BY LAURIE R. KING
A turbaned Sikh with a full beard is an impressive sight, particularly when the gentleman in question takes up most of one’s doorway.
“Sat sri a—” I caught myself: Why give a friendly greeting to an invader? “Oh, for heaven’s sake, what do you want?”
Looking back, I was probably more abrupt than he’d been expecting. I was also considerably more female and far less burdened by years. But then, he wasn’t what I’d expected to find in my doorway at that hour, either. And considering my degree of irritability that particular day, when an anniversary hadn’t gone exactly as I had intended, he was fortunate I hadn’t greeted him with a bucket of thrown water. Or a shotgun.
My morning’s vexation, already present when I first opened my eyes, had been compounded by my belated discovery of an article in the previous day’s paper. I’d spent the day driving down from Oxford via London, reaching Sussex too bleary-eyed for newsprint. By the time I saw the offending story, the sun was up and it was too late to make my escape.
It was a familiar problem, set off every time a paper, local or national, let drop a suggestion of where Sherlock Holmes was to be found. Would-be clients emerged from the crevices like wood lice on a wet day. And the case in the article had involved an aristocratic family, which only made matters worse.
The first fist on the door caught me spreading butter on my breakfast toast. At the second, I was dripping onto the bath mat. My impatience at this, the day’s third intruder, might have made a lesser man take a step back, but the Sikhs are a race of warriors, and this one was not about to be driven off by an apparently unarmed English female, not without a fight. “Madam, I have come in search of the detective.”
“You and half of Sussex.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You want a detective? Well, you’ve found one. What can I do for you?”
The dark eyes studied me with care, as if to confirm that despite my short hair and trousers, I was not in fact a male of the species. I waited for his expression to become patronising, or simply confused. Instead, he surprised me by plunging his hand into the canvas messenger pouch slung over his shoulder and pulling out a folded piece of paper, which he held out for me to take.
It was a rough hand-drawn map: the dip and curve of coastline, a squiggle of river, the line of the coastal road from Seaford to Eastbourne, a loop of lesser road around Beachy Head, and an X for our small villa.
No names, no words on the page.
“Yes, that’s us. But my husband isn’t home. Neither is the housekeeper, who’s gone up to Lewes for the day, so I get to answer the door. And because I didn’t know that accursed article was coming out, I didn’t even keep my farm manager here to wield the dogs. Oh Lord.” I’d just spotted another pair of figures past his sturdy shoulders, turning down the drive from the road.
The Indian gent’s face had grown increasingly bewildered as I spoke, but at this final exclamation, he turned and followed my gaze. “These are not friends?” he asked.
“Absolutely not. By God, I’m going to murder that newspaper—”
My grumbles were cut off as the man threw back his shoulders and drew his kirpan from its sheath, holding it aloft into the morning sun.
The kirpan, one of the five required articles of all Sikhs, is a most vicious-looking dagger even in its shorter, modern variation, a twist of gleaming steel all too suggestive of a disembowelling thrust. Certainly it impressed my next set of invaders. They came to an abrupt halt. After a moment, the turbaned head before me moved slowly: first right, then left, and right again.
The two looked at each other, and reversed course down the drive.
The Sikh put away the foot-long dagger, gave a quick flick of the wrist to drop his steel bangle—the kara is another of the five requirements—back into place, and turned to face me.
“Well,” I said. “I suppose for that you deserve a cup of tea.”
I installed my guest in front of the fireplace, where the morning flames had died away but the warmth persisted. He rose when I came in with the tray, but after a glance at his shoes, I asked what he would like to eat.
“Tea is sufficient, thank you.”
“You must be hungry. You’ve walked from the Seaford station,” I pointed out.
“How do you know where I come from?”
“That rough paper could only come from the railway station. And your shoes, which were polished this morning, are dusty now. I’ll bring you some bread and cheese.” I collected them on a tray. Also some oranges. And a bowl of some walnuts that did not look too stale.
He rose again when I came back, and did not sit until I had.
“Look, Mr—Singh, is it?”
He dropped the bread roll he had just taken from the plate and jumped to his feet yet again. “Anik Singh, madam, at your service.”
I held out a hand, which he took so cautiously, I wondered if he’d ever shaken hands with a woman. “Mary Russell, at yours. Please sit. And eat. But honestly, if you’re looking for my husband, he may not be back for a day or two.” Which is just fine, I thought. It’s not as if I’d been asking him for—“If you want to leave a note, I’ll give it to him when he returns.”
“But, madam, you said—did you not?—that you were a detective?”
“I...yes. Among other things, I am that.”
“And a detective is what I need.”
With that, the Indian gentleman had my attention. The idea that detectives were interchangeable—that he thought a detective was every bit as good as The Detective—touched both my sense of humour and my dented self-esteem. I cleared my throat.
“I see. Well, I’m not sure what I can do for you, but how about telling me what your problem is, and I’ll see if I can find someone to help you.”
I poured tea. He stirred the sugar in his, and sat back with his cup.
“Miss Russell, what do you know of the Brighton Pavilion?”
“The Royal Pavilion? Not much. George IV hired John Nash to turn a pleasant building into a mock-Mughal palace, which he then stuffed full of chinoiserie. When Victoria took the throne, she couldn’t bear the place, and forced the city of Brighton to buy it. They used it for balls and exhibitions until the War, when it became...”
Ah: the penny dropped.
“A hospital for wounded Indian soldiers, yes.”
