Silence for the Dead (6 page)

“I suppose that works. It's the fourth door to the right.” She turned and hurried back the way she had come.

I approached Patient Sixteen's closed door, my bones aching and a shrill, painful sort of excitement in my spine. I walked in without knocking.

The room was dim and quiet. A single lamp burned on a table next to a narrow bed, but the bed was empty. My gaze traveled over the washbasin, the dressing table, and the single chair. These were also empty in the reflected light, tidy and uncluttered but for a set of dishes stacked on the dressing table. I blinked, my eyes becoming accustomed to the dark.

“You should have knocked,” said a voice.

Unlike the other men's rooms, this one had a large window, dark now, looking out over the vista of trees and marshes behind Portis House. I could see the low humps of soft hills rolling away into blackness that must be the ocean.

The curtains were tied back from the window, framing a narrow alcove. A man sat there, visible only in silhouette, his knees drawn up, looking out the window at the darkness.

The sound of the voice jolted me from my strange, exhausted reverie. It was familiar in some impossible way, the sound resonating in my brain like an itch. “I came for your dishes,” I said.

“Did you?” Again, the familiarity stunned me; I tried to place the voice. He sounded as if he cared not at all. “I left them on the dressing table.” He glanced at me only briefly, his face in shadow, before turning back to the window.

I took a step into the room. From the shape of him, he looked like a normal man—all legs and arms present, no fits or shakes. His wrists were draped over his drawn-up knees, his back pressed to the wall of the window seat. I saw an outline of hair, tidy and short. His body was big but lithe, curled with the thoughtless ease of an athlete, his large bare feet on the ledge. I knew I had been picturing some kind of monster—deformed, perhaps, unrecognizable, like the ones Ally had described.
Better off dead,
she'd said of them.

But now I knew that made no sense. No patient would require
clearance
for a set of injuries, no matter how awful.
A confidential case,
Boney had said. It was something to do, then, with the man himself.

Someone important. Someone secret. Someone no one was supposed to know was here, in a madhouse. And I knew that voice.

He was still looking out the window; he seemed to have forgotten me, lost in whatever he was contemplating. I walked to the dressing table and looked at the tray. He had arranged the emptied dishes in a tidy stack, centered for easy balance, the cup placed in the middle of the empty bowl. Considerate, then. I couldn't ask him who he was, why he was here. Once Matron found out what I'd done, how I'd lied and broken the rules, I'd never be allowed in this room again. But there was nothing to do but obey, take away the dishes like the servant I was, and leave.

I had raised my hands, nearly touched the edges of the tray, when he spoke again.

“Nice weather we're having, isn't it?”

I looked up. He had turned toward me now, squaring his shoulders in my direction. He slid one elbow over and crooked it on his knee, the better to see me. At this angle the lamplight fell more fully on his face; I saw dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a sharp, shadowed jaw. His eyes on me were kind, and as I watched, he tried a tentative smile on his lips, as if it were costing him a great effort.

I dropped my hands. He must have heard my intake of breath, for his smile slowly faded.

“My God,” I said, “it's you.”

The smile nearly disappeared, just the last remnants of it touching the corners of his mouth. His eyes narrowed and he looked at me more closely.

I walked toward him, staring at his face. It was all there now, every one of his features burned into my brain, familiar from the dozens of times I'd seen them everywhere—the magazines, the newspapers, the newsreels. His voice familiar from the one unforgettable time I'd heard it. The dark curling hair, the blue eyes under winged brows, the high cheekbones, the elegant jaw now covered in second-day stubble. Though I'd never seen him close up and in person, I could see now that the photographs, the films that made him look so handsome to hundreds of poor, stupid factory girls like me—none of them had lied.

“Oh, God,” I said, unable to help myself, “you're Jack Yates.”

W
hen I said his name, the expression in the man's eyes dimmed a little, and a shuttered blankness came carefully down. “Do I know you?”

“You can't be here,” I said. “Not you.”

Jack Yates.
Brave Jack
, the papers called him, the hero of the war. Newsreels flashed in my mind, imprinted on those rare nights I'd gone to the cinema with a few other girls: Jack Yates at a navy dockside, his long coat open and flapping in the wind, his hair blowing, a smile on his face, shaking the hand of Winston Churchill. Jack Yates on the steps of a swank party, posing with Lloyd George's arm around his shoulders, and the caption
Our brave soldiers saluted by none less than the Prime Minister!
Newspaper photos of Jack standing at the Dover shore in uniform, his puttees high on his long legs, his hands clasped behind his back.
Send Me Back to the Front, Brave Jack Says.

