Chapter 15
Chapter 15
It was a summer like no other.
In the cool of the marble-floored hallway the barometer’s needle had edged round to fair and remained stuck there, unmoving, despite Mr Goddard’s daily tap on the glass. As the long August days passed and still no rain came, Coldwell’s park shimmered in the heat and the surrounding hills changed from green and purple to brown as the heather and bracken crisped into premature autumn.
In the kitchen garden, the dipping pond was reduced to a few inches of brackish water, and the river that twisted along the western edge of the park dried up to a brown trickle over baked stones. Gatley, fretting over his wilting lettuces, sent the garden boys to fill their pails from its shallows, and Johnny Farrow took the cart down to the ford by the home farm and pushed it in up to its axles, to soak its shrunken wheels.
The newspaper boy still toiled up the drive on his bicycle every morning with The Times , though Sir Randolph had left for Scotland (taking his valet and chauffeur with him, thank goodness) and wasn’t there to read it. Along with letters from Mrs Bryant in Portman Square and Miss Addison in Shropshire, it provided Kate with a link to the world beyond the parched hills. Mr Goddard commandeered it first, so the news was a day old by the time it reached the servants’ hall, but in that slow, sweltering summer it hardly mattered. The hot days melted together, separated by sultry, sleepless nights.
While Sir Randolph slaughtered grouse on a Scottish moor, in Shropshire Miss Addison busied herself with wedding preparations and her new role as mistress of Coldwell. Mr Fortescue had authorised her request for new livery for the footmen; and one afternoon a cart appeared over the crest of the drive (unannounced by Davy Wells, who had abandoned his lookout post for the shade of the woods). Dust ballooned in its wake and coated the carrier, so when he pulled up in the stable yard and wiped the sweat from his face, his handkerchief left smears of dirt.
Kate signed the receipt, running her eyes down the list of items: braided cutaway coats, striped waistcoats, moleskin knee breeches, silk stockings, and neckties.
‘It’s all right for some,’ Abigail remarked sourly as she stood in the doorway of the footmen’s wardrobe and watched Jem and Thomas unpack it all. ‘You lads get kitted out in livery costing a king’s ransom, and what do we get? A bolt of cheap cotton as a Christmas box and the job of making it up ourselves.’
‘Yes, well, now the house is being smartened up the new Lady Hyde isn’t going to want a pair of scruffs in the dining room, is she?’ Thomas said, picking at the knotted string on one of the parcels. ‘We footmen have to look the part. Doesn’t look like there are any wigs. I think I’m going to get on with the new her ladyship.’
Kate stood at the table with the invoice, waiting to mark off the items as they were unpacked. The cupboards had been thrown open and Jem was sorting through the old uniforms, making space for the new ones. Joseph perched on a stool in the corner, eating the stale end of yesterday’s loaf (since he returned from London he’d been perpetually starving), and Abigail shuffled a little farther into the small room to make way for Eliza and Susan, who crowded into the doorway to watch.
Kate bit her tongue against the urge to snap at them to go away. With Sir Randolph absent there wasn’t much for them to do in the afternoons, but their chatter and clumsy flirtation grated on her taut nerves.
It was hardly their fault. Everything grated on her taut nerves.
‘Look at that,’ breathed Susan, as Thomas folded back brown paper and held up a livery coat. ‘Those cuffs…’
The coat was the same dark green used by the Hyde family to mark ownership of their carriages and menservants since the creation of their baronetcy. The deep cuffs were crimson velvet, banded with gold braid top and bottom, finished with a row of four crested buttons. In the dingy basement, the brass gleamed with the incongruous opulence of a miser’s hoard.
Jem moved behind Kate, leaning past her to lay the old uniforms on the table. The gap between the table and the countertop behind was narrow, and his nearness was like a static electrical charge. It took all her concentration to keep her face neutral and to resist the invisible, instinctive forces pulling her towards him. The lines of elaborately looped handwriting on the invoice swam meaninglessly before her eyes.
It was almost unbearable, sometimes.
She thought their conversation in the laundry had settled the matter. If neither of them spoke of what had happened—if she made it absolutely clear that it had been a moment of madness—it would be possible to return to how things had been. Outwardly she supposed they had: they each moved through the days as they always had, going about their work in their respective parts of the house, sitting at the servants’ hall table at mealtimes, addressing each other only when necessary, and in the most impersonal terms.
