Unnatural Issue (43 page)

Quickly, Susanne put two fingers under his jaw to get a pulse. “He’s alive!” she shouted. “Hurry! We have to get him out of here before the shelling starts again!”

Now all six of them worked feverishly to free the unconscious man from his noisome burden. Within moments, they had him out, and they carefully rolled him onto his back. He was still unconscious.

Paul scrambled up to the ambulance for a canvas stretcher; they rolled Charles into it, then, as Susanne took temporary charge of the horses, all five men manhandled the thing and its burden up the slope of the crater and into the ambulance.

“Field hospital,” grunted Uncle Paul. “Closest one is English.”

“Go!” Peter shouted, waving them to go on. “I’ll find my way back; I need to look for someone.”

“All the other men are accounted for, sir,” said one of the soldiers who had helped them get the stretcher out.

Paul nodded, but Susanne would know what he meant. He was going to try to hunt down Richard, who surely could not have gotten far!

“Go,” she told Uncle Paul, just now climbing onto the driver’s bench and taking the reins from her. He nodded as she dove into the back of the vehicle to be with the patient. He slapped the reins on the backs of his horses, and they shot off again.

Peter watched them go. Charles Kerridge would live or die by the combined skills of Susanne and whatever doctor he got. There was nothing that
he
could do about that.

But he had a necromancer to hunt, and when he found the man . . .

. . . things were not going to go well for him.

Uncle Paul pulled up his lathered horses at the tent marked with the red cross, shouting in French—which, of course, the English staff didn’t understand. Susanne decided it was safe enough to leave Charles for a moment and stuck her head through the flaps at the front. “English officer!” she shouted, motioning Uncle Paul to be silent. “Buried by shelling!”

A dozen men swarmed over the ambulance then, extracting Charles and the stretcher he was still tied down to, and running him to the tent, while Susanne kept alongside, her medical bag bouncing off her hip with each step. Someone pulled the tent flaps aside ahead of them, and they were inside the heat and glare of the field hospital.

Someone grabbed her elbow before she could follow Charles to the surgeons. “You speak English?” asked a man with orderly badges.

“I
am
English,” she replied. “I’m working with the nursing sisters of St. Claire down the line.”

“Good!” The man pulled her away. “We’ve got a full ward, more coming in, and only two nurses—”

He didn’t have to say anything more. He pointed her at a line of men bedded down wherever there was space, and she went to work.

It was the job of the nurse, not the doctor, to remove small pieces of shrapnel and the odd bullet and to clean and bandage the wounds. The doctor only diagnosed, operated, set bones, or sometimes set up an irrigation station to keep a particularly bad wound clean. The nurse took care of everything else.

So all the smaller wounds on these men had been left for the nurses to tend.

As gently as she could, she did her job, adding a dose of healing magic with every bandage she tied in place, every suture she set. The orderly hadn’t lied; the tent was inundated, so much so that the ones it was not possible to save had been shuttled to one side and were being seen to by a French priest and a chaplain.

Susanne felt a lump rising in her throat, and her eyes stung with tears, to see so many. All those lives, all those boys—so many of them
were
boys, barely eighteen, who should have been enjoying life right now, not dying on the cold ground in a foreign land.

She dashed the back of her hand across her eyes and went back to work.

It seemed like an eternity laboring in a hell of blood, shattered limbs, moans and screams. Finally, she finished working on a boy who cried for his mother as she pulled bits of shell casing out of his thigh and mercifully had passed out before she was half done. She looked up.

There were no more patients.

The ward was quiet. The orderlies were going from patient to patient administering sedatives, but the doctor in charge was watching her with bemusement, his arms folded over himself.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said bluntly. “Did you follow a lover over? Are you even a nursing sister?”

Caught off-guard, she avoided the first question, and answered the second. “Not . . . exactly. What I could do convinced the Mother Superior that I was a nursing sister.”

“Oh, you’re good,” the doctor acknowledged. “And you can be using those skills on the men on the ship on the way back across the channel. But since you aren’t a trained nurse, and you shouldn’t be here in the first place, I’m going to make sure you go back. When you get permission from your father and the proper training, you can come back.”

“But—” she protested. Or tried to.

“No buts,” the doctor said, frowning ferociously. “You are going back. You aren’t a nursing sister, and you aren’t French. Don’t argue. There’s a spare cot behind that partition. Feel free to get some sleep on it. I’ll be needing your skills until the hour that the ship leaves. Oh! Where are you staying?”

Too tired to resist him, she told him. “I’ll send someone for your things,” he promised. But at that point, she didn’t care. She found the cots for the staff, with two already occupied, and fell into the nearest. She was vaguely aware of someone draping a blanket over her as she was bludgeoned by sleep.

She woke to someone shaking her shoulder. That same someone pressed a cup of hot liquid—coffee—into one hand and a plate of beans and bread into the other, then moved on to the next sleeper.

