The Furies (35 page)

‘Captain Bayer,' she said, reaching across the table to shake his hand, her fingers icy cold in his grip. ‘I'm so very glad to see you again.'

As he smiled back at her he noticed the redness of her nose and the blue tinge to her lips. ‘I'm sorry about the temperature,' she said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘But there's so little coal or wood. We only light the fire when everyone is back from work in the evening. But I could offer you some hot tea?'

He declined with another smile, lifted a chair from the stack by the forlornly empty fire-grate and sat opposite her at the card table.

‘We are very grateful you have agreed to escort us to Switzerland,' Dr Inglis began. ‘Initially the Germans appeared reasonably friendly and efficient – beastly efficient, as some of my girls have put it. But familiarity has bred contempt and as the weeks have gone by they have become increasingly insolent and, at times, frankly abusive.'

Gabriel smiled. ‘Having just met the garrison commander, I'm not surprised to hear you say that.'

‘Oh, he's quite a bully. Last week he asked us to take over the cholera sheds in this hospital – which of course we were happy to do. But some of my girls have not been inoculated against the disease, and when I insisted that they should be, I received a torrent of threats from him. In the face of such intimidation I sent a letter direct to the medical board in Vienna asking that an Austrian and not a German officer should escort us to safety. I was pleased that this was agreed and delighted that you were selected for the task.'

‘I'm honoured to have been asked, Dr Inglis. Your unit's commitment has greatly impressed me and I'm only too happy to make sure you all get to safety.'

‘Well, I never thought I would say it, Captain, but it will be a huge relief to get back to Britain. It has been very hard, looking after for so many patients in such conditions. Getting decent food has been very difficult: the war has disrupted the harvest and all we've been given is a scanty ration of sour black bread and beans, some rice and condensed milk.'

‘Who will look after the patients once you depart?'

‘A number of Bulgarian surgeons and orderlies will take over as soon as we leave.'

‘Good. Well, please give me a list of names and I will have the appropriate travel documents authorised, today if possible. In which case, we should be ready to leave as early as tomorrow.'

‘I have it all ready for you,' she said, turning the pages of the ledger. She removed a slip of paper and gave it to him. He looked at it for a moment and then frowned: he could only count fifteen names. And Elspeth's was not amongst them.

‘If I recall correctly, Dr Inglis, you had thirty women in your group?'

‘Yes, but half our number left before the Germans arrived. Dr Curcin is in charge of that party. They were trying to get to Greece, but we believe they may have joined the great exodus of Serbians over the Montenegrin mountains to Albania.'

‘Oh, I see.' Gabriel felt a flicker of unease in the pit of his stomach. He had recently read a report in a Viennese newspaper of this ‘Great Serbian Retreat', but had not considered that some of the Scottish women – including Elspeth – might be taking part in it.

‘And sadly there have been two deaths.' Dr Inglis's face darkened. ‘Shortly after Dr Curcin's party left us, we were told that Nurse Toughill was killed when a wagon slipped off the road into a gulley. I understand they buried her in a small village nearby. And then of course…' She paused to shake her head and sigh ‘…there was the tragic news about poor Elspeth.'

Her words struck Gabriel like a hammer blow to his chest and for a moment he was unable to breathe. There was a high-pitched buzzing in his ears, and although he could see Dr Inglis's lips moving he could not take in what she was saying. He blinked, forced himself to breathe, made himself listen to what she had to say.

‘…and we heard that Elspeth missed the last train from Kragujevac, but managed to find a band of Chetniks that contained a woman she knew from London – Anya somebody. And it was this Anya person who came here a few weeks ago to tell us the tragic details…'

Keep breathing, Gabriel told himself as her words faded again from his ears. He felt numb, disconnected from the room and everything in it, almost as if he was watching someone else receive the news. Gripping the table edge in front of him, he made himself refocus on her words.

‘…and so Anya told us she ran down the mountain trying to follow the wagon as it was carried downstream, but then found it smashed to pieces on rocks underneath a waterfall. She said she saw Elspeth's body wedged between the rocks…'

She stopped speaking as Gabriel leant forward and covered his face with both hands. Listening to her was almost more than he could bear. After a moment he felt her touch his shoulder and he lifted his head to look at her.

‘I'm so sorry, Captain Bayer,' she said. ‘I'd forgotten that you and Elspeth used to work together.'

He could think of nothing to say and could not look her in the eye; the anguish he had felt on hearing the terrible news was already replaced by regret he had not insisted on going with her.

