Silence for the Dead(38)

I lifted my lamp and plunged downward again, trying to peer ahead, my hand sliding along the banister, my legs disappearing into the gloom. And suddenly I noticed the cold: icy, thickening cold, climbing my ankles and legs as I descended, as if I were walking down a set of steps into icy water. The skin on my legs and thighs rose in goose bumps even under my layers of skirts, and my feet in their boots ached with numbness.

I slowed, bit my lip. There was still no sound from below.

I took another step—the cold rising almost to my waist now—and stopped. I leaned over the banister and swung my lamp in the dark, trying in vain to see something, anything, and failing. The only thing I saw in the dim glow of light was my own breath, puffing in the cold air as if I were outdoors on a winter’s night instead of indoors on a stairwell in June.

I stood still for a long moment, the lamp raised, watching as one breath and then another plumed out into the dark air. There was only the sound of my breathing echoing in the stairwell now, the inhales a high whistle, the exhales gasping with fear. There was silence from the bottom of the stairs, a waiting silence, of something patiently watching me come closer, something with all the time in the world.

Every instinct told me to turn and run; and yet, if I did so, I would turn my back on it to climb the stairs again. And if it followed me . . .

I pushed myself backward and up one step, my boot scuffling on the stair, my hand sliding on the banister and pulling with the slick grip of my palm. My breath rasped. And from below I heard it move in response, heard a footstep and the soft creak of the sole of a foot on the bottom step.

“Nurse Weekes!” Roger’s voice boomed down the stairwell. I glanced up to see him silhouetted in the upper doorway, a place that seemed miles away. “Come quick! Mabry’s nose is bleeding again.”

In a second, purely by instinct, I launched myself up the stairwell toward him, pounding up the spiral as quickly as I could. He gave me a queer look as I reached him, breathless and undoubtedly ghastly. “What were you doing down there?”

I shook my head, unable to form words for an answer, and brushed past him. No sound had followed me up the stairs; the cold was gone. I headed down the hall on legs that wobbled, Roger’s footsteps the only ones behind me.

? ? ?

“It’s nothing,” said Captain Mabry. “I’m quite all right.”

He stood at his washstand wearing the flannel top and trousers that were standard-issue pajamas at Portis House. It was an ensemble that, truthfully, did not look much different from the outfits issued to wear during the day. I thought of the shirtless man I’d seen and gripped the back of the room’s only chair to keep myself upright.

“I can get you something,” I managed. Archie had quieted and I had sent Roger to make sure every patient was accounted for, so we were alone. “Aspirin. Disinfectant.”

“It won’t be necessary.” He was wiping his nose with a flannel, catching the last trickle of blood. This nosebleed was tidier than the last one, as he’d made it to the washstand as soon as it started. Now he glanced at me in the mirror, his tone neutral and not exactly welcoming. “You should sit down.”

I did. There was silence for a long moment. I couldn’t blame him for his demeanor, considering what had happened with the doctors. I took a breath and tried to focus. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I truly am. About earlier. I’m sorry.”

He paused in surprise, the flannel holding steady in midair, but he did not look at me again. Instead he rinsed the flannel in the basin of water, the only sound the gentle splash. Even from where I sat, I could see the dark blood swirling as he rinsed. “It’s all right,” he said at last. “You would have been sacked.”

“For what it’s worth, I think you should be able to see your children.”

His eyes still on the bloody water, he shrugged, the small gesture tight with pain. “They’re right. I’m not fit.”

“That’s rubbish,” I said. “You have a few nosebleeds, that’s all. Your children would survive it.”

“Is that all you think it is?” He dabbed his nose again, then rinsed the flannel, swirling it for longer than necessary. “After the war,” he said slowly, never raising his eyes to me, “I wasn’t myself. I began drinking. It got . . . very bad.” He pulled the flannel from the water, wrung it out slowly. “Antonia—that’s my wife—was frightened. She told her father she didn’t want me around the children anymore. And her father told me that I would come here and recover, or he would move them all back to the family home and I would never see any of them again.”

I sat very still.

“So,” he continued, “I came here. I thought I’d dry out—you know, a few days of the shakes, stiff upper lip, carry on and that sort of thing—and go home and take up my life. And then . . .” He looked up at the blank wall where a mirror would be, though no man was given a mirror in his room at Portis House. He stared at the wall as if he could see himself. As impersonal as a doctor, he pulled downward on the skin of one exhausted, bloodshot eye, and then the other. “The first time it happened,” he said, “I pissed myself. And they told my father-in-law. They told him.”

That bell sounded inside me again, somewhere deep down. Oh, I understood that kind of fear. I understood it well.

Mr. Mabry, said Matron’s voice in my mind, has a particular psychoneurosis. And then, Martha: He gets afraid. He thinks he sees something.