A remarkably well-equipped hospital, as I recalled, with multiple kitchens, many subcastes of servants, and various places of worship, all of which were geared to the needs of specific Indian subgroups. The Sepoy Rebellion might have taken place well back in Victoria’s era, but the memory of it had left the British government, and especially the army, extremely wary of any faint whiff of religious offence to subcontinental soldiers—who, in the early months of the Great War, had made up a third of all Britain’s troops. “But that was only for a year or so, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Your European winter killed so many of my countrymen, the next autumn we were moved to warmer Fronts—we in the infantry, at any rate—to face trials other than frostbite. After that, the Pavilion became a rehabilitation hospital.”
“But it’s been returned to the city, I think. Four or five years ago?”
“Yes. No doubt as worn as the rest of us by its long years of war work.”
I eyed Mr Singh. A man in his fifties, who walked with the faint limp of an old injury, was sure to have seen active service.
“Were you there? In the Pavilion hospital?”
“I was among the first, in the early weeks of 1915. An English shell went astray and burst among us. One minute I was shivering and staring out across No Man’s Land—and when I woke, some days later, I was gazing up at crystal chandeliers and gilded dragons.” I gave a cough of laughter, and his bearded face crinkled into a warm smile. “I assumed at first that I had died and gone to some Christian heaven, until I began to feel my leg.”
“So why do you require the help of a detective, Mr Singh?”
“Miss Russell, do you remember what took place ten years ago last month?”
Did he imagine I might be too young for the War’s events to be seared onto my mind? True, I had been preoccupied in March 1915—fifteen years old, a recent orphan, newly arrived in Sussex—but the headlines would never fade in my mind’s eye.
“Neuve Chapelle.” I could feel the expression of distaste on my face as I said the words. The Battle of Neuve Chapelle was Britain’s first deliberately mapped-out offensive of the seven-month-old war, with detailed aeroplane reconnaissance and a tightly planned sequence of bombardment followed by assault. It would be a paradigm for a new and terrifying kind of warfare—a paradigm, too, for how the sacrifice of the troops would be wasted by the incompetence of officers far behind the front line. The big guns had indeed sent the Germans for cover. The troops had indeed managed to push all the way to the German lines—only to have the attack flounder into chaos and bloody failure when the artillery ran out of shells, the field telephones broke down, and Command’s insistence that troops wait for direct orders gave the Germans time to bring up guns of their own.
And as I remembered, nearly half the troops in that attack had been Indian.
“I was just too late to fight in Neuve Chapelle,” said my visitor. “I was healed, and received my orders to return to the Front in the third week of March. Two days before I was to go, I passed through the room of new arrivals and heard my brother’s voice.”
“Your brother was also a soldier?”
“He was. A gentle boy, four years younger than I, and yet he joined the Garhwal Rifles as soon as his beard had grown. Men of my family have borne arms for generations. Mani and I—his name was Manvir—were in the same company nearly the whole time. For fifteen years, we marched together across the north of India, serving the King. And when the Austrian Archduke was killed, they sent us to France. Mani and I reached there in late September. Both of us came down with pneumonia in November, and spent two weeks in a field hospital. When we returned to the lines, we two fought at each other’s shoulder and slept at each other’s side until the shell landed on me in the second week of January.
“As I said, this was before Neuve Chapelle, but I have talked with men who were at that battle. I know that we began to drop shells into the German lines as soon as it was light enough to see. Thousands of shells from our field guns—a wall of artillery—turning the German wire into an expanse of mud. After precisely thirty-five minutes, the guns went silent and our brigade fixed bayonets to go up the ladders.
“If I know my brother, he would have been one of the first over the top. Once there, the men were as much slowed by the mud as they were speeded by the destruction of the wire, permitting the Germans to retrieve some of their Maxim guns from the debris and get them working. My brother took three bullets before he stayed down. All three were in his front: he did not turn away.
“The two men I talked with said they were surprised that he had survived the trip to the field hospital. But he survived, long enough for the doctors to decide that he should be shipped to Brighton. He lived to reach there, too—although by then, fever had set in. When I heard his voice, he was raving, and did not know me. When I left for the Front two days later, he was still burning with fever. And yet he lived, at least for a time. Many months later, our mother wrote me to say that a field postcard had arrived from Brighton with the message that Mani had been wounded but was recovering. Some kind soul had added a note that his hand was injured and he was fighting an infection, but that he would write when he could hold a pen. Its date was early April. And that was the last we heard, until the telegram came in the beginning of July to say he was gone.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Such is war,” he said. “In another world, my brother might have been an artist, the father to many sons. But in this world, Mani was proud to fight for his King.” He reached into his breast pocket for his notecase, taking from it the photograph of a young man in uniform: slim, dark, bearded (of course) and blessed with shining eyes and eyelashes a cinema star would kill for. I dutifully studied it, then handed it back.
“And yet, you require a detective.” Sad as it might be, and interesting in the abstract—something had brought him here, and someone had drawn him a map to find us.
“Mani is dead.” He carefully slid the photograph away. “This I have known for nearly ten years. And yet, only recently did I learn that his death was not as immediate as we thought. When the telegram came, we assumed that it had simply been delayed. Administrative details for Indian troops were not always handled as...scrupulously as for white soldiers.” There was no bitterness in his voice, merely experience. “And yet, when I came here and asked to see the hospital records, all I found was a brief notation that said, Died of wounds. Not from the spring, but dated June 14.”
“Lingering deaths were all too common.”
“And so I thought. Until we received this.” He bent down for the canvas haversack he’d left on the carpet, taking out a much-travelled cardboard box some fifteen inches by four. The twine around it was new. The front bore English stamps and was addressed, in capital letters, to an army brigade headquarters in India. There was no return address.
I undid the twine and found inside some scrunched-up brown paper padding, on top of which lay a square of quality stationery, folded, with the message:
PLEASE RETURN TO THE FAMILY OF RIFLEMAN MANVEER SINGH.
I held up the page, and saw that its upper edge had been trimmed away with a pair of short, sharp scissors. The sender did not care to include a home address.