‘If it's any consolation, Captain,' Dr Inglis continued, ‘everybody felt the same when we heard the news and I bitterly regret allowing her to stay behind that last evening in Kragujevac. I should have insisted she go with us to the station, but Elspeth would not have had it any other way; that had always been her nature. And her sacrifice was not a futile one, because she did many wonderful things during her time in Serbia: she saved many lives and improved many others. We have seen so much death here, so many decent young women giving their lives to save others. Regardless of how they died – whether from disease or injury – their deaths were not in vain. We must hold on to that.'

He knew she was trying to console him, but her words seemed trite. Slowly he got to his feet, swaying before regaining his balance by grasping the edge of the card table. ‘And Dr Stewart's friends?' he muttered. ‘Sylvia…Vera?'

‘Vera left with Dr Curcin's party before Anya arrived, so she doesn't know of Elspeth's fate. Sylvia, poor girl, was distraught when she heard, but like the good nurse she is carried on working. You might go up and see her if you like: the Bulgarians have asked her to help out in their surgical ward on the floor above us.'

Sylvia. He knew how close she and Elspeth were; she would be devastated at the news. He felt a desperate urge to see her – a last connection to Elspeth. But to do it he would have to pull himself together: ignoring the pain inside his chest, he straightened up, then folded the list of names Dr Inglis had given him and put it in the breast pocket of his jacket.

‘I will return tomorrow morning with the travel documents for your party,' he managed to say. ‘Please have everybody ready.'

‘Oh don't you worry, Captain Bayer: we'll be ready. Everyone is desperate to leave.'

***

Outside the office he slumped against the wall. It took him almost a full minute to regain his composure, but after several deep breaths he managed to steady himself and stood tall again. His legs felt weak: when he found a staircase he had to grip the handrail hard to support himself. Ignoring the curious side-glances of Bulgarian nurses and Serbian prison orderlies who brushed past him he climbed the steps. He paused at the top of the stairs before walking along the corridor to the surgical ward.

The ward was – as expected – packed with casualties, attended to by a number of Bulgarian nurses and orderlies, but he immediately recognised Sylvia. She was dressed in a plain white blouse and grey skirt – as Elspeth used to wear – and was talking with a patient, a soldier with both legs in traction. He stood and watched her for a while. Then he saw her frown – almost as if she knew someone was observing her – and she turned towards him. Her eyes widened in recognition and a smile formed on her lips. But it lasted only a moment before it began to fade and he realised that she could tell he had already been told the awful news. She began to walk towards him, and he became aware that the other nurses, orderlies and patients were staring at him with curiosity. But he focussed only on her and saw the watery-eyed look of sorrow in her eyes as she arrived and stood before him without speaking, blinking as she tried to hold back the tears.

He did not know what to say to her and for a moment they stood there awkwardly, until she silently took hold of his hand and led him back towards a small door near the entrance and pushed it open to reveal a small galley kitchen. Inside the room were two Bulgarian orderlies, laughing at a shared joke as they sliced loaves of maize bread. However, on seeing Sylvia's face their smiles faded and they quietly laid down their breadknives and walked out the room, closing the door silently behind them.

The kitchen was now silent, apart from an occasional rattle from a large copper samovar, which simmered in the corner, Gabriel watched as Sylvia fought to maintain her composure. And then she could no longer hold back the tears and went towards him; he enfolded her in his arms and held her close. She sobbed silently into his chest for a while, and then she took a deep breath and pulled away. As he gently released her, he saw the dark shadows underneath the soft green of her eyes, now red-rimmed and puffy.

‘Dr Inglis told you?' she asked him.

He nodded. ‘Are we sure it's Elspeth that's…that's…' He found he could not say the word.

‘Luka came to tell us,' she whispered huskily and then sniffed back a tear. ‘He and Anya told us the story—'

‘I don't know who this Anya person is. Dr Inglis mentioned her to me, but I've never heard of her before.'

Sylvia took a deep breath before continuing. ‘We both knew Anya in London, before we joined the Scottish Women's Hospital. She was one of our arson squad.'

Arson
squad
? thought Gabriel, and she saw his puzzlement.

‘There are so many things about Elspeth you don't know, Gabriel—'

‘But did Anya actually see it happen?' It helped to suppress his grief, by focussing on the facts, to activate his rational mind again.

Sylvia sniffed again and shrugged

‘She told me she saw the cart that Elspeth was travelling in. It slid into a river and was swept away. She chased it downstream for more than a mile only to find the smashed wreckage lying on the boulders underneath a waterfall. She said she saw Elspeth, dressed in her cape and coat, wedged between the rocks…'

‘So why didn't she try to retrieve her…her…?'

