KDBookOnline
Share Us
From the street, the hospital still looks much like an imposing residence (white stucco behind black-painted railings, steps scrubbed clean), though its door stands open and there are two army ambulances parked outside. As she approaches, Sister Pinkney appears ahead of two orderlies carrying a stretcher, which they load carefully into the back of the ambulance. Jumping down from the vehicle’s back step, one of the orderlies—a man called Corporal Maloney, who seems to believe that flirting with the VADs is part of his job description—notices her and gives her a wink.
‘Morning, Miss Simmons,’ he says, once Sister Pinkney is safely back inside. ‘Lovely day for it.’
She suspects she’s supposed to ask for what, but she doesn’t want to encourage him. She’s more lowly than the VADs, and older, so he probably thinks she should be flattered by his attention. He couldn’t be more mistaken.
The elegant circular hallway looks much as it must have done before the war, except a large desk piled with manila folders and papers has been placed in front of the empty fireplace, and there are several stretchers stacked beneath the staircase that sweeps upwards round the walls. Instead of potpourri and polish, the air smells strongly of carbolic and Lysol, and beneath that, of something rotting. Usually, she arrives in the quiet spell after lunch, when the doctors have completed their rounds; when dressings have been changed, treatments administered, and patients washed and shaved; but today she immediately senses a shift of atmosphere. Up on the galleried landing two nurses manoeuvre a mattress, and she hears the clang of trollies and the muted bark of orders from distant rooms. She hesitates at the foot of the stairs, waiting to let a VAD come hurrying down before making her way up.
Matron’s desk is on the landing, beneath a vast portrait of a woman with a tiny waist, swathed in white muslin and whimsically clasping a posy of violets. (Her rosebud-lipped simper is starkly at odds with Matron’s basilisk glare: Matron is a woman who does not suffer fools.) Today Matron is not at her desk.
Going hesitantly through to Hawke Ward, the former drawing room at the front of the house, she finds most of the beds are empty, stripped of their linen. Two VADs are vigorously scrubbing the exposed rubber sheets, talking in low, disgruntled voices, which stop abruptly as she walks in.
‘Oh, it’s only you,’ says one of them—a girl called Nurse Williams, who comes from the Welsh valleys and whose lilting, singsong voice is breathy with relief. ‘I thought you were Sister Pinkney. Or Matron.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘We’ve been told to prepare for a big rush of wounded,’ says the other VAD, dragging the back of her wrist across her forehead. ‘The last of the convalescent cases have just gone and we’ve got to get ready for men straight from the front. There’s something big going on—you can hear it, can’t you?’
It is not just her cut-glass accent that advertises her well-to-do background, but everything about her, from her delicate hands and peaches-and-cream complexion (reddened now, with heat and exertion) to her air of schoolgirl earnestness. ‘Sister Pinkney’s in a frightful bait. She gave me such a dressing-down for putting kisses when I signed sweet Private Findlay’s autograph book. It’s supposed to be my afternoon off and I was going to a show at the Hippodrome, but now we’ve got all these beds to make up…’
‘Let me help.’
‘Oh—that’s kind,’ Nurse Williams says hastily, shooting the other girl a look. ‘But Sister Pinkney’s ever so exacting about how it’s done. It’s part of the training, see—how to fold the sheet and do the corners, just so…’
‘I was in service, before the war, in a big house.’ She smiles gravely. ‘If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to make beds.’
‘Oh, how marvellous! You’re an angel sent from heaven.’ The peaches-and-cream girl beams. ‘I’m Millicent, by the way—Nurse Frankland, here.’ She rolls her eyes slightly. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Simmons,’ she says. ‘Eliza Simmons.’
France
He knows the exact moment it happens, almost as if he sees it unfold in the second before impact. He hears Joseph’s high, anguished cry and turns in time to see the bright blossom of red on his thigh as he jerks and crumples.
It’s instinct that throws him back, arms outstretched to catch him. Joseph is clutching his leg and blood is oozing through his fingers. He is making rapid, keening sobs.
Jem—Jem—
It’s all right, it’s all right.
He is kneeling in the grass. Everything is muffled and slow, like being underwater. He wrestles his pack from his back to find the field dressing kit. Joseph’s helmet has rolled off and his hair is blond against the churned-up earth. Jem looks around, but there is nothing to see except smoke and mud, until a figure looms, mad-eyed, revolver raised.
On your feet, man! Forward! FORWARD!
It is what they have been ordered to do. It is part of a plan. Walk don’t run. Don’t stop for the injured. Keep going.
The barrel of the gun glints dully as the smoke shifts around them. He can choose whether to be shot by a British bullet, or live a few minutes more to be got by a German one. The outcome will be the same, but he’d rather Joseph doesn’t see it.
I’ll come back, he roars, prying Joseph’s fingers from his sleeve. I’ll come back for you, I promise.
Jesus Christ, it’s not supposed to be like this.
Summer
Chapter 8
As far as Randolph Hyde, fifth Baronet Bradfield, was concerned, his father couldn’t have chosen a more opportune moment than the early summer of 1911 to shuffle off this mortal coil.
It was very unlike the old man to be so obliging. Not only had the contentious matter of inheritance just been settled, but the weather was glorious and Coldwell at its best, a welcome contrast with the oppressive heat of London. The cherry on the cake was that the death of ‘Good Old King Teddy’ the previous year meant that a coronation was in the offing. As a baronet, Sir Randolph Hyde was not a peer of the realm and had no ceremonial part to play, but with the great and the good descending on London from every corner of the empire, the occasion would provide the perfect opportunity for him to impress his acquaintances from India with his newly acquired title, fiancée, and respectability, and to relaunch himself in society.