Unhonored (15 page)

“What is it?” Margaret asked with alarm.

Each of the tin soldiers had been formed as though it was wounded in battle. One had bandages on its face as though it was being treated for mustard gas burns. Others were missing limbs. Some were supported on their bases by crutches.

“I told you I would find soldiers,” Ellis said. The giggle in her voice had a hysterical edge. “What better place to look for toy soldiers than in a playroom? But why should anyone want to create such toys?”

“What do you mean, your ladyship?” Margaret asked.

“Well, just look at them!” Ellis insisted, holding the box out toward her maid. “They're horrific toys!”

“What toys, milady?” Margaret asked deliberately.

“These in the box,” Ellis insisted, turning the open box back under her gaze. “No child should play with such…”

The box in her hand was empty.

“I could not agree with you more on that point, Ellis,” said the husky voice behind her.

She looked up from the box.

Six soldiers stood about them in the dark nursery.

Six maimed, horribly disfigured soldiers.

 

15

SOLDIERS

“Who are you?” Ellis demanded. Her hand that still held the empty box had begun shaking.

“You know us, ma'am.” The husky voice belonged to a strong man who was taller than the others. He wore a stained and worn-out field coat with the chevrons of a chief warrant officer. He had a striking, strong jaw and a generous mouth. His brown hair, in some places nearly four inches in length, stuck awkwardly out from beneath the bandage that wrapped around his head, hiding his eyes from view. The man stood very still, as though he were afraid to move from the spot on which he stood. “You know us all.”

“Ellis!” Margaret's voice was delighted. “Did you make them?”

“Make them?” Ellis turned her gaze sharply toward her maid.

“Oh, I suppose you didn't; not really,” Margaret gushed as she openly gaped at the mutilated men struggling to stand around them. “But aren't they perfectly
horrible
!”

“Margaret!” Ellis felt disgust at her companion's obvious delight in these men's deplorable condition.

“I mean, of course I've seen
Soldiers
before.” Margaret could not stop talking. “Not up close, mind you, since Mrs. Crow has forbidden them outside the Ruins. Dr. Carmichael studiously avoided them and Merrick never had much use for them, either. But every time I've seen them, they were always so perfect and whole. These are deliciously broken, like they were in
pieces
or something.”

“Margaret, hold your tongue!” Ellis barked in a voice that brooked no disobedience. She had learned that commanding voice from her father and she suddenly recalled that it had gotten her through many difficult encounters with other medical students in her college. She turned back toward the chief. “I beg your pardon for my … for my maid, Sergeant Major. She … she does not get much out of the house.”

A wide grin split the blind sergeant's face. “I do not suppose any of you, how did you put it, ‘get much out of the house.' But if you don't act soon, Ellis, we cannot stay.”

The door to the closet in the room suddenly burst open. To Ellis's astonishment, beyond was not the small closet she remembered but a white room so brilliant that she could not see into it. Voices were calling in urgent tones from the brightness.

“Nurse! Get them in here right now! Stop gaping and move!”

The voice resonated with memory.
That's Dr. Mallory,
she realized.
It was my first day, and he was on duty.

“Nurse! For heaven's sake, MOVE!”

“Margaret,” Ellis said at once as she turned toward the sergeant major, and gripped his arm firmly. “Help me get these men through the door. Quickly now!”

“Oh, it really
is
amazing,” Margaret gushed.

“Stop talking and help me!” Ellis demanded. “You go through and I'll bring each of them to you through the door!”

Margaret did not have to be told a second time. She stepped quickly through the bright doorway. Ellis brought the sergeant major to the opening first, then each of the others in turn: the dark-haired, swarthy sergeant who had lost his leg, the young man nearly entirely wrapped in bandages, the barrel-chested corporal with the beard and both hands wrapped against his chest, the horribly burned young man with the badly disfigured face, and finally the red-haired, freckled young private with the bleeding ear who only stared into the distance as she gently pushed him ahead of her through the doorway.

