Chapter 22: And the Heaven Departed

BETWEEN DUNKIRK AND COUTHOVE AND PARTS UNKNOWN

March 1918

Try as she might—and Laura did try, again and again—she could never fully remember the rest of that night in the hotel. Her last clear and certain memory—and even that began to fade after a few days, like an overhandled photograph—was of Pim staring stricken into a tarnished mirror. Everything else was snatches and flashes.

She remembered firelight on fair hair—although she never knew whether it was Faland’s or Pim’s or perhaps the two with their heads close together. And a voice coming out of darkness— But why darkness? Where had the firelight gone? “You know what I saw, don’t you?” someone was saying. “It’s not real. It’s not. I could never—”

“No?”

She remembered being thirsty. Thinking, Was that Pim speaking? A woman, certainly. But she also remembered the woman saying viciously But I hate him, that bastard. I wish he’d— Pim would never say that.

And the other voice, answering, “I know.”

“Pim?” she thought she’d tried to say. But no sound came, and when she tried to move, she could not.

And then memory dissolved into fever-dreams; for she remembered her mother stepping out of the shrouding darkness, embedded glass scraping when a hand trailed over Laura’s face. “Look,” she whispered. “Look look look look!”

But try as she might, Laura could not answer.

And then her mother was gone, and Laura was alone. It was so dark. A reasonable voice was speaking in her ear: “If you stay, she won’t trouble you again.”

Her mouth was so dry. But she whispered, with a kind of exhausted defiance, “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

The reasonable voice replied, “She’ll follow you until you go mad.”

Laura, dreaming, thought that might be true. She was so afraid.

“Tell me where she came from,” said the voice. “Why does she haunt you?”

That was a story she’d never told anyone, and never would. But something about the tender detachment in that voice pulled words from her anyway: “She’s my mother. I saw her die. A ship exploded. She was standing by a window.” She bit blood from her tongue rather than say anything more. “Where’s Pim?”

The voice didn’t answer. It said, “What are you fighting for? World’s already ended.”

Try as she might, Laura could never recall if she answered. She didn’t think she had. Perhaps she muttered Not yet. But she remembered nothing more until she awoke to a crashing rumble to the east and jolted upright in fear. Regretted it. She was boiling with fever and it felt as if someone had thrown sand in her joints.

“Mary,” said Laura. “Pim?”

She was sitting on the bare floor. She was very sick. She could barely breathe around the fluid in her lungs. She’d a pounding headache. Somewhere in her memory was violin music like a requiem, almost mocking in its sobbing grandeur, and a voice speaking over the instrument: You’ll regret it. Dimmer still was a memory of Freddie’s face, seen as though in a dream.

Mary scrambled to her feet. Pim was sitting upright, her expression blank. “What happened?” She sounded as though her throat were full of dust. Gray daylight filtered in through shuttered windows. There was no one there but the three of them. Laura crawled to her feet, every bone and sinew chorusing protest. Pim got up too, flinching. “I remember a mirror,” said Pim. “And I saw—” She was staring blankly, as though she could see it again.

Laura turned to ask, just as Mary said, “What in God’s name?”

A draft of dank air eddied round them, a smell of sour wine, dust, and something rotten-sweet, like flowers past their best. They were still in Faland’s foyer. Laura had thought it magnificent. She had distinct memories of magnificence: fire on gold.

It wasn’t magnificent, though.

It was a ruin.

“I don’t understand,” said Pim.

The floor was covered in broken glass and splintered lumber, softening with rot. Upholstery was torn, chairs lay frayed, with the signs and smell of mice, nesting.

“I don’t understand,” Pim said again, voice rising. “What—what happened? Monsieur Faland?” She turned in a circle. “Is he hurt? Is he dead? It’s all ruined.” Her eye fell on the mirror hanging over the bar, now black with tarnish. She took one aborted step as though she wanted to look into it again. But she stayed where she was.

Laura stood silent, disbelieving.

“Shouldn’t we search?” asked Pim, urgently. “We need to search.”

“We need to get on,” said Mary, obviously capable of rationalizing away the impossible. “It’s not safe here. The walls could collapse. The ceiling. Look at the cracks.”

“But what happened?” said Pim.

Laura tried again to organize her memory, from the shelling on the Beveren road up to this dusty silence. But it wouldn’t come clear.

“It’s as though no one was ever here,” said Pim. She gave a small, nervous laugh. “The way people wake up and they find they’ve slept for a hundred years.”

“We haven’t,” said Mary. “Can’t you hear the guns?”