I stepped closer and he slid his feet from the sill and stood, facing me. He was a head taller than I, and something about him took all the air from the room. We'd all adored him, my girlfriends and I, each of us thrilling a little at the pictures of him, at the stories.

He'd been a soldier, an ordinary private—an uneducated boy from Somerset, orphaned and raised by foster parents.
Truly from nowhere,
the papers marveled, because it was impossible to imagine that someone without a title, someone who had to work for a living, could matter. Thousands of men like that died every day, our sweethearts and husbands and brothers and cousins, and none of them mattered a damn.

But not Jack. In the thick of battle, when his CO and all the officers of his dying battalion had been killed, lowly Jack had led the remaining men on a complex sortie across No Man's Land, a half-mile stretch littered with barbed wire and bodies. He'd brought them into enemy lines, holding two trenches alone until reinforcements came. When it was over, the Germans had retreated from that section of the line, and a mile of the Western Front had been reclaimed for the Allies. All because of one man, who had not lost a single soldier in the entire suicidal operation.

The newspapers had loved him. He'd been given the Victoria Cross, had been feted everywhere, was seen in every newsreel.
Brave Jack Asks the Women of England: Are You Doing All You Can?
The girls at the factory wanted to marry him, but when I told that to Ally, she only laughed, saying she'd had enough of soldiers with no money.

I looked into his face now. “You didn't go mad,” I said. “You never did. Not
you.
”

He rubbed the back of his neck and was silent for a long moment. “Do I know you?” he asked again.

“Trafalgar Square,” I said. “I was there.”

The hand dropped. “Ah.”

“I froze my arse that night, watching you. Me and my friends.”

“Yes, well.” He moved to brush past me, and I breathed the scent of him, an unfamiliar tang that went straight to my bloodstream. My own smell must have been much less pleasant, but he made no mention of it. His arm, where it brushed mine, was warm. “I'm sorry about your arse.”

“That wasn't a madman,” I said, “speaking on the platform that night. We were moved to tears.”

It was true. Even I, who hadn't cried perhaps in years, had cried that night in Trafalgar Square, where we'd gone to see Jack Yates speak as the winter of 1917 settled in. It was supposed to be a recruitment speech, a war bond speech, the kind we'd heard countless times in the past three years.
England will endure. England will not be defeated. Your brave soldiers need you.
But Jack's speech had been different. He'd been over there, he'd fought, he was one of us, and he was the only one, in those four long years of propaganda, who spoke to us with honesty. Who had actually meant what he said.

“It was a written speech,” he said to me.

“Of course it was. And you wrote it.”

Surprise made him pause. “What makes you say that?”

“Do you think,” I said, insulted, “that I don't know the difference between a speech written by a government official and a speech written by a real soldier?” Something about the entire situation made me angry: that magnificent man in Trafalgar Square, his breath puffing icy clouds as he spoke, moving us with his words—that man here, reduced to a madhouse, telling me it had been nothing. “Do you think I'm that stupid?”

“I have no idea.” He rubbed his eyes, his fingers slowly pressing into the sockets. “I don't even know who you are.”

He didn't care. My anger stuck in my throat. “Never mind. I'll take the dishes and go.”

I had turned and moved back to the tray when his hand landed on the dressing table next to me. “Wait.”

I froze. He was too close, his body too near my own. Heat was coming off him as if he had a fever. His arm was solid, the sleeve of his uniform shirt rolled up past the elbow, his forearm sinewy and strong. I felt my back go rigid, my neck begin to knot. I didn't speak.

“Wait,” he said again, as if I'd said something, and for the first time I realized he was speaking slowly, as if dragging words up reluctantly from his brain. “Trafalgar Square. My speech. Let me explain.”

I swallowed.
Drunk,
a shrill part of my mind screamed.
Or on a narcotic. He outweighs you by three stone and could overpower you as easy as breathing. He could put those hands around your neck in an instant. Damn him anyway. None of the things you believed in mattered to him at all. Get out. Get out now.

“There's no need,” I managed, my voice stiff and strangled.

His hand touched my bare forearm, and I jumped. “It's just—”

“Don't touch me.”

