A Duty to the Dead (4 page)

“Yes, I understand what you’re saying. God knows, I do. I’ve sent men into danger perfectly aware that they might not come back, and equally aware that I could not send someone else in their place. If you remember, when you first decided to train as a nurse, I warned you that the burden of watching men suffer and die would be a heavy one. Young Graham just brought that home in a very personal way. It happens, my dear. He won’t be the last. War is a bloody waste of good men, and that will break your heart when nothing else does. I’d have liked to meet this man. He sounds very fine.” He cleared his throat, in that way he had of putting things
behind him. “As to the message. Would you like to tell me what it is, and let me judge?”

I considered his suggestion, realizing that it was exactly what I wanted to do. I took a deep breath, trying to keep my voice steady. “I had to repeat the words two or three times, to be certain I knew them by heart. ‘Tell Jonathan that I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake. But it has to be set right.’”

My father frowned. “And that’s it?”

“Yes. In a nutshell.” I was tense, waiting. Afraid he might read something in the words that I hadn’t.

“I don’t see there’s been any harm done, waiting until now to pass it on to his brother,” he replied slowly. “But you have a responsibility not to put it off again. A duty to the dead is sacred, I needn’t tell you that.”

I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake.
I repeated the words in my head. I couldn’t tell my father that with time those words had become sinister. It was only my imagination running rampant, of course. Still, I was relieved that he’d found them unremarkable.

“It’s not your place to sit in judgment, you know.” And there it was again, that sixth sense that told him what I was thinking. “There must be a dozen explanations. Perhaps he tried to make himself seem braver than he was. Or safer than he was. Or perhaps there’s a girl involved. Someone his mother had hoped he might marry one day. And he’d lied about how he felt toward her. Men do strange things in the excitement of going off to war. Make promises they can’t keep, get themselves involved more deeply than they might have done otherwise. If Arthur Graham had wanted you to know more, he’d have explained why his message mattered so much. For whatever reason, he didn’t.”

And that was the crux of it. Arthur had never told me anything. And I’d been afraid that it meant there had been someone else….

It wasn’t merely vanity.

I had listened to too many men in pain, in delirium, on the point
of being sent home, dying. The dying often regretted a hasty marriage that would leave the girl a widow. Sometimes they regretted not marrying. And how many letters had I written to girls who had just told the wounded man that she was expecting his child, and he would turn his head to the wall. “It can’t be mine,” they sometimes murmured in despair. Or they were in a fever to find a way to marry her before the baby came. War and women. They seemed to go together.

There were other worries facing the wounded, of course. Debt, a family’s need, a mother’s illness, how to live with one arm or without sight. But Arthur had said,
It has to be set right…

I heaved a sigh, not of relief but of self-knowledge. Arthur Graham had confided a responsibility to me. I’d made a promise to carry that through. And there was an end to it. His past was never mine to judge, and caring hadn’t altered that.

I
must
go to Kent. I’d done both Arthur and his family a disservice by putting off doing what I’d sworn to do. If nothing else, they should have a chance to carry out Arthur’s last wish. Their duty. And not mine.

Honor above all things. I’d heard my father drum that into his subalterns and his younger lieutenants.

What I needed now was to hear my father say that it wasn’t selfishness that had held me back after all, it had been a matter of another duty, and I’d had to answer that call first. That Arthur hadn’t misplaced his trust.

To put it bluntly, I wanted comforting.

But he didn’t answer that need. And I couldn’t ask.

My own guilty conscience nattered at me instead. And the Colonel was right, there was no excuse for failing in one’s duty. No comfort to be given. I thought bitterly, whatever I discovered in Kent would teach me that dying heroes sometimes had feet of clay.

Then my father said gently, “Bess. If you’d gone down with
Britannic,
there would have been no one to deliver his message.”

Which brought me back to the nightmare that had haunted me on my long journey home. Full circle.

“I can’t go now—” I gestured to my arm.

“You aren’t fit enough to travel again just now, and you must write to this brother first and ask if the family will receive you. Your mother would tell you that war or no war, the rules of courtesy haven’t changed.” He smiled. “You do know how to reach the Grahams?”

“He made me memorize the address as well.”

