Silence for the Dead (14 page)

“Yes,” I rasped. I owed my life to this petty, bitter little man.

“A bit of a shake-up, I suppose, but you'll get over it.”

“Yes.”

He seemed to want to talk, now that the danger was past, or perhaps he was waiting for a rush of gratitude. “He's always been quiet, that one, until recently. I don't know what's gotten into him, but it's getting worse. Nearly did for that nurse last time, though I wasn't on duty at the time. He was on grave duty, you know.”

I looked up. “What?”

“Grave duty. On the front line. Had to pick pieces of men out of the mud, try and match them up, identify them for burial. I heard they left him on it for four weeks before he cracked completely. They'll never get him well, this one. Not after that.”

I stared at him, my brain turning over slowly, unable to take in anything so horrible. Roger looked at my expression and shrugged.

“All right,” I said. “You may go now. Thank you.”

But he was suspicious. “There'll be an incident report, you know. I'll make certain of it.”

“I'm sure you will.”

When he finally left, I closed my eyes, my head spinning. I listened to the slow rasp of Archie's breathing.

I wasn't mad, not the way these men were. I hadn't been to war. I didn't have their memories, their terrible experiences, their close knowledge of death, their fears.

But after today, perhaps, I thought I was beginning to see what they saw in their nightmares.

T
hree days after the incident with my father in the bed, I'd ducked into a coffeehouse in London. It was cold and damp out, and my usual routine was to stand in a crowded coffeehouse, pretending to look over the menu on the wall until it was almost my turn to order; then I'd turn suddenly, as if I'd forgotten something, and leave. It was a good way to warm one's feet and hands if one was in the middle of a long walk home.

Two women behind me had been having a conversation. The niece of one of the women had been given a chance at a position at a glove factory in Clerkenwell, but had decided to brush it off and marry her sweetheart instead. “She isn't even giving them notice,” the woman complained. “She just isn't going to go. I think she's mad. What if he doesn't marry her after all? Good jobs are hard to come by. ‘You're mad, Rachel Innes,' I said to her. ‘It'll come to no good.' But she's determined, of course.”

I'd listened a little longer, the back of my neck hot as lit coals. I waited so long it was almost my turn before I left the shop, possessed by a mad idea I had no control over, my hands and feet tingling, my legs moving on their own. I'd found our flat empty, my father not home, and where he was that day I would never know. I'd stuffed as many belongings as I could into a tiny valise and left, my nervous feet clattering loudly on the stairs.

I'd thought I'd get caught. I
knew
I would. He would come home seconds after I'd left and pursue me; he had been hiding in the closet while I'd been there, waiting in silence for me to make a move; the landlady, hearing my footsteps on the stairs, would somehow know I'd run and get a message to him. Everyone on the street was my father, or sent by him; every pair of eyes reported back to him. Even when I got to Clerkenwell and asked in a local shop where the glove factory was, I thought I'd be questioned. I thought the police would come. And when I knocked at the personnel office at the factory itself and presented myself as Rachel Innes, reporting for work, I thought they would know I was lying.

But they hadn't. They'd just put me to work, indifferent. It seemed I'd gotten away with it. They never knew that I slept in a church vestibule all the nights until I received my first pay, that I bathed and washed my clothes in the women's lav, that I worked the line faint with hunger and fear. They never knew I was a girl who didn't belong there, who didn't deserve it, who deserved nothing but death under her father's thumb. And I began to see that if I could be smart, if I could keep moving and not get caught, they would never know.

I did not go out with men when they asked me. Not ever.

I ran my hands along the bruises on my neck, pressing them with unsteady fingers.

Archie had throttled me. My body had felt a sickening recognition of the feeling; I'd been throttled before. But this had been different. I hadn't felt the bewildered surprise of my childhood, or the deadened stillness of the day with the frying pan. I'd only felt the numbness of shock, and now rage and empty, hopeless despair. I had promised myself,
Never again.
And yet here I was, treating bruises on my neck. It was as if, even to myself, I had never believed my promise.

“Kitty.”

I was still sitting on my knees in Archie's room. I wondered whether I was going to be sick.

“Kitty.”

I opened my eyes. Jack Yates was in the room with me, squatting on his haunches, his wrists dangling casually over his knees, looking at me. He was barefoot, the strong sinews of his feet balancing him without effort.

