An Unwilling Accomplice (17 page)

“Of course it is,” I told him frankly. “This man has dragged me into his troubles, and I wanted to know just how wrong I’d been, trusting him. But I think, if you want my opinion, that he used the Sister at Lovering Hall, just as he used me. Only in her case, he preyed on her feelings for him. In mine, he depended on my following instructions. But you see, that’s what I’ve been trained to do. I was told not to disturb his dressings, and I accepted that. As far as I could judge, the leg wound was not weeping or in any way indicating that something was amiss after his travels.”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

He nodded to me, settled his hat firmly on his head, and walked on.

Mrs. Hennessey had brought my kit down, and she said, watching him go, “How inconsiderate of that man. Coming at the last minute to trouble you, when you’ve hardly had time to collect fresh uniforms. And the Sergeant-Major will be here any moment.”

Simon arrived just then, my mother in the motorcar with him. I said nothing about the visit from Inspector Stephens. I didn’t want to bring up the past few days just as I was leaving for France.

The Front had advanced a little, I saw that at once when I reached the forward aid station to which I’d been assigned.

The Americans were making a difference, just as Simon and my father had claimed they would, if they could be persuaded to enter the war.

Not everyone was happy about that. More than one soldier I was treating told me that the British and the French had faced the worst of the fighting, and here the Americans were, taking all the glory. Not that they weren’t grateful—

I didn’t care about glory as long as the killing stopped.

And the maiming. I worked with one torn body after another, and each time prayed that my patient would live to see war’s end.

An American Marine was brought in late one afternoon. I didn’t know how we’d come to have him—it was a long way from his sector—but as I tended his arm, he kept up a conversation that I thought must be his way of dealing with the painful probing for the rest of the shrapnel embedded in the muscle.

He was from Virginia, a soft-spoken man who would still have been considered a boy under different circumstances. Now he was a seasoned soldier, a corporal, and the line of his jaw was hard, his eyes harder.

He had been at Belleau Wood, he told me. And that was enough.

When the Russians had surrendered, German forces had been pulled from the Eastern Front and sent to France. The French and British had tried to hold the line, but these troops were very good, and the tired Allies were getting the worst of it. I’d heard Simon and the Colonel-Sahib discuss what happened next.

In the face of the new German advance, the French had moved back to protect Paris, but an American Army with Marine brigades attached took over the French positions and refused—quite colorfully, according to Simon—to retreat.

In and around Belleau Wood, the Marines fought for nearly the entire bloody month of June, giving and losing ground until in the end they held the wood. It was the stuff of legends, and this man had been with the 5th Marines, in the thick of it.

As I stitched up the wound, I asked, “Is it true the Germans called you Devil Dogs for your tenacity?”

He smiled tightly. “Ma’am, I don’t speak any German. And probably just as well.”

And then he was gone with the dusk, after only a few hours of rest.

I wrote to the Colonel-Sahib, telling him about the encounter, and it was my mother who replied.

Darling,

Your father is away again. I’ve put your letter on his desk where he will see it first thing. I know he will be interested in the young Marine. Which reminds me, there was a small paragraph on the last page of the latest Times
. It seems that a soldier is missing, and Scotland Yard has appealed to the public to help find him. There was of course no mention of what he might have done. The plea was worded to leave the impression that he might have fallen ill or come to grief in his weakened state. Simon, meanwhile, has looked up the Major you’d inquired about. He asked me to tell you that he had had no luck there. He also looked for information on Mr. Lessup, and it appears the man’s career has been quite ordinary, something to do with trench design.

Which brought me back to my original question to Inspector Jester: was the murder of Lessup personal or related to the war? It appeared now to be personal.

The letter went on to give me all the news of home, and I slept well that night, comforted to know that Somerset, at least, was still my rock. My place of safety through all the chaos and uncertainty of war.

It was several days later when another letter came, this one written well before my mother’s but taking longer to reach me.

It was from Simon, and quite brief.

