The Foreshadowing (17 page)

I thought I had planned my journey in detail, but on the train that morning I began to think of all sorts of new things.

I knew that the hospital ships sailed from Folkestone to Boulogne, but had I fully understood what I was walking into, I might not have been so brave.

Then there was the question of passports. I hoped the identity certificate would be good enough.

As the train rattled into Kent I remember thinking I might have to give the whole thing up, or I would be stopped and sent home, in disgrace. Maybe they’d even think I was a spy trying to get back to Germany. The papers had been full of stories of people being arrested as spies, although most of them were probably totally innocent.

I got off the train at Folkestone with little clue where to go or what to do, but then I saw another girl in a VAD uniform smiling at me. She came over. I began to panic. I should give the whole thing up, and go home to face the shame and anger of my parents.

“Are you lost, too?” she said.

I nodded.

“I was, but I’ve got it all sorted now. I’m off to Boulogne. Are you?”

Without thinking, I told her I was, and then, of course, she wanted to talk to me.

“What’s your name?”

I hesitated for a moment.

“Miriam,” I said. “Miriam Hibbert.”

“Where are you from?” she asked, after she had introduced herself. Her name was Amelia, but she told me to call her Millie.

“Brighton,” I said. I didn’t want to be rude, but I couldn’t afford to give too much away.

We made our way down to the docks, and soon we were in a queue of people, mostly soldiers returning to the front, all waiting at the gate in the docks. It was about midmorning by then, and the boat was due to sail at noon. It was a hot, bright day, and the queue was long. Millie smiled as the seagulls cawed and screeched above our heads. The boats in the harbor sounded their horns from time to time, and we could smell the salt in the air.

In spite of everything, in spite of my fear, it was thrilling.

Millie chatted as we shuffled slowly forward.

“How old are you?” she asked. “I’m twenty-three.”

“I’m twenty-three, too,” I lied, but she just laughed and I smiled. After that she chatted away merrily, and asked fewer questions. I learned a lot about her, without having to tell her much about myself.

She’d been working in London and decided she wanted “a bit of adventure,” as she put it, so she had put herself forward for service overseas.

I realized from what she said about her home that she was from a very wealthy family, but found life rather boring. This was her way of having an “adventure” in a manner that her parents could not object to.

I watched Millie closely as we chatted. She was quite pretty, I thought, though some of her prettiness was down to having money to spend. I felt mean for thinking that, and tried to listen more attentively. She had a small round mouth with lips that flew as she nattered about this and that, and deep brown eyes, like mine. I decided I liked her, and I thought I could trust her. Not with the whole truth, but with some of it, at least.

“Millie,” I said, when she stopped for a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “What is it?”

“I have a problem, but I wonder if I can ask you to help me?”

“What is it?”

“It was so early when I left this morning, I forgot things. I forgot my passport.”

“Oh!” she said. “Oh, no. And what about your letter?”

“Letter?” I asked.

“From your hospital? You need a letter of authorization for transfer from the commandant of your detachment at home. Don’t tell me you don’t . . . ?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, quickly. “Yes, I’ve got that. And my identity certificate.”

She looked at me, exasperated, but then smiled.

“Don’t worry!” she declared. “I’ll get you through. As for your passport, well, either they need nurses out there or they don’t!”

And she was right.

We got to the front of the queue to find a woman in civilian clothes but wearing a red cross on an armband. There was a sailor there too.

Millie had such an air about her as she explained my predicament and flourished my identity certificate that in no time at all we were making our way up the gangplank onto the deck. It seems that passport controls are much more about stopping people from coming into the country than letting them leave.

The ship was a vast thing, almost a liner, which had been converted into a Red Cross hospital ship. It was painted white with a large red cross on each side, and we learned that it spent its time crossing the channel, bringing the wounded home and returning with supplies of all kinds, as well as new nurses like us.

We set sail.

45

The crossing seemed to take a lifetime. Millie assumed that we were going to stick together, and I have to admit I was glad of her companionship.

Besides, without her I would probably have been on my weary way home.

It was a smooth crossing, but even so, I felt a little queasy.

“You’ll feel better if we get some air,” Millie said, and since it was a warm day, I agreed.

We found a sheltered spot on one of the foredecks, and settled down, using our cases as seats.

“I wonder if I can get us a drink,” she said, and before I could answer, she was up and away. She is so bright and full of life.

