An Unmarked Grave (11 page)

He relaxed his arm briefly, swearing and jerking back in pain. I spun out of his grip, and as soon as I could fill my lungs with air again, I screamed. Furious, he shoved me toward the lorry, and I stumbled as I tried to keep my balance, hurting my wrist as I went down.

He reached for me again, pulling me up, trying to get a hand over my mouth, no longer hoping to make my death look like suicide. Now he was intent on simple murder. I cried out again before he succeeded in cutting it short.

There are only a handful of women this close to the front lines, and my first scream brought men racing from every direction. By my second, they were converging on us. My assailant flung me against the offside wheel of the water lorry with some force. I threw up my hands just in time to protect my head and face. He ducked beneath the lorry and disappeared into the shadows on the far side.

By the time the first orderly reached me, I’d scrambled to my feet, alone and furiously angry in my turn.

I could have tried to pass off the attack as female fears and an overwrought imagination in the shadowy, poorly lit latrines.

Perhaps it would have been better that way. But my hair was tumbling down my back, the side of my face where I’d scraped it on something was already an angry red in the light of the torches blinding me, and the strap of my apron had been torn off the bib. There was no disguising the fact that I’d been in trouble.

Their first thought was an attempt at rape. And why should they even consider murder?

Dr. Hicks was pushing the other men aside, leaning forward to get a better look at me. He swore as he took in the damage.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?” he demanded, his face like a thundercloud.

“My wrist—I think it banged into the pump as I broke away. Nothing a cold compress won’t help.” In spite of the effort I’d made to get myself under control, even I could hear the shock in my voice. Nor could I do much about the fact that I must have looked like a thundercloud myself.

Everyone seemed to be there in the darkness behind the ring of torchlight. Sisters, orderlies, ambulatory patients, ambulance drivers. I quickly scanned their faces searching for—what? A stranger amongst them, anyone who could fit Matron’s description of the man who’d come looking for Sister Burrows. But of course there was no one who by any stretch of my imagination could have attacked me. There was only genuine concern for me. And by coming so quickly to my aid, they had unwittingly allowed my assailant to escape.

Dr. Hicks seemed to realize that in the same moment. He half turned to the orderlies and ambulance drivers, saying grimly, “Don’t stand there—start searching the aid station. Top to bottom. Find out who did this!”

That done, Dr. Hicks marched me off to the surgery tent to bathe and dress my face, then find a compress for my wrist where a bruise was fast turning to an ugly red.

“Did you see who it was, Sister Crawford? Can you give us any description?”

“I tried. But he came from behind, out of the shadows, and I think the candle went over as he reached for me. I didn’t even know he was there until he put his arm around my throat.” I didn’t add that his other hand had been locked in the palm of the hand suffocating me, bringing all his strength to bear on cutting off my air. He had known what he was doing, there was no doubt in my mind about that.

“Did you mark him in any way?”

“Not where it could be seen. There was no chance,” I said as he tilted my head to look at my throat. “I couldn’t have reached his face, I was nearly sure of that, but where I dug my nails into his sides, there must be marks.”

“You kept your head,” he said, nodding in approval, “but sooner or later the shock will catch up with you.”

“He must have lined up with the walking wounded, then slipped away when no one was looking.”

“Yes, that chest wound—we were so busy. It must have been then.”

The soldier had been dying from blood loss when he was brought in, and somehow, miraculously, Dr. Hicks had found the source of the bleeding and stopped it. The boy—he seemed no older than that on the stretcher—was sent straight back to the Base Hospital, with a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. We’d all applauded when Dr. Hicks had stepped back and nodded, his hands and arms covered in blood. I wouldn’t have believed it possible if I hadn’t watched it for myself.

In that moment of success, someone could have stepped out of line, walked to the latrines, and waited for me. He must have seen me clearly as I sorted the cases, but I’d been too busy to see him.

“I’ll strip every man in here if I have to. You were damn—very fortunate,” the doctor was saying to me as he considered the marks on my neck. “I won’t have this sort of thing on my watch.”

And he stormed out to do just exactly that.

But of course he didn’t find my attacker or anyone with a mark on him that would correspond to my struggle.

Soon after that, he came back to escort me to my quarters, saying only, “He’s not here. Mind you, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. Or that he won’t come back. If not for you, then for one of the other sisters. And I’ll see that word is passed. This won’t be tolerated.”

He stood outside my tent until I was inside, and I found it comforting, despite my certainty that there wouldn’t be a repeat attack. At least not while the guard of the entire station was up.

I didn’t fall sleep for a long while. My body was still tense, the feel of that arm choking me still too fresh. Every little sound in the darkness seemed overly loud and menacing, even though I told myself to ignore it.

