Chapter 3: Day of Wrath

At another time, Laura would have borne it, in silence if not in good humor, out of respect to her employers. And gone to comfort Mrs. Shaw after it was done. But the presence of the box had shredded her nerves. She hadn’t realized how shaken she was until she found herself shuddering in the hall.

If anyone from the parlor called out to her, Laura didn’t hear, and didn’t trust herself to turn. Combat nursing had given her tongue the edge of a sawtooth bayonet when she was moved, and she didn’t want to turn it on kind, bereaved Mrs. Shaw, or on the scheming, silly old ladies who’d emptied their linen cupboards for her and given her a place to live.

But Laura was shaken enough, going to the kitchen, that at first she didn’t notice the smell.

It was faint. A little earthy, a little sulfurous, very rotten. It was the miasma that lingered in men’s clothes when they came out of the trenches. Laura had thought she’d never smell it again.

The smell was stronger in the kitchen. The box lying by the hearth drew Laura’s gaze like a waiting scorpion, with the smell clinging round it. The heat from the fire must have…Was she breathing? She hardly felt it as she searched jerkily for a pry bar and wedged it under the lid.

Inside was a stiff, stained jacket.

She’d last seen Freddie—was it in July? August. He’d had leave and come to see her. They’d gone to a café in Poperinghe. Eaten a vast number of eggs, heaps of greasy chips. Drunk far too much of that terrible white wine, from the one-franc bottles. He’d been all right. Thin, but they all were thin, and a faraway look in his eyes. They all had that too. He’d smiled at her, just a little gap-toothed, still freckled as an egg. Her brave baby brother. It had been a bloody summer, but a successful one. The Allies had pushed the Germans back at Messines. But then the offensive stalled.

“They’ll leave it there, for the winter,” Laura had told him, deep into the second bottle of wine. “The attack. They’ll wait until spring. Can’t you smell the rain? Can’t come soon enough.” She waved her glass at the sky. “Get on with it, rain.” She poured out her glass, a half-drunk offering. Freddie looked on disapprovingly. “Hush,” she said, smiling. “I’ll buy us another bottle.”

The Belgians said the rain would come early that year. And when it did, the ground would turn to soup. Armies didn’t attack in soup. They survived the summer, Laura had thought, hazy with wine. They’d survive the war. They would.

Freddie didn’t reply. He was sketching. A little grease from lunch shone on his chin. When he turned his paper round, she could see her own face, done in knifing black lines, the tilt of her eyes, the angle of her jaw. The marks of exhaustion, the flush from the wine, the empty gaiety, her hidden, relentless fear. His damned gift, to capture what he saw. It was worse than a mirror. She didn’t say anything.

Her other piece of news was on the tip of her tongue: that she’d been ordered up to Brandhoek, west of Ypres, to one of the casualty clearing stations in range of bombardment. But she bit it back. The sun was warm, her stomach was full, someone out of sight was playing an accordion, skillfully. They had the whole afternoon ahead of them. No one who’d been long at war gave too much thought to tomorrow. She wanted to enjoy the present. She could tell him by letter. “They’d better stop,” she finished, and poured them both more wine. “When it rains.”

“They’ll stop,” he echoed, shutting his notebook, to her relief. He grinned at her. “Now, what do you say we have a smoke and then eat the same lunch over again?”

How would a telegram have found her? Her known address was now an ash heap. Besides, the army had diverted everyone they could to digging bodies out of collapsed houses, not shuffling round with telegrams. And who could blame them? Halifax was just a city. Just people. They hadn’t expected the war to come, slyfoot across the ocean, borne like contagion in a ship full of high explosive.

Laura steeled herself, reached forward, and drew the jacket out. Mud flaked off. The cloth was stained dark. The army might send soldiers’ effects, but there wasn’t time to launder their clothes. There was no smell of a gut wound, not enough blood to have killed him quickly. She tried not to let her mind catalogue all the ways a man could die slowly. Her fingertips were stained dark, when she laid the uniform aside. Mechanically, she turned to the other odds and ends. There were not many of them. Spare buttons. A tin of pastilles. A whistle. A pocket Bible. A set of homemade playing cards in a box made from a shell casing.

His identity tags.

23rd Halifax Rifles

The world swam, her vision tunneling as her hand closed tight round the disc—discs? She opened her hand. Noted dimly that she’d bit her lip bloody. Both tags were there, the red one and the green. Both. But they took the red tag to send home. The other stayed with the body. Why— Well, there was no telling. The fog of war. She put the tags in one of her dress pockets.

Scarcely knowing what she did, Laura picked up the Bible next. It fell open. Revelation. Her eyes landed on a quotation: For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows he has a short time…The smell of the mud seemed to collect in her mouth and coat her tongue.

She knelt there for a few moments, mastering an overwhelming nausea. She laid a hand again on the stiff wool jacket, felt something sewn into the lining, where the men kept field dressings. When her hands were steady enough, she slipped her scissors out of her skirt pocket and snipped the seam.

To her surprise, she found a postcard. A picture of a castle in the mountains, faded and much handled. Smeared with brown stains, obviously wetted through at least once. She turned it over. Bayern was printed on the back. A German postcard? Why would Freddie have it? A trophy, from a dead man or a captured trench? But Freddie had never gone for souvenirs, not like some men did. She looked closer. There was something written on the back, penciled lightly, in English, in a handwriting she did not know. I will bring him back if I can. If I don’t, and the war is over, you must ask…

The rest of it was blotted by a stain, and no matter how much Laura peered, she couldn’t make it out. Finally she slipped the postcard into the pocket with the tags. What else? His sketchbook—where was his sketchbook? She scrabbled again through the box’s contents. It wasn’t there. All those drawings, the truest measure of his soul, the mirror he held to the world. Gone.

He was gone.

They’re all gone…

And then her hands were empty, and she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t cry. She felt nothing but blankness, and a faint confusion.

That was how Penelope Shaw found her, sometime later. Kneeling rigid over a bloody shirt and a Bible, a small heap of dirty oddments. Mrs. Shaw halted in the kitchen doorway. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize. Are you—are you all right? Of course not, but I mean—Miss Iven?”

“I’m all right,” said Laura.

There was a silence. Then Mrs. Shaw put a hand, bird-light, on Laura’s shoulder. “I am sorry,” she whispered again.

Laura laid her scarred fingers briefly over Mrs. Shaw’s. Neither of them said anything else.

Outside, it had begun to snow.