“Just as you did,” Nina replied. “Your mother died and you came back here. You hid in the west wing. When we found you, we took you in until help arrived.”
“Or she was never here at all,” said Paulus.
“What does that mean?” said Archie.
“Well, we’re the only ones that know she’s here, really. She could disappear again and no one would be the wiser.” He turned to her. “Is that what you want to do?”
Anna looked down at her plate. “I don’t know.”
“It’s going to come out, Anna,” Jack told her softly. “Maisey knows everything, and she can prove it. Whether you’re found or not, it will all come out.”
She nodded, did not look up.
“The story is rather hard on Creeton,” Archie admitted, pouring himself some water with a hand that did not shake. “He did do those things, I know, but he wasn’t entirely in charge of his own actions. Neither was Mabry.”
“What are you worried about?” Jack asked.
“Well, I assume that we patients will all be reassigned to different hospitals, especially when the scandal breaks. It could go hard on him. He might even face criminal charges.”
“I don’t think his family will help him,” I added.
“Still, they won’t want a scandal,” said Jack. He sighed. “I don’t really know what to do. I’ll have to think it over.” He looked at Archie. “Where do you think you’ll go?”
Archie shrugged. “Wherever they assign me, I suppose.” He smiled a little. “Maybe I’ll go to a hospital where they have a gramophone.”
My mind was turning with an idea. “Has Mabry woken yet?” I asked.
“Only briefly,” said Paulus. “He was still groggy.”
I nodded, the idea still going round in my mind. I’d talk to Mabry when he was awake.
There was nothing to do, then, but wait. We went our separate ways. Anna took West his breakfast, and they sat talking quietly. Nina flung herself on the spare mattress set up for the on-duty nurse and was asleep in minutes. Paulus disappeared to his own devices, probably to sleep as well, and Jack went to his room. Portis House was silent, the air changed. There were still cracks in the walls and the cellar was still flooded, but it didn’t seem like a haunted place. It was a big, somnolent house in the summer heat, a rich man’s folly purged of its nightmares, dozing as if already abandoned. I climbed the stairs to the nurses’ bathroom and turned on the taps in the bathtub. I unbraided my hair, took off my uniform. I sat in the bath for a long time, thinking about things. About ghosts. About endings. About beginnings.
When I got out, I didn’t rebraid my hair. I left it loose and clean; it hung to the middle of my back, swaying with my movements in a way I wasn’t used to. It was, I realized, rather a nice chestnut color. I’d never really taken the time to look at my hair in daylight. Perhaps, at almost twenty-one, it was time I did.
I found my cotton nightdress and pulled it over my head, even though the warm sun of midmorning was rising in the sky. Then I padded down the stairs in my bare feet. I made no sound. I saw no ghosts.
Jack’s room was darkened. He’d drawn the curtains, and as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see he was lying on his bed, on his back on top of the covers. He’d taken off everything but his undershorts, and he had his fingers linked over his flat stomach as he stared at the ceiling. He went very still when he saw me.
I closed the door behind me, and since it wouldn’t lock from the inside, I propped the room’s only wooden chair against the knob.
We didn’t speak for a moment as my heart careened in my chest. I could hear nothing but the blood rushing in my ears. Courage, Kitty. I took a step forward, took my nerves in hand. “You said you’d go through hell to see me naked,” I told him. “I think you win.”
In one motion, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. “Come here,” he said softly.
I came closer, fighting shyness, fighting all the fears that had held me back. When I came in range he took my wrists and pulled me in until I stood between his knees. He took my face in his hands and kissed me.
It was everything, that kiss. It was the closeness of him, his skin setting a reaction off mine like sparks, even when we weren’t touching. It was the goodness of it, the rightness of it, the fact that I was afraid, and that the fear was right, too. I could be afraid, and I could still do this, still do anything I wanted. It was the fact that he’d come back from that dark, dark place he’d been. It was the fact that both of us had thought ourselves alone in the world, and that we’d both been wrong.
He broke the kiss and bunched his hands in the skirt of my nightgown. “Is there anything under this?” he asked.
“No.”
He groaned gently. “Dear God. Give me a moment.”
“You don’t have a moment. Take it off.”
He pulled it up to my waist. “Just your legs are killing me.”
I was laughing now. “Jack, stop it.”
“Any higher and I may die.”
I pulled the fabric from his hands and wrenched the entire nightgown off over my head, dropping it to the floor in one motion. And then I was on the bed with him, on his lap, my legs wrapped around his waist, and we were kissing again, and his hands were traveling everywhere on me. I wanted them everywhere at once. His skin was beautiful in the dimmed, lazy morning light, and I felt the muscles move in his back, the bones of his shoulder blades. His hands cupped my breasts and I laid my cheek on his shoulder, reveling in the sensation of it, the scent of his skin.
He lifted my head a little and kissed his way up the side of my neck, under my ear. He was very, very good at this, I was noticing. “Jack,” I whispered, “I’m nervous. You’re going to have to be gentle with me.”
His teeth scraped my earlobe, and if I hadn’t already been sitting, I would have dissolved into a heap of wet lust. Well, perhaps not exactly gentle. “I mean it,” I said. “I didn’t think I would ever do this, so I haven’t practiced.”
“That makes no sense,” he pointed out. Before I could argue, he tenderly nipped the skin behind my ear, and when I shivered and moaned, he slid his hands under me and pulled me even closer, wrapping my legs more tightly around his waist. “I think you’ll be very good at it,” he said into my ear, and then he pulled away and looked at me. I thought I was about to die. “But you know,” he said, “if it makes you feel better, there’s a way that we—well, that you can be on top.”
I stared at him. “There is?”
He watched as the possibilities struck me, and the smile he gave me was slow and nothing if not wicked. “Oh,” he said. “This is going to be fun.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The ambulances arrived before supper. We were ready, all of us: the sick prepared for evacuation, the staff and the able-bodied patients standing under the front portico, waiting. Nina and I had even emptied Matron’s safe and the cabinet of the men’s belongings, putting all of it in a box that now sat between us. A second box contained some of Matron’s most important files. When Matron was well, she would want them.
This time, when the ambulances pulled up, we had no argument. Paulus helped the attendants load the sick as the sun stayed high in the clear sky of the long summer day.
An ambulance attendant balked when he saw our boxes. “No one said anything about this,” he said. “Are you sure it’s important?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“If it’s so important,” another attendant broke in, “just come back for it. This place isn’t going anywhere.”
I glanced at Nina, and then at the others. We were all thinking the same thing. Jack’s blue eyes were dark. Even Paulus looked a little pale.
“We won’t be back,” I assured the attendant. “Load the boxes.”
We pulled away in a convoy down the long, muddy drive. I didn’t look back as the house receded behind me. And even though I couldn’t see them, I knew none of the others looked back either.
? ? ?
In the end, we lost four patients.
It was the likely outcome of influenza. Everyone knew that. I knew that. Twenty-one had fallen sick. That seventeen had recovered was a good ratio. We’ve seen waves of it over the last year, the doctor at the hospital in Newcastle on Tyne told me. It’s different strains, I think. This one was not particularly bad.
Four men buried. Not particularly bad.
George Naylor, with the gap in his teeth, was one of them, his weakened constitution having done him in. The ones who didn’t die were sick, or weak, for weeks. Matron had a constitution of iron and was one of the first to recover; Boney, ever her faithful servant, followed shortly after, sitting up in bed with flushed cheeks and trying to give orders before passing out into sleep. I nodded at her and told her I’d do everything she said. She never remembered what she’d told me, anyway.