A Duty to the Dead Page 6

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I TURNED AWAY, looking at the gleaming white walls of the rectory in their black framework, the tiny panes of glass set into the windows like small diamonds glittering in the morning sun.

  “Go on.” There was impatience beneath the urging.

  I took several seconds to think. To wonder if I’d done the right thing in coming here. The message seemed different suddenly. Futile, and somehow infringing on something I didn’t understand.

  I tried to set the stage, so that Jonathan Graham could see what I had seen. “He had finished his medicines, and he took my hand, pulling me closer. I thought at first that he was having difficulty seeing me, but it was only to drop his voice so that no one else could hear him. He asked me if I’d carry a message to his brother for him. It was very brief, I had no difficulty remembering it. ‘Tell Jonathan I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake. But it has to be set right.’ And afterward, he made me promise to deliver the message to you in person.”

  He was watching me, his gaze intent.

  “Tell Jonathan I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake. But it has to be set right.”

  “Yes, exactly as he told me.”

  “And what did you make of his request?”

  I could feel my face flushing. I could hardly say what had gone through my mind over the weeks that had passed. It would have sounded presumptuous even to hint at it. I answered only, “I don’t know, Lieutenant Graham. I’d hoped you would.”

  “And he didn’t explain to you what it was he was trying to convey?”

  “No. To be frank, I don’t think he would have said anything at all, if he hadn’t realized he was dying. But something was preying on his mind, I could see that. And it was disturbing enough for him to try to do something about it while he could still speak.”

  “Then why not write it in your letter?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again. “It was almost as if—” I stopped.

  “As if what?”

  “It was almost as if he hadn’t wanted to put it in writing. He was insistent that I come to you personally.”

  “But Arthur has been dead some months. If it were a pressing matter, surely it would have been better to come here at once?”

  I prevaricated. “You were in France, Lieutenant Graham. And there were my duties as well. And this—” I indicated my arm.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” He continued to stare at me, but his mind was elsewhere. Then he said again, “And that’s all of the message? You’re quite sure?”

  “Yes. I’ve given it word for word.”

  “Thank you, Miss Crawford. It was kind of you to carry out my brother’s wishes. But I think you liked him, a little. Is that true?”

  “He was a very likable man,” I answered honestly. “Very popular with the men and with the nursing staff.”

  “And he said nothing about this matter until he was—dying?”

  “To my knowledge, no. None of the other nurses told me anything about promises.”

  “But then you didn’t tell them, either, did you.”

  “No.”

  “Why do you think he chose you?”

  I knew I was pink again. “Because I took the time to be with him during his last hours. I assure you, he wasn’t the only one I watched over or read to—or wrote letters for. It’s hard to explain, Lieutenant Graham, but when you are sitting by a wounded man and he’s telling you what to say to his mother or his wife or his sweetheart, there’s an intimacy that can’t be avoided. I have had men say things to me that were terribly personal, messages to their wives that they would never have shared in any other circumstance.” I paused. “It’s almost as if I’m not there, they’re simply talking aloud. But I hear these things and try not to listen at the same time. If you understand what I’m saying.”

  Jonathan Graham nodded. “Yes, I’ve asked the nursing sisters to write letters for me, when the bandaging covered my eyes.” After a moment he roused himself from whatever thoughts were distracting him, and said again, “Thank you. It was a great kindness. I hope you’ll consider staying the weekend. I think my mother would be grateful if you could.”

  “I don’t wish to impose—”

  “It’s no imposition. She would take it as a great favor.”

  We walked on, the wintry sun trying to peer through the bare trees.

  “Have you been to Owlhurst before, Miss Crawford?”

  “No, it’s my first visit to this part of Kent.”

  “We were once famous for our owls. On the far side of the churchyard there’s what’s left of the great expanse of wood that covered much of Kent in the distant past, an almost impenetrable forest. When my parents were first married, I’m told they could walk through it of an evening and count two or three species of owl calling in the dusk. I daresay they’re still there, those owls. I like to think of the continuity of life here. It helps, a little, in the trenches.”

