Maisie Dobbs (30 page)

She moved closer to Simon, who took her hand.

“It’ll be over soon. It has to be, Maisie. The war just can’t go on like this. Sometimes I feel as if I’m doctoring in a slaughterhouse. One body of raw flesh after another.”

Simon stopped and drew Maisie to him and kissed her.“My Maisie of the blue silk dress. I’m still waiting for an answer.”

Maisie drew back and looked into Simon’s eyes. “Simon, I said to ask again when this is over. When I can see a future.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Simon, beginning to tease her, “Sometimes I think you
can
see the future—and it gives me chills!”

He held her to him again.“I tell you what, Maisie. I promise that I won’t ask you again until the war is over. We’ll walk together on the South Downs and you can give me your answer then. How about it?”

Maisie smiled and looked into his eyes, bright in the moonlight. Simon, Simon, my love, she thought, how I fear this question. “Yes. Yes, Simon. Ask me again on the South Downs. When the war is over.”

And Simon threw back his head and laughed, without thought for who might hear him.

“G
od . . . .”

Simon’s lips were drawn across his teeth as he looked at the wound to the soldier’s chest, and uttered his plea to the heavens. Maisie immediately began cleaning the hole created by shrapnel, while Simon stanched the flow of blood. Nurses, doctors, anesthetists, orderlies, and stretcher-bearers were everywhere, rushing, running, working to save lives.

Maisie wiped the sweat from Simon’s brow and continued to work on the wound. Simon inspected the extent of the injury. Lights flickered, and the tent shuddered.

“God, I can hardly even see in here.”

Suddenly it seemed as if the battlefield had come to the hospital. As they worked to save the lives of men being brought in by the dozen, the tent shook again with the impact of a shell at close quarters.

“What the bloody hell . . .?”

“Sir, sir, I think we’re coming under fire,” an orderly shouted across to Simon. The operating tent was becoming part of the battlefield itself. Maisie swallowed the sour liquid that had come up from her stomach and into her mouth. She looked at Simon, and to combat her fear, she smiled at him. For one second he returned her smile broadly, then turned again to his patient. They could not stop.

“Well, then. Let’s get on with it!”

Let’s get on with it.

Those were the last words she heard Simon speak.

Let’s get on with it.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I
t was on a warm afternoon in late September that Maisie stepped out of the MG and looked up at the front of an imposing Georgian building in Richmond. Two Grecian-style columns stood at either side of the steps, which in turn led to the heavy oak doors of the main entrance. The house had once been a grand home with gardens that extended down toward the Thames, where the great river grew broader on its meandering journey from the village of Thame in Oxfordshire, after it emerged as a small stream. From Richmond it would rush on toward London, through the city, and into the sea, fresh and salt water meeting in a swirling mass. Maisie loved to look at the river. There was calm to be found in viewing water. And Maisie wanted to remain calm. She would walk to the water and back, to get her bearings.

The Retreat affair had been brought to its conclusion. Jenkins was now at Broadmoor, incarcerated with those who were considered mentally ill and dangerous. Archie and others involved in Jenkins’s wrongdoing at The Retreat were also in institutions where they would find a measure of compassion and solace. They were not being held “at His Majesty’s Pleasure” but would be released in time. Other men had returned to families or to their solitary lives, some finding renewed understanding.

Billy Beale found that he did not really enjoy publicity, that it was enough for him to go about his business each day, though if a person needed help, then he, Billy Beale, was the man.

“Of course, the missus don’t mind gettin’ a bit extra when she goes into that skinflint butcher for a nice bit of lamb, and the attention’s brought a bit of a smile to ’er face. But me, I dunno. I’m not your big one for bein’ noticed on the street.”

Maisie laughed at Billy, who daily told of the latest encounter that came as a result of being the hero of events at The Retreat. He was supervising the placement of her new office furniture, which had just been moved to a larger room on the first floor of a grand building in Fitzroy Square, just around the corner from the Warren Street premises. Finally giving in to Lady Rowan’s insistent nagging, Maisie would now be living in her own rooms at the Belgravia house.

