The Shattered Tree Read online

  Dedication

  For Jane Chelius

  For being the most extraordinary agent any author could have

  For the books

  For the birds

  For the travel

  And above all for the friendship.

  With much love from both of us.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Where It Began

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  Also by Charles Todd

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Where It Began

  October 1918

  He crawled as far as the shattered tree and lay there, faint from the effort. But he knew he had to keep moving. When he stopped, when the sweat dried on his skin, he’d begin to shiver again, wracking his body until his teeth chattered. There wasn’t enough left of his uniform to keep him warm, and his captors, God help them, had taken his boots. Good English leather. He’d stolen them himself from a corpse.

  He grimaced, afraid to look at his torn feet. He’d lost too much blood from his other wounds. The one in his leg had mercifully stopped bleeding, and the cut in his hairline had clotted over, but the damage had been done. He was light-headed from lack of food, finding it hard to concentrate. A crow couldn’t find enough to eat in this countryside after four years of war. He’d be dead soon if he didn’t reach his own lines.

  To his left the firing was heavy. Rifles and machine guns. An assault under way. But in which direction? He could see the flashes, but they told him nothing. Which way?

  He forced himself to sit up against the torn bark of the trunk.

  Think! For God’s sake, collect your wits or you’re done for.

  But the firing was fading, and he knew in some corner of his mind that the battle hadn’t stopped. He was losing consciousness.

  Fighting it, clenching his teeth with determination, he dragged himself upright, holding hard to the shattered trunk. The ground moved under his feet, heaving and shifting, and he thought he would fall down again, unable to hold on. Wet earth pummeled him. And then the shifting stopped, and he realized a sapper’s tunnel must have gone up somewhere in the sector to his left. Shaking his head to clear it, he nearly fell down.

  Voices. Hands. He blinked, trying to see. Pray God, no. Not now—

  They had to force his fingers from the bark of the tree before they could lower him to the stretcher, and then they were doing something else.

  A blanket. Something between him and that wretchedly cold wind. The warmth betrayed him, and he lay there, unable to put up any defense at all.

  He didn’t care any longer. He couldn’t fight any more. Let them take him back, it didn’t matter.

  The ground was rough; the men handling the stretcher stumbled across it, jarring his body from side to side. He remembered some of it, in and out of awareness. Listening to the soft grunts of the men carrying him, watching the stars pass in and out of light clouds overhead, struggling to keep his bearings. He was still shivering, vaguely aware of being warmer but not yet warm enough. They had put a strap across the blanket, across his chest, holding him and it in place as they tramped in the darkness.

  Lamplight turned low. Voices. A face peering down at him. Blurred. The straps taken off, the blanket lifted. He almost cried out as the cold swept in. And then the blanket was lowered again and he clutched at it desperately.

  “And what have ye brought me this time?” a Scottish voice demanded. A woman’s voice. “He’s deid. A waste. Ye ken I’d hoped for a live one.”

  “Shall I put him with the corpses, then?” Another voice, nearly as unintelligible.

  “That’s shivering, no’ death throes,” the stretcher bearer at his head said impatiently.

  “No, bring him forward. We’ll give it a try. Anyone else out there?”

  “He’s the last.”

  “Good. Deliver him, then get yourselves something to warm your insides.”

  He could hardly decipher the exchange. He tried to groan, to make some sign that he was still clinging to life, however tenuous his hold on it. But what issued from his mouth wasn’t a groan, it was a croaking laugh, rising from his parched throat.

  The face peered down at him again. He could make out straggling sandy hair beneath a once-white cap. Pale blue eyes, kinder than the voice. Freckles, a sea of them, running together as his vision failed him.

  “God save us,” the voice said. “I think we’ve caught ourselves a frog.”

  Chapter Two

  Somewhere in France, October 1918

  I washed my hands, then dried them quickly, nodding to the orderly to bring the next patient into the tent.

  Dr. Winters turned from scrubbing his instruments to peer at the man being lifted onto the table.

  “Shock,” he said. “Loss of blood and shock. I see he’s French. Odd, in this sector. Do we have a name?”

  The orderly said, “No, sir.” He shrugged. “There’s hardly enough of his uniform left to find a pocket.”

  “Then let Base Hospital sort him out.” Dr. Winters lifted the blanket, did a cursory examination, and lowered it again. “All right, get him to bed, a hot water bottle or two, and tea, as much sugar as you can find. He’s no longer bleeding, there’s nothing here that can’t wait.” He raised one of the wounded man’s eyelids. “Possibly concussed from that head injury, but the eye is responding normally to light. Where are the ambulances?”

  “They’re just coming in, sir,” the orderly reported.

  “Then he’s for them. Sister Crawford, is this your run?”

  “Yes, sir,” I told the doctor. “Nothing was said about sending anyone else up to replace me. Sister MacRae is on duty until dawn, and Sister Marshall is sleeping.” I cocked my head to listen. The firing had stopped, and the shelling hadn’t begun. Respite. “You’ll be all right. It should be quiet enough.”

