Lydia didn’t even stop at her tent, just went straight on to the fluoroscope chamber and was setting up the apparatus when Captain Calvert barged in looking for her. ‘Good, you’ve heard, then— Good God, woman, where’ve you been?’ was his only comment on her muddy and disheveled state, and he was out the door and into the surgical tent before she drew breath to reply. ‘Brickwood, I’m devastated but I’m going to have to ask you to stay,’ his voice went on as his steps retreated across the tent. ‘Go in and wake up Danvers, would you? Matron, can you get me …?’
The tidal wave of wounded didn’t slacken for another thirty-six hours. The Germans had hit the line hard, over a front of two miles: first came the men wounded in the preliminary shelling, then the thousands who’d been mowed down, like standing wheat before a reaper’s scythe, as they’d scrambled up out of the trench to meet the onrushing line of the enemy. The situation was not helped when four German shells landed on the village of Pont-Sainte-Félicité itself, turning the marketplace to rubble and killing two orderlies. Colonel St-Vire wired furiously up and down the line for more surgeons, more nurses and more orderlies, and later Thursday morning Lydia found herself administering chloroform at the tables of surgeons she’d never seen before, Captain Glover from the First Lancashire and Captain Bryce-Bayington who looked young enough to be one of Jamie’s students back in Oxford. Matron – Sister Flavia – came as close to cursing as Lydia had ever heard her do over the three extra nurses who arrived (‘Nurses! I shouldn’t hire a one of them to make tea for a proper nurse!’), and just before the Germans started shelling Pont-Sainte-Félicité a second time – as Lydia was on her way out of the fluoroscope tent – Lydia recognized one of the new nurses as the young woman she’d seen in the trenches last night, bending over the corpse of the revenant.
The young woman who had tossed a grenade at the corpse, either to destroy it or because she’d seen Lydia and Don Simon.
The young woman who was looking for a vampire with a partnership to offer you …
For a moment Lydia only stood in startled surprise. But there was no mistaking the wide forehead, the sturdy shape of the shoulders, the dark widow’s peak and snub nose. And like her own, she noted, this younger girl’s blue-and-white VAD uniform was blotched and splattered with mud – She must have been bundled straight into a truck and ordered to come here just as she got back to … to wherever it is she’s assigned, with …
With what?
The revenant’s blood? One of its still-flexing hands?
Then Burke bellowed from within the surgical tent ‘Asher! Where t’ bloody ’ell’s them snaps?’ and Lydia dashed to his side with the films that she had been taking between filling in as an assistant in the surgery. A few minutes later she glimpsed Captain Palfrey helping the orderlies carry men in from the pre-operative tent, working alongside the Indian motor-mechanics and the cook. Then German shells hit the village again, close enough that fragments of brick and wood clattered like rain on the canvas walls of the tent.
She sponged the other woman from her mind.
She worked on into the night, existing on hot tea and the biscuits Danvers’s grandfather had sent her yesterday, which her tent-mate gamely divided among the surgical staff. It occurred to her that she ought to be terrified, when a shell struck particularly close, but she found that associating with vampires for the past eight years had had the salutary effect of making her less inclined to panic: I can run away screaming anytime I want, which wasn’t the case when I was dealing with that horrid Rumanian count or whatever he was in Scotland … and if I get killed here, nobody else is likely to suffer.
James was safe, wherever he was.
Miranda was safe back in Oxford.
These men need help.
She stepped out once, around two in the morning of the nineteenth, and thought she glimpsed the pale shape of Don Simon, standing in the doorway of what was left of the town church across the green from the surgical tent, like the Angel of Death in his trim brown uniform. To make sure he’s on hand if I need rescuing, if one of those shells hits? Or just waiting for the next man to be moved into the Moribund Ward?
How many others of them are around, where I can’t see them?
Not many, she reflected, with shells still striking the village …
Bearers passed her, carrying a man from the drop-off point by the road into the pre-operative ward. I’d better get back.
When she looked again the vampire was gone, if indeed he ever had been there. She was sufficiently tired now that she wasn’t certain of what she saw.
At least the surgeons got to sleep most of last night.
The next time she emerged, toward dawn (‘There’s tea in the mess tent,’ Captain Calvert had said, ‘and you will go and have a cup and sit down for ten minutes’), she passed the door of the clearing tent, the flap tied open so that bearers could carry men in. She saw the little dark-haired nurse kneeling beside one of the cots, her arms around the shoulders of a man who lay there, freckles starring like spattered ink in his waxen face and covered with mud and blood.
