You coward.
My feelings were gone, gone.
It was only much later that I hid in the nurses’ lav and got up the courage to take off my apron and unbutton my blouse. I stood before the dim mirror and ran my hand over my smooth, white stomach, looking for a bruise. I knew what they looked like, the bruises that came from a blow like that. My father had given me dozens of them.
There was nothing.
I had not known I was crying.
I wiped my tears and stared at my unblemished skin in the mirror for a long, long time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“There were four Gersbachs,” said Nathan the cook. “Two parents, a boy, and a girl. Kept to themselves, I hear.”
“How old were they?” I asked, spooning my stew. It was night again and I was back at the table in the kitchen, eating before my proper shift began. I sounded almost normal. I tried not to let the spoon clatter against the bowl. “The children?”
“Bammy’s age.” Nathan jerked a nod at the kitchen boy, who was about sixteen. “Or so Bammy himself says. He’s from the village.”
I looked at Bammy. “Did you know them?”
“’Course not.” He looked at his shoes. “They was rich.”
“Why are you asking?” Nathan said to me.
I turned and found him looking at me closely. Before my shift I had rebraided my hair, sponged myself off, tried to rest. It didn’t matter that I was cracking up inside; I couldn’t show weakness, not to these men. “What’s it to you?” I said to Nathan, and was rewarded with an approving grin.
I turned back to the others. “But they were outsiders,” I said. “The Gersbachs.”
“Germans,” said Nathan.
“No,” I said. “Swiss.”
“Never.”
“They were Swiss,” Paulus Vries cut in. “She’s right. Not everyone’s a Hun, you simpleton.”
“And what the hell are you?” Nathan shot back at him.
“I’m South African. Did you think I was a Hun, too?”
“I don’t know what the hell you are.” Nathan looked stubborn. He hadn’t liked being wrong. “Maybe you’re a spy.”
“I fought in German South-West Africa in ’fifteen,” Paulus said tightly. “I killed as many Huns as any man here. We buried them in the heat and left them there. The Germans ought to have no love for me.”
“All right,” I said. “Back to the Gersbachs. They came here and built this place. Then what? Where did they go?”
“They moved away,” said Paulus.
“They didn’t,” Bammy broke in.
We all stared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Nathan.
Bammy shrugged. He was gawky and painfully shy, but he was warming a little with newfound authority. “There was talk in the village, that’s all. They built the house—we saw the trucks haul everything over the bridge for months. But no one saw them move out or drive away. There’s only one way off here, and that’s over the bridge. No one saw it.”
I thought of the figure I’d seen in the reflection in the window. I put my bowl down.
“Someone must have seen something.” This was Roger, who had been listening quietly until now. He looked uneasy. “What about the servants working here?”
“He fired them all,” Bammy said. “Mr. Gersbach. Said they were moving away, taking none of the staff along.”
“There you go, then,” Roger said. “They moved.”
Or he knew, I thought. He knew that, for whatever reason, they wouldn’t need servants anymore. “Perhaps they left in the middle of the night,” I said. “Maybe they had debts and had to get away.”
“You haven’t lived in the village,” Bammy replied. “No one would miss an event like the Gersbachs’ moving out, even at three in the morning.”
“Well, they must have done it,” said Paulus. “The place is empty. Their things are gone. They did it quiet, that’s all.”
Bammy shrugged and dropped his gaze back to his shoes.
There was a moment of silence. I bit my lip, my courage deserting me. I was going onto another night shift, alone. I saw a ghost today, I wanted to say. I saw another one last night. Please tell me I’m not the only one. I felt fragile, and I didn’t like it. I opened my mouth and took a breath, but it was Bammy who spoke first.
“They never left,” he said softly.
We all looked at him again. He lifted his gaze, defiant.
“They never left,” he repeated. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? The sounds in the basement, in the lav. Everyone knows it, but no one wants to say. No one saw them because they never did move away. They’re all buried here somewhere and their ghosts are haunting the place.”
I exhaled.
Nathan chewed his toothpick, uncomfortable. Roger had gone red in the face. It was Paulus who spoke. “Lad,” he said, “you’ve been listening to too many stories. It’s just an old house that’s falling apart.”
“But that’s it,” Bammy protested. “It’s not old at all. Why are there cracks in the walls? Why is the west wing falling down? Why is there mold in the men’s lav? Why is it getting worse? No one has an answer to that, do they?”
“The air isn’t good here,” Nathan said. “There’s something about it. That I know. What do you think, Nurse?”
He was looking at me again. “It’s strange,” I managed. “I suppose.”
Roger scraped his chair back and stood. “Well, you ladies can sit here and gossip about ghosts all you like, but I’ve a shift to start.” He glared at me from gimlet eyes. “So do you, Nurse.”
Of course. My watcher. There would be no love lost between Roger and me tonight. I gave him a hard look in return and stood.
It was a warm night, not a breath of wind to rattle the windows or sigh in the eaves. Through the panes of glass in the upstairs corridor I saw the garden unmoving, the clusters of trees still as soldiers. In a cloudless sky the stars had appeared, speckling the deep black canopy with small diamonds of light. I wondered whether the air smelled sweet, whether it was a perfect summer night for strolling and looking at the sky. The perfect night to do things I’d never have the time to do, with people I’d never be able to do them with.
