot

  “Have you heard the latest on the wounded?” The question sounded sly, like a test.

  “Oh, I heard,” Jamie said, his tone answering.

  Balantine eyed him. “You sound like me. One of my men gets wounded, not gonna leave him for the bloody Germans, I’ll tell you that. I’ll drag him to Dunkirk if I have to.”

  Jamie rather liked this Balantine.

  “How close do you think they are?” Jamie asked, eyeing the perimeters.

  “Don’t know,” he answered. “But they’re coming. Right now, due north is our only hope. I’ll swim for England if I have to.”

  “Have you seen action?”

  “Some. You?”

  “Oh sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams that bring to my remembrance from what state I fell—” Captain Milton stood in the middle of the street and lifted his arms to the sky—“how glorious once above thy sphere, till pride and worse ambition threw me down.”

  Jamie jogged back to collect him, answering Balantine over his shoulder, “Yes, if you count fleeing as action. For eight months we were on the French-Belgian line, near a decent little town we’d got to know quite well. All right, Milty? Come along.” He pulled him into step behind Balantine. “Nice place. One of our guys married the daughter of the mayor. Then a week or so ago, the Jerries came down like a thousand thunderstorms. And didn’t we bless Lieutenant Dunn then, for keeping on us without pity at drills. So there we were, hot at it, finally doing our job, and then suddenly we’re ordered to pull out. Pull out! Couldn’t believe it. What were we there for? It was the worst thing in the world. All that training, all the drilling, for what?” His voice dropped to a mutter. “I’ll never forget the looks of the townspeople as we left. Worst day of my bloody life. Treated us like heroes when we came, when we’d not done a bloody thing to earn it, treated us like villains when we left, and we were only obeying orders. Felt rotten, leaving. Felt like we left our own grandmothers defenseless.” He went quiet. “Don’t know what happened to them. It’s like we knew them, you know? They felt like us. Foreign, but like us.”

  “Your story sounds just like ours,” said Balantine. “We had a woman come up to our retreating column and throw a pan of dirty dishwater at us. Here we are, mate.”

  They stopped in front of a large bluish-gray brick home. The bivouac was well chosen. It was the tallest building at the halfway point of the main street with clear lines of sight in either direction. It was two or three stories high—Jamie couldn’t really tell, because the side they faced was flush, roof to ground, with only one window. He saw a soldier on lookout at the window.

  “Look what I’ve found,” Balantine called up.

  “Well, there’s a tidy catch for the day.” The soldier nodded at them. “Welcome to Camp Grayling.”

  “Private Elliott, meet Lance Corporal Grayling,” Balantine said. “He’s with me, 2nd Grenadiers, artillery, and he’s the senior officer of the lot. Beat out Griggs by enlisting three weeks earlier. Elliott’s with . . . Who are you with again?”

  “Queen’s 9th Lancers. Infantry.”

  Grayling nodded at Jamie. “Who’s your friend?” The captain had stopped walking when Jamie had put a hand on his shoulder. He stood quietly.

  “Don’t know his name, actually. All I know is he’s a captain and he’s taken a serious head wound.” Jamie twirled a finger at his own head and half mouthed, half whispered, “Gone a bit daft.”

  “Come on in, then. Don’t know when you’ve had tea last, but we’ve got lots.”

  “I could do for a cup,” Jamie said gratefully.

  It suddenly occurred to Jamie that he wanted Milton on his best behavior. When Balantine went through the door first, Jamie held Milton back.

  “Look, mate, don’t do anything—”

  Stupid, he was going to say. Don’t make me look like a fool. But Milton made eye contact. Second or third time that had happened, if it didn’t last long; then his gaze drifted, and he looked down at his jacket. Bewildered, he plucked it for something he didn’t recognize.

  Jamie tried to smarten him up a bit, tucking in the frayed edges of a hole in his jacket, pulling down a bit of bandage to cover a protruding stitch. “Look, we’re with a unit again. They’re not going to understand all the—”

  The captain held his hand up and turned it front and back, looking at his wedding ring.

  “Just . . . keep a lid on the poetry, all right?”

  “What in me is dark, illumine! What is low, raise and support!”

