Hope - Lesley Pearse [230]
But even as Bennett was carefully removing the bullet, his mind was on Hope. One of the men had brought along the bag she’d dropped, and just a quick glance into it told him that she’d come up here to stay. He knew she wouldn’t have come unless there had been some kind of trouble down at the hospital.
She had fallen asleep and her colour had reverted to its normal peachy tone; in fact, she looked more beautiful than usual, her dark lashes like tiny fans on her cheeks.
It was several hours before Bennett had a chance to talk to Hope properly, for there had already been five wounded men and two sick with fever in the hospital before she and Robbie had been brought in.
Bennett had his own hut now, and once Queenie had been persuaded that Robbie could be left for a while, he asked her to take Hope over to the hut and make her something to eat.
By the time he got over there himself, Hope had made herself at home. Despite her injured arm, she had rearranged most of his things, and was sitting on the camp bed sewing a button on his shirt. The domesticity of the scene brought a lump to his throat.
‘You should be resting,’ he said, sitting down beside her and taking the shirt from her hands.
‘I am resting,’ she insisted. ‘My arm’s fine. It hardly hurts at all now.’
Bennett didn’t believe that. He knew it would hurt for some time. ‘Well, just tell me what made you come up here then.’
She explained, and it was only then that she began to cry.
Bennett was livid. In fact, it was all he could do not to storm out, borrowa horse, ride down to the hospital and attack Truscott. But he forced himself to wait until he’d had time to think it through. Hope needed a husband and a doctor now, not a hothead.
It was her sadness that no one had come to see her after Truscott dismissed her that affected Bennett the most. He guessed that the two days she’d spent alone in their room, imagining that no one liked or cared about her, must have been akin to the distress she’d felt when Albert threw her out of the gatehouse at Briargate.
‘You are very wrong to think no one liked you,’ he said, holding her tightly. ‘It’s true some of the older surgeons are prejudiced against women in hospitals, but almost all of them have remarked what an excellent nurse you are. Truscott is a dodo. He ought to be stuffed and put in a glass case as an example of an extinct species.’
‘Why didn’t anyone come to see me then?’ she sobbed.
‘I’ll wager they didn’t know about it,’ Bennett said. ‘That ward is quite separate from the rest of the hospital. Remember, you don’t even go through the other wards to get in and out of it. Unless one of the orderlies told someone what had happened, how would they know? And they weren’t likely to talk about it if one or both of them were bribed with extra rations by Truscott.’
Hope dried her eyes. ‘It doesn’t matter any more anyway,’ she said. ‘Not now I’m with you.’
Bennett smiled at her resilience. ‘You won’t be saying that when we get some more rain. It’s the most cheerless place in God’s creation then.’
‘Not to me,’ she smiled. ‘It can’t be when you’re here.’
It was two weeks before Bennett really noticed that Hope had changed slightly since they’d been apart. He was delighted that her arm was healing very well, and that she had a good appetite, and although he had observed that she seemed to tire easily, he put that down to the arduous nature of the work she’d been doing for so long. As she looked a picture of health, with pink cheeks, bright eyes and shining hair, the fact that she was quieter, maybe sometimes even a little withdrawn, wasn’t in the least worrying. She had been through a great deal in the last year and he couldn’t expect her to remain impish and over-excited, the way she’d been on their honeymoon.
Bennett had accompanied Robbie to the base hospital, and after making his recommendations