Outwardly, it was all perfectly respectable and correct.
No one would guess that her blood raced when she passed him and that the incidental touch of his fingers when she took a tray from him in the scullery sent sparks up her arm. No one would suspect that she went over every glance, every word, every casual touch as she grated sugar or stared at columns of figures in her ledger. And relived his kiss as she lay in her tangled sheets at night.
She might have made it clear to him that it had been a regrettable mistake. It seemed she had yet to convince herself.
Abigail picked up one of the old garments from the table. Against the opulence of the new ones, it looked shabby and threadbare, its colour faded. ‘You’d hardly know them for the same livery,’ she said, examining it disdainfully. ‘I wonder how old these are.’
‘Almost as old as Mr Goddard, I’d wager,’ Eliza muttered. She was leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed over her chest, her face sallow and shiny with sweat. Kate should have reprimanded her, but she let it go. The weather was getting to them all.
‘What’s that?’ Susan said, taking hold of the faded lapel and folding it back. ‘Look—a label with someone’s name on it. William? Williams?’
Abigail peered at the scrap of embroidered tape stitched into the yellowed lining. ‘Oh yes… Looks like Williams to me. Funny to think that there were once enough footmen here that they had to name their uniforms.’
Thomas unfolded a new pair of breeches. (Kate mustered her focus to find them on the list.) ‘You can see from the photographs out there in the kitchen passage there were five or six, at least. Probably wearing these very coats.’
Susan rummaged through the pile of old uniforms and held up another jacket. ‘This one’s different from the others. Smaller too.’
‘Part of a tiger’s uniform, isn’t it? For a young lad.’ Eliza pushed herself away from the doorframe and burrowed in the mound of clothing. ‘I saw the waistcoat in here somewhere—a gold striped one… Here.’
She put it on top of the pile. Its black velvet was balding, and the bars of gold braid that formed the distinctive stripes were worn to a dull grey in places. She opened it to look in the lining.
‘Here we are… Mullins? Is that what it says?’
Out of the corner of her eye, Kate saw Jem look round.
‘Yes,’ Abigail said, looking inside the tiger’s coat. ‘There’s one in here too. A. Mullins .’
‘I wonder what A. Mullins is doing now?’ Susan spoke in a tone of awe, as if it were possible that the lad who had once been a tiger at Coldwell might now be conducting the orchestra at the Queen’s Hall or leading an expedition across the Antarctic.
‘Working as a footman somewhere else, likely,’ Eliza retorted. ‘That label looks recent. Mullins is probably the same age as us. That uniform’ll fit you, Joseph.’
Jem had turned back to the empty cupboards, but he wasn’t moving. He didn’t seem to hear Susan either, urging Thomas to try on the new coat, and Abigail joining in. ‘Ooh yes, go on; show us your fancy finery. After all, we’d better get used to it so we’re not completely giddy when we see you on duty.’
Thomas’s ears were bright pink as he took the new coat down from the peg rail. ‘I’ll put this on, just to see if it fits’—he grinned—‘but I’ll be trying them britches on later, without company, if you don’t mind.’ Slipping the coat on, he glanced round at the others. ‘Come on, Joseph—and you, Jem—don’t leave me on my own here.’
As Abigail helped Joseph into the old tiger’s livery, Thomas handed the other new coat to Kate to pass to Jem. Hidden by the open door of the cupboard, their gazes held as he slid his arms into it. The heat seemed to intensify, spreading upwards into her cheeks, downwards into her pelvis. Unfurling itself.
She could barely look at him, and yet… she couldn’t not look. The top two buttons of his collarless shirt were open, and there was something incongruous about his golden skin and the hollow at the base of his throat against the braided lapels. He looked like he’d stepped out of the past or from the pages of one of Miss Austen’s novels. As he dropped his arms to his sides again his hand brushed hers.
An accidental touch, but the rush of want it unleashed made her head spin. Only vaguely was she aware of Thomas strutting around, flicking his coattails and tugging at his scarlet cuffs, while the girls broke into a chorus of appreciative whoops. Her heart was beating so hard it was making her whole body throb.
Secretly, in the folds of her skirt, his fingers caught hers.
She looked up and met his gaze. The others vanished, their voices drowned out by the crash of her pulse. There was only Jem. His eyes—intense and fathomlessly dark—full of despair and hunger.
‘Come on then, Jem, let’s have a look at you!’