There hadn’t been noise outside before, Laura thought vaguely. Or had there been? Was that part of her fever-dreams, that they’d spent the night free of the rumble of the guns? The only sound she remembered was music. Softly, Pim said, “Like faerie revels that end at sunrise.”

“Drugs in the wine, maybe,” said Mary. “We need to go.”

“But—” Pim said.

“Now,” said Mary, turning toward the door. “If it was a hoax, damn him. If a hallucination, I don’t want to think about it. If he wants his bill settled, he can find me at Couthove. Come on.” She strode across the lobby floor, glass crunching under her feet.

There was nothing to do but follow. Laura had no strength to search, even if she’d wanted to. They passed through the airless stillness, across the lobby, and back into the daylit world. The hinges screamed as the door shut behind them. Pim’s forehead was lined with bewilderment. They found themselves out in a brisk wind and clear sun, standing on cracked cobbles rimed with melting frost, anonymous crumbling buildings all around. Pim had turned back to the hotel with an uncomprehending face.

Half the hotel was collapsed. The other half was barely standing, as though the first high wind would scatter it like dandelion fluff, back into its component bricks and wood and tile.

“I don’t understand,” said Pim again.

Laura stood beside her, staring. She didn’t understand either.

But Mary was already walking away. Just beyond the still, ruined village lay a road. They could hear the rumble of it, see the traffic. The distance between the ruined village and the teeming road was like the border between sleep and waking.

Mary had already crossed over. “Something must be happening further up the line,” she called. “Come on. Look at all that traffic. They’re going to want us at the hospital. Can you walk, Iven? No—I didn’t think so. We’ll beg a lift, then. Come on.”

“Are you all right, Laura?” said Pim. She put the back of her hand to Laura’s forehead. The maternal gesture made her ache. “You’re burning up.”

---

· · ·Hitchhiking was a perfectly usual way for nurses to get about, and it took hardly a moment’s trying before a unit of sappers took them up. The three women were met with a wave of delighted chatter, eager conversation. But there was a constraint on the men too, a grimness, and they glanced often to the east. Laura leaned against Pim, her eyes half-closed.

“Sir, what is happening?” Mary asked the officer, as they jolted along.

“Fritz is trying to get through,” came the reply. “Trying proper, this time. They say they’ve attacked the French at Amiens, pushed the Frogs back. Some say they’ve broken the French line already. We’re reinforcing the Salient. Haig’s said hold to the last man.” The sergeant turned his head and spat.

Laura and Mary exchanged glances. The line had surged back and forth but had remained unbroken for four years. And it wouldn’t break now, Laura told herself. It couldn’t. Not before she went looking for Freddie. But she was so damned sick…The chatter of the men fell disembodied on her ears as the thin spring sun fell warm on her neck. She must get well, quick as she could. She shut her eyes. “—The Americans are hopeless, I hear. Big, well fed. But hopeless. Charge machine guns like maniacs, no notion of tactics.”

“That’s what the Frogs did back in ’14. Don’t need tactics, if there’re enough of them.”

“They’ll get killed in droves.”

“Better them than us. If only they come in time.”

“They won’t.”

“Haig’s at Chenonceau, I hear. Foch is there too. And the king of Belgium. The whole shooting match.”

“Jawing and eating frog legs, are they?”

“Trying to agree on a high command. Put one bloke in charge, they say, that’s the ticket. Better one bugger in one château, deciding things, than— Sorry, ma’am,” he added, when his compatriots chided him for his language.

“Strange place to have picked you up,” another of the men was saying to Mary.

“We were wrecked on the road,” said Mary.

“There was a light across the field,” chimed in Pim. “We came upon a hotel—”

Laura was only half-listening, trying to make plans despite her feverish haze. She had to find the men of Freddie’s unit. Talk to his CO. Find one of the boys from Halifax who’d been in Freddie’s platoon. Unwillingly, she recalled the hallucination of the night before, Freddie’s face amid a seething crowd. She’d thought it was him because she wanted it to be.

Then she heard the strange silence that had fallen on the men in the lorry. One man said to his neighbor, “Do you think it was—”

There was a meaningful pause.

“A hotel, she said,” came the reply. “And music—wasn’t there music, ma’am?”

The officer was glaring. “You just met a Belgian, like as not, making money off smuggled wine. They do move around a good deal, to save themselves a raid.”

None of the men looked convinced. One said, “Was it— What was the wine like? And the music?”

“Beautiful,” said Pim at once. She seemed to want to add something else.

A man nudged his neighbor. “Sounds like him.”

“Shut it; he doesn’t exist.”