‘You’re alive!’ the young woman cried, covering the man’s hands with kisses as he raised them to touch her hair. ‘Dear God, I thought I’d never see you again—’
‘Tuathla,’ he murmured. ‘Well you know there’s no Jerry livin’ that’s yet forged the gun that’ll shoot the shell that’ll end my love for you, mo chroí, so don’t you be thinkin’ it.’
‘Miss Smith!’ Matron materialized like a ghost from the dense gloom of the lantern-lit ward. ‘If you will kindly come over here and lend us the assistance you presumably volunteered to give to your country—’
The dark-haired nurse scrambled to her feet. ‘Yes, M’am. Of course, M’am.’
Educated English. Little trace of the graceful Irish drawl that lilted her red-haired lover’s speech. Miss Smith … Tuathla Smith … or was tuathla some kind of County Liffey endearment? Lydia’s mind seemed to be turning things over very slowly, and she started as a firm hand took her elbow and Captain Calvert said, ‘I told you to get into the mess tent and sit down for ten minutes, Dr Asher. Bearers are still coming in and we’re in for a long morning of it.’
She and the captain were still in the mess tent – Captain Calvert turning to give orders to Trent, the head bearer, to marshal the walking wounded to help carry from the drop-off point – when a shattering explosion sounded from the direction of the river, and not only fragments of dirt and stone rained on the clearing station, but water, as if it had been flung from buckets. Instants later Storeman Pratt raced in, white-faced – the stores tent stood only a dozen feet from the stream – and cried, ‘Bugger it, Captain, Jerry’s blown the bloody bridge!’
Calvert said something worthy of neither an officer nor a gentleman and sprang to his feet. The surgeon at the other end of the table – a saturnine French Colonel pulled in from God knew where – cursed quietly in his native language and added, ‘What they’ve been after all along, en effet. To cut the medical help off from the lines.’
‘Finish your tea,’ ordered Calvert, as Lydia began to rise. ‘You, too, Colonel Lemoine, sir. Be back in the tent in fifteen minutes. The men can rig a causeway out of the rubble … God knows we’ve got plenty of that,’ and went tearing off in quest of Colonel St-Vire.
‘At least now they’ve got it,’ added Dr Lemoine – Lydia tried to remember what the collar insignia on his pale-blue greatcoat denoted – ‘let us hope they leave off wasting shells on men already incapable of harming them, and let us get on with our business. Before last year,’ he went on, holding aside the tent-flap for Lydia to pass through before him, ‘I gave thirty years of my life to my country’s army. But as I learned more and more about the monstrous “improvements” in weaponry I always wondered in my heart: how can we loose such horrors upon living men? Shells that can reduce men – men with wives and children – to blots of jam from five miles away. Airships to drop bombs on women and children minding their own business in their own homes. Battleships to bar food and medicines from our enemy’s country, so that all will starve together – old men, women, children.’
In the dust-choked morning haze Lydia saw his jaw work with fury and pain.
‘And yet I swear to you, Madame, when I see such things as they do – shelling the hospitals where the wounded lie, torpedoing passenger ships when they know full well that the innocent will perish – I think nothing is too savage to do to them in retaliation. No action of ours is too horrible, if it but makes them throw up their hands and cry, I quit!’
His dark brows pulled together, a handsome man of about Jamie’s age, with gray flecks in his pencil mustache and the features of a sorrowing king.
Then he glanced across at her – he was taller than she by three or four inches – and made himself smile. ‘And you, Madame? I had heard the British Army refused to accept female surgeons—’
‘Well, they do. And even if they didn’t, I’m not a surgeon, you know. My research was on glandular secretions, so I just signed on just as a regular volunteer. But when Colonel St-Vire heard I knew how to operate a fluoroscope apparatus he had me reassigned to the unit and put me in charge of the x-ray photo`graphy, and they pull me into the surgical tent whenever they need to. I couldn’t remove a splinter on my own, but I do know how to administer anesthetic, and what all the equipment is for, and the sight of blood doesn’t bother me. Here,’ she added sadly, ‘that’s enough.’
Every spare orderly and bearer, along with the ambulance drivers and the walking wounded, were streaming down to the river. In the horse-lines, the animals squealed and milled in panic. Lydia heard a motorbike roar away into the iron-gray morning, to get the Engineers from Headquarters. Now that the profile of the town was considerably flattened she could see the line of ambulance-wagons – both motorized and horse-drawn – lined up waiting on the far side of the river, while their drivers scrambled to pull free the men and horses from those who’d been hit on the bridge itself. The screams of dying mules mingled with the brutal roar of the guns.
I was in that. Lydia felt a sort of distant, tired wonder at the fact. Simon and I. I tripped over a corpse, and the hands of other dead men were sticking through the walls where dugouts had collapsed …
She thought she glimpsed Captain Palfrey in a group of mechanics, black with soot and mud and carrying beams from the ruins.
