The Guardian of Secrets: And Her Deathly Pact (63 page)

I
am
taking
the
family
back
to
Merrill
Farm
because
I
think
the
country
air
will
be
a
great
deal
healthier
for
your
father.
He
tries
to
play
down
his
illness,
but
he
doesn’t
realise
that
I
hear
him
coughing
all
night
and
that
I’ve
seen
spots
of
blood
on
his
handkerchiefs.
I
worry
about
him
so
much,
but
the
good
news
is
that
the
doctor
still
maintains
that
he
has
a
good
chance
of
recovery,
so
I
must
make
myself
believe
that
too.

Aunt
Marie
has
decided
to
stay
in
London
until
the
spring,
and
then
she’s
promised
to
join
us
in
Goudhurst.
Tom
Butcher’s
grandson
Peter
has
gone
to
Spain
to
aid
the
republic.
I
promised
his
mother
and
father
that
I’d
ask
you
to
keep
an
eye
out
for
him,
although
I
know
Spain’s
a
big
country
and
he
could
be
anywhere
(but
I
didn’t
tell
them
that).

We
miss
you,
darling,
and
I
miss
talking
to
you
about
Marta.
Your
father
doesn’t
even
like
to
hear
the
mention
of
her
name,
not
even
from
me.
He
is
keeping
his
grief
well
and
truly
hidden,
and
he
becomes
angry
when
I
try
to
talk
about
her.
I
believe
he
feels
guilty
at
allowing
her
to
stay
in
that
damned
convent
in
the
first
place,
which
is
utter
nonsense
of
course,
as
we
all
know
she
had
her
heart
set
on
it.

María,
if
anything
should
happen
to
you,
I
would
die,
so
remember
to
keep
safe
as
much
as
you
possibly
can
and
not
take
any
unnecessary
risks.
I
will
write
to
you
every
moment
I
can
and
will
try
to
send
you
news
of
your
brothers
if
or
when
I
receive
their
letters.
Take
great
care,
darling,
and
don’t
forget
that
we
all
love
you
and
miss
you
every
single
day.
And
if
you
ever
feel
that
you
want
to
come
to
London,
let’s
just
say
that
it
would
make
us
very,
very
happy.

All
our
love
always,

Mother
and
Father

PS:
I
wish
you
could
see
Auntie
Rosa.
She
is
knitting
two
jumpers
a
week
for
the
‘defenders
of
the
Church’,
as
she
is
now
calling
the
nationalists.
She
hasn’t
left
her
room
in
a
fortnight.
I
think
she’s
gone
quite
mad!

“My God, María, Pedro might be close by. That’s what your mother said. She did say that, right?” Lucia said, dancing around their small room

“Yes, she did say that.” María smiled back.

“Do you know what this means? It means that now I have a good chance of finding someone who might know someone who knows Pedro.”

María sat at the edge of the bed and gave Lucia another affectionate smile. She was a sweet and innocent girl, and she loved her brother very much, but sometimes her incessant chatter drove her to distraction.

“Lucia, calm down for a moment and listen to me. Doesn’t it strike you as strange, I mean, Pedro being in Madrid? Maybe he just told my mother that to keep her calm. If you knew my mother, you’d understand why, so please don’t get your hopes up about seeing him. After all, if Pedro is in Madrid, why has he not come to see us yet? And we are leaving soon, remember?”

Lucia sat down beside María on the bed.
“
You’re right, of course, but hope is all I have at the moment, and you of all people should know that it is the hope of seeing our men that brought us here in the first place. Maybe Pedro doesn’t know where to find us. Maybe he is too far away from the hospital and can’t get to us.”

“Maybe you should start packing,” María told her.

Chapter 69

I
t soon seemed that the whole of Madrid had upped sticks and moved camp to the Jarama valley. Fifty battalions had been mustered, converging on the Jarama area in hundreds of trucks, tanks, artillery units, and ambulances. They drove slowly and carefully through the muddied dirt tracks and the cornfields destroyed by the heavy traffic. Everyone in the convoy had been told repeatedly that the stakes were high and that should they fail, they would leave the back door open, allowing the nationalists to enter Madrid.