  Jamie sat bolt upright in darkness, heart pounding. He stared about in confusion.

  “Shut up, you imbecile!” came a whispered growl from the other side of the room.

  “You want the Germans to hear?” hissed another.

  “Milton?” The captain was not at his side, where he’d fallen asleep last night. “Where are you?”

  “Thyself not free, but to thyself enthralled.”

  A clatter, and the sound of shattered glass.

  “What’s that moron gone and done?” growled the first. Griggs, Jamie thought grimly. The one he didn’t like.

  “He’s not a moron.” Jamie grabbed his boots. He pulled them on, wincing as they slid over the arc of blisters. “He’s wounded, and he outranks you.”

  Another clatter came from outside the room.

  Men came awake, reaching for their rifles.

  “What’s going on?” said a groggy Balantine.

  “It’s Professor Shakespeare,” Griggs complained. “I’ll bloody well kill him before the Germans get a crack at it. Come this far, only to have some nutter give us away. . . .”

  “Oh, shut it, Griggsy,” said Grayling, in a wearied tone that sounded well familiar with him. “Elliott?”

  “I’ll get him.”

  “Baylor’s on watch. You best do so before he puts a hole in him.”

  “No luck there,” said Griggs. “The little pansy’s probably reading. Excellent lookout he makes. Never sleep a wink when he’s on watch.”

  “Shut it, Griggs!”

  They’d gone to bed some hours ago, all in various stages of inebriation except for Baylor, who had first watch, and Milton, whom Jamie would not allow to have a drink—especially when Griggs wanted to see if alcohol would make him quote something more entertaining, like Jack London or P. G. Wodehouse.

  When Jamie got to the entryway of this living room turned sleeping room, glass crunched under his boots. He peered through the dimness both ways down the hall. No Milton. He turned left and followed the hall to the kitchen, where Baylor sat at the table, reading by candlelight, a rifle propped at his side.

  Jamie couldn’t help but agree with Griggs. Seated leisurely at a kitchen table for sentry duty, cozily reading? What a joke. Upstairs, at a window, no candlelight, and no rations if you’re caught doing anything other than watching—that’s what Lieutenant Dunn would have done.

  Baylor looked up, adjusting his glasses. “What’s all the fuss?”

  “Have you seen my friend?”

  “He went upstairs. Heard them creak. The stairs are down the hall and round the corner to the left. Look what I found.” He closed the book and showed the cover to Jamie: Le Paradis perdu. Jamie shrugged. “It’s Paradise Lost, in French. Whoever lives here has the most marvelous library. Actually found some of the lines your mate quoted last night. Quite fascinating. Have you read it?”

  “Me?” Jamie almost laughed. He wouldn’t be caught dead reading poetry. “No.”

  “I have. Paradise Regained, too, though Milton should’ve stopped with the first. He said it all with Paradise Lost, and far better. By the by, fair warning—you best keep your friend on Griggs’s good side.”

  “He has a good side?”

  “I have to admit, it’s rather nice for him to pick on someone else for once. Glad your friend doesn’t understand it.”

  “He might, and I do. That ‘moron’ is up for the Victoria Cross.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure he means anything by it—he’s just a
ngry we’re not fighting. Looking for a whipping boy. Freud calls it displacement.” A creak overhead, and they both looked up. “Speak of the new boy.” He looked at the book. “Has he actually quoted the whole thing, front to back? In order?”

  “Not a clue. Not exactly a Milton fan.”

  Baylor sat back in his chair. “You really need to report this to someone back home. Had me spellbound last night. Professor Cathay would go mad over him. I really should do a paper on him, for posterity at least. I should take notes. Fascinating overlap of the mental and the physical, don’t you think? We must swap addresses.”

  “You’re at university?”

  “Oxford,” he said with casual pride.

  “What are you—what is your . . . ?” He didn’t run with university blokes, didn’t quite know the lingo.

  “My field? Psychology. I know about a dozen professors who’d love to get their hands on him.”

  “I better do that myself, before he breaks something else.” He nodded at Baylor, and turned back down the hall.

