by Carla Kelly
Shaken, Polly returned to her chair in the hall. She sat for only a moment, then hurried to another room, where a shriek was followed by a young child’s startled cry. Polly ran to the room to find a young woman huddled on her pillow, her eyes wide and staring. She had wakened her child, who sat up in his smaller bed, crying. Polly went to the child first, soothing the little boy until he returned to sleep.
Polly sat on the bed, her mind a complete blank. In desperation, she started to hum a lullaby she had heard Laura sing to Danny. To her relief, the girl’s eyes began to close and her head drooped forwards. She resisted Polly’s first effort to induce her to lie down. After two more choruses of the simple tune, she did not object to sliding between her sheets again and closing her eyes. She did not release Polly’s hand until she was deep in slumber.
‘I understand you,’ Polly whispered. ‘Colonel Junot held my hand when I could have sworn the ship was sinking. Can I do any less for you?’
So it went all night. She went from room to room down her side of the intersecting corridor while Sister Maria Madelena did the same in the other hall. Some rooms she went to twice to console young girls too soon old. One girl could not be consoled until Polly took her in her arms and held her as a mother holds a child. Her horror at such terrible treatment at the hands of French soldiers turned to rage that anyone would harrow up the innocent. When dawn came, Polly knew she would never be the same again, not if she lived another fifty years.
Exhausted in body, one part of her brain wanted to sleep until the war was over. The other part told her she must return every night, until the last victim in the world had been consoled. She wanted to tell Sister Maria Madelena everything she had learned, but she was too tired to do more than nod, when the nun came to her and said it was time to leave.
They walked in silence. Soon Polly was back in the part of the convent familiar to her. She smiled to hear Philemon and her sister in the dining room, laughing over something, ready to begin their own hard days as she had just ended hers. She turned to the nun.
‘How can you do that, night after night?’
‘I cannot sleep at night.’ The nun looked away, as if wondering what to say. ‘I know what it is like.’
Polly didn’t even try to hide her shock. ‘Oh, Sister,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘I…I… Oh, I didn’t know.’
‘When the French came, Mr Wilson brought me here, thinking it would be safe. We retreated to the kitchen when the…the crapaud came. She told me not to, but I tried to defend the Mother Abbess with one of the cook’s knives. They took it from me, and then all of them held me down for their own amusement…’ She couldn’t go on.
‘I didn’t know,’ Polly said again, appalled.
‘When I thought they were done, they used my own knife against me. I was determined not to die, though all around me were dead.’ She shrugged. ‘Who else would bury them?’
Polly gasped. ‘Surely you did not…?’
‘I had help. Not all of the community were murdered. We made our way down the coast to Lisbon and safety. Mr Wilson was killed here in Porto, defending casks of port—imagine how unimportant that is, Polly. I decided to join the order.’
Polly could not detect an ounce of self-pity in Sister Maria Madelena’s voice. ‘And you are here again.’
‘There is work to be done,’ the nun said, her voice brusque again. ‘Go to sleep now, if you can. Compline will come too soon, I fear.’ She peered at Polly. ‘You will join me again tonight?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Excellent!’ Sister Maria Madelena nodded and turned towards the sound of children in the courtyard. ‘Your nephew Danny and João have turned into such ringleaders! I had better go administer some discipline, or we will be accused of raising wolves in Porto.’
‘João?’ she asked, remembering the dark-haired child who played most often with Danny.
‘Yes, my dear. He is my son.’
Chapter Eight
Polly knew she would not sleep, so she did not try. She sat at the desk in her room, took out a sheet of paper, and began a letter she would never send.
She wrote ‘Dear Colonel Junot’, then paused, because the word ‘dear’ loomed up at her like a vulgar word, even though thousands of letters began that way, even those from prosaic counting houses. She drew a line through it anyway, then crumpled the page. She reminded herself that the letter was going nowhere, and wrote ‘Dearest Hugh’ on another sheet.