‘It was too dark by then, Anya said. There was a whirlpool around the rocks and they were running from the Germans and Bulgarians…they couldn't delay. The next day they arrived here. Anya had hoped to see Vera, but she had already left with Dr Curcin's party. After telling us the news, Anya and Luka left with the rest of their Cheta to try and hold up the Bulgarian advance.'

Maybe I'm having a bad dream, Gabriel thought, a nightmare that will end with Elspeth walking into the room and smiling at us both. The wretchedness was welling up inside him, and so he re-focussed on why he was here, on what he needed to do.

‘I don't know whether you've been told,' he said, ‘but I've been assigned the job of escorting you all to Switzerland.'

‘Yes, Dr Inglis told us.' She sighed. ‘I can't say I'll be sorry to leave this place. It hasn't been easy, especially without…without…' She paused and took a deep breath before continuing. ‘The Bulgarian doctors who have taken over the hospital have asked me to help with their surgical patients, but they're not up to your or Elspeth's standard.'

He half smiled at the compliment. ‘I must go back to the garrison headquarters in order to arrange the travel permits and rail tickets. I'm hoping we can leave by tomorrow.'

She nodded, and then to his surprise she stretched up and kissed him lightly on one cheek. ‘I'm glad it's you escorting us. I'm glad we got the chance to see each other again.'

He lifted his hand, and with a smile gently brushed the side of her face. ‘I really must go.'

She smiled back, then opened the kitchen door and walked back into the ward. He followed her out, the other orderlies staring at him with puzzled expressions on their faces. Sylvia mouthed a silent goodbye at him and he bowed his head at her, then turned away and walked out of the ward.

‘It will be very difficult to cross the mountains wearing a skirt,' said Dr Curcin, sitting opposite Elspeth at a long table inside The Black Goat, a tavern on the outskirts of Pec. The other Scottish women at the table regarded Curcin with surprise. ‘Parts of the Rugova canyon and mountain pass are very steep,' he continued. ‘You should wear trousers.'

‘Trousers?' Monica gave Dr Curcin a look of horror. ‘Och, surely we can wear our skirts,' she protested. ‘After all, a kilt is a skirt, and highlanders have been using them in the Scottish mountains for centuries.'

‘The black mountains of Montenegro are different,' Curcin replied. ‘There will be blizzards and deep snow. A kilt would not protect you from the cold in these conditions, but your longer skirts will not give you the freedom to climb the path.'

‘Well, we can turn our skirts into trousers,' Vera said. As everybody else at the table looked at her in surprise, she stood and stepped back from the table. ‘All we do is cut here,' – she drew a line with her finger down the front of her skirt – ‘and here,' – she spun sideways and ran her finger down the back of the skirt – ‘and then we sew the material around each leg.' She gathered the skirt tightly around her thigh to show what she meant.

‘Good idea,' Dr Curcin said, nodding thoughtfully.

‘Yes, excellent suggestion, Vee.' Elspeth rose from the table. ‘I'll see if the innkeeper or his wife can lend us a needle and thread.'

She found the innkeeper's wife busy serving food and drink at the back of the tavern. Every hostelry in Pec, including The Black Goat, was full of refugees, and Elspeth knew that the Scottish women had been lucky to find a room, having arrived the previous evening after an exhausting ninety-kilometre trek, eight days after they had left the encampment near Pristina.

That first stage of the great exodus should not have taken so long. But two hundred thousand other civilians and soldiers were also trying to escape Pristina, and it had taken two days just for the women to find a place in the seemingly endless column of refugees on the road. This was more than an army in retreat, Elspeth thought as she scanned the slender line of humanity that stretched from one horizon to the other; it was as if the whole Serbian nation was passing into exile.

They mostly walked during those first few days, occasionally taking turns to sit amongst the food and hay in the back of the wagons. And as she trudged along the road, Elspeth saw many pitiful sights: peasants labouring through the mud in primitive straw shoes, old people hobbling along on walking sticks, lost or abandoned children sitting by the roadsides, ragged Serbian boys separated from their parents and sent on the march to avoid capture by the Germans. At night the women slept inside the wagons, covered with thin rubber sheets in an attempt to keep dry. The continually falling sleet was their biggest problem; it turned the road into a putrid, energy-sapping river of mud, through which the poor oxen struggled to pull the wagons.

After three days it turned colder and the sleet turned to snow and the mud froze. For a while it made things easier, as they were able to walk on top of the frozen road surface. But the drop in temperature took its toll and soon the oxen and horses began to die: exhausted by the effort of pulling the overloaded carts and susceptible to the intense cold and lack of feed, they weakened and fell by the wayside. As soon as they perished, the animals were butchered by the side of the road and the meat given to anyone who happened to be close by.