  The floor crunched at the entryway to the sleeping room. There was enough light from the kitchen to see that a framed photograph had fallen from the wall, shattering the glass. Jamie picked up the photograph, studied the French family, put it back on the wall.

  He found the stairs and went up, trying to be as quiet as possible.

  So much for Milton keeping a lid on it.

  Yesterday when they came into the house and everyone had assembled in the kitchen to greet the new arrivals, Milton had acted the strangest yet upon meeting the men—he seemed eager, seemed drawn out of that private little box of his. He was alert and watchful, without looking anyone in the eye. At first Jamie thought it was nervous agitation in being around so many people after days with just the two of them, and hoped it would mean that lid on the poetry he had requested. It was not to be.

  Turned out, the captain found opportunities to spout the most Miltonage yet, and stuff Jamie had not heard. He acted like a street-smart kid at the edge of a busy road, waiting to dart across at a break in traffic; when a pause in conversation came, off he’d launch into one line after another, just as if he were part of the banter—not that he seemed to understand what was said to him, but certainly as if he expected his comments to be perfectly clear.

  As if anyone knew what to do with, “To all the fowls he seems a phoenix!”

  Yet, Jamie surprised himself. He found he wasn’t embarrassed at all. He found instead some sort of protection for the man, surely brought about by the duty laid upon him to get him to Dunkirk. And the man wore a wedding ring. If Jamie couldn’t win this bloody war—if he couldn’t even fight—he’d get this lunatic home to her, and that won something.

  While two of the men—Griggs and a bloke named Curtis—acted like Christmas came early with a new toy to sport with, the other three—Balantine, Grayling, and Baylor—were the regular, decent sort who showed appropriate concern for Milton, especially when they learned he was in for the Victoria Cross. Baylor, who’d had some medical training, had unwrapped the bandage and cleaned the wound. He admired the stitch work of the Belgian doctor and pronounced it a gruesome work of art. When Jamie asked if the skull around the wound seemed dodgy, as the doctor seemed to think, Baylor gingerly applied pressure with his fingertips. He didn’t seem to like the result any more than the doctor.

  “Seems a bit spongy.” He had looked at Milton with more concern than before. “He shouldn’t be walking around, that’s for sure. His skull is likely fractured, and his brain could be swelling. No idea how to set a skull. Don’t let him wear his helmet anymore. It’s too heavy.”

  At the top of the stairs was a hall. The door at the end of the hall was open. He saw moonlight.

  He came into the room, pushing the door wide.

  It looked like a child’s bedroom. One bed against one wall, another against the opposite. In the middle of the room was a dormer window, with a small desk. From the window came a brilliant stream of silver moonlight. Milton sat on a small chair he had placed in the moonpath.

  Very strange, the clumping footfalls of a heavy British Army boot in a quiet French bedroom. He could never have imagined where he’d be, one year earlier. Never imagined himself an invader of privacy, even if the residents were not home. Felt like they were.

  “Captain?”

  He came alongside the captain, who gazed at the moon. Dark hair tufted from the white bandage, which in the moonlight wash had a lavender tinge. The moonlight made the shadows beneath his eyes deeper, greenish; his lips, the color of pewter. He looked positively done in. He shouldn’t even be upright, looking like that.

  For the first time, a nudge of real worry came. How bad was that head, on the inside?

  “Here’s an idea: next time, just lie there quietly and say your lines to yourself. You won’t break things, and people will sleep. What do you say, Cap? Speaking of, wish you’d come to your ranking-officer senses—this lot could use a captain. The bloke below us is reading. Can you believe it? On watch? Dunn would kill him on the spot.”

  The captain gazed at the moon, his fingers twisting the wedding ring in place. Then Jamie realized why he seemed to appear extra wretched—he looked as if he had come fresh from finding out about his men. Battered sorrow lay heavy upon the moonwashed face.

  Jamie sat on the bed closest, coiled springs squeaking. He watched the twisting ring.

  “Tell me about her, Milton.”

  He didn’t answer, though Jamie noticed a falter in the ring twisting.

  “She’d know what to do with you, mate,” Jamie said softly. “She’d know what to say if you’d lost your . . .” And though he couldn’t bring himself to finish it aloud, the ring twisting stopped.

