Silence for the Dead

by Simone St. James

  I felt sick. “But the pills.”

  “I wanted a way out. An exit if I needed it. Thornton is practical. I paid him quite a bit of money, after all. And I would take them, sometimes, just to feel nothing for a while. Until you arrived, and you took them from me.”

  We’d been picking our way along corridors, poking into room after room. Water stains dripped down the walls; plaster had fallen in almost all of them, paint had peeled, and in one broken window a very comfortable bird’s nest had been built. It was the ruin of a house that has been abandoned for a decade, not for less than a year. The smell made my head hurt.

  And then, ahead of me, Jack stopped. “We’ve found it,” he said.

  I looked over his shoulder. He stood before a door that was closed and locked, the first locked door we’d seen. The lock looked much newer than the door did.

  “Give me your keys,” he said.

  I traded him the keys for the lantern and held the light as he tried each key in turn. I wondered whether I would feel a breath of cold at the back of my neck at any moment. “What if he comes?” I whispered.

  Jack’s hands paused. “There’s nothing we can do about that,” he finally answered. “If he comes, he comes. There’s no stopping him. There never is.”

  One of the keys hit home, and Jack swung open the door.

  It was a long, high room, made perhaps to display portraits or sculptures, the things rich people collected to show to other rich people. It was a room that would have overwhelmed and echoed, but it didn’t do so now. It was full to the rafters, items piled and stacked along the walls, covered in sheets and jumbled everywhere. Only a narrow passage had been kept clear down the center of the room, between the monstrous stacks. I jumped as something fluttered against the far window, a bird or a bat.

  We moved down the center walkway, Jack holding the lantern aloft. Under one sheet was a grand piano; under another was a thick stack of framed paintings leaning against the wall. Chairs, bookcases, mattresses, bed frames: an entire home, dismantled and stacked. If the Gersbachs had left this house, they’d gone as gypsies, with nothing except what they could carry on their backs.

  “My God,” Jack said softly.

  Boxes were shoved between the legs of the piano, stacked in the corners in toppling piles, placed atop chairs and sheet-covered love seats. Dozens, hundreds of boxes. Jack slid a trunk out from under a table, the scraping sound loud in the silence. In the circle of lamplight, he hesitated, glanced at me. Then he threw open the lid.

  The first trunk contained dishes, carelessly stacked and tumbled, the edges of the expensive china plates chipped, the handles of the teacups cracked. We opened a box full of papers—receipts, half-written letters, tradesman’s bills, pages ripped from notebooks, old albums. The letters were signed in the bold hand of a man, the writing strong and clear: NILS GERSBACH. Anna and Mikael’s father.

  Then we opened trunks of clothes. Silk dresses, jackets and skirts, suits and ties. A woman’s sun hat. A string of pearls. A dyed, feathered handbag. Men’s shirts. And shoes—satiny women’s heels, men’s shoes polished to a flawless shine, lined up in the bottoms of the boxes as if waiting for their owners to return.

  I backed away. The clothes repelled me. We shouldn’t be touching them. Here were the shoes of a younger man, not quite fully grown; and the shoes of an older man, conservative and well worn and polished. Something about how those shoes spoke of a living person sent my stomach sinking into a sickening drop.

  “They never left,” I said. As I spoke it, I knew that a small part of me had held out hope, had wanted the story to be different. “Anna, Mikael. Their mother. Their father. They never left.”

  Jack’s eyes were equally bleak. He ran a hand over his face. “No,” he said.

  “I’ll have to tell Maisey,” I said. “No one leaves without their clothes.”

  “Or their underwear.” Jack reached into another box and held up a set of silky women’s drawers, made for a teenage girl. He dropped them back on the pile as if he couldn’t bear to touch them.

  We stood silent for a moment, looking at the belongings of four people who had vanished a year before. “What could it be?” I asked him. “Could they have gone under some kind of compulsion?”

