by Hilary Green
Breathlessly Leo thanked her and stumbled away through the mud towards the far side of the camp. But here she met with no greater success than before. No one seemed to remember a family with a red-haired child or, if they did, they thought it better to pretend ignorance.
Then a young woman sitting in front of a tepee of branches suckling a baby called her over. ‘You’re looking for the Popovic family?’
‘Yes! Do you know them?’
‘They were living there,’ she indicated the collapsed remains of a hut. ‘But they moved on some time ago – must be a month or more.’
‘Do you know where they went?’
‘The father had a cousin in Skopje, I think. They were trying to get there.’
‘In Skopje?’ Leo struggled to order her thoughts. At last, in this most unexpected place, she had found a definite lead. But if the Popovics were in Skopje, how could she hope to trace them, in a city that size? At least it was confirmation that they had survived until a month ago, and that her daughter was still alive – if indeed this child was her daughter. ‘And they had a little girl with them – a child with hair the same colour as mine?’
The woman regarded her curiously. ‘Yes, now you come to mention it. Why are you looking for them?’
Leo squatted on the ground beside her, suddenly overcome. ‘If it is the family I am looking for, then the child is mine. She was given to them to care for because I was too ill to look after her myself, and I’ve been searching for her ever since.’
The tears which she had been suppressing for many long days filled her eyes and overflowed down her cheeks and the other woman reached out and laid a hand on her arm. ‘These are terrible times. We all know what it is like to lose a child. My eldest son was killed when a shell hit our home. And now this little one is sick and I do not know what to do for him.’
Leo raised her head and rubbed her hand across her cheek. ‘Let me see? I am a nurse. I may be able to help.’
It was obvious at a glance that the child was severely malnourished. ‘You are feeding him yourself?’
The woman sighed. ‘I try. But I have hardly any milk. There is no food to be had anywhere.’
‘No food? But there is food in the shops in town. I saw it myself.’
‘Oh, for the locals, yes. But they won’t sell it to us. They say they have only enough for themselves – and anyway, they don’t want us here. I think they hope that if they starve us we will go away.’
Leo hauled herself to her feet. ‘That is criminal! It’s unforgivable and it has got to be stopped.’
She looked down at the woman, feeling a sudden excess of new energy. ‘Don’t worry. I am going to get this put right. You and your child shall be fed – and the rest of the people here, too.’
The woman caught the hem of her skirt. ‘Bless you! But can you do this? Can you really help?’
Leo nodded grimly. ‘Oh, yes. I’ve learned from experience that there are always ways of making people understand what their duty is. I shall be back before evening, I promise.’
As she turned away the woman clutched her skirt again. ‘The family you are looking for – the man said his cousin was a blacksmith. Perhaps that might help you to find them.’
As she strode back through the camp Leo became aware for the first time of the signs of malnutrition and disease among the many children who grovelled in the mud or stood listlessly gazing as she passed. She collected her horse and rode back to the hospital as fast as she could. There, she went straight to the small room Leseaux had taken over for an office. Half an hour later she and the doctor confronted a very flustered mayor, and when he tried to make excuses Leseaux suggested smoothly that perhaps General Miscic, who had set up a temporary headquarters a few miles further on, should be informed of the problem. He was sure that the general would be very distressed by the thought that Serbs were treating their fellow countrymen so heartlessly. As the sun began to dip towards the horizon, Leo led a small cavalcade into the refugee camp. Behind her came a wagon filled with provisions ‘donated’ by shop keepers in the town and a group of nurses equipped with medicines and inoculations for typhoid and smallpox. They set up a small tent and before long a queue of mothers carrying or dragging small children had formed in front of it. Leo herself headed straight for the tepee where she had met the woman who had given her the first news of her daughter. She carried a flask of milk, a loaf of bread, a sausage and two apples.
‘It’s not much but it will strengthen you, and from now on you should be able to buy food in the town. Do you have money?’
‘Very little.’
Leo reached into her pocket and handed over a purse. The woman tried to refuse it but Leo pressed it into her hand.
‘Believe me, you have given me hope when I had almost given up. That is worth far more than the money in this purse.’
It was dark by the time they were able to pack up their equipment and head back to the hospital. It comforted Leo to think that they had undoubtedly saved lives here, but along with that thought came the recognition that there must be hundreds of other women and children in similar conditions all over the country. In the face of that fact her own single-minded quest for her daughter seemed selfish.
The following day, September the twenty-eighth, news came that the Spahis, the French-Moroccan cavalry, had stormed into Skopje and driven out the occupying German troops.
The field hospital followed a day later and set up camp on the outskirts of the town. The fighting was over for the moment but they still had plenty of patients: men who had walked and fought for days and nights until they collapsed from exhaustion or the effect of untreated wounds; and, increasingly, those who had succumbed to flu. As soon as she felt she could be spared, Leo went to Pierre Leseaux and told him what she had learned in Tetovo. He immediately insisted that she should take all the time she needed to follow up this lead.
‘A truck is going into Skopje to collect supplies in half an hour. You can get a lift on that. God grant that this time you may be lucky!’
