The Promise (18 page)

‘I am too,’ Belle admitted. ‘You see, I really wanted to confide in you about something that happened at the court on the day of Newbold’s trial. I couldn’t tell you about it, not when you didn’t know about my past. But a reporter spoke to me. He knew my maiden name, and I think he was at the trial of Kent, the man who abducted me, so he’d know a huge amount of my past. Part of the reason I want to give up the shop is because of him. I’ve got a feeling he might approach me again.’

‘You mean you think he might try to blackmail you?’

Belle shrugged. ‘You are quick, that’s one of the things I like about you. Mog just thought he was after a story about the robbery, but I’ve met a few maggots in my time, and I think he’s one. Call it gut instinct.’

‘But everyone you care about already knows all this,’ Miranda said. ‘You can’t blackmail someone unless they are hiding stuff from their nearest and dearest.’

‘That’s true, but what he may have realized, if he’s been poking around up here, is that I’m very respectable now. Imagine how people in the village, my customers, would react if they knew the truth about me!’

‘But he can’t possibly know the whole story! Only that you were sold into a brothel as a very young girl, and people would be very sympathetic about that.’

Belle raised one eyebrow. ‘Round here? No one would ever buy a hat from me again. Can you imagine what your mother would say?’

Miranda nodded. ‘Yes, I can, but not everyone’s like her.’

‘Enough are,’ Belle said sadly. ‘Mog and I have been so careful to fit in, to be respectable. That man could shatter all that. I don’t mind so much for myself as for poor Mog. She and Garth are so happy, she loves being well respected in the community. I brought her so much pain when I was abducted, I don’t want to bring disgrace down on her now she’s so settled.’

‘Running away to France isn’t going to stop that happening if Blessard does want to expose you,’ Miranda said.

‘True. But I suspect money is all that man wants. He’s probably looked at this shop and thinks I’ve got plenty and I’m a soft target because my husband is away at the war. If the shop goes and I’m a volunteer nurse’s aide, what’s in it for him?’

‘Ummm.’ Miranda looked thoughtful. ‘He could try Garth?’

Belle sniggered. ‘Would anyone in their right mind attempt to blackmail Garth? He’d wring his neck as soon as look at him.’

They both fell silent for a while, sipping their sherry and looking into the fire.

‘About this man Etienne.’ Miranda cocked one perfectly shaped eyebrow quizzically. ‘I sense something there. Was he a lover?’

Belle shook her head. ‘No, but I loved him.’

Miranda smirked. ‘That couldn’t be another of France’s attractions, could it?’

Belle’s eyes widened. ‘No, of course not. He didn’t even cross my mind. I just want to do something worthwhile, to feel alive again, not just marking time till Jimmy comes home.’

‘Well, you’ve made me want to join you in this mad idea,’ Miranda said. ‘So we’d better make some plans and work out how we’re going to go about it.’

Chapter Ten

The Railway bar lights were off when Belle got home at midnight after her first day at The Royal Herbert Military Hospital. She let herself in very quietly through the side door, and was just taking off her coat in the dark hall when the kitchen door opened and in the stream of light she saw Mog.

‘You startled me. I thought you’d gone to bed,’ Belle said.

‘Do you think I’d go to bed with you out roaming the streets?’ Mog snapped. ‘I had your tea on, but it’s ruined now. I suppose you’ve been living the high life with Miss Toffee Nose?’

Belle was swaying with exhaustion and in no mood for a row. ‘I’ve only just left the hospital,’ she said. ‘The only high life I’ve had today was the stink of gangrene.’

‘I take it you won’t be bothering to go again tomorrow then?’

Mog had her arms folded across her chest, and she was puffed up with anger and indignation. All the way home Belle had told herself she couldn’t possibly continue being a nurse’s aide; she had never worked so hard in her life or seen so many distressing sights. But Mog’s scorn banished that thought.

‘Have you ever known me give up on something I wanted to do?’ she asked.

It was the end of April, and for the past month since she’d told Mog and Garth that she wasn’t going to renew the lease on the shop and had been accepted at the hospital as a volunteer, Mog had ridiculed her plans. At times she had been so nasty about it that Belle had been tempted to find a room somewhere and move out. But knowing that would upset Jimmy, she’d resolved to stay in the hope Mog would come round.