Thomas’s voice broke the spell. Kate jerked her hand away and turned round. The girls must have noticed the expression on her face, or sensed the change of atmosphere, because their exuberant shouts faltered into silence.
Finding her voice, Kate iced it with her chilliest disapproval, to counter the heat that was searing through her. ‘This is a respectable house, not a music hall. Girls, it’s time you got back to work. Thomas, make sure everything is unpacked and hung up properly to get the creases out. Jem, you can finish checking the invoice. Bring it to me when it’s done.’
She swept past them, curling her tingling fingers into a fist.
Standing outside the housekeeper’s room, Jem knocked and stood back. He pushed a hand through his hair and listened for her voice over the drumbeat of his heart.
‘Come in.’
She was sitting at her desk in front of the open window, her head bent over the letter she was writing. The blinds were half-drawn to keep out the heat; the room smelled of potpourri and fine white soap, but he could just detect beneath it a trace of her own scent.
Vanilla. Nutmeg. Roses.
She had made her wishes quite clear. He had given his word, and he had kept it, though it had required ruthless self-control. He hadn’t let his guard slip.
Until this afternoon, when he had sensed the longing rising from her like heat.
‘The invoice, Mrs Furniss. From the tailor.’
She laid down her pen and stood up to take it from him. He could see the sheen of sweat on her upper lip, in the little hollow of her Cupid’s bow.
‘Thank you. Was everything there?’
‘It seems so.’ His throat went dry as his eyes found hers. ‘Nothing missing.’
‘Good.’
He should have stepped away then, before he heard the little hitch of her breath and saw the darkness spread in her eyes. The heat made it impossible to do anything in haste, which was why it felt like they were moving through honey as he lifted his hand to cup her cheek and their bodies came together, her face tipping up to his, lips parting.
He’d promised not to compromise her, and anyone passing in the corridor outside would have heard nothing untoward or inappropriate. They might perhaps have been puzzled by the long spell of silence, unbroken by conversation. They would likely have noticed that his cheeks were flushed when he came out of the room a few minutes later, his breathing uneven. They would have probably thought it odd that he hesitated for a second after he shut the door behind him, and leaned against it, collecting himself.
Luckily the passage was empty.
The heat was relentless.
Eliza had never known anything like it. It dragged at her: a physical thing, like weights sewn into her petticoat hem. It made everything move more slowly, from the stupefied flies in the stillroom to the hands of the clocks that ticked through the house.
The days crawled by.
In the evenings Thomas read aloud from the newspapers. In London the intense heat had been interrupted by a sudden freak storm one afternoon, with hailstones as big as golf balls bouncing off the pavements in the Strand. The dockers’ strike was still going on, so the shop shelves were empty while cargoes of fruit, meat, and vegetables rotted in ships’ holds at Rotherhithe. It reminded Eliza that London was a real place; one that still existed. It hadn’t just been the setting of a bizarre dream that had vanished with the coming of daylight.
Even though she was beginning to wish that were true.
He’d promised to write. Well, maybe not promised exactly, but he’d said he would, and the daily hope that a letter might come was the only thing that helped her drag herself out of bed. But it was starting to look like writing was just another one of Walter Cox’s extravagant claims that turned out to be nothing but hot air.
Like when he’d told her she was beautiful. And when he’d said if she left Coldwell and came to London, she could be his girl.
For some reason she kept thinking of those ships’ holds full of spoilt produce, everything blackening and turning to rot. The thought made her stomach heave.
It felt like the whole summer had turned bad.
The work was finally finished in Lady Hyde’s rooms.
For weeks Susan had listened to Eliza and Abigail talking about the furnishings—the eau-de-Nil silk curtains and rose-pink eiderdown, the deep, wide bath standing on lion’s feet—but as a kitchen maid she had no business beyond the servants’ basement and hadn’t seen them herself. One hot afternoon, with Mrs Furniss’s permission, she scurried up the back stairs to have a look.
The light was different upstairs, and the air smelled of potpourri undercut with fresh paint, which was a lot nicer than the mutton fat and boiled cabbage she’d been breathing all day. She followed the sound of Eliza’s voice to a room halfway along the corridor and stood on the threshold, folding her arms across her chest and tucking her chapped hands into her armpits as she looked around.
