by Leda Swann
With just a few words written to a stranger, she had reminded him of everything that was good about England, everything that he had joined the army to serve and protect. He hoped his own letters would touch her heart in the same way as hers had touched his.
Truly, his Beatrice was a sweetheart. He did not know what he had done to deserve such kindness, but he would not quibble with his good fortune. With a simple letter out of the blue, she had won his heart. Absolutely and irrevocably.
He struck a match and lit a lantern, then took up his pen. He would answer her right away, and let her know how much she meant to him. He might have lost his heart to her, but he would win hers in return. He would make her as in love with him as he was with her.
She was an angel.
She was his angel.
Three
Bronkhorstspruit, Transvaal, April 1880
Dear Miss Clemens:
What a wonderful surprise to receive your letter of March, and so grand to read of the spring at home. I can smell the clean refreshing air from here! I did not find your letter too forward, as I already feel I know you remarkably well from Teddy incessantly talking about his sisters back home.
You should know that Teddy is a fine batsman, and a true gentleman when finally he is caught out—even on the rare occasions when he’s out for a duck. Unbelievingly our cricket is played on the dustiest of wickets under a harsh dry sun. Not a blade of green grass is to be had, and the flies are most bothersome!
Aside from the monotonous food (our cook has little idea of how to prepare a meal beyond boiling a mound of potatoes in a large pot), the heat beating down on us in our red woolen jackets, and the boredom of marching to and fro with no enemy to engage, our life here is not too bad. The worst we have to complain of is the dullness and lack of society. We are all looking forward to the end of our tour of duty and returning to the green shores of England, and most of all to our family and friends.
How wonderful it is that you are a nurse at the esteemed St. Thomas’s. You must have a heart of gold to care for the sick and injured. I know of several soldiers who have had their wounds treated at your hospital, and to a man they have the highest regard for the nurses who treat them so well. With love, even.
Your letter touched my heart. Please, write to me again. Until I hear from you once more, every minute will seem like an hour.
Yours in eternal gratitude,
Percival Carterton
P.S. If I were to be so unlucky as to one day be injured, then I should want to have you to tend to my wounds, as I imagine you are as kind and softly spoken as you are beautiful. If you have the inclination, I would be honored if you would include a photograph of yourself in your next letter, so that I may kiss your sweet lips a thousand times a day. I would keep it close to my heart as a remedy against bullets. An image of your beautiful face would surely protect me against a hoard of Boers and their rifles, be they ever such fine marksmen.
Beatrice sat in the communal parlor of her lodging house, letter in hand, surrounded by a gaggle of the other nurses who boarded there. Even the matron of the lodging house, Mrs. Bettina, who could be quite severe and stern when she thought her charges were being too flighty, sat forward in her chair, listening to her read.
“‘…your letter touched my heart. Please, write to me again.
‘Yours in eternal gratitude,
‘Percival Carterton’”
As she drew to a close, one of the girls sighed happily. “He sounds so dreamy. I would love to have a soldier for a sweetheart.”
“He is not my sweetheart,” Beatrice protested, with some alarm. “I have never met him. I only wrote to him because Teddy said he never got any letters from home and seemed rather blue. You know I am walking out with Dr. Hyde.”
Maybe it had been a mistake to read the letter out to her fellow lodgers, even though she had judiciously expurgated it as she went. She didn’t want anyone to get the wrong impression, or to read more into their exchange of letters than it merited. She was merely consoling a lonely soldier with a few idle words, and pretending that her letters could make a difference.
“You have all the luck,” Lenora said, her voice tinged with envy. “I wish Dr. Hyde had chosen me to go out walking with.” She reached for another piece of shortbread and took a contemplative munch. “But with hair the color of mine, and a bottom the size of an omnibus, it’s no wonder he chose you instead.”
“You have a perfectly normal-sized bottom,” Beatrice protested, elbowing her friend in the ribs. Though Lenora had generous curves, she had a small waist—a perfect hourglass figure. The lumpish uniform they had to wear at the hospital hid the finer points of her figure, but then it hid everyone else’s, too.
Lenora pulled a face. “Yes, for an omnibus,” she muttered through a mouthful of shortbread. “Dr. Hyde clearly thinks so.”
“Hang Dr. Hyde—he’s a dry stick,” said another. “I wish I could write to your soldier, too, and get such a letter back. There’s nothing quite like a redcoat to make a girl happy.”
Even the matron looked a little misty-eyed. “Our poor young men. They are sent over to foreign countries to protect us and our way of life, and expected to live there without any of the comforts of civilization. How they must miss their friends and family back home.”
By now Beatrice had tucked the letter safely away in her pocket. “Teddy says that some of them don’t have any family at all. Or none that care enough about them to send them letters or to knit them new socks when their old ones wear out and the army has none to give them.”
“It’s a crying shame, the way they are treated.”
“They shouldn’t send our boys to war if they can’t look after them properly.”
