I heard him blow out a breath.
“Secondly in the Congo, where the sister on ward duty with me was clubbed over the head by a native man whose witch doctor had told him that if he killed a white woman, it would drive away the spirit of the dead wife that haunted him.”
“Good God,” he whispered. “You saw that happen?”
“Yes.”
“Did he try to attack you, too?”
“He didn’t see me. I was in a side room, filling up the medicine trolley for the evening round. I heard a scream—not from the sister, but from one of the patients. It was a maternity ward for the wives of the men who ran the mines. Any one of them could have been killed.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to the woman who had screamed. I didn’t grasp what had happened at first, because Sister Beatrice—the one who’d been attacked—was still on her feet, walking toward the man, making him back off, away from the patients. I don’t know how she did that. It was almost supernatural, as if a spiritual energy was coming from a body that must have already been dead. When her body was examined, it was found that only the skullcap under her veil had kept the brains in place.”
It was a long time since I’d thought about that dreadful day, but the memory was as vivid and shocking as a sequence from a horror film. We weren’t allowed to talk about it at the mission house—but I remembered one of the nuns whispering that Sister Beatrice had been lucky, because she had died for Christ. I hadn’t cried until then, but I’d shed bitter tears in bed that night. How could such a caring, skillful, dedicated person be better off dead? I couldn’t, wouldn’t accept that.
“What happened to the man?” Jack’s voice brought me back to where I was.
“He disappeared into the bush,” I replied.
“Weren’t you afraid after that?”
I considered for a moment before answering. “I was more shocked than afraid,” I said. “The native men who worked as orderlies found the attacker the next day and dragged him into the hospital, trussed up like a chicken. They wanted to kill him in front of us, to do to him what he’d done to the sister they’d admired and respected. We had to stop them, of course.”
“Was that an order? Did you want to stop them?”
“If it had happened when I first arrived in Africa, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to, no. But I didn’t have to be given an order to know what was right in that situation. We were trying to win souls, you see. We had to set an example. Forgiveness. I told them that Sister Beatrice wouldn’t have wanted him to die and neither did the rest of us.”
“And did it work?”
“Well, they didn’t kill him. The police took over then, of course. He went to prison.”
“I didn’t mean that. Did you win any souls?”
“Some of them had already become Christians. But after that most of the others handed in the necklaces of birds’ claws, bones, and feathers they wore around their necks—the things that welded them to the power of the witch doctors.”
For a long moment he said nothing. “I underestimated you, Alice. I thought your life was all prayer and care.” He stood up, his feet crunching shells as he moved. “You don’t have to get involved in this work if you don’t want to. Sleep on it.” He called Brock, who was rooting about in the seaweed at the water’s edge. “One more thing, you mustn’t mention anything we’ve discussed to the Land Girls or anyone in the village. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
When he and the dog had vanished into the darkness of the woods, I stood for a moment, staring up at the stars. You don’t have to get involved in this work if you don’t want to. His voice echoed inside my head. You said you wanted to do some good, Alice.
Yes, I thought, but this is way beyond what I imagined when I said it.
Chapter 11
I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay awake, trying to imagine the life that Jack had in mind for me. He’d said I could save more lives by working for Churchill’s secret army than by going to Falmouth to nurse at the hospital. I wondered how many men were stranded in France, and how it would feel to be shot out of a plane and come down, probably injured, in a place that was swarming with enemy soldiers.
How can I know God would want this from me?
It was a question that had often been the focus of my prayers when I was a nun. Jack had made it clear that the work could be dangerous. I wasn’t afraid of that. What was I afraid of? Being killed? Having to kill someone?