Fullepub 
Chapter 37: And I Saw a New Heaven, and a New Earth
CHÂTEAU COUTHOVE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
April 1918
It was still dark outside, the cold, sticky hour before sunrise. Laura woke, with sleep still heavy in her eyes, and saw her mother in the shadows.
She rolled to her feet without thinking. The darkness was empty. But Laura reached out anyway. For the first time, her first thought was not a wordless scream of horror and guilt. Her first thought was Are you there?
Her second thought was Why are you here? Did you lead me to Winter? It was, although she had told no one, the other reason she’d been ready to trust him.
Are you helping me?
No answer came from the darkness, but Laura stared into the empty corner, and neither experience nor reason could suppress her hope: I’m not alone.
Then Laura realized that Pim was gone.
She didn’t know why her stomach knotted. Pim could have slipped out for any number of reasons. But even as she reassured herself, Laura was reaching for her dress, thrusting her feet into damp boots, and pinning her veil as she turned to the door.
· · ·Pim wasn’t in the main ward. A glance told her that, but Laura went in anyway, her electric lantern a blue-white pool in the darkness. She stopped here and there, offering one man a bedpan, another a drink of water. Asked the ones who were awake if they’d seen Mrs. Shaw. Sighing, they admitted that they had not.
Where, then?
She came to the silent Winter. She’d bandaged the healed stump of his shoulder to conceal the fact of the old injury; she made a show of checking it, then turned to the bullet hole in his side. He hadn’t bled through the bandage, although his skin was hot and dry. She thought he’d do. Her sense of the stages of dying was unerring. Jones’s blood had helped, and the ether had worn off.
All the men nearby were asleep, although a few tossed in a pain-filled doze. A boy was whimpering. Laura turned away to give him morphine, feeling Winter’s gaze, then she returned to him, and gave him some water, and under the cover of her helping him sit up, holding the cup to his lips, he said, “Your brother’s with a person called Faland.”
They had only moments: How, when, why were questions she could not ask. So she whispered, simply, “I have met Faland. Tell me.”
Winter said, “We were in Ypres together, wounded, when Faland found us. I was close to dying; perhaps that was why I feared him so. He looked like the war to me. Devouring. I tried to tell your brother, but he didn’t understand. He saved my life, but went away with Faland. That’s where he is. That’s where I have to find him.”
She didn’t ask why he’d do so much for her brother. She knew enough of soldiers to understand the ties that sprang up between men out there: thicker than blood and selfless. “Did you find him?”
Winter said, “I saw him. During the riot.” The blue eyes stared at the ceiling past Laura’s shoulder, and she thought how it must have been for him as a fugitive, searching, stealing. Almost to himself, Winter said, “The ghost pointed and I saw you. And the same night—I saw him too. It felt like a miracle.”
“Ghost?” said Laura, despite herself.
“Front’s full of ghosts,” Winter whispered. His gaze wandered a little now. She laid the back of her hand against his forehead, felt his temperature rising. “How many dead men? A million? More? Tombs are open. Wasn’t it written? They said that would happen, at the end of the world. And I saw the dead, great and small. They can help you. They helped me. People thought I was one of the wild men. That’s why I wasn’t captured. The dead—they told me— Haven’t you seen? New heaven. That was written too. New earth. New hell too. That’s not in the verse. But it’s true. You’ve seen, haven’t you—how the new world and the old world share space…” He shook his head.
“How do I find Faland?”
“The ghosts,” he said. “You have to ask the ghosts.”
She was afraid her hope would pull her into madness with him. Afraid she was already there. Afraid they both were sane and the world was infinitely stranger than she’d thought. She was a creature of her senses: diagrams, bodies. She wasn’t equipped for this; she wasn’t a poet. “Winter, who is Faland? What would he want with my brother?”
The lucidity was fading from Winter’s face. “To eat. Just like the war does. Only he savors. Does that make him better? The ghosts said his world ended too.”
“I’ll find him,” said Laura. It was a vow. She got to her feet and said as an afterthought, “Have you seen my friend? She has yellow hair.”
A small perturbed frown, but he shook his head. Laura turned and left the ward.
· · ·Pim could not be found in the château at all. In the sterilization room, Laura found only two orderlies playing cards, and Jones, stirring cocoa powder into steaming tinned milk, his eyes red-rimmed. He looked pleased to see her. “Iven, you must come with me and see Trovato’s leg. I thought we might have to have it off after all, with the artery severed. But the small vessels are doing the work, no necrosis of the foot—”
Then he noticed the worry on her face. “What is it?”