And then the people began to die: food was scarce and Elspeth saw how poorly clothed for the winter they were; soon she came upon the terrible sight of dead civilians lying in ditches by the side of the road.

But after a week of hard walking they finally arrived at Pec, the gateway to the Rugova canyon and mountain pass they would have to negotiate if they were to make it to Albania. A short distance behind the town loomed the Montenegrin mountains, and Elspeth had gazed anxiously up at the intimidating mass of black rock – which dwarfed anything she'd seen in Scotland – and thought: are we really going to be able to do this?

It was Dr Curcin who had managed to persuade the innkeeper to give them a room in the tavern. This was no mean feat, Elspeth realised, as Pec – which normally held ten thousand people – had swelled by two hundred thousand more, who now occupied very available building while they prepared for the next stage of their journey.

The Scottish women had brought four oxen and two wagons with them, but after the trek from Pristina the animals were perilously close to collapse. In any case, they could not take the wagons into the mountains because the pass was too narrow, so Curcin traded the oxen for two miserable-looking ponies and a small amount of hay with the innkeeper, who seemed delighted with his end of the deal.

From here they would have to walk the rest of the way, Curcin said, along the Rugova gorge, a canyon that weaved a route fifteen miles deep between the mountains, and then up a steep and narrow pass that zigzagged seven thousand feet to a plateau just below the highest summit. There was a timber hut on this plateau, which would provide shelter from the elements – if they could reach it. Then they would have to descend the far side of the mountains. After a further eighty-mile walk they would reach Lake Scutari and the Adriatic coast beyond. As the pack animals would have to carry all their supplies, each woman was limited to one rubber sheet and blanket, and a small supply of rice, cocoa and maize bread.

And now Curcin had told them they needed to wear trousers.

Well, it was just as well Sylvia wasn't with them, mused Elspeth as she returned to the table: Sylvia would have protested even more than Monica about that. Elspeth looked down at the women sitting around the table and held up a pair of scissors in one hand, a needle and reel of cotton in the other.

‘Right,' she said. ‘Let's go up to our room and make trousers.'

***

The freezing wind that howled along the mountain path was fierce, and Elspeth clung onto her hat with one hand as she tried to shield her eyes from the stinging sleet driven into her face. With her other hand she hauled on the bridle of the pack-pony; the heavily laden animal needed constant coaxing from Elspeth as it followed her reluctantly up the steep and icily rutted track.

The blizzard had struck the column in the mid-afternoon of this, their fifth day in the mountains. Thick sheets of icy sleet and hail pelted the brim of Elspeth's hat as she kept her head bowed, the wind howling past her ears like some demented banshee, the conditions the worst she had ever experienced. Visibility had deteriorated and rising ahead of her, seen dimly through the hypnotically swirling flurries of snow, she could only just make out the long column of refugees, soldiers, mules and other pack-ponies as they wound their way up the mountainside.

Dr Curcin appeared beside her, the officers' cap on his head white with snow, his moustache encrusted with tiny icicles. ‘Let me take her,' he shouted, his voice almost lost in the force of the wind as he pointed at the pony.

Elspeth gratefully handed him the bridle and saw him slap the pony's rear. The animal's frost-tinged ears pricked up and it quickened its pace, trotting forward for a few steps before settling back into a slow walk again. A gust of snow temporarily blinded Elspeth and she dipped her head into the blizzard and tried to keep a steady rhythm on the icy path; just one careful step after another. But the frozen rock was treacherous and she almost lost her footing just as another figure in scots grey drew alongside her.

‘You alright, Ellie?' shouted Vera, pulling a scarf away from the lower part of her face, her eyebrows and lashes outlined with ice.

‘Yes, fine,' Elspeth shouted back, blinking snowflakes away from her eyes as she regained her balance. ‘It's just so slippery.'

‘You're doing well, keep it up,' Vera said with a white-breathed smile of encouragement, then re-covered her face with the scarf as she settled into step beside Elspeth.

They had left Pec five days ago, first walking along a forest track towards the start of the canyon, the air growing colder and the snow deeper the higher they progressed. On entering the Rugova gorge, Elspeth saw the mountains rising up on either side, the daylight obscured by black rock, which arched overhead like a gothic vault, crested with icicles that hung down like the spears of a portcullis, giving the canyon a claustrophobic, almost subterranean menace. Ahead of her the refugees plodded steadily on as the gorge cut deeper into the mountains. As she watched the column disappear into the mist that first day, Elspeth had shivered with doubt: how on earth, she thought, could they make it through such difficult conditions?

