“No,” I said, moving forward as she retreated. “He’s fine.”
It started to rain harder, the water no longer soaking into the earth but creating pockets of mud and puddles. I could feel water trickling into the neck of the mackintosh and down my neck. The effect was chilling and uncomfortable.
“Kitty.” Maisey had stepped forward. Her pretty face almost sagged with unhappiness as she looked at me.
“What is it?” I put the letters under my coat. “What is the matter, Maisey?”
“I read the letters,” she confessed. “I couldn’t help it. They had to do with Mikael. I wanted to know.” She shook her head, berating herself. “I shouldn’t have. Please tell Mr. Yates I’m sorry about it.”
I waited. Whatever had made her unhappy, this wasn’t it. “All right. I’ll tell him.”
“What I read there—it made me curious. I did some digging.”
“Digging?” What digging could she do from her father’s house in Bascombe?
“Nothing is what I thought it was, Kitty,” said Maisey. “Nothing. It’s worse than you can imagine. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I shouldn’t have come here over the bridge in the rain, but I just didn’t know—” Now I could see she was crying, her tears mixing with the rain on her face. “I didn’t know what to do, and now I still don’t know.”
“Maisey.” I tried to be calm. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. I can’t tell you now. I didn’t think it would be like this here, that this would be happening. But now there’s no time. If I don’t go back, I won’t be able to get my bicycle back over the bridge.”
“Maisey, please tell me. What is it? What did you find?”
“Everything,” she said miserably. “I made some notes. I’ll put them on the step here. They’re incomplete because I thought I’d be able to talk to you and Mr. Yates about it. But I think if you read everything, you’ll put it together.”
As I watched her place a few folded sheets of paper on the step, I felt stricken for reasons I didn’t understand. “Maisey. Just tell me. Are they dead?”
“Yes,” she said. “And if Portis House is haunted, the ghosts are Mikael and Nils, his father. I’m so grateful you’re being evacuated, because if you weren’t, I’d ask you to leave with me.”
“All right.” I took the notepapers in fingers that were numb with cold rain. “I’ll be gone in a matter of hours, Maisey. I promise.”
“Write me from Newcastle on Tyne,” she said. “When everything is settled. I don’t know what I’m going to do until then, but I’ll find a way through it. And then you can help me decide what to do.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Nina had made me take a few hours’ rest while we waited for the ambulances to come. I’d refused to go upstairs to bed, but spread a blanket in the corner of the floor and curled up to sleep, another blanket that Jack had pulled from the linen closet bundled under my head. “You should sleep, too,” I told him, as he crouched next to me.
He shook his head. “I haven’t been working your hours. Don’t worry, Kitty. I’ll be here. I’ll wake you if you’re needed.”
I gave him the letters and the notes that Maisey had brought. As I lay down, my apron rustled, and I pulled out the envelope I’d taken from Mr. Deighton’s briefcase a lifetime ago. I turned it over in my hand, looking at Matron’s writing, and then I held it out to him. “Take this, too.”
“What is it?”
“The incident reports Matron gave Mr. Deighton.”
Jack took it, his gaze searching my face. “I see. Are you going to tell me where you got them?”
“Later.” I hadn’t thought I could rest, but I found myself fading. “It will make a good story for the journey to Newcastle on Tyne.”
“Don’t you want to read it?”
“I thought I did,” I replied, “but now I don’t think so. Perhaps you could read it for me.”
“All right,” he said. “Just rest.”
“Jack,” I said, the question seeming urgent in my tired mind, “which dream was yours? I read them all twice and I can’t tell.”
His hand rested lightly on top of the blanket he’d pulled over me. “I’d rather you didn’t know,” he said after a moment. “We’re all dreaming the same thing—I see that now. It doesn’t matter which one is mine.”
I wanted to argue, but I was asleep before I could try.
I awoke a few hours later as Nina shook me. It was full dark now, and I could hear rain pounding on the windows. The patients on the floor next to me were quiet.
I rolled over. “What time is it?” I asked her.
“Nearly one o’clock,” she replied.
“One o’clock!” I gaped at her. The ambulances were over four hours late. “Have the ambulances arrived?”
“Just now,” said Nina. “But there’s a problem.”
I threw off my blanket and stood, straightening my wrinkled skirts. I’d slept fully dressed, including apron, stockings, and shoes. My hair was still wrapped in its braids. It wasn’t the best way to sleep, but I’d slept rough before. I followed Nina quietly toward the front door, stepping over the sleeping bodies of the patients.
Paraffin lamps had been brought in to light the hall. The flickering light created an eerie effect: Rows of bodies lined the floor, as still as corpses, while the rain fell relentlessly outside. I could see the men’s faces as they slept feverishly, their flushed cheeks and sunken eyes, and I recognized every one of them. Martha, Matron, and Boney had been placed side by side. They all seemed to be sleeping, and Martha tossed uneasily.
We stepped through the front doorway to find Jack Yates standing on the portico, sheltered from the rain by its colonnade. Captain Mabry stood next to him, and they were talking to two men in mackintoshes and watch caps. Four covered ambulances idled on the circular drive, and two other drivers stood in the rain and waited, smoking cigarettes.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Jack turned to me. “There are four ambulances,” he replied, “and each can only take four patients. They can only take sixteen.”
I turned to the drivers. “We’ve seventeen sick here,” I said.
“Twenty-one,” Jack corrected me. “Four more fell ill while you were sleeping.”
I was appalled. “Are you saying that fourteen of the patients here are now sick?”
“And four orderlies,” he said, “and three nurses.”
“We can’t take them all,” said one of the drivers. “We’ve no room.”
“You could put more patients in each ambulance,” Jack protested. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“I can’t do it. Each ambulance only takes four. Otherwise it’s overcrowding.”
Jack shook his head. “I saw worse than that at the Front.”
“So did I,” said Captain Mabry.
“It can’t be done,” said the second driver. “We can’t overcrowd ambulances like that. It’s against regulations. We’d be sacked.”
“What about the rest of the sick?” I asked.
The second driver turned to me. “We’ll send back a second detachment, but it won’t be until after the rain has stopped and the bridge is passable. As it is, we had a devil of a time getting here, and we have to move now, or we won’t get out of here at all.”
“These patients could be dead by then.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Jack said. “Are you going to leave these people to die?”
The ambulance driver turned to him with a look of frightened disgust on his face that I was starting to recognize. The sight of a shirt and trousers with PORTIS HOUSE HOSPITAL stenciled on them seemed to bring it out in everyone. “I know one thing,” the man said. “I know I’m not taking orders from a bloody—”