Dancing in the Rain

by Amanda Harte

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2003 by Christine B. Tayntor

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477832776

  ISBN-10: 1477832777

  For Donna Marie Tayntor, with thanks for so many things, but especially for being my friend as well as my sister-in-law.

  This title was previously published by Avalon Books; this version has been reproduced from the Avalon book archive files.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter One

  October 1917.

  It was not the first mistake she had ever made, but it just might be the worst. Carolyn Wentworth stared at her reflection in the mirror as she pinned the starched cap onto her head. Her face looked the same as it had every other day: heart-shaped like her mother’s, with her father’s deep blue eyes and golden blond hair. Her appearance hadn’t changed, but the way she felt most definitely had. Never before had she experienced the horrible sinking sensation that now lodged in her stomach. Never before had she been convinced that she had made an irreparable mistake.

  Carolyn frowned as she turned away from the mirror. What on earth had convinced her that she could do this? Why had she believed that she, who had never worked a day in her life unless you considered planning a ball at the country club work, would be able to succeed at an occupation that many women considered daunting? Perhaps everyone at home was right, and it was insanity that had provoked her actions. Perhaps.

  Carolyn shook her head as she grabbed her last clean apron. She would wait until she crossed the courtyard before she put it on. That, she knew, was the only way it had a prayer of remaining clean for more than a minute. She shook her head again. Coming to France was not a mistake. It couldn’t be.

  Though her sisters had predicted that she would regret her impulsive decision, Carolyn had refused to listen to their nay-saying. It was true that she knew little of her destination other than the fact that it was home to some of the most beautiful castles in the world. It was also true that she knew nothing of the war that had ravaged Europe for years, save the reports in the Canela Record, which were sketchy at their best. Her sisters were right about that, but what they hadn’t realized was how strongly Carolyn had believed in her decision. And now?

  She shivered, as much from nerves as from the cold that seeped through the stone walls of the castle that was now her home. From four thousand miles away, France had sounded beautiful, the cause glorious. Reality, Carolyn had discovered, was far different. Reality was a countryside decorated with hedges of rusted barbed wire rather than evergreen shrubs. Reality was towns whose beauty had been devastated by years of battles. Reality was seemingly endless rain and its companion, mud.

  Carolyn hated mud. Though it rained in Texas, the soil near Canela was sandy enough that puddles were rare and mud even less common. She frowned as she reached for her cape. Wouldn’t the old biddies at home laugh if they could see her now? Carolyn Wentworth, the girl who spent half her clothing allowance on pretty dancing shoes, was wearing boots that a lumberjack would be proud to own and slogging through mud that, no matter what she did, slopped over the boot tops and slid down to her toes, making her feet squish with each step. The same girl, whose party frocks were the envy of her friends, now spent her days in dismal gray cotton uniforms with white cuffs and collars that were impossible to keep clean. Even the shapeless white aprons, the sole part of her costume that was laundered regularly, were stained within minutes of starting work.

  Oh, yes, the biddies would laugh, but they’d also nod. “I told you so,” one would announce to the other biddies, the way she had that day when the Ladies’ Auxiliary had met at the Wentworth home and no one had realized that Carolyn was close enough to hear their words. “She might be the prettiest of the Wentworth girls, but she certainly wasn’t blessed with brains.” “A beautiful but useless decoration,” another had said.

  They were wrong! Carolyn hurried down the steep stone staircase, pausing momentarily when she reached the ground floor. She could hear the rain pounding, and even though it was only a hundred feet across the courtyard, that was enough to drench her. So what? The men she was going to see had endured far more than cold, soaking rain.

  Carolyn straightened her shoulders and prepared to dash across the courtyard. The Ladies Auxiliary was wrong. Her sisters were wrong. The whole town of Canela was wrong. She might not be as bright as her sister Martha, as clever as little Emily, or as brave as their brother Theo. But she was still a Wentworth, and she was not—she most definitely was not—useless.

  Carolyn sprinted across the expanse of mud that had once been a formal garden, her eyes focused on the wooden door leading to the east wing. Tonight she would write to her sisters, describing the elegant chateau that served as staff housing as well as a hospital, rather than alarming them with tales of the suffering she had witnessed. In the meantime, she would show everyone that she was not useless. Perhaps that would dissolve the knot of fear that had taken residence in her stomach.

  Carolyn had come to France to prove that it wasn’t just Theo and Ed and all the other men who had joined the Army who could make a difference. If this was truly the war to end all wars, she would do her part. And right now that part meant proving that she hadn’t made a mistake. Carolyn Wentworth was going to be the best nurse’s aide anyone in Goudot, France had ever seen. She wrinkled her nose as a raindrop slid down it. Why stop there? She’d be the best aide in all of France, not just in this town thirty-five miles southeast of Dieppe.

