“He screamed because he was mad. They’re all mad here, or didn’t you notice?” Roger shrugged. “It’s nothing to me. If they act up, day or night, they know me. They know me very well.”
“All right.” This was Paulus, who sat in his chair tilted with its front legs off the ground, rocking back and forth on his huge long legs. “Well-done, lads. You’ve tried your best to frighten the new night nurse. That’s enough.”
“She didn’t need any scaring.” Nathan grinned at me.
“Go on to bed,” said Paulus. “Bammy, you’re dead on your feet. You’re back on shift at six. Roger, just do your job tonight and don’t tell tales. Got it?”
Paulus tilted the front of his chair back to the floor and rose. I could get no proper read on him; he’d defended me more than once, yet seemed indifferent to my existence. It didn’t matter. He was large, and I wished he were on night shift instead of beady-eyed Roger.
I took the lamp Roger handed me and followed him down the corridor and back up the south stairs, thinking about the old library used as an isolation room. I could see now why Archie hadn’t wanted to talk about it. I wondered why a man would try that spot in the grass, in front of the library door, to try suicide. Why more than one man would try it there.
Roger walked me to the nurse’s desk. “I’ll be around about,” he said. “I have duties to attend to. You may not see me, but I rarely go out of hearing distance. If one of the men gives trouble, just yell.”
He was small and slight, not much larger than me, but when I looked closer, I saw he was wiry, with nothing but gristle under his canvas shirt, and his knuckles were pitted and scarred. Another drifter from God only knew what walk of life who had found his way here. “All right.”
He smiled briefly at me with his narrow mouth, a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “If one of them has his dreams, don’t go near him alone. But they’ll be no trouble, I warrant. They know me.” He flexed his hands a little so the scarred muscles moved. “They know me very well.”
After he’d gone, I sat briefly at the desk, which was set in a nook in the wall and was long and thin as a toothpick. I slid open the first rickety drawer, pulling out the linens list and staring at its crabbed, inked columns. Already the words and numbers blurred. I put the list down again and pulled on the other drawers. One was empty, and the other was locked. Martha had given me a ring of keys and I pulled them from the loop at my waist, perusing them. The linen closets, Martha had explained, and the medical supply closets, and the food and tea stores. One small key fit the desk drawer, which opened to reveal a set of hypodermic needles.
They gleamed dully at me in the lamplight: four of them, set in wooden holders, detached from their syringes, the needles impossibly long. They were of wicked metal, lined up with precision, carefully waiting. Set in the compartment next to the needle heads were glass syringes, their silver plungers fully compressed, and four vials of brown liquid, unlabeled. I remembered the chapter I’d read before sleeping. A nurse would attach the needle head, draw the liquid into the syringe, and inject the patient. I shut the drawer and locked it again.
Portis House consisted of a large central section with a smaller wing tilting off on either side—the west wing, which was closed off, and the east wing, which housed all the staff rooms except the nurses’。 The fenced garden was set between the curves of the two smaller wings, as if enclosed in a pair of hands. It was the central wing, easily triple the size of either of the smaller ones, that contained the men’s bedrooms, with the nurses’ old nursery on the floor above, the common and dining rooms on the floor below, and the kitchen and laundry in the basement.
I walked the long corridor of the main section softly in the quiet. Mullioned windows lined one wall, looking out over the front portico and the statue of Mary. The other wall had doorways to the men’s bedrooms, and turns to secondary corridors lined with even more doors. I had been in this place a dozen times, but never in the dark and silence of night shift, and never alone. Pale light from the silver quarter moon gave only the faintest shimmer to the windows, the light giving up even before it hit the sills. From paraffin lamps in holders along the walls between the windows rose curls of pungent smoke.
Each man’s door was, as per the rules, unlocked and open. Most had pushed their door almost closed, trying for as much privacy as possible. Perhaps, with a new night nurse on duty, they were testing how strict I’d be. I didn’t much care. I wasn’t of a mind to pick arguments over whether I could see into their rooms or not.
I approached the first door and read its wooden placard:
Thomas C. Hodgkins D.O.B. 7 January 1890 Admitted 21 December 1918
Tom, the man with no memory of the war. He’d been in this place six months. I pushed the door open and looked in, noting the tidy room with its faint smell of used socks, and the heaped and snoring figure on the bed. I pulled the door to again and moved on.
It went like this, room by room. Each man was asleep, or at least pretending to be so. I moved as quietly as I could. I had just begun to hope my first “round” might be a success when from the room I was approaching came a moan and a thundering crash.
Oh, God, I thought. A nightmare already. I pushed into the room to find Somersham, who’d been sedated during the afternoon session, on his knees on the floor, his bedclothes tangled around him. It looked as if he’d been trying to get up for some desperate reason.
“Somersham,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me. I raised my lamp and saw the glassy, sick look on his face and knew he was not having a nightmare. I swung around, looking in the dark for a basin. There was none, but I grabbed the pitcher on the washstand and, putting down the lamp, barely got it under his chin before he started vomiting.
He did so for a long time, though he had been asleep through supper and there was nothing in his stomach. The sound of it went on, torturous, until I was wincing. It paused only long enough for him to briefly take a breath, look up at me, and say, “I think it’s stopping,” before he was bent over helplessly again.
“Somersham,” I said to him in a low voice when he stopped again. “What in the world is the matter? Is there anything I can do?”
He straightened. His hair was on end, his face slick with oily sweat. He was only twenty-one or so, and the stubble on his cheeks was sparse. His eyes rolled back, the lids closing. He threw up—or his body made the motions—one more time, and then he slouched back against the bed frame, his legs still tangled in his blankets, his fingers dropping the jug into my waiting hands.
He closed his eyes again. I stared at him, crouched and ready, imagining every kind of incurable fever. “Somersham? Are you ill?”
He moaned a little, raised one hand in a weak effort, and let it fall. I leaned forward, took his shoulders gently. “Let’s get you back into bed.”
It took some doing, as even though he was young and small, he still weighed much more than I did. He tried to help, but his eyes kept rolling back in his head in that alarming way, the lids fluttering open and closed. I touched his forehead, the only thing I knew how to do. It was the sedative, I figured, wearing off and tearing him apart as it did so.