“Then we should be their family,” the matron said firmly. “We should write to them and let them know they have not been forgotten, even though they are far from home. If the army has no socks for them, we shall knit them. I am sure they will be grateful for the attention.”
The girls all perked up at this suggestion and a mutter of approbation ran through the group.
The red-haired Lenora gave a rare smile that lit up her face as if a gaslight had been turned on behind her eyes. The radiance made her look almost pretty. “My uncle is a hosier. He will give us wool at a good price if we explain it is for the soldiers. He fought in the Crimean War when he was younger.”
Her suggestion had the ideas flowing thick and fast.
“I have heard that their rations are poor. Maybe if we asked people for donations we could send them some tinned food as well as knitted socks.”
“We can do a collection around the hospital.”
“One of my relations imports tea and coffee. We could ask him to give us some coffee.”
“But how will we know where to send our letters and parcels?” one of them cried.
Beatrice smiled at their enthusiasm. Who would have thought her sudden impulse to write a letter to a lonely soldier would have led to all this? “I will ask Teddy, and he will tell me.”
Later that evening, Beatrice sat in her bedroom and smoothed the letter out on her lap. She had not been entirely open with her friends. Captain Carterton had written a postscript that she had not shared with them—it had been altogether too personal to read out in company.
Reading his words again caused a tingling in her limbs that she didn’t altogether like. She was sure it wasn’t the sort of feeling that a well-bred woman ought to have.
Dr. Hyde would never say anything so personal to her—more’s the pity. Though she had gone out walking with him for some weeks now, he had always been scrupulously polite and had never so much as kissed her glove. He was a bit of a dry old stick, she supposed, but he was at least a gentleman and he treated her with great courtesy. He had no bad habits that she knew of, but was spoken of by everyone as a respectable person.
Besides, she had to admire a man who made it his life’s work to heal the sick and discover the nature of disease. He was not o
nly respectable—he was a good man.
Captain Carterton, for all that he was Teddy’s friend and captain, did not seem like such an estimable man as Dr. Hyde indubitably was. What kind of a man would write such words to a woman he had never met? They were almost the words that a lover would write to his sweetheart.
Men like the captain were two a penny—they would court a girl passionately for a few weeks, and then throw her over without so much as a by-your-leave. They were fly-by-nights, will-o’-the-wisps, as insubstantial as dandelion seeds.
As a nurse, she’d seen firsthand the damage that such passionate courtship could do to a foolish young woman. She was too canny to be caught in such a trap—no husband and a baby on the way.
Still, she could not resist reading through the postscript again, and the tingling intensified. Teddy would surely not be happy if he knew what his captain had written to her. Mrs. Bettina would be terribly shocked. And as for Dr. Hyde? He would doubtless think twice about his invitations to walk out with him were he to know of it. Dr. Hyde was a respectable man, and the man she was planning to build a future with. It was folly even to think of writing back to the captain and giving him any encouragement.
Of course, no one but Captain Carterton himself need ever know. If she were to write to him and ask him to keep her letters private, he would surely heed her request. He was an officer and a gentleman—not some common riffraff of an enlisted man pulled out of the gutters of Manchester or York to be enrolled as a simple foot soldier.
Besides, he was far away in South Africa, and with the Boers on the brink of declaring war, his regiment would not be posted back to England any time soon. What harm was there in keeping a lonely soldier happy, and giving him something to look forward to on the long, cold nights on the high veld?
A thrill of the forbidden ran through her.
He could be her secret fantasy, her foray into tabooed territory. She could write back to him as warmly as she dared—as naughtily as her mind could devise—and Dr. Hyde need never find out.
With that comforting thought, she unscrewed the top from her bottle of ink, and began to write.
She hesitated for a long moment after she had signed her name to the bottom of the page. Then, quickly, before she could change her mind, she scrawled a postscript.
There, it was done. If he did not reply to her letter, she would refuse to be disappointed. That would show he was only a man made of flesh and blood, and not worthy of her dreams.
But she hoped her fantasy man was up to the challenge.
Sergeant-Major Tofts rolled out of his army cot, his every joint creaking in protest. Though he had spent his life in the army, he was starting to wonder if he was getting too old for it now. His poor bones weren’t the same as they used to be. Even just getting himself up in the morning was getting more difficult. Sometimes he felt that he would trade in his whole kit for a week’s sleep on a soft feather bed.
But if he were to leave the army, what then? He had no family, no home to go to. He knew nothing else, had learned no other trade to keep him from starvation. No, it would be his fate to wear his uniform on his back until the day he died, leaving a small sum in the four percents to his second cousin. Few would even notice his passing, and fewer still would mourn.
It was a depressing thought for such a fine morning. He gave himself a mental shake as he fetched a bowl of cold water and shaved the stubble from his cheeks. He had a job to do, and the lives of his men might well depend on how well he did it. The army had no time for malingerers. He wouldn’t tolerate it in his men, and he wouldn’t tolerate it in himself.
