A Duty to the Dead (3 page)

As I opened my eyes again, other lifeboats had drawn within hailing distance of ours. One of them called to us and asked if everyone was all right. I thought it was Lieutenant Browning—prayed it was.

The officer in our boat bellowed, “We’ll do.”

Someone else called across the water, “How many boats did we lose?”

“Four.” The number seemed to hang in the air like signal flags on a lanyard.

“Try to stay together, then. We’ve a better chance.”

I was nearly sure it was Captain Bartlett speaking now, but water tended to distort voices. Would he be blamed for what happened, like the captain of
Titanic?
You couldn’t see a mine in time, could you? They were purposely low in the water, bobbing, hiding in the froth, a cruel and unseen killer.

We roused ourselves and began taking stock. Three others in our boat were wounded, in addition to Eileen. The only doctor among us had sustained a blow to the head, the knob rising like a small hill, and he was slow to respond to questions about how he felt. Two of the nurses had rather serious cuts. Barbara was already ripping apart her skirts for makeshift bandaging, and others followed suit.

“Salt air is a healer,” Lucy was saying, trying for cheer. “But I doubt it was meant this way, medically.”

Barbara said succinctly, “Bloody Germans!”

I said, noticing that somewhere I had lost my cap and the heat was beating down, “We need to shield our heads and faces from the sun. Try to rig something if you can. We’ll burn in no time.”

My apron was around my arm, but I borrowed a pocketknife from the man at the helm, and with a little help managed to hack a strip from my skirt that I could wind, turbanlike, around my head.

“You look like an Arab,” one of the other women told me, and there was a general nervous laugh. But I noted that others were following my example. I managed to cut another strip and handed it to Barbara to shield Eileen’s face from the sun, rigging it over the bucket used for bailing. The glare from the water was very different, this close to it, and I found I was squinting horribly until I’d created my own shade.

We fell silent for a time, overwhelmed by events. There seemed to be no one else in the world but ourselves, a cluster of small boats at the mercy of the sea.

Thank God it was not raining or stormy.

I felt myself drifting away again on the thought, the wash of the sea against the sides of the boat and the warmth of the sun surprisingly soothing for a little while. My great-grandmother seemed to have abandoned me, leaving me to my own devices, and for a time I tried to pretend we were on the ship that had brought us back from India, lying on deck with our backs to the mast, watching moonlight streaming across the dark sea. It had been too hot to sleep below, and the passengers had come up to find a breath of air, counting stars until that palled.

POSH…I hadn’t thought of that in ages. It stood for Port side Out, Starboard side Home. The best cabins, the cooler ones, were on the port side of a vessel traveling out to India, and on the starboard side coming home. And still there were nights when not a breath of air stirred, and if the ship hadn’t been moving, we’d all have surely died of heat exhaustion.

The image of a dark ship on a dark sea faded, abandoning me too. I came back to the present, unable to escape for very long.

My arm had settled into a dull, constant ache as long as I kept it close to my body and braced. I think all of us were feeling the exhaustion of the last hours. God knew, after what we’d been through, it wasn’t surprising.

Then suddenly I was awake again, overheated in the full strength of the sun, and thirsty. I wanted to dip my hands in the cool water surrounding us and bathe my face. But I knew better. Not only would it dry my skin more, but it would also make it burn and blister.

People were sleeping for a few minutes at a time as I’d done, or staring out to sea without actually seeing it. No one seemed inclined to talk now. I wondered what memories they were chasing, and if theirs had succeeded better than mine. I turned my head to look forward, at the officer. He was anxiously scanning the horizon. The ratings were trying to keep us on course with the other boats, but I didn’t think we were making much progress toward Kea. I looked around and found that several of the boats had even drifted away. The rhythmic slap of the waves against the sides of ours was the only sound.

Surely Kea was farther away than before? It had looked closer from the decks of
Britannic.
Hadn’t it? I couldn’t be sure.

