Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  The general was patronizing her. Sanders wouldn’t have done that. The man was a well-known womanizer, and Isobel was the smartest woman Sanders had ever met. If it wouldn’t have been some kind of treason to say it, he was pretty sure she loathed the general.

  “Is that wha’y’all been doin?” she asked. Sanders stared at the back of the tent. “See, I knew it were somethin.”

  “I hardly see what your point is,” the general said, returning to his stacks of reports. Sanders heard Isobel snort.

  “I’m bringing comfort to human beings,” she said. “I do it here all day. It was my respect for your office and your war that kept me from leaving or returning in daylight. But I will continue to go. They have men suffering just as badly as we do.”

  “You will not,” the general said, not looking up. Isobel stood. She stood next to Sanders for a moment, then took another step forward, looking over her shoulder at the soldier, eyes crystalline.

  “I will,” she said. “And if you intend to stop me, you will have to have one of your men shoot me in the back.”

  Sanders stared harder at the tent. The woman had treated his men’s wounds with compassion and skill unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He had caught her sneaking across the line two nights before and demanded an explanation. She’d told him exactly what he’d known she was doing when he’d first seen her. He’d hoped she would lie. He caught her again this morning.

  The general looked up, his expression a match for hers.

  “The only reason I don’t clap you in irons or have you outright executed for treason is my respect for Raef. He’s a good officer and a good soldier, but he should have never brought you onto my battlefield if he couldn’t control you.”

  “You’re welcome to explain that to him,” Isobel answered.

  “What is this?” Raef asked as he stormed into the tent. “They told me that you were interrogating my wife.”

  “She’s been crossing to the enemy’s camp and working on their wounded,” the general said, the authority not slipping from his voice, but a new respect emerging for Raef.

  Raef sighed.

  “I don’t even have to ask if that’s true,” he said. Isobel shrugged. Sanders stared at the beige fabric in front of him. He dearly wanted to be gone, back on the front line. Give him bullets over politics any day. Raef sighed again. Looked at the general.

  “Do what you have to,” he said. The general blinked.

  “You have nothing to say for her?”

  “She’ll do what she does,” Raef said. “It’s not as though I can stop her.”

  “Oh, I can stop her,” the general said, standing. Raef leaned forward, almost imperceptibly, and the general sat back down. “If she leaves again, it will be considered deserting, and she’ll be shot.”

  Raef looked long and hard at Isobel, who didn’t shift.

  “You hear that?” he asked finally.

  “I hear it.”

  With the sharpness of execution Sanders expected from a military man, Raef turned and left.

  “Dismissed, Sanders,” the general said. Sanders nodded to the general and left, hoping Isobel wouldn’t follow him. She didn’t.

  It was a normal day. Cooking. Tending to his uniform and his weapon. Standing guard, talking with the other men. As dusk fell, he grew anxious. Orders had come down from the general that the nurses were not to cross the lines, under punishment of death. Apparently Sanders wasn’t the first one to catch Isobel leaving or returning. Word spread that Sanders had been the one to turn her in, and there was an uncomfortable, half-hearted sympathy from the rest of the front line.

  As the sun began to set, Isobel approached him. Her hair was tied up, and she wore brown canvas clothing covered in pockets and equipment.

  “Please don’t do this,” he said.

  “I respect that you have your orders, but I’m not going to just leave men in pain and without anyone to care for them, I don’t care what color they’re wearing,” Isobel said.

  “Front line’s no place for a woman,” the soldier who was keeping watch with Sanders growled.

  “I have no intention of staying here long,” she answered.

  “Please,” Sanders said. “Go back to the medical tents.”

  He wished he could arrest her. He’d have given anything he could think of to arrest her, but the general’s comment had been ironic. They didn’t keep prisoners. Anyone who wasn’t fighting or contributing otherwise got shot. Simple fact of a huge, under-resourced military. She looked into his eyes for another moment, then turned. The other soldier grabbed her arm and she shook him off with surprising force.

  “I came here out of respect, so that I wasn’t shot by accident. If you shoot me,” she said, looking at Sanders again, “you will never wonder if you did what you had to or not. But I’m going, either way.”

  She stepped up onto the rocks they were leaning against and started off across the clearing. Sanders could just make out the scent of camp fires on the breeze, blowing in his face. The two armies couldn’t see each other, but they could hear each other and they could smell each other. The bullet that would kill him was sitting next to one of those camp fires.

  “Stop,” he called. “Don’t do this.”

  She kept on. The other soldier, a friend from way back in the trenches, looked at him in horror as he leveled his rifle. Just like shooting quail back home, only people were slower than quail. She walked with her back straight, but not tight. She marched across the long grass, kicking her feet through it as she went, as if there were no one in the world but her. The gun kicked and the sound of the shot echoed across the clearing and bounced off of the hills in the distance. She fell.

  Sanders took his flask from of his hip and took a hit, turning away.

  Mandy sat outside the triage tent, picking at her nails.

  Isobel was late.

  They had only a few nurses following the troops around - most of the work was done by battlefield surgeons, and the men were left to recover as they could - and the men were brusque with her. She didn’t like going in without Isobel, which meant she mostly worked at night.