Ellis blinked against the bright whiteness around her. Her eyes quickly began to adjust and the features of the room slowly emerged from the brilliant haze.

It was one of the open hospital wards at Massachusetts General. The walls were bright with fresh, white paint. Afternoon light streamed in through the windows. There were six hospital beds in the ward, three on each side, and each gleamed in the afternoon light. Five of the beds were already occupied. Margaret, now somehow dressed in the long gray dress and white bib apron of a nurse with her hair bound tightly beneath a white scarf cap, helped the man with the bleeding ear toward the final berth.

The door behind Ellis clicked quietly shut. She turned toward it, half expecting Dr. Mallory to emerge from the door and begin berating her for not caring for the patients in the manner he prescribed.

“Why are we wasting our time with her?” said the small private to her right. At least, she assumed he was a private given the lack of markings on his jacket that hung next to his bed. His head, chest and arms were completely swathed in bandages though in the areas that were exposed she could clearly see where the blistered skin from the mustard gas had been scraped away. His voice was that of a high tenor but was raspy and rough sounding.

“Don't be that way, Mouse,” said the sergeant leaning against the foot rails of the bed across from the private. He was a swarthy man with black hair with naturally tight curls. He had an athletic build. He leaned heavily on a crutch as he was missing his left leg halfway up his calf. Ellis could see that the massive wound was soaking through the bandage.

“And how should I be?” Mouse asked in plaintive tones. “I thought we had agreed to avoid this woman.”

“The situation has changed, Private.” The blinded master sergeant was feeling his way around the bed.

“How do you figure that, Barry?” This was the barrel-chested man with the rough beard. Both his mangled hands were bandaged and bound against his chest. He lay propped up in his bed, his dark eyes fixed on her as he spoke.

“Because, Tinker, she came looking for us,” the master sergeant said. “You must admit, that is rather the opposite of the way we usually operate here, isn't it?”

The man with the bleeding ear giggled at this remark.

“I think she is dangerous.” Mouse spoke more forcefully from behind his bandaged mustard blisters. “She has cheated life and death. She is outside the bound of justice.”

“But, surely, not outside of mercy.” Ellis turned to face the man with the burn-ravaged face and scalp. She fixed on his eyes and discovered them to be a beautiful hazel color.

“Very well, Philly,” Master Sergeant Barry called to the bed kitty-corner from his own where the burned man lay. “What do you think?”

“Who are we to measure justice—or mercy,” Philly said with slurred speech through his burned lips. “Aren't they both infinite?”

“Neil would know,” said the swarthy man with the single leg as he nodded toward the freckle-faced young man with the bleeding ear.

Neil was gazing at the ceiling, holding both his hands out at arm's length with their palms up and rocking from side to side.

“Mouse is right,” said the man leaning on his crutch at the foot of his bed. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Look at what she's done to us.”

“What I've done to
you
?” Ellis said in a voice that demanded their attention.

The Soldiers and Margaret all turned to look at her.

“All I know is that I have to find my way out of this madness and back to my own sanity,” Ellis said, her voice lowering into a quiet, restrained quiver. “I need to find my cousin Jenny and the
both
of us need to leave through the Gate. I think I'm beginning to understand how I can find Jenny but I need
you
to show me the way to the Gate.”

“And then what, Ellis,” said the blind Soldier as he sat on the edge of his bed with his shoulders slumped over. “What happens to you after that? Where do you go? What do you
choose
?”

Ellis opened her mouth to speak but realized she did not know.

“Ellis, don't you remember who we are?” the blind Soldier asked in a whisper.

Ellis glanced down. Her dress was still the terrible, dull green but now she wore a nurse's apron over it. She could feel the cap on her head as she straightened up to look again on the blind Soldier.

“I do remember,” she said in soft tones. “This was the ward I served in at Boston Memorial. This is where I first saw soldiers returning from the war.”

“That's right.” The blind soldier nodded. “What do you remember?”