Once there she began, as usual, at the town hall, where she found a scene of chaos as a throng of people besieged the officials, demanding ration cards or attempting to trace friends and relatives. After a long wait she persuaded a harassed clerk to let her see the register of local residents. There were a number of Popovics but the list also gave details of their occupations, and a short way through it she gave a cry of triumph. There was a Popovic whose trade was given as a blacksmith. She scanned the rest of the list in case there was more than one but found no one else. This, surely, must be the cousin with whom the family she was looking for had hoped to take refuge!
The address given was in a suburb on the far side of the city and Leo’s first flush of excitement was dampened by the realization that getting there was not going to be easy. The retreating Germans had blown up the bridge over the River Vardar, making travel around the city extremely difficult. She had no vehicle of her own and in the general chaos public transport had pretty well ceased to operate. Requests for a taxi or a hire car were met with ironic laughter and shaken heads. After many enquiries and a long wait she managed to squeeze on to one of the few buses that were running, which took her to within two miles of her destination, but from there she had no option but to walk. Normally she would have thought nothing of it but that morning she had woken with a headache and the beginnings of a sore throat. She had pushed the sensation to the back of her mind but now, as she trudged along the unfamiliar street, she became aware that she was running a fever. It was not an unfamiliar sensation. From her early experiences in Adrianople, through the cold and wet of Lamarck, the FANY hospital in Calais, and on to Kragujevac, where she had worked under Mabel Stobart in the early years of the war, she had grown used, like all the nurses, to working with a minor infection of some sort. Normally she could shrug it off, but today she found herself tiring much more quickly and all her muscles began to ache.
She reached the place at last and was greeted by the sou
nds and smells that were familiar to her from any army camp or from her own home village of Bramwell: the hiss of hot metal being quenched in water; the ring of hammer on anvil and the smell of scorching hoof. She skirted the blacksmith’s yard and walked up to the door of the small house beside it. Her heart was pounding. In her imagination she saw the door being opened by a rosy-cheeked woman with a small, red-headed child clinging to her skirts. She did not doubt for one moment that she would recognize her instantly.
The door was opened, not by a woman, but by a scrawny boy with a pinched, suspicious face.
Leo had to make an effort to collect her thoughts. ‘Good day. I’m looking for a Mrs Popovic, but not the lady who lives here. Do you have some relations from Lavci staying with you?’
The boy stared at her for a moment, then backed away and disappeared through a door at the rear of the house. Leo heard voices and then the door reopened and a woman came towards her. She was not the full-breasted, motherly figure of her imagination, but thin and grey-haired with a worn, lined face.
‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want?’
‘My name is Leonora Malham Brown.’
It was clear that the name meant nothing but Leo had the impression that the women was uncomfortable about something. She seemed to find it difficult to look Leo straight in the face, gazing either beyond her or down to the floor.
Leo went on: ‘Am I right in thinking that you and your family are refugees from Lavci?’
In answer the woman shrugged and nodded, wordlessly implying the question, ‘What business is it of yours?’
‘Before you left there, a year ago last January, you agreed to take care of a baby girl. There was a battle going on. The mother had come to the village and gave birth prematurely but she was too ill to care for the child so she was given to you to nurse. That is right, isn’t it?’
The woman’s eyes flicked from left to right. ‘Yes, I took the child in. The Serbian captain begged me. I couldn’t let it die.’
‘Of course not!’ Leo said warmly. ‘And it was a wonderful thing you did.’ She hesitated, unable to think how to explain herself in the face of this blank defensiveness. ‘Please, what is your first name?’
‘Yelena. Why?’
‘Yelena, I am the women who gave birth to that child. I am her mother, and I have been looking for her ever since. Please!’ She reached out and seized the woman’s care-roughened hands. ‘Please, can I see her?’
The hands were pulled away and wrapped in the woman’s apron, as if they might betray some secret. ‘She’s not here.’
‘Not here?’ After the peak of expectation Leo could hardly take in the words. ‘Do you mean she is out somewhere – playing perhaps?’
‘No. She’s not here any more.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Then an idea came to her, a possibility that gave a gleam of hope. Of course, Yelena Popovic had come to care for the child, to regard her perhaps as her own daughter. Probably she had been dreading just such a day as this. She stretched out her hand again. ‘Yelena, I think I understand how you feel. You have children of your own, don’t you?’
‘Three.’
‘And I know how you must love them. Alexandra is my only child. My . . . my husband was killed at Lavci. I have nothing, no one else. Please, let me have my daughter! I have come all the way from England to find her.’
Yelena stepped back. ‘You are English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you are not the child’s mother. She is the daughter of a great Serbian nobleman, a count.’
‘Yes, Count Alexander Malkovic – but he is dead.’
‘Alexandra has gone to be with her family. A man came to collect her.’
‘What do you mean? What man?’
‘He said his name was Slobodan and he had been sent by the Malkovic family to find the child. He has taken her to them.’
‘When? When was this?’
‘Not long ago. Eight, ten days.’
Leo felt her legs give way under her. She sagged against the doorpost, almost unable to breathe. ‘You have given my child away to a stranger? God knows what he may have done with her! What proof did he give you that he came from the Malkovic family?’
