“But aren’t they even looking for more staff?” I asked Paulus as we walked through the garden gate and onto the open grounds. Since we had only one gardener, the grasses here were indifferently manicured and they brushed midway up my skirts.
Paulus shaded his eyes and looked about. The men had scattered, some of them walking the hills, others staying close to the house. I had wheeled West in his chair to the terrace and left him there at his own request, unable to spend all of my attention on one man even if he was helpless without me. “They won’t get more staff,” he said. “Not now.”
“Why not?” The men were given no games to play, so they simply wandered, or sat on the ground in the sun. They looked strange, dotting the landscape in their matching uniforms reading PORTIS HOUSE HOSPITAL, against the greenery and the bright blue of the sky. I realized with a chill that no one wanted to give these men a tennis racquet or, worse, a croquet mallet.
“Money, of course,” said Paulus in his usual brusque way. “They have to make a profit, don’t they? That’s what it’s all about.”
“They could take more patients,” I said. “Open the west wing. It isn’t being used.”
“Then they’d need even more staff, wouldn’t they? And in order to use the west wing, they’d have to fix it.”
“What do you mean?”
For the first time he glanced down at me, his big face mildly alarmed. “Has no one actually told you? Don’t go into the west wing. It’s dangerous in there. It’s falling down.”
“Falling down?”
“I mean it,” he said. “I’ve been in there and it’s a mess. There are parts of the ceiling coming loose. The last thing we need is a nurse breaking her neck in the west wing. Then we’d be really understaffed.”
I thought perhaps he was joking, but he kept his face utterly straight and I couldn’t tell. “Thank you. For the warning.”
“Hodgkins is wandering off again.” Paulus trotted off after the short man with no memory, who was as lost as a sheep.
“He’s right—he’s right, you know,” said a voice behind me.
I whirled. “Archie!”
He looked abashed at the greeting, waved a hand briefly at his surroundings. “Matron said—Matron said I could.”
“I’m glad.” He was so pale he nearly glowed in the sunlight, which showed in painful relief how very thin he was, how his uniform hung off him. He was sitting in the grass, propped on his hands behind him, his feet together and his bony knees poking upward. When he sat like that, leaning on his hands, he didn’t shake; he looked like a sick man, but one who might sit in the sunlight and recover.
“The west—the west wing,” he said, as I grabbed my skirts and kneeled next to him. “You forget my palatial suite—my palatial suite is closest to it. Paulus is—correct. Don’t go there.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “I’ve enough to do, thank you very much.”
“It’s the—the damp. It’s very bad. Much of it—is rotting.”
I looked over at the west wing, with its bare, darkened windows. It curved out over the landscape, away from us. “Why there, and not the rest of the house?”
He only shrugged and looked away.
I brushed my palms together and pointed to an especially large set of windows, winking sunlight back at us. “I wonder what those windows are. It must be a large room.”
Archie still said nothing. I’d noticed that, as talking was difficult, he often just liked to listen as I kept the conversation going alone. But this was different. His previous good mood seemed to have suddenly fallen away and he seemed almost sullen.
I kept trying. “I’m going to hazard a guess,” I said. “I think it’s a ballroom. That sounds like something rich people would have. I can’t imagine being so rich. Living grand like that.” He still said nothing, but he was listening, so I continued. “That room there,” I said, pointing to a set of windows at the very end of the west wing of the house, culminating in a door to the outside. “I think that room is—”
“That’s the library,” said Archie. His voice was curiously flat.
I turned to him, but he was still looking away. He had only tilted his head, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “All right,” I said, stepping carefully around this volatile mood. “How do you know? I thought the west wing was closed off.”
“Not the li—not the—” He swallowed. “Not the library.”
I frowned. “So the patients go in there?”
“No.”
What was he getting at? I glanced at the library again, but it sat silent. None of the patients, not even wandering Tom Hodgkins, had gone anywhere near that lonely door. I opened my mouth to speak again, but Archie swiveled toward me now. The sullen mood was gone.
“Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m out here, I imagine—I imagine going that way.” He lifted a hand and pointed, shaking, in the direction of the woods. “I imagine there’s a pub just past those trees. And I go in and—I go in and order bangers and mash and beer.” He smiled at the thought, then looked at me and tapped his temple wryly with a trembling finger.
I sat fully on the ground and pulled my knees up, hugging them. “What’s over there?” I asked Archie, pointing in a different direction, toward a sloping hill.
“The thea—the theater,” he said promptly. “It’s a—a comedy. Very—very good.” He smiled at me again. “Don’t worry. I won’t go. There’s nowhere to go—nowhere to go, is there? Not really. It’s why they don’t bother with fences. We could walk away, but we have no—we have no money, and no one will help a man wearing one—wearing one of these shirts. We all know it. You’ll find us—find us very well behaved today, by the way. The doctors come tomorrow and we—and we have to be well.”
I thought this over and frowned at him. “Be well for the doctors? Archie, I don’t understand.”
He shook his head once, and for a moment his contented expression fell away again and something very bleak, very sad, replaced it. “That’s because—that’s because you’re not a patient here.”
I swallowed. For a long second, which seemed to stretch on forever, he’d left me. It took a moment before his expression turned back to normal, but in that moment I suddenly wondered what had happened to Archie in the war.
“Tell me,” I said, when he had come back to me, “about this part of the country.” I gestured around us at the landscape.
He looked at me pleasantly. “What do you know?”
“Nothing.” My laugh was quick and held a note of bitterness. “I know the streets of London, and that’s all. I know nothing about this place.”
And so he told me about how the hills and the trees gave way to marshes in one direction, and in the other direction, where the land sloped upward, were the rocky cliffs going down to the wild sea. How this entire section of land sloped like a piece of pie, with Portis House sliding down it. He told me about what birds nested here, and which ones migrated through. He told me how the wind blew off the frozen sea in winter, turning sleet into ice on the windows and the branches of the trees. How the bridge to the mainland was often flooded over in rainstorms, and they’d had to wait for the water to come down before getting another delivery of supplies.