Silence for the Dead Read online

  Mabry hadn’t seen his children because of me. You are not their friend.

  “I hope that was instructive,” Dr. Thornton said to me as the last few men filed from the room. “Have you any questions, Nurse?”

  “No, Doctor.”

  “Come now,” Dr. Oliver chimed in. “There must be something?”

  I turned to them. “It just seems . . . it just seems that it isn’t actually treatment the men get. Medical treatment, I mean. They’re just . . . motivated to behave.” Like in a prison.

  Dr. Thornton nodded. “You’ve come from casualty cases, so the confusion is understandable. Mental cases are very different, Nurse Weekes, especially cases of shell shock. Did you think we could give them a bandage, perhaps, or a pill, and cure them?”

  “These men,” said Dr. Oliver, “need to learn.”

  I looked from one man to the other. “What about Jack Yates? Does he need to learn?”

  “Ah,” Thornton said. “That went better than expected, did it not? Perhaps I should explain. Patient Sixteen came to us with instructions from the highest level of government—the highest, I repeat—that his stay here was to remain confidential. I don’t think anyone will trust a madman’s account, but it’s good to be certain. You’ve been given great trust today. I hope you can keep it.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Why the secrecy?”

  Thornton leaned in so he could not possibly be overheard by anyone except Dr. Oliver. “Mr. Yates was a great hero to this country. To know that he has fallen to this . . .” He gestured around the room. “To know that he has fallen to such a low level would, I think, be detrimental to morale.”

  My head throbbed with pain. “But the war is over.”

  “Our great country is involved in many operations the world over,” he replied, “and will continue to be. The will of the people behind government is important. If it were to be known that Jack Yates had become a coward . . .”

  I choked, any anger I’d ever felt at Jack evaporating. “Jack Yates is not a coward.”

  Dr. Oliver patted my hand. “You’re a loyal lady, and we admire you for it. But you must understand that there is nothing lower for a man than this, than to come here. To be one of . . . these.”

  “Nothing lower,” Dr. Thornton agreed.

  I followed them to the corridor, the two of them conferring quietly together. I waited for them to finish their conversation, for them to dismiss me at last. There was a single crack in the wall, hairline thin, making its way down from the ceiling. Outside, the sun struggled to break through a thick cotton layer of cloud. I had the sudden desire to walk out the door and keep walking, walking, breathing the warm, damp air.

  Why had none of the men admitted to having nightmares?

  “Doctors.” Matron approached us, only slightly reddened from her climb up the stairs from the lower reaches of the house. “You are finished, I see.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Oliver replied. “We are ready for the weekly debriefing.”

  “Certainly.” She looked at me in a signal of clear dismissal, for which I could have kissed her feet. “Thank you, Nurse Weekes.”

  “Actually,” Dr. Thornton said, “I’d like Nurse Weekes to accompany us to the debriefing. I believe it could be beneficial to her training.”

  Matron was already flushed, so I couldn’t tell whether her color deepened. “That won’t be possible.”

  “I do believe I have Mr. Deighton’s authority, Matron, in matters of protocol.”

  “You do, of course. What I meant is that Nurse Weekes can’t be spared just now. She goes on night shift as of tonight and is scheduled to take some rest before her shift begins.”

  That stunned me out of my exhausted reverie, but before I could open my mouth, Matron had turned her gimlet stare on me. “Come with me, Nurse Weekes.”

  We stood at the foot of the servants’ stairs before she spoke again. “I’ll send Nurse Beachcombe to you when I can. She’ll tell you what’s required on night shift. You’re to report at eleven, after the others have gone off duty.”

  “This is it, isn’t it?” I said, childish in my outrage. “This is my punishment. The incident report wasn’t good enough for you. Why don’t you just sack me and have done with it? Or is it because you’re so understaffed?”

  Matron sighed. “Please go now and prepare for night shift.”

  “What was it?” I said to her. “What made you hate me so? Was it the fact that I was requested by the doctors without your clearance? Or was it that I actually cleaned that disgusting lav?”

  She looked at me for a long moment. I knew nothing of Matron; I didn’t know where she came from, or whether she had a family or friends, or even what her first name was. I realized as I looked into her hard, square face with its blunt fringe of hair that this opaqueness was utterly deliberate on her part. If she had her way, I would learn no more about her than I could learn from the statue of Mary on the front lawn. For a second she seemed about to say something; then she changed her mind, her eyes glittering as she looked at me.

  “You have a great deal to learn, Nurse Weekes,” she said.

  I turned to stomp up the stairs, but she gripped my arm. “Dr. Thornton left his notebook in the common room. Please fetch it; then, for God’s sake, go.”

  I fetched the notebook, the fine leather smooth and heavy in my hand. I was in such a storm of emotion that I had nearly left the empty common room again before I realized what I was holding.

  I remembered Dr. Thornton scribbling diligently all afternoon, his pen scratching. I felt queasy, not with unease at what I was about to do, but with a horrible, creeping suspicion. I opened the notebook.

  There was a page of names, the names of our patients. Beside each was a thick black check mark.

