The Silver Locket (22 page)

‘Rose?’ Maria touched her shoulder. ‘Sister Glossop’s just been told there’s been a raid near Albert. There are lots of casualties, so we’ll be very busy coming back. I think you ought to go to bed.’

‘Why?’ asked Rose.

‘If you don’t rest, you’re going to have a breakdown.’

‘Who would care?’

‘Rose, you’re my friend, and
I
would care!’ Maria sat down too. ‘But I care about the men, as well. You’re exhausted, and exhausted people make mistakes. You won’t notice someone’s bleeding, that a carrel tube is blocked. You’ll make errors that will cost men’s lives.’

Maria took Rose’s cold hands and rubbed warmth into them. ‘Do you still feel sick?’ she asked.

‘A bit, but that’s the train.’

‘When will it begin to show?’

‘It won’t,’ said Rose. She bit her lip and looked away. She was determined not to cry. ‘I got the curse this morning, and I’ve been bleeding like a pig all day. Maria, I’ve lost everything.’

‘Oh, sweetheart!’ cried Maria.

‘I know you’re going to say it’s for the best.’

‘I wouldn’t be so cruel.’ Maria put her arm round Rose’s shoulders. ‘I’ll help you get through this, I promise. You did so much for Phoebe.’

‘Have you heard from Phoebe?’

‘No.’ Maria shrugged. ‘I’ve written care of Mrs Rosenheim, but there’s no news, they don’t know where she’s gone, if she’s alive or dead. Rose, do you write to Mrs Hobson?

‘Yes, and she wrote back last week. Daisy’s doing well. I meant to tell you.’ Rose looked at Maria with haunted eyes. ‘Do you think I’m useless, then? Should I go back to England?’

‘No, but you should try to rest, and remember everyone needs sleep. You’re a splendid nurse. You work so hard, you’re always kind and gentle with the men, and Sister Glossop thinks the world of you.’

‘I’m a whore. A wicked, worthless liar. A stupid, greedy harlot who took someone else’s man.’

Nathan was beginning to think there must be someone looking after him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have managed to crawl the length of this foul, reeking alley.

But there was no God. If there were, he wouldn’t let scum like Hanson walk the earth, much less do the things that Hanson’s friends had done tonight.

He didn’t dare go home. His mother would have a heart attack if she saw him in this state, bruised and bleeding with a broken nose, split lips and half his teeth knocked out.

He knew he must be dripping blood and leaving a thin trail of it along the grimy pavements. After the men had finished kicking him, a dog ran up to lick his bleeding face. As he crawled painfully away, it followed him down the street. As he groped his way along the alley, rats came from their holes to look at him.

He kept going, inching forward on his knees along the bumpy cobbles, and finally he reached the house where Phoebe was in hiding. He tapped with bleeding knuckles on the door.

Phoebe gasped in horror when she saw him. ‘It’s all right,’ he managed to croak, before collapsing like a sack of offal on the threshold. ‘No one followed me.’

She dragged him in and laid him on the couch. Then she washed his face, clucking in dismay as all the damage was revealed. ‘I think your nose is broken,’ she began, and winced as much as he did as she dabbed it with a sponge.

‘I dare say you’re right.’ He could feel broken bone and gristle loose inside the jelly of his face. ‘It’s a shame I couldn’t find my teeth. I’ve heard that if you stick them back in time, they root again.’

‘Oh, Nathan!’ Phoebe’s brown eyes filled. ‘Why did they hurt you?’

‘You know why.’ Nathan shrugged, then winced again. ‘But I didn’t tell them anything.’

‘You should have done!’ cried Phoebe. ‘I never expected you to run such risks! I never wanted you to take such punishment for me!’ Phoebe started crying. ‘I n-never knew you were so brave.’

‘Phoebe, I’m not brave. They didn’t offer me a choice, they didn’t ask if I was scared. Even if I’d told them where you were, they’d still have beaten me.’

‘They know you’re not afraid of him, and that makes you braver than anybody else in Bethnal Green.’