‘And Monsieur Asher?’ asked Lemoine gently.
‘In England.’ Lydia’s throat closed at the recollection of the misty train platform: the strength of his arms, the warmth of his body against the gray of that bitter morning. At the thought of Miranda at the nursery breakfast table, solemn with a goodbye that she thought was only for a day or two. (‘I’ll see you when I come home, darling …’) It was a moment before she could speak. ‘With our daughter. I try not to think of them, at times like these.’
She turned, to go back into the charnel house of the tent.
‘And for that—’ Lemoine’s quiet voice turned grim, ‘the Boche deserve whatever we can do.’
By eleven in the morning, when the surgeons finished the last of the desperate cases, the Royal Engineers arrived with planks, beams and struts to repair the bridge. Captain Calvert ordered Lydia back to her tent and to bed. She could see at least a dozen motor trucks, and twice as many other vehicles – horse-drawn farm carts, milk floats, staff-cars – waiting on the far bank and all overflowing with wounded. The drivers, and many of the walking wounded, waded out into the Lys to fasten beams to the broken foundations of the stone bridge’s arches. ‘When they’re done,’ said Violet Brickwood, falling into step with her, ‘they’ll all come across at once and it will be all harry in the surgery again. I hope somebody’s making the surgeons rest.’
Once in their tent, Lydia lay down in her clothes and passed out as if she’d had a pipe of opium.
And dreamed of the revenant. Dreamed of being tied to a pillar in that horrible lightless room in Peking, listening to the creatures – the yao-kuei – smashing through the doors and windows only feet away from her. Dreamed of whatever-his-name-was, that colleague of Jamie’s who’d been infected with the creatures’ blood, his eyes gleaming like a rat’s in the dark and his grip brutally strong on her arm, gasping Extraordinary. Never been here in my life but remember it … as the last of his mind dissolved into the dim hive of the revenants’ collective consciousness, as he touched her face with his bloody and reeking hand.
Simon, she thought. Simon came and saved me …
And through her dream she heard his voice, like silk chilled from winter midnight, Mistress …
In her dream she was back on her cot in the nurses’ tent, Simon’s hand gentle on her shoulder, shaking her. She sat up, and threw herself into his arms, weeping: wanting Jamie, wanting Miranda, wanting to be back in Oxford researching pituitary secretions and wanting the world to be the way the world had always been. No shell-fire. No terror. No watching young men die under her very hands, no cold calm x-ray pictures of shrapnel lodged in organs that couldn’t be mended …
She whispered, ‘I want Jamie …’
The tent was silent. No camp noises, no gunfire. Just afternoon sunlight, indescribably sweet, filtering through the dirty white canvas, and the smell of grass and roses, which told her this was a dream. Don Simon, perched on the side of her cot, wore his colonel’s uniform, brass buttons winking in the light.
Does HE dream of afternoon sunlight and the smell of roses, lying in his coffin in the daytime hours?
His grip on her was strong and reassuring, the slender shoulder and steel-hard arm within the sleeve as real as anything she had ever felt. His face, in its frame of cobweb-pale hair, was the face of the living man he’d once been, save for the eyes.
His hand stroked her hair. ‘Would you have me set him before you?’
She wiped her eyes. In her dream, though she wasn’t wearing her glasses, she saw perfectly well. ‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ she said. ‘I mean, I should know it was just a picture … a very, very accurate one, since you can walk in his dreams, the way you walk in mine … The way you’re walking in mine right this minute.’
‘’Tis the best I can give you, lady.’ He moved to put his hand to her cheek and then, as if he had seen the horror of her nightmare, drew it back with the gesture unmade. ‘I would fain do more, were it in my power.’
He is in my mind, thought Lydia. Right at this moment. Asleep in his coffin, wherever it’s hidden …
This is how he convinced that poor imbecile Captain Palfrey of his bona fides. I’ll bet Palfrey’s positive he’s seen Don Simon by daylight, positive that he showed him unimpeachable proofs of the genuineness of this Secret Department of his … Positive of God knows what else! All because at some point Simon looked into his eyes, and later walked in his dreams – as she knew the old and skillful among the vampires could do – and convinced him that these things really happened. That those dreams were real memories.
I really should hate him.
But he was an old, old friend, and there was infinite comfort in the strength of his arms.
‘I just want things to be the way they used to be,’ she said at length. ‘Living in Oxford, I mean, with Jamie and Miranda, and the worst one would see in the newspapers would be bunfights about who actually reached the South Pole first. I know it can’t be that way again.’ She sat up a little, and Don Simon handed her a perfectly clean white linen handkerchief, to blow her nose. ‘I just – this is so hard.’