Where I was sitting, my back had very little support, and soon it began to ache in concert with my arm, in spite of my sling. I straightened, trying to ease both. Why had the mast on the ship from India seemed comfortable, and here there was no comfort to be had?

Barbara, stretching, turned to me and said, “The arm hurts, I daresay. But from the looks of it, this isn’t the best place to try and set it.”

“A little, yes,” I answered, managing a smile. “But nothing like what Eileen must be feeling.”

“More than a little. I broke my arm when I was twelve, falling out of the apple tree while trying to emulate my brothers. As for Eileen—” She shrugged expressively.

“Yes.” If we weren’t found soon, if she didn’t have proper care…

“We were lucky,” Barbara went on, as if to convince herself. “We got off, and no one in this boat was terribly hurt.” She glanced down at Eileen. “Except of course for her. We’ll have to bathe her legs in seawater again soon, to keep the wounds from suppurating. It’ll have to do.”

I knew what was in Barbara’s mind. The Irish girl might survive, but she could lose one or both legs to infection.

Barbara was older than most of us, an experienced nursing sister before the war had begun in 1914. She had told me once that her family had been horrified when she decided to train as a nurse. Now, with the war on, it was socially acceptable to tend the wounded. But not then, not a woman of her class, not in 1905.

With a sigh I leaned back as best I could, still trying to find comfort for my spine. The life belt was cumbersome and very little help.

One of the nursing sisters moved a little, as uncomfortable as I was. “We will be rescued, won’t we?”

“Of course we will,” I answered to cut off the rising fear in the girl’s voice. “There must be shipping, fishing boats—”

Barbara added, “There are so many of us. If a ship finds one lifeboat, it will begin to search for others. If you must worry, ask yourself how we are to get home, with no
Britannic
to carry us to England.”

A very good question. Her words turned all of our thoughts from rescue to passage back.

Lucy said, “They’re chronically short of nurses. That’s in our favor.”

“I’d rather not be sent to Egypt,” Margaret put in. “I hear hospitals there are appalling.”

Most of us understood appalling conditions. We’d worked in
them, more often than not. “Egypt is no worse than the others,” I said.

Fishing boats out of Kea began to appear over the empty horizon. A cheer went up. After what seemed to be an eternity, the first one arrived on the scene, and then others, spread out behind it. Watching them move past us, I realized that there were people bobbing in the water, even though from our position we couldn’t see them, and the boats went first to pull them out. But there wasn’t much space on the little craft, and so they couldn’t manage taking any of us from the lifeboats.

While we were watching them turn back for Kea, wondering how long it would be before we saw them again, HMS
Scourge
steamed into view and began to pick up survivors.

Our boat wasn’t one of them. But
Scourge
was followed soon enough by HMS
Heroic,
which seemed to tower over us as she came up.

The worst of the wounded, including Eileen, were sent by motor launch to Korissia, the port on Kea. We were taken aboard, climbing the ladder if we could or waiting our turn on the sling if not.

From
Heroic’
s deck, I watched our progress in, the mountainous interior growing higher, the numerous small coves and bays giving the shore a ragged outline. What sort of medical care would we find here? I wished I had two good arms. It rankled that I was a burden. There were enough injured without me.

“We’re forty nautical miles from Piraeus,” one of the officers said reassuringly, as if he’d read my thoughts. “You’ll be all right.”

The doctors and nurses already landed there had begun working frantically to save the most critical cases, making use of whatever they could collect among themselves to bind up the severest wounds, some including loss of limbs. Supplies were being off-loaded from the naval vessels now, and that was a blessing. I was a little unsteady when I got to shore but went directly to do what I could to help. Then someone noticed my swollen hand, discovered it came from a broken arm, and ordered me to step aside.

“We’ve enough nurses,” Dr. Paterson told me. “I’ll see to you directly. Meanwhile, there’s a little shade over there. And Eileen could use the company. She’s awake now. We’ve given her something for her pain, thanks to
Heroic.
”

Silently cursing my uselessness, I did as I was told, pausing to speak to a pair of ratings lying on blankets and to the nurse with the bandaged head before sitting down by the Irish girl.