Phoebe looked at Nathan’s battered face, into his blackened eyes. ‘Daniel is a vicious, evil man. Everyone in the Green is scared of him and all his friends, but I don’t think you’ve ever been afraid. It must be because you’re so religious. You believe in God.’

‘I believe in God?’ Nathan would have laughed if he had not had broken ribs and even breathing had not been so painful. ‘I go to the study house to please my mother.’

‘But you’re going to be a rabbi?’

‘I don’t think so, Phoebe.’ Nathan’s split lip twisted bitterly. ‘You know my father died in Russia, killed by Cossacks as he tried to stop the sons of Satan from burning down his home. My brothers have been killed in France, in a useless war in which the Russians are our allies – may their evil names be blotted out! Even here in England, death comes falling from the sky.’

He coughed, and spat out bits of tooth and clots of bright red blood. ‘How could I stand up in a synagogue, and tell the people to believe in a just God, when I don’t believe in one myself?’

‘Then how do you manage to be so brave?’

‘I told you, I’m not brave.’ Nathan looked at Phoebe. ‘But I want to live, and what’s the point of living if you’re afraid? Phoebe, I think you should get out of London.’

‘But where else could I go?’

‘My mother has some relatives in Leeds. I’ll write them, I’m sure they’ll take you in.’

‘Nathan, why are you doin’ this for me?’

‘You know,’ said Nathan. ‘I think you’ve always known.’

Later, Phoebe watched him sleep. Morrie made a song and dance when he returned from bullying the chorus girls, sweeping out the Palace and probably giving Daniel Hanson lip.

But when he realised the blood that stained the horsehair couch was Nathan’s, as opposed to Phoebe’s gentile gore, he quietened down again.

‘I’ll go and tell old mother Rosenheim her precious Nathan’s stayin’ ’ere tonight,’ he muttered sourly. ‘It won’t do ’er any good to see ’im in that mess.’

‘You mustn’t tell ’er I’m ’ere, too!’ cried Phoebe. ‘She don’t know where I am – an’ anyway, she wouldn’t like to think that me and Nathan was alone.’

‘She knows her boy’s been sweet on you since you was four years old.’ Morrie sucked his stumps of teeth and grinned. ‘What ’appened to that nipper you was ’avin’?’ he demanded.

‘It – it died.’ Phoebe turned away to look at Nathan, who seemed fast asleep.

‘Just as well, I reckon.’ Morrie chewed the insides of his cheeks. ‘A girl like you ain’t fit to be a mother, ain’t cut out to fetch up kids. I meant to ask you – ’ow’s your stuck-up sister gettin’ on? The one what learned to talk like Lady Muck an’ went to be a nurse?’

‘Maria went to France.’

‘Oh, did she?’ Morrie shook his grizzled head. ‘A dirty lot, them French. You mark my words – one day we’ll see ’er an’ ’er belly come waddlin’ up the Green.’

March turned into April, covering the land with green and hiding some of what the shells had done the previous winter.

The spring gave way to a warm May, and in spite of grief that dragged her down, Rose sometimes felt her broken spirits lifting. This year, she thought, would see the end of it. This summer would be when the Allies gained the upper hand.

She read the newspapers and knew that back in England more than half a million conscripts were learning how to fire a rifle, lob grenades and use a bayonet. Bank clerks, farming lads and civil servants were being turned into soldiers.

Factories were making bombs and shells by the ten million. This June or July, the Allies would overwhelm the German army and send it packing to Berlin.

One balmy afternoon the train was in a siding outside Amiens. The engine driver had a nap while the nurses waited for a lorry to bring down fresh supplies of dressings, food and medicine.

‘You asleep?’ Maria asked, as she flopped down by Rose who was sitting on the running board.

‘Just dozing.’ Rose said, stretching. ‘When will we be off?’

‘Oh, we’ve got an hour or two, don’t worry.’ Maria turned her face towards the sun. ‘Sister Glossop said we’re waiting for a dozen troop trains to go through.’

‘So this is it,’ said Rose.