The first night in the canyon they had dug snow holes into a drift underneath a rocky overhang. Wrapped in their blankets, the holes lined with rubber sheets, Elspeth and the others had spent a restless night trying to sleep before dawn finally broke. They had risen, taken a meagre breakfast of maize bread, and then started walking again. It had taken the whole of the second day to reach the end of the gorge and enter the mountain pass to begin the climb to the summit.

But the pass was a much more difficult proposition. At times it snaked between the crags, but at others it clung to the side of the mountain, and peering over the edge Elspeth had seen the sheer drop to a rushing torrent of a river that thundered far below. The heavy rain had swelled the tributary into a boiling, muddy maelstrom and she knew that any person or animal lucky enough to survive the fall would quickly be swept away.

And it was much slower going, as the path became narrower and bottlenecks began to form where pack animals had to be cajoled into continuing their progress. At these hold-ups the column ground to a halt and they would have to stand and wait in the cold until they could move again. Occasionally an over-burdened animal would slip and stumble over the icy track, and Elspeth would hear a sudden frantic braying and see a heavily laden mule or pony thrashing in the foamy brown water as it was washed downstream to an uncertain fate. On one occasion a horse slipped over the ledge, breaking its leg as it became trapped on a spur of rock a few yards below the path. It was a blessing when one of the officers agreed to put an end to its suffering, the crack of a pistol shot echoing mournfully between the mountains.

All that day they had continued in this way, making slow but steady progress, inching steadily higher and westwards.

And then this afternoon, the blizzard had struck.

Elspeth kept her head bowed against the force of the wind, mostly looking down as she took one step after another, feeling the crunch of snow beneath her ice-crusted boots, trying not to think too much about the distance they still had to go. As the afternoon wore on, the wind and snow eased. But then the daylight began to fade and it soon grew dark inside the rock-enclosed pathway. Still they carried on walking, the path winding between the mountains as it ascended ever higher towards the distant summit.

Dusk had almost fallen, yet still Elspeth saw no sign of any place they might camp for the night. As she was squinting through the gloom in order to see the line of the path, a soft yellow glow appeared: one of the refugees in the column a few yards ahead must have lit a storm lamp, she thought. It was a relief to see a light, and, relying on the feeble glimmer from the lamp, Elspeth and the others carried on walking.

After another hour, and with darkness now complete, the path began to level off. They rounded yet another curve, and from the light of the storm lamp she saw with relief that they had arrived at a broad, flat ledge enclosed on both sides by overhanging rocks.

‘We can dig snow holes here,' said Curcin, pointing to a bank of driven snow on one side of the path. There were already a large number of refugees taking shelter there, but Curcin found a free area and was already digging in the snow with his gloved hands.

Elspeth was exhausted from the strain of walking in the dark, but helped the others clear a circle of snow, then watched Monica and Aurelia use the last of the wood and kindling to light a fire. Snow was melted and water was boiled. And then, wrapped in their blankets, clustered together in a tight circle around the small fire, the women drank lukewarm cocoa and chewed a few mouthfuls of coarse boiled rice. Elspeth hugged her tin mug for warmth as she looked back down the mountain path and saw the flickering lights of campfires and storm lamps from other refugees. How many of them, she wondered, would survive this night?

After their miserable supper was finished, Elspeth watched the flames dwindle until the fire died and then followed Vera into their snow hole. With her head covered by another rubber sheet and wrapped in a blanket, she nestled up against Vera, closed her eyes, and promptly fell asleep.

***

She was the first to wake the next morning after another restless night's sleep.

Vera, curled up beside her, was gently snoring as Elspeth carefully lifted a corner of the rubber sheet covering their hole and brushed away the light dusting of snow that had gathered overnight. She poked her head outside: it felt colder than yesterday, but it had stopped snowing and the wind that had tormented them the previous day had disappeared. Although it was still night, the first hint of daybreak was evident on the eastern horizon and a star-filled cloudless sky told her further snow was not imminent. As it grew lighter, a diamond shimmer came from ice crystals on the rocks, and Elspeth watched the firmament turn from black to purple and then blue, the rays from the sun picking out the subtle undulations on the rising path ahead. It was an absolutely still dawn – no hint of a breeze – and the vapour from Elspeth's breath floated in the cold air above her head like ectoplasm. There was something almost spiritual about this moment – sunrise in the mountains – which, despite all the pain and horror of their exodus, filled her with hope. She heard whispering as others around her began to rouse, and then a sudden upward puff of snow came from nearby and the face of Dr Curcin appeared through the top of his snow-hole.