Silence for the Dead

by Simone St. James

  Mabry had been depressed and racked with guilt when he’d awoken. He’d been born to a sense of honor, and even though the blame rested with the ghosts of Portis House, he felt he’d violated his own tenets in the worst possible way. But Archie and West knew Portis House, they knew the truth, and they understood. They had been through a hell just as awful as Mabry’s own. They never spoke of what had happened, and they never laid blame. In their way, they looked out for Mabry, one of their fellow soldiers.

  In private, in the company of only his comrades, Mabry was able to sit quietly, to think, to read. To write letters. He said he’d finally had the chance to read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which Matron had refused to stock in the Portis House library.

  And I spoke to him of a way to make amends. He was thoughtful, listening in silence until I finished. “That isn’t a bad idea, Nurse Weekes,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.” If I hadn’t known him, I wouldn’t have noticed that he almost smiled.

  “And what about Mr. Yates?” Matron asked when I visited her. “Why is he not boarded with the others?”

  “He’s been discharged,” I told her.

  She thought about this for a moment. “It’s just as well. But for God’s sake, Nurse Weekes, fill out a discharge form.”

  She insisted on calling me “Nurse Weekes,” even though I didn’t wear a uniform. I had changed into my old skirt and blouse before evacuating Portis House, and now I wore my hair in a loose braid down my back or tied with a ribbon. I liked it. I was thinking of cutting it, which was supposed to be the new, scandalous fashion, but in the meantime I liked the feel of my long hair down my back.

  Even Nina wore only her civilian dress, though she said it was because she was confused, not working at Portis House yet not exactly working anywhere else. I told Matron I’d left my uniform off because I was resigning. “I wasn’t much of a nurse,” I said. “You know that.”

  “You underestimate yourself,” she said, and then she flushed, as if the words had slipped out. “You had no training, of course. But a nurse has to have a certain amount of gumption. I hope you don’t go off and get married like a ninny and do nothing with your life.”

  “I want to marry Jack Yates,” I told her. We were alone, and I was helping her with her tea. “I think that disqualifies me from ninnyhood.”

  “It most certainly does,” she agreed. She didn’t seem surprised, and when I thought of all the times she had threatened to write me up for going to his room, I could see why.

  “Besides,” I said carefully, taking the cup when she was finished with it and putting it on a tray, “you married.”

  “Marrying doesn’t make you a ninny,” she clarified, “and neither does motherhood. But both can certainly contribute to it.”

  She said nothing about her son, and I didn’t ask. There had been too much talk of death already.

  It took three surgeries to put Roger’s shoulder back together, and he’d never have the full use of it again. At first, he insisted he could still work as an orderly, which was a fiction so obvious no one knew how to reply to it. But when I visited a few days later, he had changed his mind.

  “They let Mabry in to see me,” Roger told me. “I gave him a piece of my mind. I wasn’t happy, I can tell you. He just let me go on and on, and he said he was sorry he shot me. And then he said he’d help, that he owed it to me because I saved his life.” Roger motioned me closer from his prone position on the bed. He was pale, but his cheeks were flushed with excitement. “Bloody rich, Mabry’s family is. He says he’ll tell his father it was an accident, and if I back him up, his father will give me a pension.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” I said.

  “Mabry’s mad as a hatter,” Roger said matter-of-factly, “and his father knows it. But the story is that he was defending the rest of us from Creeton with that gun. His father will soften at that. I was angry before, but now I don’t bloody care what the story is. A pension will do just fine for me.”

  I smiled at him. “I’m glad,” I said. I was.

  Creeton presented a different problem. As a mental patient who had proven himself a danger, he’d been kept in the hospital under guard. The police had come and gone; so had one doctor, and then another. I never learned what was said in those interviews, but I imagined Creeton claiming innocence, that he had blacked out, that he remembered nothing. I imagined him pointing out how docile he’d been, agreeing to have his hands tied, waiting calmly to be evacuated from Portis House. But no one trusted a madman, not truly, and the fact that he’d assaulted two nurses and a fellow patient—not to mention his very public suicide attempt—must have told against him. Creeton was moved out of Newcastle on Tyne; I heard he was reassigned to a higher-security mental hospital in Dorset.

