LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 6

       France, February 1917

      During the night before I left for France, I slept in Sophie’s room, in her bed, the way we used to do when she was small. After Mama died.

      Slept. I don’t think we actually slept. We talked until our throats hurt, we laughed into our pillows, and Sophie cried a little. Sophie’s the sentimental one; she tears up at everything, Fourth of July parades and baskets of puppies. Maybe I’ve spoiled her; maybe I’ve been too protective. I held her while she wept, and the old flannel of her nightgown scratched my neck, and the honeysuckle smell of her hair filled my head, raising all kinds of memories. My chest ached. She asked me why I had to go, and I didn’t tell her the truth. I didn’t tell her that I was going to explode, I was going to go mad, I was a pot of salted water coming on to boil under the pressure of an eternal cast-iron lid, and someone was going to get scalded.

      Instead, I stroked her honeysuckle hair and said, Because there’s a war on, Baby. There’s a terrible war going on overseas, and I have to help.

      She said, I’m going to miss you so much, what am I going to do without you here, and I kept on stroking that hair, blinking my bee-stung eyes, and when I could speak I said, You’ll be fine, you’ll be safe, Father will take good care of you.

      I said it over and over, until I believed it myself. Until it almost felt true.

      But I couldn’t numb the anguish beneath my sternum. I couldn’t cure the absence of my sister, or the fear that sometimes roused me in those sooty moments before dawn, when the terrible new day smoldered at the horizon, streaked with unknown danger.

      AS IT DID NOW, THE morning after I first met Captain Fitzwilliam. I lay on my back and stared at the crumbling ceiling, while my nerves stung and my temples burst. While the tension hurt the muscles of my jaw. Like I hadn’t slept at all, and maybe I hadn’t.

      I rolled over and opened the drawer in the bedside table, where I kept a clumsily embroidered sachet that Sophie had given me for my birthday when she was ten. Before I left New York, I had removed the exhausted lavender and slipped inside a small cake of soap, the honeysuckle soap with which I always bathed her, until she was old enough to bathe herself. I held the sachet to my nose and thought, If I can still smell her, she must be all right, she must be safe. Father must be taking good care of her.

      The light grew. Time to rise. Time for breakfast, time to wash and to dress and to drive out into the bitter February morning. The bitter February mud. I absorbed a last breath of honeysuckle and threw off the covers.

      Mrs. DeForest was one of those women who believed in a sturdy, early breakfast, stocked with protein and vitamins. She worshipped vitamins, the entire alphabet of them. She’d brought her own hens from Long Island, and not one bird had dared to expire along the way. When I stepped downstairs into the refectory at six o’clock, she sat already at the head of the long wooden table, looking clean and practical. At her left sat Corporal Pritchard, shoveling food silently into his mouth, and at her right sat Captain Fitzwilliam, wearing his tunic (but not his belt) and drinking coffee. I saw that his hair was lighter than I had supposed. It was almost golden—or maybe that was only the effect of the vast electric chandelier overhead—and spiked all over in stiff, reflective gray. I was shocked at the familiarity of his face, how I already recognized each angle of bone and each line embedded around his eyes and mouth. How I could say to myself, His skin looks better this morning, less wan, full of color, plumper. He must have slept well, after all.

      Mrs. DeForest was speaking. She nodded to me but she didn’t pause. She never paused. “It’s the result of so much planning, you know. No detail too small when it comes to people’s health. I’m a firm believer in clean sheets and fresh, abundant food. We’ve brought our own supplies, and there’s more on the way from our chapter back home. We have an awfully enthusiastic chapter. Nothing is too good for our patients, Captain Fitzwilliam.”

      “Indeed.” The captain looked at me. His eyes crinkled some sort of message. I went to the sideboard and lifted a plate. A mirror hung before me, at such an angle that I could watch the two of them, at right angles, his left knuckles nearly brushing her right knuckles.

      “Our main ward is the old great hall. That was my idea. You can’t understate the healthful benefits of the circulation of air, and the ceilings in that hall are no less than twenty-five feet high, served by no fewer than twenty fully operational windows. I saw to the refurbishment myself.”

      “But doesn’t it get cold? So many windows? The men do hate a draft, Mrs. DeForest.”

      Mrs. DeForest set down her fork and steepled her fingers over her plate. She ate eggs and fruit for breakfast—always fresh, no toast—after an hour of morning calisthenics. She had gone to college, you know, and was all up-to-date. She was the first woman I knew who cut her hair short, though pretty soon we were all doing it, bobbing our hair. But she was the first. She said that short hair saved her an hour a day, at least. Her husband was older, and they had never had children. Maybe that accounted for her skin, which was so

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