Eileen recognized me and said, shakily, “Well, we’re alive. It counts, doesn’t it?”

I smiled. “I should say it does.”

“I made such a fool of myself, didn’t I?” she added after a moment.

“I don’t think there’s any way we can predict how we’ll behave in an emergency until we’re there,” I answered judiciously.

“You didn’t panic.”

“My ancestors were battle-hardened soldiers. I wouldn’t dare panic,” I said lightly. “They’d rise up from their graves in horror.”

That brought a flicker of amusement, quickly gone. “I’ve never been hurt before. Not like this. It’s odd, you know. To be one of the wounded.”

“I was just thinking the same thing myself, not half an hour ago.”

“I’m not enjoying the experience.” There was a pause. “Will I lose my legs, do you think? Dr. Menzies wouldn’t answer me when I asked.”

“I doubt it. He’s always been the cautious one, you know.”

“Yes.” But I didn’t think she believed me.

One of the island women brought us cold water to drink, which was pure bliss, and then a little later gave us bread baked only that morning, with a small dish of almonds and olives. I was surprised to find I was hungry, and I dipped little chunks of bread into the water, sharing it with Eileen, insisting that she must keep up her strength, even if she didn’t feel like eating. Another woman brought us fruit, and gesturing with a smile, mimicked biting into it.

“Will I lose my legs?” Eileen asked again, as if she’d forgotten she’d spoken to me before about it. Looking at her, I could see she was groggy, and perhaps a little feverish.

“There will be scars,” I said, avoiding the question. “But who will see them? Here, have a little more of this orange. It will help ward off scurvy.” But she barely noticed my little joke.

Just then I realized that Lieutenant Browning had arrived, bringing in one of the last boats, and he began to take charge almost at once. I thought he was actually speaking Greek, but it was French, and he’d found someone among the local people who could translate for him. I smiled, thinking that it was just the sort of thing he would do, find a way to cope.

At some point in the afternoon he came over to speak to me, asking how I was.

No one had had time to set my arm, and I said nothing about it, although he could see my purpling hand, and the swelling. By that time Eileen had been taken to someone’s home where it was cooler, and I was sitting with one of the engineers, who’d broken his leg jumping into the water, listening to his tale of another sinking before the war.

Lieutenant Browning came back shortly with Dr. Brighton, and although I protested that it could wait, my arm was cleaned and braced and wrapped, and I was given a stronger sling. It looked suspiciously like a part of someone’s tablecloth. But there was no morphine to help, because we didn’t have enough.

I slept for a time after that, in spite of the pain. It was beginning to put my teeth on edge. And so my sleep was restless at best and my dreams were filled with mines and explosions and fear.

In late afternoon, two more warships came in, and I was among those taken to Piraeus. Crowds of people had come down to the grimy little port to watch us disembark, as if word had run before us like wildfire. A number of us were put up in one of the small hotels near the harbor. It was called the Athena, and the staff was very
kind. Margaret shared my room and helped me undress and bathe and dress again. She also cut my meat (it tasted suspiciously like goat) and broke my bread. Four times I was taken to hospital for my arm to be seen and treated and rebound. I could tell no one liked the look of it, but there was no infection, and I thought perhaps the bone was beginning to knit. Pulling Eileen into the boat, I’d managed to turn a simple fracture into a compound one, and it appeared for a time that I’d need surgery. Thank God the doctors were wrong.

Several days after our arrival, someone came to tell us the final death toll: thirty men. It was astonishing, and I put the good news into a letter home, written with my left hand and barely legible.

The question now was how to get us back to England. And how soon.

A
S IT HAPPENED,
I arrived in England before my latest letter, traveling aboard a smaller hospital ship where I was given light duties, from reading to patients to sitting with the surgical cases. It was an odd experience to stand aside while other nursing sisters did what I could do with my eyes shut, but I also had the opportunity to observe techniques or oversee the skills of new probationers, who were still struggling to remember all they’d been taught.