  She sat on the ground outside of the makeshift hospital, listening to men groan and cry. She mostly didn’t notice any more. Pain was just part of the world around her, like sunlight or dirt.

  There was almost as much dirt as there was pain. She wanted a bath. In a deep tub. To wash her hair and brush it. It had grown an inch since she’d last taken it down.

  “I can’t believe you intentionally put that burden on him,” a voice said in the darkness. Mandy stiffened, shifting back.

  “Better him than anyone else,” Isobel said. “He knew he was obeying orders. No mistakes.”

  “But he has to live with shooting a woman in the back,” the man said.

  “He did shoot a woman in the back,” Isobel said.

  “He will live with that for the rest of his life.”

  “It isn’t a pretty world,” Isobel said. “He knew that, before.”

  “They aren’t going to like it when you come back,” the man said.

  “I have no intention of doing any such thing,” Isobel answered.

  “You’re going to stay over here?” the man asked.

  “They’ve made it clear which side I belong on,” she said.

  “You really are unbelievable. You’re going to fight against me?”

  “I’m going to do no such thing. I’m just going to put back together the things you tear apart.” Isobel was angry. Spitting angry, and her voice rose as she spoke. “Do you ever think, even begin to think about the pain you cause? You and your self-righteous wars and your fighting for justice and freedom and…” there was a very long pause as her words ran out, “everything else you say you’re fighting for, and this, that back there, that’s what you leave behind. Do you ever listen to them?”

  “I know the cost,” the man said.

  “And yet you keep on,” Isobel said. “I’m done with this, Raef. I don�
�t care if you go mad, I’m not doing it anymore.”

  “I have to see it through,” the man said.

  “And so will I.” There was a long silence. “It feels like the world has descended into hell. And it happened while we were right here, watching.”

  “It isn’t the worst I’ve seen,” the man said.

  “I worry about being married to the kind of man who could see what you’ve seen,” she said. Mandy pushed herself deeper into a shadow, desperately not wanting Isobel to notice her.

  “It never lasts forever,” the man said. “And then we’ll go find quiet again.”

  “Blast your quiet,” Isobel exploded. “And your hiding away. It isn’t good enough.”

  Isobel stormed past her, and there was a shift of cloth somewhere in front of Mandy. The man left.

  “Amanda,” Isobel called. “You can come out now.”

  Mandy stood and sheepishly entered the tent, the stench of rotting meat knocking her back. Isobel shook her head, looking around.

  “Barbarians. The Romans were better medics than this.”

  “Who are the Romans?” Mandy asked. Isobel grunted.

  “Let’s get to work.”

  Hours later, Isobel demanded quarters of her own, and helped Mandy move into the spare tent. It had belonged to a soldier who had died on the field. Even so, it was a luxury. Many of the men slept under the stars. Or the rainclouds, as the case were.

  “You’re stayin?” Mandy asked.

  “I am,” Isobel said. “I’ve been dismissed from the Union side.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “They don’t see that the fight is between the killers and the healers. They think I’m working on both sides of the line.”

  Mandy settled onto the ground, grateful for a space where no one was going to trip over her. Isobel pulled her waist-length black hair down and ran her fingers through it, then produced a brush from one of her pockets. Mandy felt her eyes get big as she watched Isobel brush and then braid her hair. Without a word, the woman came to sit behind Mandy and began to work the leather ties out of Mandy’s hair.

  “Why are you here?” Isobel asked.

  “I want to help,” Mandy said. She let her head jerk back as Isobel pulled at something.

  “Sorry,” Isobel muttered. “And no one comes into this hellpit because they want to be here. Who did you follow?”

  Mandy swallowed, her throat swelling at the memory.

  “Lionel,” she said.

  “How long has he been dead?” Isobel asked. Mandy dropped her head, looking at the blood under her fingernails. The stench of dead men lingered on her everywhere. She wanted a bath.

  “Six months.”

  The brush ripped through her hair, the sound of breaking strands filling Mandy’s ears for a moment. Isobel had a firm grip on her hair at the base of her neck, and she felt nothing. She waited.

  “How old are you?” Isobel asked.

  “Sixteen,” Mandy said, feeling the brush slide more easily through her hair. Isobel dropped her death grip and worked the brush up higher and closer to Mandy’s head now. It was like being baptized.

  “And where are your parents?”

  “Ma’s dead,” Mandy said. “Daddy’s in Savannah.”

  There were bad stories about Savannah. Bad.

  There was a longer silence as Isobel just sat and brushed Mandy’s hair, long even strokes, now, without tangles.

  “They don’t think about putting it all back together,” Isobel said. “Just tearing it apart.”

  Mandy didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t.

  “You should go,” Isobel said finally.

  “Where?” Mandy asked. She’d thought about it, no question. She didn’t want to see the ashes of Savannah, and she didn’t have anywhere else to go. A number of the soldiers had proposed to her, as they lay in their cots, bleeding out their life onto the dirt floor. She didn’t know what else to do, so she’d just kept turning up at the medical tent, after Lionel had died. It was something to do tomorrow. She didn’t have any plans, after that.

