A Duty to the Dead

CHAPTER TWO

AS IT HAPPENED, I arrived in England before my latest letter, traveling aboard a smaller hospital ship where I was given light duties, from reading to patients to sitting with the surgical cases. It was an odd experience to stand aside while other nursing sisters did what I could do with my eyes shut, but I also had the opportunity to observe techniques or oversee the skills of new probationers, who were still struggling to remember all they’d been taught.

My father met my train at Victoria Station and tut-tutted over the bandaged arm strapped to my side under my cloak. He reached into the carriage for my valise, saying gruffly, “Well, it could have been worse, Bess. Britannic was in all the newspapers, you know, and speculation has been rife that she was torpedoed. They’ll be giving you a campaign ribbon next. Captain Bartlett is already in London, facing an inquiry.” As we made our way through the throngs of people-most of them families greeting soldiers or saying good-bye to them-he added over the uproar of the next train pulling out, “I told you to stay out of harm’s way!”

“Yes, well,” I said dryly, “I was trying. The mine had different ideas.”

“Damned efficient Germans.” He studied my face. “Still in pain?”

“A little,” I lied. The train from Dover to London had been crowded, and my arm had been jostled in spite of the sling and every care.

He tried to shield me from the bustle of people coming and going. “Let’s get you out of here, then.”

We threaded our way through the valises and trunks and people cluttering the platform, and he handed in my ticket for me. Then we were outside, in the street, and London was cold, wet, and rainy. A far cry from the warmth of Greece. All the same, I was so thankful to be home. The journey from Athens to Malta to Dover had been long and arduous, and somehow a ship no longer seemed to be a haven. We had spotted submarines on three different occasions, but they had been after more important prey.

My father was saying, “My dear, there’s not a hotel to be had anywhere. We’ll have to make do.”

“There’s the flat for me. What about you?”

“I’ll stay at my club. Tomorrow the train leaves at some ungodly hour, seven, I think. We’ll have to be down again by six-thirty.”

“Wake me up at five-thirty, if you will. It takes me longer to dress.”

He was trying to conceal how worried he was about me, but he said only, “Growing conceited about your looks, are you?”

“Quite vain,” I retorted. It was an old argument. Richard Crawford, career officer in the Army that he was, had wanted a son to follow in his boots. Instead he’d got a strong-willed and determined daughter. We had battled ever since I was three.

He waved to a cab that was waiting down the line, and it pulled up for us. “In you go. At least you haven’t a great deal of luggage to worry about. That’s a blessing. But your mother has already bethought herself of that. The house is full of female things, and she’ll expect you to make a fuss over all of them.”

“I shall.” The war wasn’t over for me, whatever Mama might hope. I’d have to find myself new uniforms, or have them made up.

We stopped at the flat I shared with four other nursing sisters, and I made a clumsy dash through the rain for the door. My father, at my heels, got there first and opened it for me.

Mrs. Hennessey, in the ground-floor flat, answered my knock and was on the point of sweeping me into a copious embrace when she glimpsed the strapped arm.

“Oh, my dear!” She hardly came to my chin, an elderly widow who had lived in this same house since her husband died in 1907. It had been converted into flats in 1914. She reached out and took my left hand. “You’ll be wanting the key, and with that arm, who’s to see to you? None of the others are here just now, you know. But I’ll be glad to come up and clean, cook a little, whatever it is you need.” She hesitated. “We heard that Britannic had gone down. Was it very bad?”

“We were so fortunate there were no wounded onboard,” I answered. “But for the rest of us it was a little wearing. Still, we were very lucky.” A response I’d given so often it was like a parrot repeating a lesson and not a part of me. Of my experience.

“Indeed.” Mrs. Hennessey peered into the hall. “Is that your father with you, dear?” She had strict rules about men coming up to the flat. If we wanted to say good-bye to any male over twelve and under sixty, it had to be done at the foot of the stairs, in plain view of anyone coming and going. Diana called it the cruelest blow to romance she’d ever encountered, but none of us had so far complained to Mrs. Hennessey’s face.

“Who else?” I asked with a smile. “There are no handsome young men left in London to meet my train. He’s dragging me home tomorrow, but I’ll have to stop over tonight.”