My father met my train at Victoria Station and tut-tutted over the bandaged arm strapped to my side under my cloak. He reached into the carriage for my valise, saying gruffly, “Well, it could have been worse, Bess.
Britannic
was in all the newspapers, you know, and speculation has been rife that she was torpedoed. They’ll be giving you a campaign ribbon next. Captain Bartlett is already in London, facing an inquiry.” As we made our way through the throngs of people—most of them families greeting soldiers or saying good-bye to them—he added over the uproar of the next train pulling out, “I told you to stay out of harm’s way!”

“Yes, well,” I said dryly, “I was trying. The mine had different ideas.”

“Damned efficient Germans.” He studied my face. “Still in pain?”

“A little,” I lied. The train from Dover to London had been
crowded, and my arm had been jostled in spite of the sling and every care.

He tried to shield me from the bustle of people coming and going. “Let’s get you out of here, then.”

We threaded our way through the valises and trunks and people cluttering the platform, and he handed in my ticket for me. Then we were outside, in the street, and London was cold, wet, and rainy. A far cry from the warmth of Greece. All the same, I was so thankful to be home. The journey from Athens to Malta to Dover had been long and arduous, and somehow a ship no longer seemed to be a haven. We had spotted submarines on three different occasions, but they had been after more important prey.

My father was saying, “My dear, there’s not a hotel to be had anywhere. We’ll have to make do.”

“There’s the flat for me. What about you?”

“I’ll stay at my club. Tomorrow the train leaves at some ungodly hour, seven, I think. We’ll have to be down again by six-thirty.”

“Wake me up at five-thirty, if you will. It takes me longer to dress.”

He was trying to conceal how worried he was about me, but he said only, “Growing conceited about your looks, are you?”

“Quite vain,” I retorted. It was an old argument. Richard Crawford, career officer in the Army that he was, had wanted a son to follow in his boots. Instead he’d got a strong-willed and determined daughter. We had battled ever since I was three.

He waved to a cab that was waiting down the line, and it pulled up for us. “In you go. At least you haven’t a great deal of luggage to worry about. That’s a blessing. But your mother has already bethought herself of that. The house is full of female things, and she’ll expect you to make a fuss over all of them.”

“I shall.” The war wasn’t over for me, whatever Mama might hope. I’d have to find myself new uniforms, or have them made up.

We stopped at the flat I shared with four other nursing sisters,
and I made a clumsy dash through the rain for the door. My father, at my heels, got there first and opened it for me.

Mrs. Hennessey, in the ground-floor flat, answered my knock and was on the point of sweeping me into a copious embrace when she glimpsed the strapped arm.

“Oh, my dear!” She hardly came to my chin, an elderly widow who had lived in this same house since her husband died in 1907. It had been converted into flats in 1914. She reached out and took my left hand. “You’ll be wanting the key, and with that arm, who’s to see to you? None of the others are here just now, you know. But I’ll be glad to come up and clean, cook a little, whatever it is you need.” She hesitated. “We heard that
Britannic
had gone down. Was it very bad?”

“We were so fortunate there were no wounded onboard,” I answered. “But for the rest of us it was a little wearing. Still, we were very lucky.” A response I’d given so often it was like a parrot repeating a lesson and not a part of
me.
Of my experience.

“Indeed.” Mrs. Hennessey peered into the hall. “Is that your father with you, dear?” She had strict rules about men coming up to the flat. If we wanted to say good-bye to any male over twelve and under sixty, it had to be done at the foot of the stairs, in plain view of anyone coming and going. Diana called it the cruelest blow to romance she’d ever encountered, but none of us had so far complained to Mrs. Hennessey’s face.

“Who else?” I asked with a smile. “There are no handsome young men left in London to meet my train. He’s dragging me home tomorrow, but I’ll have to stop over tonight.”

“Then here’s the key, my love, and if you need anything, just ask. I’ll be bringing up a bit of hot soup later. Tell your father I’ll keep an eye on you.”