‘Then you must have a screw missing to work a sixteen-hour day for nothing,’ Mog retorted.

‘You think it’s nothing to help save soldiers’ lives?’ Belle sighed. ‘To me it’s far more rewarding than making hats for vain women with more money than sense.’

‘What about making some money for when Jimmy comes home? You’ll soon fritter away everything you made at the shop with nothing more coming in.’

‘That’s my business,’ Belle said.

‘Maybe it is, but I’ll bet you’ll talk it over with Miss Toffee Nose and she’ll come up with another hare-brained scheme even more ridiculous than this one.’

Belle felt hurt and saddened by the jealousy and spite in that remark. ‘I’ve already told you dozens of times that this was my idea and not Miranda’s, and don’t call her Miss Toffee Nose, she isn’t, and she’s been a very good friend to me. I’m going to bed now. I just hope by tomorrow night you have found a way of accepting that this is what I want to do.’

Mog snorted her disapproval. ‘It’s all women of her sort who are rushing off to make nuisances of themselves in France. That’ll be her next plan, I expect.’

‘Those women are not making nuisances of themselves in France. They are doing a marvellous job.’

Mog flounced back to the kitchen and slammed the door behind her. Belle was too tired to pursue her and try to talk her round, so wearily she went on up the stairs to her bed.

She knew that the real cause of Mog’s disapproval was fear that Belle was forgetting she was a married woman. Mog saw marriage as a finality; that once the vows were made a wife shouldn’t want or need a life beyond serving her husband and keeping him happy. While she appreciated it couldn’t be quite that way for Belle as Jimmy was away, she still wanted to see her centring her life round him, sitting at home at nights knitting him socks, writing him letters and making plans for when he returned.

Belle certainly hadn’t forgotten she was married; she wished more than anything that the war would end soon and Jimmy would come home so they could settle down together again. But it was clear the war wasn’t going to end any time soon, and she couldn’t even be certain Jimmy would survive it. It was not in her nature just to sit around indefinitely twiddling her thumbs.

Jimmy was right behind her too. The letter he’d written in reply to hers about doing voluntary work had made his views quite clear.

‘I’ll be proud to think you are doing your bit for wounded soldiers,’ he wrote. ‘God knows, the wounded men I’ve seen here need all the help they can get to recover from their injuries. Uncle Garth and Mog will probably disapprove of you doing anything that takes you out of their sight, but pay no heed to them, they’ve got fixed ideas because of what life has dealt them.

‘I think when I do come back that we should get a home of our own. We’ve both spent too long having our lives arranged by others. I often daydream about us living by the sea, maybe running a guest house instead of a public house, I’d give anything to be somewhere quiet and clean. Even when we’re sent back from the line the gunfire never lets up, but the way I deal with all the horrors here is imagining lying between soft, clean sheets with you, windows open, a soft breeze wafting in and complete silence, or sitting by a roaring fire eating anything that isn’t bully beef.’

Jimmy always mentioned the constant noise of gunfire and his longing for silence in his letters, and Belle was well aware that the man she married might not be the same man when the war was over. Maybe it wouldn’t be possible to go to France, but at least working at the hospital would give her a better understanding of what he was going through.

Once Belle was in bed, she lay there thinking over the long day she’d just had. Matron, a slender and severe-looking woman, had looked her up and down when she arrived on the ward in the morning. Belle was wearing the regulation high-necked, ankle-length navy blue dress, white cuffs, collar, apron and cap but it didn’t appear that she had the woman’s approval.

‘All your hair must be secured back under your cap,’ Matron said archly. ‘You will do exactly as you are ordered and if I find you incompetent I will ask you to leave immediately.’

‘Yes, Matron,’ Belle said as she tucked back the couple of stray curls which had escaped her cap. She was a little shaken by the chilly reception, for although she hadn’t expected to be thanked for volunteering to help out, she certainly hadn’t anticipated being treated like a schoolgirl.