He didn't let go; I didn't think he'd even heard me. His fingers were long and agile, the nails cut short, the hand an almost perfect study in the dim light, curling to touch the sensitive skin on the inside of my arm. It wasn't a tight grip, but I thought of the last time a man had touched my bare skin and I felt like screaming. The fact that my blood raced under Jack Yates's fingers made it worse.

“You're right,” he said, the drag still on his words, just a slight lag that a casual observer might not notice. He was fighting it hard. “I did write the speech. I thought they'd censor me, cut me off somehow, but they didn't. I think they knew what I would say. I believed it.” He took a breath, began to quote the speech itself. “‘I'm just a regular soldier . . .'”

“Let me go,” I said.

“‘. . . but despite this war, in this new world, I am more. I can be more. You can be more. Anyone can be more . . .'”

I turned. I thought I was fast, but—drugged or not—he was damnably faster. He caught my wrist before I had the ghost of a chance to slap his face.

“What is your name?” he said, his dark eyes looking into mine. His pupils were dilated, but somewhere in there I saw a spark that made me want to look away.

“Kitty Weekes,” I said, holding his gaze.

“Kitty Weekes,” he said slowly. “I think you're in some sort of trouble.”

“Nurse Weekes.”

I whirled. Matron stood in the open door behind me, the massive bulk of Paulus Vries at her shoulder. Wedged in on her other side was Boney, her eyes nearly bulging out of her narrow face.

We made quite a tableau, Patient Sixteen and I: I filthy and covered in mold, my hair askew, my uniform damp, my wrist in the grip of a man wearing only a loose shirt and a pair of trousers. I wrenched my hand and he let me go.

“Nurse Weekes,” said Matron again. “You do not have the proper clearance to be in this room.”

“I—”

“According to Nurse Shouldice, you claimed the proper clearance. An untruth.” Matron's eyes blazed with real anger, and I wondered what had so dearly set her off. “Nurse Fellows tells me the procedure has been clearly explained to you, so there can have been no misunderstanding. Have you any explanation for your actions?”

“Of course she does,” Jack Yates said from behind me. “I asked her here.”

Boney was nearly choking with indignant energy; this was likely the most exciting thing that had happened to her in a month. But Matron narrowed her eyes, her anger cooling under a swift look of uncertainty. “Mr. Yates. The nurses at Portis House are required to follow the rules. You needn't cover for this girl.”

I made an outraged sound in my throat.

“I wanted these dishes cleared,” he said smoothly, moving up beside me. I did not look at him. “When I opened the door, Nurse Weekes was passing. I asked her to come in and take them.” He gave a remarkable impression, under pressure, of a sober man. “I see no reason to discipline her. She was only doing as she was told.”

It was patent nonsense; if he'd hailed me as I was passing, why had I told Nina I had clearance beforehand? I expected Matron to call him on it, to put him in his place and foist me out the door. Instead she said, “Mr. Yates, you are kind, but this is not necessary.”

This seemed to annoy him. “I asked,” he said slowly, “her here.”

Matron swallowed, as if actually swallowing his absurd fiction. “Very well. Thank you, Mr. Yates.” She turned to me, her gaze unfeeling. “I've told you I expect cleanliness at all times. Please go clean your slovenly appearance and resume your duties.”

I felt my jaw clench. “Yes, Matron.”

“Go.”

I moved for the door, but Jack Yates spoke again. “I have another question.”

“Yes, Mr. Yates.”

“What did you mean by ‘clearance'?”

There was a surprised beat of silence. “Yours is a sensitive case, Mr. Yates,” said Matron. “We have a number of nurses and other staff at Portis House, some of whom come and go, not all of whom we know as thoroughly as we would wish.”

“So you give them clearance?” he said. “To come here?”

“Yes, of course. It's a requirement for your own protection. Surely you were aware of the situation?”

“No.” I gripped the doorjamb as he said the word, staring down at my hand, my heart lurching at the bare confusion in his voice. “No, I wasn't aware.”

I could turn. I could look at him once more, reassure him somehow. But I raised my eyes to see Boney goggling at me, Matron's narrow stare on me. I wondered whether Jack Yates was looking at me, too.

“I have no time to deal with you tonight,” said Matron to me in a low voice. “There will be an incident report. We will speak tomorrow.”

I nodded and brushed past her. I set my shoulders, mustered the best dignity I could in a filthy uniform, and left without looking back.