Silence for the Dead

by Simone St. James

  I was still bent over my knees, my hands curled motionless in the air above my feet. It was a whisper, yet it was as shrill as nails down a blackboard, and my back teeth clamped together and ground.

  Sssh.

  My feet were cold now, and the ends of my fingers. The sound was coming from the men’s hallway, through the door several feet in front of me. I clasped my hands to my knees and looked back up the stairs I had just come down, thinking about escape. Then the sound came again and I turned back, its pull inexorable. There was no voice in my head, no fist in my stomach. I recognized it now as the dragging shuffle of feet in the corridor, one foot and then the other. Approaching.

  Sssh.

  It could be a patient, a sleepwalker. I could help. As the thought hit me, I remembered the last time I had had such an idea: the night I had seen the shirtless man go into the stairwell. This stairwell. The one I was currently sitting in.

  I never see anything walk but the sleepwalkers, Roger had said.

  The lamplight, still lit in the corridor at this hour, flickered on the square of floor I could see through the doorway. I had no time to run.

  He came into view, slender and white, the naked line of his narrow shoulders clear against the rising light. I saw him through a curious double vision, blurred yet distinct. I did not see his face. He looked down at his feet, which I saw for the first time were bare. He took one step, and then slowly pulled the other foot forward, his heels slipping on the floor. Sssh. The movement was defeated, despairing. Stop, I wanted to shout. I wanted to get the sound out of my head, wanted the vision to go away and leave me alone. Please, please, don’t look up and see me . . .

  My breath came in short, terrified gasps now, puffing before me in icy steam. My arms tingled and my hands burned hot with panic. He wasn’t this slow before, I thought wildly, but did I know for certain? I had seen him only as he had disappeared through the doorway, had followed him only after he had gone down the stairs. It had seemed so fast at the time.

  His steps now took forever, but never wavered. He walked through the doorway and onto the landing below me, then down one riser, down another. I rose and stood, grasping the railing, just as I had that long-ago night. I moved away from it, from the cold and the despair that came off it in waves, from that inexorable descent down the stairs. My own breath coming high and whistling in my chest, I ran up the stairs again without looking back. He’s doing it over and over, I thought. That descent. The same thing, again and again. Why?

  And something new came to me, now that I had seen him in full. I hadn’t seen his face, but his body had not been the body of a grown man. His had been the sleek lines of a teenage boy, not yet twenty years old.

  • • •

  I switched staircases and came downstairs another way. I bypassed the kitchen and slipped out the kitchen door, no longer hungry. I saw no one, but as I stepped out into the grounds, trying to put some distance between myself and the house, I saw a solitary figure. It was Jack, heading for the stand of trees that led to the clearing. He was half in a run.

  I picked up my skirts and followed. He noticed me almost immediately, turning and waiting for me to catch up. “Did you see her?” he said as I approached.

  I shook my head. “Who do you mean?”

  “It was Maisey, I think. I saw her come this way, but I don’t see her now. She might have left letters for me.”

  It was early to be getting replies to the letters he’d sent, but I followed him as he jogged ahead of me through the stand of trees around the clearing. I was glad to see him. My skirts slowed me down, and when I reached the clearing, he’d already checked the hiding spot under the bench. “Nothing,” he said.

  He stood and turned to me, and I almost found myself smiling. He looked rested and alert, and his gaze took me in inquisitively. I was so used to seeing him in his hospital uniform that I briefly wondered what he looked like in any other clothes. “You’re up early,” he said.

  “I’ve had the strangest morning,” I managed.

  His blue gaze traveled over me, up and down again. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “What—?” His gaze moved past my shoulder. “That’s not Maisey.”

  I turned. Through the trees, I briefly saw the figure of a girl; then it disappeared.

  I was frozen to the spot, but Jack touched my arm. “Was that the girl you saw the other day?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know.”

  “I’m going after her.” He started to move.

  “Jack, what are you doing?”

  “She might lead me somewhere,” he said. He turned and looked at me. “How much damage can she do if I’m awake?”

  I had no choice but to follow him as he took off at a trot. When we emerged, we saw only a flash of fabric through a stand of brush fifty feet away. “Hello?” Jack shouted, but she was gone again before we got there. We fought through the brush until we could see clearly, and then we were only in time to see her figure descend the other side of the rise. She had her back to us and she did not turn. She was slender and she wore the same simple blouse and skirt I’d seen before, her blond hair wound behind her head, her gait stately and unhurried. Her shoulders dipped behind the rise, and then her head, and she was gone.

  “Bloody hell,” said Jack, and he took a run up the rise, his strides taking him up the slope with no effort at all. I was still halfway up when he reached the top. “Where the hell did she go?” he cried in frustration.

  I pointed. “Over there.”

  She’d made it to Portis House. She was back by the west wing, where I’d seen her before. There were footprints flattening the grass. As we watched, she picked up her skirts and turned the corner out of sight.

  “She’s not a damned ghost,” said Jack.

  “No.” The realization drained me of fear as I stared at the trail she’d left. “And she’s not Maisey, either. Let’s catch her.”