Her first impression of the forty-bed ward to which she had been allocated was surprise that it was so orderly and peaceful, even if rather gloomy as the window at the far end of the ward was high up and narrow. Most of the patients were lying down, and their counterpanes were smoothed out, snowy-white sheets turned neatly back, but there was no groaning or thrashing about in pain as she’d expected. Almost all of the patients’ eyes turned to look at her; some of the men even managed a cheeky grin. There were two Queen Alexandra’s Sisters on duty, and two other women who she assumed were either civilian nurses or volunteers like her.

The first task she was given was to go outside the ward to scrub down a bed a soldier had died in the night before. The disinfectant was so strong it stung her hands and the smell took her back to New Orleans and the stuff they used to wash the clients’ private parts with. It made her smile to herself to imagine how Matron would react if she was to reveal that.

When she had finished that job Sister Adams, a plain and very skinny woman in her late thirties, who Belle assumed was the most senior of the nursing staff, told her to observe while Sister May did the dressings.

It was like a baptism of fire. The first patient had been hit by a grenade. He’d had what was left of his right arm amputated just below the shoulder at a field hospital, but his whole chest and right side was a vivid mass of torn and burnt flesh.

Belle didn’t feel sickened, just appalled at such a hideous wound, and had she been left to clean it with the saline solution herself she wouldn’t have known where to start and would have been frightened of hurting the man even more. But Private Lomax didn’t cry out as Sister May gently dabbed the wound; he kept his eyes on Belle and even tried to hold a conversation.

‘Your first day?’ he asked.

Belle told him it was.

‘You watch Sister May carefully, she’s the best and the gentlest. I see you’re wearing a wedding ring. Is your husband in France?’

As Miranda had said, married women couldn’t be accepted for nursing training. Belle had lied about her age and said she was twenty-three, but she had admitted she was married. At her interview they had made it quite plain they were only prepared to accept her as a volunteer because her husband was on active service.

‘Yes, I think he must be near Ypres. He can’t say of course, but there’ve been little hints.’

‘We’ve had a great many men in here who were wounded there,’ Sister May said. ‘I do hope your husband stays safe.’

‘Thank you, Sister,’ Belle replied, then turned her attention to Lomax again. ‘What will you do now?’ she asked. He was so young, no more than nineteen; although his good arm was muscular, his body had the wiriness of a young boy.

‘Go on back to Sussex and help Dad on the farm,’ he said. ‘It’s lucky I’m left-handed. So I’ll still be able to do most things.’

His courage and lack of self-pity brought a lump to Belle’s throat.

By the time she and Sister May had worked their way round one side of the ward, Belle realized that it must be a sort of code of honour among the wounded not to show distress at their injuries, as not one of them complained or cried out as their wounds were dressed. One man had lost both legs, one had to lie on his stomach because his back was one huge open wound. Another man had been told that morning that his leg had to come off above the knee as he had gangrene.

The smell from his wound was the only thing that had made Belle gag during the day. She’d emptied countless bedpans, three times she’d had to clean up a man with dysentery. She had dealt with vomit and blood, and helped lay out a man who had finally died from a terrible stomach wound. Yet it was only the smell of the gangrene that really sickened her.

Sister May was around twenty-eight, tall and well-built, with the rosy cheeks of a country girl. She was firm and professional, but Belle sensed her innate kindness as she worked quickly and efficiently without any fuss. She was a good person to learn from as she gave Belle a little information about each patient and explained what each of them needed. She said she and the other nurses were very glad of volunteer help, and that she thought Belle was made of the right stuff to be very useful.

During the afternoon a convoy of ambulances arrived at the hospital with over a hundred more wounded on stretchers. Belle went out with Sister May and Sister Adams to receive them, and to show the stretcher bearers which ward they were to take them to.

At least half of the new arrivals were in a very bad way. They might have been stripped of their uniforms and their wounds dressed in a hospital in France, but now they were going to have operations in an attempt to save their lives.

Belle had never felt quite so inadequate. All she could do was watch and learn from the nurses as they spoke to the patients and reassured them. Sister May directed her to which of the men could be given a drink, or to light and hold a cigarette to the lips of those who wanted one, and at one point she took Belle aside and asked if she would write a letter home for one man who had been blinded.