  Somersham recovered, as did MacInnes and Hodgkins. All were slated to be moved to another hospital, but MacInnes went home to his wife, the successful novelist. Somersham’s family didn’t want him back, but I quietly wrote Hodgkins’s cousin and told her what had happened and that he was about to be transferred. She appeared within the week and took him home.

  “My God, the paperwork,” Matron said as she sat up in her sickbed. “Where are my eyeglasses? It’s enough to drive me to drink. What a mess. Why has Mr. Deighton not come?”

  Nina and I exchanged a glance and evaded the question.

  When I wasn’t at the hospital, I was in the temporary flat I’d rented with Jack, two doors down from the room that housed Archie, West, and Mabry. He put Anna Gersbach in a third flat of her own. He’d taken our flat as “Mr. and Mrs. Yates,” looking the landlady in the eye and daring her to disagree. She didn’t. “We’ll fix that part later,” he told me when she was gone and we were alone, making my heart flip in my chest. “When we have time.” In the meantime, we were busy.

  Jack wired his banker, told him he was sane again, and withdrew some funds. Then he wired his man of business, who’d been taking care of the farm Jack had inherited from his parents, and told him he’d be home within the month. “Make sure your books add up,” he’d put in the telegram. “I’m quite good at math.”

  He kissed me, hired a car, and drove to Bascombe. He returned with Maisey Ravell and a stack of files she’d stolen from her father’s study.

  And then we dealt with Anna Gersbach and what had happened at Portis House.

  There was no question about it: Anna had killed her father, which made her a murderer. But she was also a pawn who’d been given no chance to defend herself, whose home had been stolen and sold, who had never been allowed to mourn her brother or tell of how he had been so brutally murdered by the man she’d killed. She was also a girl who had been through too much, and was in mental distress, not quite in her right mind. As we spent more time with her, we could see that she couldn’t make many decisions, that she relied on us for even the smallest things, that when we spoke of her case, she stopped listening, as if not hearing our words would make them go away.

  Maisey moved into the flat with Anna, made certain she ate and washed, found her more clothes to wear. What they spoke of when they were alone together, whether Anna told Maisey of the pain she’d been hiding all those years, I did not know. But I thought, perhaps, they understood each other.

  But there was no way to keep Anna free from what had happened. We had no choice. We went to the magistrate at Newcastle on Tyne and gave him everything—every file, every witness account. Everything but the ghosts.

  The resulting scandal was so large even Matron heard of it. The story had already broken that England’s Brave Jack had spent six months in a madhouse. England’s Former Hero Shell-Shocked, read one headline, and most of the others followed suit. Then the second wave of stories washed over the country’s newspapers:

  SHOCKING SCANDAL AT MENTAL HOME.

  DOUBLE MURDER LED TO SCANDALOUS COVER-UP.

  FATHER-DAUGHTER MURDER WAS SELF-DEFENSE.
r />   “I WAS A VICTIM,” ANNA GERSBACH CLAIMS.

  Anna was taken into custody by the magistrate to wait for the inquest. Reporters came to our flat in a steady stream, asking for interviews and shooting me very, very interested looks. Jack introduced me to all of them as Mrs. Yates and stared at them as he had the landlady. They were persistent, but he gave them nothing, not a single interview or quote, and they were all disappointed.

  It was overwhelming, and our days were full. But at night we never spoke of any of it. At night we got in bed together and the world went away. We talked of nothing, or of everything. Or we did other things. I’d finally found something I was truly good at, if Jack’s enthusiasm was anything to judge by. I’d grown achingly used to the feel of him, the smell of his sweat on my skin. And when we slept, it was the dreamless sleep of the exhausted.