  “I doubt it,” Dr. Winters replied wearily. “I could use a dozen of you. See that they don’t keep you.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said with a smile. “And I’ll bring back as many nurses as I can find.”

  “Half a hundred will do. All right, off with you.” He turned to the orderly as they heard the ambulances pulling in. “Get him stabilized as best you can, then put him aboard. And afterward if you can find a cup of tea for me as well, I’d be grateful.”

  The orderly summoned the stretcher bearers, who had been squatting just outside the tent, enjoying a cigarette.

  As they began to lift the stretcher, one said, “Good thing he’s out, poor sod.”

  The orderly followed them. “Easy, lads. Let’s warm him up as best we can, and straight on to the line.”

  Dr. Winters and I watched them go, then I went to fetch the hot water bottles and another blanket against the cold night air. There was hardly any sugar in the emergency tin, but I did what I could.

  Sister MacRae was supervising the loading of the other patients as I came back.

  Dr. Winters was waiting for me. “Bess?”

  He was the same height as I was, a sturdy man with prematurely graying hair and sharp blue eyes. He’d worked himself to near ex
haustion, and the fighting hadn’t let up, despite the promise of an end to it. I was worried about him.

  “Sir?” I paused at the tent flap, looking back at him.

  “Nothing. Go on. Just—tell them we need more hands. And supplies are low. Ask them to resupply us as soon as they can. The next run, if possible.”

  “I’ll speak to Matron myself,” I said, and he smiled.

  “Yes, do that.”

  Our latest patient was hunched into a knot, still shivering in spite of the blankets covering him. With the help of the orderly I put one hot water bottle at his feet and the other close by his hands, then added another blanket from our precious store. He wasn’t awake enough to swallow the tea, and so I sent it on to Dr. Winters, who needed that bit of sugar too.

  The light was a little better where he lay now, and I gently searched again for a name. Officers generally wrote them in a pocket or on the underside of a lapel, sometimes even at the neck, so that their body could be identified if they were dead or too badly wounded to speak. As the first to treat a patient, we made every effort to identify him, because whoever brought him in was likely to know who he was, or the sector where the stretcher bearers found him might well connect him to a man later reported missing or thought to have been taken prisoner. With casualties running high, the task of keeping up with the living, the wounded, and the dead was enormous.

  As I pulled at the remnants of the pocket, it came away in my hand. I could just see where a strip of something had been ripped out of the uniform’s fabric. As if the owner had sewn in a piece of cloth with his name written in permanent ink. Then why rip it out again?

  The only reason I could think of was to keep the Germans from knowing who he was if he was taken prisoner. A general’s son—or that of someone in the French cabinet—someone important enough to become a hostage?

  It didn’t matter. When he was awake, he would be able to tell the base hospital what his name was.

  That done, I hurried to my quarters and picked up my kit, stuffing a half-dry uniform in the top and a sack with a pair of muddy boots on top of that. I hadn’t had time to clean them. Closing the flap, I went out to make certain I had all the paperwork I needed for each patient being transported. We were halfway through the process when a star shell burst almost overhead, and one of the men swore. It was always a forerunner of an attack.

  “Don’t they ever stop?” he growled. “We’ll hardly be able to keep up with what’s coming.”

  In the strange glare of the shell, slowly descending, we looked drained of color, our faces deeply shadowed and almost frighteningly unfamiliar. It had faded by the time we had the last patient safely strapped down, and I was turning to find my seat in the ambulance carrying the severely wounded.

  Sister MacRae appeared out of the darkness, holding a letter.

  “Will ye post it for me?” she asked, and before I could answer, she was making her way back to the surgical tent.

  I tucked the envelope into my pocket and waved to the lead driver. He was already rolling as I took my seat in the second vehicle from the rear.

  I’d ridden with our driver before, a man named Robinson, square face, sandy hair, tired eyes. We were all tired, I thought, as he greeted me.

  “Sister,” he said, starting the motor. “How bad is our cargo tonight?”

  “Two bleeding still, one of them worrying. One with broken ribs, haven’t punctured the lung yet, but I think he’s wound tight enough to keep them in place for now. A head wound, and a man delirious from fever. He’s the greatest risk. A case of appendicitis. And one weak from loss of blood.”

  “They’ll be starting the shelling shortly. I’d as soon not stop unless we have to.”

  “Then fingers crossed.”

  I’d been at this aid station for a week now, and we’d moved up twice, to stay within reach of the worst cases. Sister Nelson had worried that the Germans might push back and we’d be overrun, but I didn’t think it would happen. This sector had made fairly even progress for days, and it seemed likely that we could keep up the pressure on the German lines. But, I thought as we bounced over a rut deeper than most, war didn’t follow rules. Still, losses had been fairly heavy on both sides, and I rather thought it was HQ that pushed so hard, not the men in the field. A respite in the worst of the fighting would be welcomed if only for a chance to sleep. One of the artillery officers had already warned me, though.

