“It would be dangerous for me in England.” She reminded him. “The Foreign Office has already tried to kill me.”
“Ah.” He was concerned now and she knew he was seeing the situation from her point of view.
“Would you be permitted to marry me in England?” She seized her advantage now that he doubted himself.
“Who will try to stop me?”
“Non compos mentis doesn’t just mean ‘not of sound mind’. It also means no marriage, no contracts, no financial decisions.”
He was silent then, and when he looked at her again his eyes were full of thought. He took off the fedora and slapped his thigh with it, which made his horse jump to the side. She heard him grumbling to himself, “There must be a way.”
She thought of the power of attorney in her bag. This paper would give her the right to speak for him, to pass him through customs, to make minor medical decisions, but no practical rights. As a ward of the crown his property was held in trust and power of attorney could not change that. Marshall had hoped the piece of paper might prompt a re-opening of his case before the authorities. She thought about the powerful military men who had hoped to cover up the politically charged murder of a child by silencing the witness forever in an asylum. Marshall had not known about that. She thought about many more things as they rode slowly north. Doctor Engel could have him declared sane. That documentation might secure a hearing in England.
The train station appeared far ahead as a tiny square box. They rode in silence and the tiny box grew larger and larger. It was not a city station, but a work stop to service the engine, take on fuel and water from a high tank on wooden supports, and transport supplies for the repair of the tracks and the reconstruction of bridges and tunnels damaged during the war.
“Stay here,” he warned her.
“I will.” She tried to look weak and harmless to the men who came and went into the building. She sat on her horse and gave them each an insipid smile. And as she suspected, none paused in their business to speak to her.
Sonnenby did well, trading the horses for tickets and came back to her with instructions to gather their luggage from the pack. Everything they did not take became the property of the station master. Sonnenby showed her the tickets.
“Istanbul. Once there I must do something else to book passage to Calais.”
“Calais?” She asked him.
“And from there to London.”
She did not argue, for the sound of the train wailed in the distance. She would try to convince him to at least stop in Vienna long enough to talk to Doctor Engel. Later.
He slept. He was propped against the window, one shoulder on the thick sill that held tightly to the glass, his head tipped forward and to the side, his dark hair fell over his eyes. His hands rested on his lap, bandaged neatly again. His lips were slightly parted and his chest rose and fell deeply, assuring her that his body was finally getting the rest it needed to heal properly.
She could not sleep. The rocking of the train and rhythmic clacking should have lulled her to numbness and then unconsciousness as it had Sonnenby, but a persistent dread tortured her awake. There could not be a more grievous crime than to become emotionally attached to a patient. She closed her eyes. Not to sleep, but to erase the image of Sonnenby sitting so peacefully across the compartment from her.
Not to be. Her lids lifted and forced her to look at him, to look at her failure. She fidgeted on the bench and tried to look out the window, but his face was relaxed against the glass. She looked at the luggage rack, but his name hung from the tag on the handle of his satchel. She closed her eyes again but not for long.
Elsa knew that patients often latched on to their therapists as treatment progressed. It made perfect sense. Their counselor represented a comforting steadiness and a clear, calm reason in contrast to their own jumbled thoughts and feelings. As a patient recovered his or her stability of mind, a gradual release of the lifeline was encouraged by the therapist until finally the patient would be able to walk away confident and whole.
At least that was the theory. Elsa had heard the ugly rumors of psychiatrists who had taken advantage of the emotional frailty of their young and attractive female patients, and banked on that dependence to bolster their own egos or satisfy their desire for power and control over another. The problem was that any complaint a patient might make could not be taken seriously, both because of her sex and because of the stigma of being mentally ill. Elsa knew this.
She looked at Sonnenby again. He might be misguided. It was possible he was reacting emotionally to her compassionate attention. Certainly gentle kindness was something he had not experienced in the last year. Perhaps in his whole life. It was conceivable that he would have fallen in love with any woman who showed him even the smallest amount of courtesy and care.
She might only be a symbol of a woman to his damaged psyche. Not a real woman. The fact that he associated her with a mythological character should be proof of that. A Valkyrie was an all-powerful eternal woman. A woman who by occupation was “chooser of the slain”. A woman who saved the world from the cruelty and greed of men by the sacrifice of her immortality and the healing balm of her love. Elsa covered her face. It would be a sacrifice. Her sacrifice. He was in love with an idea, not with her.
Once she had been captured by those fatal words, “I love you”, there could be no retreat with honor. To bring him home with her would mean the end of her career, but breaking with him would be traumatic. For both of them. Even now the memory of his body inside hers made her ache to feel it again. Thinking about leaving him forever caused her stomach to twist. It had not ended well for either Ophelia or Brunhilde.
