The child smiled at last. “I’d like a magic horse. I’d gallop away and find Elsie.”
Elsie was his sister. They’d been walking to school together when the ship blew up. Laura didn’t reply, but smoothed the matted, tow-colored hair and got up. Her brother’s real name was Wilfred, but hardly anyone remembered. He’d been Freddie from infancy. He was serving overseas.
He still hadn’t written back.
“Purple horse?” inquired the doctor-in-charge, passing. Unlike his civilian colleagues, he’d been behind the lines of the Somme in ’16. He and Laura understood each other. They walked off together down the aisle between beds.
“Yes,” said Laura, smiling. “It was early days. Some fool with the RAMC, straight from England. He was assigned the horse, white as you please, got windup about snipers. Tried aniline dye, the poor beast wound up violet.”
The doctor laughed. Laura shook her head and consulted her endless mental checklist. But before she could set off, the three-month-old gash in her leg betrayed her. A cramp buckled her knee, and the doctor caught her by the elbow. Her leg was the reason she was in Halifax, discharged from the medical corps. A bit of shell casing, deep in the muscle. They’d got it out, but almost taken the limb with it. She’d been evacuated on a hospital train.
“Damn,” she said.
“All right, Iven?” said the doctor.
“Just a cramp,” said Laura, trying to shake it loose.
The doctor eyed her. “Iven, you’re a wretched color. When did you come on shift?”
“Flattery, Doctor?” she said. “I’m cultivating a modish pallor.” She didn’t quite remember.
He looked her over, shook his head. “Go home. Or you’ll be in bed with pneumonia. We can manage for twelve hours. Unless youwantto go sprawling while holding syringes?”
“I haven’t gone sprawling yet,” she said. “And I still have dressings to—”
She could browbeat most of the staff, but not this one. “I’ll do it. You are not the only person in Halifax who can dress burns, Sister.”
She met his adamant eye, then gave in, threw him a mock salute, and went to take off her apron.
“And eat something!” the doctor called to her retreating back.
· · ·
The wind struck her in the teeth when she went outside, dried her chapped lips. She pulled her cap closer round her ears. Clouds massed, lividly purple, over the water. She longed to go straight home and drink something hot. But she’d got off early. There was time to go to Veith Street. She hadn’t been there since the explosion.
The wind rippled her skirt, made her nose ache. The task would not improve with keeping. She set off, limping. To her right, the Atlantic heaved under a field gray sky. To her left, the city sloped gently upward, blackened and torn by fire.
Laura Iven was sharp-faced and amber-eyed, her jaw angled, her mouth sweet, her glance satirical, a little sad. She wore a pale blue Red Cross uniform under a shabby wool coat. A knit cap, defiantly scarlet, hid tawny hair chopped short. She walked with the ghost of a brisk, supple stride, marred by the new limp.
The wind cried in broken steeples and sent eddies of blackened snow swirling round her boots. Boats in the icy harbor snubbed their mooring lines; no ship could dock at the burnt piers. The cold crept in off the water, reached dank fingers under her cap and down the collar of her coat. A lorry backfired from the opposite curb.
For a moment, she was back in Flanders. She jolted instinctively into the cover of a charred wall. One foot slid on the snow; her bad leg couldn’t steady her. Only the wall saved her from goingfacedown. She got her balance, swearing colorfully, if silently, in the cant of soldiers from five nations.
The lorry rumbled past, puffing petrol. No explosion could keep Halifax down for long. The city lay at the world’s crossroads. She’d never seen it silenced, except that one day. Perhaps her mother, who believed in prophecies, would have found a quotation for that howling quiet that came after the flash, and the rippling flat-topped cloud. She’d have whispered the Dies Irae maybe—Day of Wrath—even though Laura’s parents were not so much Catholic as strange.
But she couldn’t ask her parents. Her father had been on the water when theMont Blancexploded. Her mother had been at home, watching the ship burn from a front window. When it detonated, all the glass flew inward.
Laura kept walking. A flaw in the wind brought her a voice from the bay as though it spoke into her ear:Come on, you fucking bastard. She glanced out into the fairway, saw a tug fending off a freighter, everyone shouting. She kept on. Imagined sitting down to supper. A chicken, maybe, or buttered potatoes. Tried to conjure it clearly, but it slipped away. The war had fractured her concentration.
· · ·
Their old neighborhood was called Richmond, and it teemed with industry, with kindness and goodwill. The whole region had answered Halifax’s distress, had sent carpenters and seasoned wood, new furniture and canned goods. Undertakers.
Laura passed neighbors rebuilding. They called to her: questions about wounded relatives, snatches of news. She called back, answering, commiserating. Stopped once to look at a boil on the crown of a balding head. Promised to lance it when she had a moment. She had a surprising amount of experience with civilians. Plenty of Belgians, lacking alternatives near the fighting, came to army nurses for medical care. Laura didn’t think there had ever been a war where the army delivered so many babies.
She kept walking, avoiding snowdrifts and shattered glass. Thought about Belgian babies. One or two small girls called Laurenumbered among the children she’d eased into the world. Those were pleasant memories. She was concentrating so hard on them that she walked past the house before she recognized the place. But her feet stopped before her mind knew.
Memory supplied a small house, a little shabby. White clapboards, roughened with salt, a pitched roof. Her own upper window, looking out over the dockyard to the Narrows beyond. The path out the front door, lined with seashells, her mother’s vegetable garden straggling up with the clover, fighting its way through the sandy soil.
