Silence for the Dead

by Simone St. James

  “But he wasn’t German!”

  “He was close enough, with the name and the accent. When Germans have killed your friends and relatives, when they’re shooting at you every day . . . Well, some men need a target for their rage and frustration.”

  He would know more about it than I would, of course. I nodded and went back to my search.

  “There are several incidents on record,” Jack continued. “In one, Mikael was stripped naked by a bunch of drunken officers and dumped in the center of the nearest town in the middle of the night. They’d painted the words KILL THE BOCHE on him. Boche was another word for German, like Hun. Two men got reprimands for that. In the second incident, they stole a helmet from a dead German soldier and put it on Gersbach’s head. Then they forced him at bayonet point to get out of the trench and stand in the open, right in the German sniper lines.”

  I paused again. “I get the idea,” I said, sickened. “I don’t think I need to hear more examples.” I turned and saw Matron’s thick cardigan hanging from a peg, started going through the pockets.

  “There were more reprimands for that one,” Jack said. “He was lucky to get out of it alive. Shortly afterward, his section of the line came under heavy attack. It was chaos, but there were several witnesses who agreed on one thing. At the height of the attack, Mikael ran.”

  My fingers closed on a slim set of keys in Matron’s pocket. I turned and looked at Jack again. He was seated on the chair across from Matron’s desk, one leg crossed over the other knee as when I’d sat there using the telephone. “And did he run?” I asked. “Or was that another lie?”

  Jack looked grim. “It happened. The witnesses were credible ones, and they all said the same thing. During an artillery attack, Mikael retreated, and they found him hours later, a mile down the road from the front line, sitting on the ground and weeping.”

  Sweet, kind Mikael, Maisey had called him. Gentleman enough to spend time with his little sister and her friend. How many men like that had been sent off to the front lines, along with the strong ones, the brave ones, the bullies? Shamed by his father, given no choice, he’d been packed off to a hellish place against which he had no defenses.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He was court-martialed,” Jack replied. “In the army, desertion is a capital offense. The witnesses proved it, and he didn’t deny it. So he was sentenced to execution by firing squad.”

  Maisey had said that she’d heard he’d been shot in some horrible way. “That’s barbaric.”

  “It’s military justice, Kitty,” Jack said quietly.

  “But if he was shot over there, then how . . . ?”

  “He wasn’t. A lot of men were convicted of desertion and cowardice during the war, but most had their sentences commuted. Only a few were actually executed. An officer on the tribunal looked at Mikael’s case and decided that the bullying was a mitigating factor. He commuted Mikael’s sentence and sent him home on a dishonorable discharge.”

  I walked slowly to the door of Matron’s office, thinking. I wandered up and down the corridor, looking for the nearest locked door, barely registering what I was doing. “He came home in disgrace,” I said. “He came home a coward.”

  “Yes,” said Jack, following me. “I imagine his father was livid.”

  I found a locked supply closet I’d never been shown, and touched the handle, running my finger along it. And then I stopped, turning absolutely still.

  It is like how I heard they executed some of those Poor Fellows but I never saw one (execution) myself so I don’t know why I dream of it.

  “His father did it,” I said softly. “His father executed him for cowardice. In that spot outside the isolation room.”

  Jack leaned on the wall next to me and looked down at me. “There’s a record of Mikael’s body,” he said. “Dead of a rifle shot to the middle of the forehead. There’s a record of the father’s body, too. Nils Gersbach. Also dead of a gunshot, this time to the heart.”

  “Who shot Nils Gersbach?” I asked no one. “Did Mikael fight back?”

  Jack shook his head. “There isn’t an account of it. But I wonder, myself, if his wife wasn’t involved, or even Anna. There’s no record of their bodies. And no one has seen them since.”

  I turned slowly, my mind churning, and faced him. “What do you mean, record of the bodies? Record kept where?”