I met a friend at Sandhurst who mentioned he’d met the Nevilles in the early days of the war. Miss Neville’s father had opened his London house to officers, after his son had joined the Army. This continued until August 1916, when his son was killed on the Somme. He himself died shortly afterward. The London house has been closed ever since. There’s still black crepe on the door knocker. It has never been taken down. I went to see for myself if it was still there. Neither Miss Neville nor her stepmother has come down to London since that time. I have that on good authority. However, Miss Neville sometimes visits friends from her school days. My friend couldn’t be sure, but he rather thought she’d attended Aldersgate. I went in search of Diana, but Mrs. Hennessey tells me she’s in France.

And Diana had also been sent to Aldersgate, a distinguished school for young ladies near St. Albans. She and Miss Neville must be close enough in age to remember each other.

But where was Diana?

I couldn’t very well ask around. But I did have one possible resource. I let it be known to the next Australian patient I encountered that I had a message for Sergeant Lassiter.

He was the cocky Australian I’d treated on occasion—the last being a badly infected shrapnel wound in his palm—and over time he’d become a friend. He seemed to know half the soldiers serving in France, and he had helped me more than once to find someone whose whereabouts I badly needed to discover. In fact, once he’d nearly been taken up for desertion on my behalf. A very fine soldier by all reports and popular with everyone who knew him.

It was a New Zealander who brought me word that Sergeant Lassiter had received my message, and a Scot who slipped me a scrap of paper early one evening as I was on my way to find a cup of much needed tea. We’d been busy since before dawn and it was now after seven.

“Begging your pardon, Sister,” the Scot asked, “do you ken the cocoaburro bird?”

In his Scots accent I almost didn’t recognize the kookaburra, a bird of Sergeant Lassiter’s native land. He always used its odd, laughing call to alert me to his presence. In this case, it was intended to discover, without asking names, the right recipient of the note.

“Yes—yes, I do, Corporal,” I said at once. He passed me the scrap of paper and with a nod, went on his way, his kilt swinging with that ground-covering stride common to men of the Highlands.

I put the message in my pocket, for we were not to correspond with the men we treated, and I wasn’t sure what Sergeant Lassiter might have written. Explaining about Diana and Aldersgate School and Miss Neville would be difficult.

Sister Baker, just coming from the dwindling line of patients and on her way to where we kept our supplies, called to me. “Who is your handsome beau?”

She meant it as a jest. But I was careful, hoping she hadn’t noticed what he’d given me.

“Alas, he was looking for one of his officers. He didn’t stay to chat.”

A buxom girl from Rutland with fair hair and freckles, she laughed. “Alas, indeed. I sometimes think the only way to get their attention is to dig a bit of metal out of them.”

Sister Baker hurried on, intent on her errand, and I quickly drank my cup of tea before going back on duty. We finished the last of the line of wounded just after nightfall, and I sat down on an overturned pail to catch my breath. And then the shelling began, the first ranging shots falling perilously close to us. There were no ambulances now to take away the last of the wounded, but we moved them back as quickly as we could. Men from one of the reserve trenches came to help us, and that speeded up the operation. By that time, the German shells were finding their mark, and a new line of wounded soon demanded our attention.

I had had only the sketchiest breakfast and half a sandwich for lunch. By midnight, I was achingly tired and very hungry—hungry enough now to feel a little light-headed. The incessant shelling didn’t help, but I held on grimly until I was relieved, a little after two in the morning, by two new Sisters brought up by the ambulances that were taking our wounded back.

I fell on my cot too exhausted to think. Then far too soon an orderly was calling to me, and I had to find the strength to get up again.

But he had also just brought me a tin of hot soup and a chunk of bread that had also come up with the ambulances, and with the food a large mug of hot tea.

It was bliss. I broke up some of my bread into the soup—my mother would have been horrified—and enjoyed every mouthful. The rest I ate with my tea, wishing it were a sweet bun from the bakery in the village at home, those we had in such plenty before the war and the rationing.