“I remember…” Ellis hesitated, her eyes narrowing. “I remember there were six of you in the ward. I remember treating each of you as calmly as I could manage but inside I was more terrified by the moment.”

“Terrified of us?” asked Philly.

“No,” Ellis said, shaking her head.

“Terrified for
him,
” the blind master sergeant said.

“Yes,” Ellis said. The walls of the room felt as though they were closing in on her. It was as though the room were becoming the box … the box of broken toy soldiers that she had found in the abandoned nursery.

“For Jonas,” Tinker suggested as he cocked his head to one side.

“He was still a Canadian citizen,” Ellis said, her eyes blinking back tears. “He was out of work and they drafted him. He had skills as a watchmaker and … and he left for the war.”

“And so you saw us, here in the box,” the blind soldier said and nodded, a tear of his own coursing down his cheek.

“He was so impetuous; so headstrong,” Ellis said, the memories of her feelings in the hospital ward rushing over her in waves, threatening to overwhelm her and drag her drowning beneath them. “When his uncle lost the shop to creditors, he struggled to find work but he somehow managed barely from month to month. He so very badly wanted a child and when we lost…”

She could not go on.

“When you lost your child.” The master sergeant urged her to continue.

Ellis could barely speak the words. “When I … miscarried, we were both of us devastated but somehow it broke Jonas. He grew distant and I thought, perhaps, that he blamed me. I don't think he did, but it poisoned things between us. He stayed out late. Slept late. He seemed to lose interest in any pursuits. When the draft notice came, I wondered if it weren't a relief to both of us to have an excuse to be apart.”

“But then you came to the soldiers' ward,” said the man with the mustard gas burns.

Ellis nodded, her words soft. “Then I met you.”

“But was it really us?” the blind master sergeant asked.

“I … what do you mean?” Ellis stammered.

“We are not those men that you met,” said Tinker, his hands firmly wrapped against his chest but his grin wide inside the bushy beard. “We look like them because we must—because it is how you relate to us in this place.”

Margaret's face was suddenly drained of color. She hurried over toward where Ellis stood and gripped her arm. “We have to go now.”

“I … I don't understand,” Ellis said, shaking off Margaret's grip. “We don't know where the Gate is yet!”

“Do you think this person is actually a nurse?” said Mouse from deep within his bandages as he nodded his head toward Margaret. “She only appears that way because
you
want her to fit into your memory of this place. The world, it seems, is very much what
you
make it.”

“Come along, my lady,” Margaret hissed. “We have to go now or we'll never find Jenny!”

“Stop it, Margaret!” Ellis snapped. “What do you mean I'm causing all of this? That can't be true. I'm trying to get out of here—not make
more
of it!”

“And, might I add,” said the one-legged soldier, “you
really
should have finished your dance with Jonas.”

The soldier called Red giggled again, his hands rising into pose for a waltz.

Ellis's jaw dropped.

“They're lying,” Margaret said, desperation rising in her voice. “Don't listen to them.”

Ellis stepped forward, walking slowly down the row of beds, her eyes fixed on the blind sergeant. Her words were careful and direct. “I asked you before, Sergeant—who are you?”

“You know us, Nurse Harkington, or was it Dr. Kirk?” he said with a wistful smile. “You came into the ward every day after that, sat with us and wrote our letters for us. Each time you left, you stopped at the door and turned to wave to us. We all called out to you. Do you remember what you would call back as you left?”

Ellis nodded.

“I said, ‘Good night, my angels!'”

The blind soldier smiled and stood before her. As he did, he grew taller and stronger. His tattered uniform began to gleam like polished metal. A bright aura surrounded his form as he started to rise.

Ellis stepped backward between the beds.

The soldiers on either side, each began to grow and to rise. The deformations of their war wounds melted away and their figures became whole and renewed. Each floated upward into the high ceiling space, their tattered, war-weary uniforms merging into armor so brilliant that Ellis had trouble focusing her eyes on them.