  We ran. He was faster than me, but I’d been working hard and climbing the stairs dozens of times a day; I nearly kept up with him. We followed her trail around the house, giving a wide berth to the patch of weeds in front of the isolation room. We saw nothing, not even when we fanned out and looked from all angles.

  “She can’t have gone far,” Jack said. “We’d see her. She must be hiding somewhere.”

  The sun had come up now. Martha would be getting up, would find the bed next to her empty, and breakfast would be started in the kitchen. “We can’t,” I said to him. “We’ll get in trouble.”

  He looked at me. “To hell with trouble, Kitty. We have to find out who she is.”

  But I shook my head. I’d promised Martha only the day before, and here I was, alone with Jack Yates, outside at the wrong time of day, chasing shadows instead of working. We might have been seen already. “I can’t be caught, Jack. Not again. I can’t.”

  He spun around, his gaze looking for the mysterious girl. I backed away.

  He swore, colorfully. He was very good at it.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” I said, and I turned back toward the house.

  • • •

  No one had noticed that I had broken the rules yet again. I served breakfast in obedient silence. I told a bewildered Martha I’d had a nightmare and had gone for a walk. My explanation seemed to satisfy her.

  I fed Archie in the infirmary. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. I made a note to ask Nina to check on him more frequently, and to see whether a mild sleeping draft would be possible. There must be a way to help a tortured man get a little rest, I thought, without punching him with a drug that would fell cattle. But any draft would likely come from the odious Dr. Thornton, and God only knew what would be in it.

  I’d given Archie an aspirin as a weak consolation and was heading back through the downstairs hall when Boney stopped me. “Nurse Weekes,” she said. />
  The words sent an icy bullet of foreboding into my chest, but I kept my chin up. “Yes?”

  Two spots of high anger rose on her cheeks. “I thought you knew the rules,” she said accusingly.

  I stared at her, fighting dismay.

  “You’ve been here for several weeks now,” Boney said. “I thought it would be obvious.”

  “I—”

  “But perhaps,” she talked over me, “this particular rule was not explained.”

  Now I was confused. “What rule?”

  She sighed as if she’d lost count of how many times she’d repeated herself. “About visitors. They are not allowed. Especially men.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Nurse Weekes, I’m telling you there’s a man in the front parlor who claims to be your brother. Whoever he is, get rid of him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  My blood rushed in my ears. My skin burned and froze at the same time. This, I thought, was what happened when a girl was about to faint; for a second I was light-headed, and Boney’s lips moved in disapproving silence, the way people talked in the films at the cinema. I followed her down the corridor, kept my feet moving when she pointed to the door of the front parlor, her lips still moving. I approached the parlor door alone, its outline jangling in my vision, the sound of my own footsteps echoing up through my body as if my ears were plugged. This could not be happening.

  And yet, of course, it was. My brother, Syd, sat in the front parlor, the same room Creeton had seen his family in. Syd sat looking about him in one of the hideous chairs, a high-backed armchair with decrepit maroon upholstering over its sagging seat. The chair was angled slightly away from the window, so the fresh sunlight fell across it in a clean diagonal, and he was tapping his palms nervously on the arms.

  My brother. Alive. Hope bloomed in me, sudden and fierce. Syd was home. He could help me.

  He’d changed. His face looked older, his hair longer. He carried the set of his shoulders differently, as if something in the last five years had made him stand taller, and he was heavier now than the too thin boy I’d last seen.

  Still, when he saw me in the doorway and smiled, rising from the chair, I knew him. This man—his brown hair, his dark eyes, his lean build, the length of his nose and the set of his chin—was unmistakably my brother.

  “Kitty,” he said, and put his arms around me. He smelled of sweat and the wool of his suit. He didn’t smell like Syd anymore.

  He pulled back and looked at me. “Thank God I’ve found you,” he said. “Thank God.”

  “You’re dead,” I said numbly, thinking of his neatly made bed on the day he’d left for the army. “I mean—you were—”

  “Did you think it? Ah, God, Kitty, I’m sorry. I should have written a letter. It was a near thing more than once. But it was madness at the Front, you know, and they censored all the letters. There didn’t seem much point.”

  “Not much point?”

  “I thought you might rip up like this. Kitty, for God’s sake just sit down, will you?”

  I lowered myself mechanically into one of the other ugly chairs and stared at him. The one question I most dreaded came out of my throat. “Have you been home?”

  He sat down himself. “Yes, for months.”

  “Months?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Father’s been asking for you, you know. I’ve been looking for you all this time. It hasn’t been easy. You’ve led me a devil of a time. All over London, and now here. What possessed you, Kitty?”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  He sighed. “We have a lot to talk about. So much has changed. It isn’t like it was before. Everything is different.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t easy. I thought you’d have to get work, you know, so I asked in the shops. And eventually I found a shopgirl who’d worked with you at the glove factory, only she knew you under a different name. When I asked at the factory, they didn’t know where you’d gone, but one of the girls told me. She’d been friends with one of your flatmates, I think—I don’t remember. And I followed you to your last job, at the wool factory, but someone said they’d heard you left town. That left the train stations.” He smiled. “Lucky for me, the man who sold you your ticket remembered you.”