‘Did you not weep for the dying,’ replied the vampire in his soft voice, ‘and fear for your life, and curse the stupid uselessness of it all – did you not pray that the world will somehow heal before your daughter grows to be aware of its horrors – you would be no more human than the fools and monsters that let this war begin. I have had centuries of watching war and stupidity, Mistress, and they grow no better, I am sorry to say. Your courage is the wine of hope to the men you work with, as well as to those you save. To James as well, I think, and to your child. It keeps their hearts beating. I am sorry you are in pain.’
She wrapped her hand around his, pretending (I shouldn’t …) for a time that he was the living man he had been …
Although goodness knows as a living man he was probably a bigoted Catholic and a friend of the Grand Inquisitor and an enemy of England and a firm believer in the humoral theory of medicine. He probably beat his valet, too.
‘Thank you,’ she said simply, and raised her head from his shoulder. ‘I’ve seen the woman – the one who was hunting the vampires, and looking for the revenant last night. She’s one of the extra VADs who came in last night, her name is Smith – Tuathla Smith, I think … Oh, bother,’ she added, as the tent-flap opened and Matron came in, and suddenly the light changed and Don Simon was gone and the sound of shelling, though no longer close enough to shake the ground, pounded the air with a constant, terrible roar. She heard men shouting above the grinding roar of a fleet of motors …
Lydia sat up, and fumbled for her glasses, on the plank floor beside the cot. By the light it was about four in the afternoon. For one moment she recalled that she’d dreamed about roses … roses and sunlight … then she picked up her much-creased cap from beside the pillow, pinned it on, and said, ‘How many of them are there? Should I go to surgery, or the fluoroscope room?’
‘Fluoroscope.’ Matron spoke over her shoulder as she leaned over Violet’s cot. ‘Come on, Miss Brickwood, they’ve got the bridge fixed and the ambulances are coming in. There’s tea in the mess tent, and sandwiches,’ she added, as Lydia ducked through the flap.
For the next fourteen hours Lydia alternated between working the fluoroscope and assisting whichever of the three surgeons needed help: dripping chloroform with a steady hand, retracting the edges of wounds so that shards of metal could be fished out, clamping off blood vessels and stitching shut flesh and organs so that Captain Calvert or Captain Burke or Colonel Lemoine could get on with the next man. Well after sunrise on the following day – the twentieth – the last of the urgent cases was finished, though the hammering of the German guns had eased many hours before. A dozen of the last group in the ambulances were German prisoners, muttering confusedly: Haben wir gewonnen?
Lemoine retorted, in the same tongue, ‘You have lost – as you will lose all in the end.’
But Captain Burke only patted his patient’s hand and said, ‘Nowt t’worry reet now, lad,’ as Lydia signed the orderlies to carry the shattered man into the fluoroscope room to see where the shrapnel was buried.
When they were finished at last Colonel St-Vire ordered the whole surgical staff, save for himself, to their tents: ‘And I’d better not see one of your faces for the next eight hours, understand? I hear we held the line and pushed Jerry back. It’ll be awhile before they try again.’
‘Sir, can you tell the neighbors to keep it down?’ Captain Calvert pointed east, in the direction of the Front and the thunder of the guns. ‘I can’t see how I’m to get my beauty rest with that frightful din going on …’
‘’Ud take more’n eight hours’ kip, think on, to render – hrrm! – some people beautiful …’
Lydia returned to her tent without the slightest thought for Miss Smith, lay down again, and was asleep within moments, dreaming of arteries and kidneys, of pancreatic ducts and lobules, with a sensation of walking in some wonderful garden without anyone’s life being at stake, only to view these wonders at her leisure.
When she woke up, and washed (finally!) and brushed her hair and had bacon and porridge and tea in the mess tent, and felt herself again (‘Be ready to be on at six, Dr Asher …’), she went to the ward tent in quest of the little dark-haired volunteer with the heart-shaped face.
And found that she was gone. Nor was there any sign of the red-haired, freckled soldier she’d sat beside, though two men recalled seeing them (‘She bust out weepin’ like a babe, M’am, an’ cried out his name … Danny? Davy? Harry? Su’thin’ like that.’) While Lydia had been sleeping, trucks and ambulances had been departing steadily, carrying the most stable of the men back to the base hospital at Calais. Hundreds had already gone.
Matron – unsurprisingly – had barely had time to scribble down the names of the men as they were brought in, and the nature of their wounds. She thought the extra volunteers had come in from the Friends’ ambulance station at Neuve Chapelle, and possibly – she wasn’t sure – from the base hospital.
There was no Nurse Smith listed anywhere.