Freed of that constraint, she said whatever she wanted. She described the long night of comforting sorrow of such a magnitude she scarcely could grasp it. The words poured on to the page, and another like it and another, as she wrote of the young girl who spent her entire night patting the bedclothes and searching the room for her little one, a half-French infant strangled at birth by a midwife in a remote Portuguese hamlet.
She faltered a moment, then wrote of the girls whose troubled minds compelled them to act out their rapes over and over. Maybe even more frightening were the young girls who lay perfectly still in as small a space as they could contort their figures, eyes wide and staring in the dark.
Exhausted and weary with tears, Polly wrote it all to Hugh Junot, her friend, so he would know what a pathetically tiny bit of good she was doing at Sacred Name. ‘Knowing you’—she put down the pen, unable to continue for a moment. She picked it up, reminding herself calmly that she did know the man, and knew what he wanted to hear from her. ‘Here is what I have learned: it is possible to survive, when all hope has perished.’
She didn’t need to reread anything, because the experience of that night would never leave her mind, no matter how many years passed. Polly picked up the pencil again, rubbing it against the end of the wooden desk to get one more sentence from the lead, one more line no one would ever see. ‘I wish you were here, Hugh. I would feel more brave.’
‘I miss you,’ she said out loud as she folded the letter. ‘Your loving Brandon.’
Hugh kept himself supremely busy in Lisbon, which was not a hard thing to do, considering the confusion, intrigue, and bustle in the old seaport. Over excellent port, which only served to remind him of the town he had just left, Hugh listened as the Major in charge of the Marine detachment told him of the summer campaigns underway throughout Spain.
‘Where are the armies?’ Hugh asked.
‘Sir, we believe Wellington is drawing out a fight near Salamanca. After that, if he wins, the road is open to Madrid,’ the Major said. He tipped the last of the wine into Hugh’s glass. ‘Could this be our last summer in this wretched country? Shall we drink to that?’
They did. The major invited Hugh to join him at his favourite brothel, but Hugh shook his head, returning some vague regret about reports to write.
Hours later, restless and tangling his sheets into ropes, Hugh wished he had accepted the Major’s invitation. He knew how badly he needed the comfort of a woman’s body. Trouble was, he only wanted one body, and its owner was far away, unaware of his admiration.
His thoughts were not chaste. He had never wanted a woman more than he wanted Polly Brandon. He got up and went to the window. How does anyone explain this feeling? he asked himself as he watched the Marine sentries below, taking their prescribed steps, about faces, and returns. I never expected this. How is it I have lived on the earth this long, and never felt this way before? It was just as well he had not accompanied Major Buttram to the brothel; he would only have disappointed whomever he paid to service him.
He was disgusted with himself. In her polite way, Laura Brittle had made it plain he was not to reappear at the convent in Vila Nova de Gaia. She was a sister watching out for her own, and he obviously did not meet her standards. In misery, he knew that if he paraded his rank before Laura Brittle, the family wealth, and a handsome estate in a charmed corner of Scotland, it would make no difference. Laura Brittle thought him too old, and he was not good enough.
He paced the floor, angry at the unfairness of it all. He tried to remind h
imself of the misery around him in this tragic country, which had sacrificed so much, but it didn’t work this time. He could only think of his sacrifices, and how this war had cost him wife and children. There was no one he could make love with whenever the mood grabbed them; no bright eyes looking into his as they shared the same pillow; no smile to greet him across the breakfast table, telling him prosaically of bills and schooling; no one to sit with in a pew on Sunday morning; no one to tease him when he stepped on her foot during a waltz, as he invariably would have; no one to turn the page for him when he played the piano; no one. It chilled him to the bone and gave him grief beyond parallel.
He sat at his desk. Laura Brittle be damned; he would write to Polly Brandon, even though it was an ill-mannered thing to do. ‘My dearest love’ came from his pen. He shared his whole heart to her, page after page, leaving nothing unsaid of an intimate nature. He had never been one to gild a lily, either, and he was too mature to begin now. When he finished, he signed it ‘Love from all my heart, Hugh’, then immediately ripped it into tatters.