  “I remember Arthur saying something about them. He could never find where they nested.”

  Jonathan smiled. “That was Arthur for you. Always trying to get to the bottom of things. My mother will tell you he was a very clever child, interested in science but with a leaning toward the law. I expect he’d have become a solicitor but for the war.”

  I said nothing. Arthur had told me that he had turned away from the law as a profession. I tried to remember his words.

  “There’s evil in goodness and goodness in evil,” he’d said. “I’ve seen too much of the evil in the law to be comfortable with it.”

  “What would you like to do, then, when the war is over?”

  “I think I’d like to grow coffee in East Africa. Somewhere new where I could start over.”

  “Why should you wish to start over?”

  “Because there would be no memories of the past infringing on the present.”

  I’d thought he meant memories of the war. Now I wondered.

  “Lieutenant Graham, I’d like very much to ask you a question. Though you needn’t answer if you don’t wish to.”

  “Of course. What is it?”

  “Can you right this wrong for your brother? Is it in your power?”

  “Why should you doubt me?” His voice was cold.

  “It isn’t doubting you so much as wanting to believe that his faith in both of us wasn’t misplaced. I saw his distress. This was on his conscience, if you will. He was helpless to rectify what lay in the past. But he thought you might be able to do that for him. I’d like to leave here with the feeling that Arthur will rest easier now.”

  “Your sense of duty does you credit, Miss Crawford. You can rely on me to see to it that Arthur’s last wishes are treated with the greatest respect.”

  “Indeed. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  We made our way back to the house in silence, and I tried to tell myself that I had faithfully kept my promise. There was, after all, nothing more I could do or say. And if Arthur had trusted his brother, I must believe he knew he could.

  Then why did I have this feeling that treating Arthur’s last wishes with the greatest respect wasn’t the same as promising to carry them out?

  I could almost hear the Colonel Sahib’s voice: Walk away, Bess. If Arthur had wanted more from you, he’d have told you more.

  The question really was, would Arthur have felt satisfied?

  Well, to be fair, it was possible that Jonathan Graham knew what it was Arthur wanted but not how to go about it. After all, he’d had only a matter of minutes to digest my message.

  Who are you to talk? my conscience demanded. After leaving your duty to the eleventh hour. What would you have done, my lass, if Lieutenant Graham had died of his own wounds?

  I sighed as we walked through the door and would have liked to go directly to my room for a bit.

  But Mrs. Graham was standing there waiting for us, as if she’d watched our progress from a window, and she rushed me into the sitting room the instant I’d handed my cloak over to Susan.

&nb
sp; “You must be freezing, my child. Come and sit by the fire. Would you like something warm to drink?”

  “No, I’m fine, Mrs. Graham, thank you.”

  “You saw the memorial?”

  “It was—touching,” I said, trying to think how to answer.

  “Yes. I think he’d have been glad of it.”

  Jonathan had gone to some other part of the house, and I wondered if he would tell his mother any or all of that message. Or what he would tell her. I was just grateful now that she hadn’t brought up the subject again.

  After lunch, she asked if I’d care to walk around the village. “For the sun is stronger now, and it will be more comfortable.”

  It was the last thing I wanted. The cold, after the Mediterranean Sea, was penetrating. My arm preferred to sit by the fire. But I smiled and said that I would, and she sent me up for my coat.

  Muffled once more in scarf and gloves, I followed her down the lane and into the churchyard. I thought at first she was going to take me back to see the memorial.

  Instead we walked a little way among the gravestones, and I could admire the lovely mellowed stone of the church above us. Its air of age was comforting, like an anchor—or a rock—that spoke of centuries past and centuries to come.

  Neither of us mentioned the raw graves marking where men had come home to die. Arthur might have been among them, if his leg had waited another few weeks to turn septic.

