A Duty to the Dead Read online

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

  “Arthur? Was that the child’s name?”

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

  “Ah. Go on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Fear of what?”

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

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

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

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

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

  My father frowned. “And that’s it?”

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

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

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

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

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

  It wasn’t merely vanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  To put it bluntly, I wanted comforting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “He made me memorize the address as well.”

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER THREE

  Somerset, Late December 1916

  MY ARM WAS stubborn and refused to heal properly. By Christmas, I still couldn’t brush my hair with that hand, it was so weak.

  Dr. Price fretted over it, threatening to send me to a specialist in London.

  My mother urged me to go anyway, to see what could be done. “You’re lucky there’s been no infection, what with the cut. There will be a scar, I’m afraid. We’ll ask Nora for some lotion or ointment to make it look a little less angry.” The gash had gone deep, very deep. The scar was raised and ugly still.

  “I’m not worried, Mother. Bones take their time, you know. Let’s wait another week.”

  But it was the duty of mothers to fuss, and truth was, I was glad to be home for a bit, leaving decisions to others. My father, on the other hand, was after me to exercise my arm.

  “They’ll not take you back again until it’s strong enough,” he warned me. “You can’t swim in this weather, worst luck, but we can have you sit by the bath and move your arm back and forth in warm water. That should help. It’s what they did for my leg in India.”

  He’d broken it playing polo.

  “I’ll try,” I promised, and did. I also had my own ways of keeping the arm working. Exercises I’d learned aboard Britannic, listening to doctors instruct wounded men.

  “Muscles atrophy without use,” they’d explained. “Leave a limb in a cast too long, and it will be worthless. A baby could knock you over. But this—”

  And men had done their best, crying sometimes from the pain or the frustration as they worked. I’d learned an entirely new vocabulary from my patients. Most of it unacceptable, even to tease my father.

  I found myself thinking at one point that in coming home wounded, I’d somehow stepped back into the old pattern of parent and child. It was strange, after being responsible for life-and-death decisions in a hospital ward. I’d grown used to responsibility and consequences, to holding back my own emotions in order to give comfort to someone else, to handling recalcitrant patients or men so far gone in delirium they thought they were still fighting the Germans. Now I was tucked up in bed with a glass of warm milk, just as I’d been at seven when I had measles.

  The truth dawned on me slowly: my mother and father missed the old Bess, and they were still recovering from the shock of Britannic going down. It must have been days before they had had news of me, whether I was alive or drowned. And so I drank the milk without complaint and let them heal too.

  One day my father stopped by my chair in the small parlor where I was trying to read.

  “Have you done anything more about your promise?”

  “I wrote to Jonathan Graham. I asked to meet him, adding that it concerned his late brother.”

  “You want to see this girl for yourself, I think. The one Arthur abandoned.” He was half teasing, half serious.

  “Not at all,” I answered with more heat than I wanted to hear in my voice. “I must deliver my message in person. It’s what I was asked to do. Arthur told me over and over again—a letter was useless, I had to speak to Jonathan face-to-face.”

  “Jonathan may be at the Front.”

  “No, I’ve asked friends. Apparently he’s at home as well, convalescing.”

  “Then go before your leave is up.”

  “Yes. I shall.”

  He said nothing more. But a week later he brought me a letter from the post and dropped it in my lap.

  I took it up, dreading it, thinking it must be my orders.

  My father said, “They’ve answered.”

  And I turned over the envelope. The sloping handwriting was unfamiliar, but the return address I knew all too well.

  Opening the letter, I scanned the contents quickly.

  “It appears that Jonathan Graham is willing to see me.” To conceal my relief, I added dryly, “He’s probably bored to tears, or else he’s already got his orders to return to the Front. I’m to come at my convenience, and Thursday next will do very well.”

  My father laughed, then added, “You aren’t ready to drive.”

  My own motorcar, the one I’d fought my father for, was now in the stables, collecting dust, tucked safely out of range of the zeppelin raids on London.

  Since the Colonel refused to sanction the purchase, I’d had to ask one of my male friends to advise me. I wanted the independence a motorcar could give me.

  I hadn’t counted on it breaking down during my first visit home.

  My father, I told you so written all over his face, had brought Simon Brandon with him to ferry me home while he consigned the offending motorcar to a nearby smithy. Simon Brandon was younger than my father by more than twenty years. He’d risen in the ranks to become the Colonel’s regimental sergeant major, and was nearly as domineering, but much easier to cajole. He treated my mother like the Princess Royal, and rumor had it that he was in love with her, because he’d never married. As usual, rumor had got it wrong.

  “I can manage quite well,” I told my father now. “There were times when I drove ambulances in France, and anything at Gallipoli that needed being driven. Including an officer’s motorcar, when he lost his leg.”

  “My dear, it’s the train or else I drive you.”

  I didn’t want him going to Kent with me.

  “Very well, the train, then.”

  “I’ll see to it. Meanwhile, Simon’s invited you to luncheon.”

  My father drove me to the station and saw me off with misgivings he kept to himself. My mother had scolded me, warning me against taking a chill, worried that the Grahams wouldn’t look after me properly, wanting to keep me home and safe for as long as possible. She didn’t see me off, claiming the press of getting my uniforms ready before my orders came. But I knew she was afraid of crying. If it had been left to her,
I’d never be out of her sight again. It was a measure of how frightened she’d been.

  She had said to my father once when she thought I was not within hearing, “With that arm broken, she would have drowned.” It had been a cry for comfort, but my father had answered her, “And she didn’t. Don’t make her timid, my dear. Courage will keep her safer than fear.”

  My mother had said to me afterward, “Your father is a fool.”

  When I asked her why, she’d shrugged. “Men generally are,” she’d retorted, and changed the subject.

  I had found myself wanting to hug her, but I didn’t dare, knowing she would have wondered why, and probably guessed. She is good at reading hearts, my mother.

  The train’s carriages were filled with eager young men on their way to war, leaning out their windows and talking excitedly to others boarding at each station. I looked at their faces and felt sad. The captain of artillery sitting next to me said under his breath, “Little do they know,” when a rousing cheer went up as we pulled out of the next small town.

  We weren’t winning, and the killing would go on and on. That was the fate of trench warfare, of a stalemate neither we nor Germany could break.

  I’d seen that the captain wore one arm in a sling as well, and I asked him where he’d served. “France,” he answered. “I’m on my way back again.”

  “Is your arm healed?”

  “Near enough. I don’t have to carry a rifle or a pack. It’ll do. How is yours healing?”

  I had to admit it was not doing as well as I’d hoped.

  He knew Jack Franklin, as it turned out, and we spent the journey to London in conversation. Jack had been our neighbor before he’d married and gone to live in Warwick. My father had had high hopes for him in the Army, and Captain Banks promised to give Jack our best wishes when next they met.

  In London I changed trains for Tonbridge, and we rolled through a dreary rain that lasted almost all the way, lashing the windows and dampening my spirits.

  After Sevenoaks, I was alone in the compartment, and I removed my sling, tucking it in the small case beside me. Flexing my fingers, I gingerly tested my arm. If I was careful, it would do.