At the centre of the packing material was a knife, a twin to the one Mr Singh had used to chase away the would-be clients: smooth wooden handle with a decorative silver end, encased in a slim, curved leather sheath also tipped in silver. When he laid it beside our teacups on the table, I saw that the leather was far from new, dark with both use and stains.
“May I?” I asked.
“Of course.”
When I picked the scabbard up, using my left hand, my fingers came down atop the four darkest spots on its back side. I slid the kirpan out. The steel blade was clean and smelled faintly of oil, its cutting side razor sharp. It was also beautiful, in a deadly sort of way, with a complex arabesque etched into the steel near the guard. That design was a part of the manufacture. The blade’s other carving was not.
I bent over the weapon to study the marks. Beginning where the blade’s point entered its vicious upturn, an amateur hand had carved a series of brief phrases into the steel, using a rounded alphabet descending from horizontal lines.
“This is writing,” I said. “Sanskrit?”
“Gurmukhi. My little brother was a romantic. He wished his kirpan to bear a record of every battle in which he had fought. Beginning with a duel of honour, one might call it, when he was thirteen years old.” He reached out to touch the roughest, faintest words near the tip. “That childhood tussle is represented by the word for nose, to commemorate how he’d bloodied his enemy’s. The next line says lathi. That marks Mani’s first active service in the army, when we had to charge a crowd with our batons drawn. But the last one is what brought me here, from India.” He laid his finger next to the tenth scratched phrase, close to the knife’s guard. “That one you would translate as three bullets.”
I looked at him, then carried the weapon over to the window, where it was bright despite the gathering clouds. I dug around in the desk drawer for the big looking glass, and held it above the writing. Considering that proper engraving tools would have been as thin on the ground in the Western Front as they were on the Northwest Frontier, the scratched letters were remarkably clear and controlled—even the last one. And all had been made by the same hand.
I gazed out at the garden, thinking. Ten years. Ten years ago, my own life had changed, although I would not know it for a time. Not that meeting a man on a barren hillside was comparable to charging, bayonets drawn, toward the German lines, but... Ten years ago, for both events.
I smiled wryly down at the artifact in my hand. Don’t be an idiot, Russell.
Back at the fireplace, I returned the blade cautiously to its scabbard and laid it on the packing.
“I agree, it looks as though your brother lived long enough—and was fit enough—to add Neuve Chapelle to his kirpan. But what do you expect me to do?”
The dark eyes blinked in surprise. “I need to know what happened. Why my brother lived for some weeks, yet did not write. Why he was recovering, yet then he died.” I studied his face. The embers whispered. And after a minute, Mr Singh slumped back into his chair. “You will not help me. I knew it was unlikely. I merely did not wish—”
“Oh no,” I said. “You misunderstand. I will find out what happened, if you truly want.”
“Why would I not?”
I could think of any number of reasons. “Not all mysteries have comfortable solutions.”
His smile was that of a soldier who has lived with loss too long to remember its beginning. “There is a hole in my life where my brother was,” he said gently. “If it can be filled, it must be.”
“I’d like—” But my wishes went both unvoiced and unmet. The clatter of the doorbell came just as a face peered around the corner of the bow window, trying to see inside.
I shot to my feet with an oath; the startled soldier came upright an instant later. “Where are you staying?” I demanded.
“I have not yet—”
“Never mind. Mrs Hudson—the housekeeper—she’ll be home in an hour or so. Tell her I said to put you in the guest room. Patrick will go for your things, which I’m assuming you left at the station? I shall be back when I have news. No, you can’t come with me—that’s really not possible. If you want to help, perhaps you could hold this current batch of invaders in place while I make my escape?”
A quick dash upstairs gave me a change of clothing and my still-packed valise. As I trotted back down, I heard my Sepoy troop puzzling over the demands of the people on my doorstep—two of them German, by the sound of it. To my amusement, his English had deteriorated mightily in the past five minutes.
“Oah, verry sorry,” he said, wagging his turban back and forth like a pantomime Indian. “Please, you look for the home of who?”
“Not home, Holmes,” the irritated voice enunciated. “Sherlock Holmes. Does he live here or not?”
“Shairlock Holmes? The man of the hound story and the pipe? Is he a real man, then? But why would you think he lives here?”
I slipped down the hallway to the study, then out of its window to the ground. The trio at the door heard the car too late to intercept me, and the determined-looking young man marching through East Dean cast me not a glance. I will admit to a degree of satisfaction as the first drops splashed against my windscreen a minute later: every would-be client was going to be very wet by the time they reached the shelter of the village inn.
I drove through Seaford and along the coast to Brighton, scarcely aware of the chalk Downs to my right or the waves to my left.
It had been sunny, ten years ago yesterday. I remembered everything about that day, every vivid detail. All along the coastline, one could hear the rumble of guns from the distant Front. I had been walking with my nose in a book, only to literally stumble across the man who would change my life. Sherlock Holmes: teacher, partner, and for the last four years, husband. A man no less maddening now than he’d been a decade ago, when he’d looked down his long nose at me from his seat on the ground, to deliver a cool and dismissive insult.
On the one hand, does an anniversary matter? Of course not: one day is like another, merely a square on a calendar. And yet, we humans are issued a limited number of days in our lives, and some resonate more than others. Some days—some anniversaries—require at least a degree of recognition. More than a puzzled look after a wife’s protest, when her teacher-partner-husband suggests that she drop him in London to finish a touch of research rather than—
I tore my thoughts away from that spiral, and scolded my self-centred preoccupations. A young soldier was horribly wounded in a foreign land, leaving his family bereft, Russell. Kindly keep some perspective on the matter at hand.
