Dusk Read online

  Eve Edwards

  DUSK

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Ticket

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two: Sketch

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three: Letters

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  EVE EDWARDS has a doctorate from Oxford University and thinks researching is a large part of the fun in writing historical fiction. She lives in Oxford and is married with three children.

  eve-edwards.com

  Books by Eve Edwards

  THE OTHER COUNTESS

  THE QUEEN’S LADY

  THE ROGUE’S PRINCESS

  DUSK

  In loving memory of Jennifer Lovell

  And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds

  – ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)

  Part One

  TICKET

  1

  THE SOMME, FORWARD MEDICAL STATION, NEAR ALBERT, 1 JULY 1916, 2 A.M.

  ‘Nurse, I’m ready for the next patient. What do we have?’

  Helen checked her hastily scribbled notes for the surgeon. Dr Cameron was one of her favourites among the medical staff, a cheery Scot, short of stature, whose balding crown glowed in the operating theatre lights with a steady and reassuring beam. Absurd, but she’d learnt to look at it whenever she felt adrift or scared, drawn to flutter at his side like a moth to the collector’s lantern.

  ‘We’ve a lung, a knee and a head wound, doctor.’

  ‘Head wound – will he pull through?’

  Helen swallowed, remembering the deep injury she had seen on the scalp, blood against dark hair like the red stripe on the dark wing of the cinnabar moth. ‘Unlikely, doctor.’

  ‘Best leave him then. Bring me the lung.’

  Helen signalled to the orderlies, two elderly labourers with whom she communicated in her schoolgirl French. ‘Celui-là. Vite, vite!’ The ‘lung’ in question was a poor private no older than her; he had taken shrapnel in the chest on a ration run, according to the tag on his toe.

  The old men heaved the stretcher up and bounced the boy into the operating theatre. Helen had already cut off his bloody uniform, but it was nigh on impossible to keep the place as clean as she had been taught. The surgeons had stopped demanding it of the nurses, seeing they were fighting an impossible battle when the casualties came in so fast.

  And tonight had been a ‘quiet’ night.

  Dr Cameron probed the injury. ‘Two holes. Thank God he’s insensible. Chloroform.’ Helen, who had received the extra training required to administer the anaesthetic, gave the boy a light dose to keep him under as Miss Kelly, an experienced nurse in her fifties, moved closer to assist the surgeon.

  The doctor tutted, annoyed by the insult of the injury to the young victim. ‘We’ll have this sorted at the double.’ With the deft touch of someone with too much experience of grave injuries, the surgeon repaired the damage and sewed the boy up, humming as he did so. ‘That’ll have to do. Lord, I’m hungry. Can’t wait for breakfast. Bring the knee and tell me how the head is doing.’

  Two operations later, the surgery was over. The head had died on the table – a merciful release, Dr Cameron had told the nurses as the man was taken away. You could not save everyone. The knee had become an amputation, but the patient was expected to pull through.

  The Scot stripped off his bloodied gown.

  ‘Good work, Nurse Kelly, Nurse Sandford. Go and get some rest, my dears. We’ve orders to clear the beds. Pass the word on.’

  Helen nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’ She exchanged a grim look with the other nurse. He didn’t need to say any more. That order meant another assault was planned, casualties expected. The day shift would have their hands full. She would have to snatch what sleep she could before going back on duty. ‘I’ll tell Sister, shall I, Miss Kelly?’

  The older woman gave her a grateful smile. ‘Thank you. If you wouldn’t mind. I’m dead on my feet.’

  Pausing at the head nurse’s station in Ward One, Helen passed on the message to her section leader.

  Sister Richards received the news with her usual stoic acceptance, her face strangely waxen, reminding Helen of a weather-worn marble angel in Highgate Cemetery, each drop of bad news sliding over her face, taking a little more of her identity with it every time. ‘Thank you, Sandford. I’ll see you back on duty at six unless you are required.’

  Helen left Sister Richards looking despairingly at her list of patients, calculating who would survive the removal from the forward medical station to one of the units further behind the lines. Helen was thankful she didn’t have to make these life-and-death choices, her junior position sparing her some burdens. There were too many decisions to make as it was. Should she have said the head wound might pull through? What if they had operated on him first?

  She hurried out of the hut, running away from the night’s work. You couldn’t think like that. Helen’s teachers in nursing school had warned her that she had to stick with her decisions, not unpick them afterwards. Do what you think is right. Prioritize. Read the medical evidence and draw conclusions based on fact not fancy.

