Something of what I was feeling must have shown in my face.
My father misinterpreted it and said, “Yes, you’ve had a rough time of it, my dear. Best to think about something else for a bit. Your leave will be up soon enough.”
“Soon enough,” I echoed, and took the cup he brought me.
It was a souvenir from Brighton, with the Pavilion painted on it. I had never understood where Marianne, one of the nurses with whom I shared the flat, had found all of them, but the shelf in the tiny kitchen held plates from Victoria’s Jubilee, Edward VII’s coronation, and half the seaside towns in England. My father held a cup with Penzance on it.
He raised his eyebrows as he noticed that himself. “Good God, your mother would have an apoplexy. No decent dishes?”
“We do very well,” I answered him. “Didn’t you notice the teapot? It’s Georgian silver, I swear to you. And there are spoons in the drawer that are French, I’m told, and the sugar bowl is certainly Royal Worcester.”
He joined me at the table, stretching his long legs out before him. “Bess.”
I knew what he was about to ask.
“It wasn’t bad,” I said, trying to put a good face on all that had happened to me. “Frightening, yes, when we first hit the mine, and then when we had to abandon ship.” I didn’t mention the boats pulled into the screws. “And worrying, because there were so many who were hurt. The papers said we were lucky in the circumstances that only thirty died while over a thousand lived. But what about those thirty souls who never came home? Some are buried near Piraeus, in the British military cemetery there. Others were buried at sea or never made it out of the water at all. I think about them. On the whole, everyone behaved quite well. And it was daylight, and sunny, though the water was cold. That made an enormous difference to those who jumped.”
“Do you want to go back to duty?”
He was offering to pull strings and keep me at home to work with convalescents.
“Yes, I do. I make a difference, and that matters. There are men alive now because of my skills.” And one who died in spite of them…
I changed the subject quickly. “Do you know the Graham family? Ambrose Graham? In Kent.” Too abrupt-I’d intended to broach the subject casually. But his concern had rattled me.
He frowned. “Graham…Rings a bell somewhere.”
“He had something to do with racing, I think-a horse called Merlin the Wise.”
“Ah. One of the finest steeplechasers there ever was. That Graham. He died some years ago. His first wife was a cousin of Peter Neville’s. He lost her in childbirth, and Merlin had to be put down that same year. Neville wrote me that it turned his mind.” He finished his tea and sat back. “Any particular reason why I should remember the Grahams tonight?”
My father was nothing if not all-seeing. His subalterns and his Indian staff had walked in fear of him, believing him to have eyes everywhere. I knew better-it was a mind that never let even the tiniest detail escape his notice.
“Not especially.” I was fishing for words now, the right ones. “His son Arthur was one of my patients, you see.”
“Arthur? Was that the child’s name?”
“Arthur was a son of the second family. Ambrose Graham married again.”
“Ah. Go on.”
“At any rate, Arthur was healing quite nicely. Then his wound went septic almost overnight, and he-died,” I ended baldly.
“And you felt that somehow it was your fault. You must have been very tired and upset, my dear, to believe such a thing. Men do die from wounds. I’ve seen perfectly hardy souls taken off by the merest scratch while others survive against all odds. Even Florence Nightingale couldn’t have done more. You must accept that as part of the price of nursing.” His voice was unusually gentle.
“No. Not that. I mean, yes, I felt-it was appalling that he died, that we’d failed, although we’d done all that was humanly possible… There is something else. As he was dying, Arthur made me promise to give one of his brothers a message. He was insistent. I don’t think he would have died in peace if I hadn’t agreed.”
I could see Arthur’s face again, taut with suffering as he reached for my hand, intent on what he was saying, urgent to make me understand why I must carry out his wishes. He’d died two hours later, without speaking again. And I’d sat there by the bed, watching the fires of infection take him. It was I who’d closed his eyes. They had been blue, and not even the Mediterranean Sea could have matched them.
“What sort of message?” He knew soldiers, my father did, and his gaze was intent. “Something to do with his will? A last wish? Or more personal, something he’d left undone? A girl, perhaps?” When I hesitated, he added, “It’s been some time, I think, since you made your promise. Is that what’s worrying you, my dear? There were no wounded on Britannic’s last voyage.”
“It was the voyage before that-if you remember, I had only a few days in London before we sailed again.” I should never have brought up the subject tonight. I don’t even know why I had, except that as our train rumbled through Kent, and I was finally safely back in England, I faced for the first time the unpalatable truth that I could very well have died out there in the sea, one of those thirty lost souls. And if I had, and there was any truth to an afterlife, it would have been on my soul that I’d failed Arthur. I was sorely tempted to change trains there and then in Rochester, and make my way unannounced to Owlhurst. It would have been a foolish thing to do-my father was waiting for me in London, and for all I knew, Arthur’s brother was in France, out of my reach. But the urgent need to assuage my sense of guilt had been so strong I could hardly sit still in my seat. I knew what it was, of course I did. It was the taste of near failure, and to my father’s daughter, failure was unthinkable.
I tried now to find a way of disentangling myself from what I’d begun, but I was in too deep and heard myself saying instead, “The message-how am I to judge it? How can I know if I waited too long, if I’m already too late? Arthur wasn’t delirious, he knew what he was telling me and why. What we’d been giving him hadn’t affected his brain. I know the dying dwell on small things, something left undone, something unfinished. This was different. He was still in command of his senses when he held my hand and made me swear. I think until the last minute, he still believed he’d live to see to it himself. He desperately wanted to live. He turned to me as a last resort.”
“If the moment made such an impression on you, why have you put off carrying out his wishes?”
I rubbed the shoulder of my bad arm. “I don’t know,” I said again. And then was forced to be honest. “Fear, I think.”
“Fear of what?”
“I was still grieving, not for the man his family knew, but for the one I’d nursed. They’d remember him differently, as their son, their brother, their friend. I wasn’t ready for that Arthur. I wanted to hold on to my memories for a little while longer. It-I know that was selfish, but it was all I had.” I looked at my father, feeling the shame of that admission. “I-it was a bad time for me.”
“You cared about this young man, I can see that. Do you still?”
I hesitated, then made an attempt to answer his question. “I’m not nursing a broken heart. Truly. It’s just-my professional detachment slipped a little. I-it took a while to regain that detachment.” I stirred my tea before looking my father in the face. “You’ve commanded hundreds of men. There must have been a handful of them who stood out above the rest. And you couldn’t have said why, even when you knew you oughtn’t have a favorite. They’re just-a little different somehow, and you want the best for them. And it hurts when you lose them instead.”
“Yes, I understand what you’re saying. God knows, I do. I’ve sent men into danger perfectly aware that they might not come back, and equally aware that I could not send someone else in their place. If you remember, when you first decided to train as a nurse, I warned you that the burden of watching men suffer and die would be a heavy one. Young Graham just brought that home in a very personal way. It happens, my dear. He won’t be the last. War is a bloody waste of good men, and that will break your heart when nothing else does. I’d have liked to meet this man. He sounds very fine.” He cleared his throat, in that way he had of putting things behind him. “As to the message. Would you like to tell me what it is, and let me judge?”
I considered his suggestion, realizing that it was exactly what I wanted to do. I took a deep breath, trying to keep my voice steady. “I had to repeat the words two or three times, to be certain I knew them by heart. ‘Tell Jonathan that I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake. But it has to be set right.’”
My father frowned. “And that’s it?”
“Yes. In a nutshell.” I was tense, waiting. Afraid he might read something in the words that I hadn’t.
