Chapter 13: Away into the Wilderness

THE GOTHIC, OUT OF HALIFAX

March 1918

The ponderousGothic,belching smoke, was drawn up at the quay with the gangplank down. Her convoy waited beyond the mouth of the harbor, gray smudges against the steely sea. They were to be convoyed to Liverpool first. Mary had business in London, before they went to Belgium. One heard that the system of convoys kept passenger liners safe from the U-boats, but Laura still had a horror of shipwrecks. Her palms sweated despite the cold as she went up the gangplank.

Two years after the comet, when the Titanic sank, all the fishermen of Halifax had gone out to the wreckage. They’d come back pale and hastily got drunk, as an endless stream of coffins came off their boats, to be buried with neither family nor ceremony. There had been so many dead that the undertaker had to invent a system of tying tags to toes to keep track of them all.

Charles Iven had been one of the men who’d gone out to the wreck. His drinking had got worse after that. Once, on a night he was very drunk, he’d even described it to his children.

“Just floating,” he’d said. “Hundreds of them, in the water. Staring up, staring down. Like dynamited fish. We hauled them up, and some of them had their eyes pecked out by seabirds. Little children sometimes. There were so many. Thousands. Progress. Pah. What’s progress? Give people God’s power—to build ships like islands, or fly like birds, or set fire to the bowels of earth like the devil in his damned pit—it just writes their stupidity larger and larger until they drown the whole world. Our hands get bigger and our spirits shrink. Is it any wonder, really, that God’s done with us? That was the white horseman, Marie. That ship. Not your comet. Who cares about a comet? Pray, all of you.”

Laura mounted the gangplank, thinking she could face shellfire with equanimity if they could just get across the Atlantic.

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· · ·Mary and Pim arrived half an hour after she did. Laura was smoking on deck to calm her nerves. Pim’s hair fell in wisps under her hat, and her face had a fresh color. Admiring looks filtered in from the other passengers. Mary seemed harried. She had, Laura understood, a mass of donations—bandages and sachets and pajamas and things—that she must chivvy across the ocean.

They joined Laura at the rail after they got their baggage settled. Mary accepted when Laura offered her a cigarette. Pim wrinkled her nose. Clouds were coming in. The turbines roared. They watched the other passengers board. There were more women than men among the new arrivals, and they were nearly all wearing black.

“So many,” said Pim.

Laura drew on her cigarette. Some of their fellow passengers wore the extravagance of Victorian formal mourning, others merely shawls or armbands. They clung together, a flapping mass, like crows about to take flight. “They’re going over for news,” said Mary. “They besiege the Red Cross. They dog the generals with letters. It’s the modern world, they say. How can a man just vanish?”

“ ‘Go on your way to the shadowy abyss,’ ” Pim quoted softly. Her eyes hadn’t left the mass of black-clad people. “ ‘If with your singing you can placate the Furies, the monsters, and pitiless Death, you can take back your beloved.’ ” At Mary’s glance of surprise, she said, “Gluck. Well, Orpheus. Going after Eurydice. That’s what they’re all hoping for, isn’t it? Even you, Laura—” She stopped. Laura wasn’t listening. Just for a moment, she’d seen a spot of stillness in the moving mass of people. Seen a woman wearing a bloody housecoat, her eyes empty pools of scarlet.

Pim said, “Laura? Laura?”

Just a phantasm brought on by the stress of departure. “Sorry, woolgathering,” Laura said. “Can we go inside before we freeze, do you think?”

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· · ·Laura had never traveled on a passenger liner before. She’d got to Europe on a transport, in February of ’15, and returned on a hospital ship. She and Freddie had dreamed of traveling, of course. They’d been watching the ships come and go, peering out Laura’s upper window, since they were children. “She’s going to Russia,” Laura would say with authority, while the smokestack billowed on one ship or another, her imagination skipping away in blatant disregard for the actual routes of ocean liners. “She’s going to Saint Petersburg.”

“And,” Freddie would put in eagerly, “there’s a woman aboard who’s got a great diamond, the Northern Star, and she stole it from its rightful owner, a tsaritsa of the royal family—she is a disgraced servant girl, and now she is in a new situation, rich as Croesus because of that one jewel, but she cannot sell it or cut it so she is rich and poor and now she is going back to the land of her birth, always afraid the tsaritsa will get wind of her passage…”

Well, I’m getting on one of those ships now, Freddie,Laura thought to her brother’s absence. It’s not Petersburg. Just Liverpool, but that’s something, isn’t it? I wish…

She cut off that thought.

Their tickets were second-class. They had decent meals and a promenade deck, a library and a smoking room. Laura had nothing to do, and no one to care for, aside from the memorable night at dinner when she got a fish bone out of a choking old gentleman’s throat.

She slept a good deal. Read novels that did not tax her fractured concentration. Smoked innumerable cigarettes, and drank more than she ought to.

Pim chased Laura down in their berth one afternoon, brandishing scissors. Laura, trying to nap, was unamused. “Nurse found dead in a second-class stateroom with scissors through the heart?” They’d been reading murder mysteries to each other in the library.

“If anything, it would be ‘innocent widow from Halifax found dead’—you’re much more murderous than I am, for all you like to joke. Laura, stop glaring. I’m cutting your hair.”

