Chapter 9: The Dead, Small and Great

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADIAN MARITIMES

February 1918

Laura had not had a nightmare since she went to Flanders—she never dreamed at all anymore. She fell asleep to darkness and came awake again. Most of her colleagues said it was the same for them. Some protective quirk of the brain, to keep them from reliving their days.

But Laura had a nightmare on the night of Mrs. Shaw’s tea party. She dreamed of the comet.

She was sixteen again, and it was 1910, the year the comet came, and her mother appeared at school, just as she had in life, to take Laura and Freddie home. They hurried back to Veith Street together. “Freddie,” Laura said. “I’m so glad to see you. I had an absurd dream, that you had— Well, it’s all right. You’re here.”

He smiled at her, but didn’t say anything.

Their mother insisted on holding an umbrella over their heads. “Come on,” she told them. “We have to hurry.”

It was Laura who saw it, when the umbrella bobbled. She happened to be looking up. “Freddie,” she whispered. “Look.” There was fire in the sky. A blazon of white, stark against the thin blue of the winter noon. Seeing it, Laura was afraid. Her hand hurt where her mother held her wrist.

“Don’t look at it, my darlings,” her mother whispered. “Try not to breathe—the comet will drench the world in gas—comet gas, foul, green—stay under my umbrella, we’re almost there.”

Then suddenly they were in their own house, and her father was drawing the curtains. Laura had not been afraid when the real comet came, visible in the January daylight, even though her parents had trembled and called it a sign of the End. But in her dream she was terrified. The house got darker and darker. “No,” she tried to insist. “It’s just a comet. Dust in the sky. In school we—”

Her mother said, “Laura, Laura, they lie to you in school. To keep the public calm. World’s ending, dear. Four Horsemen, remember? And the first one’s white. What color is the comet?”

Laura tried to explain. That’s not the world, that’s not how it works. A single scarlet tear ran down her mother’s cheek. There’s no horsemen. Nothing so grand as horsemen…

“Maman? Are you all right?”

Her mother smiled at her even as another scarlet tear slipped down. “Of course I am. We’re safe here. We’re safe at home. We’re all together.”

But the scarlet tears poured faster and faster down her face, and Laura tried to go to her, to reach out to stanch the blood, but she couldn’t move. She was knee-deep in mud now, the mud was in her house, and the comet, the comet was coming and there was nothing she could do…Her mother’s eyes were pools of blood. “Laura, chérie, it’s all right. We’re all together, you see.”

The comet outside exploded, a shattering noise, and all the glass blew in, and there was fire all around, and green gas, and in the middle of it all her mother was bleeding. No, it wasn’t her, it was Freddie there, with a face full of blood. Laura was slipping and scrambling in mud, choking on gas, trying to get to him…

Then Laura lurched upright, wet with cold sweat. She was in her room and it was the blackest, coldest hour before dawn, with the fire burned down in the grate. The moon must have set, for even that cold trickle of light was gone from her window. She lay there panting. Saw the shadows of the armoire, the chest, the vanity.

And another shadow in the corner opposite.

The shadow moved. An intruder? A trick of the light? She tried to leap to her feet but realized that she could not.

It was a person, not a shadow. It had stepped from her nightmare.

From her memory.

A familiar housedress. Blood in her eyes. Glass in her body. Accusation in every line of her ruined face: You didn’t save me, why didn’t you save me? The apparition came closer. Stiff fingers, full of glass, trailed over Laura’s face. Laura couldn’t move at all. And then the shadow was speaking with Agatha Parkey’s voice, as she’d spoken in the séance, a loud, flat, blaring voice: “Ded but he’s alive, ded but he’s alive. Ded but he’s alive!” The fingers were choking her, gripping her throat, and she could feel the glass in the hands pricking her neck, shaking her back and forth. “Fredi Fred Fr Fin Find FIND…”

Laura jolted awake just as her door flew open. Three white flannel wrappers and three nightcapped heads bobbed in the doorway, and Lucretia Parkey held aloft a lamp like an elderly Lucia di Lammermoor. “Laura?” said Agatha Parkey. “Laura. Are you all right?”

“I—” She tried for an easy answer, witty, polite, but her voice cracked.

“Oh, dear,” said Lucretia, bustling into the room. The lamp chased away the shadows, and it was just Laura’s ordinary, old-fashioned bedroom.

“I had a nightmare, Miss Parkey.” She dragged her fingers through her hair, trying to clear her head.

“Well, you can’t stay up here,” said Agatha. Cataracts had left her eyes white as an egg, but she still seemed to be peering about the room. “The Departed are relentless when they want something. Often enough it’s the only idea they’ve got in their heads. Come downstairs. We shall sit round the kitchen like girls, and have cocoa.” Her sensitive nose twitched. “Without spirits.”

