Silence for the Dead

by Simone St. James

  But they hadn’t. They’d just put me to work, indifferent. It seemed I’d gotten away with it. They never knew that I slept in a church vestibule all the nights until I received my first pay, that I bathed and washed my clothes in the women’s lav, that I worked the line faint with hunger and fear. They never knew I was a girl who didn’t belong there, who didn’t deserve it, who deserved nothing but death under her father’s thumb. And I began to see that if I could be smart, if I could keep moving and not get caught, they would never know.

  I did not go out with men when they asked me. Not ever.

  I ran my hands along the bruises on my neck, pressing them with unsteady fingers.

  Archie had throttled me. My body had felt a sickening recognition of the feeling; I’d been throttled before. But this had been different. I hadn’t felt the bewildered surprise of my childhood, or the deadened stillness of the day with the frying pan. I’d only felt the numbness of shock, and now rage and empty, hopeless despair. I had promised myself, Never again. And yet here I was, treating bruises on my neck. It was as if, even to myself, I had never believed my promise.

  “Kitty.”

  I was still sitting on my knees in Archie’s room. I wondered whether I was going to be sick.

  “Kitty.”

  I opened my eyes. Jack Yates was in the room with me, squatting on his haunches, his wrists dangling casually over his knees, looking at me. He was barefoot, the strong sinews of his feet balancing him without effort.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said.

  “You don’t look it,” he replied.

  “You’re not supposed to leave your room.”

  “No,” he agreed. He reached out and put a hand on my forearm, the fingers curling over me with gentle force. “Come with me.”

  I stared at his hand on me. This was the third time Jack had touched me. I’d counted, remembered each occasion with perfect clarity. I stared down at his bare fingers on my skin, their darkness against my pale arm. The sight of it, the feel of it, did something to me. It made my brain feverish; it made my skin feel too small, as if I could crack it open and fly away. I had never asked him to touch me, but he kept doing it anyway. And I never stopped him. I could not take my eyes from his hand.

  He pulled me up, gently, and the next I knew, I was sitting in the only chair in his room, and he’d found my lamp from somewhere. He set it on the small side table and went to the washbasin. In the warm circle of light I could see his back, the muscles flexing under his shirt.

  “I’m not supposed to bother you,” I said.

  “You’re not bothering me.”

  “No. I mean I’m not supposed to be here at all, talking to you. Roger is likely spying. He’ll tell Matron. I’ll lose my job.”

  Jack said nothing, only turned from the basin, handed me the flannel, and sat on the edge of his bed. He wasn’t drugged this time, and his gaze was clear and intelligent as he watched me sponge my neck.

  “You look rather shaken,” he said.

  “I saw him,” I replied. “Last night, and again tonight.” It had been the shirtless man I’d seen in the window’s reflection tonight, his figure unmistakable. “And earlier today I saw someone else in the grass by the isolation room. A man. He called me a coward.”

  “What?” Jack’s voice was icy with shock. “Kitty, what did you say?”

  “I said I saw him.” The words were a relief, but I thought of the darker shadow I’d seen in the library window and I shuddered. “Two of them, though not at the same time.”

  “You couldn’t have, Kitty. You couldn’t.”

  “He hit me,” I said, tears stinging my eyes.

  “What?” Jack said again. I seemed to have amazed him into repeating himself. “When I saw you from the window today?”

  “Yes.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “Perhaps you should start from the beginning.”

  I did. I told him everything, though I left out that the assault had reminded me of my father’s beatings. By the time I’d finished, Jack had stood and was pacing the room. He stopped with his back to me, thinking.

  “It’s ghosts, isn’t it?” I said. I had been through so much fear that the temptation to babble was strong. “I’ve never thought of ghosts before. I’ve never even considered they existed. I never knew. But now . . .”

  Jack bowed his head, his back still to me, as if what I said affected him.

  “This place is haunted.” I had to say it aloud, make it real. “Ghosts.” I rubbed my hand over my eyes. “For God’s sake.”

  “I’ve always thought,” Jack said slowly, “that it was in my mind.”

  “How could you?” I said.

  “Easily,” he replied with bitterness. “I see ghosts all the time. We all do.” He turned only part of the way back toward me, so I saw his face in three-quarter profile. As if he wanted to look at me but couldn’t quite manage it. “You see them when you close your eyes. Sometimes they beg you for help, and sometimes they just die again. Then you start seeing them when your eyes are open. They’re just there. They’re trying to stanch the blood from an artery with a piece of cloth, or they’re laughing at a stupid joke right before the shell hits, or they’re running next to you in a sortie before they’re hit so hard you never even find the body. There are days the ghosts are quiet and there are days the ghosts never stop.” He paused, the breath coming out of him with a soft sound that was not quite a sigh. “It was one more ghost— that was all. I wasn’t even surprised. What was one more ghost?”

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” I said. “I’m sorry. But the other men are seeing them, too.”

  He hadn’t left his room in months; he couldn’t know what the others saw. But he would have heard what the men screamed in their nightmares. I tried to imagine lying in bed, listening to that at night. Wondering whether your madness was yours alone. Wondering whether what you heard was a figment of your unhinged mind.

