Silence for the Dead (4 page)

I
didn't think; I only sank to my knees, fighting with my skirts, beside the man prone on the ground. He was wedged between the two tables, curled in on himself, his hands up. When I leaned over him I saw that it was Captain Mabry, his glasses tumbled off to the floor, his face streaked with blood.

Creeton. It must have been. Or perhaps Creeton with the help of another. Or someone else altogether? I didn't know any of the men well enough to be sure. I pulled the captain onto his back as the room erupted into chaos behind me, chairs scraping as men pushed them back, excited voices. “He's done it again!” said someone.

“All right, then.” A man's voice boomed over the others. I looked up to see the orderlies had come into the room, and the biggest one, a huge man with pale hair cropped close to his scalp, was giving orders. “We're going off to the common room. All of us. In order. Single file. Nice and quiet.”

His vowels flattened over one another, the consonants crisp and brittle. British, and yet somehow alien. I had just placed it as South African when Matron appeared behind the huge orderly and peered past him, her expression livid.

“What is the meaning of this?” she barked to the room.

I looked back down at Captain Mabry. He was lying in my lap, as docile as a trained dog, looking up at me. His nose was bleeding profusely, a great gush of blood down the front of his face, over his lips and chin, onto his shirtfront and the floor. It was a nosebleed in full flush, more gobbets of fresh black blood moving sluggishly out of his nostrils.

Nina appeared over my shoulder. She took in the situation briefly, said, “I'll get the Winsoll's,” and was gone before I could ask what that meant.

I swallowed. “Right, then.” I rolled him farther up over my knees. The nose didn't appear broken; it seemed, unbelievably, like a simple nosebleed. I lifted his torso and tilted his head back—he cooperated with perfect obedience, as if I knew what I was doing—and crooked my elbow under the back of his neck. “Lean back. Lean on me as far back as you can and look up.”

A bloody nose, of all things. The one thing—the only thing—I knew how to treat, at least temporarily. The only thing I had experience of.

Captain Mabry tilted his head back. With practiced precision I pinched his nostrils shut, high up, just under the hard section of bone. He gurgled a bit. The men were leaving the room, muttering, as the big orderly watched them go. I could smell the captain's shaving soap, could feel the texture of his linen shirt against my supporting arm. There was a spot of dried soap at his temple. I looked away.

Behind me, someone shuffled and walked away, but I couldn't see who. The captain went very still.

A pair of masculine feet, clad in worn leather shoes, came into my line of vision. Creeton crouched next to me, his wrists draped over his knees, and looked the two of us over. “Well, well,” he said, his voice pitched low, dangerous, and strangely pleased. “Hello, sister.”

I glared at him and said nothing. This man had put his hand on me. My skin crawled.

He leaned closer until his breath, hot and damp, fanned the wisps of hair behind my ear. “Having a good time, are we, on our first day with the madmen?”

“Be careful,” I said back, just as low. “I bite.”

He recoiled. He must have seen something steely in my eyes, because uncertainty flickered across his face, but he covered it quickly with a leering smile. “Perhaps I'd like that.”

“Where I bite, I promise you wouldn't.”

Surprise again, but he had no chance to answer before Matron stood over him. “That is quite enough, Mr. Creeton.”

Creeton pushed himself to his feet slowly, obeying with an air of open defiance. He turned and followed the others from the room without another word.

Matron stepped forward and looked down at us. “Mr. Mabry,” she said, disappointment in her voice.

Mabry blinked up at her, his expression impossible to read beyond my hand and the trail of blood.

“Another nosebleed,” said Matron. “I thought we were past this. You haven't had one in several weeks, and it seemed you had conquered this particular problem. But now I see I was wrong. You realize I'm going to have to report this to the doctors, don't you?”

“I'm terribly sorry,” said Mabry.

“I realize you may be. But it doesn't change the fact that I must put this in my report to the doctors. If you had refrained, things would be different.”

“I'm terribly sorry,” he said, his voice fainter this time.

“Nurse Weekes,” she said without acknowledging him further, “please see that he is cleaned and sent to his room for rest. The sight of him will upset the other patients.”