  “There’s been no demand for ransom,” he said. “That we know of, at least. And how can you subdue four grown, healthy people at once, including a grown man? Perhaps they had debts.”

  “Then why not sell the piano, or the paintings? Why abandon thousands of pounds’ worth of belongings?” I looked at the shoes, paired up as if their owners had just left them. “I think they’re dead, Jack. I can’t help it. I do.”

  “Who would murder an entire family, including the children? And why? It must have been an illness. It’s the only way.”

  “Then someone buried them.” I motioned my hand around the room. “And someone did this.”

  “We have to find their bodies, Kitty.” His voice was quiet. “You know that. We don’t have a choice anymore.”

  I thought of the girl who had worn those underthings, a girl who was shy but devoted to her one best friend. A girl who had been excited, perhaps, to wear a string of pearls, made to look like her mother’s real ones, not knowing when she put them away that she’d never need them again. The thought of it pressed behind my eyes.

  And I thought of Creeton, breaking a window and marching out to the isolation room with a piece of glass. It was all connected somehow, the Gersbachs and the madness. Everything that was wrong here, everything that was tainted, was connected to these trunks.

  “I know,” I said to Jack. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we have to find their bodies.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The next morning the heat was already heavy, promising a stifling day. The wind, smelling of damp and salt, blew hot from the mainland, rolling off into the marshes and tousling the trees. After a morning’s work, I slipped into my quiet spot outside the kitchen door and lit a cigarette, thinking about my expedition with Jack the night before. The men were taking their exercise at the other side of the house, out of sight. I had just taken my first puff when a voice came from behind me.

  “I’d marry you for one of those.”

  I whirled. Mr. West was sitting in his chair next to a clump of boxed bushes. He eyed my cigarette hungrily.

  I looked around and saw no nurses. “Did they just leave you here?”

  “I asked to be alone. You don’t think you’re the only one who knows about this spot, do you?” He nodded at my cigarette. “But I don’t mind the interruption, as long as you’ll give me one. The price of my silence, you know.”

  I walked over and handed him a smoke. Despite his severe injuries, West was one of the easier patients to deal with; he was quiet and not prone to arguments with the others. He wasn’t bad looking by any means, and his arms and shoulders were layered with muscle from maneuvering the chair. As far as I could tell, his mental affliction consisted of quiet periods punctuated by bouts of depression so bad they completely debilitated him.

  But he was in a good mood today, and as I held the match to his cigarette, he inhaled with real pleasure. “Ah,” he said, his eyes drifting half closed as he exhaled a stream of smoke. “I meant it, you know. I’ll marry you for this.”

  I smiled and took a drag of my own. “Thanks, but no.”

  “What is it? You don’t want a fellow without legs?” His tone was teasing, not touchy, and he gave me an appreciative once-over. “You don’t need legs for everything, you know. All of my other parts work just fine.”

  “I’m happy for you. Go use them on some other girl.”

  He laughed. “I would, but my fiancée jettisoned me as soon as I came home, and I don’t meet many women in this place.”

  I swallowed. Not a week ago he’d had one of his bouts, pulled from the bed by Paulus like a sac
k of potatoes, tears streaming heedless down his face. I pushed the memory away. “Are you sure you told her about your parts working?” I said lightly.

  “Ah, no.” He took another long drag and savored it. “She wasn’t the sort of girl you could say that kind of thing to.” He didn’t even notice my glare, he was so suddenly lost in thought. “Do you know—I don’t even think I liked her very much.”

  “No wonder,” I said, thinking of a girl who would disown a man who’d seen his own legs blown off before his eyes. “She sounds like a useless twit.”

  “You should pity her. She won’t get any of my money.” He pointed at me with his cigarette. “My family has piles, you know. You could live like a queen. My older brother died at Mons and it all goes to me.”

  Val, I thought. It was a word he said over and over during his bouts. I’d thought it the name of a woman, but now I knew better. “I’m too lower class for a nob like you, then,” I said. “You need a girl who’s been to finishing school. A girl who knows her silverware. Carry on the family line, that sort of thing.”