I needed to start with the Pavilion and its brief time as a home for wounded Indian soldiers. Of course, there were the hospital records that Mr Singh had consulted, no doubt composed of endless shelves and cabinets filled with dusty, ill-organised, and often illegible file folders.
In search of a shortcut to save me from the archives, I parked on a wet side street and put up my umbrella, approaching the Royal Pavilion from the south. John Nash’s unlikely domes and minarets rose up above the workaday city traffic like something conjured by one of its patients’ fever dreams—or like a display of upright spindles in a yarn shop window. What must an actual citizen of India make of this gallimaufry of elements? And this was only the exterior.
As the new southern gate came into view (presented four or five years before by the Maharaja of Patiala, a man of such excellent manners that he’d refrained from bursting into laughter when he laid eyes upon the Pavilion) I noticed a grocer’s lorry idling nearby, with several men off-loading crates and canvas-draped trays. Some kind of an event, no doubt. Which gave me an idea.
I stood out of the drizzle to watch for a bit, until I had my man: late fifties, neither labourer nor giver-of-commands, but clearly regarded as an authority both by those doing the off-loading and by the man in charge of the event itself. When the lorry had finished and the sleek-haired figure in the good suit had trailed after the supplies, fussing all the time, the man I’d been watching stepped under the portico to light a cigarette. I moved over to join him.
“Good morning,” I said. “Oh heavens, don’t let me interrupt your hard-earned break. I was hoping the rain would let up and I could have a wander through the gardens.”
“Might not be for a bit, miss,” he said.
“Looks like they’re having a party.”
“Mayor’s got a dinner of some kind. Daughter’s engagement, I think they said.”
“A fine place for it.”
“That it is.”
“You know, I should ask—have you worked here for a while? That is, I don’t suppose you were here when it was the Indian hospital, were you?”
His reply told me I’d judged his amused and proprietary expression correctly: “That I was, miss. Started in the garden here the month the Clock Tower was finished, in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Eighteen eighty-seven that was,” he provided, a nod to my youth. “Since then I’ve done pretty much every job there is.”
“Oh good! I’m looking for some of the nurses who were here at that time. Writing an article on, er, women in wartime, you know?” It was an excuse that matched my appearance and my educated accent, and gave him a reason to indulge in airing his memories.
“And a fine lot they were, too,” he said. “Though in truth, the girls weren’t here for more than a few weeks.”
“No?”
“Some idiocy in the papers. The Mail, it was, had a picture of some of ’em next to a patient here, stirred up talk about white girls nursing brown men. So they got the younger girls out of here as soon as they could, and even the married ones they replaced with men by the summer.”
Clearly, I’d had other things on my mind that spring than the innuendo campaigns of the sensational press.
“Having spent some time as a VAD myself, I can’t say the colour of the patient’s skin made much of a difference to me. In any event, perhaps you remember one or two of the older ones, who stayed on?”
“You want Mrs Straub,” he said promptly. Perhaps too promptly?
“Do I?”
“Well, not sure want is the word, but if you can get on her good side, she can tell you anything you need to know.”
“A bit of a dragon, I take it?”
“Tigress, maybe. She can be...protective.” The twinkle in his eyes suggested that he’d like to watch me get anything out of the woman.
“Since I have no interest in stirring up any tabloid rubbish, I’m sure we shall get on just fine. Any idea where I might find her?”
“Last I heard she was at the Victoria in Lewes.”
“Lovely. And have you any suggestions? For ‘getting on her good side’?”
“Not a one,” he said, with no sign of regret.
“Then I shall have to try honesty,” I replied. “Thank you for your help, and perhaps you could lift a glass to my luck, later tonight.” So saying, I pressed a coin into his palm and opened up my umbrella.
I figured that “Victoria” meant the Lewes hospital rather than the tearoom, and so it proved. She was even on duty. Unfortunately, the judgment of tigress proved all too apt.
Beryl Straub: sturdy, scrubbed, and stern, fixed me with an iron gaze through steel spectacle frames, and waited for me to convince her of my need.
Mrs Straub was the Victoria’s head nurse. I had sat in a cool, damp office waiting for her to return from her duties in the wards, and had been greeted by a shake of the hand and the news that she could only spare me five minutes.
“Then I won’t waste any of your time. I was told that you were a nurse at the Pavilion when it first began to take in the Indian soldiers.”
“December 1914, that’s right.”
“One of those early patients came to me recently with a problem.”
“Yes?”
“Anik Singh, is his name.” She did not react. Why would she, after all these years? “I don’t imagine you remember him, he was blown—”
“He was in a trench when a shell went off. Among the first intake of patients. I remember him.”
“Ah, good. He’s fine, by the way. A minor limp, is all.”
She waited.
“The problem isn’t about him, but his brother. Manvir Singh was wounded in March, 1915, in the battle of Neuve Chapelle. He arrived in Brighton a week or so later. A field postcard was sent home indicating that he’d been wounded and was being cared for. Then in late June or early July, a death notice was sent out, and his family assumed that he had lost a slow and lingering fight. However, recently they have had...a further communication. Anonymous, unfortunately. It suggested that Manvir recovered, for a time—that he was conscious and active before his eventual death.”
She waited.
“I know his wounds had become infected before he reached Brighton, and infections have a way of coming back. Or he could have needed surgery, and failed to survive that. But the family wishes to know. And I thought you might perhaps be able to help.”
“With...?”
I studied her face. It revealed nothing, very determinedly.
“Information about the young man’s death. About his final weeks. Perhaps about the anonymous correspondent.” Her face did not shift a hairbreadth, and yet I could have sworn there was a reaction, deep down.
Time to wait her out. For thirty seconds, her mask held. Then a slight change of focus in her eyes betrayed that her thoughts had gone inward. Another thirty seconds...
