The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (142 page)

Belle found her way to the chair and sat down. ‘When was this?’ she said. ‘Did you see him again?’

‘A couple of weeks ago,’ said Winsloe, ‘and no, I didn’t. Like I said, things got fuzzy. When I came to, I was at Hazebrouck, no idea where he’d gone.’ He paused. ‘The thing is,’ he said angrily, ‘he saved my life. But I didn’t
ask
him to. I told him to go away. But now I suppose I’ve got to live with it, haven’t I? I mean, you’ve got to, haven’t you? If someone does a thing like that.’

Belle couldn’t speak.

‘Why’d he have to go and do a thing like that?’ said Winsloe. ‘I never even asked him.’

Belle put her cold hands together in her lap. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Lights flash painfully in his head. He’s awake again. He wishes to God that he wasn’t.

‘Captain Palairet?’ says a woman’s voice. Soft, insistent. Infuriating.

He opens his eyes. Shuts them again. The glare is agonizing: shards of glass piercing his skull. Why can’t they put out the bloody lights?

He opens his mouth to tell them, but he can’t make a sound, just lies there gaping like a fish.

He’s been doing that for days. And yet every time he wakes, he has this pathetic hope that this time –
this
time – he’ll be able to talk. Each time the disappointment crashes in afresh. He would never have believed it could be so maddening – so all-consuming and
humiliating
– not to be able to speak. It makes him savage: flaring up at trifles, perpetually on the point of losing his temper.

‘Captain Palairet? Oh, good, you’re awake. Look! You have a letter! Isn’t that nice? I’m afraid it’s done the rounds: postmarked three days ago; must have been misdirected. Shall I leave it here, where you can reach it?’

Anything, so long as you leave me alone. Oh, and on your way out, Sister Gregory, hand me a revolver, so that I can shoot down that bloody chandelier.

He has a room to himself, for which he knows he should be grateful, but isn’t. It has a high ceiling with elaborate plaster mouldings, and sumptuous yellow silk curtains – and, of course, the hated chandelier, suspended directly above him like some baroque instrument of torture. Whose idea was it to turn a casino into a hospital?

Somewhere a door slams, and he twitches so violently that he nearly falls out of bed. Instantly his heart is racing. Cold sweat slicks his skin.

It’s only a door, he tells himself in disgust. His body doesn’t believe him. His body thinks they’re under fire.

Twenty, thirty times a day – whenever a door slams or a trolley creaks, or a train trundles past on its way to Boulogne – he ducks for cover. It’s completely beyond his control. And so damned humiliating. It makes him feel like the worst kind of coward.

The doctors say it’s only natural that things are so much worse than the last time, when he got shot. ‘You see, Captain Palairet, at that time you were at war, and you
expected
to get hurt. This time, you believed that it was all behind you. So of course the shock would be that much the greater . . .’

Is that why I can’t talk?
Adam had scrawled on his notepad.

‘Ah. Well, you see, we’re not absolutely sure about that.’

Will I get better?

‘My dear fellow, as to that, we really couldn’t say.’

They do like to hide behind the plural when the news isn’t good.

‘Shall I just slit the envelope for you?’ says Sister Gregory, hovering.

She’s pretty, with flaxen hair and large grey eyes that remind him vaguely of Felicity Ruthven. To get rid of her, he picks up the letter – which in itself is a performance, as he has to prop himself on his good elbow and ignore the pain that blossoms everywhere else. The pain in his thigh is so bad that he nearly cries out, only of course he can’t. Not that moaning would lessen the pain. But he still wishes he could.

Sister Gregory makes her habitual clucking noise that sets his teeth on edge, and takes the envelope from his hand as if he’s a child, and opens it neatly, and draws out the letter. She makes a great show of not looking to see who it’s from, although clearly she’s dying to find out.

Adam glances without interest at the sender’s address on the back of the envelope. His heart lurches. It’s from Belle.
Belle?
In Saint-Omer? What the hell is she doing in France?

Wild imaginings crowd in on him. Somehow she’s heard that he got blown up – perhaps Maud sent her a wire? Yes, that must be it – and she’s coming to see him. Now everything will be all right. She’ll come back with him to Cairngowrie, and they’ll pretend that Cornelius Traherne never existed, and . . .