  Jamie gazed at the ring. What would his father do? He’d know what to say. He was good with people.

  He rested back on his elbows. He looked about the room.

  “Do you know what, Milty? I’m gonna open a pub someday. I came to it on watch one night, few months back. I’ve got it all planned out. It’ll be a nice place, a place you can get a decent meal, cheap. Comfortable, warm, great lovely fireplace, with a mantel I’ll make myself. I’d like to open it on the street that ends at my dad’s boatyard, except for one problem—there’s a place there already. Evelyn’s. I could never give her the competition, I’d go straight to hell—she’s the kindest soul you’ll ever meet. And yeah, it’s true—no one can beat her puddings. But mine would be a different sort of place. Hers is more of a café. Mine, I want more manly. Mine, I want a cup on the counter for folks to toss in change for those down on their luck, and there’s sure to be those after the war. I want a place where a man can come in, order a plate of chips and fried fish like he had pockets of money, enjoy it like a king, and if he’s flat broke, he can leave without paying, no questions asked. We’ll just take it out of the cup.”

  The ring twisting started again.

  “But do you know what’s the centerpiece of my place? It’s a very modern wireless, maybe a top-of-the-line Ekco, right at the end of the bar where folks can gather with their pipes and mugs and listen to King George tell how Lord Gort came back in mighty force and whipped Hitler and all his men. This isn’t the end, you see, this running for England. I know it in my heart.”

  The captain’s fingers stilled.

  “And I want you there, with your wife and kids, when the king tells us this war is over, and your men and the little girls in that ditch have been avenged. You and I will look at each other across the room, and we’ll lift our mugs.” He swallowed hard. “I think you quote Milton because your heart is broken, mate, not your head.”

  A look of anguish passed over the moonwashed face.

  “Look, I’m going on too much. Let me just say this and I’ll shut up forever: You lost your squad of men. That’s the worst thing in the world. But you saved another. And that’s the best. You keep that close, captain.”

  The lavender lips twitched, and then a sound came from the capt
ain, a strange, guttural clicking sound. He shifted in his chair, his fists grew white, his body seemed to stiffen, and at first Jamie feared a fit, feared the man was choking. Jamie shot up, unsure what to do, should he run for Baylor, should he—?

  “J-J-J-J—”

  “Milton! You all right?”

  “J-J-J-J—Jacobs,” he gasped. The fists relaxed, and he sat exhausted. “Jacobs.”

  Jamie stood very still. After a moment, he eased back onto the bed.

  “Well. Good to know you, Captain Jacobs,” he said softly.

  One painfully stammered word was all he could manage to deliberately speak, yet Milton’s words flowed from the captain’s lips easy as moonlight fell on his face.

  And this time, the captain spoke with unusual grace.

  “Half yet remains unsung.” He lifted his face to the moon. “Good he made thee, but to persevere he left it in thy power—ordained thy will by nature free, not over-ruled by fate.” He half turned to Jamie. “God towards thee hath done his part—do thine.”

  He seemed to expect a response.

  Jamie shrugged. “Sure. Will do.”

  But the captain reached and clutched a handful of Jamie’s jacket. He shook him. “God towards thee hath done his part—do thine.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll do my part.”

  “God towards thee hath done his part.” A tighter clutch, more insistent shaking, and now a build of anxiety. “Do thine. Do thine!”

  “I don’t know what my part is! You’ve got to calm down, you’ll only—”

  Wait.

  If he made it, if Jamie made it, then maybe to Captain Jacobs, it would be as if his men did.

  Jacobs would have gotten someone home. Jamie’s part was to get home.

  “Someone’s got to open that pub,” he said quickly.

  The captain closed his eyes. His hand dropped away, and he lifted his face to the moonlight.

  Jamie said, “Come on, mate. Upsadaisy. Lots of walky-walky tomorrow. Let’s rest that buggered head while we can. Nope, turn around, this way—two steps, right over here. Easy now. There we are. See? When’s the last time you slept in a bed? Who knows, Milty—perhaps by this time tomorrow, we’ll be in sight of home. I wonder where you live. Maybe that can be your next word.”