  “That’s where Maisey came in. Remember, she read the letter I received from my contact at the War Office, telling me what had happened to Mikael. I think she read it and suspected what may have occurred. She’d already suspected that Anna was dead. And if there are deaths, if there are bodies, there is one person who tends to know.”

  My father is the local magistrate, Maisey had said. “Oh, God. Maisey’s father. Her father knew.”

  “According to her notes, she went into his study and looked through his files. And she found records of Nils’s and his son’s bodies being removed from Portis House and cremated.”

  “But nothing about Mrs. Gersbach or Anna.”

  Jack shook his head.

  “If Nils killed Mikael,” I said slowly, figuring it through, “it’s possible he killed the others, too. And the bodies weren’t recovered.”

  “Or they’re alive,” Jack said. “Who killed Nils?”

  Alive. The girl we’d seen in the trees. Was it Anna? Where had she come from? Where was she, that she couldn’t contact her best friend?

  “And why has no one heard of this?” I asked Jack. “Why was everything covered up?”

  “As to that,” Jack said slowly, “if Deighton was interested in the property for a hospital, and he was willing to cut in the local authorities . . .”

  “Maisey’s father,” I said. “If there was a cover-up for profit, he must have been part of it. He told his daughter he didn’t want her looking into Anna’s disappearance, that it was probably nothing. He’s been lying to her. No wonder she was so distraught when she came here with the letters.”

  “Are you certain this is the right closet?” he said.

  I looked down at the keys in my hand. “No.” I began trying them in the lock, a welcome distraction from thinking about the execution that had taken place on the grass outside the library. Kneel, he says . . . “But I think it is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know Matron,” I said. I held up a finger. “First, she would take the keeping of the patients’ personal belongings very seriously. Second, she would keep them meticulously organized, labeled, and stored somewhere locked. But not in her office, because she does not need to access them every day. So in a closet nearby. And she would keep the key herself, without giving a copy to Boney, because she would see it as her responsibility alone. Each man’s things will have an itemized and dated list included. I’ll wager it now.”

  He was watching my face. He always knew what I was thinking. “She’ll be all right,” he told me gently. “You’ll see.”

  “Yes, well.” I swallowed my worry.

  “There was nothing in those papers about you, you know.”

  I looked up at him. “What?”

  “The envelope you gave me. The incident reports you asked me to read for you. I did. And there was nothing in there about you.”

  “What are you talking about? My brother—”

  “Is not mentioned. There is an incident report stating that a visitor arrived on a day not set for visiting and created a commotion. It says the nurses tried to eject him and the patients became disturbed. That was her word, ‘disturbed.’ It states that the orderlies were late in arriving, and by the time the visitor was shown off the grounds, the patients were very upset. She claims full responsibility for the incident. Kitty, you’re never mentioned at all, and neither are the other nurses.”

  “What about the other incident reports?” I said. “The one in whic
h I went to your room without clearance. And the second time, the night Roger told on me. And the night when Archie attacked me.”

  “There’s one about the attack. I suppose she had to write that one. But it’s brief and carefully worded. Matron seems to be an expert in writing a report that doesn’t give much away. I have to admire it.”

  “And the others?”

  Jack shook his head. “Nothing. Just those two reports. Nothing else.”

  My stubborn brain wouldn’t take it in. “That can’t be right, Jack. She told me she was writing incident reports. She told me Mr. Deighton would read them, and there was nothing she could do. Are you saying she was lying?” My face felt hot and tingling. “Oh, my God. She was trying to frighten me all along. She never meant to have me dismissed. When I see her again, I’ll kill her myself. I’ve barely slept, I was so worried.”

  Jack’s voice was thoughtful. “I’m starting to think, perhaps, that Matron puts on quite a good show of being frightening. But a show is what it is.”

  “She’s practical,” I replied. “She can’t afford to lose a nurse, that’s all. It certainly wasn’t out of affection for me.”

  “You may be wrong about that,” Jack said.