I thanked her and let my father see me up the stairs to the flat under the eaves.

“A mercy it was a broken arm and not a broken limb,” he said as we reached the last landing. “I couldn’t have carried you another
step.” He unlocked the door for me and stuck his head inside. “I’ll have dinner sent round to you. I expect the larder is empty.”

“Mrs. Hennessey is bringing me soup. That will do. There’s tea,” I said, glancing toward what we euphemistically called our kitchen. “I’d do anything for a cup.”

He laughed and came in, shedding his coat. He was not presently a serving officer, he’d retired in 1910, but they had found work for him at the War Office nonetheless. A tall, handsome man with iron gray hair, broad shoulders, and the obligatory crisp mustache, he wore his uniform with an air. We called him Colonel Sahib, my mother and I, behind his back.

He made tea quickly and efficiently while I pored over the mail collected in the basket on the table.

Three of the letters were for me, friends writing from the Front. I wasn’t in the mood to open them and set them aside. The war seemed too close as it was, the streets filled with soldiers, some of them wounded on leave, the drabness of late November feeling as if it reflected the drabness of another year of fighting. For a little while I just wanted to forget that somewhere bodies were being torn apart and people were dying. We could hear the guns as we disembarked in Dover, and I had no way of knowing whether it was our artillery or the Germans’.

Something of what I was feeling must have shown in my face.

My father misinterpreted it and said, “Yes, you’ve had a rough time of it, my dear. Best to think about something else for a bit. Your leave will be up soon enough.”

“Soon enough,” I echoed, and took the cup he brought me.

It was a souvenir from Brighton, with the Pavilion painted on it. I had never understood where Marianne, one of the nurses with whom I shared the flat, had found all of them, but the shelf in the tiny kitchen held plates from Victoria’s Jubilee, Edward VII’s coronation, and half the seaside towns in England. My father held a cup with Penzance on it.

He raised his eyebrows as he noticed that himself. “Good God, your mother would have an apoplexy. No decent dishes?”

“We do very well,” I answered him. “Didn’t you notice the teapot? It’s Georgian silver, I swear to you. And there are spoons in the drawer that are French, I’m told, and the sugar bowl is certainly Royal Worcester.”

He joined me at the table, stretching his long legs out before him. “Bess.”

I knew what he was about to ask.

“It wasn’t bad,” I said, trying to put a good face on all that had happened to me. “Frightening, yes, when we first hit the mine, and then when we had to abandon ship.” I didn’t mention the boats pulled into the screws. “And worrying, because there were so many who were hurt. The papers said we were lucky in the circumstances that only thirty died while over a thousand lived. But what about those thirty souls who never came home? Some are buried near Piraeus, in the British military cemetery there. Others were buried at sea or never made it out of the water at all. I think about them. On the whole, everyone behaved quite well. And it was daylight, and sunny, though the water was cold. That made an enormous difference to those who jumped.”

“Do you want to go back to duty?”

He was offering to pull strings and keep me at home to work with convalescents.

“Yes, I do. I make a difference, and that matters. There are men alive now because of my skills.” And one who died in spite of them…

I changed the subject quickly. “Do you know the Graham family? Ambrose Graham? In Kent.” Too abrupt—I’d intended to broach the subject casually. But his concern had rattled me.

He frowned. “Graham…Rings a bell somewhere.”

“He had something to do with racing, I think—a horse called Merlin the Wise.”

“Ah. One of the finest steeplechasers there ever was. That Graham. He died some years ago. His first wife was a cousin of Peter Neville’s. He lost her in childbirth, and Merlin had to be put down that same year. Neville wrote me that it turned his mind.” He finished his tea and sat back. “Any particular reason why I should remember the Grahams tonight?”

My father was nothing if not all-seeing. His subalterns and his Indian staff had walked in fear of him, believing him to have eyes everywhere. I knew better—it was a mind that never let even the tiniest detail escape his notice.