  She tugged the heavy door open and let herself into the east wing. What had once been a grand ballroom and several smaller reception rooms had been turned into an operating theater and wards for the non-ambulatory patients. Carolyn donned her apron, then forced a smile onto her face and sauntered into the first ward, pretending she was walking into the Canela Country Club for the most important dance of the season. Despite the heavy boots, her step was light, and she let her skirts sway ever so gently. Sodden cotton didn’t drape like silk, but even the slight swirl added to the illusion. Perhaps if she could convince herself that this was not a mistake, the men would never know how close she was to fleeing like a frightened rabbit.

  “How are my favorite beaux today?” Carolyn asked. The low murmur stopped, and she felt twenty pairs of eyes focus on her. “As you can see,” she said with a rueful glance at her mud-spattered skirt, “this is not Goudot’s driest day.” Thank goodness, her voice sounded as carefree as if this were indeed a party and the men were her dancing partners. Maybe those years of planning parties and learning to treat even the most difficult guests’ demands gracefully were more valuable than she’d realized. At least her horror at the suffering that surrounded her wasn’t audible. Now, if only she could keep smiling, it wouldn’t be visible, either.

  “I told you she’d come,” one man announced to the patient in the bed next to him.
Though Carolyn could see only the back of the second man’s head, it was swathed in a bandage. He must be a new patient, someone who had been brought in after her shift ended yesterday. Perhaps in a day or two she would know the men’s names, but yesterday the wards had blurred into a single image of nameless men.

  Another patient made a show of consulting his watch. “She’s five minutes late, Henry,” he said to the man with the head wound. “I was sure she didn’t want to see us no more.”

  Still another man nodded. “C’aint blame her. This place is enough to make a man sick, let alone a purty gal.”

  Carolyn tried to keep her smile from fading. Though she had thought that she had camouflaged her feelings yesterday, it was obvious she had not. These men had realized that she was appalled by the sights and sounds of the hospital ward, and they had been betting on whether or not she’d return. How shallow she must have looked! Here they were, soldiers who had been wounded, and she—an able-bodied woman—was so weak that she couldn’t face them. Perhaps the Ladies’ Auxiliary had been right. Perhaps she had been useless. But that was about to change. These men deserved the best care, and she would give them nothing less.

  “Now, gentlemen,” Carolyn said with the smile that had never failed to charm the young men of Canela, “don’t tell me y’all would hold it against a girl if she spent a couple extra minutes primping.” As she had hoped, the men exchanged grins. Carolyn lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “I shouldn’t tell you this. My granny would say that I was destroying the mystery, but the fact is, I wanted to wear my best perfume for you, and I had to look everywhere to find it.”

  The man named Henry gave a triumphant crow. “I told you! You fellas were wrong.” He turned his head toward the doorway where Carolyn still stood, and her heart plummeted with pain as she realized the nature of his injuries. “C’mon over, honey. Let me be the first to smell that perfume.”

  Carolyn kept the smile fixed on her face as she approached the blind man. Although Henry could not see her, the other patients could. “Here I am, Mr. Phillips,” she said, reading the name on the chart at the foot of his bed. She stood at his side, hoping that the scent that she had so liberally sprayed on her wrists and throat would overcome the smells of the sickroom.

  The room itself was lovely, its walls covered with a delicate green wallpaper, its oak floors gleaming from years of polish, its windows long and perfectly proportioned. Even crowded as it was with beds, the room was still beautiful. What was not beautiful was the stench of illness, medicine, and harsh cleaners.

  “I’d be honored if you’d call me Henry,” the man said. He was older than the other patients, perhaps in his thirties, his accent telling Carolyn that he was English like her new roommate.

  “I couldn’t do that, sir.” She stuck a thermometer into Henry’s mouth. “My granny wouldn’t approve. She always said a girl shouldn’t be too familiar with a gentleman the first time she met him.”

  One of the other men chuckled. To Carolyn’s relief, the mood in the ward had lightened. Laughter, she had heard, was a healing force. Perhaps she could use that to help these men.

  “Say, Nurse, can you settle an argument for us?” The man who asked the question lay two beds away from Henry.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Tell my buddy here the right way to say the name of this here town. He says it’s go dot, but them Frenchies just laugh when we say that.”

  Carolyn shrugged. “They laugh at my Texas drawl, too. Don’t ask me why, but the French don’t pronounce the last t in Goudot.”

  “Did you say goo dough?”

  “That’s right.”

  The soldier turned to his friend. “Fellas, I reckon we can remember that. We’ve sure got a lot of goo here, and we’re Doughboys. Doughboys stuck in the goo.”

  When they stopped laughing, the man next to Henry asked Carolyn to write a letter for him. Writing letters was one of Carolyn’s talents. Unfortunately, she was far less skilled at the tasks that were her primary reason for being here.

  Today was a little easier than yesterday. She spilled less of the water when she washed their faces and hands, and the patients that she helped eat did not look as if they had taken a bath in their food today. Perhaps with a few more days’ practice, she would have mastered those chores. But the last chore … Carolyn tried not to let her revulsion show. There was no chance that she would ever enjoy emptying bed pans. Not even the scent of her perfume could keep her from wrinkling her nose at them.

  “I reckon this don’t smell like a country club.” To Carolyn’s mortification, one of the patients chuckled at her distress.

