HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADIAN MARITIMES
January 1918
Freddie’s clothes came to VeithStreet instead of Blackthorn House, and the telegram that ought to have preceded them didn’t reach Laura at all. She wasn’t surprised. Nothing had worked properly, not since December.
December 6, to be exact. In the morning. When theMont Blanchad steamed into Halifax Harbour, oil on deck and high explosive in her hold. She’d struck a freighter, they said, and the oil caught fire. Harbor crews were trying to put it out when the flames found the nitroglycerine.
At least that was how rumor had it. “No, I don’t doubt it’s true,” Laura told her patients when they asked, as though she would know. As if, after three years as a combat nurse, she’d learned about high explosive from the things it wrote on people’s skin. “Didn’t you see the fireball?”
They all had. Her father had been in one of the boats trying to drown the blaze. Halifax afterward looked as if God had raised a giant burning boot and stamped. Fresh graves in Fairview sat snug beside five-year-old headstones from theTitanic,and the village of the Mi’kmaq had vanished.
And the post was a disaster. That was why she’d not heard from Freddie. He was her brother, he was a soldier; of course a backlog of his letters was lost in a sack somewhere. She had no time to think of it. She had too much to do. The first makeshift hospital had been scraped together in a YMCA the day after the explosion. The snow was bucketing down and Halifax was still on fire. Laura had walked past the uncollected dead. Shut their eyes when she could reach them, laid a hand once on a small bare foot. Three years of active service, and she was familiar with the dead.
Familiar too with the sight of an overrun triage station, although it was her first time to be met not with soldiers, but with parents clutching their burnt children. Laura had taken off her coat, washed her hands, reassured the nearest wild-eyed mother. Had a word with the overwhelmed civilian doctor and set about organizing the chaos.
That was a month ago—or was it six weeks? Time had stretched, as it did when wounded poured in during a battle, reduced not to minutes or hours, but to the pulse and the breath of whoever was under her hands. She slept standing up, and told herself that she was too busy to wonder why Freddie didn’t write.
“That damned virago,” muttered one doctor, half-annoyed, half-admiring. The Barrington hospital was full of willing hands. The Americans, blessedly, had piled a train full of all the gauze, disinfectants, and surgeons in Boston and sent it north. It was January by then, with snowdrifts head-high outside. The gymnasium had been turned into a hospital ward, sensibly laid out, ruthlessly organized, competently staffed. Laura was doing rounds, bent over a bed.
“That harpy,” agreed his fellow. “But she’s forgotten more about dressings than you’ll ever know. She was in the nursing service, you know. Caught a shell over in France somewhere.”
It was Belgium, actually.
“Caught a shell? A nurse, really? What did she do? Dress as a man and creep up the line?”
The first doctor didn’t take the bait. “No—I heard they shelled the forward hospitals.”
A startled pause. Then— “Barbaric,” said the second doctorweakly. Laura kept on taking temperatures. Both doctors stopped talking, perhaps contemplating trying to practice medicine under fire.
“Lord,” the second doctor said finally. “Think all the girls who went to war will come back like that? Cut up, incorrigible?”
A laugh and a shudder. “Christ, I hope not.”
Laura straightened up, smiling, and they both blanched. “Doctor,” she said, and felt the subterranean amusement in her watching patients. She was one of them, after all, born by the harbor, before the world caught fire.
The doctors stammered something; she turned away again.Virago indeed. A fanged wind was tearing white foam off the bay, and her next patient was a blistered little boy. The child wept as she peeled off his dressings.
“Hush,” said Laura. “It’ll only hurt for a moment, and if you’re crying how can I tell you about the purple horse?”
The little boy scowled at her through his tears. “Horses aren’t purple.”
“There was one.” Laura snipped away stained gauze. “I saw it with my own eyes. In France. Naturally, the horse didn’t start out purple. It was white. A beautiful white horse that belonged to a doctor. But the doctor was afraid that someone would see his white horse on a dark night and shoot him. Turn that way. He wanted a horse that would be hard to see at night. So he went to a witch—”
A lurch. “There aren’t witches in France!”
“Of course there are. Bestill.Don’t you remember your fairy tales?” Freddie loved them.
“Well, the witches haven’tstayedin France,” the child informed her, in a voice that quivered. “With a war on.”
“Maybe witches like the war. They can do what they like with everyone busy fighting. Now, do you want to hear about the purple horse or not? Turn back.”
“Yes,” said the little boy. He was looking up at her now, wide-eyed.
“All right. Well, the witch gave the doctor a magic spell to make the horse dark. But when the doctor tried it—poof!Purple as a hyacinth.”
The child was finally distracted. “Was it a magic horse?” he demanded. “After it turned purple?”
Laura was tying off the bandages. The child’s tears had dried. “Yes, of course. It could gallop from Paris to Peking in an hour. The doctor went straight to Berlin and pulled the kaiser’s nose.”