  She paused in the doorway to allow her eyes to adjust to the dark. In a few hours, dawn would flush the horizon, bringing a false rosy glow to the dead world. Night was kinder, veiling the ugliness, but she could still see it in her mind’s eye. At heart a nature lover, Helen had spent much of her life as a child out of doors on tramps through the countryside, seeking out the hidden world of hedge and copse, avoiding her home and her father for long, happy hours. This place had once also been a landscape of lush meadows and slow rivers; now the fields around the River Somme had undergone a thorough and complete beating. Though it was high summer, this area had been so pounded by artillery that nature had been whipped into a retreat. The churned mud was a dirty bone-white due to the chalky soil. The odd stray drift of flowers among the network of wooden duckboards was the only proof that things could still grow. It was haunting how the stubborn blood-red poppies and bright dandelions clung on where other flowers had given up. During the day, chalkhill blue butterflies still hung from stems, flexing their wings, bravely pretending life as normal could proceed. Helen had no such hope. Most of the trees were amputees, the last remaining sprays of leaves waving their surrender.

  BRITISH LINES, THE SOMME, 1 JULY 1916, 2 A.M.

  The ticket lay flat on Sebastian’s palm, slightly damp like everything else in the trenches. Creased down the middle, folded and refolded so many times, it was threatening to make a permanent division into two parts.

  He knew every single curl on that elaborate font, the sloping S, the roundness of the Os.

  The Palace Theatre of Varieties invites you to an evening of Patriotic Songs

  ‘Your King and Country want You’

  We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go!

  23rd October 1914, Row F, Seat 14

  He ran his finger
over the middle, knowing he risked further degrading the thinning pale pink paper, delicate as butterfly wings. The ticket gestured to a life beyond mud-and-plank walls, his talisman, something solid in contrast to the holder who felt so insubstantial. Since orders came down for the attack on the German lines in the morning, Sebastian had been going about his duties as if he were dreaming but not able to wake. Full consciousness was too dangerous – that way lurked insanity. The 1st Somerset Light Infantry, or what was left of it, had been asked to steel themselves to do the unthinkable so often, he was no longer sure he had any courage left, having expended it all on other days, other raids. Tired – so tired. If he could manage in this semi-aware state, he might get by. It was the men who dwelt too much on things that got the shrieks. A bit of emotional lobotomy was the only way to survive.

  He could not, would not, lose it in front of the men.

  Find an anchor and hold steady. Sebastian fixed his gaze on the music-hall memento, a paper skin overlying his lifeline, forcing his mind away from the danger zone. The ticket was his link to the first time he met Helen. Now, near the likely end of things, perhaps he need not fret too much about tearing it. Life was dissolving around him, a tablet in a glass of water, fizzing away to nothing but bubbles and a bitter taste. Would something as fragile as romance survive or would that too crumble to meaningless pieces? He no longer knew.

  ‘Have you ever been to Germany, Doodle?’

  Sebastian looked up from his notebook, slipping the worn ticket back between the covers. He had earned his nickname – in its full form Yankee-Doodle – thanks to the happy coincidence of his habit of sketching in his book or on any scrap of spare paper, and his American blood. Private Cook, the unit’s clown and fixer, had christened him a few months back and the name had stuck – now everyone used the friendly moniker.

  ‘What was that, sir?’

  ‘Germany – have you visited?’ Sebastian had thought his commanding officer had been snatching a few moments of sleep before tomorrow’s assault. Instead, Captain Williams lay staring up at the stain of sleepy, fat bluebottles that covered the plank ceiling of the dugout, hands laced across his chest like a medieval tomb effigy. The captain had had little enough rest since the orders had come through to prepare the company, but, like Sebastian, he was probably unable to close his eyes even though they were supposed to be off duty, the other officers in the company standing the watch. The constant artillery fire from their own lines to clear the wire from no man’s land made them all strangers to sleep. The returning barks from German guns were unnerving. Sebastian pushed away the thought that an unlucky hit could bury them alive; at least in the dugout they were safe from shrapnel.

  ‘Germany? No, sir. I never had the chance.’

  ‘I forgot – you’re so bally young. You were what? Sixteen when this madness blew up in our faces?’

  ‘Seventeen, sir. Nineteen now. I did travel but not to Germany.’

  ‘I had friends in Berlin before all this.’ Williams waved his hand in the direction of the Germans hunkered down in the ruined village of Serre. ‘Spent the summer of eleven there. A fine country. Damned fine.’ His words were punchy, but his tone lacked energy as if he too felt half rubbed out of existence.

  ‘So I’ve heard, sir.’ Sebastian wondered at this strange mood that had come upon his captain. He needed his leader to show no cracks if he was going to maintain his own determination not to fail in his duty.

  Williams scratched the bites on the back of his hands. ‘I can’t help asking myself if any of my friends are over there.’

  Sebastian couldn’t think of a suitable answer. Despite the best attempts of the propaganda back in London, it was a rare Tommy at the front that held any personal grudge against Fritz, but neither did they think too much about him as a person. If you did that, it became next to impossible to take the shot or go over the top. ‘Best not to wonder, sir.’