But she glanced at the clock, and stood. “I’m sorry, miss, I’m needed in—”
I made my voice hard. “Mrs Straub, if I need to, I’m quite capable of digging through the hospital records to find the names of all the nurses on duty that spring, and harassing them for what they know. Manvir Singh gave his life for this country. His family deserves to know how.”
Her hand continued to show me the door. However, in the hallway, she paused. “Miss—Russell, was it? My day ends at six o’clock. Come back then, and we shall talk further.”
I was in the waiting room at six, but she did not appear. She was inside her office, the stop-and-start of her voice betraying a lengthy telephone call. Her assistant left at half past six. Shortly after, the office went silent.
A long time later, the door opened. She looked older than she had earlier, and not simply because it was the end of a long working day. In her hand was a small piece of paper.
“Miss Russell, there are some things that are not mine to disclose. My strong impulse is to turn you away. But since I know who you are and the resources you wield, I doubt that my refusal will keep you from, as you say, ‘digging.’ These are the five women who worked at the Pavilion from the time it opened until they were replaced the following summer. There was one other, but she died two years ago. I have not included VAD girls or the nurses who came and went.”
She held out the page, but when I took hold of it, her fingers kept their grasp for a time. “I ask you, please, to treat these women with care. They may well still be troubled by their long, hard, noble wartime service. I urge you to think carefully before you proceed. Indeed, I can only hope you decide to go home and assure Mr Anik Singh that his brother died with honour, in the service of his King.”
She stepped back inside her office, shutting the door in my face.
Margaret Ainsley, Bristol
Faith Prescott, London
Rosemary Langdon, London
Mary O’Connor, London
Marguerite Winslow, Birmingham
Unfortunately, there were no other details, be it street, telephone number, or even a husband’s name. Still, if the telephone directory didn’t lead me to them, they would all be old enough—and with luck, either propertied or educated enough—to be on city voting registries. And there was always a way to find registered nurses.
I found a Brighton directory at the hospital’s front desk, and saw three entries for the name Ainsley. I checked my watch: too late to call on a strange woman? Not if I hurried. My map showed one address down among the slums—an unlikely home for a trained nurse—and another on the western edges of the city. The third was just half a mile up the London road. However, when the woman who answered the door said that yes, she was Mrs Ainsley, I knew I had the wrong place: she wasn’t even as old as I.
“I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” I said, raising my voice over the sounds of raging children, “I’m looking for a Mrs Ainsley who nursed at the Pavilion during the War.”
“That’s my mum,” she said, then turned to shout, “Reggie, if you don’t leave off tormenting your sister—”
I stopped the closing door with my hand, and asked apologetically, “Would that be Mrs William or Mrs Arthur?”
“Arthur, on Peakside Street.”
Mrs Arthur Ainsley was also home, and also about to sit down to her dinner. She was a woman in her midforties, with just the kind of calm, comforting face one would want to have beside one’s hospital bed. However, when she heard my question, about an Indian soldier named Manvir Singh, the face closed up.
“I can’t help you.”
“Mrs Ainsley, please, his brother—”
“I can’t. You have to go.”
“Who’s there?” called a male voice.
“It’s no one, dear, just a woman looking for a wrong address.”
I looked at the closed door. The porch light went off.
Well, that was interesting.
Either the woman found the mere thought of that period of her life too disturbing to consider, or she knew something she didn’t want to tell me. However, I was not going to get anything from her tonight, not with Mr Ainsley in residence. Should I stick around and approach her in the morning—or move on to London and work my way through the three women located there?
Considering the option of returning home to straggling invaders, an irritated housekeeper, and a client in need of explanations, it was not a difficult choice.
My London club gave me a room and a set of telephone directories. Since showing up at doors was not practical here—the number of London listings attached to those three surnames being roughly equal to the entire population of Brighton—I also asked for one of the club’s modern rotary telephones. My ear already ached at the thought of how many hours I was going to spend with the earpiece pressed against it, hunting through all those men’s names in search of Faith Prescott, Rosemary Langdon, and (my heart sank) Mary O’Connor. Why, oh why did the Post Office not consider the woman in a partnership deserving of a separate entry?
The Langdons did not take me long, the next morning. Unfortunately, they also did not give me a Rosemary, or indeed any woman who had nursed in Brighton during the War. I sent out for the more peripheral London directories, and skipped past the many (many) pages of O’Connors to start on Prescott. Where, to my amazement, my eye caught on the name Faith tucked in between an Edward and a Frederick. She might have been married ten years ago, but she appeared to be single, or widowed, now.
I inserted my finger into the rotary, then stopped. She was probably at work; she might be the wrong Faith Prescott—but the address was only a brief Underground trip away. And the sky outside promised a fresh, sunny morning. Who needed husbands and anniversaries, anyway, when a woman had London and an interesting investigation stretched out before her? And tonight, by way of reward, I could simply take myself to dinner. I could even go to the cinema: Who was to stop me?
The thought cheered me through the Underground and up a tidy street to the polished bell pull. I listened to its echo fade. The house was as trim as one might imagine from a nurse: scrubbed walk, polished windows, paint that was not fresh, but clean. The sort of house whose resident would use good quality stationery with the address printed thereon.
I did not hear any sound from within, yet... Had the curtains shifted a fraction? I spoke aloud, as if to an ear pressed against the door.
“Mrs Prescott? My name is Mary Russell. I was sent by Beryl Straub. Mrs Prescott, I have a couple of questions about your time at the Brighton Pavilion.” Nothing moved. “I can come back, if this isn’t a good time.” Silence, and yet, the sensation that there was someone inside. I waited—and after a minute came the hard quick clackclackclack of heels approaching down a hallway. The door came open.