‘That’s out of your system, you randy goat,’ he murmured, and took out another sheet. He began this one ‘Greetings, Brandon, from someone with rag manners. I suppose I deserve a slap across the face for being so bold as to write to you, but I am wondering how you are.’
This letter was as easy to write as the first one. He described Lisbon, that dirty, charming city so full of intrigue. He wrote of the Marines he had chatted to, his conversations with the great and the lowly. He told her he wasn’t satisfied he had learned enough to write a report yet, but that autumn would probably see him back in Plymouth, doing precisely that, and chained to a conference table again. ‘What, no sympathy from you, Brandon? You don’t like a whiner? Take care of yourself. Hugh Junot.’
He read it through and found nothing objectionable. Because he had the liveliest confidence the Brittles would make sure Polly never received it, should he be so bold as to send it, he added a postscript on the other side: ‘Damn me, if I don’t miss you, Brandon.’
He addressed it to ‘Brandon Polly, Convent of the Sacred Name, Vila Nova de Gaia’, knowing full well he would never send it. Still, it looked good on his desk, almost as though these were normal times and he was writing to a beloved wife far away. There was no reason he couldn’t just leave it there and return to bed.
When he woke hours later, he saw that the letter was gone, along with yesterday’s towel and last night’s slop jar. After his initial jolt, he found himself surprised that Portuguese servants were so efficient. He relied on the Brittles to intercept his bit of nonsense.
Polly knew she would never get accustomed to the misery of her nightly duty at Sacred Name, but as July wore on, she learned to adjust to it. Sister Maria Madelena was right—because of her tender sympathy during nighttime ordeals, the little mothers had no hesitation in sitting with her in the courtyard during the afternoons and learning what little English she had time to teach. It went well; so well, in fact, that she started taking out the letter to Colonel Junot she was never going to post and adding on to it, describing the mothers and children and their efforts to learn English. ‘You were right, Colonel,’ she wrote. ‘I am useful here.’
Her usefulness continued in a way she had not anticipated. She was not even certain she liked the next change—travelling upriver with Sister Maria Madelena to shepherd other young girls to the sanctuary of the Sacred Name.
‘How do you learn of them?’ Polly asked, as they sat with the children in the afternoon sun.
Sister Maria kissed her son, then sent him back to play. ‘There is a network of interested folk who hear things. We take a barco rabelo upriver to the village of São Jobim, where we find the young girls waiting for us, some Portuguese, some Spanish.’
‘It’s not dangerous?’
The nun shrugged. ‘Who is safe anywhere in Portugal? There has been no trouble in more than a year, although we always travel with a small detachment of Marines. You will be safe. Ask your sister.’
Polly did. ‘I think that is an excellent idea,’ Laura told her. ‘Sister Maria tells me you already have a wonderful rapport with the young mothers. Perhaps it is because you are so young, yourself.’
‘Laura, I am not so young, not compared to some of them. I’ll be nineteen this autumn.’
Laura seemed almost surprised. ‘Why, yes, I suppose you will,’ she murmured. ‘I was reminded recently that I am at fault in thinking you younger than you are. You may go upriver.’
Her only regret in the journey was the mode of transportation, one of the flat-bottomed sailing craft used to transport kegs of port wine downriver from wineries farther up the Douro. The war had disrupted the thriving business upriver and the barcos were used now to transport people across the Douro to Oporto proper, and to move what wine was available closer to Vila Nova and the ships anchored at the mouth of the mighty river.
‘Ships are the bane of my existence,’ Polly muttered the next morning to the nun as she allowed a Marine to help her into the craft as it bobbed at the wharf. ‘I will claim a spot near the gunwale and try not to make a total fool of myself.’