  “You think I’m shamming? I’m not. How much do you think it costs to be in this place? God, the number would give you nightmares. The monthly fee is more than you make in a year.”

  “This place?”

  “‘An exclusive retreat of peace and solace,’” he said, obviously quoting a brochure. “‘A place in which those of distinction can be assured they’ll find the proper care.’ Our families don’t want us mixing with the lower classes, and they prefer to forget that we did it for years in the trenches, so they pay for the privilege. All of us here are officers except for MacInnes and Yates. Or didn’t you notice?”

  I stared at him. With no uniforms on the men, I’d had no idea. There was Captain Mabry, of course, but everyone seemed to call him Captain because he was so obviously gentry. I had no idea of the rank of the others.

  “Somersham’s family is in railroads,” said West, ticking off on his fingers. “Massively rich, they are. Mabry’s the only one from old money; his family owns half of Shropshire. Childress’s father is a newspaper baron. Even MacInnes has pots of money; his wife writes tawdry novels that sell like mad, and they live in a mansion in London. Yates is an orphan, but his parents left him their farm, and he doesn’t let on but it’s profitable as hell. I don’t know where Creeton’s money comes from, but there’s lots of it. My own father is in dairy.”

  “Dairy?”

  “Yes. Not noble, I realize, but you’d be surprised how much money is in milk and butter.” He ground out his cigarette and smiled at me. “I’m your best bet, you know. Most of the men have fathers who hate them. My father pities me, but I’m all he’s got, and at least I can carry on the family business.”

  I thought of the parents who had sat with him, awkward and unspeaking. I was reeling. I’d seen blood, piss, vomit, and naked men at Portis House, but none of it had shocked me the way what he’d just said nearly knocked me over. All my life, I’d looked at other people in terms of money. But not here. Never here. This was the only place where I’d forgotten about class.

  My own cigarette burned out, forgotten, and I dropped it. Something important tickled in the back of my mind, then receded again. I liked to think of a girl meeting West, falling in love with him, caring for him, making the depression go away. But I’d lived too long in the real world for that. “Then you should go home,” I said, “and learn the dairy business.”

  The look he turned on me was friendly, but had sadness like the keen edge of a razor. “Do you really think it’s that simple?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think you were stupid,” he agreed. “Would you wheel me in?”

  • • •

  “Did you know about this?” I asked Martha as we cleared the plates away from supper. “About all the money these men have?”

  “I’m sure I never thought about it,” she said, not in her usual good humor. “Besides, money isn’t much if you haven’t got your mind, is it?”

  “That isn’t the point,” I replied. “These men are paying a lot of money to be here. A lot. And yet we’re completely understaffed, the house is falling down, and we work twenty-four-hour shifts for barely any pay.”

  Now her eyes widened. “You’re not a labor union organizer, are you?”

  “Of course not. What I’m saying is that someone is making money from this place. Mr. Deighton, and probably the doctors, too. They’re getting rich.” And if that had been the plan from the beginning, there was a very good reason to get rid of the Gersbachs.

  “It’s nothing to me.” She put a plate into the dumbwaiter with something that was almost like force. “I’m just trying to get some work done, unlike some people I know.”

  I looked at her. “What’s the matter?”

  She put another plate into the dumbwaiter, her bottom lip pouted out now.

  “Martha. Out with it. What is it?”

  She looked around, saw the nearest orderly leave with a tray of dishes, then leaned in and hissed clumsily in my ear. “You left last night.”

  I went cold. “What?”

  “I woke up to get a glass of water and you weren’t in your bed. We’re not supposed to leave our room at night, Kitty! Where did you go?”

  “Martha—”

  “And then I talked to Nina this morning and she said Patient Sixteen went for a run last night.” She looked at me balefully. “I’m not a fool, you know, Kitty. I’m not.”

