A Question of Honor (5 page)

Chapter Four

“D
ear God.” I’d gone riding with Lieutenant Wade. I’d danced with him. We had won a croquet tournament not six months before he went to England on leave, escorting Mary Standish. So many people dead—I couldn’t quite take it in.

We were about to turn south, but I touched Simon’s arm, and said, “While we’re here, I’d like to speak to the Middletons. Would you mind? We could speak freely to them, couldn’t we?”

I could see that he thought it unwise, but he reversed the motorcar, and after asking someone in the local pub for directions, we found the Middleton house on the outskirts of the village.

They were so much older now than the husband and wife I remembered as a child. Their hair was white, their faces lined. They recognized Simon at once, welcoming him into their home, and then turned to me.

“This can’t be our little Bess?” Captain Middleton asked. “But I believe it must be—you look so very much like your mother. And how is she, and your father? I haven’t seen them in—well, it must be six months now.”

I hadn’t been aware of how my parents had stayed in touch with so many former officers and men and their families. It was a measure of their feelings for the regiment, even now.

Mrs. Middleton took my arm and said, “Come into the kitchen with me, dear, while I make tea. We were just talking about it, and I’ve a lovely lemon cake we’ve been looking forward to.”

She whisked me out to the kitchen while Simon and Captain Middleton sat down in the parlor, already talking about the progress of the war.

“The Sergeant-Major looks pale. Has he been wounded?”

“Yes, it was a training accident,” I said, not wanting to tell her how Simon had come by that wound or where. “But he’s well now.”

“That’s good. Albert—Captain Middleton—has been regretting not being young enough to fight for King and Country again. Never mind the loss of his foot. But to tell truth, I’m just as glad. I’m too old to worry about him the way I did in India. What brings you to our door? I hope it’s not bad news about your mother or father!” She was filling the kettle with water and taking out the tea things. I offered to help but she refused. I was the Colonel’s daughter and so I must not be put to work.

“Not at all. We were driving down from the north, Simon and I, and we stopped to see Mrs. Standish. I thought you were living in Shepton Mallet?”

“We were, my dear, but the house held too many memories. All those children we took care of. Grown now, and some of their names already in the casualty lists. It’s heartbreaking.”

I could understand. I’d seen the names of too many of my own friends there.

“I missed Rosemary,” I said. “She’s staying with the mother of her fiancé. I understand her future mother-in-law hasn’t been well.”

“That’s so like Rosemary. She’s grown up to be quite a lovely girl. Sometimes I wonder how dear little Alice would have looked now, and if she’d have found someone to love.” She sighed. “It was like losing our own child. I couldn’t sleep for the longest time, thinking I could hear her calling to me from her sickroom. But there you are. Children die, don’t they, no matter how much you love them.” The teakettle began to sing, and she poured a little of the hot water into the teapot, rinsing it.

“I remember when Lieutenant Wade volunteered to accompany Mrs. Standish to England. It was such a kind thing.”

“Yes, and I was never so surprised than when I heard he had killed five people. I couldn’t believe they’d found the right man.” While the tea steeped, she set about cutting the lemon cake. “Cakes aren’t quite the same these days, with all the shortages. But we make do.”

All of Britain was making do.

“There was nothing about Lieutenant Wade that seemed—different—between the time he brought Mrs. Standish to you and when he returned to escort her back to India?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

She set the slices of cake on the tray, added the cups and saucers, the individual plates, forks, and spoons, the sugar and a jug of milk, and lastly, the delicately embroidered tea napkins that she must keep for guests.

I moved to pick it up for her, but she smiled. “I’ve done this all my life. I’m used to carrying in the tea tray.”

And we walked in procession to the sitting room, where Simon rose at once, took the tray from Mrs. Middleton, and set it on the tea table.

We enjoyed our tea but ate sparingly of the cake, knowing how hard it was to find the sugar and flour and eggs to make such a treat.

Captain Middleton, reminiscing about India, said, “It was a hard life, there on the Northwest Frontier. But I missed it when I had to leave it. Missed the men I served with and had to leave to the charge of others. I even missed the heat, when I came home to England.” He chuckled. “It rained for a week, as I remember, and I thought I’d never sleep on dry sheets again.”

Simon, laughing with him, asked about his former charges.

“Ah. The girls are well, all of them. The lads are another story. We’ve lost too many of them. I’ve kept an album, you know, photographs of all of them. Would you care to see it?”