‘Why are you hovering there with a face like that?’ Eliza demanded, appearing in the doorway of the adjoining room. ‘Come in properly, for goodness sake! Feast your eyes on this bath, and be glad you don’t have to clean it. I might have known all her ladyship’s luxuries would mean more work for us, not less.’
Susan advanced doubtfully. Her feet sunk into the plush carpet and her eyes swept over the walls, where blossoms bloomed on trees that looked nothing like the ones in Derbyshire, and peacocks perched, trailing their extravagant tails.
‘Very nice, I’m sure.’
‘ Nice? ’ Eliza sounded affronted, as if she’d chosen the fancy fittings herself. ‘Is that all you can say? Nice? ’
‘Well, it’s not what I would have chose.’
Eliza gave a short laugh. ‘Hark at you! Lady Hyde must be kicking herself for letting her housekeeper furnish her new suite of rooms, instead of the kitchen skivvy!’
Misery twisted in Susan’s stomach. Eliza’s sharp tongue had been a match for Mrs Gatley’s filleting knife lately. Susan wished she didn’t feel its cuts so deeply.
‘I’m not saying that,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s just… peacocks.’ She shuddered, her gaze shifting uneasily from one painted bird to another. ‘They’re bad luck, aren’t they?’
Eliza’s eyes flicked skywards. ‘I thought that was owls? Or was it crows?’
‘It is…’ Susan wished she’d held her tongue. ‘Owls and crows can be bad omens, but peacocks are too. Or at least their tail feathers. You shouldn’t have ’em in the house, not even as images. They have eyes, see?’ She flapped a hand at the rich plumage of the nearest bird. ‘The devil’s eye.’ She tucked her arms tight into her body again. ‘Still, I suppose it’s all right for Miss Addison. Only a few weeks before she’s safely wed, and if the rest of us die old maids… Well, that’ll suit them nicely, won’t it?’
She could tell Eliza was about to make some stinging retort, but she stopped short, her mouth open.
‘Wait—what do you mean, die as old maids?’
It always surprised Susan that Eliza and Abigail didn’t know these things. But Eliza had grown up in a town, not a village like the one Susan had left, where half the stones in the churchyard had her surname on them and the seasons flowed to the rhythm of ancient sayings and superstitions.
‘It’s like a curse,’ she explained. ‘If you bring peacock feathers into a house, it’s said that any unmarried women there will stay that way. Old maids, on the shelf forever.’
Eliza’s mouth snapped shut. There was a pause.
‘What a load of nonsense,’ she said, but before she turned away Susan saw the fear on her face.
On the last night of August, it rained.
Kate was woken by the sound of rushing water and cool air moving across her body. For weeks she’d slept with the sheets pushed back and the window by her bed open. Now, as the black heavens unleashed their pent-up fury, the gutters filled and overflowed and a waterfall cascaded onto her windowsill. Instantly awake, she wrestled with the window, trying to shut out the deluge, but the wood must have warped in the warm weather. Giving it a frantic pull, the metal latch came away in her hand.
She lit the candle and stared at it stupidly. At the same moment, as if engineered by some unkind deity, the rain doubled in strength and the pool on the windowsill began to fall in a steady stream onto the corner of the bed.
She yanked the bed away from the wall and snatched her wash jug to catch the flow. Still it came. In desperation she ran out into the corridor and through the summer dark to the back door.
Outside the night was loud with water. Dawn was close enough for the sky to have lightened to gunmetal grey, against which the rain was a silvery cascade. The air smelled green and teeming, and within seconds she was drenched. High above her bedroom window a broken gutter channelled the rain down with particular force, and attempting to ram the window shut from outside, as she had intended, meant standing directly beneath it. She hesitated, then—taking in a breath—stepped into the stream of water and pushed at the jammed window.
‘Here—let me.’
Jem was there, his hand beside hers on the stuck window frame. ‘I heard you go out,’ he said, close to her ear. Her strength had been inadequate to shift it more than a fraction, but with two sharp shoves he closed the gap. Shielding her from the onslaught with his body, they ran together back to the door.
He shut it quietly, sliding the bolts back across, then turned to look at her. They were soaked through, though he was wearing trousers and a shirt and could still make some claim to decency.
Unlike Kate. Her wet nightdress stuck to her like a second, transparent skin and rain dripped from the end of her plait. After the weeks of stifling heat, the change in temperature was dramatic, but it wasn’t just the cold that made her shiver.
‘We do seem to be unlucky with the weather,’ he murmured, turning his head away, trying not to look at her.