  And the rest of the pages—four in all—were covered in inky doodles, of clumsy giraffes and splotchy elephants, a dog sitting on his hind legs begging, a cat with long whiskers. A hillside dotted with trees and houses.

  I snapped the book shut, and I did not notice that my hands were shaking.

  • • •

  There was no point in undressing, as I’d only have a few hours to sleep, so I dropped onto my narrow bed in the nursery, untying my boots and letting them fall to the floor. I lay on top of the thin quilt fully clothed and rubbed my eyes.

  Exhaustion took my body, but my mind was alive with all I’d seen. Something in me was shifting, changing. I felt as if I’d been touched with an electric wire. I’d never sleep. I rolled over and reached down, finding the book and the locket under the bed.

  I pulled both of them onto the bed next to me and propped myself up on an elbow, opening the book. Practical Nursing: An Everyday Textbook for Nurses. I ran my finger down the table of contents.

  Nina had told me there would be no time to read at Portis House, and she’d been right. I owned no books myself, but I had perused the shelf of books in the common room—Ethan Frome, The Thirty-Nine Steps—and silently selected the ones I wanted. Books were a means to an end, even novels; for the more a person knew, the less she could be taken in.

  Treatment of infectious disease. Bandaging practices. The lancing of boils. On disinfection. Correct suturing. I’d been caught unawares earlier when Dr. Thornton had expected me to inject a patient and I’d hesitated. I’d been lucky neither man had noticed. I turned to the chapter titled “Intravenous injections” and began to read.

  Footsteps approached from the hall and I flipped the book shut, shoving it under my pillow just as Martha came to the door. “Matron sent me,” she said. “Do you want the curtains shut?”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t sleep.”

  “It doesn’t help much anyway,” she agreed. “Matron says I’m to bring you supper if you like.”

  I’d been sent away before supper. Matron wanted to get rid of me that badly. I had no wish to put yet m
ore work on Martha, who had handled night shift already. “I’m not hungry.”

  Martha sat on the edge of the bed and groaned as the weight came off her feet. “I’m sorry about night shift, but I can’t say I’m sorry for my own sake. I’m so tired. I’ll appreciate a good sleep tonight— that’s for certain.”

  I was still lying on my side, propped on an elbow, and from my position I could see the thin bones of her shoulder blades through the back of her blouse. How someone as small and thin as Martha accomplished the monumental workload at Portis House was rather surprising. “What do I do on night shift, then?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes.” Martha rubbed her ankles, not willing to go quite so far as to remove her shoes. “Well, there’s a desk next to the stairwell door in the men’s hallway—you’ve likely seen it.”

  “Yes. In the nook built into the wall.”

  “That’s the one. That’s the night nurse’s desk. You sit there, though you make rounds once per hour, checking on the men. Their doors should be open, or at least ajar, except for Patient Sixteen. Those are the rules. You go as quietly as you can and you check to see they’re sleeping.”

  “It sounds dull.”

  Martha rubbed her eyes. “Perhaps. It’s easy, unless any of the men has a bad night. Then it gets more exciting than you’d like.”

  I thought of the sessions I’d listened to earlier that day. “They have nightmares?”

  “If it happens, you get the orderly—I think Roger is on duty tonight. Though you likely won’t have to fetch him, because he’ll hear and come on his own. You shouldn’t approach the patient without an orderly, because when they’re in that state, they tend to thrash. You probably know all of this from London.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Well, all right. Most of them calm down nicely once they’re awake. If a man wakes and he doesn’t calm down, there are hypodermics in the nurse’s desk, locked in the drawer, for emergencies.”

  I lay back, feeling the hard edge of the book under my pillow. I’d have to study before I went on duty tonight, and pray that things were calm. “And what do I do the rest of the time? When the men aren’t having nightmares?”

  “You count linens,” said Martha. “The inventory lists are in the top drawer of the nurse’s desk, as well as a pen and ink. Both the upstairs and the downstairs closets. Make sure to count the linens on each man’s bed, or the count will be off.”

  I stared at her. “We count the linens every night?”

  Martha yawned. “Yes, and the inventory goes to Matron in the morning. She always checks, so you can’t cut corners. Write a nightly report and leave it in the desk drawer; Boney takes it to her every day. Oh, goodness—I have to get up or I’ll fall asleep where I’m sitting.” She moved to rise, but when she put her hand down on the mattress, she stopped. “What’s this?” She picked up the locket and peered at it.

  “I found it,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “It was under the bed. It isn’t mine.”

  “This was Maisey’s.” Martha turned it over in her hands. “She must have left it.”

  “Is that Nurse Ravell? The one who was here before me?”

  Martha nodded. “Her initials are engraved on the back, just here.”

  I looked closely as she showed me. “Martha, don’t you think it strange that she left her boots and her locket behind?”

  Martha frowned, uneasy. “Perhaps. She was an odd girl.”

  “What did she say when she left?”

  Now Martha looked away. “Nothing. She didn’t speak to us, that is. We didn’t see her when she left.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She went on night shift one night, and in the morning she was gone.”

  I could do nothing but stare.