  ‘You’re right, as always, Doodle. You’ve an amazingly level head on your young shoulders.’

  Sebastian took the compliment, undeserved though he knew it to be. He was only calm because all the alternatives were worse. He faced the dawn with dread, haunted by the thought that there was little or no point to their courage as this stalemate in the trenches had gone on for too long. For all the pep talks from top brass, their knowledge gained from poring over maps at headquarters, it was hard to believe that yet one more push would break through the German lines. He could see what they were trying to do – it wasn’t as if there were no strategy behind the orders. The whole hellish situation was like one of those interminable rugby games at school where the scrum had been too evenly matched. For all the shouting of the sports masters, neither side could do more than splatter each other with mud until some lucky heel scuffed the ball free. He sometimes wondered if the generals thought that their troops were actually teams to be pitted against each other, not considering how their bodies were being blown up, sliced apart, gassed to death.

  Christ.

  Best not to think at all.

  Helen retreated to the cocoon of nurses’ huts, a small collection of iron-roofed buildings hastily assembled on the site of what once must have been a prosperous farm. Some of their equipment was housed in the shell of the barn; the house itself was roofless. Even so, several of the male orderlies had taken to bedding down there, preferring it to the huts that could become either freezing or like ovens, depending on the whim of the weather.

  She envied the men their freedom to choose. For decency’s sake, the nurses did not have such latitude. Many people back home found it shocking to have women so near the front, not because of the danger, but the risk of fraternization between the sexes. The nurses countered possible accusations of loose morals by chaperoning each other in this masculine world of doctors and soldier patients. Helen shared her cubicle with Mary Henderson, another sister in her section, but they were rarely there together, working opposite shifts. As anticipated, the little enclosure was empty, her bed ready for her. Eating could wait until after she had slept. She took off her headscarf and apron and hung them on a peg. Starched cuffs, collar and blouse followed, then she filled the enamel basin on the box washstand. She couldn’t bear the idea of taking anything from the theatre into her bed. Checking the door was firmly closed and the curtains pulled, she finally took off her underclothes and soaped her face, arms and chest briskly. She fell into a kind of standing doze, exhausted by the night’s work.

  The suds smelt medicinal, not like the rose perfume that her sister, Flora, had favoured back in the days when they could afford a few luxuries. The water trickled cool down to her elbows, then to the tips of her little fingers, before dripping to the linoleum. The shivery sensation brought back the memory of someone running a stalk along her inner arm. She closed her eyes to savour the brief escape.

  A picnic. Young people stretched out on a riverbank, young gods come to the mortal world to play. Sebastian leaning over her and tickling her awake with the feathery bluegrass. Yes, that was what he had called it, the faint trace of America in his accent, as light as the touch of the seed head against her skin. She would have called it plain meadow grass until she met him, but now preferred the name he used as it captured the faint blue wash of the ripening stem. He had insisted on sketching her as she lay on her back, her sleepy smile the definition of spring, he had claimed, full of promise.

  But he didn’t want her near him now.

  Helen shivered and grabbed a linen towel, quickly drying herself, a burst of frustration at his last letter fuelling her movements. She had thought he understood her, but instead he had tried to send her home.

  ‘Stupid, stupid war.’ She glared at her reflection.
She was still pondering her reply, knowing better than to post the first impassioned response. How could she make him see that her sacrifice was as worthy as his? That women were not butterflies to be kept in a glass house?

  She pulled a nightgown over her head. Perhaps he thought she had no common sense – a sweet face but no brains? Strange really. It had always been the other way round before, her intelligence praised to make up for what she lacked in looks. Sebastian was the first man to say she was pretty, but she had decided long ago it was the artist in him who saw interest in forms that others thought quite ordinary. He had made her feel desirable, her with her unfashionably full figure and long, straight brown hair. He’d claimed it shone with golden highlights, but, as she punished it now with a brush, she could see nothing special about it.

  ‘Far too heavy and dull, Helen,’ she told herself, unembarrassed to be talking aloud as there was no one to overhear. Her tone turned mocking. ‘Not like Flora’s blonde curls.’ Lord, how many times had she heard that comparison when she was growing up? She was used to playing the ugly sister to Flora’s Cinderella.

  Looks had promised to determine the sisters’ destiny. Their father had been blunt: he declared Helen a wasted effort of a girl when she left school at fourteen, fit only for service or teaching; Flora, the family jewel, was destined for great things. Helen had stumbled over the threshold of adulthood where others glided.

  Bending closer to the little mirror, Helen brushed her fingertips over her skin. She had suffered from a bad complexion in her last year at home, but it had cleared up with age. Still, her father had never forgiven her for daring to be so plain.