‘Yes, I reckon this is where we’re going to make the breakthrough, in the valley of the Somme. Rose, you look quite well today. You actually have some colour in your cheeks. How do you feel?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not exactly fine. You still cry at night, and some mornings you look terrible. But today, you seem much better, so you’re coping, getting stronger.’

Rose supposed Maria must be right. Sitting here in the warm sunshine, she was not in pain. The awful, sickening, churning misery, the debilitating grief that threatened to destroy her sanity, overwhelmed her only now and then.

On a day like this, she could be philosophical. She could think about him without crying. Even God could not change history, and she blessed the day they’d met in Rouen, when he’d told her what she’d known since that appalling party.

They’d wasted so much time. But the months they’d had together had been worth a lifetime of regret.

‘Letters, Sisters!’ An orderly came striding down the track, carrying the canvas bag he’d taken off the lorry that had just pulled up beside the line. ‘Here you are, Miss Courtenay, three for you.’

Rose glanced through them. One from Celia Easton, one from Elsie, one from – no, it couldn’t be, after what had happened. But all the same, he’d written.

So perhaps he’d changed his mind?

Chapter Fourteen

Then she realised he must be dead, that this was something found among his things, to be sent to the daughter he’d disowned. It would a legacy of blame, saying she was responsible for Lady Courtenay’s death, and she’d also driven her father to an early grave.

She wondered who would inherit Charton Minster, but couldn’t summon up the strength to care. Opening the letter, she saw there were several pages, covered with Sir Gerard Courtenay’s bold, Victorian script.

‘My dear Rose,’
he’d written, which was the first surprise.
‘I hope you are in good health, and doing well in France.

‘When you were last in Dorset, we parted on bad terms. You may have regretted certain hasty things you said to me. You have always been inclined to speak first and think later. We are father and daughter still, however, and although a less forgiving parent might have been more harsh with you, I am prepared to overlook your faults and lay no blame.

‘Michael Easton had some leave a couple of weeks ago, and came to see me. Michael is an excellent young man, who is bravely doing his duty to his king and country. In spite of all the hardships that our gallant officers are suffering in this present crisis, he was bearing up remarkably.

‘He still respects and honours you. Last autumn, he could have withdrawn his offer of marriage, and I would not have blamed him. But it seems this fine young man is still in love with you, and still wishes you to be his wife.

‘I urge you to think about this very seriously. It is what your mother would have wanted and would give me tremendous pleasure, too. Michael knows you are my heir, but he has expectations of his own, and I feel he is a generous man who would love a beggar maid if her mind and character were pure.

‘I should be so pleased to see you settled with a husband who could guide you and protect you, and form your opinions, for the rest of what I hope will be a useful life.’

‘It’s good news, I hope?’ enquired Maria.

‘Well, it isn’t bad.’ Rose put the letter in her apron pocket, and looked at Maria thoughtfully. ‘I didn’t know my father was a such a gullible old man.’

She stood up and stretched. ‘Come on, let’s help the men with those supplies.’

As Rose laid out dressings on the trays and made up quarts of sterilising fluid, she thought of Michael Easton, the fine young man who fathered children then abandoned them, and who was interested in Rose because one day she’d have some money.

Then Michael wrote himself, to say he still had one day’s leave, and he’d like to meet her for a chat. Maybe he could take her out to tea, the next time she was due in Rouen?

She thought perhaps she ought to go and meet him. If she didn’t, Michael would probably tell her father she was being difficult. Sir Gerard would write again, and so it would go on.

She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t allowed to see him by herself. These days, all the rules and regulations that had governed nurses’ conduct since the beginning of the war were very much relaxed. In the early summer of 1916, it was common to see sisters arm in arm with officers, sitting in cafés with their beaux and flirting decorously.

Three weeks later, Michael was waiting on the station platform as the train pulled in. She saw him from the window, and realised she’d forgotten he was so handsome, so broad-shouldered and so tall. In his smart, clean uniform and highly-polished boots, he looked every inch the gallant British officer and perfect gentleman.

‘Hello, Rose,’ he said. He turned to the lieutenant at his side. ‘This is Freddie Lomax, he’s in my company.’