  “We’ll use up our stock of shells. A mad barrage. Wait and see. No one wants to transport the damn—the blasted things back to England.”

  We rattled and bounced and slid through the dark, following the ambulance ahead of us, lights dimmed almost to the point of vanishing from sight if we fell too far behind. Robinson did what he could to prevent the worst of the jolting, but there was no way to avoid much of it.

  Robinson said, in the darkness, “Your father’s Colonel Crawford, is that right?”

  “Yes.” My father had retired from active service a few years before the war had begun, and he had made up for that by doing his duty wherever he could. London had often found a use for him, much of it too secret to discuss with my mother or me, which sometimes meant that he disappeared for days or even weeks at a time. We had grown used to that over four years of war, but it had not got any easier. He had been in France more than a few times, although he never spoke of it. Nor did Simon Brandon, my father’s Regimental Sergeant-Major. London had not wanted him to return to active service for reasons that were obscure but took him into danger more often than not. As my mother had said dryly on one occasion, “The Army seems to prefer to kill him their own way, rather than allow the Germans to try their hand at it.”

  But of course the Germans had tried. More than once. And almost succeeded.

  Robinson threw a quick glance my way. “I’m not supposed to talk about what I see, but the Colonel was in Calais this week. Spy hunting, gossip had it.”

  Surprised, I looked at him. “Was he indeed?”

  “Aye, I took wounded down to the port for loading, and there he was, coming off the Sea Maid. Arthur pointed him out to me.”

  Arthur was another orderly I’d got to know fairly well. His cousin had been in my father’s regiment, and if Arthur claimed he’d seen my father, then I believed he had.

  There had been no word from home for a fortnight. That was not unusual, given the volume of mail the censors were required to deal with, but I couldn’t stop a niggling worm of worry from creeping in when the post was slow in arriving. It was one reason I wrote home as often as I could, so that they wouldn’t worry about me. Careful letters, light ones that wouldn’t trouble the censors. But my mother knew how to read between the lines.

  Robinson swore, then apologized as we hit a particularly deep rut and the ambulance struggled to bridge it and stay on track. I clutched at the handle of my door and braced myself. Behind me I heard one of the wounded cry out.

  But we made it safely to the base hospital after all, and I was relieved to turn my cargo, the worst of the wounded first, over to one of the Sisters there. It was her task to assign them to wards.

  “I don’t like the look of the appendix case,” she said quietly, for my ears only. “I’d best send him straight to surgery.”

  I nodded, and after instructing the stretcher bearers, she moved on to the next man.

  Soon afterward, I presented our list of much-needed supplies to Matron, and then she and I went through the list of incoming patients before walking to each bedside, assessing their condition after the arduous journey.

  The ribs case was breathing well enough, the bleeding patients were still stable, and a doctor was already bending over one of them.

  The delirious patient was being strapped down, and a Sister was preparing to give him something to bring down his fever. His wound didn’t appear to be gangrenous. Yet.

  The appendix case was already being prepped for surgery.

  We came to the last bed, and I thought at first that this patient was asleep. A
sister was just bringing in a fresh hot water bottle wrapped in a towel to put at his feet, and another had warmed the blankets that had been spread across him. The shivering had stopped, and it was likely he’d dropped into an exhausted state. We still had no name for this one. Lieutenant X was on his chart. The orderly at the forward aid station had just been able to make out his rank.

  The ward was quiet, it was an ordinary transfer, and someone was already packing an ambulance with our precious supplies, thanks to Matron’s efficiency. I’d even managed to persuade her to send us another Sister. Dr. Winters had wanted two, but he’d be grateful for one.

  And then without any warning, the night was torn apart by a scream.

  The delirious man, an officer with one of the Highland regiments, had flung the Sister buckling his straps halfway across the ward, glass breaking and the tray she had set on his table falling to the floor with a ringing clang. Matron and I turned quickly, but the Scot was across the empty cot where the appendix case would have been, and before we could stop him, he had clamped his hands around the throat of the French officer.

  Blankets went flying off the bed; the Sister with the hot water bottle backed away in surprise. The patient under attack had come alive with such an astonishing burst of strength and energy that Matron, reaching for the Scot’s right arm even as I caught at the left, was thrown back into me.

  I could hear someone shouting for help as Matron and I went down on our knees. In the same instant, the Scot’s flailing foot grazed my forehead and struck Matron squarely on the chin. Dazed, she sank to the floor even as I fought to get to my feet. By this time, the doctor who’d been examining the ribs case was there, and I shoved Matron into his arms. As he was dragging her to one side, out of the fray, I turned back to the two men, who had been struggling on the cot and were now fighting on the floor on the far side.

  I went after them, trying to break the grip the Scot had on the other man’s throat, but he was large, and I was making very little progress when the doctor caught the Scot’s hair in one hand and pulled his head back. And then two burly orderlies were dashing down the aisle between the rows of cots. One of them set me aside, and I left them to it, scrambling out of their way as the Scot flung the doctor off. I heard him swear as his head hit the side of the cot.