“I'll be all right,” I said.

“You don't look it,” he replied.

“You're not supposed to leave your room.”

“No,” he agreed. He reached out and put a hand on my forearm, the fingers curling over me with gentle force. “Come with me.”

I stared at his hand on me. This was the third time Jack had touched me. I'd counted, remembered each occasion with perfect clarity. I stared down at his bare fingers on my skin, their darkness against my pale arm. The sight of it, the feel of it, did something to me. It made my brain feverish; it made my skin feel too small, as if I could crack it open and fly away. I had never asked him to touch me, but he kept doing it anyway. And I never stopped him. I could not take my eyes from his hand.

He pulled me up, gently, and the next I knew, I was sitting in the only chair in his room, and he'd found my lamp from somewhere. He set it on the small side table and went to the washbasin. In the warm circle of light I could see his back, the muscles flexing under his shirt.

“I'm not supposed to bother you,” I said.

“You're not bothering me.”

“No. I mean I'm not supposed to be here at all, talking to you. Roger is likely spying. He'll tell Matron. I'll lose my job.”

Jack said nothing, only turned from the basin, handed me the flannel, and sat on the edge of his bed. He wasn't drugged this time, and his gaze was clear and intelligent as he watched me sponge my neck.

“You look rather shaken,” he said.

“I saw him,” I replied. “Last night, and again tonight.” It had been the shirtless man I'd seen in the window's reflection tonight, his figure unmistakable. “And earlier today I saw someone else in the grass by the isolation room. A man. He called me a coward.”

“What?” Jack's voice was icy with shock. “Kitty, what did you say?”

“I said I saw him.” The words were a relief, but I thought of the darker shadow I'd seen in the library window and I shuddered. “Two of them, though not at the same time.”

“You couldn't have, Kitty. You couldn't.”

“He hit me,” I said, tears stinging my eyes.

“What?” Jack said again. I seemed to have amazed him into repeating himself. “When I saw you from the window today?”

“Yes.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “Perhaps you should start from the beginning.”

I did. I told him everything, though I left out that the assault had reminded me of my father's beatings. By the time I'd finished, Jack had stood and was pacing the room. He stopped with his back to me, thinking.

“It's ghosts, isn't it?” I said. I had been through so much fear that the temptation to babble was strong. “I've never thought of ghosts before. I've never even considered they existed. I never knew. But now . . .”

Jack bowed his head, his back still to me, as if what I said affected him.

“This place is haunted.” I had to say it aloud, make it real. “Ghosts.” I rubbed my hand over my eyes. “For God's sake.”

“I've always thought,” Jack said slowly, “that it was in my mind.”

“How could you?” I said.

“Easily,” he replied with bitterness. “I see ghosts all the time. We all do.” He turned only part of the way back toward me, so I saw his face in three-quarter profile. As if he wanted to look at me but couldn't quite manage it. “You see them when you close your eyes. Sometimes they beg you for help, and sometimes they just die again. Then you start seeing them when your eyes are open. They're just there. They're trying to stanch the blood from an artery with a piece of cloth, or they're laughing at a stupid joke right before the shell hits, or they're running next to you in a sortie before they're hit so hard you never even find the body. There are days the ghosts are quiet and there are days the ghosts never stop.” He paused, the breath coming out of him with a soft sound that was not quite a sigh. “It was one more ghost— that was all. I wasn't even surprised. What was one more ghost?”

“I'm sorry, Jack,” I said. “I'm sorry. But the other men are seeing them, too.”

He hadn't left his room in months; he couldn't know what the others saw. But he would have heard what the men screamed in their nightmares. I tried to imagine lying in bed, listening to that at night. Wondering whether your madness was yours alone. Wondering whether what you heard was a figment of your unhinged mind.

“Part of me knew it,” Jack said. “But, Kitty, I don't trust my own judgment anymore.”

“Is it true that men try to kill themselves in that spot by the isolation room?”

“Yes.” Jack still did not turn. “Always there. One with a razor he found God knows where. The other with a knife he stole from the kitchen.”

I looked at the line of his half-turned profile, thinking about the knife under my mattress. “Why there?” I asked. “Why in that place? What is driving them? It isn't just madness.”

He sighed, and finally he turned his body and looked at me. “Kitty, you're talking about something I thought I was hallucinating. It's a little hard to fathom.”

