Silence for the Dead(22)

“The trouble with Matron. Is it very bad?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “She said there will be an incident report.”

“That’s bad. I’m sorry. She asked. I can’t lie to her. I need this job.”

By lying my way into Jack Yates’s room, I could have gotten her sacked. The thought bothered me, something I was far from used to. “It’s my fault.”

“What got into you? For God’s sake, just follow the rules or we’ll all be out the door. Though that bathroom was a nasty one—I’ll give you that. I’ve never seen Matron make a girl do that before. When I started, she had me rake leaves out of the back garden. I thought it horrible at the time.”

“I suppose I should be honored.”

“No. You cleaned it, though, right enough; I checked. What’s Matron got in for you?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

Martha chimed in, “I don’t think Matron does it on purpose.”

“No.” Nina sighed. “Of course you don’t. Get your cap on, Kitty, and let’s go.”

? ? ?

The men took daily exercise after breakfast, as long as the weather was fine. As the next day was a textbook example of June in all its beauty, a painting of sunny skies and soft breezes, the men were duly shuffled out behind the house to the grounds. I was sent with them to supervise, in the company of Paulus and one other orderly.

I was starting to understand the intricacies of the staffing at Portis House. Matron hadn’t exactly been truthful with me; in fact, she had outright lied. Even with only nineteen patients, Portis House was grievously understaffed. Everyone—nurses and orderlies alike—was stretched to the breaking point. One week per month on night shift, Matron had told me, but that would require four nurses on rotation; we had only three. Boney was permanently assigned to “special duties” and never had to work nights, part of the reason Nina despised her.

My inexperience meant I hadn’t noticed as quickly as I might have, but I was starting to see. When the last nurse had quit, days had gone by with no nurse on night shift at all. There were only six orderlies, including Paulus, covering twenty-four-hour duty; they did all the heavy work and one of them always had to be on call in case a patient became unruly. They walked around as gray faced as we did. If Matron told me now, as she’d said that first day, that I’d get “two hours of leisure time in the early afternoon,” I would probably laugh in her face, for the idea was as likely as taking a trip to Monte Carlo.

And so now there were three of us—and I a woman—supervising eighteen grown madmen on the open, sun-drenched lawns of Portis House. There was no fence or wall around the grounds; only the manicured garden near the house was circled with a low garden wall and a waist-high gate that opened out to the grasses and hills beyond. Even a child could have unlatched this gate, or climbed over it, and so the men were essentially given free rein.

“But aren’t they even looking for more staff?” I asked Paulus as we walked through the garden gate and onto the open grounds. Since we had only one gardener, the grasses here were indifferently manicured and they brushed midway up my skirts.

Paulus shaded his eyes and looked about. The men had scattered, some of them walking the hills, others staying close to the house. I had wheeled West in his chair to the terrace and left him there at his own request, unable to spend all of my attention on one man even if he was helpless without me. “They won’t get more staff,” he said. “Not now.”

“Why not?” The men were given no games to play, so they simply wandered, or sat on the ground in the sun. They looked strange, dotting the landscape in their matching uniforms reading PORTIS HOUSE HOSPITAL, against the greenery and the bright blue of the sky. I realized with a chill that no one wanted to give these men a tennis racquet or, worse, a croquet mallet.

“Money, of course,” said Paulus in his usual brusque way. “They have to make a profit, don’t they? That’s what it’s all about.”

“They could take more patients,” I said. “Open the west wing. It isn’t being used.”

“Then they’d need even more staff, wouldn’t they? And in order to use the west wing, they’d have to fix it.”

“What do you mean?”

For the first time he glanced down at me, his big face mildly alarmed. “Has no one actually told you? Don’t go into the west wing. It’s dangerous in there. It’s falling down.”

“Falling down?”

“I mean it,” he said. “I’ve been in there and it’s a mess. There are parts of the ceiling coming loose. The last thing we need is a nurse breaking her neck in the west wing. Then we’d be really understaffed.”

I thought perhaps he was joking, but he kept his face utterly straight and I couldn’t tell. “Thank you. For the warning.”

“Hodgkins is wandering off again.” Paulus trotted off after the short man with no memory, who was as lost as a sheep.

“He’s right—he’s right, you know,” said a voice behind me.

I whirled. “Archie!”

He looked abashed at the greeting, waved a hand briefly at his surroundings. “Matron said—Matron said I could.”

“I’m glad.” He was so pale he nearly glowed in the sunlight, which showed in painful relief how very thin he was, how his uniform hung off him. He was sitting in the grass, propped on his hands behind him, his feet together and his bony knees poking upward. When he sat like that, leaning on his hands, he didn’t shake; he looked like a sick man, but one who might sit in the sunlight and recover.