Dr. Engel must never know. No one could know, yet she could not merely hide Sonnenby in the cellar. She could not bring him home to her sisters and her parents as a mental patient. To love him meant that she must dissolve her life. Give up everything. Not only a grand sacrifice of her goals, but people would say, “Oh yes, Elsa Schluss succumbed to feminine weakness. Too bad, she had showed some promise as a professional.” They would say that women cannot be trusted in positions of responsibility. Elsa set her teeth, thinking of what people would say. As if men could be trusted in positions of responsibility. Look at this recent war. She fumed. Brunhilde was admired for her sacrifice, Ophelia pitied, Elsa would be vilified.
But her next thought confused her, for though her mind was ticking through the list of dreadful consequences, her heart was busy basking in the images of long winter nights wrapped in his strong arms, his mouth on hers and warm blankets over them both.
But did she love him or not? Perhaps she did not love him. Perhaps the events of the past month had given her a psychological dependence on him. Perhaps the forced intimacy of their bodies in close quarters and the heightened dangers they had faced together had fused them in a bond that was not love, but a reaction to a survival situation. It would fade when the danger faded.
She put a hand to her forehead. She had the symptoms of love. She felt comfortable and content when she was with him, agitated and anxious when he was away. When he spoke to her in his rumbling baritone she felt a little shiver of pleasure. When she felt the warmth of his hand on her body she felt drawn closer to him, she wanted more, no matter if it were merely his finger or his entire arm, but she desired that he must touch her again. She had never shown symptoms like these with her other patients.
She had bathed men’s bodies and talked to them and dressed them and cleaned their wounds and, granted, had been fond of a few of the witty ones. But never had she contracted the full force of love. She had never lain in bed at night in a fever of passion nor twitched with the spasms of lust. She had not breathed the contagion of dependence that infected a woman in love.
Elsa rubbed her cheek. She would test her symptoms. She readied herself for the examination, and then closed her eyes and imagined her life without him. She then imagined in great detail that another woman comforted him in the night. She then imagi
ned that he told her that he did not love her. She imagined standing in front of him, looking up at his firm jaw and that dark shadow of his beard which never seemed to disappear even after he shaved. She looked at his dark eyes with their thick black lashes and saw his firm lips as he spoke, and listened to his voice as he told her he never wanted to see her again.
Elsa had to stop the diagnostic, for this imaginary event brought terrible feelings of self-pity. She quickly dug her handkerchief from her pocket. She was infected. It was lethal. She blew her nose and sniffed. Fatal. She was in love with her patient. Nothing more could be done for her. This was her Gotterdammerung and she was about to be professionally immolated.
The train whistle blew for the next station. Across the aisle Sonnenby woke with a start. “Good God,” he breathed. “Will I never sleep well again?”
Elsa quickly touched her nose with the handkerchief and tucked it in her sleeve. “No.” She said with finality. “You will not sleep well until we get to Vienna and you can lie in clean sheets in a soft bed with no alarm clock or telephone or train whistle. No Bedouins with knives and rifles, no Ministry officials with reams of papers. No prison cells, no men with swagger sticks. No straightjackets, no biplanes with machine guns.”
He smiled as he stretched his arms over his head and rolled his shoulders. “That sounds wonderful. But I will not be your kept man in Vienna. I can smuggle you into England on a forged passport, Elsa. You could disappear. Let them think they have killed you.”
She looked at her hands in her lap. With that option she would evade all troubles by avoiding them completely. Dr. Engel would feel terrible, that he had sent her away to die in the wilds of Syria. Her parents and sisters would grieve again. It would be terrible if they thought she were dead.
It would hardly be less terrible if she posted a letter from London saying that she had run off with a man she could never legally marry and could not decently introduce to anybody in society. It would be worse if they discovered who he was. That she had run off with her patient. Her patient she had first met in a straightjacket, an illegitimate madman who had killed at least three people while in her company, and probably more when she wasn’t looking. A man charged with treason. She tried to imagine the scene of her explanations to her family and stopped before she could get too far.
She squirmed and asked, “How can I run away from my family, my mother and father, and Doctor Engel?” She did not look up at him. She already knew how his face would look. He would be puzzled. He had no family to answer to. He no longer owed fealty to the military structure that had betrayed him. He could not see how her guilt and shame would poison her mind and eat away at her identity like gangrene in an untended wound. He did not have the training or experience. He could not do a diagnostic on her psyche.
But he did. His voice was tender when he said, “Tell yourself that there is nothing more important that to love and be loved in return, regardless of anything else.”
She lifted her eyes. She wished that were true.
“Because,” he gave her a stern look, “it is true.”
“Other things are still important,” she insisted. “I do love you and I will suffer for it.” She was thinking of Brunhilde and Ophelia now.
“Schatze, darling,” he said to her, “only if you permit it.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The train continued its journey toward Istanbul. She read a newspaper, she fidgeted, she arranged her papers and Sonnenby’s files. She did not dare take out his mother’s letters, though she considered that one day it would be appropriate for him to read them. Instead she took out the two pocket watches and ran her finger over the filigree etching on the heavy silver of Marshall’s, then on the scratched and pitted surface of Descartes’. She felt their loss as a miserable tightness in her throat and a pain in her stomach that could not be relieved. Sonnenby noticed her expression and leaned over the foot well of the compartment to see what she was doing.