“Not especially.” I was fishing for words now, the right ones. “His son Arthur was one of my patients, you see.”

“Arthur? Was that the child’s name?”

“Arthur was a son of the second family. Ambrose Graham married again.”

“Ah. Go on.”

“At any rate, Arthur was healing quite nicely. Then his wound went septic almost overnight, and he—died,” I ended baldly.

“And you felt that somehow it was your fault. You must have been very tired and upset, my dear, to believe such a thing. Men do die from wounds. I’ve seen perfectly hardy souls taken off by the merest scratch while others survive against all odds. Even Florence Nightingale couldn’t have done more. You must accept that as part of the price of nursing.” His voice was unusually gentle.

“No. Not that. I mean, yes, I felt—it was appalling that he died, that we’d failed, although we’d done all that was humanly possible…. There is something else. As he was dying, Arthur made me promise to give one of his brothers a message. He was insistent. I don’t think he would have died in peace if I hadn’t agreed.”

I could see Arthur’s face again, taut with suffering as he reached for my hand, intent on what he was saying, urgent to make me understand why I must carry out his wishes. He’d died two hours later, without speaking again. And I’d sat there by the bed, watching the
fires of infection take him. It was I who’d closed his eyes. They had been blue, and not even the Mediterranean Sea could have matched them.

“What sort of message?” He knew soldiers, my father did, and his gaze was intent. “Something to do with his will? A last wish? Or more personal, something he’d left undone? A girl, perhaps?” When I hesitated, he added, “It’s been some time, I think, since you made your promise. Is that what’s worrying you, my dear? There were no wounded on
Britannic’
s last voyage.”

“It was the voyage before that—if you remember, I had only a few days in London before we sailed again.” I should never have brought up the subject tonight. I don’t even know why I had, except that as our train rumbled through Kent, and I was finally safely back in England, I faced for the first time the unpalatable truth that I could very well have died out there in the sea, one of those thirty lost souls. And if I had, and there was any truth to an afterlife, it would have been on my soul that I’d failed Arthur. I was sorely tempted to change trains there and then in Rochester, and make my way unannounced to Owlhurst. It would have been a foolish thing to do—my father was waiting for me in London, and for all I knew, Arthur’s brother was in France, out of my reach. But the urgent need to assuage my sense of guilt had been so strong I could hardly sit still in my seat. I knew what it was, of course I did. It was the taste of near failure, and to my father’s daughter, failure was unthinkable.

I tried now to find a way of disentangling myself from what I’d begun, but I was in too deep and heard myself saying instead, “The message—how am I to judge it? How can I know if I waited too long, if I’m already too late? Arthur wasn’t delirious, he knew what he was telling me and why. What we’d been giving him hadn’t affected his brain. I know the dying dwell on small things, something left undone, something unfinished. This was different. He was still in command of his senses when he held my hand and made me swear. I think until the last minute, he still believed he’d live to see
to it himself. He desperately wanted to live. He turned to me as a last resort.”

“If the moment made such an impression on you, why have you put off carrying out his wishes?”

I rubbed the shoulder of my bad arm. “I don’t know,” I said again. And then was forced to be honest. “Fear, I think.”

“Fear of what?”

“I was still grieving, not for the man his family knew, but for the one I’d nursed. They’d remember him differently, as their son, their brother, their friend. I wasn’t ready for that Arthur. I wanted to hold on to my memories for a little while longer. It—I know that was selfish, but it was all I had.” I looked at my father, feeling the shame of that admission. “I—it was a bad time for me.”

“You cared about this young man, I can see that. Do you still?”

I hesitated, then made an attempt to answer his question. “I’m not nursing a broken heart. Truly. It’s just—my professional detachment slipped a little. I—it took a while to regain that detachment.” I stirred my tea before looking my father in the face. “You’ve commanded hundreds of men. There must have been a handful of them who stood out above the rest. And you couldn’t have said why, even when you knew you oughtn’t have a favorite. They’re just—a little different somehow, and you want the best for them. And it hurts when you lose them instead.”