“Who?” said Pim.

“No one,” said the officer. “Just a story.”

“Will you tell us?” said Pim.

“He’s a charlatan,” said one.

“A madman.”

“A Frenchman.”

“No,” said a new voice. An old, authoritative voice. “He’s the devil himself, and right at home.”

Silence went round the lorry. Laura heard a driver cursing his horses outside. A dog barked, high and sharp. The sun went behind a cloud and the sweat chilled the back of her neck. Then another man snorted and said, “Devil don’t live in old hotels, you can lay to that. No, if the devil’s anywhere, he’s in a château, in General Headquarters, maybe. Eating frog legs with the others.”

Derisive laughter.

“The man in the hotel—he’s called the fiddler,” said one of the men, persistently. “That’s what all the stories say, anyway. Can make you forget all this”—his gesture took in the world around them—“but what they all say, every story, is those who’ve drank with him, heard the music, seen what he shows you, and then come back out here—” He spat out to the leeward side of the lorry. “Well, they’re always pining for it.” Laura caught the Irish in the speaker’s lilting voice. “But you only see it once. You can’t get back. They say men have gone mad. Looking for the fiddler. Like they can’t ever be happy again.”

“And they say that sometimes a man finds him,” said another voice, “and no one ever sees that man again.”

“Twaddle. People go mad for all sorts of reasons. But going for want of a jig…no. It’s just a story.”

One man elbowed his neighbor. “I’d be here if I was the devil,” he said. “Why, half the army’d sell its soul for a decent drink. Bet he’s racking up the score.”

Laughter erupted, over the officer’s protests.

---

· · ·They got to Couthove at sunset, after a day spent inching down a packed road amid the horse-drawn ration wagons, the lorries and marching men, the dogs pulling machine gun carts, the motorcycles. To the east, the scattered lights of Poperinghe, British HQ in Flanders, reflected off the low, boiling clouds.

The lorry halted. Helpful hands lowered Laura to the ground. Pim was stumbling. Mary looked ten years older. Laura’s cough had settled deep in her chest. The men called good wishes to them all, health to Laura. Then their motor roared and the road swallowed them.

Mary’s hospital was built into the château itself, looming dark against the sky. Even in the dusk, Laura could see that Couthove had been grand once. There was a grace about it still: in its long, repeated windows, steep-sloped roof, two curving wings. But the windows were boarded up, the drive potholed. They walked up from the gate, the château looming larger.

The door was flung open hospitably before they’d got even halfway. A pair of figures, one stout and one tall, appeared. The stout one wore a white Red Cross uniform; she spoke first, coming quickly down the steps. “Mary, good lord. I had almost given up hope.”

Mary had lit up like a hound at a fox hunt. “Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away. Now tell me—”

The tall figure was wearing a doctor’s coat; his voice was flatly American. “I thought you were bringing us fresh hands, Mary. Not more work. That one can barely keep her feet.” The doctor had a thin-lipped face, dark hair, a prow of a nose, and eyes that saved the rest, large and liquid and dark. He eyed Laura and Pim, frowning.

“It’s all right, Doctor,” said Mary briskly. “Doctor Jones, Miss Iven, Mrs. Shaw. Miss Iven’s got a Croix de Guerre, Jones, and three years’ service with the CAMC. A jewel. She’s just a bit poorly, is all. Influenza.”

Jones’s eyes narrowed as he looked Laura over. “You should have left the poor woman at home.”

“Lovely to meet you all,” the woman in the Red Cross uniform said kindly. “Lord, I’m glad to see you—come in, come in—and Mary, I must talk to you about ether—we’ve enough for the time being, but—” The two women went through the front door together.

“Well, come on,” said the doctor to Laura and Pim. “Let me get a look at you. It isn’t as though I had enough work.”

Laura, the world going a little hazy, found herself in a foyer, floored in cracked black and white. Grimy walls, once seafoam green, were festooned with wires for the lights and the telephone.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Laura. “I’ve just got a touch of—”

“Pneumonia, yes, I have ears, it sounds like you are trying to breathe underwater,” said Jones. “Not particularly all right if you ask me.” His eyes had fallen on her hands.

Jones turned to snap orders to someone out of sight. She heard a voice speaking, low, somewhere ahead: “The wounded are going to come down on us like three tons of bricks, Mary; you couldn’t have come back at a better moment.” Her voice dropped lower. “The men—at night—anxious—” Then Laura lost the thread of speech.

“Get some rest, Iven,” called Mary. “I’ll need you back on your feet.”

“Well, you’re not getting her tonight,” muttered Jones.