Dear Adam
, she writes. Her handwriting is sprawling and emphatic, with several splotches and crossings out.
A strange man called Winsloe told me what happened, and since then I’ve moved heaven and earth to find you
. . .

Winsloe. Of course. He’d come to see Adam yesterday, having somehow managed to get past Sister Gregory. For half an hour he’d sat beside Adam’s bed in accusing silence, before blurting out a resentful ‘Thank you’, and rushing from the room. He seemed to have taken it as a personal slight that Adam’s injuries had been worse than his own.

. . .
I had
no idea
that you were were even in Flanders, and now you’re hurt, and when I telephoned the hospital some awful nurse spent ages telling me that she couldn’t possibly tell me
anything,
and that you’re not seeing visitors
. . .

Of course I’m not. Would you, if you were in this state?

. . .
so I’m writing to ask if you’ll see me. I know I’ve no right to expect it after what I did – but I
need to see you
, Adam. I need to make sure that you’re all right
. . .

Another door slams, and this time he twitches so violently that his good arm catches the water jug on the side table, sending it flying. The sound of it shattering is like a whizz-bang exploding, so of course he ducks. Bloody
hell
.

That’s another thing he misses. Swearing in one’s head just isn’t the same.

Little Sister Gregory comes running. Of course. Presumably she was waiting on the other side of the door. As she kneels to clean up the mess, she gives him a sweet, sympathetic smile that makes him want to decapitate her.

To avoid her sympathy he glances at the letter crumpled in his fist. Something twists in his chest. He badly needs to see Belle. And just as badly, he couldn’t bear for her to see him. Not with one arm shattered in four places, and his head a mass of bandages, and a shard of shrapnel the size of a bayonet sticking out of his thigh, and too close to the artery to remove ‘just quite yet’, whatever the devil that means.

But he needs to see Belle. He needs to look into her fathomless dark eyes; to watch that wry twist of her mouth when he’s said something with which she doesn’t agree. Although of course he wouldn’t be able to
say
anything to her at all.

. . .
Adam,
please.
I need to know that you’re all right. Scribble a line – dictate a wire – anything – and I’ll be on the next train. I can’t bear not to know
. . .

And then what? he wonders. We sit in awkward silence while you do your damnedest not to look horrified? After which, presumably, you go back to Saint-Omer, and I get myself packed off to some convalescent hospital, and we never see each other again?

Because nothing’s changed, has it, Belle? There’s still something getting in the way of our being together, just as it did at Cairngowrie. And I can’t fight it, because you won’t tell me what it is. So even if I could persuade you to come back with me – perhaps by making some disgusting plea for sympathy: ‘Please don’t leave me, the poor, crippled, mute ex-soldier’ – sooner or later you would leave, wouldn’t you?

And I can’t, I just can’t go through that again.

The wind tipped over the dwarf cypress, and Belle leaned down to right the pot and position it a little closer to Private Arbuthnot’s headstone, so that it would appear in the foreground, and soften the severity.

As she took the shot, she wondered for the twentieth time if there would be a letter waiting for her tonight when she got back to Saint-Omer.

That wretched, wretched nurse.

‘Can’t you even tell me if he’s out of danger?’ Belle had pleaded.

‘Oh goodness no,’ the nurse had said, sounding infuriatingly as if she was enjoying herself. ‘I couldn’t possibly give out any details whatsoever on the telephone, especially as you’re only a friend . . .’

She’d enjoyed saying that, too. And she’d absolutely loved telling Belle that there was no point ‘whatsoever’ in making the journey to the hospital at Wimereux, because Captain Palairet didn’t want visitors, so she’d only be turned away.

‘So he’s well enough to make stipulations,’ Belle had cut in acidly.

The nurse’s reply had been shrill. ‘Twisting my words will do you no good at all, Miss Lawe.’

‘Just let me speak to him—’

‘Out of the question. Besides, Captain Palairet
can’t
speak.’

‘What do you mean?’

A silence at the other end of the line, as if the nurse knew she’d said too much.