Where, I thought, lying there, was the “cousin” who had been sent to keep me safe?

Wherever he was, he’d nearly been too late.

Another search was made at first light, but there was no sign of my attacker. Dr. Hicks excused me from my morning shift, but I went to him and asked him to let me work. As frightening as the experience had been, I knew that I was safer and less likely to dwell on what had happened if I kept busy.

Everyone was sympathetic, and I noticed that someone was always within call, wherever I went.

But what to tell my father? And if Simon got any inkling of what had occurred, he’d be in France before the day was out, still bleeding or not.

In the end, I decided to say nothing to them. For all I knew, it had indeed been an attempt at rape, not murder.

I was walking across to my quarters that night when I heard Dr. Hicks just behind me say sharply, “Who the devil are you?”

I turned to see him challenging someone who was only a black silhouette against the faint light of the distant shelling.

“The new orderly,” the voice said. “I walked up. There wasn’t any transportation.”

“Then you’ll damned well stay there until I can take a good look at your orders.”

I knew that voice, didn’t I? But I couldn’t quite place it, for coming out of the darkness, half muffled by the big guns, I couldn’t quite make the connection. I needed more to jog my memory.

“I’ll wait until you have sorted him out,” I told Dr. Hicks, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man’s face as they repaired to the small tent where the doctors kept their paperwork and whatever medicines we had under lock and key.

But he said, “No. Wiser to go inside and leave me to deal with this.”

Nodding, I did as I was told, and as soon as I was safely in my quarters, he was gone.

The next morning Sister Clery said, “Have you met the new orderly?”

“A glimpse, nothing more.”

“Well, I can tell you he isn’t like the rest. Wait until you see for yourself.”

“More to the point, is he good at his work?”

“Wasted,” she said firmly. “Remember that hand that we thought might be turning septic? We had to take it off this morning, and Corporal Dugan was fighting us for all he was worth. Barclay held him for us until we could get the ether mask over his face—”

I didn’t hear the rest. I had placed the voice now, as well as the way the man had been standing as he spoke to Dr. Hicks.

What was Captain Barclay doing in France at a British aid station masquerading as an orderly?

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

I
SAW HIM
coming out of the canteen, a cup of tea in his hand, grimacing as he drank it without sugar or milk.

I called, “You’re the new man, are you? Barclay?”

“I’m never going to learn to like tea,” he said plaintively, approaching me.

“Sorry. It’s all we have. There’s a shortage.”

“So I’ve heard.” He glanced around, then said swiftly, “Bess. You don’t know me.” With that, he walked off.

But wherever I was, it seemed that Captain Barclay—Barclay the orderly—was somewhere close by. He seemed oddly out of place to me in his khaki orderly’s tunic with the red cross on his sleeve. I’d seen him in his own uniform, and he wore it with an air that suited his rank. Still, everyone else took him in stride, and his attempts at rank-and-file humility were successful, although sometimes I caught a gleam in his eyes that belied them. Working with the wounded, to his credit he did the most menial task from emptying bloody basins to carrying away an amputated limb with the grim stoicism of a seasoned orderly. He’d been in the trenches, of course, he’d seen and dealt with worse, but it was not something anyone grew accustomed to, however hard the shell put up to keep one’s sanity in the face of such horrors.

I couldn’t help but think in the dark hours of the night that he’d appeared right on the heels of the attack on me. And then I’d remind myself that the Colonel Sahib had sent him, and the Colonel Sahib was seldom wrong in his judgment of a man’s character.

I could also see Dr. Gaines’s fine hand in all this. Captain Barclay had been pressing to return to his men, ready or not. This would be a lesson in a different kind of humility—forcing him to listen to his doctors.

In a way his presence was comforting. In the first place it freed me to work without looking over my shoulder. In the second, I’d been concerned about someone
hovering,
in my way at every turn. But apparently he’d been ordered to keep his distance, close enough to protect me but without being underfoot. I’d have given much to discover why my parents had turned to Captain Barclay as the safest choice to watch over me. He was, as I knew only too well, a very persuasive man. Still, his wound helped him carry off his charade. That must have carried some weight.

What little I learned about his “story” came in bits and pieces from others.

He was Canadian, had joined the British Army because he had been living in Britain when war was declared, but he was rejected because of a leg injury that refused to heal properly—hence his limp—and so he’d become an orderly instead. (His time in the clinic had given him a good background to make that believable. He talked about his duties there with the ease of experience.) He wasn’t married (this from Sister Clery), and his father was in the merchant marine—which was close enough to the truth. I asked where he lived, and I was told he’d been an orderly at Longleigh House in Somerset, had served in Dover, on several patient transport ships (which had aggravated his bad leg), and was now with us.