“Look, my dear, Julian and I have decided to spend most of our dotage at Chelstone. Of course we’ll come up for the Season, and for the theater and so on. But it is so much calmer in Kent, don’t you think?”

“Well, Lady Rowan . . . .”

“Oh, no, I suppose it wasn’t that calm for you, was it?” Lady Rowan laughed and continued. “Anyway, with James on his way to Canada to take care of our business interests again—thank heavens— the house will be all but empty. We’ll have a skeleton staff here, naturally. Maisie, I must insist you take over the third-floor living rooms. In fact, I need you to.”

Eventually Maisie concurred. Despite the fact that business was coming in at a respectable clip, Billy was now working for her, and money saved on her own rent would contribute to his wages.

As was Maurice’s habit at the closure of a case, Maisie had visited the places of significance in The Retreat affair. During her apprenticeship, she had learned the importance of such a ritual, not only to ensure the integrity of notes that would be kept for reference, but for what Maurice referred to as a “personal accounting,” to allow her to begin to work with new energy on the next case.

Maisie had walked once more in Mecklenburg Square, though she did not seek a meeting with Celia Davenham. She had received a letter from Celia after events at The Retreat became headline news. Celia had not referred to the inconsistency with the surname Maisie had given, but instead thanked her for helping to put Vincent’s memory to rest.

She took tea at Fortnum & Mason, and at Nether Green Cemetery she placed fresh daisies on the graves of Vincent and his neighbor Donald, and stopped to speak to the groundsman whose son rested in a place overlooked by passing trains.

Maisie drove down to Kent in early September, when the spicy fragrance of dry hops still hung in the warm air of an Indian summer. She passed lorries and open-top buses carrying families back to the East End of London after their annual pilgrimage to harvest the hops, and smiled when she heard the sound of old songs lingering on the breeze. There was nothing like singing together to make a long journey pass quickly.

She drew the car alongside menacing heavy iron gates, and looked up, not at blooms, but this time at blood red rosehips overgrown on the wall. The Retreat was closed. Heavy chains hung on the gates and a sign with the insignia of the Kent Constabulary instructed trespassers to keep out.

B
ecause memories had been given new life by her investigation, they too were part of her personal accounting. Maisie wrote letters to Priscilla, now living with her husband and three young sons in the South of France, each boy bearing the middle name of an uncle he would never know; to the famous American surgeon Charles Hayden and his family; and to Iris, who lived in Devon with her mother. Like many young women who came of age in the years 1914–18, Iris had no husband, for her sweetheart had been lost in the war. Maisie’s letters did not tell the story of The Retreat, but only reminded the recipients that she thought of them often, and was well.

Now, as Maisie stood in the gardens of the grand house, looking out over the river and reflecting once again upon how much had happened in such a short time, she knew that for her future to spread out in front of her, she must face the past.

She was ready.

The conversation demanded by Billy had untied a knot in her past, one that bound her to the war in France over ten years ago.

Yes, it was time. It was more than time.

“M
iss Dobbs, isn’t it?”

The woman at the reception desk smiled up at Maisie, her red lipstick accentuating a broad smile that eased the way for visitors to the house. She crossed Maisie’s name off the register of expected guests and leaned forward, pointing with her pen.

“Go along the corridor to your left, just over there, then down to the nurses’ office. On the right. Can’t miss it. They’re expecting you. Staff Nurse will take you on from there.”

“Thank you.”

Maisie followed the directions, walking slowly. Massive flower arrangements on each side of the marble corridor gave forth a fragrance that soothed her, just as the sight of water had calmed her before she entered. Yes, she was glad she had made this decision. For some reason it was not so hard now. She was stronger. The final part of her healing was near.

She tapped on the door of the nurses’ office, which was slightly ajar, and looked in.

“I’m Maisie Dobbs, visiting . . . .”

The staff nurse came to her.

“Yes. Good morning. Lovely to have a visitor. We don’t see many here.”

“Oh?”

“No. Difficult for the families. But you’d be surprised what a difference it makes.”

“Yes. I was a nurse.”

