Silence for the Dead(110)

Mabry had been depressed and racked with guilt when he’d awoken. He’d been born to a sense of honor, and even though the blame rested with the ghosts of Portis House, he felt he’d violated his own tenets in the worst possible way. But Archie and West knew Portis House, they knew the truth, and they understood. They had been through a hell just as awful as Mabry’s own. They never spoke of what had happened, and they never laid blame. In their way, they looked out for Mabry, one of their fellow soldiers.

In private, in the company of only his comrades, Mabry was able to sit quietly, to think, to read. To write letters. He said he’d finally had the chance to read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which Matron had refused to stock in the Portis House library.

And I spoke to him of a way to make amends. He was thoughtful, listening in silence until I finished. “That isn’t a bad idea, Nurse Weekes,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.” If I hadn’t known him, I wouldn’t have noticed that he almost smiled.

“And what about Mr. Yates?” Matron asked when I visited her. “Why is he not boarded with the others?”

“He’s been discharged,” I told her.

She thought about this for a moment. “It’s just as well. But for God’s sake, Nurse Weekes, fill out a discharge form.”

She insisted on calling me “Nurse Weekes,” even though I didn’t wear a uniform. I had changed into my old skirt and blouse before evacuating Portis House, and now I wore my hair in a loose braid down my back or tied with a ribbon. I liked it. I was thinking of cutting it, which was supposed to be the new, scandalous fashion, but in the meantime I liked the feel of my long hair down my back.

Even Nina wore only her civilian dress, though she said it was because she was confused, not working at Portis House yet not exactly working anywhere else. I told Matron I’d left my uniform off because I was resigning. “I wasn’t much of a nurse,” I said. “You know that.”

“You underestimate yourself,” she said, and then she flushed, as if the words had slipped out. “You had no training, of course. But a nurse has to have a certain amount of gumption. I hope you don’t go off and get married like a ninny and do nothing with your life.”

“I want to marry Jack Yates,” I told her. We were alone, and I was helping her with her tea. “I think that disqualifies me from ninnyhood.”

“It most certainly does,” she agreed. She didn’t seem surprised, and when I thought of all the times she had threatened to write me up for going to his room, I could see why.

“Besides,” I said carefully, taking the cup when she was finished with it and putting it on a tray, “you married.”

“Marrying doesn’t make you a ninny,” she clarified, “and neither does motherhood. But both can certainly contribute to it.”

She said nothing about her son, and I didn’t ask. There had been too much talk of death already.

It took three surgeries to put Roger’s shoulder back together, and he’d never have the full use of it again. At first, he insisted he could still work as an orderly, which was a fiction so obvious no one knew how to reply to it. But when I visited a few days later, he had changed his mind.

“They let Mabry in to see me,” Roger told me. “I gave him a piece of my mind. I wasn’t happy, I can tell you. He just let me go on and on, and he said he was sorry he shot me. And then he said he’d help, that he owed it to me because I saved his life.” Roger motioned me closer from his prone position on the bed. He was pale, but his cheeks were flushed with excitement. “Bloody rich, Mabry’s family is. He says he’ll tell his father it was an accident, and if I back him up, his father will give me a pension.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I said.

“Mabry’s mad as a hatter,” Roger said matter-of-factly, “and his father knows it. But the story is that he was defending the rest of us from Creeton with that gun. His father will soften at that. I was angry before, but now I don’t bloody care what the story is. A pension will do just fine for me.”

I smiled at him. “I’m glad,” I said. I was.

Creeton presented a different problem. As a mental patient who had proven himself a danger, he’d been kept in the hospital under guard. The police had come and gone; so had one doctor, and then another. I never learned what was said in those interviews, but I imagined Creeton claiming innocence, that he had blacked out, that he remembered nothing. I imagined him pointing out how docile he’d been, agreeing to have his hands tied, waiting calmly to be evacuated from Portis House. But no one trusted a madman, not truly, and the fact that he’d assaulted two nurses and a fellow patient—not to mention his very public suicide attempt—must have told against him. Creeton was moved out of Newcastle on Tyne; I heard he was reassigned to a higher-security mental hospital in Dorset.

Somersham recovered, as did MacInnes and Hodgkins. All were slated to be moved to another hospital, but MacInnes went home to his wife, the successful novelist. Somersham’s family didn’t want him back, but I quietly wrote Hodgkins’s cousin and told her what had happened and that he was about to be transferred. She appeared within the week and took him home.

“My God, the paperwork,” Matron said as she sat up in her sickbed. “Where are my eyeglasses? It’s enough to drive me to drink. What a mess. Why has Mr. Deighton not come?”