Dr. Gaines again,
I thought. And he’d also been responsible for my own return to France.

Several evenings later, Dr. Hicks sent me to the Base Hospital for supplies—we’d been running short for three days, but he hadn’t been able to spare anyone. With a brief respite in the fighting—the guns were silent and lines of fresh troops were making their way to the Front to relieve those who’d endured a week of heavy shelling—we had only a trickle of new patients.

We took with us three badly wounded men who were due to be sent back for more treatment, and Barclay was assigned to drive.

It was a more or less uneventful journey, although once a nervous company of raw troops fired on us from a distance before their sergeant got them under control again, shouting at them in a Glaswegian accent that made half of what he was saying unintelligible.

We delivered our patients and saw to it the instructions accompanying them were duly signed for, then collected the list of desperately needed medicines, bandages, needles, sutures, and so on that Dr. Hicks had requested. An hour later, the ambulance carefully stocked, I got into the seat beside Captain Barclay after he’d turned the crank.

“Wait until we’re out of sight,” he said in a low voice, turning out of the racetrack and picking up the road to the Front.

And so I waited. Last night the sun had set in a blaze of gold and red, sliding behind a bank of deep purple clouds. Now it was pitch-dark without the flickering light of the shelling, and the only way we could be certain we were on what passed as a road were the wide swaths of deep ruts left behind by the lorries. Our blacked-out headlamps were woefully inadequate, casting shadows that only made it harder to judge anything in time to avoid another bone-wrenching jolt. About two miles out we spotted the single chimney and broken wall of a farmhouse. It had become a marker of sorts, and we all knew to watch for it. The rest of the village was little more than rubble, with no way of judging where the streets had been, much less the houses or shops that once had lined them. How this single chimney and wall had survived God alone knew.

The ambulance rocked and swayed over the debris, and I feared we would never extract it again just as Barclay turned off the motor and silence fell. I could have sworn I heard a cricket somewhere, it was so quiet.

“All right,” he said, turning to me, his face a pale mask in the darkness and oddly sinister. “I’m sorry there was no chance to explain before this. I was told I didn’t know you. I suspected the Sergeant-Major’s touch there. Necessity or precaution or jealousy.” The mask split into a white grin in the shadows.

“How is Simon?” I asked anxiously.

“I didn’t see him, to tell the truth.”

And that worried me. Surely if he were well enough, Simon would have been consulted.

“Then how did you become involved in this? What did they tell you? Dr. Gaines and my father?”

“Dr. Gaines had been sent for. He must have told your father that I’d accompanied you to Nether Thornton and then to the Gorge.”

“But you’d spoken to my father once. When I was sailing to France. You told him where to meet me.”

“That was sheer luck. Bess, I called the War Office. They found him, wherever he was, and passed on my message. Apparently they thought I was the Sergeant-Major. The Colonel had a few words to say about that when we spoke again.”

I could just imagine how annoyed my father was. The relationship with Simon was sacrosanct. He wouldn’t have appreciated Captain Barclay’s efforts, however well intentioned.

“At any rate, your father asked if I was fit enough for duty and if I’d take on a hazardous assignment. I was to report directly to him. Or if I couldn’t reach him, then to your mother.”

I’d told Simon about my companion on those journeys. Was it he who’d remembered?

“What did they tell you? How did they explain that I might be in danger?”

I still wasn’t prepared to trust this man.

“The Colonel told me the truth. At least I had the feeling he did.”

“What did they tell you?” I asked again, trying not to sound impatient.

“That someone had been murdered and you were the only witness who could testify to that. The trouble was, the killer knew you, but you couldn’t identify him as easily. That you were in danger. Well, by God, they were right. I heard about what happened just before I got there, and if I get my hands on that—on whoever it is, I’ll kill him myself.” The grin had disappeared like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, and I could feel the tension in the man across from me, a deep-seated anger that was like a flare of warmth in the ambulance.

“At any rate,” he went on after collecting himself, “when they spoke to me, I jumped at the chance. I’d rather be back with my men, but if that’s out of the question, I’ll use this assignment to prove that I’m ready to fight again.”

“Going over the top is not easy with a bad leg,” I said. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Yes, I can get others killed if I’m a burden,” he said impatiently. “That’s been brought home to me. But your father saw to it that I was given a background that wouldn’t make anyone suspicious. And your father asked me to give you this.”

He moved in the darkness and his hand stretched out toward me. In the palm lay the little pistol that Simon had given me once before. I recognized it immediately.

“My father? Not Simon himself?”

“I never saw the Sergeant-Major, Bess.”

I bit my lip. Once before I’d been afraid that bad news was being kept from me. I had that feeling again. Had Simon not lived to reach England? Had he lost that arm?

