Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [127]
Dorothea—for such she insisted I call her, two minutes into our acquaintance—was the elder of two girls in a moderately well-to-do family. Her sister, eight years younger, had recently come out, snagged a handsome guardsman, and married, leaving the spinster at home with her parents, dressed in a pair of defiant trousers but sporting her hair in two thick coils over her ears. I wore my own hair long for the convenience of it, but I thought she might be unwilling to face the battle of bobbing hers.
Thus I found her, dutiful on the surface but seething beneath, and gloriously happy for the opportunity of drawing the half-dozen albums of photographs, sketches, letters, and newspaper clippings from the de facto war shrine that occupied one corner of the family sitting room. The room itself was stodgy and stuffy and smelt of dog; Dorothea was a gust of cold air, setting the lace mantel-cloth and fringed lamp-shades to fluttering. As she bent so eagerly over the photographs, her face came to life, and I wondered how long it would be before she fled the antimacassars. (One could only hope that she wasn’t driven to murder her parents first.)
“This is the tent we worked out of when I first got there, and that, if you can believe it, was my ambulance. October 1915. Used to be a butcher’s van; I had to paint out the name because I didn’t think it a very fortunate image for the poor boys being shoved inside. But I’m sure we didn’t have any girls with green eyes in Belgium. The next spring, let’s see.” She turned some pages with scarred fingers—nurse’s fingers, owing to the sepsis transmitted from their patients’ wounds—and I stifled a sigh. At this rate, I should still be here at tea-time tomorrow.
“One girl, she was called Charlie, her eyes were green. Yes, this is she.” Dorothea shifted the album so I could see the open, grinning figure, bursting with vitality and the joy of being alive and needed. Her hair was short, curls springing out from under her cap, her light eyes sparkled at the camera, and I could easily imagine a young nobleman falling head over heels in love at first glance. “She died a couple of months after this was taken—the dormitory took a direct hit in ’16 and she bled to death. Poor thing; how the boys loved her.” Not Charlie, then. Dorothea turned a page, and another. Nursing sisters in white; surgical wards; two wan doctors sprawled on supply crates with blood on their coats and glasses of beer in their hands; a line of drivers dressed in dusty greatcoats, knee-high boots, and gas-masks, resembling some monstrous insect race; a photograph of a ruined village with a queue of men winding through it, blinded by gas, each with his hands on the next man’s shoulders. The War.
Dorothea was seeing only familiar, even loved faces. “Matilda—I wonder what could have happened to her? Wanda married one of the men she carried from the Front. The twins—identical they were, and didn’t they have some fun with the doctors? Did Bunny—? No, her eyes were blue, I’m sure they were. And I heard she married, too. Elsie . . . no. Joan. She died, in Cairo. Gabrielle—no, she was a titch of a thing, could hardly hold one end of a stretcher on her own, though she was a fantastic driver, once we raised the seat for her. You said your driver carried a man?”
“So I was told.”
More pages turned, Dorothea contributing interesting but useless tit-bits about the personae dramatis depicted