  “Maybe not,” she agreed, “but my dancing partners in Texas weren’t as gallant as you gentlemen are.”

  “I shore would like to dance with you,” the man replied.

  Carolyn knew that his wish was unlikely to come true, for he had a compound fracture of his left tibia. Looking for a way to ease his worries, she started to say, “My granny …”

  “Carolyn?” At the familiar voice, Carolyn raised her head. Helen Guthrie, the nurse who shared with Carolyn the tiny third-floor room that had once been a scullery maid’s quarters, stood in the doorway, her face ashen. “As soon as you’re finished …” She gestured toward the hallway behind her.

  Though Carolyn did not know the other woman well, she was familiar enough with illness to know that something was wrong. “What can I do?” she asked a minute later, when she’d made her excuses to the patients.

  “I need your help,” Helen said. She had looked ill when seen from a distance, but close up, her pallor was alarming, her face unnaturally white against her dark brown hair, her eyes clouded with pain. “Hollow Heart is back, and he needs me in the operating room,” Helen continued, her voice weaker than normal. It wasn’t, Carolyn was certain, only the prospect of working with the man who was reputed to be the most difficult of the Army physicians that caused Helen’s pallor. The woman was ill.

  Carolyn raised one eyebrow. “I know it’s not polite to say this, but you look awful.”

  “I feel awful,” Helen admitted. “I can’t keep any food down, and my legs don’t want to support me. I can’t go in there.” She shuddered as she glanced toward the operating theater.

  Unsure what Helen thought she could do, Carolyn asked, “Do you want me to ask Miss Pierce to assign another nurse?” The head nurse was strict, but everyone agreed that she was fair.

  Helen shook her head. “There isn’t anyone else. The fighting near Ypres is worse, and we got another trainload of patients last night. Right now there are more wounded than the doctors can handle.” Helen gripped the wall as another wave of pain washed over her. “Everyone’s on duty. That’s why I need you.”

  Carolyn reached out to steady her roommate. At just over five feet tall, Helen felt tiny compared to Carolyn’s own five and a half feet. “What do you mean?” She wrapped her arm around Helen’s shoulders.

  “I need you to take my place.”

  Carolyn shook her head. “You know I can’t do that. I’m a nurse’s aide, not a nurse.” If she had difficulty with bedpans, how would she handle surgery? “I don’t know anything about operating room protocol.”

  “Please, Carolyn.” Helen’s English accent became more pronounced as she pleaded. “Think about the men in there. They need you.”

  It was crazy. It wouldn’t work. She would get sent home in disgrace for impersonating a nurse. Carolyn started to shake her head, but as she did, she pictured Theo or Ed lying on a stretcher, waiting for a doctor. How could she not do whatever was possible to help all the men like her brother and her fiancé?

  “What about Hollow Heart?” she asked, referring to the doctor whose reputation terrified the nursing staff.

  The gleam she saw in Helen’s eyes told Carolyn that Helen realized she had decided to help her. “He probably won’t know the difference. He doesn’t look at us nurses, anyway. We’re just another instrument that he needs—not real people. Besides,�
� Helen asked, “what can he do to you?”

  “He could fire me.” The image of the notorious Dr. Hollow Heart throwing her out of the operating room rose before Carolyn. She could picture the man, tall and as lanky as Ichabod Crane, pointing a bony finger at her as he ordered her to leave. Then she laughed. “You’re right, Helen. He can’t do anything. You can’t fire a volunteer.” She gestured toward the door. “Go back to bed. I’ll do my best.”

  And, crazy as it was, Carolyn was grinning as she walked toward the operating room. How much worse could this be than emptying bedpans? She had survived that, and she would survive this. After all, this was a chance to prove that Carolyn Wentworth was more than a decoration and that coming to France had not been a mistake.

  Her smile faded when she opened the door and she paused for a second, trying to regain her equilibrium. She had been in the operating theater the day she arrived in Goudot, but that had not prepared her for the scene before her. The room had been empty when Helen had shown it to her on their impromptu tour. At the time, Carolyn had been jarred by the juxtaposition of flocked wallpaper and a gleaming parquet floor with sturdy iron beds and tables covered with instruments. Today she felt as if her senses were being assaulted. The voices of a dozen doctors and an equal number of nurses mingled with patients’ groans, while the odor of carbolic acid failed to overcome the stench of illness. And in the midst of what appeared to be barely controlled chaos was the man she sought.

  There was no question about which of the doctors was Dwight Hollins, more commonly known to the nursing staff as Dr. Hollow Heart. Only one man stood alone, pacing the floor. Only one man had a scowl etched onto his face. As Carolyn entered the room, he glared at her. With an ostentatious look at the clock, he said, “Good afternoon, Nurse.”

  “Good morning, Doctor,” Carolyn corrected him. She wouldn’t let this man intimidate her. He was, after all, just a man, like all the others. His legs were encased in the same knee-high boots, the same woolen uniform. Like the other doctors, he had slipped a white linen smock over his jacket to protect it during surgery. That was no surprise. What was a surprise was that he bore no resemblance to Ichabod Crane.