  Martha glanced at me, caught the look on my face. “I’m sure there was nothing strange about it. She kept to herself, that’s all. Perhaps she’d just had enough.”

  “Martha, for God’s sake. She left in the middle of the night?”

  “Not necessarily.” She bit her lip. “She could have gone at dawn.”

  Something uneasy turned in my stomach. Portis House was far from anything, deliberately so. How would a girl get out of here alone, in the dark or in the first reaches of light? Had she walked all the way across the bridge? What made her want to leave so badly that she would walk out during a shift, leaving her boots, her locket, and her book behind?

  After Martha had gone, I pulled the book from under my pillow again. A page at the front featured a drawing of Florence Nightingale treating the wounded in the Boer War, etched in ink. She was a female silhouette in long sleeves and Victorian skirts carrying a lantern across a battlefield, its light shining from the folds of her cloak. On the ground before her a wounded man reached up, begging for help, his gaze on her benevolent face. The Lady with the Lantern, the caption read. And beneath it: The angel of the battlefield, which every nurse should aspire to be.

  I looked at Florence for a long time. She was as perfect, as impassive, as the statue of Mary outside, but there was something about the way she stood, the confident sway of her cloak, that I found myself liking. They drew her as pretty, but I imagined her as tough as old leather. I scoffed at myself and turned back to the chapter on hypodermics.

  The first time I read the chapter, I stumbled over words I didn’t know, so I read it again. I stared at the diagrams, memorizing them, and then I read the chapter yet again, sentence by sentence. I’d never had much education, but education, in my experience, was no match for doggedness. If I wanted to learn something, I was capable of studying it in a book until I understood it, no matter how long it took. In the end it was a matter of winning over the words that refused to obey, of comprehending them through sheer determination.

  No one had ever accused me of a lack of determination.

  I hadn’t thought I’d sleep, but as the faint sun vanished into darkness, as I heard the creaks and groans of the house around me, and somewhere below me the men sat to supper, my eyes drifted closed. I put the book under my pillow again, the image of Dr. Oliver’s soft hands behind my eyelids, replaying the way those hands had handled the hypodermic, pushed the needle under the skin. The words from the pages pricking my brain like pins, I drifted to sleep.

  Night shift was coming, after all, and I had to be ready for the dreams.

  PART TWO

  Night Shift

  We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go, For your King and your country both need you so. We shall want you and miss you, But with all our might and main, We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you, When you come back again.

  —“Your King and Country Want You,” 1914

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nina woke me at ten o’clock, and as I was still dressed I had only to wash my face, tidy my braids, and don my boots. As the other girls went to bed, I descended the darkened spiral servants’ stairs to the lower floors.

  My first stop was the kitchen. The few hours I’d slept had strangely refreshed me, and I was ravenous. The entire house was dark; I had to feel my way down the corridor on the servants’ level, but I found the kitchen lit with two paraffin lamps, one perched on a high counter and the other in the center of the wooden worktable in the middle of the room, around which sat four figures in the postures of people just recently off their feet.

  “Hullo,” I said, recognizing Paulus Vries’s large frame and the wide pot-bellied figure of the head cook, who I thought was called Nathan. “Is there any food?”

  Nathan moved his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other and regarded me flatly. “You night shift?”

  “Yes.”

  “Might be something for you. Bammy, check the stew pot.”

  The smallest figure rose from the table, and I saw it was a kitchen boy, no older than sixteen. He wore a greasy cap of fabric tied behin
d his head like Nathan’s and a set of stained and well-worn cook’s whites. He lumbered to the darkened stovetop without a word. None of the other figures moved; they sat with their hands resting on their thighs or on the tabletop, their fingers curled, their shoulders a little slouched. It was the timeless pose of a person first sitting down after an endlessly long shift on his feet, wanting nothing but to sit and not think and not be ordered somewhere for a few blessed minutes, and I recognized it well.

  I pulled up a chair for myself. Bammy thumped a bowl of stew and a slice of bread down before me, even remembering a spoon. I thanked him and he responded only by dropping into his chair again, sprawling as if he’d just done an expedition to Kilimanjaro.

  “So you’re on night shift.” Paulus’s accent sounded exotic in the humdrum English kitchen. “Did you sleep?”

  “A little,” I said between bites. “Did you?”

  “I’m finished,” he replied. “I’m off now. You have Roger tonight.” He nodded to the fourth figure at the table, a second orderly much smaller than himself. Roger was tidy, with brown hair slicked neatly back from his forehead. He looked at me with a flinty stare and nodded.

  “All right,” I said. “Why are the lights out? Why the lamps?”

  “Electricity goes off at night,” said Paulus. “We’re not on the main lines all the way out here—far from it. The electricity runs off generators, and we turn ’em off at night.”

  I stopped tearing my piece of bread. “There’s no electricity all night?”

  “No.” This was still Paulus. “We kept the generators on at first, but they kept malfunctioning at night—something kept getting into ’em, though we don’t know what. We don’t have the manpower or the supplies to repair them every day, so we decided to turn them off at night. No need to light this whole place anyway.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” I said, “except for the part in which no one can see.”