They scattered, with backward glances.
Laura said, “Overrun?”
“Lord, yes,” said Kate, the smile fading. “They’ve been evacuating field hospitals down south, and leaving behind the men who can’t be moved. It’ll be us next. They’re even saying we’re going to withdraw from the Ridge, as it’s indefensible.” She shook her head.
“Withdraw from the Ridge?” demanded Laura. “That how many men died taking? What was it all for if they’re just going to—” She swallowed the rest.
Kate looked startled at her vehemence. “Don’t think that way, Iven, you’ll run mad. Come. I’d take you to supper if I could, but I only have half an hour, I’m afraid. Although it’s poor hospitality for your pains.” She cast an assessing eye on Laura’s gait. “Healed all right, did you?”
“Never mind my leg,” said Laura.
Kate passed into the sterilization marquee. “No? A blighty wound, back home with honors, and now you’re here again?”
Laura must have been silent an instant too long. Or perhaps something showed on her face. Kate knew her very well. “Oh—Christ—we saw about Halifax in the papers. But you didn’t sayanything in your letters. Did—” Kate read the answer on Laura’s face. She looked older suddenly. “Laura, your people, did they—”
Laura said with a dryness she did not feel, “Pitiful, I know, but you will perhaps understand now why I am so very interested in the fate of my brother.”
“Laura, I—” Kate read Laura’s face again, and shut her mouth. “As you say. But—” She fell silent, frowning.
Laura went to get tea, and take a moment to collect herself. She found the tea-things without trouble, added sugar and tinned milk, brought the two cups back. Then she sat and without preamble said, “I got a telegram in Halifax, from the Red Cross. It said Freddie was missing, presumed dead. But if he’s missing, then they can’t have sent his things along, could they? And they did. I have his tags.Both of them.” Laura pulled them out from where she wore them strung around her neck. “I couldn’t make sense of it. So I came back.”
Something moved through Kate’s eyes, like a flicker of recognition.
“Kate,” said Laura.
Kate said, “I didn’t think you’d come back. I didn’t dare say anything in a letter. And now that you’re here, Istilldon’t—” She stopped, began again. “It happened just after you were wounded, after they took you away. It was such chaos, that day.”
Laura grew very aware of her pulse, beating at neck and wrists. “I remember.”
Her friend’s expression was reluctant. “I—don’t want to put you in danger.”
Laura’s only answer was a disbelieving snort.
Kate looked angry. “Yes, I know you don’t care, you daft girl. But you’re running reckless as a man on a trench raid. Do you think I can’t see it?”
“Surely that’s my own business.”
“It’s mine too. And every other person’s who loves you, prickly wretch. Do you think I want to tell you something that makes you go charging off, get yourself arrested, or killed?”
Laura stared. “All that? Kate, tell me.”
Kate said, “You were gone.” She sounded almost incensed, that Laura had got herself injured. Laura could understand. The worst night of all their lives, and Kate’s indefatigable deputy, her ward sister, had been gone. Just like that. “It couldn’t have been more than a day or two after we’d sent you off to base hospital. I could hardly tell which way was up by then, or what I said to whom. I didn’t think you’d live. I grieved. I was so tired. And I can’t remember things properly anymore.” She shook her head. “But I remember that a young man came into the hospital. He was so dirty, like all the men off the Ridge. And he’d that look about him, shell-shocked.”
Laura knew that look well. Glassy-eyed, the thousand-yard stare.
“But he wasn’t wounded,” said Kate slowly. “He was—he was strange. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure, afterward, that he wasn’t a ghost. He asked about you. I don’t remember what I answered. ‘She’s gone,’ I think I said. And I told him to wait. There were fifteen emergencies on my hands, and I went to deal with the worst of them. When I happened back, he was still there. He told me there was a man, a German prisoner, wounded, whom he’d found carrying the jacket and the tags of a Wilfred Iven.”
Laura hardly dared to move, lest she interrupt.
“Of course, for your sake, I went to see. The German was delirious, nearly dead of exhaustion, had a wound in his shoulder gone bad. But he did have your brother’s jacket. Was clutching it to himself, with the tags in his hand. I asked him what had happened to the owner of the jacket, but he was too far gone in fever to hear me. So, I had him brought in at once, and broke a hundred rules to get him a bed, and to get his arm off in time…I was thinking of you, how you’d loved your brother, and that if you lived, you’d want to know what happened to him. And that the German might be the only one that knew.”
“What happened to the other soldier—the one who came and got you?” asked Laura. “What did he look like?”
“I could hardly tell, with the night and the rain and the dirt. I never got his name. He vanished. Duty done. Maybe the German saved him, and he was trying to do right by him.”
“Did he live? The German?”
“Oh, yes. Had his arm off at the shoulder joint. I kept him with me; he was at death’s door with fever for—weeks? More? But he lived.”