I touched the cool flannel to the inflamed skin on my neck. “Are they the Gersbachs?” I asked quietly. “The ghosts?”

“I don't know.”

“You've never thought about it?”

“No, Kitty. I haven't.”

“No one thinks about it,” I said. “No one talks about it. Let's just be quiet and it will all go away—is that it?”

“That isn't fair,” he retorted. “You know why we don't talk about it. You've seen for yourself.”

I held the flannel to the back of my neck, looked down into my lap. He was right. I'd attended the sessions with the doctors, watched privileges being taken away, visits denied. There was nothing to be gained by babbling to the doctors about ghosts, nothing but a careless note in a file and a longer sentence in this prison.
We have to be well for the doctors.
And as Captain Mabry had expressed so clearly, my connection to the doctors meant that none of the men would ever talk to me.

“And we don't think about it,” Jack went on, “because we can't
leave
.”

I couldn't exactly criticize that, could I? I, who had never cried to a neighbor or run to a policeman for help in the middle of London when my father was hitting me? I'd never admitted what was happening, even to myself, because that would have made it real. Who was I to be brave?

I raised my chin and looked at him again. “All right. But the nurses. The orderlies. Captain Mabry's nosebleeds, the nightmares. They must have some idea.”

“And what would they do?” said Jack. “People see what they want to see. They're just nurses doing their jobs.”

And I wasn't. I wasn't really a nurse, and I wasn't doing my job. Martha was supporting her family back in Glenley Crewe; Nina was earning money for her wedding and marriage. What would happen if either of them had started talking about ghosts, the way Martha had talked about the orderlies being afraid of the basement? Any nurse, any orderly who hadn't left already was in desperate need of the work. And the consequences of seeing ghosts were as dire for them as they were for the patients.

“What about the woman?” I said. “Have you ever seen her?” When I'd told him the story, I'd described the woman I'd seen.

“No,” said Jack.

“I don't know what she was,” I said. “I didn't get the same feeling from her that I did from—from the others. But I never got very close.” My mind was turning it over. I couldn't stop it. It was better than cowering in fear. “If she wasn't one of the Gersbachs, who was she?”

He watched my face for a moment. “You're not going to solve this, Kitty. You can't.”

“You're right.” My neck hurt, but I straightened in my chair. “But there's one thing different now.”

“What's that?”

“You're talking to me. You and I are talking about ghosts for the first time. Right now.”

He opened his mouth, closed it again. “You're the one asking questions.”

“And you're answering them. I want to know, Jack.” As I spoke the words, I felt how true they were. “I want to know who they were. What they want.” I felt light-headed, as if I could float to the ceiling, and the sensation, surprisingly, was not unpleasant. “I'm going to find out.”

“Kitty, think,” he said. “You just said you could lose your job just for being in this room. Think about what you're saying.”

“If they died here,” I said, “if there was a sickness, or something—where are they buried? When were the funerals? Where are the graves? Who sold this place to Mr. Deighton, the house and all the land? Four people are gone, Jack. Gone. How did that happen?”

“Kitty. You can lose everything. Why do you want to do this?”

In that moment, he looked weary. He wouldn't help me; I could see that. He couldn't. And I thought briefly, dispassionately about my mother. I wondered where she was, whether she ever thought of us. I wondered whether it mattered to her that Syd was dead, that I'd been left to fend for myself alone. I hated her with a hatred that was casual and often forgotten, but I also understood her. She'd known, just as I had, that it was life or death to leave. And when you run, you must not look back, must not check over your shoulder, must not think too much, must not wonder. For I would only drag her down and drown her.

Sometimes putting yourself first was the only thing you could do.

But it would have been nice to have someone to rely on, just once in my life. It would have hurt a little less.

“It's wrong,” I said. “Captain Mabry should see his children. Archie shouldn't spend his nights screaming like that. And I'm not supposed to fix it—I'm not supposed to see the patients as my friends, as anything but a job. That's fine. But I'm about to get sacked, and I need a weapon.”

“What do you mean?”

I laughed, an ugly rasp from my throat. “Jack, I'm not even a nurse. There's already been at least one incident report, and there are going to be more after tonight. I have three weeks, if Matron doesn't dismiss me herself when she hears I've been in your room again. I need something to fight back with. There's a secret here that someone's keeping; I can smell it. And if I can find it, I can use it.”