She was in her late thirties, brown-eyed and brown-haired, a streak of grey rising from her left temple. She wore trousers—though she looked the sort who would change to a skirt before leaving the house—and a heavy cardigan with too-long sleeves that covered her hands to the knuckles. She wore thick socks with the noisy Cuban-heeled shoes, and stood as if her feet were pinched.
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m looking for a Mrs Faith Prescott?”
“I am she.”
“I wanted to ask you a few questions about the Indian Hospital in the Royal Pavilion, in early 1915.”
A shadow seemed to pass over her face. Fear? Revulsion? Sadness? “Yes.”
“You were there—is that correct? As a nurse on the wards?”
“Only until June. 1915.”
“Yes, I heard about the scandal-mongering newspaper. Pity, that. I remember how pressed most places were for nursing help—I was officially too young for anything beyond reading to the wounded and helping them write letters, but even I got pulled in to change dressings from time to time.” I gave her a wry smile, to cement this personal connection, then asked, “I wonder if I might come in, just for a bit? Save you from letting out all the heat.”
She started to glance over her shoulder but caught the motion. I thought for a moment she would refuse, that she would shut the door in my face—but she seemed to brace herself and step back.
As I followed her down the hall and into the parlour, I saw no indication that some other person had rapidly fled the scene. I did notice that the clack of her heels was nowhere near as emphatic as when she’d come towards the door. Which meant she’d wanted me to think the delay was due to her being at the back of the house, not that she’d been tiptoeing along the hall in stockinged feet and eyeing the stoop through a crack in the curtains.
Either the woman was deeply frightened of visitors, or Beryl Straub had warned her I was coming.
The room was quite warm, from morning sun and the remains of a small fire. I took off my coat and hat, chatting all the while—what a welcoming room (in fact, it was); that’s a charming desk (which my fingers itched to open in search of stationery); oh, you have children! (three, by the looks of the mantelpiece photos)—but to my interest, she neither removed her own warm sweater nor moved to play the proper hostess and take my coat. I draped the garment over the arm of a settee and sat down, making a brief but thorough survey of the framed photos before raising my friendly face to her.
“How old are your children?”
Even this question had no softening effect on her. If anything, it seemed to raise her maternal hackles before she replied with the most minimal possible information. “My children are sixteen, fourteen, and eight. And a half.”
“You and your husband must be proud of them.”
“My husband is dead.”
“Oh, I am sorry,” I said.
“He was killed in the War.”
“That must have been hard, to be on your own with three small children.”
“My father died when I was young, so my mother was free to come live with us. She still does, which means that I can work nights when I need to.” Her right hand came up to encircle her left wrist for a moment, then dropped away with a jerk.
“So you’re still a nurse?”
“I am. I was fortunate enough to get a position at Guy’s. I’ve been there now, oh, going on six years.”
“You must have started there when your youngest was small.”
Her face, which had started to relax as she told me about her mother and her professional life, closed sharply. “Bills to pay.”
“Oh, of course, I was sympathising, is all.”
“Miss Russell, I do have a number of tasks waiting for me.”
“I’m so sorry! Thoughtless of me. Well, I have an acquaintance who is looking for information about his younger brother, who was transferred from the Front to the Pavilion hospital in March 1915. He died later that spring, but the family never received any details. Manvir Singh, was his name. Do you remember that patient?”
The woman was holding herself so tight, I felt that a flick of the fingernail would cause her to shatter. “Half the patients were named Singh. It seemed.”
“I imagine so.” I kicked myself for not making Mr Singh give me the photo of his brother. “This one would have been in his early thirties. He took three bullets in the battle of Neuve Chapelle. Might have lost some fingers.”
She shot to her feet, her right hand clasping her left forearm so tightly, one would have thought she was trying to stop a spurting wound. “Miss Russell, there were so many wounded soldiers, so many horribly mutilated dying, gassed young men, I try not to remember any of them. Please, I have to ask you to go.”
To refuse would have been inhuman. I apologised, snatching up my coat and following her to the door. “Thank you, Mrs Prescott—here’s my card, please let me know if you think of any—”
But the door was shut, the heels retreating.
Food for thought, as I went down the scrubbed front steps and along the street.
As Mrs Straub had said, nurses, no less than the soldiers they treated, could suffer long-term consequences from the endless grinding months of trauma, day in and day out, over the long years of war. Mrs Prescott could be one of those, repelled by questions that threatened to stir up memories.
Yet if that were the case, would she not have tried harder to leave nursing entirely, instead of returning to a lesser and civilian form of daily reminders? And her responses: easy and forthcoming when it came to nursing duties and helpful mothers, then tightly monosyllabic when asked about children or husband. And wasn’t there something about the photos over the fire? The husband, in uniform, was placed slightly apart from the others. And although I had seen his face from the settee, a person seated on the other chairs—including what was clearly her habitual seat—would not.
As for her left forearm, why did she occasionally grip it—and not want me to notice her doing so? Did her old traumas include a physical one like a broken wrist? Was that why she’d worn that thick sweater despite the room’s warmth, because of something on her arm she didn’t want me to see? Such as... What? A scar? A tattoo?
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Russell,” I said aloud. Women like Faith Prescott didn’t have tattoos.
I stood for a minute on the busy pavement, staring down unseeing at the descending steps to the Underground station. Time to search out the other two women in London? Or look more closely into Faith Prescott? She was hiding something—there was no doubt about that. But was it her secret, or that of one of the others?
I sighed, and descended into the dim and smoky depths. I’d give it this afternoon, and if nothing came up I would change my course. And I could always treat myself to the cinema and a nice anniversary dinner when this was finished.
Many dusty hours later, I returned the latest of the file folders to the Somerset House records clerk. I now knew the rough outlines of what had happened, that spring of 1915. And I knew who could fill in the details.