Then it was all to do over. She still was unable to get to Charles. She did hear from Peter, however, in the form of a note delivered along with her things.
Did not find RW. Trying to get you assigned here. So far, no luck. Looks like you’re being shipped back no matter what. P

Well, there it was.

She returned to the cot to find all of her things neatly packed beside it. It was a relief to at least be able to change her clothing but a shock to find a very official-looking document inside, ordering her to a transport ship. The document informed her that if she did not comply, she would be assumed to be a spy, and would be arrested and charged.

She could scarcely sleep that night, despite exhaustion; she kept having nightmares—in some, she was back in England, at Whitestone Hall, being pursued by trolls. In others, she was here in France, in a gaol cell, with walking dead trying to reach her through the bars. None of her magic would work, and she was utterly alone. No one answered her screams for help.

The next morning, she was awakened the same way—except that the meal this time was bread and bully beef—and went about the ward doing what she was ordered to in a fog. She rapidly lost count of the days she had been there, and while her diligent work finally made the doctor stop frowning every time he looked at her, she eventually had to make up some nonsense about being an art student to get the others to stop treating her as if she were a camp follower. At least she had listened diligently to all the art talk and was able to pretend to some expertise, though she feared what would happen if somehow, someone got hold of some art supplies and pressed her to paint.

That would be a total disaster.

Perhaps a week after she and Charles had arrived at the field hospital, she woke to someone shaking her roughly, without the usual coffee and food. “Get yer gear, miss,” said a strange voice. “Yer bein’ shipped out with the invalids.”

Only half awake, she huddled herself into her clothing, got her bags, and—

And stopped a moment, to leave the medical kit with the precious syringe and needles on the bed of one of the other nurses. She wouldn’t need it where she was going, and they would.

Then she picked up her gear and followed the sound of voices out into the gray dawn.

Stretchers were being loaded into more ambulances, all motorized ones. Without so much as a word, a soldier looked at her, looked at a paper in his hand, and took her by the elbow. She was summarily boosted up into the back of a crowded ambulance.

“Take care of’ em,” the man said brusquely, and banged on the side of the vehicle. It took off with a lurch.

She checked all the drugged and semiconscious passengers in her care; none was Charles. From the records left with each, all were common soldiers.

She was beginning to get an idea of why she was being kept from Charles. Not because anyone suspected anything—because he was an officer. Suspect, with no clear idea of what, if any, training she had had, she would not be allowed near an officer. But she was a pair of hands, and that was better than nothing for the Tommys.

She set her chin stubbornly. If that was how it was—well, these men were going to get better care from
her
than the officers got from their “real” nurses. She tended them assiduously, trickling healing into them as soon as she could concentrate. As the light grew and the ever-present pounding of guns faded slightly into the distance, traffic on the road increased. Abruptly, the ambulance lurched, and the sound of the tires on the road changed to the rattle of tires on cobblestones.

But the rattling woke several of the boys, who, confused by their surroundings, thirsty, anxious, began making plaintive requests of her. That kept her occupied right up to the point where the ambulance stopped again.

The canvas doors were pulled open; the same soldier with the papers was there, waiting, along with several stretcher bearers. He didn’t so much “help” her out of the back of the ambulance as pull her out, and dump out her bags at her feet. Clearly she was expected to deal with them herself.

He gave her just enough time to pick them up before taking her by the elbow again and marching her up the gangplank, following and preceding men with invalids on stretchers. At the top, there was another soldier, and with obvious relief, her escort surrendered her, and her papers, to this fellow.

He passed her off to a sailor, who, with a bit more courtesy, escorted her to a tiny bunk in a room with six of the same in the bowels of the ship, showed her where to stow her things, and then took her to a giant ward in what must have been a ballroom. Clearly this had been a passenger ship, now pressed into service as a hospital ship for the journey across the Channel, and a troopship back to France.

This time she found herself in service not as a nurse, but as a lowly aide. It was with a profound sense of relief that she felt the ship begin to move. At least the trip across the Channel would only take a few hours.

And then what?

She considered this as she emptied basins, scrubbed the floors after accidents, took away filthy, bloody bandages and dressings. Right now, she had nowhere to go but Whitestone Hall, and that, she would never do. Richard was clearly in France now
,
but there was no guarantee that he would stay there.

And she wanted to be near Charles, no matter what.

Peter had managed to get her quite a nice sum of money when he understood that she was being sent back. It was more than enough to set her up anywhere.

All right, then. She would stay in London. It would be hard for Richard to find her there. He would never expect that she would be working in a hospital. She could get another job as an aide—and since she didn’t drink, didn’t steal, didn’t purloin the patients’ drugs for herself, she could probably get transferred to Charles’ ward fairly quickly, assuming that it just didn’t happen as soon as they found out that she was several cuts above the usual sorts of aides.

She smiled to herself. That was the answer. She’d be there, even when she wasn’t officially on duty. She’d be there whenever he needed something, and when he
did
need something, she would make sure that she was the one to give it to him, by hook or by crook. Men fell in love with their nurses all the time. Why not this time?