“Then here’s the key, my love, and if you need anything, just ask. I’ll be bringing up a bit of hot soup later. Tell your father I’ll keep an eye on you.”

I thanked her and let my father see me up the stairs to the flat under the eaves.

“A mercy it was a broken arm and not a broken limb,” he said as we reached the last landing. “I couldn’t have carried you another step.” He unlocked the door for me and stuck his head inside. “I’ll have dinner sent round to you. I expect the larder is empty.”

“Mrs. Hennessey is bringing me soup. That will do. There’s tea,” I said, glancing toward what we euphemistically called our kitchen. “I’d do anything for a cup.”

He laughed and came in, shedding his coat. He was not presently a serving officer, he’d retired in 1910, but they had found work for him at the War Office nonetheless. A tall, handsome man with iron gray hair, broad shoulders, and the obligatory crisp mustache, he wore his uniform with an air. We called him Colonel Sahib, my mother and I, behind his back.

He made tea quickly and efficiently while I pored over the mail collected in the basket on the table.

Three of the letters were for me, friends writing from the Front. I wasn’t in the mood to open them and set them aside. The war seemed too close as it was, the streets filled with soldiers, some of them wounded on leave, the drabness of late November feeling as if it reflected the drabness of another year of fighting. For a little while I just wanted to forget that somewhere bodies were being torn apart and people were dying. We could hear the guns as we disembarked in Dover, and I had no way of knowing whether it was our artillery or the Germans’.

Something of what I was feeling must have shown in my face.

My father misinterpreted it and said, “Yes, you’ve had a rough time of it, my dear. Best to think about something else for a bit. Your leave will be up soon enough.”

“Soon enough,” I echoed, and took the cup he brought me.

It was a souvenir from Brighton, with the Pavilion painted on it. I had never understood where Marianne, one of the nurses with whom I shared the flat, had found all of them, but the shelf in the tiny kitchen held plates from Victoria’s Jubilee, Edward VII’s coronation, and half the seaside towns in England. My father held a cup with Penzance on it.

He raised his eyebrows as he noticed that himself. “Good God, your mother would have an apoplexy. No decent dishes?”

“We do very well,” I answered him. “Didn’t you notice the teapot? It’s Georgian silver, I swear to you. And there are spoons in the drawer that are French, I’m told, and the sugar bowl is certainly Royal Worcester.”

He joined me at the table, stretching his long legs out before him. “Bess.”

I knew what he was about to ask.

“It wasn’t bad,” I said, trying to put a good face on all that had happened to me. “Frightening, yes, when we first hit the mine, and then when we had to abandon ship.” I didn’t mention the boats pulled into the screws. “And worrying, because there were so many who were hurt. The papers said we were lucky in the circumstances that only thirty died while over a thousand lived. But what about those thirty souls who never came home? Some are buried near Piraeus, in the British military cemetery there. Others were buried at sea or never made it out of the water at all. I think about them. On the whole, everyone behaved quite well. And it was daylight, and sunny, though the water was cold. That made an enormous difference to those who jumped.”

“Do you want to go back to duty?”

He was offering to pull strings and keep me at home to work with convalescents.

“Yes, I do. I make a difference, and that matters. There are men alive now because of my skills.” And one who died in spite of them…

I changed the subject quickly. “Do you know the Graham family? Ambrose Graham? In Kent.” Too abrupt-I’d intended to broach the subject casually. But his concern had rattled me.

He frowned. “Graham…Rings a bell somewhere.”

“He had something to do with racing, I think-a horse called Merlin the Wise.”

“Ah. One of the finest steeplechasers there ever was. That Graham. He died some years ago. His first wife was a cousin of Peter Neville’s. He lost her in childbirth, and Merlin had to be put down that same year. Neville wrote me that it turned his mind.” He finished his tea and sat back. “Any particular reason why I should remember the Grahams tonight?”

My father was nothing if not all-seeing. His subalterns and his Indian staff had walked in fear of him, believing him to have eyes everywhere. I knew better-it was a mind that never let even the tiniest detail escape his notice.

“Not especially.” I was fishing for words now, the right ones. “His son Arthur was one of my patients, you see.”

“Arthur? Was that the child’s name?”

“Arthur was a son of the second family. Ambrose Graham married again.”

