The Walnut Tree Read online

  As I approached he was just turning away from the British officer, his face like a thundercloud. I don’t think he even recognized me when I spoke his name—his mind was still on the argument he’d apparently lost.

  “Henri? It’s Elspeth—Elspeth Douglas.”

  He stared at me blankly, then took in my uniform, his gaze finally coming to rest on my face.

  “Dear God!” was all he could manage. “What are you doing here?”

  “Henri, have you heard from Madeleine? Do you know you have a son?” I asked quickly, for my driver would be impatient to be on his way.

  “Yes, her letter found me three weeks after he was born. I was frantic with worry. I wrote to her in return, but the mails are chaotic. She wants me to come to Paris, to see the boy, but how can I?” He gestured around us at the lorries and the wounded, the columns of troops and the long lines of ambulances heading the other way. “I’m here as temporary liaison with the British, but I might as well be in Corsica, for all the good it does me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I know it must chafe. But I don’t think our side knows what’s happening either. It’s all been so quick. Henri, is there word of Alain?”

  “You haven’t heard? He’s missing. Somewhere in the Marne. There is hope that he was taken prisoner, but so far we’ve learned nothing to substantiate that.”

  My heart turned over, and I could feel Alain’s ring against my skin. It seemed almost too heavy to bear. Like Henri’s news.

  “Missing? But surely—”

  Henri shook his head. “You’ve no idea what it was like in those first weeks.”

  “I saw the Paris taxis set out for the Front. I was there.”

  “Were you?” He seemed to find that hard to take in. “You were still in France?”

  Behind me, the ambulance driver hit the horn, and both of us jumped.

  “Yes, Madeleine went into labor that very day. I must go.”

  He reached out, took my arm. “Elspeth, thank you for all you did for Madeleine. For the child. I won’t forget. My family owes you more than I can ever repay.”

  He leaned forward, kissed me on the cheek, and then said, “Be careful. Please.”

  “And you.”

  Then he was gone, and I was clambering back into the ambulance. Before I had the door closed, we were lurching forward, catching up with the line of lorries and other ambulances heading toward the fighting.

  I sat back in my seat, thinking of Henri and Madeleine. Of Alain.

  Missing? That could mean he was a prisoner, or that his body had never been found. Even that he was badly wounded and no one at the French hospital knew who he was. There was no way of guessing which, and if the French Army couldn’t find him, how then could I?

  We were out of Calais now, on what passed for a road that was so deeply rutted and scarred it was impossible to make any speed at all. The signs of devastation were all around us soon enough, shelled villages, blasted orchards, toppled church towers, ruined convents, a land of the dead. Horses littered the verges, and cows, all dead, and there were rough crosses here and there where people too had died.

  Familiar to me from my earlier experience, but to the other nurses it seemed like a moonscape, with nothing about it to show what once had been here. I could hear them, in the back of our ambulance, exclaiming in horror.

  We were passing a column of Scots troops, and I scanned them for faces I knew. And then I saw him, at the head of the column, in deep conversation with another officer.

  “Peter? Peter, it’s Elspeth,” I cried out the window.

  He heard my voice, turned to look, and then we were past him, moving steadily forward. Out of reach, out of touch.

  But leaning out my window, I saw him lift a hand in greeting.

  I settled back into my seat once more, smiling. My driver said, “Do ye know half the Army, then?”

  I didn’t answer. My heart was still thundering in my chest, and I could hardly believe my luck. I’d seen Peter. He was alive, he was well. First the letter, and now this, however brief an encounter it was.

  And then the euphoria seeped away. He was marching toward the fighting, not away from it. Today—tomorrow—he would be in another battle. I could find him in my aid station, bloody and half recognizable. Or lying there on a stretcher, already dead.

  But even that would be better than his being taken to another station. Where I would never know if he lived or died of his wounds.

  Uncertainty was as unsettling as knowing, but then war carried no guarantees in its wake.

  It was nightfall when we reached our post. In the darkness ahead we could see the flashes of artillery salvos, feel the earth shake as the shells exploded. But there was no time to dwell on that. A row of stretchers waited for us, orderlies moving amongst them, and then we were taking our places beside the handful of Sisters already at work. The doctor had been killed two days before, and we found ourselves doing what we could to save men who needed care beyond our skills.

  I spent the next week working feverishly to keep men alive, to prevent infection setting in and taking away a life that shouldn’t have been lost. For infection was the enemy we all faced, doctors, nurses, patients. A bit of cloth, a bit of earth, anything driven into a wound, too tiny for the eye to see, could make the difference in survival. I reached a point where I hardly looked at faces, only at shattered bodies, and prayed while I worked that this one or that one would live against all odds. Thank God another doctor was quickly sent up to us, and when he slept I couldn’t have told anyone. I myself was short of sleep, we all were. And then there was a lull in the fighting, and we finally caught up. I stood there, hands on my back, stretching weary muscles as the last of the patients left for hospitals behind the lines.

  “Go to bed,” Sister Maynard told me. “Sleep while you can.”

  “You’re as weary as I am,” I answered.