  In the dark, I told him everything and he told me everything. Those long nights, in the dark, we each understood the other. And then we slept.

  Eventually, one by one, the men were removed from the hospital. Mr. Deighton was arrested while trying to flee to France. Maisey’s father was arrested for fraud, as were the coroner he had bribed and the sexton who had cremated the Gersbachs for a fee, no questions asked. Dr. Thornton was investigated, though he could not be directly connected to the scandal; he hid, predictably, behind a bank of expensive lawyers. I never discovered what happened to Dr. Oliver.

  And at last, the jury at Anna’s inquest refused to indict her for reasons of self-defense, and Anna was freed. Portis House itself descended into a legal quagmire; supposedly it was Anna’s to inherit, but the wheels of English law turned notoriously slowly. She could not sell it, even if she could find a buyer; she could do nothing with it, it seemed, but live in it, moving back in with her memories and ghosts.

  She didn’t return to the house. Instead, Anna and Maisey went off on a tour of the Continent together until the scandals died down. They never said where they got the money for the trip, but I knew. Captain Mabry was pleased. “I shot at her,” he told me. “It’s the least I can do.”

  Before they left, I had one last interview with Anna, alone. “I don’t mean to distress you,” I said to her, “but there’s something I want to ask.”

  She looked at me with her curiously disconnected expression, as if she was watching a play.

  “At Portis House,” I said. “Your father—his ghost—wanted a sacrifice. You said that sacrifice was you. You told Jack to shoot you.”

  She looked away. “I don’t think he would have. I know that now.”

  She was right; Jack had told me that already. He had always planned to shoot Mabry, not Anna, and he had not shot to kill. “But your father’s ghost wanted you dead,” I said. “He wanted you dead so that he could go.”

  “It’s true,” Anna said.

  “But, Anna, you’re not dead. Your father never got his sacrifice.”

  Her lips pressed together.

  “He never got what he wanted,” I continued. “Mikael is gone—you felt that. But your father . . . If you didn’t die, and Mabry didn’t die . . .”

  Anna’s gaze slid to mine, and for a second she was present; for a second she was clear. “Kitty,” she said. “Don’t go back to Portis House.”

  • • •

  Mabry and West got their transfer forms and packed their bags. The story of Mabry defending us from Creeton had stuck; Mabry’s wife and her father had heard of it, and though they weren’t ready to have him home, Mrs. Mabry wrote that she would apply to visit. She would come alone at first, but perhaps someday she would bring the children.

  West had no desire to be discharged. He needed more time—this time, he hoped, in a place that “won’t make me madder than I was to begin with.”

  It was Archie who, at long last, went home. When his father, the newspaper baron, read of the scandal at Portis House, he discharged his son. “He never really wanted me admitted,” Archie told me. “Not truly. It was the stuttering and the shaking that made him nervous. I think I’ve passed some kind of test.”

  “So you’re fully healed, then?” I asked him. “That’s what you let your father believe?”

  He looked pained. “I had to tell him something, Kitty, or I’d never go home. I told my father I’d glue pages at the paper if he wanted. I still get the nightmares, but not as bad, not now that he is gone. I want to try it—normal life, that is. My father doesn’t need to know that I’m not right in the head, not really, and that I’ll never get well.”

  Martha recovered enough to go home to Glenley Crewe until she regained her full strength and got another job. Matron was given a prestigious position at a new hospital in Cornwall, including lighter duties and a raise in pay. She took Nina, Martha, and Boney with her. But before she started her new position, Matron herself decided to take six weeks off to walk the Lake District. “I’m not retiring,” she told me firmly. “Nursing still needs me, Nurse Weekes.”

  And then she was gone—everyone was gone.

