Charles Todd - An Unmarked Grave

The sister on duty smiled and nodded to me. She believed I was there to familiarize myself with all the patients, and I let her take a moment to describe the conditions of her charges. But at this present moment, I was concerned most about just one.

I tried to quell my impatience as we began to pace slowly down the row of cots, stopping to look at both sides. There were men in various stages of recovery, some of them asleep, others moaning in a drug-induced unconsciousness. One or two were barely awake, watching us as we stopped, their faces pain ridden and thin.

I was two beds from the end of the room when I heard a rapid-fire outburst of familiar words.

Sister Randolph was in the middle of a description about the man in front of us, and I lost track for a moment. She had to repeat her comment, and I nodded. Finally we had come to Simon’s cot. He was still speaking rapidly, urgently, as if something mattered intensely in his drug-clouded mind.

“We can’t understand him half the time,” Sister Randolph was saying. “It’s some foreign tongue, I’m told. One of our convalescents was in India for a number of years with his regiment. He didn’t know enough of the language to translate, but he said he thought it was Hindu.”

“Hindi,” I said automatically. “Hindi is the language. Hinduism the religion. A Hindu is the man or the woman.” But it wasn’t Hindi that Simon was speaking just now, it was Urdu, the Muslim equivalent.

I went to his bedside. Someone had shaved him this morning, but his face was flushed with fever, his hair long and soaked with perspiration. But mercifully I could see both arms under the bedclothes. There had been no amputation.

“I was in India,” I said. “Let me sit with him a bit, and see if I can decipher what he’s saying.”

“Please do!” Sister Randolph said gratefully. “It’s very worrying not to know what’s on his mind. I can tell that something is, and it may be hindering his recovery.” She referred to her chart. “His name is Brandon. We don’t know much else about him. Regiment, that sort of thing. Dr. Gaines admitted him as an emergency patient.”

“What’s his status?”

“If the fever breaks, Dr. Gaines expects he’ll keep his arm. If it doesn’t, well, there will have to be steps taken.” She lifted the sheet, and I could see how swollen and inflamed Simon’s shoulder and arm were. “We’ve kept the wound clean, we’ve fed him to keep up his strength, but it’s a matter of time. I’ve grown rather fond of him, and I would hate to see him back in surgery. But I’m afraid…” She let her voice dwindle, as if not wishing to speak the words. “Such a strong, handsome man. A pity, isn’t it? War and all this pain and suffering.”

“Yes.”

I brought a chair over and sat down. Simon was restless, and he still spoke in staccato sentences. I listened for a while, accustoming my ears to the sound of his voice and words I hadn’t spoken except to my family for some years. But it came back to me surprisingly quickly.

Simon was on patrol. That much I gathered from the names he mentioned. They had been ambushed in the hills above the Khyber Pass, and he was trying to keep his men alive until a rescue column arrived. He’d sent a heliograph message to a watcher some distance away on the Indian side of the border and it was a matter of time before help got to them.

I heard Simon say, “Keep your head down, man!” And then he swore. “They’ve got a sniper up there somewhere. I saw the muzzle flash. He’s damned good with that rifle. It must be British, not native, to be that accurate.” And then someone must have said something to him, for he replied, “I told the Colonel Sahib that I suspected one of those damned traveling musicians might be a spy, but we couldn’t prove it.”

The switch to English was so unexpected that at first I couldn’t follow it.

And then he was incoherent once more, encouraging his men, keeping them alive, and finally going out himself to hunt down the unknown rifleman. I remembered that engagement, long past, but when my father and a detachment of lancers went in search of the men who were pinned down, my mother had sat on the veranda all evening, waiting for news.

She had said nothing when the bloody remnants of the column came back, but I heard my father issue the order for the man who played the tambourine to be found and brought to him. I was never told what had happened to the spy. It had been regimental business only, and not for my ears or even my mother’s.

Glancing at my watch after sitting beside Simon for several minutes, I saw that I had to report for duty, and I slipped away, brushing his face with my fingertips as I did, feeling the dry heat of high fever on his skin.

I told Sister Randolph as I left that the patient was reliving old engagements, a result of his fever, I thought, and nothing that would hamper his recovery. She smiled and thanked me again.

“It’s such a relief to hear that. Perhaps since you understand what he’s saying, you could visit him from time to time, in case anything changes.”

I promised I would, grateful to her for giving me a reason to sit with him.

For the next two days I spent as much time with Simon as I could, but there seemed to be no change in his condition, and I found myself waking up in the night with a start, thinking that he had died. But he hadn’t, he held on, as he so often did against impossible odds.

And on the third morning, when I hurriedly downed my breakfast and ran up the back steps to spend a moment with him, I found him awake.

Dark eyes under dark brows stared back at me, but I didn’t think he knew me because he hadn’t fully returned to awareness. I reached down and touch his face again. This time the skin was oily with the sweat of breaking fever, but cool. Blessedly cool. I was on the point of going to find Sister Randolph and asking her to bathe him-in fact, I had turned away to do just that-when his hand locked on my wrist and spun me around.

“Bess?” His voice was hoarse from fever and the constant barrage of words that had come bubbling up from the depths of illness. “Is that you, Bess?”

I looked down. He was staring at me, frowning, as if he couldn’t quite believe the evidence of his eyes. Then he blinked and said, “Am I still in France?”

“No-I mean, it’s been a while. You’ve been very ill. Your shoulder-you nearly lost your arm.”

Frowning, he said, “Did I tell-did anyone tell the Colonel what happened there in France?”

“That you were wounded?” I sat on the edge of his cot. “Yes, of course. You even left the hospital, but then the fever overtook you and the Colonel Sahib brought you here.”

“Dear God-”

He released my wrist and wiped a hand across his eyes. “Bess. Get word to your father. I’ve got to see him.”

“Simon, it can wait.”

His mouth was tight as he said, “Don’t argue.” His eyes closed and he grimaced. “Do it.”

I’d been trained all my life to respond to that tone of voice. One obeyed instantly, doing as one was told, without question. In India, safe as we’d believed we were, danger was everywhere, and the memory of the bloody 1857 Mutiny, when the Indian Army turned on its English officers and their families, and massacred all they could lay hands on-soldiers, women, children-was always present. Hesitation or delay could mean the difference between living and dying.

Only this time I was ordered to reach my father at once-and only then could I see to it that Dr. Gaines was alerted about the change in his patient’s condition.

I did as I was told, urgently begging use of the clinic’s telephone, putting through a call to my mother and seeing to it that word was passed to my father. Then I went in search of the doctor. I found him watching Captain Barclay walk up and down the passage.