CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Oh, good,” said Jack. “We’re alone.”
I looked up from the weak cup of tea I’d been sipping. It was early morning, purplish light filtering through the rain that still poured down the high windows. I was dressed in my uniform and apron, but I’d left off my cap; there hadn’t seemed much point to wearing it. I sat at the small table in the kitchen, a picked-over plate before me.
Jack had slept for only a few hours, but he looked much better than I imagined I did. He’d shaved, and his sleeves were rolled up in his usual fashion. In the soft light of morning, his presence seemed larger than life, his brows dark wings over eyes that missed nothing about me as they took me in, the line of his jaw as perfect as if etched in ink.
He pulled up a chair and sat across the corner from me. He leaned back, crossed his arms, and stretched out his legs, which were long enough to reach all the way under my chair. “You cooked,” he said.
I nodded. The staff may have gone home, but the kitchen was still well supplied; I’d found bacon, kidneys, eggs, tea, and bread. It hadn’t been particularly hard to manage, and I’d prepared large amounts of each. “Are you hungry?”
“Not now, but the others will appreciate it. Have you checked on Archie?”
“Yes, briefly.” We’d put him in the main hall with the others; Nina had stayed up with them, and when I finished my breakfast I was to relieve her. “Nina says he may have slept a little, but it’s hard to tell. He isn’t responsive and he hasn’t spoken since last night.”
“Mabry and I will go back to the library today. I want to see that lettering in daylight.”
“Because you want to see how he wrote it?” I put my teacup down and stirred it unnecessarily. “Archie had no knife on him. And his fingernails were clean.”
“No.” Jack’s voice was soft. “Because I don’t think he wrote it.”
My throat closed. What had happened, exactly? Would we ever know? “Jack, I don’t know how to help him.”
“You may not be able to. It may be partly a matter of time.”
“We left him there. For three hours.”
“Vries left him there.”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I should have seen he was gone. He was my responsibility. I’ve mucked it up, Jack. I’m in over my head, and I’ve mucked this up so badly.”
“Ah, now, Kitty.” He uncrossed his arms and leaned toward me, taking one of my hands in his. He traced the line of the scar on my hand, his thumb warm on my skin. “No one put you in charge, did they? You weren’t trained for command. And yet here you are.”
I looked at him, the tight bands around my chest easing a little. “I suppose you know the feeling.”
He smiled a little at that. “And how many men have you lost? None.”
“I don’t even know if that’s true,” I said bitterly. “They could all have died in the ambulances, and I wouldn’t even know. Tom and Somersham and all the rest of them. They could be dead in a rainy ditch somewhere.”
“I don’t think so.” He said it with complete sincerity; it was not meant as a platitude or a patronizing pat on the head, but as a declaration of quiet belief. He cupped his hand over mine and held it. “We’ll find Creeton,” he said, “wherever he is. He can’t have gone very far. We’ll keep these men alive for as long as it takes for the ambulances to get back; we’ve plenty of supplies. And we’ll let Archie recover. I saw men like that at the Front sometimes. Sometimes they got well again with rest.”
“And Mikael Gersbach?” I said. “What about him?”
He looked up at me, and a shadow crossed his expression.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” I said. “The man Paulus saw last night.”
“Paulus claims he doesn’t know what he saw.” Something very dark crossed Jack’s features, a memory of something awful. “But he’s lying. I saw it myself. He’s lying.”
“What did he see?”
“It was reflected in the window when I raised the lamp. Just for a second.” The darkness crossed his expression again, as if he were fighting it. “There was a tall man holding a rifle. The rifle was held down by his side, and he was staring at us—and then he was gone. I smelled metal and blood.”
“That’s the man I saw,” I said, my voice a rasp. “The one who hit me.”
“I know.” He looked levelly at me. “It’s Nils Gersbach. Mikael’s father.”
It made sense. The man comes, and he’s so horribly angry, Tom had told me. And the men’s dreams: Get up, you coward. “You’ve read the letters, and Maisey’s notes,” I said.
“Yes. I haven’t put it all together yet, but I’m close. And I’ll tell you everything. I just want to be sure you’re ready to hear it.”
His hand over mine was warm and strong, and I didn’t want him to let go. My gaze dropped to the shirt he wore, with its ever-present stencil, and I shook my head.
“What is it?” said Jack.
“I’m just thinking that we aren’t much like nurse and patient anymore,” I replied. “If we ever were, really.”
The look he gave me was wry. “No, we were never much good at that part.”
“It feels stupid to treat you like a patient when I couldn’t have done much without you,” I said. “Is there . . . anything I can do for you? Anything you want? Except”—I held up a hand as he opened his mouth to speak—“taking my clothes off.”
He let my hand go and leaned back in his chair. “Well, now I have to rethink.”
“I mean it,” I said. “Name something. Except for that. I haven’t had a bath in days, and I think you’d regret it.”
“I doubt that.” His grin had a spark of mischief in it. “Please tell me that Matron keeps current newspapers somewhere.”
“In her office,” I affirmed. “And no one’s taken black ink to them, either. I’ll get them out. Anything else?”
“There is one other thing.”
The idea of doing something to please him made me happy. “What is it?”
“Are you certain?”
I bit my lip. “This is going to involve breaking the rules, isn’t it?”
“Most certainly.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“Well, if you’re offering,” he said, “I’d like to find my clothes. My own clothes, that is. The ones I was wearing when I arrived at Portis House.”
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