But wherever I was, it seemed that Captain Barclay-Barclay the orderly-was somewhere close by. He seemed oddly out of place to me in his khaki orderly’s tunic with the red cross on his sleeve. I’d seen him in his own uniform, and he wore it with an air that suited his rank. Still, everyone else took him in stride, and his attempts at rank-and- file humility were successful, although sometimes I caught a gleam in his eyes that belied them. Working with the wounded, to his credit he did the most menial task from emptying bloody basins to carrying away an amputated limb with the grim stoicism of a seasoned orderly. He’d been in the trenches, of course, he’d seen and dealt with worse, but it was not something anyone grew accustomed to, however hard the shell put up to keep one’s sanity in the face of such horrors.
I couldn’t help but think in the dark hours of the night that he’d appeared right on the heels of the attack on me. And then I’d remind myself that the Colonel Sahib had sent him, and the Colonel Sahib was seldom wrong in his judgment of a man’s character.
I could also see Dr. Gaines’s fine hand in all this. Captain Barclay had been pressing to return to his men, ready or not. This would be a lesson in a different kind of humility-forcing him to listen to his doctors.
In a way his presence was comforting. In the first place it freed me to work without looking over my shoulder. In the second, I’d been concerned about someone
What little I learned about his “story” came in bits and pieces from others.
He was Canadian, had joined the British Army because he had been living in Britain when war was declared, but he was rejected because of a leg injury that refused to heal properly-hence his limp-and so he’d become an orderly instead. (His time in the clinic had given him a good background to make that believable. He talked about his duties there with the ease of experience.) He wasn’t married (this from Sister Clery), and his father was in the merchant marine-which was close enough to the truth. I asked where he lived, and I was told he’d been an orderly at Longleigh House in Somerset, had served in Dover, on several patient transport ships (which had aggravated his bad leg), and was now with us.
Several evenings later, Dr. Hicks sent me to the Base Hospital for supplies-we’d been running short for three days, but he hadn’t been able to spare anyone. With a brief respite in the fighting-the guns were silent and lines of fresh troops were making their way to the Front to relieve those who’d endured a week of heavy shelling-we had only a trickle of new patients.
We took with us three badly wounded men who were due to be sent back for more treatment, and Barclay was assigned to drive.
It was a more or less uneventful journey, although once a nervous company of raw troops fired on us from a distance before their sergeant got them under control again, shouting at them in a Glaswegian accent that made half of what he was saying unintelligible.
We delivered our patients and saw to it the instructions accompanying them were duly signed for, then collected the list of desperately needed medicines, bandages, needles, sutures, and so on that Dr. Hicks had requested. An hour later, the ambulance carefully stocked, I got into the seat beside Captain Barclay after he’d turned the crank.
“Wait until we’re out of sight,” he said in a low voice, turning out of the racetrack and picking up the road to the Front.
And so I waited. Last night the sun had set in a blaze of gold and red, sliding behind a bank of deep purple clouds. Now it was pitch-dark without the flickering light of the shelling, and the only way we could be certain we were on what passed as a road were the wide swaths of deep ruts left behind by the lorries. Our blacked-out headlamps were woefully inadequate, casting shadows that only made it harder to judge anything in time to avoid another bone-wrenching jolt. About two miles out we spotted the single chimney and broken wall of a farmhouse. It had become a marker of sorts, and we all knew to watch for it. The rest of the village was little more than rubble, with no way of judging where the streets had been, much less the houses or shops that once had lined them. How this single chimney and wall had survived God alone knew.
The ambulance rocked and swayed over the debris, and I feared we would never extract it again just as Barclay turned off the motor and silence fell. I could have sworn I heard a cricket somewhere, it was so quiet.
“All right,” he said, turning to me, his face a pale mask in the darkness and oddly sinister. “I’m sorry there was no chance to explain before this. I was told I didn’t know you. I suspected the Sergeant-Major’s touch there. Necessity or precaution or jealousy.” The mask split into a white grin in the shadows.
“How is Simon?” I asked anxiously.
“I didn’t see him, to tell the truth.”
And that worried me. Surely if he were well enough, Simon would have been consulted.
“Then how did you become involved in this? What did they tell you? Dr. Gaines and my father?”
“Dr. Gaines had been sent for. He must have told your father that I’d accompanied you to Nether Thornton and then to the Gorge.”
“But you’d spoken to my father once. When I was sailing to France. You told him where to meet me.”
“That was sheer luck. Bess, I called the War Office. They found him, wherever he was, and passed on my message. Apparently they thought I was the Sergeant-Major. The Colonel had a few words to say about that when we spoke again.”
I could just imagine how annoyed my father was. The relationship with Simon was sacrosanct. He wouldn’t have appreciated Captain Barclay’s efforts, however well intentioned.
“At any rate, your father asked if I was fit enough for duty and if I’d take on a hazardous assignment. I was to report directly to him. Or if I couldn’t reach him, then to your mother.”
I’d told Simon about my companion on those journeys. Was it he who’d remembered?
“What did they tell you? How did they explain that I might be in danger?”
I still wasn’t prepared to trust this man.
“The Colonel told me the truth. At least I had the feeling he did.”
“What did they tell you?” I asked again, trying not to sound impatient.
“That someone had been murdered and you were the only witness who could testify to that. The trouble was, the killer knew you, but you couldn’t identify him as easily. That you were in danger. Well, by God, they were right. I heard about what happened just before I got there, and if I get my hands on that-on whoever it is, I’ll kill him myself.” The grin had disappeared like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, and I could feel the tension in the man across from me, a deep-seated anger that was like a flare of warmth in the ambulance.
“At any rate,” he went on after collecting himself, “when they spoke to me, I jumped at the chance. I’d rather be back with my men, but if that’s out of the question, I’ll use this assignment to prove that I’m ready to fight again.”
“Going over the top is not easy with a bad leg,” I said. “You know that as well as I do.”
“Yes, I can get others killed if I’m a burden,” he said impatiently. “That’s been brought home to me. But your father saw to it that I was given a background that wouldn’t make anyone suspicious. And your father asked me to give you this.”
He moved in the darkness and his hand stretched out toward me. In the palm lay the little pistol that Simon had given me once before. I recognized it immediately.
“My father? Not Simon himself?”
“I never saw the Sergeant-Major, Bess.”
I bit my lip. Once before I’d been afraid that bad news was being kept from me. I had that feeling again. Had Simon not lived to reach England? Had he lost that arm?
I looked down at the little pistol. Nurses were not permitted to carry weapons, but this time, remembering my feeling of helplessness when that arm had come around my throat and how lucky I was that I’d been able to kick the water pail, then scream, I touched it with my fingertips and then settled it carefully in the pocket of my uniform.
Captain Barclay was saying, “Better to wing him, Bess. Your father wants him alive.”