  I shook my head. I know her, I was about to say again, but then I remembered that Matron had had a husband, and a son, and I had never guessed. Perhaps I didn’t know her as well as I’d thought.

  “Fine,” I said finally. “We’ll leave it. But I know I’m right about this closet.”

  I was. One of the keys worked, and the door swung open to reveal neatly kept shelves. There were a few small suitcases, and boxes tied with string; there were also a few parcels wrapped simply in brown paper. I realized that these were the belongings each man had come here with, the things of his own life he had surrendered. Some men had come with suitcases, others with a box of beloved items. And some men had come with nothing.

  Each item had a paper tag attached to it, with Matron’s large, looped handwriting. SOMERSHAM, WILLIAM. D.O.B.: 16 APRIL 1898. ADMITTANCE DATE: 7 JANUARY 1919.

  I studied the tags one by one. Jack was silent next to me, looking over my shoulder. It seemed he couldn’t find words for those few long moments, as if the sight of that closet had temporarily robbed him. I finally put a hand on the brown paper parcel with his name on it.

  I slid it off the shelf, held it in my hands for a moment. It weighed nearly nothing; Jack had come here, it seemed, with the clothes on his back and little else. I turned to him, the small parcel between us, and the ceremonial pose of it, I with an item in both my hands, presenting it to him, struck me with deep truth.

  I raised my eyes and looked into his. I could not fathom what I saw there, could not truly understand what this moment would mean to a person who had suffered what he had. He didn’t speak; it seemed he couldn’t. And yet he put his hand on the parcel and took it from me, and then he ducked down and kissed me swiftly on the lips, his touch telling me more than words ever could.

  He stood back and untied the string. The paper fell open to reveal a folded shirt and trousers, a pair of suspenders, a watch, a wallet, a wool jacket. When Jack Yates had checked into Portis House, wishing to kill himself, he had not even worn a tie.

  He let out a sigh, a great whoosh of air as if a weight had been lifted from him. He picked a piece of paper from the top of the stack of folded clothes and held it up to me with a half smile. “You should have wagered money,” he said.

  It was Matron’s list of items in the parcel, of course. I smiled back at him.

  Jack released the parcel and it dropped to the floor. I blinked in surprise, but before I could recover, he grabbed the bottom hem of his hospital top and wrenched it off over his head in one quick movement. I was left gaping at his bare chest, unexpected and utterly fascinating.

  “What are you doing?” I managed.

  “These are my clothes,” he said simply. He sounded almost happy. He kicked off his shoes. “I’m putting them on.”

  “Right here?”

  “Come, now.” He looked up at me and grinned fully, watching my reaction. Too late, I realized he was distracting me as he yanked the drawstring of his hospital trousers and dropped them to the floor. “You’re a nurse,” he said. “Surely at some point you’ve seen one of us in the altogether?”

  I stood there like a ninny. He wasn’t in the altogether—he wore drawers, of course, and at the moment he showed no signs of removing them. But he wore nothing else. I should turn my back, I thought stupidly, but I did no such thing. His body was lean, the flat muscles sliding under the skin hypnotic. He had small whorls of hair on his chest, a shade lighter than the hair on his head. His hips were narrow, his legs long and strong, smaller whorls of hair on his thighs and farther down. I stared.

  He bent and picked up his trousers, the knobs of his spine moving under the flawless skin of his back. He shook the trousers out and stepped into them, and I felt a short stab of disappointment that I couldn’t look at his legs anymore. He fastened the trouser buttons, the movement strangely intimate. He was enjoying the fact that I was looking at him. There was something in my gaze, I realized, something I had not consciously put there, that he was soaking up like a sponge.

  He picked up the shirt next and slipped it over his head, and I could see the tufts of hair under his arms as he raised them, the soft, firm undersides of his biceps, the play of skin over his ribs. Then the fabric fell and he tucked the shirt into the trousers as I felt the slow pulse of my heart at the base of my throat.

