Silence for the Dead(52)

After that first night, Archie was not in his room. When I was back on the day shift, Boney told me he was in the infirmary again.

“You may as well take his supper to him,” she said, handing me a tray and staring at the bruises on my neck in a way I’m sure she thought was discreet. “You’ll have to see him sometime.”

“Is he in there because of me?”

She shrugged. “Matron’s order. It’s either that or the isolation room. He’s been quiet, so he’s in the infirmary.”

“Fine,” I said, and took the tray down the corridor toward the stairs. I didn’t want her looking at my neck anymore.

Archie was curled on his side in bed, his thin body barely making an impression under the covers. His eyes were closed, though I knew he wasn’t asleep; they stayed closed as I brought in the tray and set it on the bedside table.

“They’ve put your soup in a bowl again,” I said. “I’ve told them to put it in a mug, but they don’t listen.”

There was a sound from the bed, and I turned to find him looking at me.

“Expected someone else, did you?” I said.

He stared at the marks on my neck, his expression one of stark horror. “Kit-Kitty—”

“Don’t,” I said. I dumped his tea into the sink, rinsed the cup, and began to carefully transfer the soup. “Don’t say it. Don’t apologize. There’s nothing to apologize for.”

I kept my eyes on the soup. I couldn’t look at him. I could hear his breathing, heavy and harsh.

“I’m s-s—,” he tried.

I gritted my teeth, focused on not spilling the soup. “Archie, stop.”

“I’m so s-s—”

I turned my back and took the empty soup bowl to the sink. I would rinse it before I took it back to the kitchen. I may as well.

“Kitty,” he said again behind me. My vision blurred. I put the soup bowl down and put a hand to my mouth. I stood there for a long time, struggling to take one breath, and another. I recalled it again, the needle I’d jabbed into his arm, the scream he’d made.

It had happened to Maisey Ravell, too, and she’d run from him before he could say he was sorry. As if he were a dangerous monster. And, to all appearances, he was. Or he was just a man who had been through hell and was still there, a man who had spent weeks digging the rotting bodies of his comrades from the mud and still saw visions of it daily.

“Kitty. Pl-please—”

I turned around. His cheeks were wet, though he did not sob. I took a deep breath, took in a gulp of air that smelled of ammonia, musty old sweat, and the faint tang of vomit, the air that was the smell of this place. And then, the tray of supper forgotten, I walked over to the bed and got on it next to him, sitting up with my back against the brass bedstead. He rolled over and put one arm around my hips, his head in my lap. His shaking hand trembled in the folds of my apron.

“It wasn’t you,” I said to him.

He said nothing.

“I know it wasn’t,” I went on. “I knew it at the time, even as it was happening. It was never you. And still I gave you that needle.”

The arm on my hips hugged me a little tighter.

“Who is he?” I ventured. “Do you know?”

He flinched in my lap. I heard him take a breath, but he didn’t answer for a long moment. When he did, his voice was almost a whisper, but his stutter was gone.

“He comes in my dreams,” Archie said. “He tells me I’d be better off dead.”

I stayed silent in shock.

“I tell him no,” the man in my lap went on, a quiet confession. “Always no. But it’s wor—it’s worse and last—last night, I don’t know—it was—”

“Hush,” I said softly. “I understand. I do.”

“I’m sorry,” he managed a long moment later.

“No.” I put my hand on his back, between his narrow shoulder blades, a back that looked as diminished as a boy’s beneath his infirmary shirt. My cheeks were wet, too, now, but I did not sob. “It’s me that’s sorry,” I said through the thickness in my throat. “It’s me that’s bloody well sorry.”

We sat there for a long time, I on top of the covers, my boots on the bed. I, who had stayed away from men for four years. I sat there in bed with a strange man, his arm around me, his head in my lap. It was against every regulation in the world. I couldn’t seem to stop breaking rules, even when I tried.

Finally, he fell asleep. The soup was cold by then, but I didn’t have the heart to take it away. He’d need to eat something when he woke, even something cold. He was too thin as it was.

I slid out of bed and left him, closing the door behind me.

? ? ?

It was time for the men’s leisure hour after supper, and they had assembled in the common room, but as I approached I saw they had all stopped what they were doing. The chess players had turned away from their game; the readers had put the books and magazines down in their laps. Even the men who only stared absently out the window had turned, their gazes alert.

Matron stood in the center of the room. In the soft light of a summer evening she looked the same, her face set in its familiar hard lines under her mannish hair. The electricity was still on—it would not switch off until after curfew—and the lights cast pools of yellow that were slowly losing out to the dusky blue-gray of the long summer twilight out the tall windows and the terrace doors.