  “Part of me knew it,” Jack said. “But, Kitty, I don’t trust my own judgment anymore.”

  “Is it true that men try to kill themselves in that spot by the isolation room?”

  “Yes.” Jack still did not turn. “Always there. One with a razor he found God knows where. The other with a knife he stole from the kitchen.”

  I looked at the line of his half-turned profile, thinking about the knife under my mattress. “Why there?” I asked. “Why in that place? What is driving them? It isn’t just madness.”

  He sighed, and finally he turned his body and looked at me. “Kitty, you’re talking about something I thought I was hallucinating. It’s a little hard to fathom.”

  I touched the cool flannel to the inflamed skin on my neck. “Are they the Gersbachs?” I asked quietly. “The ghosts?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve never thought about it?”

  “No, Kitty. I haven’t.”

  “No one thinks about it,” I said. “No one talks about it. Let’s just be quiet and it will all go away—is that it?”

  “That isn’t fair,” he retorted. “You know why we don’t talk about it. You’ve seen for yourself.”

  I held the flannel to the back of my neck, looked down into my lap. He was right. I’d attended the sessions with the doctors, watched privileges being taken away, visits denied. There was nothing to be gained by babbling to the doctors about ghosts, nothing but a careless note in a file and a longer sentence in this prison. We have to be well for the doctors. And as Captain Mabry had expressed so clearly, my connection to the doctors meant that none of the men would ever talk to me.

  “And we don’t think about it,” Jack went on, “because we can’t leave.”

  I couldn’t exactly criticize that, could I? I, who had never cried to a neighbor or run to a policeman for help in the middle of London when my father was hitting me? I’d never admitted what was
happening, even to myself, because that would have made it real. Who was I to be brave?

  I raised my chin and looked at him again. “All right. But the nurses. The orderlies. Captain Mabry’s nosebleeds, the nightmares. They must have some idea.”

  “And what would they do?” said Jack. “People see what they want to see. They’re just nurses doing their jobs.”

  And I wasn’t. I wasn’t really a nurse, and I wasn’t doing my job. Martha was supporting her family back in Glenley Crewe; Nina was earning money for her wedding and marriage. What would happen if either of them had started talking about ghosts, the way Martha had talked about the orderlies being afraid of the basement? Any nurse, any orderly who hadn’t left already was in desperate need of the work. And the consequences of seeing ghosts were as dire for them as they were for the patients.

  “What about the woman?” I said. “Have you ever seen her?” When I’d told him the story, I’d described the woman I’d seen.

  “No,” said Jack.

  “I don’t know what she was,” I said. “I didn’t get the same feeling from her that I did from—from the others. But I never got very close.” My mind was turning it over. I couldn’t stop it. It was better than cowering in fear. “If she wasn’t one of the Gersbachs, who was she?”

  He watched my face for a moment. “You’re not going to solve this, Kitty. You can’t.”

  “You’re right.” My neck hurt, but I straightened in my chair. “But there’s one thing different now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re talking to me. You and I are talking about ghosts for the first time. Right now.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it again. “You’re the one asking questions.”

  “And you’re answering them. I want to know, Jack.” As I spoke the words, I felt how true they were. “I want to know who they were. What they want.” I felt light-headed, as if I could float to the ceiling, and the sensation, surprisingly, was not unpleasant. “I’m going to find out.”

  “Kitty, think,” he said. “You just said you could lose your job just for being in this room. Think about what you’re saying.”

  “If they died here,” I said, “if there was a sickness, or something—where are they buried? When were the funerals? Where are the graves? Who sold this place to Mr. Deighton, the house and all the land? Four people are gone, Jack. Gone. How did that happen?”

  “Kitty. You can lose everything. Why do you want to do this?”

  In that moment, he looked weary. He wouldn’t help me; I could see that. He couldn’t. And I thought briefly, dispassionately about my mother. I wondered where she was, whether she ever thought of us. I wondered whether it mattered to her that Syd was dead, that I’d been left to fend for myself alone. I hated her with a hatred that was casual and often forgotten, but I also understood her. She’d known, just as I had, that it was life or death to leave. And when you run, you must not look back, must not check over your shoulder, must not think too much, must not wonder. For I would only drag her down and drown her.

  Sometimes putting yourself first was the only thing you could do.

  But it would have been nice to have someone to rely on, just once in my life. It would have hurt a little less.

  “It’s wrong,” I said. “Captain Mabry should see his children. Archie shouldn’t spend his nights screaming like that. And I’m not supposed to fix it—I’m not supposed to see the patients as my friends, as anything but a job. That’s fine. But I’m about to get sacked, and I need a weapon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I laughed, an ugly rasp from my throat. “Jack, I’m not even a nurse. There’s already been at least one incident report, and there are going to be more after tonight. I have three weeks, if Matron doesn’t dismiss me herself when she hears I’ve been in your room again. I need something to fight back with. There’s a secret here that someone’s keeping; I can smell it. And if I can find it, I can use it.”

  “You’re talking blackmail,” he said softly.