‘If he’s well enough to turn away visitors,’ Belle insisted, ‘then surely—’

‘He can’t
speak
, Miss Lawe. He is mute. A lot of our patients are. Now I believe I’ve already made myself perfectly clear, and I don’t think there’s anything more to say. You will simply have to write first, or else we shall be forced to turn you away at the door.’

That had been three days ago. Three days of waiting in vain for the post. Had he even received her letter? Or was he too badly hurt to write?

Another gust of wind tipped the dwarf cypress into the mud. Belle blinked at it, and turned up the collar of her coat, and wondered what to do next.

It was freezing in the cemetery – or rather, in the bleak expanse of mud beside the Hazebrouck road which would, when finished, be known by some euphonious name, but was now simply No. 32 on Sophie’s map.

Twelve rows of stark new headstones towards the front – priority being given to the named graves – backed by seventeen rows of temporary wooden crosses for the unidentified, who in time would each get their own beautiful stone headstone, inscribed simply
A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God
. A few of the headstones bore little bunches of coloured ribbons that fluttered wildly in the wind. Somehow they only emphasized the sense of devastation and loss.

At the far end, by the road, a long wooden hut like a seaside pavilion afforded tea for the steady flow of visitors who’d managed to find their way through the mud. Belle could see a clump of them emerging into the wind, clutching their fluttering maps, and moving awkwardly in their new
sabots
, which someone must have advised them to buy in order to deal with the mud. Behind them, a trio of officers had just drawn up in an army motor. No doubt they’d come to pay their respects to an old comrade.

In the corner furthest from the gates, Sophie was fighting a losing battle to make the site less appalling – and to hold on to her temper, which was growing worse with each day that passed without news of Ben.

‘But I
told
you to plant them three feet apart,’ she cried at her assistant, a hapless young factory worker from Leeds.

At the outburst, several of the visitors turned and stared.

Belle wondered if she ought to go across and intervene. She decided against it. Latterly, a constraint had sprung up between them. Sophie hadn’t said anything, but it was becoming clear that she was beginning to lose hope about Ben; while ever since Mr Winsloe’s strange, resentful visit, Belle herself had been plagued by an irrational notion that if by some miracle Ben did turn up alive, that would mean that Adam would die.

She told herself that was nonsense, but she couldn’t shake off the sense of dread – and the awkwardness when she was with Sophie. It just didn’t seem possible that both Adam and Ben would be allowed to live.

A feather-light tap on her shoulder, and she turned to see a visitor – a woman, fortyish, with the stretched look of grief – smiling apologetically as she clutched her hat to her head with one hand, and a crumpled map with the other. ‘
So
sorry to disturb,’ she murmured, ‘but I seem to be having a little difficulty . . .’

Why are they always so polite? wondered Belle as she helped the woman find the sector which contained the remains of her only son. Why does the poor thing feel the need to apologize?

The woman was nervous and talkative: she’d come over from Birmingham by herself, on a Tourist Ticket from Thomas Cook’s. It gave her just two days to find her son, and she’d already been misdirected twice, and time was running out, not that she was complaining, she could see how hard everyone was working to make it nice . . .

Of one accord, they stopped and looked about them. Sophie’s team of gardeners were doing what they could with turf and holly and yew, but nothing could disguise the stark ugliness of the site.

‘It’s just that I didn’t expect it to be so
bleak
,’ murmured the woman, softening that with another apologetic smile. ‘I mean, a battlefield would seem to imply – well, a field? But I suppose I’m simply being . . . well. But it is so very
bleak
.’

Belle led her to the start of the correct row, then quietly withdrew, to leave her alone with her son.

She was glad that Sophie was too far away to have heard that last remark. From the look of things, she was working herself up into a state.

‘Is it really too much to ask?’ she cried, brandishing a small yew tree at her assistant. ‘All I want is for you to put them in the right way up!’

By the refreshment hut, more visitors turned and stared. At the gate, one of the officers detached himself from his companions and began making his way slowly through the cemetery.

Belle sighed. Sophie sounded worryingly close to tears. Perhaps it was time to persuade her into the refreshment hut.