The wind blew inshore, so the barco sailed along against the current, expertly guided by a Portuguese sailor at the long pole in the stern. She and Sister Maria Madelena watched the river narrow and its sides steepen as they travelled through the canyon cut by the Douro. Throughout the morning, Polly watched other barcos rabelos coming downstream flying British ensigns. There were wounded men on the deck, with surgeons bending over them. Last week, news had reached the convent of a battle in north central Spain in the Arapiles hills near Salamanca, and Philemon had told Laura over the breakfast table to prepare for casualties.
‘My sister tells me even the army sends the worst of the worst to Philemon’s hospital,’ she couldn’t help saying proudly to Sister Maria. ‘It was only supposed to be a satellite naval hospital.’ She looked closer. ‘Oh, Sister, excuse me. I didn’t realise you were praying.’
It was dusk by the time they reached the village of São Jobim. ‘Ordinarily, we try to leave earlier in the morning, so we can make the trip in one day,’ Sister Maria Madelena said, as they approached the wharf.
There were few people about. Polly couldn’t see any men at all. She looked at Sister Maria Madelena, a question in her eyes.
‘The men have gone with the army or the partisans,’ the nun explained. ‘So it is, in every village in Portugal.’
What happened once the barco docked was a marvel of efficiency, testament to how many times Sister Maria Madelena had made this voyage of rescue. From the Marines to the Portuguese mariners, everyone worked quickly. Escorted by the Marines, they were helped ashore and into the church across the square in a matter of minutes.
‘I thought you said we were in no danger?’ Polly asked.
‘That is correct,’ the nun replied, as she nodded to the priest approaching them. ‘We are merely careful. Good evening, Pai Belo. Do you have someone for me?’
He did, pointing to a young woman huddled on a bench and shivering, despite the warmth of a late July sun only just now setting west across the Douro. Polly glanced at Sister Maria, as her eyes caught the motion of the priest passing a note to her. It was done so quickly she might have mistaken it. Well, never mind, Polly thought, going to the girl and sitting beside her. She knew enough Portuguese to murmur, ‘You are safe now’, not touching her, but sitting close.
Sister Maria joined her. ‘Pai says she is from across the border, where other young girls have come lately.’
‘It’s so far,’ Polly said, resting her hand gently on the girl’s shoulder.
‘Not so far,’ Sister Maria contradicted. ‘I come from beyond the border myself. I have a brother—’ She stopped, as if to remember him. ‘I have a brother there. It is not so far.’
They spent the night in the church, sharing a frugal meal of bread and cheese, while the Marines ate their own rations and stood sentry duty. Sister Maria
and the priest conversed in low tones, with occasional glances at Polly and the young woman—her name was Dolores—who rested, silent and fearful, her eyes wide.
Before the rising sun cleared the canyons of the Douro, they were on the water again, relying this time on the strong current to carry them west to Oporto. After resigning herself to her by now obligatory offering to Neptune or Poseidon, or whatever mischievous god governed the waves that so discomfited her, Polly turned her face to the sun and held Dolores’s hand for most of the rapid trip downriver to the sea.
They arrived by noon on the speedier return trip, docking at the navy wharf and sharing a cart to the convent with Laura and other wounded from upriver. Swallowing her fears in the face of her sister’s single-minded duty, she let Laura press her into duty, washing dirty limbs and cutting away bloodsoaked clothing. ‘If I didn’t need you so badly…’ Laura began, and then her words trailed off as Philemon—his arm red to the elbow—directed her to another crisis.
After a night of unending work, Polly fell into bed, not bothering to remove her clothes, now as stained and reeking as those of the wounded she had helped. Her head crunched on paper, but she only touched it and closed her eyes.
The warmth of the afternoon sun woke her, coupled with her own hunger and the twine tickling her nose. She brushed at her face and opened her eyes so see a letter bound in heavy paper and tied in a bow. She thought she recognised the casual handwriting, and ‘Brandon Polly’ confirmed it. Colonel Junot had written to her.