And that for some reason reminded me of the message still in my pocket.

It was a little bloodstained now, spatters from when I’d staunched the bleeding in a badly mangled thigh.

Sergeant Lassiter hadn’t used a name.

She’s closer to the Ypres Road.

And then he’d given me the number of the aid station.

She might as well be on the moon, for I was on the Somme.

The Germans were fighting ferociously. And it seemed they had shells to spare, the way they pounded at the British and French lines, looking for—praying for?—a break somewhere that would enable them to push farther south, as they had done in 1914, when they had caught the French off guard. They’d nearly had Paris then, and it had been at risk more than once since. In June, they might have had Paris again, if it hadn’t been for the American Army and the gallant Marines.

We went about our duties without respite, trying to ignore rumors of peace, seeing the evidence of our own eyes in the stretchers brought to us. And the dread Spanish influenza was still with us, killing cruelly, taking an enormous toll.

Pulling back at one point, we came upon a small encampment of refugees caught by the shift in the fighting. Men and women who had tried desperately to hold on to their own bit of land, farms that had been in the same families for centuries. Most had fled long ago, south of the Seine, well away from the fighting.

These people had heard the rumors of peace, they too had believed them—or wanted to—and somehow they had made their way forward in the hope of reclaiming what was theirs as soon as the guns fell silent.

One woman was heavily pregnant and pale with the onset of labor. Three children clung to her, while her husband begged us to do something. There were seven other families, and one of the men had begun to cough in a way that worried me. The onset of influenza? Or tuberculosis? He hung well back, keeping out of the light we were using to set up the aid station again.

I hadn’t delivered a baby since the days of my training. But I brought the woman in to lie down on one of the cots, fishing in my kit for some of the biscuits my mother had sent back with me. I’d been hoarding them, slowly savoring a touch of home, but now I gave them to the children, who stared at them as if they had never seen such things before, then gobbled them down hungrily as the father led them away. I realized all of them were hungry and tired and footsore, and I thought they must surely regret their impetuous decision to come north again.

The baby was slow to come. Ordinarily a second or third child came quickly, sometimes before its time. I remembered one woman from Hampstead Heath who complained that her first child had taken two days to make an appearance, while she nearly had the second one in the omnibus that had brought her to the hospital.

And then the problem was clear. This was going to be a breech birth, where the baby’s head, usually the first part to appear, is in the wrong position and the legs or buttocks try to make their way through the birth canal.

I felt a frisson of fear. We weren’t set up for a Cesarean. The chances were the mother would die, leaving three—possibly four, if the baby survived—children alone with the father to care for them. And there was no time, no ambulance available to take her back to a hospital equipped to help her. It had been nearly four years since I’d watched Dr. Morton gently and firmly reposition a baby for a normal delivery.

The woman, sweating and in great pain, looked up at me piteously. She had seen my face, she was afraid she was going to die.

I smiled at her, then said, in halting French, uncertain of the words, “The child is twisted, Madame. It will take a little work to right him. It will be painful, but it must be done.” And it must be done at once before the child was in a position where a Cesarean was the only choice.

I set to work, praying that I wouldn’t rupture the walls of the womb or twist the umbilical cord around the baby’s neck, gently but firmly turning him while the mother cried out in pain. But I had nothing to give her. Nothing at all.

And then I had the baby’s head, facedown, in the correct place, and I shouted, “Now, Madame, push, I beg of you!”

She did, and suddenly, as if it was what the child had intended all along, the head came smoothly into my waiting hands, and shortly after that it slid out of the mother’s body with ease. “A girl, Madame!”

I realized that she was a very small infant. There had been little food for the mother, and she had probably given most of what she had to her children. Just as well, I thought, making it easier for me to shift the baby. But she cried lustily as I wrapped her warmly after tying off and clipping the cord, and I laid her in her mother’s arms. The woman was crying with joy, now, the pain forgotten as I finished what had to be done. The father came forward timidly, to see the child, and I left them to it, going to clean myself up.