I looked down at the little pistol. Nurses were not permitted to carry weapons, but this time, remembering my feeling of helplessness when that arm had come around my throat and how lucky I was that I’d been able to kick the water pail, then scream, I touched it with my fingertips and then settled it carefully in the pocket of my uniform.

Captain Barclay was saying, “Better to wing him, Bess. Your father wants him alive.”

“But who is he?” I asked. “Why did he—what reason could he have for attacking me? I’ve never made an official report of any kind.” I wanted to know precisely how much my father had told the Captain.

“It appears he killed one Major Carson, who was in your father’s old regiment. And that he’s willing to kill again to protect himself. That woman. The one who lived near the Gorge. Apparently he’d killed her husband as well. The orderly who had discovered the Major’s body.”

Finally satisfied, I nodded. “He must be in the Army. He would have to be to reach the Major and then to attack me. One can’t simply take the next ferry across the Channel.”

“Yes, that was your father’s theory. They don’t know what rank he actually holds. But it’s easy enough out here to kill someone and steal a uniform. One unmarked grave more or less wouldn’t be noticed.”

But one couldn’t murder a Major without a flag going up. He’d be missed. A private soldier wouldn’t.

What’s more, whoever this was had been able to carry off the masquerade as Colonel Prescott. Both in person and in the contents of the letter he’d written Julia Carson. I wondered how many roles as a military officer William Morton had played on the stage. Shakespeare was filled with them, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plays as well. Gilbert and Sullivan had created lively military characters. Productions had come out to India and were amazingly popular.

But then Matron had questioned Colonel Prescott’s manner—something had made her uneasy. Of course until I asked questions, Matron had kept her doubts to herself. Had I allayed her suspicions—or would she at some point bring them up with someone else?

Matron. I felt a chill. She’d seen his face. But he’d made no effort to harm her. Why? Had there been no opportunity? Or did he think she could wait?

Captain Barclay was adding grimly, “Something could have happened in the trenches between this man and Carson. Not everyone out here is a gallant soldier serving King and Country.”

I’d heard stories of shooting unpopular officers in the back when the opportunity presented itself. Charging across No Man’s Land is a chancy business at best, and it would be easy, firing at the enemy, to find one’s nemesis in the crosshairs.

If Sabrina had been cut off without a farthing when she married her actor, there could very well be hard feelings against Vincent for not doing more for her when the elder Carson died.

But Vincent hadn’t been shot in the back; his neck had been broken.

Captain Barclay gingerly climbed out and restarted the ambulance. “We’ve delayed long enough. They’ll begin to wonder, up ahead.”

The overworked motor coughed and struggled for several seconds before finally turning over properly. Captain Barclay reversed gingerly, the wheel jerking in his hands, and then we were safely back on what passed for a road. I stopped a sigh of relief, but I had a feeling he felt the same way.

We traveled in silence for a time.

I said, “Someone knew I was at the aid station. I don’t see how he could.”

“It shouldn’t be that difficult.” He turned to me in the darkness. “ ‘My sister’s at a forward aid station.’ Or ‘I served under Colonel Crawford before he retired. Is it true his daughter’s a nurse out here?’ Word gets around.”

And so it had last winter, when I’d asked for information about convents that took in French orphans. The answer had come back to me in the most unexpected way.

“Then I’m still at risk. But he won’t try to kill me at the aid station here. Not again. For one thing, I’m carefully watched. All the sisters are. But my next posting—or on the way to it—I’ll be vulnerable.”

“Quite. But I wouldn’t write off someone stopping this ambulance and killing both of us,” he said tightly.

I shivered at the thought, and touched the weight of the little pistol in my pocket. Simon had reminded me that it wasn’t of a caliber to kill or maim. But it was better than no protection, and it could make enough noise and cause enough pain to stop my assailant until someone came to my rescue.

With that thought in mind, when we had reached the station, I slept more soundly in what was left of that night.

Barclay was always in sight, wherever I was, and I wondered when or if he slept at all. He looked tired, and some of that I put down to his leg still being weak. His limp seemed to be worse, but he never complained.

Sister Clery, sitting down beside me as I ate a hasty dinner before returning to my duties, eyed me with interest. “I think,” she said after a moment, “that you have a beau. And he really is handsome, even though he’s not an officer. He ought to be. Perhaps there’s something mysterious in his past that prevented him from joining the Army under his own name.”

Realizing she was speaking of Barclay, I laughed. “He’s actually a rich American in disguise, and he followed me to France because I’ve refused his proposals of marriage nine times.”

She laughed with me. “I tell you, Bess, if that were true, I’d volunteer to mend his sad and broken heart myself.”

“Alas, I fear it’s beyond mending.”