“Ah. Go on.”

“At any rate, Arthur was healing quite nicely. Then his wound went septic almost overnight, and he-died,” I ended baldly.

“And you felt that somehow it was your fault. You must have been very tired and upset, my dear, to believe such a thing. Men do die from wounds. I’ve seen perfectly hardy souls taken off by the merest scratch while others survive against all odds. Even Florence Nightingale couldn’t have done more. You must accept that as part of the price of nursing.” His voice was unusually gentle.

“No. Not that. I mean, yes, I felt-it was appalling that he died, that we’d failed, although we’d done all that was humanly possible… There is something else. As he was dying, Arthur made me promise to give one of his brothers a message. He was insistent. I don’t think he would have died in peace if I hadn’t agreed.”

I could see Arthur’s face again, taut with suffering as he reached for my hand, intent on what he was saying, urgent to make me understand why I must carry out his wishes. He’d died two hours later, without speaking again. And I’d sat there by the bed, watching the fires of infection take him. It was I who’d closed his eyes. They had been blue, and not even the Mediterranean Sea could have matched them.

“What sort of message?” He knew soldiers, my father did, and his gaze was intent. “Something to do with his will? A last wish? Or more personal, something he’d left undone? A girl, perhaps?” When I hesitated, he added, “It’s been some time, I think, since you made your promise. Is that what’s worrying you, my dear? There were no wounded on Britannic’s last voyage.”

“It was the voyage before that-if you remember, I had only a few days in London before we sailed again.” I should never have brought up the subject tonight. I don’t even know why I had, except that as our train rumbled through Kent, and I was finally safely back in England, I faced for the first time the unpalatable truth that I could very well have died out there in the sea, one of those thirty lost souls. And if I had, and there was any truth to an afterlife, it would have been on my soul that I’d failed Arthur. I was sorely tempted to change trains there and then in Rochester, and make my way unannounced to Owlhurst. It would have been a foolish thing to do-my father was waiting for me in London, and for all I knew, Arthur’s brother was in France, out of my reach. But the urgent need to assuage my sense of guilt had been so strong I could hardly sit still in my seat. I knew what it was, of course I did. It was the taste of near failure, and to my father’s daughter, failure was unthinkable.

I tried now to find a way of disentangling myself from what I’d begun, but I was in too deep and heard myself saying instead, “The message-how am I to judge it? How can I know if I waited too long, if I’m already too late? Arthur wasn’t delirious, he knew what he was telling me and why. What we’d been giving him hadn’t affected his brain. I know the dying dwell on small things, something left undone, something unfinished. This was different. He was still in command of his senses when he held my hand and made me swear. I think until the last minute, he still believed he’d live to see to it himself. He desperately wanted to live. He turned to me as a last resort.”

“If the moment made such an impression on you, why have you put off carrying out his wishes?”

I rubbed the shoulder of my bad arm. “I don’t know,” I said again. And then was forced to be honest. “Fear, I think.”

“Fear of what?”

“I was still grieving, not for the man his family knew, but for the one I’d nursed. They’d remember him differently, as their son, their brother, their friend. I wasn’t ready for that Arthur. I wanted to hold on to my memories for a little while longer. It-I know that was selfish, but it was all I had.” I looked at my father, feeling the shame of that admission. “I-it was a bad time for me.”

“You cared about this young man, I can see that. Do you still?”

I hesitated, then made an attempt to answer his question. “I’m not nursing a broken heart. Truly. It’s just-my professional detachment slipped a little. I-it took a while to regain that detachment.” I stirred my tea before looking my father in the face. “You’ve commanded hundreds of men. There must have been a handful of them who stood out above the rest. And you couldn’t have said why, even when you knew you oughtn’t have a favorite. They’re just-a little different somehow, and you want the best for them. And it hurts when you lose them instead.”

“Yes, I understand what you’re saying. God knows, I do. I’ve sent men into danger perfectly aware that they might not come back, and equally aware that I could not send someone else in their place. If you remember, when you first decided to train as a nurse, I warned you that the burden of watching men suffer and die would be a heavy one. Young Graham just brought that home in a very personal way. It happens, my dear. He won’t be the last. War is a bloody waste of good men, and that will break your heart when nothing else does. I’d have liked to meet this man. He sounds very fine.” He cleared his throat, in that way he had of putting things behind him. “As to the message. Would you like to tell me what it is, and let me judge?”