Outside on the busy pavement, I was surprised to find the sun nearly down. What time was it, anyway? I glanced down at my wrist, finding my watch reversed, and reached over to paw it around—and my hand went still. After a moment, I smiled. Yes.
Back at the Prescott house, I waited across the street beneath an overgrown lilac until the two upstairs windows went dark. A few minutes later, a light went on behind the curtains downstairs.
I crossed over to the nurse’s scrubbed steps. This time I knocked softly rather than pull the bell: no reason to wake the freshly sleeping children upstairs. The door came open, and I gave the children’s mother an apologetic smile.
“Good evening, Mrs Prescott. I need to know about the steel bangle you wear on your left arm.”
It was, as I’d expected, nearly identical to the one encircling the wrist of Anik Singh. It was large for a woman’s arm—yet instead of slipping it off before she answered the door, she had pushed it up her arm and pulled down the cuffs of her sweater to hide it.
That told me the bangle was more than an idiosyncratic piece of jewellery to her.
She made tea, reassuring her curious mother that all was well before she closed the older woman out of the parlour. While she poured, I went over to the desk. Her stationery was indeed in the top drawer: same width, same paper, same watermark I’d seen on the other. In a cubbyhole at the desk’s back was a pair of scissors with three-inch blades.
I returned the page to its place, closed the drawer, and went to the settee to accept my cup.
“It was the knife, wasn’t it?” she asked. “That gave me away?”
“Yes.”
“How? I didn’t put my address on it, didn’t use newspaper to pad it. I even printed it so no one could recognise my handwriting.”
I was tempted to tell her that the knot in the twine could only have been that of a nurse, or some such nonsense, but I refrained. “No, it was the knife itself. Manvir Singh was in the habit of etching it with the battles in which he carried it. When his brother saw that its final reference was to Neuve Chapelle, he knew its owner had survived. At least, long enough to carve words into the blade.”
She gave a bitter little shake of the head. “I knew I should throw it away. Even if it was important to him.”
“Why get rid of it at all? You’d had it for ten years.”
“My son came across it in the attic. It’s lethally sharp. Not a toy.”
“This would be your eight-year-old?”
“My—yes. My first two are both girls.”
I knew that from the photos covering the mantelpiece.
“Do you know where he is buried? They didn’t send his remains home. His brother might like to know.”
“Oh, they only buried the Muslims, somewhere up in Surrey. The Hindu and Sikh religions require cremation, so they built a special place for that out in the countryside.”
“There’s a burning ghat in Sussex?”
“Not anymore. They did make a sort of memorial chapel on the site. Remote, but rather pretty.”
I could only imagine what the local farmers had made of crematory smoke drifting over from the next field.
“And the ashes? Are they at the memorial?”
“They were scattered at sea.”
So much for a graveside visit, then.
“It sounds as if you were very fond of him.”
“I was fond of many of those soldiers. Often young, always in pain, far from home, and in that peculiar setting, yet all were eager to return to the fight. Even those far too badly wounded to be put back on the Front.”
“Yes, I understand that Manvir’s injuries might have made it impossible to handle a rifle.”
“He was certain that he’d be judged fit for duty. His hearing would have been the following week.”
“Really? But I thought—Wait. How did he die?”
Her eyes dropped, and her hand came over to turn the bracelet on her wrist, around and around. “There was a fight.”
“Amongst the patients?”
She tipped her head, a gesture I took as a shamed yes. And it was true: even discounting her fondness for one of the participants, a nurse might be ashamed of allowing any kind of scuffle to arise between patients, and all the more if it had led to a death.
“So what happened? Was there an arrest?”
She shook her head. “The army had the hospital write down Mani’s death as being from his wounds. Which in a way was almost true, since the bullets had left him weak in all but spirit. At any rate, he was cremated and his...the other man was sent back to the Front. He died there, a year or two later.”
I stared at her, saw a tear start down her cheek only to be wiped away vigorously. She lifted her head, and I saw her bitterness. “By the summer of 1915, they were desperate for soldiers. Remember, conscription did not start until the following year. If it was an accident, not an attack, then they could have their officer back.”
Had the dead patient been English, things might have gone differently, but she was right: by June, there was not a man to spare. Even if he had killed another man in a fight.
“What was his name? The man responsible for his death?”
“Does it matter? He died. Knowing who it was could only harm his family.”
Holmes would want me to press for the name. But Holmes was not here.
She could be lying, I thought. Certainly she is leaving things out. But perhaps a little more research might prevent my thoughtlessly crashing through the lives of innocent families. Perhaps not asking questions might be the better way, just this once.
She noticed the direction of my eyes, which had dropped again to where she worked the steel bangle around her wrist. She took a deep breath, then seized firmly around the circlet to pull it off, handing it to me over the tea things.
It was warm and smooth and heavy in my fingers. The kara was as much a part of Sikh doctrine as the kirpan, worn by men and women alike. The simple steel bangle, unadorned and never removed, was a constant reminder of God and the strength of the warrior. And sometimes of other things, as well.
I held it out to her. “His brother has Manvir’s kirpan. This would only confuse matters.”
Slowly, listening to the meaning behind my words, she took it.
I stood. “You won’t hear from me again. But here’s my card. In case you wish to speak to me about anything.”
I laid the white card on the table, and gathered my things.
When I left, the kara was back on her wrist, and wonder was dawning on her face.
I did not get back to Sussex until the late the following evening. To my considerable relief, Mr Singh was not there waiting for me, having retreated to a guesthouse in Eastbourne: that difficult report could wait until tomorrow.
It was an even greater pleasure to discover that Holmes had returned. He came downstairs to find me slumped into a chair before the fire, coat and hat still on, too tired to move any farther.