  He attached the suspenders next, slid them over his shoulders. The trousers were a little roomy on him now, but not much; even before he’d come here and gone on a hospital diet, he’d been slim. I saw him now as if through a glass; I could see the patient he’d been, and the man he was, at the same time. They had always been the same person, at least to me.

  He put his shoes and socks on and straightened, looked at me.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  He rolled his shoulders, one and then the other, then both at the same time, the movement making the fabric of his shirt play over his skin. Then he stilled and looked at me, his expression dark. “Come here.”

  I took a step closer, knowing only that I wanted to be nearer, to be as close as I could. He put his arm around my waist and pulled me to him, flush against him. Then he kissed me again.

  This kiss was different. He held me tight, and even through layers of fabric I could feel every sinew of him, the beat of his heart and the heat of his hands on my back. I put my arms around his neck and touched his hair with my fingertips. His hips were flush against mine. He teased my mouth open and I let him, the taste of him, mixed with the smell of his skin, overwhelming me. He had kissed me before with need, and the need was still there, but it was tempered with passion that made me ache, made me rise up and open to him as much as he would let me.

  He broke the kiss and ran a thumb along my lower lip. He did not let me go. “That’s better,” he said, breathing hard. “I wanted to kiss you as a man.”

  “You are a man,” I said.

  He rubbed my lip again—the sensation of it was raw, as if I had no more defenses—and kissed the corner of my mouth, my jaw, the tender spot on my neck. Then he stopped, holding me, his head dipped to the spot beneath my ear, breathing me in.

  I touched his face, ran my fingers along his jaw and his cheekbones. I knew every line of them, every contour, though I’d never touched them before, not like this. The feel of him beneath my hands sent a spark of something through me, dangerous and heady and wonderful.

  “Jack,” I said after a long moment.

  “Hmm?”

  “Are you kissing the nurses just to get newspapers?”

  When his body shook against mine, I knew he was laughing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The rain had not stopped. Though it was morning,
the clouds were so thick we needed the electric lights in the patients’ hall in order to see through the gloom. The light thrown by the electric bulbs wasn’t as strong as the light from the paraffin lamps, and Nina kept a lamp lit as she worked.

  “No one’s died yet,” she told me bluntly when I came to relieve her. “It’s well there’s only five. It makes it easier.”

  “Six,” I said.

  She passed a glance to Archie, who lay still on his blanket. “Yes, well, I meant five infected. I’ve tried feeding them, but no one will take anything. Did you make the breakfast in the kitchen? Thank God.” She stared over my shoulder as Jack came up behind me. She took in his change of clothes and was momentarily speechless.

  “Good morning,” Jack said.

  “Blimey,” said Nina.

  “I think we ought to regroup,” I cut in. “We put the patients on the floor here for evacuation, but the rain hasn’t stopped, and we may not get help for another day yet. The floor isn’t the best place for them.”

  “I agree,” said Nina. “They should be in their rooms, in bed.”

  I turned to Jack. “Let’s find Paulus and Roger. And Captain Mabry. Let’s see if we can move these men back upstairs.”

  Paulus and Roger were in the kitchen devouring much of the breakfast I’d cooked. We sent them upstairs to prepare the six bedrooms and get a stretcher. Then I put a plate together, poured a cup of hot tea, and brought a tray to West.

  He was in the common room, looking out at the rain. He didn’t thank me when I gave him the food, but I could tell he was famished. I took a seat in one of the rickety chairs and looked out at the rain as he ate.

  “It’ll lighten up by tonight,” he told me. “And then we can get help.”

  “How do you know it will stop?”

  “I feel it in here.” He pointed dismissively to the stumps of his legs. “I felt it coming, and now I can feel it going. Coming is worse. It nearly made my teeth hurt.” He took another bite of bacon, didn’t look at me. “I’m not useless, you know.”