Sch?nbrunn said quickly, ‘But they were found in the end?’ I could feel him willing her to say the twins had turned up – that news had been received of them since he and I had arrived in England.
‘No, they weren’t found,’ said Mrs Battersby. ‘Not hide nor hair nor whisker. There were all kinds of suspicions and rumours that some nasty-minded person might have taken them. Some folk said they had seen a stranger hanging around, offering children sweets. But the police thought it unlikely anyone took the girls. They were in the hospital, you see, with other children, and nurses and doctors all around – very strict isolation it had to be, and they kept all the doors locked and didn’t allow anyone in apart from the doctors and nurses. They wouldn’t even let the parents in.’
‘An isolation hospital,’ said Sch?nbrunn, thoughtfully. ‘Yes, it would certainly have been difficult for anyone to get in there.’
‘It’s my belief the girls weren’t as poorly as we thought, and they ran away to get back to their homes. I can only trust to the good Lord that they found their way there, and that some Christian soul helped them, for the thought of them out there in the snow and ice … I keep hoping we’ll hear something. I wake up many a night, thinking I can hear them chattering away to one another in their bedroom – although Mr Battersby believed they didn’t always need to speak to understand one another, if you take my meaning. And then I think, well, perhaps tomorrow there’ll be a letter or a telephone call to say they’re all right.’
‘I do hope there will,’ I said, and I meant it more than she could have known.
‘Mr Battersby took it very badly. There’s nights he goes out and walks the lanes – even though walking any distance is a sore trial to him, having taken a bullet in the last war – but he can’t get rid of the idea that he might come across some clue that’s been missed. “Girls,” he’ll call, just softly like, not wanting to alarm them if they’re in earshot, which of course they aren’t. He knows it’s illogical to call for them, but he says he can’t seem to help it. “Girls,” he calls. “Where are you?”’
I wanted to tell her who we were and how we, too, were trying to find the twins, for the thought of that poor man wandering the lanes calling for the lost girls was almost more than I could bear. Sch?nbrunn sent me a warning glance.
‘Folks said it was the infirmary’s fault they went,’ said Mrs Battersby, ‘but I never believed that, for those doctors and nurses were good as gold to those children, and you’d maybe like to put that in your forms as well, Mr … er … I did hear the Sister in charge left the place almost immediately afterwards, though. I don’t know what happened to her – there was some story that she couldn’t face having lost two of her charges, and that she simply walked out that same night or it might have been the next day.’
Sch?nbrunn frowned, and I could see he was wondering if this might be a useful line of enquiry. But he did not say anything, and I managed to ask about the infirmary itself. Had it been near here?
‘Oh, yes. Ugly old place it is, just a few miles away. If you’re going back to Oxford you’ll likely see it across the fields. The nurses scrubbed out a few of the rooms and disinfected them to use as wards, and the men carried in beds and suchlike.’ She shivered. ‘I dare say the children’d be too ill to notice much, but I wouldn’t want to be in that house. A gloomy place it is, built more than a hundred years ago, and an odd history it’s got, if you can believe all you hear. At one time it was made into some kind of orphanage – Victorian days, that was – and they say all manner of cruelties went on there. But you can’t believe all you hear.’
I was about to ask outright for the name of the place, but Sch?nbrunn forestalled me, saying, ‘It sounds something of a landmark.’