“Yes, Matron.”

“And report to the kitchen in twenty minutes. I presume you know where it is.”

•   •   •

T
he kitchen was downstairs, a huge, utilitarian room full of ranges and instruments I couldn't put a name to. A male cook and several kitchen boys were cleaning up after supper with the help of two orderlies, and in one corner a small table had been set with simple bowls and spoons. Matron, Martha, and Boney were all seated at it when I arrived. Nina came behind me; she had helped me clean up Captain Mabry with the aid of Winsoll's, which had turned out to be a kind of disinfectant. I could still smell it in the back of my nose and behind my eyes. We'd also changed my bloodstained apron.

A kitchen boy put a pot of stew on the table, and at its savory scent my appetite returned. It seemed this was the nurses' evening meal.

When we had all taken a bowl, Matron spoke. First she bowed her head and recited a prayer; we all bowed our heads in silence. Then she straightened and gave us her eagle stare again.

“Nurse Fellows,” she said. “Please begin.”

Boney lifted her chin, as if reciting in front of the class. “I ordered the linens you requested, Matron, and they should come with the next delivery. I also completed the inventory of the storage room in the west hallway.”

“Very well. I expect a written report on my desk by morning.”

“Yes, Matron.”

The stew was delicious. The shaken, horrified feeling I'd had in the dining room began to recede. This seemed to be a sort of nurses' meeting. I ate and listened with half an ear, thinking about nosebleeds.

“Nurse Beachcombe?” said Matron.

“Patient Sixteen ate his supper,” said Martha. “Or I think he did, as the orderlies brought down an empty tray. He didn't want me to stay in the room.”

“And how did he seem?”

I wondered whether that was a blush on Martha's cheeks, or whether she was just overheated. “He was no worse than usual, Matron. He was sitting on that window seat he likes. He barely spoke to me.”

“But did he appear improved at all? Sociable?”

“No, Matron.”

For a moment Matron looked almost uncertain. “I had so hoped for improvement. Though of course I realize he's—” She broke off. Martha and Nina exchanged a glance.

I put down my spoon. “He's what?”

Matron regarded me for a moment. “Patient Sixteen is the least of your worries, Nurse Weekes,” she said. “Carry on, Nurse Beachcombe.”

“Yes, Matron. The coal was low in the fires today, so I spoke to one of the orderlies about it. He said there's water leaking somewhere in the cellar, and none of them want to go down there to the scuttle, and they're having to draw straws.”

“What do you mean, they don't want to go down there?”

“Well.” Martha's eyes went even wider in her heart-shaped face. “They say the water leaks constantly, they can't make it stop, and the scuttle is placed far in the back. You have to cross the cellar to get to it. And sometimes, at the back, they hear sounds in the water behind them closer to the stairs, like—like splashing footsteps. And so they won't go down.”

We all fell silent. Finally Matron spoke. “Are you telling me,” she said, her mannish voice slow with disbelief, “that the orderlies—grown
men
—are afraid of a few mice in the cellar?”

“Unacceptable,” said Boney.

Martha bit her lip. “But they say it's true.”

“It sounds like poppycock to me,” said Nina, as she shoveled in another mouthful of stew. “Send me down there. I'll go.”

“There will be no need, Nurse Shouldice,” said Matron. “I will speak to Paulus myself.”

Paulus, I gathered, was the huge orderly, the man with the South African accent. Nina shrugged. Martha worried her lip, her supper forgotten.

Matron turned to me. “And you, Nurse Weekes? What nonsense have you brought me? Or are you a girl with even a minimum of intelligence?”

There was a glint in her eye; she was waiting for something from me, something she expected. I lifted my chin. “What happened in the dining room today,” I said. “The nosebleed. I'd like an explanation.”

“Would you?” said Matron.

“From the way you spoke to him, there's obviously a history. If I'm to care for him, I'd like to know what it is I'm to expect.”