My father studied my face. I wanted to squirm, as I’d done as a child when I’d got caught in a mischief. He said, “It’s not wise to get close to a soldier, Bess. Ask your mother.”

I wanted to cry, but I forced myself to smile, for his sake. “Yes, so you’ve told me. A solicitor, a banker, a merchant prince. But never a soldier.”

But in my mind I could still see Arthur’s face. The worst of it was, I knew very well he’d have done everything in his power to carry out
my
last wishes. How could I have let him down?

Besides, I would probably have never known about that other girl, if he’d lived.

Somerset, Late December 1916

M
Y ARM WAS
stubborn and refused to heal properly. By Christmas, I still couldn’t brush my hair with that hand, it was so weak.

Dr. Price fretted over it, threatening to send me to a specialist in London.

My mother urged me to go anyway, to see what could be done. “You’re lucky there’s been no infection, what with the cut. There will be a scar, I’m afraid. We’ll ask Nora for some lotion or ointment to make it look a little less angry.” The gash had gone deep, very deep. The scar was raised and ugly still.

“I’m not worried, Mother. Bones take their time, you know. Let’s wait another week.”

But it was the duty of mothers to fuss, and truth was, I was glad to be home for a bit, leaving decisions to others. My father, on the other hand, was after me to exercise my arm.

“They’ll not take you back again until it’s strong enough,” he warned me. “You can’t swim in this weather, worst luck, but we can have you sit by the bath and move your arm back and forth in warm water. That should help. It’s what they did for my leg in India.”

He’d broken it playing polo.

“I’ll try,” I promised, and did. I also had my own ways of keeping the arm working. Exercises I’d learned aboard
Britannic,
listening to doctors instruct wounded men.

“Muscles atrophy without use,” they’d explained. “Leave a limb in a cast too long, and it will be worthless. A baby could knock you over. But
this
—”

And men had done their best, crying sometimes from the pain or the frustration as they worked. I’d learned an entirely new vocabulary from my patients. Most of it unacceptable, even to tease my father.

I found myself thinking at one point that in coming home wounded, I’d somehow stepped back into the old pattern of parent and child. It was strange, after being responsible for life-and-death decisions in a hospital ward. I’d grown used to responsibility and consequences, to holding back my own emotions in order to give comfort to someone else, to handling recalcitrant patients or men so far gone in delirium they thought they were still fighting the Germans. Now I was tucked up in bed with a glass of warm milk, just as I’d been at seven when I had measles.

The truth dawned on me slowly: my mother and father missed the old Bess, and they were still recovering from the shock of
Britannic
going down. It must have been days before they had had news of me, whether I was alive or drowned. And so I drank the milk without complaint and let them heal too.

One day my father stopped by my chair in the small parlor where I was trying to read.

“Have you done anything more about your promise?”

“I wrote to Jonathan Graham. I asked to meet him, adding that it concerned his late brother.”

“You want to see this girl for yourself, I think. The one Arthur abandoned.” He was half teasing, half serious.

“Not at all,” I answered with more heat than I wanted to hear in my voice. “I must deliver my message in person. It’s what I was
asked to do. Arthur told me over and over again—a letter was useless, I had to speak to Jonathan face-to-face.”

“Jonathan may be at the Front.”

“No, I’ve asked friends. Apparently he’s at home as well, convalescing.”

“Then go before your leave is up.”

“Yes. I shall.”

He said nothing more. But a week later he brought me a letter from the post and dropped it in my lap.

I took it up, dreading it, thinking it must be my orders.

My father said, “They’ve answered.”

And I turned over the envelope. The sloping handwriting was unfamiliar, but the return address I knew all too well.

Opening the letter, I scanned the contents quickly.

“It appears that Jonathan Graham is willing to see me.” To conceal my relief, I added dryly, “He’s probably bored to tears, or else he’s already got his orders to return to the Front. I’m to come at my convenience, and Thursday next will do very well.”

My father laughed, then added, “You aren’t ready to drive.”

My own motorcar, the one I’d fought my father for, was now in the stables, collecting dust, tucked safely out of range of the zeppelin raids on London.

Since the Colonel refused to sanction the purchase, I’d had to ask one of my male friends to advise me. I wanted the independence a motorcar could give me.