And he reached behind his chair, taking a leather-bound photograph album out of the bookcase there.

I moved my chair closer, so that I could see while he showed Simon the contents.

I knew most of the faces, of course, and I watched the children who had been sent home to England to be educated grow into young adults.

And here on one page was Alice, lovely little Alice, and Rosemary. On the next page were Mrs. Standish, and just behind her, Lieutenant Wade, standing by the little grave of her daughter.

“It was the worst day of my life when that child died,” Captain Middleton was saying. “But the doctors could do nothing. Writing the letter to Alice’s mother took all the courage I could muster. No one wants to be the bearer of such news. But it had to be done.”

I looked closely at Lieutenant Wade in the photograph. Could I have been mistaken when I thought I’d seen him in the rain in France? I couldn’t be sure. Does murder change a person’s face? Or was it only that ten years had passed?

I said, as if just discovering it, “That’s Lieutenant Wade.”

Captain Middleton peered at the photograph. “He was a good man. I’d have sworn to that. But we can’t always be right in our judgments, can we?” And he turned the page, shutting off that part of the past.

We left soon afterward, thanking the Middletons for their hospitality.

On our way back to London, Simon asked, “Are you any more certain now than you were before? That photograph. Did it help or not?”

“I don’t know,” I told him truthfully. “I wish I did.”

The next day I sailed for France.

Simon saw me off at the railway station.

“Let it go, Bess. Lieutenant Wade died in the Khyber Pass. Let his bones stay there.”

“I’ll try,” I said. And at the time, I meant it.

Chapter Five

I
reported to my post, which was again a base hospital, but I soon found myself sent to a forward aid station. The German Army was fighting to hold on, and it was a bloody business.

As I worked with the wounded, sorting them, trying to stabilize them for the uncertain transport to a base hospital, I had no time to worry about England or Lieutenant Wade.

But as I was lying in my cot each night, trying to erase the images of the day and relax enough to let sleep come, I thought back to the journey I had made with Simon to the Cotswolds and the conversations I’d had with Mrs. Standish and the Middletons.

Such a different picture of the man had emerged, more like that we’d had of Lieutenant Wade before the Military Foot Police knocked at our door. It was very difficult to imagine him as a cold-blooded killer. If he hadn’t chosen to risk running for the border, if he’d decided to take his chances standing trial, what would have come of it? What could that trial have shown us about him as a man? Was there another side of his personality, one he’d kept well hidden? Or was he what he seemed to be, with no secrets to hide or tell?

If he hadn’t run, could a trial have cleared his name? More than one person accused of being a murderer turned out to be nothing of the sort. It was easy to point a finger at Wade, coming as he did from his parents’ home in Agra, leaving their bodies to be found by servants.

But what was the truth?

Night after night I fell asleep without finding any answers to my questions.

And there was Simon. He had taken me to see Mrs. Standish and to speak to the Middletons. But he had not wanted to do it. He had wanted to leave the past in the past, to accept the fact that Lieutenant Wade had perished. He hadn’t wanted to put my father and my mother through the anguish of reliving that week in India. And I rather thought he didn’t want to relive it either. He’d been Regimental Sergeant-Major. My father had been Colonel. How had they gone so very wrong in their reading of one of their own?

I could understand that.

At the same time five people had lost their lives because of this one man. And if he had survived the Khyber Pass and made his way across Afghanistan’s very difficult terrain, there was still his debt to society, unpaid.

Of course it wasn’t my responsibility to bring him to justice.

On the other hand, I dealt every day with life and death. I’d watched men die who would have given everything they owned to live one more week, one more month, one more year. There was the young Corporal who had just learned he was the father of a son. The Lieutenant who had just had word that his brother had been killed, and now he was dying as well, leaving his parents with no one to care for them. The Sergeant one day away from his leave who was planning to go home and be married. And none of them had seen the dawn. It was heartbreaking, it was real, it was impossible sometimes to forget.

Who were the three people in England? And why had they deserved to have their lives cut short?

I found myself thinking about them more than once. A father, a mother, a daughter. How old was that daughter? Ten? Fourteen? Twenty? Had it been a matter of unrequited love? Had Lieutenant Wade wanted to marry her and been turned down?

The doctor at our station commented that I had circles under my eyes, and he sent me back to my cot to sleep another two hours. I knew it wasn’t a matter of enough sleep. The war was crammed into a corner of France, and broad as the Front was, most of the activity funneled down to Calais or Rouen. It was not unlikely that I’d encounter Lieutenant Wade again. As a patient, as one of a column of men moving up or falling back, whatever the tide of fighting brought in its wake. He could so easily see and recognize me before I was even aware he was there.