She frowned. If there'd been a test, I wondered whether I had passed it. “Mr. Mabry has a particular psychoneurosis,” she said. “He often seems calm, but he is prone to fits. They can be violent, so you must take care if you're in his presence when he's struck with one. He has broken several items during his time at Portis House.”

I digested that. “And the nosebleed?”

“Is one of his recurring fits. The doctors believe it is of particular concern. They have been focusing their treatment on it, and before today he hadn't had one in nearly three weeks.”

“Treatment?” I looked around the table. “Do you mean he somehow
makes
himself have nosebleeds?”

“You saw it yourself,” said Boney. “How else did he get it?”

I decided not to mention that I hadn't been in the dining room at the time. “It's just—I didn't know a nosebleed could be caused by force of will.”

“He doesn't will 'em,” said Martha. “He gets afraid. He thinks he sees something.”

“That's bunk and you know it.” Boney turned on her, her lips tight, spots of red high on her cheeks. “He does no such thing!”

“Nurse Fellows is correct,” Matron broke in. “Mr. Mabry suffers from delusions, as do many of the men here. Mind over matter, Nurse Weekes. Mind over matter. It is what many of the men here still have to learn.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “And now, I expect you all to return to your posts for the evening. We have work to do.”

“
I
t was a test, wasn't it?” I said much later in the nurses' quarters as I sat on my narrow bed and pulled off my shoes. “Supper, I mean. Putting me in there alone.”

Martha, standing before the washbasin and pouring water over her hand from the pitcher, glanced sympathetically at me. “I wouldn't worry about it. Boney does it to all the new nurses.”

“She leaves them alone with the men to test them? Does Matron know about this?”

“It's Matron's
orders
,” said Nina, landing heavily on the edge of her own bed. “Boney would never think up anything on her own.”

I rubbed my feet. The bed was hard and the mattress thin, yet my body nearly groaned aloud in relief. We had spent the evening cleaning the dining room, mopping the floor in the front hall, polishing the banisters, carrying baskets of clean linens up the stairs from the laundry, checking the lavatories, closing the windows in the bedrooms, and making sure the men behaved in the common room. The only real nursing we'd done was for Mr. West, the soldier with the bad legs—it turned out he'd had both legs blown off below the knee, and sometimes needed medication for the pain. The sight of those two shortened legs, the empty expanse of trouser pinned carefully over them, had made me almost wish for my twelve-hour shifts at the factory.

“It's really for the best, you know,” said Martha, drying her hands. “Not everyone can handle it here. It's best to know right away.”

“We've seen enough of them come and go, God knows,” said Nina. “You won't be here long yourself, Martha, if you keep repeating the orderlies' scary stories to Matron.”

“He wasn't lying,” Martha protested. “He was
scared.
”

“It's this place,” said Nina. “Anyone who stays here long enough goes just as mad as the patients, with the exception of you and me. And sometimes I wonder about the two of us, working here as long as we have.”

“That's not fair. This is a good job.”

I listened to them and remembered Matron's words.
I think that someone desperate might do.
I wondered what made Martha and Nina—and Boney—so desperate that they were the only girls to stay.

Money, perhaps. Or perhaps, like me, they were girls with nowhere else to go.

“This was the nursery,” Martha said to me, gesturing around the room, her eyes shining just a little. “This room here. Isn't that nice? It's so pretty.” She looked up and down the long room, taking in the grandness of it despite the shabbiness of the current furniture. “I like to imagine what it was like to grow up here. The children, tucked in their beds. There were only two, you know, and they had this room all to themselves. Wouldn't it be lovely, to grow up in a room like this?”

She was smiling, and her eyes were sweet and kind, but her skin was sallow, her bones sticking through the shoulders of her dress like broomsticks. She'd grown up, like me, where children didn't live in grand houses, and now she worked a job with madmen—a job in which I'd seen her carry linen baskets twice her weight up two flights of stairs—and she called it “good.” She dried her thin, chapped hands, and I knew that deep down she was hard, but she wasn't hard enough. No one ever was.

“The children sound like spoiled brats to me,” I said.