  “I don’t think you’re a fool.” I didn’t; I had seen Martha’s skills outstrip my own too many times. “It wasn’t what you think. We weren’t—you know.”

  “No.” Her voice was tight. “I don’t know. And you—you shouldn’t know. Respectable girls don’t. It just—it isn’t done between patients and nurses. It isn’t!”

  “Hush. Lower your voice. I told you there is nothing going on between us.” Except he had touched me, and kissed my neck, and I still dreamed about it. “If we don’t go to the kitchen for supper, they’ll be looking for us. And for God’s sake don’t say anything.”

  She followed me only part of the way down the corridor, and then she stopped. “It’s easy for the rest of you,” she said.

  I turned and looked at her. “What?”

  “It’s easy for Boney, because she’s Matron’s favorite and Matron would protect her against anything. It’s easy for Nina, because she has her fiancé. And it’s easy for you—you’ve worked at Belling Wood and you could get a job anywhere even if you do have incident reports. But this job is all I have.” She looked pleadingly at me. “I can’t go back to Glenley Crewe. I can’t. We’ve no money, and it’s a small place. I’m completely humiliated there. If you mess this up, Kitty—and I don’t know what you’re up to, but I know it isn’t good—you mess it up for all of us. If you’re fooling around with patients, we’ll all be tarnished with it, no matter what we’ve done. And it matters to me. It does.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment after she’d finished. She stood in the dim light of the corridor, her big eyes tired, her pretty cheeks flush with misery. I hadn’t thought how what I was doing would affect the other nurses. It was what I did: Look ahead, don’t look down, and for God’s sake don’t start thinking about the people around you.

  I blew out a breath. “All right. I won’t get you dismissed.”

  “You’ll stop what you’re doing?”

  “I’ll behave,” I tempered. “I’ll be the soul of a good nurse.”

  She wanted to believe, but she looked wary. “He isn’t just any patient, Kitty.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” I said to her. “Don’t you think I know?”

  The words came out heartfelt, and I watched as her face slowly relaxed, the exact moment when she decided to trust me again. I felt no better when she did it, no better at all. No, Martha was not a fool. As she walke
d with me to supper, I suspected the fool here was me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I awoke from a horrible dream I couldn’t remember, something so bad I opened my eyes with my arm already thrown over the side of the bed, feeling under the mattress for my knife. Only when I had my fingers on the handle did sleep start to fall away. I pulled the knife out anyway and rolled over onto my back, exhausted and sweating, the knife resting on my stomach under my hand. I stared into darkness only faintly tinged with dawn, my breath rasping, a primitive part of my mind still living in the dream.

  I wouldn’t sleep again. Martha slept in the bed next to me, huddled on her side, oblivious. With barely an hour before we were to wake, there was no point in tossing and turning here. I got up and dressed. Perhaps someone was about—Nathan, perhaps, or one of the orderlies. Even a conversation with Roger or Bammy would be better than the silence in my head that left me alone with my own thoughts, my own bad dreams.

  I had just picked up my boots, ready to tiptoe out the door in my stockings, when I noticed the knife still on the bed. I’d picked a filleting knife, long and razor sharp, and the kitchen had no doubt missed it. I could bring it down there, say I’d found it, innocently replace it. Instead I put it back under my mattress before I padded off down the corridor.

  I descended the servants’ stairs to the first landing, halfway between our floor and the men’s floor. I sat on the step and took a moment to pull on my boots and lace them. The only illumination came from a high window, through which the dark was beginning to give way to an indigo purple light that made my fingers look blue and frozen as they tied the laces. In the height of the long days of summer, the sun would be up in less than an hour. It was a quiet moment, and as my dreams receded into an ache in my skull, I let myself breathe and begin to wonder whether there would be anything I could snatch from the kitchen for an early breakfast. I had finished lacing my boots when I heard the sound.

  Sssh.

  I went still, my breath suspended.

  Sssh.