For the first few weeks, María could think of nothing but the job she’d been sent to do. There were enormous losses, estimated at between twenty and twenty-five thousand, on the republican side, and the International Brigades also lost thousands in the first few days of fighting.

Day after day, María watched the orderlies leave the tents, carrying out amputated limbs and corpses, mopping up blood from the floors that filled buckets to the brim, and dumping mountains of bodies for a later burial. When the fighting eased off for a short while, her life became a monotonous existence of muddy fields of olive groves, rain-drenched trenches, and food that consisted of watery soup or congealed stew. María acknowledged that the doctors and medical staff tried their best to save the dying men, crying for their mothers and asking with hope in their eyes if they were going to live, but the reality was that they just couldn’t cope with the seriousness of injuries inflicted on the battlefield.

The normal passage of time didn’t exist anymore. The wounded came in day and night—they were everywhere—and the shortage of doctors and nurses was becoming increasingly apparent. María was only a trainee nurse at best, but she found herself giving injections and administering anaesthetics for doctors who no longer cared who did it. Soldiers with stomach wounds were the worst, for she had been warned not to give water to those patients. She did disobey that command on occasion, though only when she thought that a drink of water was the only comfort she could give to a man who was going to die anyway.

After a while, the medical station found itself right at the front, stuck there without the possibility of moving back again because of the risks to the stretcher-bearers. To make things worse, the dressing stations were carried into sheltered ditches and trenches that made them increasingly vulnerable to enemy fire, not to mention a dirty and muddy place to work.

María handed the wounded who had a chance of survival over to the ambulance men, who probably had the most dangerous job of all. She shook the hands of these men and tried to ignore the fear she saw in their eyes before they set off on their perilous journey to the hospital in the dead of night without lights to guide them. She knew that she might never see the face of a driver again, for there was always the danger of the ambulance being blown up with the wounded inside before reaching the destination. She walked around the camp practically dead on her feet but always with one eye looking out for Pedro’s familiar face. She asked the International Brigade Units if they knew of him. She gave notes to some who said they might and a description of him to those who asked for it. She tried not to think about Miguel, Pedro, or Carlos lying injured or dead close by, but she was convinced that one day soon, her worst fear would become a reality and she would just have to deal with it.

She especially tried not to think about Carlos. She was becoming increasingly worried about him, but she also felt strangely detached from him. He had given her moments of such happiness only to take them away again, but she was not stupid. They were at war, and war was unreliable. It played with people’s lives and tore them apart. He had told her that he loved her and would do anything for her. He would run to the ends of the earth to be near her, but if he really did love her, she thought, why had he not come to her?

There were few rest periods; but when they did manage to sleep, it was in a trench near the medical tents. There were never enough private moments, time to think, reflect, and dream. The nurses’ tent was worse than a busy metro station, with people coming and going all through the day and night, passing through whilst waiting for the next shift to begin and washing away the blood that stained clothes and skin.

She found that she could sleep better in the trenches, where she could think, dream, and be undisturbed for the most part. It was quiet there, peaceful almost, and María was intensely moved at these times. The dark sky at night, with beautiful softly twinkling stars, seemed so close yet at the same time so far away from the reality of the scorched and bloodied earth. Sometimes she would be lucky enough to see the sunrise. In those precious moments, she was home in her world and the war was so far away that she could even forget it for a moment or two. At other times, she sat in the hole and studied the calm bravery of the men around her. Some were far from their own countries, families, and everything they knew. They had chosen to come to the madness and, if necessary, to die. She had spoken to many men, lying in pain, knowing that they would die, yet out in the fields, others still rushed forwards, truly believing in the righteousness of the republican cause and seemingly undeterred by thoughts of their own deaths.