I thought the locked drawer wouldn’t open; I nearly dropped the keys in my haste. Only when I pulled one of the hypodermics from its slot and felt its unfamiliar weight in my hand did I remember that I had never given an injection before. I fumbled with the needle, with the vial of liquid, and ran back to Archie’s bedside.
Archie had stopped screaming, but he still struggled under Roger’s grip. Sweat beaded on his reddened face and he stared at Roger with deadly hate. I approached the bed, readying the needle as I’d seen in Practical Nursing, trying to grip it properly between the fingers and the pad of the thumb. I jerked up the sleeve of Archie’s pajama top, revealing his upper arm.
“Go ahead,” Roger grunted at me. “Quickly.”
I pressed the needle against Archie’s skin. I swallowed. My throat was as raw as sandpaper, pain blooming at the base of my jaw and at the back of my neck. I pictured the book again, the ink diagrams, the words that ran through my head.
Quickly.
Somersham’s vomiting. It had nothing to do with the drugs. Part of his particular neurasthenia.
Quickly.
Captain Mabry’s humiliation, Dr. Thornton’s eloquent little lesson. These men are not your friends.
Nurse Ravell, so frightened she’d run in the night. This had happened to her, too.
Quickly.
“For God’s sake!” Roger nearly shouted. “I can’t hold him.”
I jabbed the needle under Archie’s skin and pushed the plunger home.
It was messy; Archie gave a yelp of pain. I wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t expert enough. In a matter of seconds, it made no difference. His body collapsed on itself, a dead weight. Roger let him go and stood, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“Bloody hell,” he said. He looked at me. “You all right?”
I nodded. I was kneeling on the floor next to the bed, the emptied needle in my hand. I slumped down, my bottom landing hard on the backs of my calves, my arms dropping to my sides. I couldn’t speak. I watched Archie’s body on the bed, his head tilting senselessly to one side, his face slack.
“I’d strap him in,” Roger went on, “but he won’t need it now. One of those doses and they sleep like babies. We won’t hear another peep from him tonight.” He looked at me again. “You’ll want some aspirin, then. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” I rasped. I owed my life to this petty, bitter little man.
“A bit of a shake-up, I suppose, but you’ll get over it.”
“Yes.”
He seemed to want to talk, now that the danger was past, or perhaps he was waiting for a rush of gratitude. “He’s always been quiet, that one, until recently. I don’t know what’s gotten into him, but it’s getting worse. Nearly did for that nurse last time, though I wasn’t on duty at the time. He was on grave duty, you know.”
I looked up. “What?”
“Grave duty. On the front line. Had to pick pieces of men out of the mud, try and match them up, identify them for burial. I heard they left him on it for four weeks before he cracked completely. They’ll never get him well, this one. Not after that.”
I stared at him, my brain turning over slowly, unable to take in anything so horrible. Roger looked at my expression and shrugged.
“All right,” I said. “You may go now. Thank you.”
But he was suspicious. “There’ll be an incident report, you know. I’ll make certain of it.”
“I’m sure you will.”
When he finally left, I closed my eyes, my head spinning. I listened to the slow rasp of Archie’s breathing.
I wasn’t mad, not the way these men were. I hadn’t been to war. I didn’t have their memories, their terrible experiences, their close knowledge of death, their fears.
But after today, perhaps, I thought I was beginning to see what they saw in their nightmares.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Three days after the incident with my father in the bed, I’d ducked into a coffeehouse in London. It was cold and damp out, and my usual routine was to stand in a crowded coffeehouse, pretending to look over the menu on the wall until it was almost my turn to order; then I’d turn suddenly, as if I’d forgotten something, and leave. It was a good way to warm one’s feet and hands if one was in the middle of a long walk home.
Two women behind me had been having a conversation. The niece of one of the women had been given a chance at a position at a glove factory in Clerkenwell, but had decided to brush it off and marry her sweetheart instead. “She isn’t even giving them notice,” the woman complained. “She just isn’t going to go. I think she’s mad. What if he doesn’t marry her after all? Good jobs are hard to come by. ‘You’re mad, Rachel Innes,’ I said to her. ‘It’ll come to no good.’ But she’s determined, of course.”
I’d listened a little longer, the back of my neck hot as lit coals. I waited so long it was almost my turn before I left the shop, possessed by a mad idea I had no control over, my hands and feet tingling, my legs moving on their own. I’d found our flat empty, my father not home, and where he was that day I would never know. I’d stuffed as many belongings as I could into a tiny valise and left, my nervous feet clattering loudly on the stairs.
I’d thought I’d get caught. I knew I would. He would come home seconds after I’d left and pursue me; he had been hiding in the closet while I’d been there, waiting in silence for me to make a move; the landlady, hearing my footsteps on the stairs, would somehow know I’d run and get a message to him. Everyone on the street was my father, or sent by him; every pair of eyes reported back to him. Even when I got to Clerkenwell and asked in a local shop where the glove factory was, I thought I’d be questioned. I thought the police would come. And when I knocked at the personnel office at the factory itself and presented myself as Rachel Innes, reporting for work, I thought they would know I was lying.
But they hadn’t. They’d just put me to work, indifferent. It seemed I’d gotten away with it. They never knew that I slept in a church vestibule all the nights until I received my first pay, that I bathed and washed my clothes in the women’s lav, that I worked the line faint with hunger and fear. They never knew I was a girl who didn’t belong there, who didn’t deserve it, who deserved nothing but death under her father’s thumb. And I began to see that if I could be smart, if I could keep moving and not get caught, they would never know.
I did not go out with men when they asked me. Not ever.
I ran my hands along the bruises on my neck, pressing them with unsteady fingers.
Archie had throttled me. My body had felt a sickening recognition of the feeling; I’d been throttled before. But this had been different. I hadn’t felt the bewildered surprise of my childhood, or the deadened stillness of the day with the frying pan. I’d only felt the numbness of shock, and now rage and empty, hopeless despair. I had promised myself, Never again. And yet here I was, treating bruises on my neck. It was as if, even to myself, I had never believed my promise.
“Kitty.”
I was still sitting on my knees in Archie’s room. I wondered whether I was going to be sick.