Silence for the Dead(18)
But now I knew that made no sense. No patient would require clearance for a set of injuries, no matter how awful. A confidential case, Boney had said. It was something to do, then, with the man himself.
Someone important. Someone secret. Someone no one was supposed to know was here, in a madhouse. And I knew that voice.
He was still looking out the window; he seemed to have forgotten me, lost in whatever he was contemplating. I walked to the dressing table and looked at the tray. He had arranged the emptied dishes in a tidy stack, centered for easy balance, the cup placed in the middle of the empty bowl. Considerate, then. I couldn’t ask him who he was, why he was here. Once Matron found out what I’d done, how I’d lied and broken the rules, I’d never be allowed in this room again. But there was nothing to do but obey, take away the dishes like the servant I was, and leave.
I had raised my hands, nearly touched the edges of the tray, when he spoke again.
“Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?”
I looked up. He had turned toward me now, squaring his shoulders in my direction. He slid one elbow over and crooked it on his knee, the better to see me. At this angle the lamplight fell more fully on his face; I saw dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a sharp, shadowed jaw. His eyes on me were kind, and as I watched, he tried a tentative smile on his lips, as if it were costing him a great effort.
I dropped my hands. He must have heard my intake of breath, for his smile slowly faded.
“My God,” I said, “it’s you.”
The smile nearly disappeared, just the last remnants of it touching the corners of his mouth. His eyes narrowed and he looked at me more closely.
I walked toward him, staring at his face. It was all there now, every one of his features burned into my brain, familiar from the dozens of times I’d seen them everywhere—the magazines, the newspapers, the newsreels. His voice familiar from the one unforgettable time I’d heard it. The dark curling hair, the blue eyes under winged brows, the high cheekbones, the elegant jaw now covered in second-day stubble. Though I’d never seen him close up and in person, I could see now that the photographs, the films that made him look so handsome to hundreds of poor, stupid factory girls like me—none of them had lied.
“Oh, God,” I said, unable to help myself, “you’re Jack Yates.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
When I said his name, the expression in the man’s eyes dimmed a little, and a shuttered blankness came carefully down. “Do I know you?”
“You can’t be here,” I said. “Not you.”
Jack Yates. Brave Jack, the papers called him, the hero of the war. Newsreels flashed in my mind, imprinted on those rare nights I’d gone to the cinema with a few other girls: Jack Yates at a navy dockside, his long coat open and flapping in the wind, his hair blowing, a smile on his face, shaking the hand of Winston Churchill. Jack Yates on the steps of a swank party, posing with Lloyd George’s arm around his shoulders, and the caption Our brave soldiers saluted by none less than the Prime Minister! Newspaper photos of Jack standing at the Dover shore in uniform, his puttees high on his long legs, his hands clasped behind his back. Send Me Back to the Front, Brave Jack Says.
I stepped closer and he slid his feet from the sill and stood, facing me. He was a head taller than I, and something about him took all the air from the room. We’d all adored him, my girlfriends and I, each of us thrilling a little at the pictures of him, at the stories.
He’d been a soldier, an ordinary private—an uneducated boy from Somerset, orphaned and raised by foster parents. Truly from nowhere, the papers marveled, because it was impossible to imagine that someone without a title, someone who had to work for a living, could matter. Thousands of men like that died every day, our sweethearts and husbands and brothers and cousins, and none of them mattered a damn.
But not Jack. In the thick of battle, when his CO and all the officers of his dying battalion had been killed, lowly Jack had led the remaining men on a complex sortie across No Man’s Land, a half-mile stretch littered with barbed wire and bodies. He’d brought them into enemy lines, holding two trenches alone until reinforcements came. When it was over, the Germans had retreated from that section of the line, and a mile of the Western Front had been reclaimed for the Allies. All because of one man, who had not lost a single soldier in the entire suicidal operation.
The newspapers had loved him. He’d been given the Victoria Cross, had been feted everywhere, was seen in every newsreel. Brave Jack Asks the Women of England: Are You Doing All You Can? The girls at the factory wanted to marry him, but when I told that to Ally, she only laughed, saying she’d had enough of soldiers with no money.
I looked into his face now. “You didn’t go mad,” I said. “You never did. Not you.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and was silent for a long moment. “Do I know you?” he asked again.
“Trafalgar Square,” I said. “I was there.”
The hand dropped. “Ah.”
“I froze my arse that night, watching you. Me and my friends.”
“Yes, well.” He moved to brush past me, and I breathed the scent of him, an unfamiliar tang that went straight to my bloodstream. My own smell must have been much less pleasant, but he made no mention of it. His arm, where it brushed mine, was warm. “I’m sorry about your arse.”