I considered his suggestion, realizing that it was exactly what I wanted to do. I took a deep breath, trying to keep my voice steady. “I had to repeat the words two or three times, to be certain I knew them by heart. ‘Tell Jonathan that I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake. But it has to be set right.’”

My father frowned. “And that’s it?”

“Yes. In a nutshell.” I was tense, waiting. Afraid he might read something in the words that I hadn’t.

“I don’t see there’s been any harm done, waiting until now to pass it on to his brother,” he replied slowly. “But you have a responsibility not to put it off again. A duty to the dead is sacred, I needn’t tell you that.”

I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake. I repeated the words in my head. I couldn’t tell my father that with time those words had become sinister. It was only my imagination running rampant, of course. Still, I was relieved that he’d found them unremarkable.

“It’s not your place to sit in judgment, you know.” And there it was again, that sixth sense that told him what I was thinking. “There must be a dozen explanations. Perhaps he tried to make himself seem braver than he was. Or safer than he was. Or perhaps there’s a girl involved. Someone his mother had hoped he might marry one day. And he’d lied about how he felt toward her. Men do strange things in the excitement of going off to war. Make promises they can’t keep, get themselves involved more deeply than they might have done otherwise. If Arthur Graham had wanted you to know more, he’d have explained why his message mattered so much. For whatever reason, he didn’t.”

And that was the crux of it. Arthur had never told me anything. And I’d been afraid that it meant there had been someone else…

It wasn’t merely vanity.

I had listened to too many men in pain, in delirium, on the point of being sent home, dying. The dying often regretted a hasty marriage that would leave the girl a widow. Sometimes they regretted not marrying. And how many letters had I written to girls who had just told the wounded man that she was expecting his child, and he would turn his head to the wall. “It can’t be mine,” they sometimes murmured in despair. Or they were in a fever to find a way to marry her before the baby came. War and women. They seemed to go together.

There were other worries facing the wounded, of course. Debt, a family’s need, a mother’s illness, how to live with one arm or without sight. But Arthur had said, It has to be set right…

I heaved a sigh, not of relief but of self-knowledge. Arthur Graham had confided a responsibility to me. I’d made a promise to carry that through. And there was an end to it. His past was never mine to judge, and caring hadn’t altered that.

I must go to Kent. I’d done both Arthur and his family a disservice by putting off doing what I’d sworn to do. If nothing else, they should have a chance to carry out Arthur’s last wish. Their duty. And not mine.

Honor above all things. I’d heard my father drum that into his subalterns and his younger lieutenants.

What I needed now was to hear my father say that it wasn’t selfishness that had held me back after all, it had been a matter of another duty, and I’d had to answer that call first. That Arthur hadn’t misplaced his trust.

To put it bluntly, I wanted comforting.

But he didn’t answer that need. And I couldn’t ask.

My own guilty conscience nattered at me instead. And the Colonel was right, there was no excuse for failing in one’s duty. No comfort to be given. I thought bitterly, whatever I discovered in Kent would teach me that dying heroes sometimes had feet of clay.

Then my father said gently, “Bess. If you’d gone down with Britannic, there would have been no one to deliver his message.”

Which brought me back to the nightmare that had haunted me on my long journey home. Full circle.

“I can’t go now-” I gestured to my arm.

“You aren’t fit enough to travel again just now, and you must write to this brother first and ask if the family will receive you. Your mother would tell you that war or no war, the rules of courtesy haven’t changed.” He smiled. “You do know how to reach the Grahams?”

“He made me memorize the address as well.”

My father studied my face. I wanted to squirm, as I’d done as a child when I’d got caught in a mischief. He said, “It’s not wise to get close to a soldier, Bess. Ask your mother.”

I wanted to cry, but I forced myself to smile, for his sake. “Yes, so you’ve told me. A solicitor, a banker, a merchant prince. But never a soldier.”

But in my mind I could still see Arthur’s face. The worst of it was, I knew very well he’d have done everything in his power to carry out my last wishes. How could I have let him down?

Besides, I would probably have never known about that other girl, if he’d lived.