—
The Folkestone docks were chaos to the untrained eye. Lorries and ambulances crisscrossed the yards with no apparent care for the processions of soldiers, stretcher bearers, and walking wounded, who marched like ants from warehouse to warehouse. A large, badly painted steamship was moored in the middle of the chaos. A red cross painted on the funnel was its only protection from the U-boats that patrolled the Channel. Men were unloading stretchers from the deck and a lower cargo door, while those who could walk hobbled down the gangplank as best they could. Many were on crutches, some wheeled in bath chairs. Several men were carried down by orderlies, sitting on regular metal chairs.
From the steep hill above, Alice quieted the engine to say, “Looks like they have the perimeter guarded. I’ll try to use my credentials to get you as close as I can.” As Alice’s credentials consisted of a certificate she and Minnie had printed up in their studio, and handed out to all members of their messenger corps, Beatrice had no comfort that they would be allowed anywhere near the ship.
Fortunately, the brand-new private, on the smallest checkpoint, was already overwhelmed in managing his rifle and a clipboard while having to raise and lower the heavy barrier.
“Motorbike Brigade, transporting nurses,” shouted Alice as they approached. “Can’t stop in case the plugs give out.” She pulled a certificate from her coat and gave it to him as she continued to coast the motorbike forward slowly with her feet. “Open up sharpish, lad,” she barked. “Don’t want to decapitate two matrons with the barrier, do we?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, and though his eyes widened at the incongruity of women in trousers and oily goggles, he ran to raise the barrier and wave them through, his rifle falling off his shoulder and hanging at a dangerous angle from his elbow. Alice drove all the way to the gangplank to park the motorbike among a row of waiting ambulances.
As they watched, the crowd began to seem less random. Beatrice detected patterns in how the injured were moved: some to ambulances, some to a makeshift hospital building. She could see several men with clipboards and lists giving directions as the stretchers came off the ship. Nurses moved up and down the rows of men, checking their injuries.
“We should ask a man with a clipboard,” said Beatrice. “They have the lists.”
“No, they will surely have us escorted away,” said Agatha. “See where they are keeping families behind that fence?” Back towards the main road, a small group of people waved and called out. But they were too distant to hear anything or make themselves heard. “We should ask a nurse.”
She stepped from behind the ambulances and consulted a nurse in a severe navy blue uniform and frilly cap under a scruffy man’s greatcoat. The nurse looked around and nodded. Then she went over to a man with a clipboard and asked him a question. While he was consulting his papers, Beatrice scanned the myriad faces for Hugh’s. It was alarming how many men looked, at first glance, as if they might be him: a similar turn of the head or line of jaw, a pair of gray eyes under a heavy bandage, a hand reaching out from a man whose face was burned beyond recognition. For a moment she feared she had forgotten what Hugh looked like. Perhaps he had faded from memory as her father’s face kept doing this winter. Fading so she had to stop, sit down, and will back every feature, every quirk of the eyebrow, until she had his face again for immediate conjuring.
She saw John Kent first, walking from behind the last ambulance in the row, speaking to the driver. Agatha saw him too, and began to run towards him. Beatrice turned to follow, but Hugh’s face appeared in her path. She did not see from where he came. She felt her heart leap as she looked him up and down for injuries. She did not bother to be shy; there were too many hurt to consider one’s manners.
“Beatrice,” he said. She ran into his arms, and he embraced her hard, his head sunk on her shoulder and his shoulders shaking as he tried not to break down.
“Are the others with you?” she asked, her face pressed to his hair. “Daniel?”
“Daniel is gone,” said Hugh, his voice hoarse. “I could not bring him home, Beatrice.”
“I am so sorry,” she said. As she comforted him, she saw Agatha struggling to look in the back of the ambulance. Her husband pulled her away and spoke in her ear. As he held her tight, her knees buckled and she threw her head back in a low cry that seemed to come from the deepest core of pain.
“We must go to your aunt,” said Beatrice, and Hugh hesitated for a moment, as if unwilling to let her go. But then he put his chin in the air, pretending that he could see perfectly well out of eyes blurry with unshed tears, and they hurried to help John and his distraught wife.
—
It was bittersweet to follow the ambulance home to Rye, to see it draw up outside the Wheaton home and to see Lady Emily and Eleanor sobbing with joy and pain, cradling Harry Wheaton in their arms. Agatha climbed from the front seat of the ambulance as if she had become a hundred years old in the journey of a few miles. John supported her arm. She could only shake her head slowly at Lady Emily. And Lady Emily could only kiss her cheek, as if both ladies had been struck dumb by death. Hugh helped unload the stretcher cases as Major Frank examined the patients’ labels and directed their disposition about the hospital.
“This one doesn’t belong here,” said the Major. “He’s a private, and this is an officers’ hospital.”
“He’s a local boy, Major,” said Hugh. “Served as batman to both Harry here and my cousin, Daniel. It was my cousin’s last wish that we see him home.”
“Understand the sentiment entirely,” said Major Frank. “But can’t be done. No mixed wards, you know? Have to send him on by train to Brighton.”
“No, you can’t,” said Hugh. “He’ll never last the trip, and besides, his family doesn’t have the money to traipse to Brighton to care for him.”
“My hands are tied,” said the Major. “From the shape he’s in he probably should never have made the Channel crossing.”
“You’ll put him in the private wing of the house,” said Harry Wheaton. His voice was slurred from exhaustion and pain. His stump oozed at the edges of the bandage, and he was obviously in more agony than he was showing. “Put a cot in my father’s study. Easy for the nurses to get to and his family can come and go through the garden doors.”
“Harry, you’ll not put the farrier’s son in your father’s study,” said Lady Emily. “How could you think of such an insult to your dead father?”
“Not his study anymore,” said Harry.
“I beg your pardon!” said his mother.
“I beg yours, Mother,” said Harry. “But my father, the Colonel, took care of his men, and I should do the same.” He gestured to the orderlies holding the stretcher on which Snout lay unconscious, his cheeks flushed and his chest wheezing with each breath. “Chop, chop. In the study, if you please.” As the stretcher was carried in, Harry added, in a low voice, “Perhaps if I had stood up for the scrawny little blighter earlier…”
“I’ll let his parents know,” said Alice. “And I’ll take Miss Nash home.”
As Beatrice climbed into the sidecar, hitching her baggy breeches up once again in full view of a puzzled Lady Emily, Hugh came to grip her hand in his.
“Once again duty divides us, it seems,” he said. “I must make sure Snout is settled and then go to my aunt and uncle.”
“Do not feel any concern for me,” she said. She returned the pressure of his hand. “I am so grateful you are here to help them. Daniel is an unbearable loss, Hugh.”
“When I have seen to both, may I come to you?” he asked.
“I would be happy,” she said. “I will wait up for you.”