‘The child had a locket, left with her by the doctor who brought her into the world.’
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘The man was able to tell me what was inscribed inside it, so I knew he must be genuine.’
‘But I am her mother!’ Leo was sobbing now. ‘She belongs to me, not to them! Where has he taken her? Where?’
Yelena Popovic shrugged. ‘Belgrade, I suppose. That’s what he said. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. Alexandra has gone to live with her real family. You will have to speak to them.’
‘But how can I? Belgrade is still in enemy hands . . .’ Her words were cut short by the slam of the door.
For a long time Leo stood propped against the doorpost, tears running down her face. Men passing by threw her curious looks and one muttered something about ‘got her in the family way and then chucked her out, I shouldn’t wonder’. Slowly she regained control and began to think. If the man knew what was inscribed in the locket, the family motto of the Malkovics, then he must have come from them, and the only person who could have sent him was Eudoxie, Sasha’s wife. Somehow she must have heard about Alexandra’s birth. That was not so surprising. Plenty of people had been around at the time and gossip had probably reached Eudoxie in Athens. Leo wondered what had happened to the new will he had mentioned in his last letter, in which he repudiated his marriage and declared her child as his heir. If that had been destroyed was it possible that Eudoxie might be prepared to pass Alexandra off as her own? She offered, after all, the only possible way of continuing the Malkovic line and much would depend on that in terms of money and land, once the occupying Bulgarians had been driven out. The child could have been born during her time of exile in Athens. No one would be any the wiser.
With an effort Leo straightened up and began the long walk back. The situation was becoming clear: Eudoxie had heard about the birth, and presumably been told the name of the foster mother, and she had sent out men to search, just as Leo herself had been searching. The bitter fact was that one of them had reached his target just before her own arrival. There was only one course of action open now. She must wait until Belgrade itself had fallen and the Bulgarians had finally been ousted. Then she would go to the Malkovic home and demand her child. The threat of a scandal should be enough to ensure her victory.
A chill wind was coming off the mountains and Leo found she was shivering. By the time she reached the bus stop the shivering had become convulsive, her head was burning and she felt faint. Mercifully a bus appeared quite quickly, but that only took her to the city centre. She still had to get back to the place where the hospital had set up camp. Only half aware of what she was doing she began to plod in that direction. A wave of dizziness swept over her and she caught at a lamppost for support. Then, somehow, she was sitting on the cold ground and darkness was closing in around her.
Nineteen
Leo regained partial consciousness to the sensation of being lifted and moved but then she lapsed back into oblivion. After that she was only aware of alternately burning with fever and shivering, of the unending ache in all her muscles and the pain in her head. Arms lifted her, cups were held to her lips, her face and neck were bathed with cool water but she hardly knew where she was or how she had got there. Then, one morning, she woke with the instinctive knowledge that the fever had left her. She was weak, so weak that she could hardly lift her head off the pillow, but the pain and the burning had gone. Gazing up at the ceiling she realized that she was no longer in one of the tented wards of the field hospital. She was in a private cubicle, but from the sounds she could hear from beyond the walls she guessed that it was part of a larger ward. She tried to remember what had happened just before she collapsed, but her last clear recollection was of hearing the triumphant news
that Skopje had fallen.
It was a relief when the door opened to see a face she recognized. It was a young Irish nurse called Jeannie.
‘God be praised, you’re awake!’ the girl exclaimed. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Death warmed up – but only slightly.’ Leo’s mouth seemed reluctant to obey her and the words came out slurred.
‘Well, that’s not surprising. Let’s see if we can make you more comfortable. Then I’ll call Doctor Pierre. He’ll be mightily relieved to hear you’re on the mend. To be sure, there have been times in the last day or two when we thought we were going to lose you altogether.’
Leseaux came hurrying in soon afterwards. He looked at the chart at the end of her bed, felt her forehead and took her pulse and nodded. ‘So, we are over the worst – or let us hope so. You have given us some very anxious moments, ma petite. But what happened? One of our drivers found you collapsed at the side of the road. Did you find the little one?’
‘The little one?’ Leo queried. Something was stirring in her memory but her brain seemed to be full of fog.
‘Your daughter. You went to find her. Do you remember?’
It came back to her then, with the force of a physical blow, so that she whimpered with the pain of it. Leseaux took her hand in his. ‘Ma chère Leo! Forgive me. I did not mean to distress you. Can you tell me what happened?’
‘Not there,’ Leo mumbled. ‘Taken away. A man took her away.’
‘A man? What man?’
‘I don’t know. She said . . . the woman said he was taking her back to her family.’
She jerked up in the bed, so that Leseaux laid his hand on her shoulder to press her back, murmuring, ‘Rest, rest. You must try to be still.’
‘Belgrade!’ Leo said. ‘He has taken her to Belgrade. I have to go there!’
‘You must be patient. You are far too weak to go anywhere and anyway our forces have not yet reached Belgrade. It will not be long but you must wait for a while yet.’
The recollection of the wider conflict came back to her. ‘The war! How is it going? Have we got the Bulgars on the run?’