Page 32 of The Number of Love
He’d been lucky, the doctors had said. Through and through. No vital organs hit. No internal bleeding.
Heknewhe’d been lucky—knew it the moment he pressed his hands to that hot, sticky mess that was his back and stomach on the railcar. But luck didn’t make the ceilings any less boring or the pain any less acute when he tried to do something actuallyhuman.
He would be a shell for the next weeks or months, that was all. An artificial man, delegated to the barest physical duties. Eat. Sleep.Take his medicine. Try to pretend it wasn’t embarrassing to have a nurse in her grey uniform hand him a bedpan. Try not to think about Thoroton and the other chaps still in Spain, still working and fighting and discovering anddoingwhile he lay here like a ... like a...
His fingers twisted in the sheet as a moan sounded from the next cot over. He was better off than many of the blokes here, and he knew it. He’d had nothing amputated. He hadn’t lost any brothers in a mad rush up some hill, into the face of exploding ordnance. He’d not encountered any of that nightmarish mustard gas that the Germans had started using over the summer.
He’d gain his feet again, assuming infection didn’t set in.
But he wanted todosomething. Idleness wasn’t, apparently, in his nature. It’s just that he’d never realized it until now, when it was his only option.
“Mary,” the bloke on the other side of him groaned. “Mary. Mary.”
“Mary will be to see you later today, Private.” The nurse’s voice was cheerful, but not gratingly so. Drake turned his head just enough to see her. She was uncommonly tall, clad in the same boring grey uniform and white apron every other nurse wore, the white kerchief tied over her nearly black hair. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but she looked pleasant. And she turned to Drake with a bright smile. “There’s our newcomer, alert and ready for a meal, no doubt. How are you feeling, Lieutenant Elton?”
It would be a long time before the idea of food did anything but inspire pain, he suspected. But he conjured up a grin. “Like I’ve been shot.”
“Astounding.” She poured him a cup of water and helped him hold his head up so he could sip it. As if he were an infant. “I’m Nurse Arabelle Denler. I imagine we’ll be seeing a good bit of each other until we’ve got you back on your feet.”
“How do you do?” He nearly choked on a chip of ice, garbling the question.
“How polite you are. But as I am far better than you, please don’t feel you must engage in such niceties for my sake.” When she smiled, a single dimple appeared in her left cheek. The unevennessbrought interest to her otherwise plain face. “Where are you from, Lieutenant?”
He had to cough to clear his throat of the vicious ice chip. And of course the coughing lit his entire torso on fire. Which should at least melt the ice. He made no objections to being settled back onto his pillow, knowing well his face had contorted with pain. “Here,” he managed from between clenched teeth. “London. And Spain.” After he had spent the last seven years of his life in a place, he could claim it as his own, couldn’t he?
“Oh, how interesting! When you’re well enough, you can tell me all about your foreign travels.” She tucked the sheet up around him, precise and efficient, and gave him the single-dimpled smile again. “Have a few minutes’ rest, Lieutenant. We’ll be bringing your dinner round shortly.”
He blinked by way of answer, afraid to loosen his jaw enough for more words lest a moan escape—and the ward was already full enough of those. His fingers dug trenches in the mattress again, though at some point the remnant of drugs in his system must have stolen him away. He jerked to alertness when a clatter sounded at his side, hot words wanting to blister his tongue at the new pain inspired by the abrupt motion.
He would never take movement for granted again. Never.
It was a different nurse this time, this one a bobbed blonde who was beautiful, where the first nurse had been plain. Her sharp green eyes seemed to size him up in a heartbeat too. “May I help you sit up, Lieutenant?”
Risky ... but no more so than the risk of choking on every sip of broth if he didn’t. “Yes, please. Nurse...?”
“Stafford.” She slid an arm behind his back and levered him up a bit, fitting another pillow behind him with her other arm in a slick move that proved she did this many times a day.
The chap in the cot across from him laughed. “Call her ‘Nurse Stafford’ and you’ll get a lecture from the ward matron. It’s Her Grace.”
A duchess? Of Stafford. That made something try to click intoplace in his head, though he couldn’t quite be sure what. “What’s a duchess doinghere?”
Her Grace finished fluffing his pillow and gave him a small smile a second before sending an exaggerated glare to the fellow across the aisle. “My bit, that’s what. Andyou, Corporal Henderson—I warned you about outing me to the new arrivals. Just see if I bring you an extra biscuit today.”
The Duchess of Stafford. He knew the name, though he’d certainly never met her. But from where? Ah. He had it. “Did you ever get your Renault?”
Her hands stilled, and her brows lifted as she looked down at him again. “Are we acquainted, Lieutenant? Forgive me, if so—I don’t recall how or when.”
“No.” He shook his head but then regretted it. Though how a simple action like moving his neck could make pain light up in his stomach he just didn’t know. Still, he forced a smile. “Visited friends in the Cotswolds a few years ago. Had a meal with one of your drivers.”
“Ah.” Her smile reappeared, and she positioned a tray over his legs. “A new car seemed a waste in times like these. But I broke the new stallion. And when this dratted war’s over, I’m going to make my ace of a husband teach me to fly a plane.”
The duke was a pilot? Somehow that was just as shocking as learning that his wife was a nurse. “In the RNAS?” It had to be either the Royal Naval Air Service or the Royal Flying Corp.
“The RFC—he was one of the first to sign up, fool man, and no one could talk him out of it.” Pride saturated her voice though, not irritation. “Stationed at Northolt, though, not on the front—which is why the boys and I are in London. We still get to see him several times a week. We’re lucky.” She moved a bowl of not-steaming broth onto his tray. “Shall I?”
For the first time since he’d arrived here this morning, he actually looked around the ward. There were two rows of cots on each of the walls, facing each other. Almost all were filled with soldiers. White bandages everywhere, stumps where limbs should have been, some chaps with faces as pale as the sheets they lay on.
He swallowed and ignored the throbbing that hadn’t yet ebbed from the effort of sitting up. Or waking up. Or just being, perhaps. “I can manage, I think. Thank you, Your Grace.”
