“We need to get away.” Jack glanced at the sky as he pulled up the rope ladder. “Will you be able to cope on your own? The medical kit’s down below, inside one of the benches.”
“Is there a hospital on Tresco?” There hadn’t been time—or enough light—to assess the men’s injuries. I’d never had to remove bullets. But I knew enough to realize that it would be dangerous even to try on my own, in these conditions.
“No,” he said, “but there’s one on the main island—St. Mary’s.”
“We need to get them there, then.”
“You don’t think they can make it back to Cornwall?”
“I wouldn’t like to risk it. They’ll be safe, won’t they, once we reach the Scillies?”
He hesitated a moment. Then he nodded. “You’d better go to them.”
It was getting light by the time I went back up on deck. The men were all sleeping, helped into oblivion by a few sips of the brandy I’d found when I located the medical kit. I’d had to tourniquet three of them, including the American, who’d been shot just above the elbow. The fourth man—a Scot with an accent so strong I struggled to understand him—had gashed his head.
From what I could gather, the men had been attacked when they’d passed through a checkpoint on their way to the beach. Their Resistance courier—the man who had come to meet our dinghy—had shot the German sentry dead when he began firing. The Scot had dived for cover at the sound of gunfire, and had fallen down a railway embankment, his scalp splitting open on a chunk of concrete.
Attempting stitches on a boat that was pitching in the open sea would have been too risky, so I cleaned up the wound and bandaged his head as tightly as I could. When I was satisfied that I’d done all I could for him and the others, I went to get some fresh air.
Jack was scanning the horizon with the binoculars. There was rain in the air, the sea a charcoal smudge against the pale gray of the sky.
“How are the patients?” he asked, as I stepped into the wheelhouse.
“All fast asleep,” I replied. “I’m hoping they won’t wake up until we get them back onto dry land.”
“Well, thank goodness you came. God knows what would have happened otherwise.” He lowered the binoculars and turned to me. “You realize you probably saved their lives?”
I shook my head. “All I’ve done is patch them up. The people at the hospital are the ones who’ll save them.”
“But if you hadn’t been in that boat, they’d never have made it. Not one of them was capable of rowing. They’d have been sitting ducks for the Germans.” He reached into a compartment under the wheel and pulled something out—a bulky shape swathed in white cloth. “Are you hungry?” He unwrapped a loaf of bread and tore off a piece, handing it to me. I bit into it, edging farther into the wheelhouse as the wind spattered raindrops against the back of my neck.
“It’s a shame there’s nothing to go with it,” Jack said between mouthfuls. “We could do with something hot to dip it into. Soup would be good, wouldn’t it?”
I nodded. I hadn’t tasted soup for years. Not since leaving Ireland.
“What’s so funny?”
I hadn’t realized I was smiling. It must have been a wry sort of look on my face, because what I’d been remembering wasn’t very nice. “I was thinking about the convent,” I said. “If you’d done something wrong, they put you on short measures of soup for a week. But there was a worse penance than that.”
“What?”
“Well, if you were really disobedient, there was something else you had to do before you got your soup: you had to kiss the feet of the ten oldest nuns in the convent.”
“Ugh!” He glanced at the bread in his hand as if he’d suddenly discovered it was crawling with weevils. “Why on earth did you become a nun? You could have been a nurse without all of that nonsense.”
“I wanted to work in Africa,” I replied. “It wouldn’t have been easy to do that on my own, at the age I was then.” I glanced through the rain-speckled glass at the gray-green sea, avoiding his eyes.
“That’s quite a sacrifice.”
There was something about the way he said it. I suspected that he’d guessed this wasn’t the whole story. I hadn’t intended to tell him about the boy I’d left behind in Ireland—but in this topsy-turvy world, where so much was supposed to be secret, I suddenly felt compelled to tell the truth.