Laura flushed. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“You didn’t,” said Lucretia comfortably. “The old don’t sleep very much. Come now, dear.” She stumped over to the bed, picked up Laura’s dressing gown, nudged her slippers nearer.

Laura didn’t want to have to lie back alone in the darkness. She put on her wrapper and slippers. Lucretia put a warm arm round her, and Laura felt the surprising strength in her, in the birdlike scapulae, the knotty fingers. They made a little procession down the hall.

“Waiting for something to happen?” Laura asked Lucretia as they walked.

“Well, yes,” said Lucretia. “To you, you know. All your ghosts. You’re trailing them like penitent-beads. Your family. Your patients. Not dear Freddie, of course. Because he’s not dead.”

Laura said nothing.

The kitchen was surprisingly warm, considering the hour, with a fire burning slow and hot in the oven stove. Hadn’t she smothered the fire before going to bed? Laura helped Lucretia to a chair and then went to add more wood. Clotilde was bustling around with hot milk and powders. She put a cup into Laura’s hands, when Laura came and sat down.

“I haven’t had a nightmare in years,” said Laura. How did Agatha contrive to make her blind eyes seem to be watching? Laura sipped her cocoa. Realized that she felt safe in that kitchen. As though the phantoms in her mind were no match for fire and chocolate, and those three ancient women, sitting round in their nightdresses and frilly wrappers and caps, looking serious. Lucretia and Clotilde were both watching Agatha.

Agatha said, “We don’t often give advice.” The room was still, except for the faint sound of the fire, whispering. Agatha smiled, a little. She’d only three teeth. “We answer questions, but we rarely offer advice.”

“Sometimes, though,” put in Lucretia. “To the worthy.”

Laura was silent. There was something impressive about their quietness, the crags and valleys of their faces. Their hands on the scarred wooden tabletop.

“Laura,” said Agatha. “I will tell you three things that are true. You may believe as you like. The first true thing is this: Your brother is alive.”

There was no prevarication in her voice, none of the thickets of words with which the Parkeys hedged their bets in séances.

“Second: He will not come back to you. You must go to him. Third: To save him, you must let him go.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” said Lucretia.

“And I will give you some advice,” said Agatha. “Wars are stark things, are they not? Black and white. Allies and enemies. Not this time. You will not know who your enemies are, nor will they reveal themselves as you expect. You will not know whom to trust, but you must trust regardless. Do you understand?”

“No,” said Laura.

“You will.” Agatha’s three-toothed smile was a little frightening in the firelight.

Laura said what she could never say aloud in daylight. “He’s dead. They’re all dead. There’s nothing to save. I failed. The comet came. The fire. My mother was right. It’s the end of everything.”

“Perhaps. But there is something to save,” said Agatha.

The kitchen was fracturing now into amber light and scarred wood. Three old ladies, straight-backed. Their caps had become hoods, their dressing gowns were sweeping robes, and all three of them looked at her with eyes that had seen sorrows like hers a hundred times: a quiet, remote empathy.

Agatha said, “I suppose that is another piece of advice for you, Laura. Do not despair. Endings—they are beginnings too.”

Her voice echoed in Laura’s head. The fire and the shadows were dissolving into nothing, and then Laura came quietly awake in her own rumpled bed. Clear morning light fell on her face.

She lay there a moment. Shook her head at herself. Dreams within dreams.

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· · ·But this dream would not let her go. It lived behind her eyelids: green gas and fear, mud, the comet, her mother’s voice. Agatha in her kitchen saying Your brother is alive. When that evening came at last, Laura stirred up her fire against the frigid dusk, closed her door, sat down at the desk, and set all Freddie’s things in front of her. The jacket, laundered now. The Bible, with the place marked. The postcard from Bayern. I will bring him back if I can…She looked at the two tags, the cord twined round her stiff fingers. All her correspondence stacked neatly off to the side.

What did she know?

The Red Cross said he was missing. But he wasn’t. She had his things.

Someone knew what had happened to him. Someone in Flanders. The person who’d packed that box. Who’d taken the jacket. Knows but isn’t telling me. She understood. God knew she’d lied to enough families, to spare them.

Who is it? Who knows?She reached for her letters. One by one she paged through them all. We don’t know where he died. We don’t know.

She laid the creased papers aside and sat for a long time, thinking.

Someone knows.

Before she could think too much about what she was doing, she got up from her desk and left her room. In the foyer, she put on her cap and coat and scarf, slipped out into the frigid evening, closed the Parkeys’ front door soundlessly behind her. She was going to call on Penelope Shaw. Or, more specifically, Pim’s friend Mary Borden.