“You are the better surgeon,” he added. “But you understand, it can’t be helped. I’ll have to take him in with me.”
“I do, sir,” said Hugh. He was relieved to see the red-brick house and the fine consulting rooms officially disappear from his future. He was happy to let go of the dream of being the renowned London surgeon, for he had no interest now in what seemed like the shallow trappings of fame and society. Instead he could only see the little red rooftops of Rye, all huddled under the church, and the broad green of the marshes at sunset, the dark bluff of the Sussex hills behind, and a small cottage on a steep cobbled lane.
“Ten-day pass,” said the surgeon. “Best of luck to you, my boy.”
—
While they waited for a hospital ship, Hugh consulted with the other doctors, changed dressings himself, and talked the nurses into bringing extra beef broth, extra butter, extra blankets. He used his credentials to be allowed to stay all day, and at night he slept on the floor by Daniel’s cot, rolled in a blanket. If love and care could shepherd his cousin and the others safely home, he was determined to provide both.
But Daniel grew worse as the others grew stronger. He was intermittently subject to a high fever that left him shaking and covered in sweat. His skull had not been broken open, which would have been a sure mark of death, but his head wound did not heal as fast as Hugh would have liked, and he suspected his cousin’s brain was swelling. Daniel began to be confused about his surroundings, and he called a nurse Auntie several times.
On the morning that the hospital ship appeared in the English Channel, Daniel seemed calm and strangely lucid after a night of trembling sweats.
“I am not going to leave this place, Hugh,” he said. “All night I dreamed of Aunt Agatha and Uncle John’s garden, and of you and me smoking on the terrace, and I knew I was sitting there for the last time.”
“Don’t speak that way,” said Hugh. “The ship is coming, Daniel.”
“I’m not afraid,” said Daniel. “I think Craigmore is waiting for me. I am only sad to leave you all, and I don’t want you to be sad.”
“The ship is coming now,” said Hugh.
“I need you to take care of the boy,” said Daniel. “To get him home to his mother.”
“We will take him home together.”
“Is Wheaton awake?” asked Daniel.
“I would be sleeping if you weren’t chatting like fishwives over there,” said Harry, his gruffness hiding his emotion.
“I’m so sorry about your father, Harry,” said Daniel.
“If you see him up there, smoke a cigar with him for me,” said Harry. “Tell him not to come and rattle all the dressers when I borrow his guns for the shooting.”
“A lovely sentiment,” said Daniel. “And I thought you such a brute, Harry.” He seemed cheered by such a spirited exchange, but his breathing was very shallow.
“You will come home with me,” said Hugh. “I insist.”
“I need to give you my poems,” said Daniel. He reached with some difficulty under his pillow for his small black notebook. “Lock them in a drawer if you must, but perhaps you will ask Beatrice Nash to edit them.”
“Not your friend, Mr. Tillingham?” asked Hugh.
“No, no, he would edit them to death in his own image,” said Daniel. “Your Beatrice has a light touch. If you wish to publish them, give them to Beatrice.”
“She is not my Beatrice,” said Hugh.
“Make her so, Hugh,” said Daniel. “She is so obviously meant to put up with you.”
“Daniel, you must be strong,” said Hugh. But Hugh could feel a tear on his cheek. His vibrant younger cousin was so very frail; his skin seemed to have already assumed the strange, waxy translucence of death.
“Will you write me a letter, Hugh, as they do for all the boys who must leave us?”
“Of course,” said Hugh. He fumbled for a pen and found a blank page at the back of the notebook.
“Give my father the respects of his son and tell him I hope I have performed my duty,” he said. “To my Uncle John, write that I send all the love a nephew ever gave a loving uncle.” He paused to catch a fleeting breath and added, “Tell Celeste she made me the happiest of men and restored my name and spirit with the gift of her hand. I hope she and the child will live a happy life.”
“And what message have you for Aunt Agatha?” said Hugh. Daniel did not reply. He seemed to be fading into sleep. “Do not leave her unforgiven, Daniel. Do not leave her with anger, Cousin, for my sake if nothing else.”
“Tell her I always knew,” said Daniel faintly.
“That she loved you?” asked Hugh.
“Tell her I always felt her great love like a blanket around me. Now I am come to the edge of the place she feared”—he paused and seemed to stare as if at a new landscape—“tell her I can better understand why she tried so hard to save me. I have caused her fear to come true.”
“It is not your fault,” said Hugh. “You did your duty.”
“Oh, Hugh, she will be so unhappy,” said Daniel. “Tell her I will die with her name on my lips.”
“You are half my life, Cousin,” said Hugh. He could barely write for the tears moistening the paper and smudging the ink. “You can’t leave me to go home to Sussex alone. Please don’t go.”
“You are half my life too,” said Daniel. “Live for both of us, Hugh. Love for both of us. And for goodness’ sake try to be a little less stuffy.”
“Am I writing that down too?” asked Hugh, smiling and crying at the same time.
“Yes, dear Hugh. It is the unexpected note that makes the poem. You, Hugh, are the unexpected note.”
She wrote to Daniel every day, setting aside the hour from ten to eleven in the morning to sit in her study and stare at the bare branches of the trees, and the frost under the hedges, as she composed her careful lines. It was a bitter winter, and the glass study was unheated. Jenny brought a hot brick for her feet, as usual, and she wore gloves with the fingers cut out; and the cold and the wisp of her breath added the proper dimension of penance to the ritual.
She did not beg him to love her again, or to forgive her for what she had done in her fog of anxiety and fear. She did not seek to burden him with her pleading. Instead she wrote a cheerful account of the small events that stack, one upon the other, to build an ordinary day. She wrote of Smith and the gardener hacking the last frozen cabbages from the ground. She wrote of having to speak sternly to Cook, who had discarded her boots, and wore only men’s socks in the kitchen on account of her inflamed bunions. She reported in detail on Celeste’s contentment and how determined she was not to let her increasing girth keep her from the sick visiting and her needlework. She had made lace for baby bonnets and donated much of it for other young mothers at the church, and she played the piano weekly at the hospital and the almshouses.
They were keeping chickens behind the stable house and were drawing plans to turn over the lawn in her private garden to plant vegetables in the spring. From a surfeit of caution, she was careful not to catalog John’s comings and goings. She referred to “an uncle of yours” and reported on such interesting news as his being an absolute baby about having a tooth pulled at the dentist and his new interest in acquiring goats, goats offering milk and meat while being better sized for a large in-town property than a cow. Jenny and Cook, she reported, had balked at the idea of eating goat, as if offered rattlesnake or crocodile, and “an uncle of yours” was in complex negotiations to have the goats sent to a farm when the time came, to be exchanged for a smaller portion of a butchered lamb.