“It has,” Eleanor admitted.
“My greatest fear, when recruiting my nurses, was that they would become too attached to certain soldiers in their care. It would reflect badly on the nurse herself, and more importantly, it would put our entire mission into question. You know, of course, that we have many detractors, both here and at home?”
“I do.”
“Narrow-minded people who believe our nurses are nothing more than opportunists and worse?”
Miss Nightingale offered another spoonful of the cereal, and though Eleanor had not yet regained her appetite, she was not about to refuse it. “That is why I must ask you to do nothing—and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough—that would bring your service here, or ours, into disrepute.”
Eleanor signaled her assent with a mute tilt of the head.
“Good,” Miss Nightingale said. “Then I think we understand each other.” She got up, carefully placing the cereal bowl on the seat of the wooden chair. “I trust in your judgment and take you at your word.” With a rustle of her skirt, she went to the door, where Moira was waiting. “I’m afraid there has been more bloodshed near the Woronzoff Road. I will need you both to report for duty tomorrow at first light.”
Then she was gone. Eleanor’s head fell back on the pillow and stayed there until the night came…and with it, again, Sinclair.
He had studied her face in the candlelight as if he were looking for clues, but seemed happy with what he saw. “You’re better,” he said, putting his hand to her brow. “The fever’s gone.”
“It is,” she said, resting her cheek against his palm.
“Tomorrow, we can leave this accursed place.”
Eleanor didn’t know what he was talking about. “Leave?” Sinclair was in the army, and she was to report for duty in the morning.
“We can’t very well stay here, can we? Not now.”
Eleanor was confused. Why not? What had changed, apart from the fact that they had both recovered?
“I’ll manage to find some horses,” he went on, “though we might have to make do with just one.”
“Sinclair,” Eleanor said, worried that his own fever might have returned after all, “what are you saying? Where would we go?” Was he delusional?
“Anywhere. The whole damn country is a battlefield. Wherever we go, we shouldn’t have any trouble finding what we need.”
“What we need?”
That was when he had met her gaze most steadily, cupping her face between his hands, before speaking. He had knelt by the bed and, in a low voice, told her a story, a story so terrible she had not believed him—not a word of it. A tale of creatures that haunted the Crimean night, and preyed upon the dying. (“I see it in my dreams every night,” he said, “and still I could not tell you what it was.”) Of a curse, or a blessing, that defied death itself. Of a need that never stopped…and to which she was now, like him, a slave. She couldn’t believe it, and she wouldn’t believe it!
But she could feel the wound just above her breast—it had left a telltale scar—which Sinclair said was the proof.
He kissed it now, contritely, and she felt the hot tears burning in her eyes. She turned her face to the wall, gasping for breath. The room, which had a tall window opening onto the sea, suddenly felt unbearably close and stifling.
Sinclair clutched her hand, but she withdrew that, too. What had he done to her? What had he done to them both? If he was lying, then he was mad. If he was telling the truth, then they were both doomed to a fate worse than death. Eleanor had been raised in the Church of England, but she had never been particularly devout; she left that to her mother and her sisters. But what Sinclair was telling her was even to her mind a sacrilege of such magnitude that she could barely contemplate it…or dwell on the life that it would necessitate.
“It was the only way I could save you,” Sinclair was saying. “Forgive me. Eleanor. Please say that you can forgive me.”
But at that moment, she could not. At that moment it was all she could do to breathe the damp air of the Bosporus, and consider what she might do…
Even now, it was a dilemma that offered no easy way out.
As she paced the floor of the infirmary, it was a struggle to keep her thoughts from the white metal box—with the blood inside it—that stood before her. All she had to do was reach out, open it, and take what she needed. There it was, beckoning to her.
She forced herself to look away and went to the window.