“Oh,” said Laura. She dived under the blankets. “Absolutely not.” Her voice came out muffled. “Caps and veils will do extremely well for me, Mrs. Shaw, and you may brandish your scissors at someone else.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. I see your head, and it pains me. You shouldn’t be asleep anyway,” added Pim, virtuously. “It’s teatime.” Mercifully, she’d stopped waving the scissors.

“I’m not asleep now,” said Laura with some resentment.

“You’re worse than a five-year-old boy. Your hair won’t take but a moment. Why don’t you want to?”

“Because I want my tea.” Laura sat up, feeling rumpled. Pim was neat from pinned-up hair to booted feet.

“You can— Laura, if I am being a prat, you may murder me after all, but—even battle-scarred war heroes like yourself are allowed to look pretty.”

“Oh, Christ, don’t be charitable,” said Laura, rubbing her face. “I was having such a nice nap.”

Pim said, “And you are. Pretty, I mean. A good man won’t care about your hands, or your leg.”

“So very earnest. But he will care about my hair?”

Pim met Laura’s eyes, flushed suddenly, and put down the scissors. “No, not at all. Let’s go to tea, then.”

If Pim had insisted, Laura thought wryly, she’d probably have kept balking. “No, you’re right.” She stood up and plunked herself down at the chair in front of the tiny vanity.

“My,” said Pim. “Now you look like a cat about to have a bath.” But she picked up the scissors. “You’ll see. You’ll never be Empress Sisi, but how about roguish curls?” She gave Laura a critical look. “I think I can manage that.”

“I should like to see you try.”

“Just wait,” said Pim, with the confidence of the very beautiful. Laura sighed, and let Pim have her way. It had been a long time since Laura cared about her hair. Although, now she was thinking of it, she had wept, when she first cut it. God, that was long ago. While she was in training, Laura had imagined, in her most secret impractical dreams, that she’d meet someone in France. A young aristocrat maybe. An officer. A flier. That they’d fall passionately in love, that they’d wed, bound eternally by shared adventures.

But truth was different. She wrote Freddie once, about love in a field hospital: It doesn’t seem right letting a man fall in love with you—falling in love with him—when you’re the only girl he’s seen for months, and he’s hurting worse than he’s ever hurt in his life. It’s just hothouse emotion—like an orchid in a greenhouse—it can’t survive in the real world.

Laura had long since put romance aside, and vanity too. But she looked with some surprise at herself, after Pim stepped back. Roguish was a stretch, but it was an improvement. Her cheeks and lips had acquired some color—she was eating a bit more now and not working monstrous shifts. Her hair had little touches of honey in the lamplight.

“I know you modern girls laugh at corsets,” said Pim. “But really, they support the bust and improve posture—” She broke off with a shriek. Laura had aimed a pillow at her nose.

“Teatime, Mrs. Shaw,” said Laura. “Or you’ll have me in a farthingale and pattens by dinner. Or a toga.”

“You know,” said Pim, “once, for fancy dress, I went as an Elizabethan noblewoman. I was a great success. Made the farthingale myself.” But she was smiling.

“Not surprised in the least,” said Laura, with feeling.

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· · ·After supper that night, Laura and Mary went into the library to smoke. Pim eyed their cigarettes with disfavor. “It turns your fingers yellow.”

“A filthy habit,” Laura agreed, blowing out smoke. She had another murder mystery, Death in Amazonia, and her mind was pleasantly far from both Europe and Canada.

Mary was going over some list of inventory, running a pencil down a page, a finger of ungenteel whiskey beside her. Even though she kept company with them, there was always a part of Mary that stood aloof. Preoccupied. Mary tended her hospital, Laura reflected, the way some women hovered over their husbands and children. It was her enterprise. Her place and her purpose. Her obsession.

Pim was trying automatic writing. It mostly made her mutter a lot to herself as she turned the paper in all directions, trying to drag meaning from the scribbles. But eventually she got to the end of her page, looked sadly at the resulting nonsense, and put it aside. She and Mary fell to talking.

Laura only half-listened. Pim was talking about angels, and Laura, who knew all about archangels, and thrones, and dominions—her mother had been thorough—was wishing she would change the subject.

“Why shouldn’t there be angels?” Pim was saying earnestly. “On the battlefield, I mean? God is everywhere.”

“Why should there be?” said Mary, who took unholy delight in baiting Pim. “They probably have better things to do.”

“But what about the angels at Mons?” Pim pursued. “I read all about that. There were pamphlets at church. An archbishop preached about it.”

Laura tried to concentrate on Amazonia, but it was no use. Like everyone else, she knew about the Angels of Mons. During the retreat, in ’14, the British Expeditionary Force would have been routed, or so the story went. Except that a pack—flock?—of armed angels appeared and drove the Germans off. No doubt the Germans had their own version of the story. Laura sometimes wondered, idly, what happened when the celestial backers of one army encountered those of the other.

“It wasn’t angels at all,” put in Mary, a gleam to her eyes. “I heard it was ghostly archers from Agincourt. Front’s riddled with ghosts, you know. It was certainly the lads from Agincourt.”

“But angels—” protested Pim.

Laura found herself strangely annoyed. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

Mary and Pim looked at her in surprise. Laura bit her tongue before she could say anything else. Like Don’t you understand? The world ends with high explosive, not trumpets, and even if an angel existed, it would be shot from the sky like an aeroplane.

Pim said, “Of course angels matter. They are proof of God’s—” She paused, looking unsettled. Laura wondered what the final word should have been. Love? Wrath? Sheer damned indifference?

“I’m sorry, Pim,” said Laura. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”