“Watch my things, Miriam, please?”

I started, not yet used to my new name. But I smiled. She made everything seem easy, and I wondered if maybe it was. Maybe life
was
easier than I made it.

She was gone a long time, and I took the copy of
Greek
Myths
from my case and began to read.

Out of curiosity I opened it at the place Father had been reading, and felt a stab of regret shoot through me again.

Cassandra. He had reached a page that talked about Cassandra.

I read for a while, but the motion of the ship, the warmth, the fresh air and my tiredness all caught up with me. I must have fallen asleep.

At least, that is what I imagine, for only that can explain what happened next.

I was no longer Alexandra, in 1916, but another girl, long, long ago. I was on a ship still, making a fateful journey, but it was a warmer sea that my boat was crossing, and the boat was moving under sail and oar, not coal and steam. A ship that left the waters of the Hellespont, with the battered walls of Troy far behind, to head out across the Aegean.

As the ship reeled across the heaven blue sea, I suffered as that other girl suffered. Abducted from my home by the violence of a foreign king, I prophesied not only his death, but my own as well, and despite the heat I shivered at the pain of a storm of things foreshadowed and foreseen.

The worst of it, as ever, was that no one would believe me.

My every utterance was taken to be worthless, the rantings of a madwoman. Yet I
knew
the truth for what it was, and it was coming to meet me faster than I thought possible.

The seagulls wheeling above my head should have told me we were approaching the French coast, but as I gazed at them, they were transformed into ravens. They flapped blackly around the boat, calling to me, mocking me.

“You should know the future only when it has come; to know
it before is grief too soon given. All will come clear in the sunlightof the dawn.”

The boat drove on through the breaking waves.

44

By late afternoon the French coast was in sight. The sunshine of Folkestone had vanished, and a heavy rain beat down on us from a black sky. Our ship had to wait while a troop ship maneuvered in the harbor, and so it took slow turns up and down the coast for an hour or more.

When Millie had finally returned with a bottle of lemonade, she took one look at me and decided I was unwell. I think I was no more than tired, but she feared something worse, and dragged me into the ship’s galley, where once again she had no trouble in making everyone do as she bid.

Before long I was sitting with my feet up in an officer’s berth, a glass of ice water in my hand. This was not the quiet, unobtrusive arrival I had planned, but I couldn’t stop Millie, and in any case, I was in something of a mess.

By the time the boat docked I had recovered, and then there was no more waiting.

We stepped onto Boulogne Quay, onto French soil. The whole journey had taken no more than twelve hours. As we made our way from the docks to the railway station, I wondered what was happening at home, in Brighton. My parents would have discovered that I had disappeared. It would be a day at least before my letter reached them—I had wanted to give myself that much of a head start in case they came looking for me—and even when they did get it, I didn’t think it would reassure them very much. I knew they would be sick with worry, and yet I felt detached, not just by the distance between us, but by my sense of purpose.

That evening Millie and I were put into our detachment. There are a dozen of us in all, with a superintendent and a quartermaster above us, and a commandant above them. Our superintendent is called Sister McAndrew. She’s tough, keen on discipline. When I told her I’d forgotten my outdoor uniform, she made me buy one from the stores.

She gave us each a booklet of rules detailing how we have to behave in France. I tried my best to look interested, though I can’t shift the feeling that none of this really applies to me. My disguise is a means to an end; I’m only here for one thing. Then I remembered that if I’m caught I won’t be able to find Tom, and I started acting like a nurse again.

I saw Sister McAndrew looking at me hard, but I told myself it was only my imagination. I am Miriam Hibbert now.

Millie and I have been assigned to No. 13 Stationary Hospital, but we will spend a couple of weeks learning general duties in the rest station at the railway station.

It has been a baptism of fire.

43

They all have it.

All of them.

The trench-haunted look. An appalling weariness behind their eyes. Every single man who has passed through the rest station while I have been here, and there have been literally thousands of them, has exuded an awful aura of . . . of what?

Is it horror? Or fear? Pain or fatigue or shock?

It is all of these things. They don’t talk about the trenches specifically; you pick up hints and notions and hear stories and rumors, but none of them talk about it directly. Yet there is enough to form a terrible picture of what they have witnessed, what has been done to them, what they have done to other people. That’s what made me realize what it is about them.