  I stared at him in horror. Four years of running, of covering my tracks, of false names and anonymous boardinghouses and sleeping in church vestibules—all of it undone by the ticket clerk who’d leered at me when, destitute and starving, I’d bought my ticket for Newcastle on Tyne. It would have been comical if I hadn’t felt sick.

  “And how did you find me from there?” I managed.

  “Oh, I asked around again. These are small towns up here, and lots of people remembered you. Someone remembered you hiring a car, and then—”

  “The driver.”

  “Yes. Surprised, he was. Said he’d thought you were coming to visit a patient.”

  I leaned forward, put my elbows on my knees. Syd took the opportunity to pull his chair closer. He took my hands in his, looked in my eyes. “I’m just so glad I’ve found you, Kitty,” he said. “I’m just so glad.”

  I looked into his face. He was my brother, and he was alive. Perhaps we could both run. Pool our resources, our talents. It didn’t matter anymore. We could stand strong together. Perhaps, for the first time, I could be safe.

  “Kitty,” he said, “I’m living with Father again. He’s very worried about you. He’s been worried since the day you left. I have some bad news, you see.”

  I stared at him, uncomprehending.

  He squeezed my hands, as if I were weeping. “Father has cancer,” he said. “He’s terribly sick. He won’t last long. He’s a changed man, Kitty. Sometimes I think the worry about you has nearly done him in. I’ve been living with him, nursing him. I’ve gotten to know him as a man now, as a new man. I have a good job with an insurance agent, and I can afford to support him. His fondest wish is to see you before he dies. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? Do you see?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m here to take you home.” He smiled at me. “I don’t know how you got to this place, but I’m here to take you back with me. You can see Father and—”

  I pulled my hands from his. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Of course I’m serious. It’s Father’s wish to see his daughter again.”

  “I’m not going back there,” I said. “And you know why, Syd. You know why.”

  He leaned back in his chair, looking at me. “Well, I have to say it—no, I don’t. We had some rough times growing up—I’ll admit that. It was a bit hairy after Mother left. But you can’t mean that you’ve held a grudge this long.”

  My stomach was doing somersaults. I had to remember that he’d been away, that he hadn’t seen how bad it had gotten. That, even before he’d left, he hadn’t been hit as often as I had and my father had done most of his dirty work to me while Syd was in the other room. I closed my eyes and took a breath.

  “All right. I’m going to tell you about it this once, Syd. Just once. I can’t repeat it ever again.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  And I told him, in as few words as I could. I told him about the beatings, the chokings, the cracked and bruised ribs. I even told him, so help me, about the knife in my mouth and the night our father had dragged me from under the bed and given me the scar. And that very last night, when he’d climbed over me on the bed, pinned me down, and laughed in my face.

  It was a confession, but not just of my own sins. It was a confession of someone else’s sins, and for a moment it felt freeing, until I looked at my brother’s face.

  Syd’s expression had fallen. He stared at me with shock, with horror, and it took me a moment to understand. The shock and horror were not dire
cted at the story I told. They were directed at me.

  I stopped, and we were silent. There were no voices in the hall. I heard the breeze blow in the eaves.

  He turned away, out the window. Then he sighed, a hopeless sound. “Kitty,” he said.

  “Now you see,” I almost pleaded. “You have to see.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve made this very difficult.”

  “It isn’t difficult. It’s simple.”

  “It’s difficult because I don’t believe it.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “Are you saying I’m lying?”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, and he turned back to me. “Kitty, he’s your father. Your family. A daughter owes her father a debt.”

  I pushed my chair back and stood. “I don’t owe him a debt, Syd. And I’m not a liar.”

  “Aren’t you?” He looked pointedly at the uniform I wore. “False names, Kitty, false backgrounds—you lied everywhere you went. I don’t know what game you’re up to now but I’m not believing another of your stories.”

  “It isn’t—” I blinked, hard. “Syd—you were there. He hit you, too. I saw him.”

  “That was years ago.” He pushed back his chair and stood. “You don’t understand. He is a changed man, Kitty. He admits he’s done wrong in the past, and he regrets it. You can’t know how bitterly.”

  “Now who’s a liar?” I said. “He punched me in the stomach and called me a whore, Syd. And that was on a good night.”

  “You’re foulmouthed, too.” The corner of his mouth twisted down. “Father wants to make amends. He wants you to come back so it can all be straightened out. He’s dying, and I’m his son, and for God’s sake I’m bringing you back.”

  I looked in his eyes, and that was the rub of it: He believed it. He believed every word he said, with passionate devotion. My father probably was dying; that likely wasn’t a lie. But my father had convinced Syd of the rest of it, as if he’d found a religion. Syd wanted to believe, and he’d convinced himself I’d made everything up. God knew why—but he did. I felt the hope that had begun to bloom in my chest die sharply, with a quick pain. And then everything I’d taught myself in the past four years came back to me in a rush.