  In the sea there were no markers for the dead. No place in the deep to mourn, no place to leave flowers. Just degrees of latitude and longitude on a chart.

  Mrs. Graham nodded toward the rectory. “We have a new rector now. And a new doctor. Times are changing. But then nothing stays the same forever, does it? Even one’s children grow up and go off to die.”

  “You’re worried for Jonathan,” I said.

  “Dr. Philips tells me the bandages will be off in another fortnight. After that, it will be a matter of days before his orders come.” I could hear the pain in her voice and for once was thankful that my own mother had not had a son.

  “They’re in desperate need of men,” I said.

  It was not what she wanted to hear.

  She gave me a sharp glance and didn’t answer. We walked on down the street, where brick houses lined the road. One of them, set back a little, was covered in what would be honeysuckle and roses in summer. Their bare branches arched across the front of the house, trembling in the wind.

  Mrs. Graham caught the direction of my interest and said, “That’s the doctor’s surgery. And just down there is the house that Arthur would have had, if he’d lived. It’s part of our property, going to the eldest son on his marriage. There’s a caretaker now, one of my school friends who fled London at the start of the war. She was that certain the Kaiser would sail up the Thames before she could pack her boxes.”

  It was a handsome house, with a front garden set off by a low wall and a cat curled on the doorstep, waiting to be let in. I smiled without realizing it, and she said, “Yes, the cat goes with the house. It or its ancestors have always lived there. Arthur was fond of cats, did you know?”

  But he hadn’t said anything to me about cats or dogs. I would have replied, if anyone had asked me, that we’d spoken of everything under the sun. I realized now that “everything” hadn’t included his childhood or his family. How much had I told him about the Colonel? I couldn’t remember…. We’d lived in the present. It turned out to be all there was, though he’d wanted a future.

  At the next corner, where a row of shops began, we paused. “Did you know this was once a famous smuggling area? Goods were brought up from the coast and hidden wherever the Hawkhurst Gang believed they were safe. There’s a hotel now where the inn stood—it provided the horses and wagons for the smuggled goods, and the story has come down that an underground passage ran between The Rose and Thorn and the church. We couldn’t find Arthur and his brothers one afternoon—he must have been twelve or thirteen at the time. We finally discovered them in the church, searching for the secret door to the tunnel. I had to explain to them that nearly every village with a smuggling past has such stories of underground passages. They were sorely disappointed.”

  I smiled as we turned back the way we’d come. “It was probably a story the smugglers themselves invented to keep Customs officials busy searching in the wrong places.”

  A little silence fell. I could sense that Mrs. Graham was on the point of asking me about what I’d told Jonathan, and I was bracing myself to meet her pleas. I was grateful when a young man came out of one of the other houses we’d just passed and called a greeting to her, heavy with relief.

  “Just the person I was after. Could I borrow your Susan, Mrs. Graham? I’ve got an emergency on my hands, and Betsy is with Mrs. Booth, awaiting the baby.” He caught up with us, nearly out of breath and flushed with worry.

  “Certainly not,” Mrs. Graham answered him. “We have a guest at present, and Susan is indispensable.” She turned to me, her face stiff with disapproval. “Miss Crawford, this rude young man is Dr. Philips.”

  “My pleasure, Miss Crawford. And my apologies. But I’m shorthanded, and there’s little time for polite exchanges—”

  I interrupted him. “I’m a trained nurse,” I said. “Can I help in any way?”

  The doctor stopped short. “Are you indeed? Oh, thank God. Will you come with me?” He hesitated. “You aren’t put off by swearing, are you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then I must take her, Mrs. Graham, and return her to you later in the day. Forgive me, but it’s urgent.”

  Mrs. Graham wanted no part of this arrangement. She said, “Dr. Philips. Miss Crawford will not accompany you. You may have Susan—under protest—but you must make certain she’s back in time to serve our luncheon.”