The conversation in the kitchen dogged me as I sat at the narrow nurse’s desk and pulled the linen lists from the drawer. The Gersbachs dogged me. Only one family had lived in this house. Only four people. And now I lived in their house, slept in their nursery, looked from the same windows they had looked from, ran my hands along the same stairway rails they had smoothed with their own palms. They were not just the absent owners of giant dining rooms and paintings gone from the walls. One heard about people disappearing, perhaps, but never entire families. Never entire families, just vanishing into the air.
And I had followed something into the stairwell the night before, felt it waiting for me in the dark at the bottom of the stairs. I had seen something in the library window, something that had hit me.
The need to talk to Jack Yates was like an itch. I wanted to confide to him what had happened to me, and—I admitted it—I just wanted to see him. But I was being watched, and tonight I would behave. Jack had to get well. That had to come first.
I slid aside the linen lists and drew out Practical Nursing, which I had slipped into the desk drawer earlier in the evening. I opened the book and looked at Florence Nightingale again. Florence would never have gone into a patient’s room and started crying about her problems. She would never have seen things and started to crack up. I pulled my lamp closer to me on the desktop, turned to the chapter on sutures, and began to read.
Two hours later, it seemed as if the night would be a quiet one. The men slept without nightmares; Roger had disappeared to his other duties; and when I did my rounds, if Jack Yates was awake he made no sound. No moans came from the walls of the la
v, and the drains sat undisturbed.
I studied until my eyes blurred. There was nothing for it; I would have to count linens soon. This was how Martha and Nina did night shift, then: a numbing repetition of making rounds and counting, with no company in the silence, nothing but the slurring thoughts in your head. Listening to one’s own quiet, creaking footsteps in the corridor, shivering a little as the night wore on, looking out the darkened windows, trying not to think of sleep.
I caught my reflection in a window’s darkened glass. My face had filled out just a little, the effect of a week of regular meals. It was a narrow face, heart shaped, the nose longish, the eyes dark and long lashed, perhaps, but overall unremarkable. The only feature that set my face apart was the lower lip, my mother’s lower lip, which was soft and full, yet curled in almost a sensual sort of disdain. I had no control over the look of that lip, but men seemed to find in it an invitation, and it had enraged my father. I had paid, I thought, a very high price for such a small thing.
I slid my own face out of focus and looked past it to the garden, wondering what it would feel like to be out there, feeling the warm night air breathe gently across me.
I was cold. My shoulders rose instinctively, flexing upward. I put a hand to the back of my neck and rubbed it. The body grew cold at night on its own, but this was different. A distinct icy chill, on my neck and back, between my shoulder blades. A draft. Or—
“No,” I said softly to myself.
The word came out on a breath of frosted air.
Reflected in the glass, something moved behind me.
From one of the rooms came a scream. I recognized the voice: Archie again. My hands were icy, my feet made of clay; I did not want to turn around, but at the second scream I was already moving.
There was nothing in the icy corridor behind me. I ran to Archie’s door, never fast enough, pressing as if moving underwater. The air was cold and strangely heavy. Somewhere deep in the walls a pipe groaned, punctuated with a familiar clang. I gripped the jamb of Archie’s door and propelled myself into the room, grabbed the brass foot of the bedstead, and pulled myself toward him.
He was arched again, just like the night before, his head thrown back and his mouth frozen in a rictus of terror. I took his shoulders and tried to shake him. “Archie!” He thrashed, his sinews twisting like leather under my hands. This is last night, I thought. I am living it again.
He quieted for a moment, panting on the bed, staring at me in stark fear. “Archie,” I said as gently as I could, leaning over him. “Wake up. It’s all right. Wake up.”
There was a second in which Archie—the real Archie—was in those eyes. And then something changed. His face contorted; his teeth gritted together. Then he launched himself upward, reached his hands around my neck, and squeezed.
I was too shocked to think. The pain was tremendous. “Archie,” I tried to say, but the word would not leave my throat.
He squeezed harder, pulled me toward him. “You coward,” he said to me.
I tried to shake my head, but could only gasp.
“You are a coward,” he said again, his stutter gone, his voice deep and eerie. Wherever Archie had gone, it was far away from the man who was gripping my throat now. I began to struggle, my fingernails biting into the backs of his hands.
Spots danced in front of my eyes, but two incredibly strong hands, their backs lined with black tufts of hair, wrenched Archie’s grip from me. Roger pressed Archie’s arms down into the mattress and twisted to look back at me, where I had staggered away from the bed.
“Get the needles,” he said. “Now.”
I wasted only a few seconds standing there, gasping for air, my hands on my neck, watching the small, wiry Roger pin down his patient. Archie was larger, longer limbed, and possessed of inhuman emotion that gave him strength; yet Roger bent over him and held, his forearms shaking, his face grim with deadly seriousness. It was only that Archie was weakened and underweight that kept him down, and still he thrashed and screamed, the nightmare still on him. I turned and ran from the room.