  • • •

  It was mid-August, and Jack and I were the only two passengers on the platform at the tiny train station at New Thetford, somewhere in Warwick. The sun was massively hot in the middle of the day, and sweat gathered at my temples and on the back of my neck as I adjusted my wide-brimmed hat lower over my face. I shaded my eyes with my gloved hands and stared off down the track.

  “It’ll come soon enough,” said Jack. He’d taken refuge on a wooden bench squeezed into a thin strip of shade and was paging lazily through a newspaper—that day’s newspaper, with nary a story blacked out. “We’re almost there, you know.”

  The track seemed to waver in the heat as I watched it, but there was still no sign of a train. “No, I don’t know,” I said to him. “I’d never been out of London before Portis House. I’ve no idea where we are.”

  “We change trains here,” he replied easily, “and then we go to Somerset. And then we’re home.”

  “Aren’t you nervous?” I asked him. “I’m prickly as a bear. My clothes are all new and I’m not used to them. And I hate wearing gloves.”

  He put the newspaper down on his lap. He looked impossibly handsome even in a summer suit and tie, and he’d barely broken a sweat, the infernal man. He held out a hand. “Give me your hand.”

  I walked across the platform and held out my right hand, but he took my left instead and pulled the glove off. He leaned down and gave it a solemn kiss, right on the knuckle near my ring. “You look like a respectable lady, Mrs. Yates.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, and we both laughed.

  I put the glove back on and stepped away from him. I had to or the train would come to find me sitting quite comfortably on his lap, heat be damned. “I’ve never run a farm before,” I said.

  “You’ll do fine,” he said, picking up the paper again.

  “What if I don’t like it?”

  “Then I’ll sell it and we’ll go live like bohemians in the South of France.”

  “What if I want a job?” I said, remembering Matron’s advice. “What if I want to be useful?”

  He looked at me. “Do you want to be a nurse? A trained one?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’ve never done anything but live day to day. I’ve never really thought about what I want to do.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “I was raised on my parents’ farm, and I know how to run it. My father taught me since childhood. But I never really thought about whether I wanted it. And then I went to war.”

  I looked at him. Oh, how I adored him. That easy competence that he had with everything. The way he treated me as if I mattered. Those gorgeous hands of his. “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “Isn’t it. No matter what happens. No matter what we do.”

  He thought about it, and his face relaxed almost into a smile. “Yes, it is. The train’s coming.”

>   I put a hand on my hat and turned to watch it approach.

  And somewhere, miles behind us, Portis House sat solitary, continuing its slow descent into the marshes.

  Photo by Adam Hunter

  Simone St. James is the award-winning author of The Haunting of Maddy Clare, which won two RITA® Awards from Romance Writers of America and an Arthur Ellis Award from Crime Writers of Canada. She wrote her first ghost story, about a haunted library, when she was in high school, and spent twenty years behind the scenes in the television business before leaving to write full-time. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband and a spoiled cat.

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  Turn the page for a preview of Simone St. James’s new novel,

  THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT,

  about a psychic medium in 1925 London who is compelled to investigate the murder of her greatest rival when she receives a message from beyond the grave.

  Available in April 2015 from New American Library in paperback and as an e-book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  LONDON, 1925

  The man who sat before me at seven o’clock on a Tuesday evening was lying.

  He’d come with an impeccable reference from a barrister client of mine, and though he was barely thirty-five, the tailoring of his three-piece suit and the glint of his watch chain spoke of success. He wore power easily in his posture and the set of his shoulders, like a man accustomed to it, and yet the problem he set me was not only trifling—it was false.

  He dropped his gaze to the table, where my fingers rested over his, and I took the opportunity to study his face undetected. Slender, clean-shaven. Almost handsome, but not quite; something about the width of the temples was off, and an absolute seriousness marred his expression, suggesting no sense of humor. His brows were drawn down as though something weighed on him, and his mouth was pulled into a grim line, as though he were thinking of something terrible and new. Whatever his true reason for consulting a psychic, he was not giving it away.