He saw the watches and a shadow passed over his face. “I have been reading Descartes’ notebooks and papers,” he told her. “I have everything he had in his attaché and his satchel.”
She frowned and looked up at him. The tone of his voice was wrong for the words. He sounded edgy. She looked at his jaw and his neck, then at his temples. He was agitated and trying to hide it.
“They are in French,” she told him unnecessarily.
“Of course they are in French,” he let his breath out. “I can read French. Can’t you?”
She said soothingly, “My French is from school. I know enough to be polite and avoid getting lost on the Metro, but that is all. I did not get high marks in French.” She moved the two watches into the folds of her skirt and out of his sight. “What is wrong?” She asked.
“Hiding their watches from me does not remove them from my memory.” He slid forward on his seat and stretched his left hand to take the watches out again. He flipped open one and then the other and looked at their faces. Marshall’s was clean and bright, while Descartes watch was old enough to have been his grandfather’s. “Jean-Philippe’s is a little slow.” He tapped the crystal. He gave her a sidelong look. “I am well, Nurse Schluss. I see your eyes taking in every detail of my most subtle expressions. I am feeling fine. Lucid even.”
But he was still tense, and a vein in his forehead was more visible than normal. She asked him again, “What is wrong, Henry?”
He returned the two watches to her. “Jean-Philippe was doing more than collecting rocks between Basra and Baghdad.” He leaned back in his seat across from her. “He has extensive notes on the tribal leaders, the sheiks and headmen and sharifs of all the tribes from India to Russia. He has correspondence with men associated with both Anglo-Persian Petroleum and Turkish Petroleum. The two companies are merging.”
Elsa did not see the significance. “He was a geologist for the French. He was a cartographer. Of course he would be on the payroll of investors.”
“I am an investor.”
“Did he know that?”
Sonnenby frowned. “Most certainly he did, though he never brought it up, or asked me about my father or told me anything about what he was doing here.”
She tilted her head up at him. “How big an investor are you?”
He shrugged and looked away. “Big.”
“How big?”
“My father was good friends with Gulbenkien. He holds a certain percentage of the stock.”
That meant nothing to Elsa. “Does this have anything to do with that safe in London?” She was beginning to get a glimmer of what he was getting at. “Is there an incentive to have the stock transferred?”
“I would say there are several million reasons to have the stock transferred, and only two ways to do it.” He looked dejected as he handed her a crumpled piece of paper.
It was a letter on fine stationary from a law office in Paris. “I can’t read this very well,” she told him. “I can see it concerns the disposal of shares of stock in Turkish Petroleum upon the death of your father.” She looked up at him. “What does it say?”
“It says that the shares are willed to me upon the death of my father as a transfer of property. The shares cannot be traded publicly, but must be sold back to the company if I chose to rid myself of them.” He paused, “If I am considered non compos mentis, they will be held in trust by the crown and cannot be transferred or sold at all. I have to die to release the shares.”
“I see.” She handed the paper back to him. “Well then.”
“Incentives,” he said slowly, “that start to make sense now. Churchill needs a controlling interest for the crown, to keep the oil flowing for the navy. National security cannot be left in private hands.”
“And so you are all that is holding up this merger.” She couldn’t help but look around as if an assassin was poised in the next compartment.
He asked her, “What can I do? There is a price on my head. You cannot be involved. We should not be travelling together.”
Sonnenby put his head in his hands. “Someone gave it to him. I think he was supposed to locate me. The rest of the letter details a short biography of me and news that the Foreign Office had removed me from the hospital and sent me to Damascus in the custody of Marshall. There are names of people to talk to in Damascus. He lifted the letter and pointed to a name near the bottom. “Farmadi.”
“Farmadi helped me find you. And I made Descartes get you out of the Army Headquarters,” she murmured. “And he did.”
Sonnenby rubbed his face. “They could have turned me in. Descartes could have slipped a knife between my ribs. He could have shot me off my camel.”
“No, Jean-Philippe was not a murderer, but he could have made a phone call in Baghdad, he could have left you at the headquarters. He could have abandoned me in the street.” She shook her head. “He did not. He was your friend. He was my friend.”
Sonnenby folded the letter and put it in one of his chest pockets. “He was.” He looked around the compartment. “I could use his help now. And Marshall’s.” He sighed. “I can pretend to be dead, Elsa. I am tempted to disappear in Anatolia somewhere in the mountains and live the rest of my life as a sheep herder.” He rubbed his face. “But I cannot ask you to live in the bush. You need to go to the city. I would have to live here alone.”
They were interrupted as a passenger ran past the compartment towards the rear of the train. Elsa frowned. Even an urgent call to the water closet would not require such speed. The passenger was followed by another, then a third. Sonnenby became alert and moved to the widow. A loud blast from the train hurt her ears, but there was no station for miles. They would not be in Konya until the evening.
Sonnenby was cursing, using English words she did not know. When he returned to his seat he was grim.
Blue Damask Page 34