Winter whispered, “Iven, what are you doing?”
“I’m going to save your life. Pretend not to understand English, all right?”
“Please,” Winter whispered. “Don’t—”
Freddie plunged back into the vortex of the hospital. He found Kate White again, her hair sticking to her cheeks with rain, a smear of blood on her forehead. “Sister, there’s a German prisoner out there with the wounded.” She was already shaking her head to dismiss him, but he forged on. “He’s got the jacket and the tags of a bloke called Wilfred Iven. He don’t speak much English. But he showed them to me. Said he was to give them to a nurse called Laura Iven. I didn’t know what to do with him.”
“Iven—” Kate White whispered, and then her exhausted gaze sharpened. “Out there? Take me to this man. Quickly.”
Kate followed Freddie out, through the wreckage of men on stretchers, to the place where Winter knelt, head bowed. She summoned orderlies in her wake, and dropped down at once beside Winter. Took his pulse, touched his forehead, looked at his wound. Shook her head. “Get him up,” she said to the orderlies. “Now.Where did you get these things, sir?” The question was directed at Winter. She had Freddie’s jacket in her hands.
Winter said nothing. Freddie didn’t know if he was conscious. Kate turned her head, but she sought for Freddie in vain. He’d slipped out of reach of the lantern, behind the shield of the rain and the darkest part of the night.Don’t ask who I am. I’m nothing, I died on the Ridge. Think only of him. He’s the only one who can tell you what you want to know. If you save him. You have to save him.
Only then did he realize that Faland hadn’t been a figment of his shattered mind. For Faland wasthereagain, with him in the sheltering darkness, near enough for Freddie to see that one of his eyes reflected the glittering point of the lantern, and the other did not. He was watching the little lamplit tableau: the nurse and the wounded man. “Well, you are a clever boy, aren’t you?” he murmured. “Think she’ll save him for her dead friend’s sake?”
“Mysister,” whispered Freddie in a voice he hardly recognized.“Laura.”The orderlies were rolling Winter onto a stretcher. Kate was bending to take the tags clutched in Winter’s hand. Freddie’s tags. All that was left of Private Wilfred Charles Iven. She slipped the tags from Winter’s failing grasp, although he made a faint sound of protest. She said, “Come on, you’re not going to die on me, sir. Get him up. Gentle with that arm.”
And then they carried Winter away through the rain. Just like that he was gone. Just like Laura. Everyone was gone.
Freddie was alone. The purpose that had driven him off the Ridge left him suddenly; he swayed like a puppet with cut strings.
But he didn’t fall. A hand caught his elbow. “What now?” said Faland, still beside him. “Off you go, back to barracks? Or to Bedlam more like, considering the look on your face.”
Freddie didn’t answer. He had nothing. What future waited for him but to lie down in the mud and let the drowned man take what was his? “I’m already dead,” he whispered.
“Straight to perdition, then?” Faland said lightly. “Well, it can hardly be worse, can it?” And when Freddie turned his head to look, Faland smiled.
CHÂTEAU COUTHOVE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
March 1918
They took Laura upstairs toa bare room with a sloping ceiling, and there she was sick for four days. Early on, Pim hovered with tea and broth and mustard-plasters, but by the third day Laura grew delirious as her fever climbed, and Jones ordered Pim out. Laura was racked with nightmares of her mother, of reaching hands and ruined eyes. She dreamed she was in an endless corridor full of doors and someone was crying, in a half-familiar voice,“Why can’t I remember?”
She said, “Who can’t remember?”
“The blessed,” Faland’s voice said. “The blessed forget and the damned remember.”
“Where are you?” she demanded. But his voice had already faded into a sharper one saying “Iven, come back,” and Laura opened her eyes. Doctor Jones sat by her bed, his thumb pressed to the pulse point on her wrist, a towel and a basin on an overturned crate beside him. Laura realized that her hair was wet; little runnels of cold water ran across her throat and jaw.
“I didn’t know surgeons went in for nursing,” she said. Her mouth was paper-dry.
He looked into her face, and she thought his expression lightened. “There you are. Not usually, no. But we’re understaffed and you’re in the crisis; I came up to browbeat you through it. Your fever’s come down in the last hour. You’re past the worst of it now, I hope.” He wet the cloth again, laid it on her hot forehead. “But in case I am wrong, you are stillnotto die, I need someone to assist in surgery. Have some water, you look like you just crossed the Sahara in August.”
He got her to sit up, put a cup to her lips. She gulped until her head swam, flinched at the pain in her lungs. His hands smelled faintly of disinfectant. “All right, enough, lie down again,” he said. His tone was acerbic, but his hands were steady, professional. He’d taken the same oaths she had. He was trying to save her life.
“Thank you,” she whispered, lying back, letting her eyes drift shut.
“Why the devil did you come back here?” It sounded as though he were talking half to himself. “Wounded, honorably discharged—why come back?”
She didn’t have an answer, but he didn’t seem to expect one. “Just keep breathing,” he advised, as more cool water ran with the sweat down her face.
· · ·
Laura came through the crisis, and that evening she woke up alone, found herself staring at a spiderweb on a roof beam, trying to piece together all the hours since she’d arrived in Europe. She hoped they’d been able to give Fouquet a proper burial. The room was small, the ceiling sloped, and it contained nothing but two narrow brass beds, one on each side, with a nightstand each and hooks like crooked fingers on the wall. It must have been a maid’s room, when the château was a home instead of a way station. Laura’s trunk sat by her bed, retrieved from the wrecked lorry, and Pim’s lay at the foot of the other.
They’d come to Dunkirk, gotten on a lorry. She remembered Fouquet. Bombs. A dark shape in the road. Music. But try as she might,the rest would not come clear. Finally, in frustration, she rolled to her feet, stood stiff-kneed against a bout of light-headedness. Began groping in her trunk for a flannel and a clean uniform. She couldn’t do Freddie any good in bed. When she was dressed, she sat down for a few minutes to clear her swimming head. Then she hauled herself upright again, and turned determinedly for the door.
A narrow staircase took her out of the servants’ quarters, down and down, and finally spat her out in the main foyer, the evident nerve center of Mary’s small hospital, full of the sound of quick feet, a mingling of men’s and women’s voices, the smell of decay, chocolate, and carbolic.
