Silence for the Dead(34)

Portis House consisted of a large central section with a smaller wing tilting off on either side—the west wing, which was closed off, and the east wing, which housed all the staff rooms except the nurses’. The fenced garden was set between the curves of the two smaller wings, as if enclosed in a pair of hands. It was the central wing, easily triple the size of either of the smaller ones, that contained the men’s bedrooms, with the nurses’ old nursery on the floor above, the common and dining rooms on the floor below, and the kitchen and laundry in the basement.

I walked the long corridor of the main section softly in the quiet. Mullioned windows lined one wall, looking out over the front portico and the statue of Mary. The other wall had doorways to the men’s bedrooms, and turns to secondary corridors lined with even more doors. I had been in this place a dozen times, but never in the dark and silence of night shift, and never alone. Pale light from the silver quarter moon gave only the faintest shimmer to the windows, the light giving up even before it hit the sills. From paraffin lamps in holders along the walls between the windows rose curls of pungent smoke.

Each man’s door was, as per the rules, unlocked and open. Most had pushed their door almost closed, trying for as much privacy as possible. Perhaps, with a new night nurse on duty, they were testing how strict I’d be. I didn’t much care. I wasn’t of a mind to pick arguments over whether I could see into their rooms or not.

I approached the first door and read its wooden placard:

Thomas C. Hodgkins D.O.B. 7 January 1890 Admitted 21 December 1918

Tom, the man with no memory of the war. He’d been in this place six months. I pushed the door open and looked in, noting the tidy room with its faint smell of used socks, and the heaped and snoring figure on the bed. I pulled the door to again and moved on.

It went like this, room by room. Each man was asleep, or at least pretending to be so. I moved as quietly as I could. I had just begun to hope my first “round” might be a success when from the room I was approaching came a moan and a thundering crash.

Oh, God, I thought. A nightmare already. I pushed into the room to find Somersham, who’d been sedated during the afternoon session, on his knees on the floor, his bedclothes tangled around him. It looked as if he’d been trying to get up for some desperate reason.

“Somersham,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me. I raised my lamp and saw the glassy, sick look on his face and knew he was not having a nightmare. I swung around, looking in the dark for a basin. There was none, but I grabbed the pitcher on the washstand and, putting down the lamp, barely got it under his chin before he started vomiting.

He did so for a long time, though he had been asleep through supper and there was nothing in his stomach. The sound of it went on, torturous, until I was wincing. It paused only long enough for him to briefly take a breath, look up at me, and say, “I think it’s stopping,” before he was bent over helplessly again.

“Somersham,” I said to him in a low voice when he stopped again. “What in the world is the matter? Is there anything I can do?”

He straightened. His hair was on end, his face slick with oily sweat. He was only twenty-one or so, and the stubble on his cheeks was sparse. His eyes rolled back, the lids closing. He threw up—or his body made the motions—one more time, and then he slouched back against the bed frame, his legs still tangled in his blankets, his fingers dropping the jug into my waiting hands.

He closed his eyes again. I stared at him, crouched and ready, imagining every kind of incurable fever. “Somersham? Are you ill?”

He moaned a little, raised one hand in a weak effort, and let it fall. I leaned forward, took his shoulders gently. “Let’s get you back into bed.”

It took some doing, as even though he was young and small, he still weighed much more than I did. He tried to help, but his eyes kept rolling back in his head in that alarming way, the lids fluttering open and closed. I touched his forehead, the only thing I knew how to do. It was the sedative, I figured, wearing off and tearing him apart as it did so.

My hands were cold as I pulled the bedclothes up from the floor and tried to tuck them around him. Was this what sedatives did? Was this normal? I knew nothing—nothing. Was there something I should be doing? What if he died on me? For the first time, alone on a dark floor with a semiconscious patient, I was struck by what I had done, what monstrous thing I was pretending. He could die in an instant and I could only look on, helpless.

What had been in that injection?

He seemed to settle, the drug sucking him back into sleep again. “He’s coming,” he said to me with the voice of exhaustion, unable even to open his eyes. “He’s coming. I can hear him.”

“Somersham?”

His eyelids fluttered, the eyes beneath them moving. One chilled hand brushed my arm like a leaf falling in autumn. “Help me,” he whispered, so low I almost thought I’d imagined it. “I’m so afraid.”

My mouth had gone dry. He’s mad, that’s all, I thought, and yet almost without willing it I leaned forward, closer to his face as it slowly went still. “What?” I whispered back to him. “What is it?”

Nothing.

I leaned back again. Silence descended around me, broken only by the rasp of Somersham’s breathing. The lamp I’d set down cast a yellow circle of light on the floor.

I took the fouled water jug and the lamp and stepped into the hall. The commotion hadn’t roused anyone, or if it had, they lay in their beds trying not to listen. Roger, for all his talk of being in earshot, was nowhere to be seen. The moonlight hadn’t moved in the windows. I turned and walked, alone, toward the lav, my footsteps sounding softly on the floor.