‘Come with me,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll get you a towel.’
They slipped through the shadows to her parlour as silently as ghosts. She shut the door softly, carefully, and went into the bedroom to pick up her keys from the bedside table. The candle still burned, but its glow didn’t reach Jem, standing in the shadows by the parlour door. She sensed him, though. Awareness of his presence shimmered through every cell in her body as she unlocked the linen cupboard.
He took the towel she held out and shook out its folds, but he didn’t use it for himself. His gaze was soft as he took her face between his hands, drying her gently, squeezing the water from her hair, the towel a caress against her neck, her cheek.
‘I’ll go. You need to take that wet nightdress off before you freeze.’
That was what did it, what snapped the last gossamer thread of her resistance. His tenderness. The way he looked after her, like no one else did or had ever done. The way he made her feel as if she mattered.
‘Don’t go.’
She rose onto her toes to press her lips to his, lightly at first. Hesitantly. She had no right, she knew that, not after the way she had spoken to him on that morning in the laundry. His mouth was motionless beneath hers, and then he pulled back, his sigh fanning her cheek.
‘We said this mustn’t happen…’
‘I know.’
He took the towel and wrapped it around her, drawing her to him with its edges, close enough to rest his forehead against hers.
‘We can’t, Kate—’
‘But we can’t not, can we?’
She had tried. All these weeks, she had tried, and it had taken so much effort that she feared it would break her. Turn her mad.
‘It’s dangerous… You could lose your place—’
He was repeating her own argument back to her. Their mouths were so close together their words were little more than exhalations of breath. She took his face between her hands, and water dripped from his hair onto her skin.
‘I know, and it scares me. But what scares me more is the thought of still being here as an old woman with an empty life behind me. A life of service… Being invisible.’
He shook his head, helplessly. ‘You’re not invisible. You’re all I can see… But I’m not good enough for you, Kate; I’m not worth the risk. There are so many things you don’t know about me—’ His eyes flickered closed. ‘I should never have dared come within a mile of you. I’m a footman , for Christ’s sake—that’s the most I can ever hope to be—’
‘None of that matters.’
His insecurity touched her, just as his tenderness had, but his lack of certainty only made hers grow stronger. She cupped the back of his head and kissed him slowly and with a sort of reverence, marvelling at the presence of him… the living manifestation of her solitary dreams. And then she twisted herself free of the towel and went to blow out the candle, so they were folded into secretive shadows.
She found his hand and led him to the narrow bedroom.
‘You’re sure?’
She didn’t want to think of all the reasons why she shouldn’t be.
‘You said what I want matters to you.’
‘It does.’
‘I want this.’
Gathering up handfuls of wet cotton, she lifted her nightgown upwards, over her head. In the silence she heard his shaky exhalation and stepped into his arms.
It was the hour between night and dawn, where the old day was spent and the new one not yet minted. The still hour, when those late to bed were sleeping and the early risers weren’t yet stirring. Around them the vast old house was silent as he peeled off his damp clothes and lay down beside her in the narrow bed, and the world shrank to the scent of his skin, the touch of his fingers—brushing her collarbone, trailing across her ribs, stroking her hair—the warmth of his mouth and the hard planes of his body against hers.
Outside the rain still came down steadily, a murmured lullaby. It puddled on the baked ground, soaking down to the roots of the scorched grass, running off the hills in rivulets that swelled into streams, that gushed into waterfalls. It splashed on the dusty leaves of trees in the park—crisping and turning prematurely brown—washing them clean, bringing them back to life. It fell on the wilting lilies in Gatley’s garden, and they tipped their faces up to the heavens and opened their parched throats to the deluge.
July 2nd 1916
France
He comes to with a jolt, levering himself upright, his veins singing with panic. For a moment the pain in his head makes the sky blacken and the figures moving around him fade to phantoms. He thinks he might be sick.
His face is tight and hot, his lips parched to stiffness. As his surroundings swim back into focus, he understands that he is at an Advanced Dressing Station and is one of many men laid out on stretchers on the baked earth.
He searches his mind but has no recollection of how he got there. Was it Henderson again? His memory gapes, then he remembers the advance. He remembers Joseph falling, and the blood on his hands. He remembers his promise to go back.