He tossed some wood on the embers and fetched us each a drink, then sat in the other chair, legs stretched out to the warmth.
Silence descended. Broken by Holmes clearing his throat. “Er, Russell. I believe I may have neglected to wish you a happy anniversary.”
I looked at him blankly for a moment, then laughed aloud. “Oh heavens, I’d forgot all about it. Don’t worry, Holmes, you can make up for it next year. Let’s say for our fifth wedding anniversary.”
He looked both relieved and confused, which is never a bad state for a husband. I put down my glass, shed my outer garments, and went to see what I could find by way of supper. And lunch.
“Was Mr Singh still here when you got back?” I asked around a mouthful of cheese and biscuits.
“He’d just gone. But Mrs Hudson told me you had left a houseguest for her.”
So as he took out his pipe and tobacco, I told him about my days: the newspaper article, the Sikh gentleman, the head nurse in Lewes. As often happened, the telling stimulated the reflection, allowing my thoughts to run on two tracks, one aloud and one internal.
In those early months of the War, ten years ago, social niceties had gone the way of the Queen of Hearts’ soldiers: up in the air. Anything was possible. Women became bus conductors and police constables, delivered beer, and worked in factories. Women carried stretchers, drove ambulances, and nursed male patients—until a tabloid newspaper stirred up scandal, and the younger of those nurses were tidied away.
Mrs Faith Prescott, however, was too valuable to waste. A trained nurse before she married, with a husband and children, she was no blushing innocent. And with a mother at home to care for the children, she could be kept on at the Pavilion hospital until a full complement of male nurses was brought in.
She was fond of her patients, some—it must be said—more than others. With one in particular, a darkly handsome young man in a turban, she formed a bond.
A bond that in the normal course of events would have broken when Rifleman Manvir Singh was discharged and shipped home, leaving behind him a degree of heartache and a handful of wistful memories.
“But that’s not what happened?” Holmes’s prompt startled me into attention.
“No. I spent the day up to my neck in records at the War Office, piecing it together. And even now, I could not say for certain that the ‘bond’ between Mrs Prescott and Manvir Singh was any more than romantic fantasy.
“However, in the last week of May, her husband, one Captain Jonathan Prescott, stepped on something in the trenches and developed an infection. A minor one, but sepsis moves fast in those conditions, and he was given medical leave before it got to the point that he lost a foot.
“Captain Prescott came home the first week of June, some two weeks before the last of Brighton’s women nurses were due to be replaced. He, as many men would, resented his wife not being home to care for him, but it was wartime, she was needed.
“However, either he caught her by accident, or he suspected wrongdoing and went to the hospital specifically to find out. There he discovered his wife and her patient. Mind you, the whole thing took place out of doors in the Pavilion gardens, a very public place, so whatever he saw can’t have been actually compromising. But he thought it was, and started shouting and threatening and finally attacked Manvir Singh physically. In the fight that followed, Manvir died. An accident, to some extent, although Prescott was fit and Manvir was still weak, with one arm he could barely lift.
“And now I have to decide how much of this to tell Mr Singh tomorrow. Because Captain Prescott was never charged. Not with manslaughter, not even with assault. The police considered it a fight between equals, despite Manvir’s condition, and the death an accident. The army was happy to haul Prescott back to the Front, and not lose one of its officers to prison. One does suspect that his superiors knew what had happened and disapproved, because his leave was cut short and he was sent back to France. Where he died the following summer.”
Holmes smoked, and we listened to the fire for a time. “So,” he said, “what are you going to tell your client?”
“I’m not sure he needs to know. I can’t help thinking that the truth will make many people unhappy. Even more unhappy than they are. What would you do?”
“As you know, Russell, I have never hesitated to lie to a client in service to a greater good. Has justice been had, here?”
“The killer is long dead. And honourably so.”
“What, then, would be the benefit in further punishment of his family—or indeed, that of the victim?”
“We agree, then. Good.”
Having reached that conclusion, Holmes pulled back his outstretched heels and knocked the dregs of his pipe into the fireplace. He dropped the empty pipe into the ashtray, set his hands on the arms of his chair—then noticed that I had not moved.
“Something else?”
“Nothing that affects my meeting with Mr Singh tomorrow. But something that might come back in the future, yes. Not for some years, I imagine, but I left the door open by giving her my card.
“The first time I went to see Mrs Prescott, she’d been warned I might come. She hid the kara before coming to the door, and rearranged the photographs on the mantelpiece. One of those showed her two daughters and an infant, who was little more than an armful of white clothing. When I went back to the house that evening, the pictures were back in their original places, and one that was missing had been restored. It showed all three children, and was far more recent.
“She lied to me, early on. She said her youngest child was eight, then corrected herself to eight and a half. Among the dusty papers I sorted through today was a church registry, in the parish where the family lived before they moved up to Mrs Prescott’s new position in London. The boy was born in February 1916.”
“Nine years old. Not something a mother would get wrong.”
“Unless she hoped to lead me away from a scent.”
“How far did you pursue matters? Did your day’s travels include military records?”
“They did not. Although I would not be too surprised to find that certain of Prescott’s superiors breathed a small sigh of relief when his honourable death in battle came before he could be granted another home leave.”
“Sometimes,” my husband agreed firmly, “ignorance can be the wiser choice.”
“Indeed.”
He rose, tightened the belt of his dressing gown, and walked through checking the windows and doors before going back upstairs.
I sat for a bit longer, gazing into the last flames among the embers.
That second photograph, the recent one that reappeared on the mantelpiece, had indeed shown a lad rather more mature than eight years of age. It had also shown a boy with remarkably dark, handsome eyes, skin that would tan quickly in the summer, and the shiniest black hair this side of India.
Someday, on an anniversary perhaps, his mother would give him a steel bracelet, and a story.