  “I slept a little, earlier. Go on.”

  I thanked her and was on my way to my quarters when a shadow stepped out of the deeper patches of darkness by the tents.

  Startled, I opened my mouth to call out to Sister Maynard when the shadow’s torch flicked on and I saw that it was Peter Gilchrist.

  “Oh, you gave me such a fright,” I exclaimed as he turned off the torch. “I couldn’t imagine—”

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he said quietly. “But I kept looking for you. Earlier, on the Ypres road. I couldn’t understand what had happened. Whether you were safe, or something had gone wrong.”

  “But you must have got my letter.”

  “Have you written? We’ve been on the move, and the post hasn’t caught up. When first I saw you there on the road last week I thought you had never left France. And then I recognized the uniform. I knew then that you must have reached London safely.”

  I told him what had happened that day, and he nodded. “The Major. He’s been relieved, thank God.”

  I couldn’t invite him into my quarters, and there was nowhere else that was even remotely private where we could talk. But before I could say anything, he took my arm and was leading me toward a battered motorcar.

  “It’s Lieutenant Harding’s motor. He bought it from a Captain who was shot outside Mons. I don’t know who owned it before that. It has quite a history, apparently.”

  Surprisingly the seats were intact, and he held the door for me, then walked around to sit behind the wheel.

  “I didn’t know you were a Sister,” he said.

  “I wasn’t. Not when we met on the Ypres road. When I got back to England, it seemed to be a very sensible thing to do.”

  “I can’t imagine your cousin agreeing to this.”

  “He has no idea.”

  Peter chuckled.

  “I don’t believe anyone knew who I really was, when I went into training. I was Elspeth Douglas of Cornwall. A nobod
y whose late father was a Scot. I now live in a flat with three other nursing Sisters, or possibly there are four now. It’s not even half the size of the small drawing room in the castle. I sleep in a room that the lowliest drudge in the kitchen would distain. But then I hardly had time to sleep, the training was so rigorous.”

  “You are remarkable,” he said. I could see his smile, a flash of white teeth in the darkness. “But I must tell you that it’s far too dangerous to work in forward aid stations. I wish you would ask for a transfer to a rear hospital.”

  Astonished, I could only stare at him. Finally I said, “I thought you of all people would understand. That day on the road to Ypres—it changed me. I don’t think about the danger, only about broken bodies, men dying.”

  He was silent for a time and then he said, his voice different in the darkness, “That day changed me as well. I think I’m in love with you, Elspeth Douglas. And I can’t protect you, if you walk into danger.”

  My mind was in a whirl. He shouldn’t be telling me such things. There was Alain, there was the ring—

  And there was Peter, sitting so close to me I could feel the warmth of his body in the cramped confines of the motorcar. I could remember his arm around me in the ambulance, the way his dark eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled.

  Alain was quite possibly the handsomest man I knew. Peter was black Scots, tall, dark, and not handsome at all in the conventional sense. And yet there was something about him, something I couldn’t name, but it was compelling, and it drew me. It was his face I saw in my dreams. The guilt of that was suddenly more than I could bear.

  “For God’s sake, say something,” he said as the silence dragged on.

  “Peter, please—”

  And then a torch flashed across our faces, and I saw the outline of Dr. Colton behind it.

  “What’s going on? I thought I heard a motor coming up.”

  “Dr. Colton. This is Captain Gilchrist. He’s a friend of the family. He’s in the line not far from here and he came to see if I was all right.”

  Peter got out and extended his hand to Dr. Colton, who after the briefest hesitation, took it.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve caused a bother,” he said easily. “I encountered Sister Douglas on the way to her quarters, and we’ve been sitting here talking.”

  “She should be sleeping,” Dr. Colton replied, casting a glance at me. I wondered if my guilt was writ large on my face, and if he read into it more than he should.

  “Yes, I know. I was just leaving.”

  I got out of the motorcar, realizing that Dr. Colton expected it of me.

  “Good night, then,” Dr. Colton said, and with a nod, he walked away, giving us a final moment of privacy.

  The width of the motorcar separated us, Peter and me.

  I said, “Peter. It’s too soon.” It was all I could find to say. This was not the time nor the place to explain Alain. Not after Dr. Colton’s interruption. And I wasn’t sure what I wanted to tell him. I couldn’t be falling in love with him. I couldn’t—

  “Yes, I know. I ought not to have spoken. But war makes a mockery of propriety sometimes. There’s no way I could speak to your cousin, now or in the foreseeable future. Will Rory do? He’s somewhere here in France.”

  “He’s just been taken back to England with head wounds,” I said.

  “Ah.” There was desolation in that one word. Peter looked toward the Front, his dark brows drawn together in a frown. “Still, I can’t say that I regret telling you. There are no guarantees of tomorrow, are there? And it’s probably better if we wait for peace and know where we stand. But I’m yours, yours to command. I want you to know that. Whatever happens.”

  And then he was getting back into the motorcar.