The staff nurse smiled.“Yes. I know. His mother told us you would be coming. Very pleased, she was. Very happy about it. Told us all . . . well, never mind. Come with me. It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”

“Where is he?”

“The conservatory. Lovely and warm in there. The sun shines in. They love the conservatory.”

The staff nurse led the way down the corridor, turned left again, and opened a door into the large glass extension to the main building, a huge room filled with exotic plants and trees. Staff Nurse had not stopped talking since they left the nurses’ office; they do that to put the new visitors at ease, thought Maisie.

“This was originally called the Winter Gardens, built by the owner so the ladies of the house could take a turn in the winter without going outside into the cold. You can have quite the walk in here. It’s a bit too big to call it a conservatory, I suppose. But that’s what we call it.”

She motioned to Maisie once again. “This way, over to the fountain. Loves the water, he does.”

The staff nurse pointed to an open window. “And though it’s warm, it doesn’t get too warm, if you know what I mean. We open the windows to let the breeze blow through in summer, and it still feels like summer, doesn’t it? Ah. Here he is.”

Maisie looked in the direction of her outstretched hand, at the man in a wheelchair with his back to them. He was facing the fountain, his head inclined to one side. The staff nurse walked over to the man, stood in front of him, and leaned over to speak. As she did so she gently tapped his hand. Maisie remained still.

“Captain Lynch. Got a visitor, you have. Come to see you. A very beautiful lady.”

The man did not move. He remained facing the fountain. The staff nurse smiled at him, tucked in the blanket covering his knees, and then gave Maisie a broad smile before joining her.

“Would you like me to stay for a while?”

“No, no. I’ll be fine.” Maisie bit her lip.

“Right you are. About twenty minutes? I’ll come back for you then. Never find your way out of the jungle alone!”

“Thank you, Staff Nurse.”

The woman nodded, checked the time on the watch pinned to her apron, and walked away along the brick path overhung with branches. Maisie went to Simon and sat down in front of him, on the low wall surrounding the fountain. She looked up at this man she had loved so deeply, with all the intensity of a first love, a love forged in the desperate heat of wartime. Maisie looked at the face she had not seen since 1917, a face now so changed.

“Hello, my love,” said Maisie.

There was no response. The eyes stared at a place in the distance beyond Maisie, a place that only he could see. The face was scarred, the hair growing in a shock of gray along scars that lay livid across the top of his skull.

Maisie put her hand to his face and, running her fingers along the jagged lines, wondered how it could be that the outcome of wounds was so different. That scars so similar on the outside concealed a different, far deeper injury. In comparison, her own wounds from the same exploding shell had been superficial. Yet Simon’s impairment freed him from all sensation of the deeper wound: that of a broken heart.

Simon still did not move. She took his hands in hers and began to speak.“Forgive me, my love. Forgive me for not coming to you. I was so afraid. So afraid of not remembering you as we were together, as you were. . . .”

She rubbed his hands. They were warm to the touch, so warm she could feel the cold in her own.

“At first people asked me why I didn’t come, and I said I didn’t feel well enough to see you. Then as each month, each year passed, it was as if the memory of you—of us . . . the explosion—were encased in fine tissue-paper.”

Maisie bit her lip, constantly kneading Simon’s still hands as she spoke her confession.“I felt as if I were looking through a window to my own past, and instead of being transparent, my view was becoming more and more opaque, until eventually the time had passed. The time for coming to see you had passed.”

Breathing deeply, Maisie closed her eyes and gathered her thoughts, then continued, her voice less strained as the weight of formerly unspoken words was lightened.

“Dad, Lady Rowan, Priscilla—they all stopped asking after a while. I kept them at arm’s length. All except Maurice. Maurice sees through everything. He said that even if people couldn’t see my tissue-paper armor, they could feel it, and would not ask again. But he knew, Maurice knew, that I would have to come one day. He said that the truth grows even more powerful when it is suppressed, and that often it takes only one small crack to bring down the wall, to release it. And that’s what happened, Simon. The wall I built fell down. And I have been so filled with shame for being unable to face the truth of what happened to you.”