I thought the locked drawer wouldn’t open; I nearly dropped the keys in my haste. Only when I pulled one of the hypodermics from its slot and felt its unfamiliar weight in my hand did I remember that I had never given an injection before. I fumbled with the needle, with the vial of liquid, and ran back to Archie’s bedside.
Archie had stopped screaming, but he still struggled under Roger’s grip. Sweat beaded on his reddened face and he stared at Roger with deadly hate. I approached the bed, readying the needle as I’d seen in Practical Nursing, trying to grip it properly between the fingers and the pad of the thumb. I jerked up the sleeve of Archie’s pajama top, revealing his upper arm.
“Go ahead,” Roger grunted at me. “Quickly.”
I pressed the needle against Archie’s skin. I swallowed. My throat was as raw as sandpaper, pain blooming at the base of my jaw and at the back of my neck. I pictured the book again, the ink diagrams, the words that ran through my head.
Quickly.
Somersham’s vomiting. It had nothing to do with the drugs. Part of his particular neurasthenia.
Quickly.
Captain Mabry’s humiliation, Dr. Thornton’s eloquent little lesson. These men are not your friends.
Nurse Ravell, so frightened she’d run in the night. This had happened to her, too.
Quickly.
“For God’s sake!” Roger nearly shouted. “I can’t hold him.”
I jabbed the needle under Archie’s skin and pushed the plunger home.
It was messy; Archie gave a yelp of pain. I wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t expert enough. In a matter of seconds, it made no difference. His body collapsed on itself, a dead weight. Roger let him go and stood, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“Bloody hell,” he said. He looked at me. “You all right?”
I nodded. I was kneeling on the floor next to the bed, the emptied needle in my hand. I slumped down, my bottom landing hard on the backs of my calves, my arms dropping to my sides. I couldn’t speak. I watched Archie’s body on the bed, his head tilting senselessly to one side, his face slack.
“I’d strap him in,” Roger went on, “but he won’t need it now. One of those doses and they sleep like babies. We won’t hear another peep from him tonight.” He looked at me again. “You’ll want some aspirin, then. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” I rasped. I owed my life to this petty, bitter little man.
“A bit of a shake-up, I suppose, but you’ll get over it.”
“Yes.”
He seemed to want to talk, now that the danger was past, or perhaps he was waiting for a rush of gratitude. “He’s always been quiet, that one, until recently. I don’t know what’s gotten into him, but it’s getting worse. Nearly did for that nurse last time, though I wasn’t on duty at the time. He was on grave duty, you know.”
I looked up. “What?”
“Grave duty. On the front line. Had to pick pieces of men out of the mud, try and match them up, identify them for burial. I heard they left him on it for four weeks before he cracked completely. They’ll never get him well, this one. Not after that.”
I stared at him, my brain turning over slowly, unable to take in anything so horrible. Roger looked at my expression and shrugged.
“All right,” I said. “You may go now. Thank you.”
But he was suspicious. “There’ll be an incident report, you know. I’ll make certain of it.”
“I’m sure you will.”
When he finally left, I closed my eyes, my head spinning. I listened to the slow rasp of Archie’s breathing.
I wasn’t mad, not the way these men were. I hadn’t been to war. I didn’t have their memories, their terrible experiences, their close knowledge of death, their fears.
But after today, perhaps, I thought I
was beginning to see what they saw in their nightmares.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Three days after the incident with my father in the bed, I’d ducked into a coffeehouse in London. It was cold and damp out, and my usual routine was to stand in a crowded coffeehouse, pretending to look over the menu on the wall until it was almost my turn to order; then I’d turn suddenly, as if I’d forgotten something, and leave. It was a good way to warm one’s feet and hands if one was in the middle of a long walk home.
Two women behind me had been having a conversation. The niece of one of the women had been given a chance at a position at a glove factory in Clerkenwell, but had decided to brush it off and marry her sweetheart instead. “She isn’t even giving them notice,” the woman complained. “She just isn’t going to go. I think she’s mad. What if he doesn’t marry her after all? Good jobs are hard to come by. ‘You’re mad, Rachel Innes,’ I said to her. ‘It’ll come to no good.’ But she’s determined, of course.”
I’d listened a little longer, the back of my neck hot as lit coals. I waited so long it was almost my turn before I left the shop, possessed by a mad idea I had no control over, my hands and feet tingling, my legs moving on their own. I’d found our flat empty, my father not home, and where he was that day I would never know. I’d stuffed as many belongings as I could into a tiny valise and left, my nervous feet clattering loudly on the stairs.
I’d thought I’d get caught. I knew I would. He would come home seconds after I’d left and pursue me; he had been hiding in the closet while I’d been there, waiting in silence for me to make a move; the landlady, hearing my footsteps on the stairs, would somehow know I’d run and get a message to him. Everyone on the street was my father, or sent by him; every pair of eyes reported back to him. Even when I got to Clerkenwell and asked in a local shop where the glove factory was, I thought I’d be questioned. I thought the police would come. And when I knocked at the personnel office at the factory itself and presented myself as Rachel Innes, reporting for work, I thought they would know I was lying.
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