I hadn’t counted on it breaking down during my first visit home.

My father,
I told you so
written all over his face, had brought Simon Brandon with him to ferry me home while he consigned the offending motorcar to a nearby smithy. Simon Brandon was younger than my father by more than twenty years. He’d risen in the ranks to become the Colonel’s regimental sergeant major, and was nearly as domineering, but much easier to cajole. He treated my mother like the Princess Royal, and rumor had it that he was
in love with her, because he’d never married. As usual, rumor had got it wrong.

“I can manage quite well,” I told my father now. “There were times when I drove ambulances in France, and anything at Gallipoli that needed being driven. Including an officer’s motorcar, when he lost his leg.”

“My dear, it’s the train or else I drive you.”

I didn’t want him going to Kent with me.

“Very well, the train, then.”

“I’ll see to it. Meanwhile, Simon’s invited you to luncheon.”

My father drove me to the station and saw me off with misgivings he kept to himself. My mother had scolded me, warning me against taking a chill, worried that the Grahams wouldn’t look after me properly, wanting to keep me home and safe for as long as possible. She didn’t see me off, claiming the press of getting my uniforms ready before my orders came. But I knew she was afraid of crying. If it had been left to her, I’d never be out of her sight again. It was a measure of how frightened she’d been.

She had said to my father once when she thought I was not within hearing, “With that arm broken, she would have drowned.” It had been a cry for comfort, but my father had answered her, “And she didn’t. Don’t make her timid, my dear. Courage will keep her safer than fear.”

My mother had said to me afterward, “Your father is a fool.”

When I asked her why, she’d shrugged. “Men generally are,” she’d retorted, and changed the subject.

I had found myself wanting to hug her, but I didn’t dare, knowing she would have wondered why, and probably guessed. She is good at reading hearts, my mother.

The train’s carriages were filled with eager young men on their way to war, leaning out their windows and talking excitedly to
others boarding at each station. I looked at their faces and felt sad. The captain of artillery sitting next to me said under his breath, “Little do they know,” when a rousing cheer went up as we pulled out of the next small town.

We weren’t winning, and the killing would go on and on. That was the fate of trench warfare, of a stalemate neither we nor Germany could break.

I’d seen that the captain wore one arm in a sling as well, and I asked him where he’d served. “France,” he answered. “I’m on my way back again.”

“Is your arm healed?”

“Near enough. I don’t have to carry a rifle or a pack. It’ll do. How is yours healing?”

I had to admit it was not doing as well as I’d hoped.

He knew Jack Franklin, as it turned out, and we spent the journey to London in conversation. Jack had been our neighbor before he’d married and gone to live in Warwick. My father had had high hopes for him in the Army, and Captain Banks promised to give Jack our best wishes when next they met.

In London I changed trains for Tonbridge, and we rolled through a dreary rain that lasted almost all the way, lashing the windows and dampening my spirits.

After Sevenoaks, I was alone in the compartment, and I removed my sling, tucking it in the small case beside me. Flexing my fingers, I gingerly tested my arm. If I was careful, it would do.

The early dark caught up with me long before I’d reached my destination, but through the rain-wet windows I could see rolling downs, the lights of farms, and the houses of villages through which we passed with only the briefest of stops.

The fruit trees were bare, but I had seen clouds of blossoms, coming up from Dover the spring we arrived in England from the Colonel’s last posting in India, and their beauty had taken my breath away after the dry featureless expanse of the Northwest Frontier.
Now the hop fields were flat and hardly recognizable save for the oast houses, like broken windmills. In one pasture, sheep huddled, backs to the wind and almost invisible in the shelter of a stone wall. A man in a cart crouched wretchedly under his umbrella as he waited for the train to thunder past a crossing. I think my resolution dropped with the weather and I wished myself home again, sitting by the fire in comfort.

In his letter, Jonathan Graham had told me that I would be met. But when the train pulled into Tonbridge the winter dusk had turned to darkness, and there was no one waiting as I stepped out onto the windswept platform. For a mercy the rain had stopped. I could see the station master talking with the engineer, and so I walked into the booking office where it was warmer. It too was as empty. Then through the front window I saw the flicker of a lamp in the street beyond and heard the sound of a horse being turned. I went through to find a small dogcart there, and a driver muffled to the teeth against the cold.

