THIRTY-SEVEN
Watson awoke with a start, his mind struggling to make sense of where he was or what time it was. He was lying, still fully clothed, on one of the cot-beds. In the lamplight he could see Mrs Gregson on one of the others, sitting upright, with Miss Pippery curled next to her, eyes tight shut. The older woman was stroking the young VAD’s hair, slowly and tenderly. She smiled when she saw Watson was awake.
He helped himself to some water and looked at his watch. It was almost midnight. The last he remembered was a visit from Torrance and more cross words with the major. Then, another infusion of blood and feeling light-headed. Staff Nurse Jennings had come, he recalled, although he couldn’t say whether she volunteered blood or not. The tent swam a little with the effort of remembering. ‘I’m sorry—’ he began.
Mrs Gregson shook her head. ‘I’d have woken you if anything happened. You looked all done.’
He moved stiffly, feeling his age, over across to where de Griffon lay. He no longer had the oxygen mask on, his face looked serene, his breathing was steady. Watson gingerly checked the pulse. It was nicely robust.
‘I think you saved him,’ said Mrs Gregson.
‘I think we saved him. I’ll need to question him about how this started, once he is strong enough. And I should get his sample to a laboratory.’ Watson had saved some of the blood extracted from de Griffon for analysis.
‘All that can wait. You look dreadful. You gave too much blood.’
It was probably true. He was certainly fatigued and the room felt as if he were on some ocean liner, rolling gently in a swell. ‘You did the same.’
She threw him a look that, without any need for vocalizing, told him she was younger and fitter than he. ‘I’ll wake up Alice – Miss Pippery – in a while or so and I’ll get some sleep myself. But you go back to your room, now. That’s a VAD order. The other thing can wait.’
‘The other thing?’ he asked groggily.
She mimed digging with a shovel.
He shook his head. ‘Mrs Gregson, I am many things, but I’m not a grave robber. We’ll have to go through proper channels.’
She raised an eyebrow to show what she thought of those. ‘Go to bed. Now. Shoo.’
Too weary to argue, he thanked her, picked up his tunic and walked out into the dank night.
Well done, Watson, said the imposter in his head.
Yet, even knowing it was fraudulent, the return of the voice gave him some comfort. As he took one leaden step after another up the hill, his collar turned up to the wind, he wondered how his life might have turned out without that fateful meeting in the chemical laboratory of St Bart’s. It was one of those forks in the road that litter everybody’s life. That one had hinged on a chance conversation with Stamford, his former dresser from Bart’s, at the Criterion Bar. What would he have become if their paths had never crossed and Stamford hadn’t engineered a meeting with a man who had ‘a passion for definite and exact knowledge’? And if that man hadn’t already secured lodgings in Baker Street?
He would have become a quotidian GP, he supposed, like one of those he had bought his several practices from over the years, fingers stained with silver nitrate from burning warts, iodine from treating cuts and burns and nicotine from the endless cigarettes a long surgery demanded, his shoulders hunched from too many bedside visits, the hours spent peering over dying men and expectant mothers.
No, he’d take the way the world had turned out for him over the past few decades. Even if the final act wasn’t the one he had been anticipating. But then, he thought as he heard the low, pitiful moans of a delirious soldier issue from one of the tents, who could have anticipated all this?
In answer, there came only the low grumble of assault guns from the south.