“I can’t find Pim.”
“She’s a grown—” He seemed to realize that Laura was really worried. “Well, she’s not here.”
“She’s not in the château. I have to find her.” She left the sterilization room, words trailing away in Jones’s startled silence, pulled open the front door, breaking the hospital fug with the smell of early spring. She peered out into the predawn gray.
Jones followed her into the foyer. “Iven?”
Laura was scanning the grounds, the drive. Dead ahead, the rusted iron gate of the château, and beyond the road, marked with the lights of lorries, running east. To the left was the ruined orchard, and beyond lay the hospital cemetery, enlarged every week of the war. Was that a light, there, among the crosses?
Jones had seen it too. He was staring narrow-eyed into the night. “I thought Shaw looked peculiar, yesterday evening, when you came back from that dinner. I suppose it was too much to bear, dining in luxury after weeks of tending to men in pieces? And Mrs. Shaw would crack picturesquely, and go out wandering the moors in a nightdress or something.”
It cut too near the bone to be amusing, but Laura was glad of Jones’s presence as they went out together, through the slick grass at the edge of the drive. Laura could almost talk herself into an innocent explanation, convince herself that Pim was upstairs. The cemetery was on the far side of the overgrown apple orchard. They cut between the trees, whose shadows were just visible under a faintly graying sky.
The light reappeared in the cemetery. Laura thought she heard a voice. “Did he say I had him?” It wasn’t Jones’s voice.
Laura could not hear the answer, but the speaker laughed. “Oh, he told you, did he? Will I come if you do it? Yes, of course I shall. But don’t think that—”
The voices faded. The gleam of light had gone again. But Laura’s eyes found movement in the graveyard. Too tall to be Pim. Thinner than Jones. The light was so uncertain. Was it Faland? Was there really, in their wonder-stripped world, a monster she could placate, to get her brother back? Pim’s voice, shaking, said, “Please.”
Laura’s brain started working again. Why would Faland be here? How would Pim have known? What was she doing?
Then Jones’s light caught Pim running. There was no one else there.
“Mrs. Shaw,” Jones called peremptorily.
But Pim wasn’t looking at him. “No!” she called, running still. “Wait, I said I would, I—”
No one was there. Pim slowed to a walk, then stopped, panting. She stared blindly at the graves. Laura saw her shoulders shake. Then she turned toward them, collecting herself with the startling speed of a gently reared woman. Laura had seen her in profile, lips parted, a face full of some tormented emotion too complex to name, but Pim was smiling by the time she turned. “Laura, is that you?” she called. “And Dr. Jones, good heavens. Were you looking for me? Oh, lord, have I made a ninny of myself? Forgive me, please, both of you.” She brushed grass from her skirt. Jones hadn’t said anything; he looked suspicious. Laura wondered what he’d heard, what he’d thought, of that broken exchange in the shadows. Pim kept right on talking: “Was I sleepwalking? I suppose I must have been. You know, I had a maiden aunt prone to sleepwalking. Terrible thing. I think it’s the overstrain. Do you think it’s too early for a cup of tea?”
Oh, Pim,Laura thought. There were a dozen questions on the tip of her tongue, but a glance showed her Pim’s eyes wary behind that beautiful smile, and Laura didn’t think she’d get an answer. Not with Jones standing right there.
In the château, then. The instant she and Pim were alone.
But solitude wasn’t so easy to come by. Day was breaking and a dozen voices greeted both Laura and Jones the instant they passed the front door: a clamor of emergencies. One man had bled through his dressing, a nurse had seen signs of gangrene in a man’s leg, they were getting more Frenchmen that day, anything to relieve the strain on the overstretched regular hospitals. The rhythm of it all swept Laura up, and Pim didn’t let herself be corralled; she was on her feet without a break, fetching, carrying, sketching, while men dictated letters.
Young came at noon, the gravitas of his bearing only a little marred by his ears. He was closeted first with Mary, then with Pim, leaving the staff all eager to know what was going on.
“He’s still looking for their escaped German prisoner,” said one of the nurses, the one shameless about eavesdropping. “The fellow was actually seen in Poperinghe, it seems. They are searching abandoned buildings nearby. And the queen of Belgium is coming to us! At least that rumor’s true. This very evening, on her way to supper, and General Gage is coming with her. And a newspaperman. Oh, Mary’s going to have us all in a fury of scrubbing.”