A few minutes later he was sitting at the mess table with his men, shoveling food into his mouth. A shipment from England had just arrived and the men who had received letters or parcels from home were in high spirits. Their jocularity infected the whole table, and though he grumbled at them to keep the noise down, everyone knew they were good-natured grumbles and no one took any notice of him.
He was sipping the last of his coffee when Private Willis wandered over to him and tossed him a small packet. “Letter for you, Sir,” he said, as he wandered off again.
Sergeant-Major Tofts almost dropped it in his surprise. Who would be writing to him? He looked at the address on the envelope, but it was not one he recognized. Carefully, as though it might blow up in his face if he mishandled it, he opened the envelope. Experience had taught him that good news didn’t generally come in unsolicited messages.
The paper wasn’t edged with black. That was a relief—it wasn’t a note to inform him that any of his friends or relatives had died. But the handwriting wasn’t familiar and when he scanned the signature, he didn’t recognize that, either. With a growing sense of curiosity, he began to read.
My dear Sergeant-Major,
You are no doubt surprised to receive this letter and little parcel out of the blue, but there is a small group of ladies here in England who would like our boys abroad to know they are not forgotten.
One of our number knows another in your regiment, who provided us with the names of men in his company so that we might write to them. I chose you to correspond with as we are in similar positions, although I would not presume to consider mine is as fraught as yours.
My name is Mrs. Bettina, and I am the matron of a boardinghouse near Westminster, London. Like you I consider myself to be responsible for the welfare of my charges, as well as the running of disciplined operations. My poor husband, George, passed away from consumption quite some number of years ago, leaving me to run our boardinghouse alone.
Although there is no one to share my cold bed at night I am lucky to have my ladies to keep me company, and so I am not lonely. There is always a multitude to do, from keeping the accounts to purchasing food from the markets. From dawn to dusk my life is busy and full, it is only in the quiet of the night that I find myself alone.
George used to love to wear the warm woolen socks that I became an expert at knitting. I found I have not lost the skill over the years, and so it was my pleasure to once more take up my needles and make for you the enclosed small token of my regard for our men such as yourself who serve Queen and Country across the reaches of the Empire. I do so hope you find them to your size and liking.
I’m afraid I know little of your conditions there, my imagination is full of exotic birds, large carnivores, and giant spiders. If there is one thing I abhor, it is spiders. I know from books there can be sand as far as the eye can see, and I profess I find that hard to imagine. A sea of sand! What that must be like!
My dear George used to shoot at ducks and quail with a shotgun and hated getting sand in the moving parts, so I daren’t think what it must be like for you living in a sandy environment and trying to keep your rifle clean.
I fear I have prattled on far too much. It would be wonderful if you could spare some time and write a few lines in reply.
Yours,
Mrs. N. Bettina
When he had finished, he folded the letter again and put it in his pocket. So, the women of England thought about the soldiers abroad, did they, and cared for their comfort and wellbeing? It came as a surprise that he cared so much to know.
He’d like to meet the woman who had written to him so kindly. Her letter had struck a chord in his soul.
He’d never been much of a man for book learning, but he could read and write tolerably well. Well enough not to disgrace himself anyway.
He rose from the mess table with barely a grimace of pain at his still-stiff joints. Come this evening he would borrow a pen and paper from one of the officers and write her a reply.
Captain Carterton pushed aside his breakfast of deviled kidneys and snatched the letter from the silver tray with indecent haste. Leaving his unappetizing meal to congeal in its fatty gravy, he slit open the letter with his breakfast knife.
“Business calls,” he barked at his fellow officers as he left the mess hall and made his way back to his tent to read Beatrice’s words in peace.
Westminster, London, May 1880
Dear Percy,
How wonderful to receive your reply. I was in the middle of my shift when my landlady arrived at the hospital with the welcome news there was a letter from South Africa waiting for me at home. It was torture to have to wait until I had finished my duties, whereupon I ran home as quickly as I was able and immediately retired to the privacy of my room to open the envelope and savor the words you had written. I sat on the edge of my bed and carefully unfolded your pages. I can but scarcely imagine the conditions under which you put pen to paper, and yet your penmanship is impeccable!
I laughed at your description of Teddy and his batting ability, I am sure you are exaggerating his abilities. My memories of us children playing cricket are that he would always be out on the first or second ball and then leave the game in a terrible huff. He found it severely demoralizing to be beaten by his elder sisters, even though we were twice his size.
I do so hope you are never injured in battle, please do not even think such things. I have seen the beautiful bodies of young men scarred and disfigured by bullet and bayonet, and these are relatively simple wounds suffered during accidents in training exercises. I shudder to think of what happens to an untreated wound without proper care and attention.
The poor wretches I have helped to heal are laid out under the ether, their naked bodies exposed while the surgeons repair their injuries. I do so hope that I never see your body in this state.
Please do not think of me as an improper woman, talking of such matters, but I am a nurse, trained to heal. The male body is one of God’s most beautiful creations, and it is so sad to see it broken.
Thinking of you,
Beatrice