Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

DIANA SEPTEMBER 1918

The boys began to arrive three days later. The staff was kept busy in every corner of the house: checking students in, overseeing luggage, tactfully separating parents as quickly as possible from the younger boys while keeping the older boys from running wild. Diana spent nearly six straight hours in her new office.

It was her job to accept any updated medical records for returning students and go through a thorough health history with the parents of new ones. It was a luxury she'd rarely had—to make note of such minor issues as measles and chicken pox, a broken ankle from falling out of a tree or stitches from a bicycle accident. She reassured the anxious mother of an asthmatic nine-year-old that his physical activity would be closely monitored and politely deflected a father who wanted assurances his son wouldn't be coddled despite a bout of rheumatic fever last winter.

Some of the parents had lost older sons in the war; some of the boys had lost their fathers. Diana listened patiently to a mother whose only child was beginning here this fall.

"I didn't want to send him away," she admitted. "My husband has been in France since 1915 and has only just been invalided out with lung damage. But Luke has been asking me for a year to go away to school. I've told him he can change his mind at any time, that I'll come get him at once if he wants to come away. I just wish I knew what was best to do."

"I'm sure he'll be fine," Diana said reassuringly. "He'll be well watched over."

"Truthfully," the mother said, in a much softer voice, "I think he's glad to get away from home. His father is not … not exactly as he was before. Too much noise, too much bother. The littlest things make him angry."

Diana thought of her older brother, once so lighthearted, whom she hadn't seen smile in months. "I'm very sorry. The war exerted a terrible price, even on those who survived."

In a whisper that did not disguise despair, the mother asked, "Will it ever get better?"

"Time heals many things." And that, Diana thought despondently, is about the most useless thing she'd ever said. Time could heal. But not always, and not everyone. When the mother had left, Diana made an extra note to keep a personal eye on her son.

The flow of parents and a few grandparents slowed to a trickle as the afternoon wore on. Diana ensured the infirmary was in perfect order and that the store closet was stocked with medications and dressings for small injuries. Then she began putting her notes into a concise report for her meeting she had scheduled with Clarissa Somersby before the whole school gathered for dinner.

Diana had spent the afternoon listening to approaching footsteps—the ones she heard now were different: male, firm, but with a slight hesitation in gait that her medical mind instantly categorized as soldier, wounded.

"Nurse Neville? Diana Neville?"

She turned in her seat, prepared with her professional smile to greet whatever father awaited her.

He had brown hair, a slender build but with the erect carriage of, yes, a former soldier, but too young to be anyone's father—at least of any boy old enough to attend this school. One of the school masters, then; there were still several she hadn't met.

But as these logical thoughts and impressions flashed through her mind, her body buzzed with something more instinctive that brought her to her feet. She took several steps closer, and he broke into a smile.

"It is you," he said. "Well, Nurse Neville, it's a long way from Thiepval."

Diana had met a lot of soldiers in three years of war nursing, but she didn't even have to search for this man's name. "Lieutenant Murray. What are you doing here?"

"Me? I'm from Northumberland. I grew up not five miles from here. The question is, what is a London-born nurse doing this far north? And it's not lieutenant anymore. It's Josh."

"What's your name?" she had asked the soldier with the bone sticking out of his lower left leg. It was a way of trying to keep him conscious, to keep shock from stealing him away, to make him focus on the here and now.

"Josh," he'd said through gritted teeth. "Joshua Murray."

"Stay with me, Josh. We'll get you straight into surgery. We'll take care of you."

"Promise?"

It wasn't the first, or even the five hundredth, time Diana had been asked that. But when she looked into his eyes, hazel ringed with green, and said, "I promise," the words tugged at something deep within her chest. Her heart? It didn't matter. A war zone was no place for hearts. And so she'd assisted in his surgery and got him through the first forty-eight hours and shipped him back to England for rehabilitation, as she'd done with every other soldier that had survived.

But now he was standing in front of her—standing, not lying on a bloody stretcher—at least five inches taller than she was, his face clean-shaven and no longer hollow-cheeked, wearing a three-piece suit instead of a uniform or hospital gown. It was all so odd. Was it really happening?

His expression changed, a mark of concern between his eyes. "Are you all right? Do you need to sit back down?"

Diana began to laugh. "Do I need to sit down? I can't believe you're on your feet. Not after the last time I saw you."

"You promised you'd take care of me. Are you telling me that was just a line you feed every soldier? That you fully expected me to die?"

There weren't a lot of smiles in field hospitals, at least not the kind of smile Joshua Murray gave her now. All at once, Diana thought it might be a good idea to sit down. But she wouldn't let him have the last word.

"What I never expected was to have you walk into the infirmary of a boys' school as though you owned the place. Really, what are you doing here?"

He gestured to her chair and she sat gratefully while he pulled out a wooden straight-backed chair and straddled it, elbows braced on the back. Diana shot a quick look at his leg, but there was nothing to see beneath the carefully-tailored trousers. She was pretty sure he wasn't wearing a brace, which, truth be told, was more than she'd expected.

"Considering I was in and out of consciousness most of the time you knew me, I will forgive you for not knowing that before I was Lieutenant Murray, I was Joshua Murray, with an MA in classics and history. I meant to stay at Oxford when I finished my degree, but my father had a stroke and I was needed at home. Fortunately, our farmhouse is the nearest neighbor to Havencross and the Somersbys were kind enough to take me on. I'd only been here a year before war broke out." He eyed her intently. "Now your turn. How did a nurse born and bred in London find herself all the way up here in the wild?"

"There aren't a lot of jobs available for nurses, at least not those who want to leave the war behind. I didn't want to work with soldiers anymore. I know that's selfish, but—"

"Not selfish."

"Maybe. My mother doesn't understand. Certainly not the Northumberland part. As far as she's concerned, civilization ends somewhere around Coventry."

There was more to it, but Joshua didn't need to know that. No one needed to know how London had just too many damned people. After years of living on top of one another in tents and field hospitals, after the constant pressure of wounded men in crowded wards, after the relentless, eternal thrum of heavy guns pounding day and night never more than three miles away … Diana had craved silence. Solitude. Ninety schoolboys might not sound like the perfect escape, but it had to be better than what haunted her dreams.

Those hazel-green eyes of Joshua Murray looked far too knowing. But bless the man for discretion—and probably a measure of understanding—for he simply said, "You're going to be very popular, Miss Neville. Ninety boys and fifteen schoolmasters—half of them will be in love with you by Michaelmas."

"And the rest?"

He grinned—there was no other word for it: "The rest are fools." He stood up and swung his chair back against the wall it had come from. "I'll see you at dinner."

She listened to his footsteps receding. Yes, he had a definite hesitation in that left leg. It must still be considerably weaker than the right one, but he covered it well. Those who'd been to war knew how to cover lots of things.

There was no use trying to get any more work done. Diana tidied up her files and desk and checked her watch: ten minutes to her meeting with Miss Somersby. As she picked up the notebook that went with her everywhere, another set of footsteps sounded in the corridor.

For one moment her heart leaped at the thought of Joshua returning, but these were too light. One of the boys, perhaps? But no, there was a distinct clicking sound—the sound made by the heels of a woman's shoes.

She crossed the room, expecting to find Beth Willis. Although she was even busier than Diana, they had spent a little time together each day since her arrival.

The footsteps were just outside the door when Diana opened it with a greeting on her lips.

A greeting that died instantly. It wasn't Beth. It wasn't anyone.

The corridor was entirely empty.