But truth was different. She wrote Freddie once, about love in a field hospital:It doesn’t seem right letting a man fall in love with you—falling in love with him—when you’re the only girl he’s seen for months, and he’s hurting worse than he’s ever hurt in his life. It’s just hothouse emotion—like an orchid in a greenhouse—it can’t survive in the real world.
Laura had long since put romance aside, and vanity too. But she looked with some surprise at herself, after Pim stepped back. Roguish was a stretch, but it was an improvement. Her cheeks and lips had acquired some color—she was eating a bit more now and not working monstrous shifts. Her hair had little touches of honey in the lamplight.
“I know you modern girls laugh at corsets,” said Pim. “But really, they support the bustandimprove posture—” She broke off with a shriek. Laura had aimed a pillow at her nose.
“Teatime, Mrs. Shaw,” said Laura. “Or you’ll have me in a farthingale and pattens by dinner. Or a toga.”
“You know,” said Pim, “once, for fancy dress, I went as an Elizabethan noblewoman. I was a great success. Made the farthingale myself.” But she was smiling.
“Not surprised in the least,” said Laura, with feeling.
· · ·
After supper that night, Laura and Mary went into the library to smoke. Pim eyed their cigarettes with disfavor. “It turns your fingers yellow.”
“A filthy habit,” Laura agreed, blowing out smoke. She had another murder mystery,Death in Amazonia,and her mind was pleasantly far from both Europe and Canada.
Mary was going over some list of inventory, running a pencil down a page, a finger of ungenteel whiskey beside her. Even though she kept company with them, there was always a part of Mary that stood aloof. Preoccupied. Mary tended her hospital, Laura reflected, the way some women hovered over their husbands and children. It was her enterprise. Her place and her purpose. Her obsession.
Pim was trying automatic writing. It mostly made her mutter a lot to herself as she turned the paper in all directions, trying to drag meaning from the scribbles. But eventually she got to the end of her page, looked sadly at the resulting nonsense, and put it aside. She and Mary fell to talking.
Laura only half-listened. Pim was talking about angels, and Laura, who knew all about archangels, and thrones, and dominions—her mother had been thorough—was wishing she would change the subject.
“Why shouldn’t there be angels?” Pim was saying earnestly. “On the battlefield, I mean? God is everywhere.”
“Whyshouldthere be?” said Mary, who took unholy delight in baiting Pim. “They probably have better things to do.”
“But what about the angels at Mons?” Pim pursued. “I read all about that.There were pamphlets at church. An archbishop preached about it.”
Laura tried to concentrate on Amazonia, but it was no use. Like everyone else, she knew about the Angels of Mons. During the retreat, in ’14, the British Expeditionary Force would have been routed, or so the story went. Except that a pack—flock?—of armed angelsappeared and drove the Germans off. No doubt the Germans had their own version of the story. Laura sometimes wondered, idly, what happened when the celestial backers of one army encountered those of the other.
“It wasn’t angels at all,” put in Mary, a gleam to her eyes. “I heard it was ghostly archers from Agincourt. Front’s riddled with ghosts, you know. It was certainly the lads from Agincourt.”
“But angels—” protested Pim.
Laura found herself strangely annoyed. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”
Mary and Pim looked at her in surprise. Laura bit her tongue before she could say anything else. LikeDon’t you understand? The world ends with high explosive, not trumpets, and even if an angel existed, it would be shot from the sky like an aeroplane.
Pim said, “Of course angels matter. They are proof of God’s—” She paused, looking unsettled. Laura wondered what the final word should have been. Love? Wrath? Sheer damned indifference?
“I’m sorry, Pim,” said Laura. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
NO MAN’S LAND, YPRES SALIENT, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
November 1917
Freddie, skidding and stumbling behindWinter, fought to keep his head clear. When they paused in a shell hole, he closed his eyes and tried to evoke better days; himself reading verse to a long-suffering Laura while she pored busily over a textbook on the other side of the fire. But the image wouldn’t come clear. No poet, living or dead, could have imagined this place, real, upon the earth, and their very language was insufficient to describeit.
He would have died a dozen times if not for Winter. Twice the German pulled him down when a shell fell close, held him still when they saw the muzzle flash of a machine gun. But more, it was Winter’s stoic presence, the splash of his footsteps, walking near enough to touch, that kept him moving. He’d no idea whether they were behind his lines or Winter’s, somewhere in No Man’s Land, or in the ninth circle of hell, with Satan on the horizon chewing on traitors. He didn’t have enough strength to care.
And then, just ahead of him, Winter halted.
Freddie lurched into Winter, then caught his balance, panicky.Fall into that mud and he wouldn’t get out again. “What?”
“There.” Freddie, following the jerk of Winter’s chin, saw what his shuddering brain first took for eyes, staring gleefully out of the darkness, but realized must be cigarettes. They’d found other people. At last. He was too far gone to be afraid for himself. But he was afraid for Winter. What if itwasn’tGermans? He’d rather it be Germans. They’d maybe kill him, certainly make him prisoner, but they wouldn’t kill Winter.
A shell splashed and exploded, showering them with earth. They flung themselves flat and began crawling. A whizz-bang whined and splashed into a shell hole, nearer still, but this one didn’t explode. Cover—they needed cover. A machine gun chortled, far too near. There must be a hole there, not yet flooded, a trench…something. Another shell splashed down, and another howled as it flew. They reached the lip of a crater and Freddie tumbled in, his cry lost in the almighty noise. Winter came falling after him. The shell hole was full of reeking, freezing water, and Freddie’s next cry was smothered in wet. He thrashed his way to the surface just in time to see Winter go under, rolled over, and dragged him up, just as a third man, indistinct in the dark, fleeing the iron rain as they were, fell into Winter.
