CHAPTER EIGHT
When I said his name, the expression in the man’s eyes dimmed a little, and a shuttered blankness came carefully down. “Do I know you?”
“You can’t be here,” I said. “Not you.”
Jack Yates. Brave Jack, the papers called him, the hero of the war. Newsreels flashed in my mind, imprinted on those rare nights I’d gone to the cinema with a few other girls: Jack Yates at a navy dockside, his long coat open and flapping in the wind, his hair blowing, a smile on his face, shaking the hand of Winston Churchill. Jack Yates on the steps of a swank party, posing with Lloyd George’s arm around his shoulders, and the caption Our brave soldiers saluted by none less than the Prime Minister! Newspaper photos of Jack standing at the Dover shore in uniform, his puttees high on his long legs, his hands clasped behind his back. Send Me Back to the Front, Brave Jack Says.
I stepped closer and he slid his feet from the sill and stood, facing me. He was a head taller than I, and something about him took all the air from the room. We’d all adored him, my girlfriends and I, each of us thrilling a little at the pictures of him, at the stories.
He’d been a soldier, an ordinary private—an uneducated boy from Somerset, orphaned and raised by foster parents. Truly from nowhere, the papers marveled, because it was impossible to imagine that someone without a title, someone who had to work for a living, could matter. Thousands of men like that died every day, our sweethearts and husbands and brothers and cousins, and none of them mattered a damn.
But not Jack. In the thick of battle, when his CO and all the officers of his dying battalion had been killed, lowly Jack had led the remaining men on a complex sortie across No Man’s Land, a half-mile stretch littered with barbed wire and bodies. He’d brought them into enemy lines, holding two trenches alone until reinforcements came. When it was over, the Germans had retreated from that section of the line, and a mile of the Western Front had been reclaimed for the Allies. All because of one man, who had not lost a single soldier in the entire suicidal operation.
The newspapers had loved him. He’d been given the Victoria Cross, had been feted everywhere, was seen in every newsreel. Brave Jack Asks the Women of England: Are You Doing All You Can? The girls at the factory wanted to marry him, but when I told that to Ally, she only laughed, saying she’d had enough of soldiers with no money.
I looked into his face now. “You didn’t go mad,” I said. “You never did. Not you.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and was silent for a long moment. “Do I know you?” he asked again.
“Trafalgar Square,” I said. “I was there.”
The hand dropped. “Ah.”
“I froze my arse that night, watching you. Me and my friends.”
“Yes, well.” He moved to brush past me, and I breathed the scent of him, an unfamiliar tang that went straight to my bloodstream. My own smell must have been much less pleasant, but he made no mention of it. His arm, where it brushed mine, was warm. “I’m sorry about your arse.”
“That wasn’t a madman,” I said, “speaking on the platform that night. We were moved to tears.”
It was true. Even I, who hadn’t cried perhaps in years, had cried that night in Trafalgar Square, where we’d gone to see Jack Yates speak as the winter of 1917 settled in. It was supposed to be a recruitment speech, a war bond speech, the kind we’d heard countless times in the past three years. England will endure. England will not be defeated. Your brave soldiers need you. But Jack’s speech had been different. He’d been over there, he’d fought, he was one of us, and he was the only one, in those four long years of propaganda, who spoke to us with honesty. Who had actually meant what he said.
“It was a written speech,” he said to me.
“Of course it was. And you wrote it.”
Surprise made him pause. “What makes you say that?”
“Do you think,” I said, insulted, “that I don’t know the difference between a speech written by a government official and a speech written by a real soldier?” Something about the entire situation made me angry: that magnificent man in Trafalgar Square, his breath puffing icy clouds as he spoke, moving us with his words—that man here, reduced to a madhouse, telling me it had been nothing. “Do you think I’m that stupid?”
“I have no idea.” He rubbed his eyes, his fingers slowly pressing into the sockets. “I don’t even know who you are.”
He didn’t care. My anger stuck in my throat. “Never mind. I’ll take the dishes and go.”
I had turned and moved back to the tray when his hand landed on the dressing table next to me. “Wait.”
I froze. He was too close, his body too near my own. Heat was coming off him as if he had a fever. His arm was solid, the sleeve of his uniform shirt rolled up past the elbow, his forearm sinewy and strong. I felt my back go rigid, my neck begin to knot. I didn’t speak.
“Wait,” he said again, as if I’d said something, and for the first time I realized he was speaking slowly, as if dragging words up reluctantly from his brain. “Trafalgar Square. My speech. Let me explain.”
I swallowed. Drunk, a shrill part of my mind screamed. Or on a narcotic. He outweighs you by three stone and could overpower you as easy as breathing. He could put those hands around your neck in an instant. Damn him anyway. None of the things you believed in mattered to him at all. Get out. Get out now.
“There’s no need,” I managed, my voice stiff and strangled.
His hand touched my bare forearm, and I jumped. “It’s just—”
“Don’t touch me.”
He didn’t let go; I didn’t think he’d even heard me. His fingers were long and agile, the nails cut short, the hand an almost perfect study in the dim light, curling to touch the sensitive skin on the inside of my arm. It wasn’t a tight grip, but I thought of the last time a man had touched my bare skin and I felt like screaming. The fact that my blood raced under Jack Yates’s fingers made it worse.
“You’re right,” he said, the drag still on his words, just a slight lag that a casual observer might not notice. He was fighting it hard. “I did write the speech. I thought they’d censor me, cut me off somehow, but they didn’t. I think they knew what I would say. I believed it.” He took a breath, began to quote the speech itself. “‘I’m just a regular soldier . . .’”
“Let me go,” I said.
“‘。 . . but despite this war, in this new world, I am more. I can be more. You can be more. Anyone can be more . . .’”
I turned. I thought I was fast, but—drugged or not—he was damnably faster. He caught my wrist before I had the ghost of a chance to slap his face.
“What is your name?” he said, his dark eyes looking into mine. His pupils were dilated, but somewhere in there I saw a spark that made me want to look away.
“Kitty Weekes,” I said, holding his gaze.
“Kitty Weekes,” he said slowly. “I think you’re in some sort of trouble.”
“Nurse Weekes.”
I whirled. Matron stood in the open door behind me, the massive bulk of Paulus Vries at her shoulder. Wedged in on her other side was Boney, her eyes nearly bulging out of her narrow face.