I had to put him out of my mind and get on with what I had come to France to do, save as many men as I possibly could. What’s more, we had learned so much about treating wounds since I’d gone into training, and I was learning still more. It mattered more than a ten-year-old murder.

We fought a losing battle with the numbers being brought in, and then just as quickly as they had multiplied, they dwindled. This was something we had come to expect in trench warfare, where first one and then another sector felt the brunt of an attack. And then the probe moved on, always testing, always trying to find a weak point where an attack could succeed. It was done on both sides of No Man’s Land, of course, but we only saw the outcome on our own side.

One afternoon we found ourselves with barely enough wounded to support continuing to keep the aid station open. In fact, the fighting seemed to have moved well beyond us, and we tried not to feel too cheerful about this, for fear the tide would turn. But accustomed as we were to an ever-changing Front, to see it static for even a few days lifted our spirits. A sign of hope.

I was sent back to the Base Hospital with a half-dozen ambulances, the last of our severely wounded, and because they needed more hands, I was kept on there. There were a large number of amputees in the recovery wards, and I had some experience working with them. Not long afterward, I was on the move again. The worst of our cases had stabilized to the point that we could send many of the men back to England for extended care. I was given charge of the convoy.

Amputees were difficult cases both medically and emotionally. For many of the men it was worse than dying. Keeping them alive was a matter of tending to their bodies and ministering to their minds. We took a chaplain back with us, and he comforted many of the patients. I held others while they cried.

These men had marched off to war taking into account the fact that they might not come back. When their wounds were such that they had a fair chance of full recovery, they were often impatient to heal and rejoin their men or their comrades in the trenches.

And while an amputation was a ticket home, in the eyes of the men, it was also failure. They could no longer fight. They had to leave behind friends who were still in the thick of the struggle. Their greatest fear was what they would read in the faces of parents or wives or children who remembered them whole and now saw them shattered. Many of them could never return to the work they had done before the war began. And charity—pity—was something they could not tolerate. The suicide rate was high, and constant vigilance was necessary

We reached England without losing anyone. And that was only because these were recent amputees who had neither the strength nor the means to kill themselves. Still, there were three who worried me to the point that I gave instructions at the clinic they were sent to for a twenty-four-hour watch over them.

I left my charges with a heavy heart, knowing the battle still ahead of them, and I was grateful to be given five days of leave before returning to France.

I longed for home and something to take my mind off war. And so without even letting anyone know I was coming, when I reached London, I took the next train to Somerset. There I cajoled one of the farmers just leaving the town market at the end of the day to give me a lift to the house.

Iris opened the door to my knock and stood there exclaiming in surprise.

“Oh, Miss, and never a word—I can’t believe my eyes!”

She took my kit from me and, still flustered, stood aside to let me step inside. “And your parents off to Oxford only this morning. They’ll be that upset. But I have the number here where they’re to be staying—it’s a funeral, Miss, another one, and your father to deliver the eulogy for the poor Captain—”

It was clear she expected me to rush to the telephone in my father’s study and try to reach my parents at once. But I couldn’t. The Colonel Sahib never refused to speak for one of his men or anyone in the regiment. The present Colonel was in France, and so my father took on many of the formal duties for him. This meant so much to grieving families. The regiment was a family too.

“And the Sergeant-Major? Is he in Oxford as well?”

“I can’t say, Miss. But it’s very likely. It was Captain Saunders who died of his wounds. That’s the name your father left on his desk. Mrs. Saunders, The Beeches, Oxford.”

He’d been a Lieutenant, Robert Saunders had, who rose quickly through the ranks. His care for his men had been legendary, and he’d been mentioned in dispatches countless times for bravery under fire. I felt his loss myself.

“We’ll say nothing, Iris, agreed? It would be wrong to interfere with their plans. I need to sleep more than anything, and I can do that here as well as in London.”

“Yes, Miss,” she said doubtfully.

“I’ll just go up to my room, and perhaps you could bring me a light tea in a while? I’m starving.”

“We have fresh eggs, Miss, and there’s vegetable marrow and leek soup that Cook made for dinner. And the last of the red currant jam with scones?”

“It sounds heavenly.”

She insisted on carrying my kit up to my room, assuring me that there were fresh sheets on the bed as always, just waiting for me.

