Silence for the Dead(11)

“Unacceptable,” said Boney.

Martha bit her lip. “But they say it’s true.”

“It sounds like poppycock to me,” said Nina, as she shoveled in another mouthful of stew. “Send me down there. I’ll go.”

“There will be no need, Nurse Shouldice,” said Matron. “I will speak to Paulus myself.”

Paulus, I gathered, was the huge orderly, the man with the South African accent. Nina shrugged. Martha worried her lip, her supper forgotten.

Matron turned to me. “And you, Nurse Weekes? What nonsense have you brought me? Or are you a girl with even a minimum of intelligence?”

There was a glint in her eye; she was waiting for something from me, something she expected. I lifted my chin. “What happened in the dining room today,” I said. “The nosebleed. I’d like an explanation.”

“Would you?” said Matron.

“From the way you spoke to him, there’s obviously a history. If I’m to care for him, I’d like to know what it is I’m to expect.”

She frowned. If there’d been a test, I wondered whether I had passed it. “Mr. Mabry has a particular psychoneurosis,” she said. “He often seems calm, but he is prone to fits. They can be violent, so you must take care if you’re in his presence when he’s struck with one. He has broken several items during his time at Portis House.”

I digested that. “And the nosebleed?”

“Is one of his recurring fits. The doctors believe it is of particular concern. They have been focusing their treatment on it, and before today he hadn’t had one in nearly three weeks.”

“Treatment?” I looked around the table. “Do you mean he somehow makes himself have nosebleeds?”

“You saw it yourself,” said Boney. “How else did he get it?”

I decided not to mention that I hadn’t been in the dining room at the time. “It’s just—I didn’t know a nosebleed could be caused by force of will.”

“He doesn’t will ’em,” said Martha. “He gets afraid. He thinks he sees something.”

“That’s bunk and you know it.” Boney turned on her, her lips tight, spots of red high on her cheeks. “He does no such thing!”

“Nurse Fellows is correct,” Matron broke in. “Mr. Mabry suffers from delusions, as do many of the men here. Mind over matter, Nurse Weekes. Mind over matter. It is what many of the men here still have to learn.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “And now, I expect you all to return to your posts for the evening. We have work to do.”





CHAPTER FIVE


“It was a test, wasn’t it?” I said much later in the nurses’ quarters as I sat on my narrow bed and pulled off my shoes. “Supper, I mean. Putting me in there alone.”

Martha, standing before the washbasin and pouring water over her hand from the pitcher, glanced sympathetically at me. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Boney does it to all the new nurses.”

“She leaves them alone with the men to test them? Does Matron know about this?”

“It’s Matron’s orders,” said Nina, landing heavily on the edge of her own bed. “Boney would never think up anything on her own.”

I rubbed my feet. The bed was hard and the mattress thin, yet my body nearly groaned aloud in relief. We had spent the evening cleaning the dining room, mopping the floor in the front hall, polishing the banisters, carrying baskets of clean linens up the stairs from the laundry, checking the lavatories, closing the windows in the bedrooms, and making sure the men behaved in the common room. The only real nursing we’d done was for Mr. West, the soldier with the bad legs—it turned out he’d had both legs blown off below the knee, and sometimes needed medication for the pain. The sight of those two shortened legs, the empty expanse of trouser pinned carefully over them, had made me almost wish for my twelve-hour shifts at the factory.

“It’s really for the best, you know,” said Martha, drying her hands. “Not everyone can handle it here. It’s best to know right away.”

“We’ve seen enough of them come and go, God knows,” said Nina. “You won’t be here long yourself, Martha, if you keep repeating the orderlies’ scary stories to Matron.”

“He wasn’t lying,” Martha protested. “He was scared.”

“It’s this place,” said Nina. “Anyone who stays here long enough goes just as mad as the patients, with the exception of you and me. And sometimes I wonder about the two of us, working here as long as we have.”

“That’s not fair. This is a good job.”

I listened to them and remembered Matron’s words. I think that someone desperate might do. I wondered what made Martha and Nina—and Boney—so desperate that they were the only girls to stay.

Money, perhaps. Or perhaps, like me, they were girls with nowhere else to go.

“This was the nursery,” Martha said to me, gesturing around the room, her eyes shining just a little. “This room here. Isn’t that nice? It’s so pretty.” She looked up and down the long room, taking in the grandness of it despite the shabbiness of the current furniture. “I like to imagine what it was like to grow up here. The children, tucked in their beds. There were only two, you know, and they had this room all to themselves. Wouldn’t it be lovely, to grow up in a room like this?”