Staggering to his feet, he sways drunkenly and almost falls on the man lying next to him, who has a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his face, and recoils, whimpering in alarm. Jem feels like he’s standing on the deck of a listing ship and raises his hands to his own head, but can find no dressing or any wound that would account for the feeling of a sledge hammer beating at the inside of his skull. Carefully, stopping frequently to steady himself, clutching his head with both hands to contain the ache, he picks his way through the stretchers.
A Regimental Medical Officer standing at the door of a sandbagged dugout breaks off his conversation and looks round as Jem approaches. His neat moustache has lost its definition in several days of stubble and the red cross on his white armband is almost obliterated by bloodstains. ‘I’ll try to get you on the next convoy,’ he says wearily, through the roar inside Jem’s head. ‘The ambulances can’t keep up. Those with bleeding wounds take precedence I’m afraid.’
‘I don’t need it, sir.’ His tongue is thick inside his mouth. ‘I have to get back.’
Beneath his tin helmet the RMO’s face registers surprise. ‘Lance Corporal, you were in a trench mortar attack. You were brought in unconscious and suffering from a severe concussion—’
‘I’m all right. I have to get back. Sir.’
Has he said that already? He senses that the RMO is torn between professional duty and the prospect of lightening his burden of responsibility. To sway the balance, Jem makes an effort to lift his head and meet the man’s eye, though his face blurs out of focus and there seems to be a curtain across one side of his vision.
‘I need to return to my battalion, sir. I have to collect the wounded.’
The RMO’s face seems to be coming close and then moving away, looming and retreating, looming and retreating. Jem tries to swallow but his mouth is too dry. The need to be sick is building inside him and his face feels clammy, but just as he’s not sure he can hold it much longer, the RMO looks past him.
‘Thank bloody God,’ he says with jubilant relief.
Three ambulances are snaking towards them in a plume of dust. Patting Jem absently on the arm, the RMO goes to meet them, and the other man comes out of the dugout to follow. As he passes Jem, he says, ‘I wouldn’t bother, pal. Going back for the wounded. It’s been almost thirty-six hours. There’ll be no one left out there alive.’
Thirty-six hours? More than a whole day?
Jem’s legs take him forward. He makes it a hundred yards and is sick into the long grass beside a heap of stinking dressings.
Brighton
When she next goes to Lewes Crescent on Tuesday afternoon, the first convoys of wounded men have arrived.
They were greeted at the station that morning by crowds of cheering well-wishers. (She knows this, because Mrs Van de Berg was one of them, having gone with one of the ladies from the bridge club, to distribute chocolate and cigarettes to the Poor Brave Boys.) At Lewes Crescent, she finds stretchers leaning against the railings, drying in the sun after being scrubbed clean. The elegant hall is cluttered with trolleys and screens, and a laundry hamper has been left at the foot of the stairs. The space is filled with male voices; and through the doorway to the inner hall, she sees a queue of men, dirty and bedraggled. Upstairs, on the gallery, Corporal Maloney is talking to one of the doctors, too grimly focused to give her a second glance. The front of his white tunic is smeared with blood.
The smell is overwhelming. The tang of disinfectant has been swamped by the stench of the slaughterhouse, of meat gone bad. It makes her gag.
She finds Sister Pinkney at Matron’s desk, writing rapidly in a ledger. She waits, not wanting to intrude in this place of purpose and protocol. When Sister Pinkney glances up, she finds herself apologising. ‘Mrs Van de Berg has provided postcards, with stamps attached, for the men to send word home, but I’m sure now isn’t the time—’
‘On the contrary, Miss Simmons.’ Nurse Pinkney’s face is drawn, and she removes her wire-framed glasses to rub at the red welts they have left on the bridge of her nose. ‘Now is the perfect time. A lot of families will be waiting for news.’ She lowers her voice. ‘But, please, prepare yourself. If you’re shocked, do not show it, and if you’re upset, do not cry. I hope you don’t faint at the sight of blood?’
A flash of memory. A white shirt splashed with red, scarlet drops on the stone flags.
She shakes her head.
‘Good.’ Sister Pinkney’s expression softens. ‘These men are soldiers, Miss Simmons, but they are also sons, brothers, husbands. Without nursing experience it’s quite natural to be daunted by their injuries, but you must look past them and see the man. Think of him as someone you might know yourself.’
‘Of course, Sister Pinkney.’
But as she goes into the ward, where the smell of the charnel house is stronger than ever and the pristine beds she made up are occupied, it is exactly that possibility that makes her heart falter.