  He glanced at me and then said, “Miss Crawford volunteered, I believe. I’ll have her back to you, no harm done, as soon as possible. Come along, there’s no time to waste.”

  “Dr. Philips—” Mrs. Graham was indignant.

  “It’s quite all right, Mrs. Graham. I have a duty to help. Forgive me, but I must go.” I could see the anger in her eyes. I’d disappointed her in some way, but there was nothing I could do about it now. “Dr. Philips?”

  He touched his nonexistent hat to her, then took my arm and led me away, his strides twice the length of mine.

  “I expect I’ve caused you no little trouble, Miss Crawford. But I’m rather desperate, and my patient comes first. I’ll do my best to smooth matters over for you.”

  He was a tall man, prematurely graying, with dark eyes. A strong odor of pipe tobacco swirled in his wake as I tried to keep pace with him. We’d reached the house he’d just come from and were hurrying up the walk. “What’s the matter with your patient?”

  As I spoke I looked back. Mrs. Graham was standing where we’d left her, staring after us. I turned away and followed Dr. Philips through the door of the house.

  Dr. Philips was saying, “This is a man who suffers from shell shock. You don’t have any preconceived notions about that, do you? Cowardice, and all that? No? That’s good. He terrifies his poor wife, but there’s nothing she can do when he has one of his spells. I’ll give him an injection and he’ll calm down. But you’ll be there to see to it that he does himself no harm meanwhile.”

  I had had some experience with shell shock. None of it the sort of thing I wanted to walk into the middle of, not knowing the circumstances.

  “Who is in the house with this man—besides his wife?” I asked.

  “No one at the moment, worst luck. It’s the housemaid’s day off, and she’s gone to Cranbrook to visit her sister.” We stepped into the cold entry, went through the inner doors, and turned down a passage on the left side of the stairs.

  A harried young woman stepped out of the nearest room. She had been crying. She said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do—I left him there, I couldn’t watch him any longer.”

 
“You did just the right thing, Mrs. Booker. Now run along to your mother’s house and let her take care of you. Miss Crawford and I will see to Ted.”

  He was walking on as he spoke, opening the last door along the passage, pushing it wide for me to enter. It was a small back parlor where a man sat in a chair in front of the windows, a shotgun across his knees.

  I stopped, surprised. I hadn’t expected to find him armed. Small wonder the man’s wife had been terrified.

  “Come along, Ted,” Philips said in a strong voice. “You aren’t going to kill yourself here, in the house. Certainly not in front of this young woman. You don’t want to upset her, do you? Let me take the gun and give you something for the pain.”

  From across the room Ted Booker stared at him, unaware who the doctor was. I could see the blankness in his eyes. Ignoring us, he went on talking to invisible companions, men he could see clearly and appeared to know well.

  He was arguing, vehement and insistent and profane. It appeared that a sniper had already killed three of his men, and he was on the field telephone, asking someone to do something about it.

  “I can give you his range, damn it.” His voice was ragged, close to the breaking point. “We can’t hold out much longer. I tell you, the Hun’s got us in his sights—”

  He ducked then, swearing, and shouted, “Someone stop that bastard! No, not you, Harry—” There was a garbled exchange, as if he were struggling with another man, the shotgun jerking wildly in his grip. And then he cried out, screaming Harry’s name over and over again, springing to his feet and finally bending to someone lying there in front of him, pleading with the man not to die.

  I said quietly to Dr. Philips, “Who is Harry?”

  “His brother.”

  Dear God, no wonder this poor soul was distraught!

  The doctor tried again, but I could see he wasn’t getting anywhere asking the man to buck up and put the past behind him. Ted Booker was in a dark place no one else could reach. But there might be a way….

  Ignoring the shotgun, I crossed the room to take Booker’s arm. “We must get him to the dressing station,” I told him urgently. “Hurry, he’s bleeding badly.”