  “No. I’ve never blackmailed anyone in my life, and I don’t intend to start. I’m talking about knowledge, Jack. In order to win, you just have to know more than your opponent does. I’ve told enough lies to know. I’ve been at a disadvantage since the day I came here. I need to get ahead. Digging up secrets may not be the means for my leaving. It may be the key for me to stay.”

  There was a silence between us. I couldn’t read Jack’s face in the gloom, but he looked at me for a long moment, and when he spoke, his tone was almost admiring. “I can’t tell if that’s brave,” he said, “or just coldhearted.”

  It stung, but I put on my best bravado. “Coldhearted or dead, Jack,” I said. “Everyone has to choose sometime.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Even among the mad, life at Portis House had a routine. Meals were served at exact times; morning awakening and evening curfew were strictly observed. The time between was a simple rhythm of rest, exercise, walks in the garden, reading, napping, or just staring out the window. Many of the men seemed barely to notice one another. Very few appeared to be friends. Perhaps that was strange, but I understood it, as did the other nurses. A man fighting for his sanity had the energy only for the simple tasks of his daily life. Friendship was a luxury.

  I had thought the routines pointless at first, but it didn’t take me long to see they were not only valuable; they were very nearly the stuff of life. That a man’s soup was ten minutes late could upset him; that it rained during the time of his usual walk could send him into a black despondence. As the patients traveled through their weary, sometimes painful days, we nurses and orderlies worked day and night in the background, our own routines never stopping. One man couldn’t abide a single hair in his basin; another pulled his blankets to the floor every night and slept in the corner as if he were still in a trench, leaving us with bundled linens soaked in sweat.

  Florence Nightingale had dealt with fevers, poultices, broken limbs, festering wounds. I wondered what she would have thought of the nurses on her ward tending to a man whose only illness was that he’d completely forgotten he’d been in a war at all.

  I rotated back onto the day shift. There were no more nightmares on my watch; I counted linens. Jack Yates stayed in his room and I stayed out of it. I wrote a terse account of the assault by Archie and submitted it in my nightly report to Matron. I heard nothing about it, nor about discipline for breaking the rules about fraternizing with patients yet again.

  After that first night, Archie was not in his room. When I was back on the day shift, Boney told me he was in the infirmary again.

  “You may as well take his supper to him,” she said, handing me a tray and staring at the bruises on my neck in a way I’m sure she thought was discreet. “You’ll have to see him sometime.”

  “Is he in there because of me?”

  She shrugged. “Matron’s order. It’s either that or the isolation room. He’s been quiet, so he’s in the infirmary.”

  “Fine,” I said, and took the tray down the corridor toward the stairs. I didn’t want her looking at my neck anymore.

  Archie was curled on his side in bed, his thin body barely making an impression under the covers. His eyes were closed, though I knew he wasn’t asleep; they stayed closed as I brought in the tray and set it on the bedside table.

  “They’ve put your soup in a bowl again,” I said. “I’ve told them to put it in a mug, but they don’t listen.”

  There was a sound from the bed, and I turned to find him looking at me.

  “Expected someone else, did you?” I said.

  He stared at the marks on my neck, his expression one of stark horror. “Kit-Kitty—”

  “Don’t,” I said. I dumped his tea into the sink, rinsed the cup, and began to carefully transfer the soup. “Don’t say it. Don’t apologize. There’s nothing to apologize for.”


  I kept my eyes on the soup. I couldn’t look at him. I could hear his breathing, heavy and harsh.

  “I’m s-s—,” he tried.

  I gritted my teeth, focused on not spilling the soup. “Archie, stop.”

  “I’m so s-s—”

  I turned my back and took the empty soup bowl to the sink. I would rinse it before I took it back to the kitchen. I may as well.

  “Kitty,” he said again behind me. My vision blurred. I put the soup bowl down and put a hand to my mouth. I stood there for a long time, struggling to take one breath, and another. I recalled it again, the needle I’d jabbed into his arm, the scream he’d made.

  It had happened to Maisey Ravell, too, and she’d run from him before he could say he was sorry. As if he were a dangerous monster. And, to all appearances, he was. Or he was just a man who had been through hell and was still there, a man who had spent weeks digging the rotting bodies of his comrades from the mud and still saw visions of it daily.

  “Kitty. Pl-please—”

  I turned around. His cheeks were wet, though he did not sob. I took a deep breath, took in a gulp of air that smelled of ammonia, musty old sweat, and the faint tang of vomit, the air that was the smell of this place. And then, the tray of supper forgotten, I walked over to the bed and got on it next to him, sitting up with my back against the brass bedstead. He rolled over and put one arm around my hips, his head in my lap. His shaking hand trembled in the folds of my apron.

  “It wasn’t you,” I said to him.

  He said nothing.

  “I know it wasn’t,” I went on. “I knew it at the time, even as it was happening. It was never you. And still I gave you that needle.”

  The arm on my hips hugged me a little tighter.

  “Who is he?” I ventured. “Do you know?”

  He flinched in my lap. I heard him take a breath, but he didn’t answer for a long moment. When he did, his voice was almost a whisper, but his stutter was gone.

  “He comes in my dreams,” Archie said. “He tells me I’d be better off dead.”