I tried to sleep. Truly I did. But by the next morning, I was awake before the sun came up, lying there trying to will my eyes closed again. Finally I got up, put on a dress from the wardrobe rather than my uniform, and walked down to the kitchen, where I found a heel of bread and some honey. With that in hand, I walked through the wood and down the path to Simon’s cottage.

But I could tell, as I always could, that the cottage was empty. I was tempted to go inside and leave a message, and then I decided against it. Instead I turned back the way I’d come. It was when I was passing the shed where my own motorcar lived when I was in London or France that I was suddenly possessed with the idea of going to call on the Middletons again.

I hurried to the house, changed again into a fresh uniform, surprised Cook just blowing up the fire to set the kettle on to boil, and made a quick breakfast sitting there at the freshly scrubbed table as I used to do when I was a child and home and looking for a treat.

It was only seven o’clock when I opened the doors to the shed and pulled out the crank to my motorcar. It turned over easily, for Simon kept the vehicle in good repair. And I was on the road before the heat of the day.

I realized afterward that I should have asked for a Thermos and a picnic basket to take with me, but traffic was very light and I pressed on. There was the occasional herd of sheep filling the road or dairy cows making their way in single file from the milking barn to the pastures. Once I followed a hay wain, so overladen it seemed to wobble from side to side, for a quarter of a mile before it turned off into a farmyard. There was no military traffic to speak of, and I was grateful.

And then I was into the Cotswolds, through them, coming into the village where Mrs. Standish and the Middletons lived. I saw no reason to disturb Mrs. Standish, and instead drove on to the Captain’s bungalow.

They were as surprised to see me as Iris had been, but welcomed me as warmly as they had before, offering me a cool lemonade after my long drive.

We made conversation about the war as we’d done when I was here with Simon the last time. Captain Middleton was eager for any scrap of news that the papers had not printed, and I told him what I could about the situation in France.

Mrs. Middleton went off to set the table for lunch, and that was my chance to ask the Captain more about Lieutenant Wade.

“Something that has stayed with me after my last visit was your comment that he’d killed three other people in England before returning to India. My parents never spoke to me of those deaths. I expect they felt I was too young. Could you tell me a little more about them?”

“Lass, are you sure you want to know? It’s not pleasant.”

“It’s more harrowing to imagine than it will be to know,” I told him.

He got up from his chair and limped to the hearth where there was a small stand of pipes on the mantel shelf. He chose one, filled and tamped it, and finally lit it. When it was pulling well enough to suit him, he came back to sit down.

“We only heard scraps of the story. I learned later that it was widely covered in Hampshire. Especially the hunt for the killer. The family lived just outside of Petersfield, as I remember. It was the afternoon off for the staff, and they had gone into the town to celebrate the birthday of one of the maids. When they came home again some time after five, they found their master, their mistress, and the daughter of the house shot dead in the sitting room. Someone went for the police, but of course nothing helpful was found. It was thought that the house was being watched, and when the staff left, whoever was out there assumed it was empty and came in to take what he could. And so the hunt was up for anyone who had been passing through the town or who had anything in his past that might explain why he would do such a thing.”

I sat there, shocked and trying not to show it. “How did they finally come to the point where they suspected Lieutenant Wade?”

“Apparently someone in the village remembered seeing him that same day. On the road out to the house. Later it was discovered he’d taken the train on to Southampton where his ship was waiting to sail with the tide. But sail it had. And so there was nothing for it but to send word to India that he was wanted for questioning. The upshot of that was, his own parents were found dead, and so it was assumed that Lieutenant Wade must have killed the family in Petersfield as well.”

“But why should he do such a thing? Was there a reason for him even to know them? Had he just walked in an open door and murdered three people?”

“It was said he’d known them before. Before he joined the regiment. But I never heard just how.”

“It’s horrifying,” I said. “And I find it very hard to square that with the man I knew in India.”

“That’s what everyone seemed to be saying. Scotland Yard came here to interview us and Mrs. Standish, but we couldn’t tell them anything useful. And so they went away. What distressed us both was the fact that the man had been in our house twice, and not very long after he’d left it that last time, he killed. Dolly couldn’t sleep for a fortnight, thinking about it. It could have been us, she said. But not by the hand of Lieutenant Wade. Surely not.” He frowned, and I could see that he was trying to convince himself that he believed wholeheartedly in what he’d said, that the Lieutenant would never have harmed them.