  I couldn’t very well say, Thank you for coming . . . I couldn’t very well walk around to the driver’s door, closer to him. All my training in the proper way to address everyone from the bootblack to the Queen, and I was at a loss when it really mattered.

  Peter tried to make it easier for me. He smiled, that flash of white teeth, and I could imagine it touching his eyes as he said gently, “My dear girl, I’ve everything to live for now. You haven’t seen the last of me.”

  I smiled. And then realizing that in spite of his boast, I might never see him again, realizing how easily life was snuffed out by a bullet, a bit of shrapnel, the finality of a shell landing in the wrong place, I quickly moved forward, reached through the open window into the motorcar, and offered him my hand.

  I hadn’t thought—clutching the windowframe with my right hand, I’d given Peter my left—and there was no ring upon it now. But he wasn’t to know why. He took it, held it for a moment, his fingers warm as they enclosed mine, then he lifted it to his lips, turned it over, palm up, and kissed it.

  As I stepped back, he reversed, and then he was swallowed up by the darkness, the sound of the motor fading in the distance.

  I walked on to my quarters, still feeling the touch of his lips on the palm of my hand, wondering how in the name of God I was to sleep after Peter’s visit.

  The cold reality of life intruded as I lay down on my cot. Alain was missing. Possibly killed in action. Under the circumstances, I had no right to listen to Peter’s promises or anyone else’s.

  I was committed to Alain. Until such time that I could in honor tell him that I loved someone else.

  The question was, did I?

  What were my true feelings for Peter Gilchrist?

  Over the next few days it was a question that haunted me as we worked with the wounded, and it was all I could do to concentrate on the task at hand. Then Dr. Colton accused me of woolgathering as we dealt with a chest wound, and I made a concerted effort to put Peter Gilchrist out of my mind.

  Chapter Six

  We were pushed back by another German attack, scrambling to move ourselves and our wounded out of harm’s way. I was in the last ambulance, my companions the dead. Their pale faces reflected the light from the shelling, and I thought, They are the lucky ones, beyond pain and worry and grief.

  A letter from Madeleine, by some miracle, had reached me the day before. She wrote,

  Henri saw you in France, much to his consternation. He had believed you were safe in England. My dear, how did this come about? You never mentioned it to me. How can you bear to work with the wounded? I am told that the sight of such terrible wounds can drive one mad. You must be a far braver soul than I. But what should I tell Alain if we are able to reach him finally? He will be so worried for you. The hope now is that he is prisoner of the Germans. He and his men were fighting a rearguard action to allow the main body of troops to move to a stronger position when he was cut off. He got most of those in his command clear of the encircling Germans, he and one sergeant holding them at bay, before he was overrun. It’s believed that he was wounded, although no one was able to say how severely. We pray that it was not serious and that he has been able to survive in the wretched conditions of a prison camp. He has earned a medal for such courage. Meanwhile, young Henri is thriving. He has his father’s blue eyes and my chin. When I think how much we owe you, I’m at a loss for words.

  I read the letter again. Alain. Wounded? A prisoner? There was room to hope.

  Missing so often meant dead, the body unrecovered. Unrecoverable.

  But if he was a prisoner, wounded or not, he was no longer fighting. If the wound healed, he would live to see the end of the war. Safely out of it.

  Knowing Alain, how that would chafe, it was hard to think of him in such straits. And how good was German medical care in a prison camp? I touched the ring at my throat, a talisman now for his safe return.

  I’d tucked the letter away in my traveling box, the little portable desk that Bruce, my cousin, had given me when I first went to France to study.

  To remind you to write, he’d said as I opened it.

&n
bsp; He too had been a German prisoner. And he’d escaped. But at what cost?

  There had been no news of Rory or Bruce since I left England, and I couldn’t write to my cousin, not without giving myself away, the envelope itself betraying where I was, and why.

  We beat our hasty retreat, set up the aid station again as soon as we safely could, and watched the long line of wounded come in. The machine-gun cases were the worst, I thought, although the burned pilot was nearly as bad. Watching those flimsy aircraft high above our lines was incredible, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to fly. My father had told me once that it was the last freedom.

  New orders arrived, coming in with the next convoy of ambulances. I was reassigned to transfer duty. I was to accompany severely wounded men on their way to England for more care.

  I went to Dr. Philips straightaway.

  “I don’t want to leave France,” I said, showing him my orders.

  He looked at them, then said, “You’re a very good surgical nurse, Sister Douglas. I shall hate to lose you. But I can’t change your orders. And it’s important for you to have this respite. Leave will bring you back to us all the more rested and better able to serve these men.”

  It was meant for encouragement, but I didn’t need respite. I had found on my arrival in France that all I’d learned in my training was just a beginning, that standing beside a doctor working on the worst cases had taught me more in a few minutes than I’d learned in days of working in the hospital in London. I could second-guess the doctor, put into his hands the scalpels and the swabs and the threaded needles and the scissors before he asked for them. The result had been so very uplifting, an indication of my ability to make a difference.

  My flatmate, Bess Crawford, had written to me before I left London for Dover that she had discovered depths in herself that she hadn’t been aware of, before she went to France.