“Miss Crawford?”

“Yes, I’m Miss Crawford.”

He grudgingly got down to fetch my valise and my small case from the platform, then returned to hand me up into the cart. But I shook my head. “I’ll ride with you, instead.” Reaching for the blanket folded on a seat, I realized that it was colder than I was.

Without a word he settled me into the seat next to him. As he climbed up to join me, his bulk blocked the worst of the wind. I huddled beside him and set my teeth to stop them from chattering. In the cold air, my arm ached. Broken bones tend to do that.

The horse snorted and began to walk on, and I said to the man holding the reins, “What is your name, please?”

“Robert.”

It was all the information I got for several miles as we left the lights of Tonbridge behind and the darkness settled around us like a cloak. The blanket across my knees began to unthaw and I kept my
gloved fingers cradled in an edge of it. I watched houses and then the occasional farm pass by, windows lit, people no doubt just sitting down to their tea. I felt remarkably alone, and even unwanted. I could sense Robert’s hostility and in a way understood it—it was my fault he’d had to drive out on a night like this.

We must have traveled five miles or more beyond the last village when we came to a large, rambling house set back in the trees behind a high wall. It was brick, and every window seemed to be blazing with light. At first I thought it must be my destination, ready to welcome me, but as we passed by, Robert must have sensed my surprise.

“The asylum,” he said, and fell silent again.

The horse trotted on, the sound of his hooves and the cart wheels filling the night.

Robert reached behind him into the cart and brought out a rug I hadn’t seen in the darkness at the station. He thrust it toward me, and I took it, gratefully wrapping it over my shoulders. The wind seemed to cut straight through my traveling coat, touching my skin with sharp fingers.

Some time later, the cart’s nearside wheels dropped off the road into a deep rut. The jolt caught me off guard, and I was nearly thrown from my seat onto the verge.

Robert’s hand came out in the nick of time and caught me, holding me back as the horse regained the road and the cart stopped rocking wildly. I hadn’t even had time to cry out, it had all happened so fast. But for the quickness of the man beside me, I’d have been pitched out on my head. Or worse, perhaps, on my still-healing arm.

I shuddered at the close call, and Robert said, “Beg pardon. I must have dozed off.”

My heart was racing, and I could still feel his fingers in that bruising grip.

I’d have been happy to see a stoat or a fox along the road, any living thing, by the time I could glimpse the lights of another village ahead of us.

Cottages, houses, then a pub, The Bells, its sign swinging in the wind, a cricket pitch on the other side of the road, and then the tall silhouette of a church set on a slight rise behind a low stone wall. To one side was what must have been the rectory, a lovely tall black and white Tudor house, and through the mullioned windows I could see a comfortable parlor done up in blue and cream, with a pair of china dogs set on the windowsill, their backs to the stormy night.

We turned the other way, under the sheltering limbs of two great trees overhanging the wall, and then another turning brought us into a lane with four or five houses in a row. The largest of them was Georgian and backed up to the far side of the churchyard. Gardens that must have been colorful in summer lay in the shadow of an iron fence, and a gate set into it led up the walk to an elegant door.

A single lamp burned above it, and the horse drew to a halt, as if he knew he had come home.

Robert got down and came around to help me, taking the rugs from me. Then he opened the iron gate for me and carried my valise and case up the walk before lifting the knocker.

A maid answered the summons almost at once, opening the door wide and welcoming me inside. Robert set down my bags, then disappeared into the night as the door shut on him.

“Mrs. Graham asked me to show you directly to your room, Miss Crawford. There’s dinner in half an hour. I’ll come for you to show you the way.”

“And you are?”

“Susan, Miss.” She bobbed a curtsey, smiling in welcome.

“Thank you, Susan.” I was glad not to have to present myself to Arthur’s mother travel worn and with muddy hems.

The hall floor was patterned parquet, and on a gateleg table between two doorways stood a vase with dried flowers arranged in it. Above it was a fine oil painting of a black horse, and I wondered if this was Merlin the Wise. As I followed Susan up the lovely curving
stairs and down a wide passage, I thought of my mother’s last words of advice.