“Now there's a bit of sense,” said Nina from her bed. She was untying her apron, her head bent down, her stringy hair coming loose from its bun and dangling. “Besides, who wants to grow up in a damp old house in the middle of nowhere, no matter how rich you are?”

“You're just not picturing it,” Martha persisted, her eyes half closed and looking somewhere far away. “I like to imagine Christmas. The whole room decorated and lit with candles. Gifts of oranges and wooden toys. The children on Christmas morning. It must have been wonderful.”

“Christmas!” Nina snorted. “You're out of your mind. It's only June. And why aren't you undressing, anyway?”

Martha shrugged. “I'm working night shift.”

“What?”

“Matron's orders. She told me after supper. She said that since we've had no one on night shift since Maisey left, I will have to do it.”

“That's ridiculous,” I interjected. “You've been working since six o'clock this morning!”

Martha bit the edge of her thumbnail. “I'll be tired, for certain, but I can make it through.”

“What do they need one of us on night shift for, anyway?” Perhaps I was exhausted, but for some reason, this injustice—Martha having to work twenty-four hours straight—made me angry. “Don't they just lock the men in their rooms and be done with it?”

Nina gave me the
you're stupid, aren't you?
look that I was beginning to recognize. “Of course we don't lock them in. We're not allowed.”

“They're madmen. This is a madhouse. Why in the world not?”

“Obviously you haven't seen what a man can do to himself in a locked room, have you?”

I thought of the rule against belts, against straight razors, and said nothing.

“The bathrooms, too,” Nina said. “The inside bolts are taken off, and we aren't given keys. So that means someone has to work the night shift and check in on them. We get nightmares, sleepwalking, insomniacs. Some of them want to harm each other over some petty argument, or get deluded into thinking they can walk out the front door and go home.”

“It isn't so bad,” Martha said gently. “There's an orderly on duty all night, though he sleeps in his chair most of the time. Matron has us count linens. It's usually quiet, except when someone starts screaming.”

“Oh, God.” I rubbed a hand over my forehead. “I need a cigarette.”

“Look what you've done,” Martha accused Nina. “You don't have to be so harsh. Now she'll run off and leave us, just like the last girl.”

Nina turned to me darkly. “If you do, and I have to do double work again, I'll find you and skin you myself. Do you hear me? Besides,” she added, “you shouldn't smoke. I hear it isn't healthful.”

•   •   •

I
t was hours before I slept that night. I lay endlessly on the lumpy, narrow bed, shivering in my thin nightgown under the single regulation blanket, staring at the far-off beams of the ceiling. The coal fire we'd laid in the nursery fireplace burned low and hissed in the damp, and feverish wisps of clammy air passed over me in drafts. The house made distant noises as it settled and groaned in the gloom. Nina snored, oblivious.

I listened for screams, but heard none. I wondered where Martha was, whether she was counting linens. I wondered whether Ally would ever find out about the deception I'd used to get here, and what she would think of me if she did.

Perhaps she'd be angry, or perhaps just disappointed in me. Most people were, sooner or later.

I tried rolling onto my side, but it was no warmer that way. It was the beginning of summer, but the nights were still chilled, especially this far north out on the marshes by the sea.

Who were the Gersbachs and why had they built a house here? I wondered where they'd gone. I saw my brother Syd's bedroom, the bed so neatly made up, the coverlet folded down precisely, the way it had looked on the morning he left for war without saying good-bye.
Shut up, Kitty, and go to sleep.

I pressed my eyes shut. My nerves were waiting for the screaming, waiting, waiting.
He gets afraid,
Martha had said of Captain Mabry.
He thinks he sees something.

Cold sweat trickled down my body. Creeton's hand on me, the blunt intrusion of his fingers through the fabric of my skirts. Captain Mabry's blood, his stillness on my lap. Someone moving behind me, though I never saw who. I dozed, part of me still waiting for something to come—the hard grip of fingers, or the screams. Or the shuffle of feet behind my back. Dawn was years away.

And Syd's cold bedroom, dark and abandoned. Someone moving behind me that day, too, as I stood in the doorway.

No matter how bad it gets,
I said to myself just as I did every day,
I'm never going home.