  “Anywhere,” Isobel said. “You tell me where you want to go, and I’ll see to it that you get there. Pick any place in the world.”

  “The world is a big place,” Mandy said. “And I don’t know much about it.”

  There was the sound of a smile that might have been a cry.

  “There are beautiful places in the world,” Isobel said. “Beautiful.”

  Mandy swallowed.

  “Savannah was beautiful.”

  Isobel paused, then continued brushing Mandy’s hair.

  “There’s no place you might want to go?”

  “Back,” Mandy said. “That’s all I want. To go back to before.”

  “I can do a lot of things,” Isobel said. “But I can’t do that.”

  Mandy had seen Isobel save men’s lives. But he had also heard the woman tell men that they would never see their wives or children again. They seemed grateful, Mandy thought. To be allowed to give up. Isobel would tell some to fight, but the ones she told to give up, they went quietly. She wondered if it wasn’t the best way. To have Isobel put her palm on your forehead and tell you that you didn’t have to fight any more.

  She found that she was crying.

  She sniffed and checked her hands for clean spots that she was willing to use to wipe her face. There was dirt and blood everywhere.

  Isobel resumed brushing her hair.

  “It won’t be forever,” the woman said. “And in the end, you will have survived it. You will be stronger than any woman you meet, and most men. And life will open up and the path will roll on before you. Don’t let it make you hard. Let it make you strong.”

  Mandy nodded.

  She was one of the ones who had to keep fighting.

  Isobel began the long process of tying Mandy’s hair back up.

  Adelaide

  Adelaide adjusted her hat and took another sip of her tea. The waitress paused by her table and Adelaide motioned her on with a casual wave of her hand. It was one of the best mornings they’d had in weeks, and she’d sent invitations to several friends to meet for lunch at their favorite cafe. The serving girl wasn’t the usual one, and Adelaide found her a touch annoying. What did the girl think, that she was here alone?

  Elaine was the first to join her a few minutes later, and they chatted about the recent engagement between one of their friends and a factory owner in Reading. Adelaide said that she didn’t know what Jane was thinking of, leaving the city like that, but Elaine insisted that the young man’s contacts were worth it.

  Claire was running late, as usual, and showed up with her hair disheveled under her nurse’s cap.

  “Did you get the promotion?” Adelaide asked with a raised eyebrow. Claire sighed, her chest falling with her shoulders.

  “They gave it to Glenna.”

  Adelaide tut-tutted over the hospital’s poor decision, secretly feeling a bit smug. Claire was one of the new women who thought that she could have a career and still find a man, and the sooner she learned that she had to pick one or the other, the better, as Adelaide saw it. Elaine was sympathetic. She might have meant it.

  Isobel was later still, but where Claire was late because she simply couldn’t keep her life in order, Isobel was late because one deserved to wait for Isobel. Adelaide envied her deeply pale skin and how exquisitely her dark hair emphasized it. Her hats were apropos, defiantly out-of-fashion, but worn on the way that only Isobel could wear them, making her a statement unto herself whenever she turned up.

  Adelaide hadn’t been sure she would come.

  They talked of various social notables, marriages, births, deaths. Scandals. Suddenly Isobel spun in her chair.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “Pardon?” the dapper man at the next table said, folding his newspaper into his lap.

  “I asked, what did you say?” Isobel repeated. The ladies were scandalized, laughing to each other as
Isobel turned further in her chair to face the man.

  “I just said that we all saw it coming,” he said.

  “Saw what coming?” Isobel asked. He held out his newspaper.

  “They started the invasion of France.”

  Isobel barely glanced at the paper before tossing it onto the table in front of her and stood.

  “Not again,” the woman muttered as she left.

  Aurélie

  Aurélie set the bundle of dynamite the way Bernard had shown her, finding the girder on the bridge that looked most like the one out at Bernard’s farm. The railway bridge was huge compared to the little cart path that crossed the stream at the farm, but she could see how the parts matched together.

  “Remember, Aurélie, the purpose is not to destroy the bridge. You must not do this. We want to prevent the trains from coming, not to prevent the trains from ever coming,” Bernard had said, his grizzled old finger wagging in the air as it often did.

  “Yes, yes,” she’d laughed at him, pulling up her socks again. She would take her bicycle across the countryside, an inconspicuous girl with her school satchel over her shoulder. She occasionally got stopped, but the Germans were mostly bored, looking for someone to talk to who would smile at them.

  Aurélie was good at smiling.

  People said she was pretty. Lots of boys had wanted her to talk to them, before the Germans came, and when she had gone to dances, she had never lacked a dance partner. And then the Germans had come and the boys had gone away to work camps far out in the country, and now the only boys who wanted to talk to her were in ugly green-brown uniforms. She made the best of it, smiling and talking to the German boys in their awkward, tentative French, pretending she spoke no German, and listening to their conversations that they thought she couldn’t understand.

  She was also a very good listener.

  Her uncle Pierre was part of the Resistance, and Aurélie had talked him into letting her help over the objections - the outright forbidding - from her mother Magdeleine.