Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [13]
The fear tightened inside Joseph, knotting his stomach. This was exactly what he was supposed to be able to help, the shock, the despair, the inward wounds the surgeons could not reach. “What is it, Mrs. O’Day? I need to know!”
“I don’t know how it happened, and I don’t care,” she answered, meeting his eyes with a fierce honesty. “I don’t understand how any of these boys have the courage to go over the top, knowing what could happen to them, or along the tunnels under the ground. They’re terrified sick, and yet they do it, and they make jokes.” Without warning her eyes filled with tears and she turned half away from him. “Sometimes I hear them saying . . .”
He reached out his hand to touch her arm, then changed his mind. It was too familiar. “What is it you want to tell me, Mrs. O’Day?”
She blinked several times. “There’s a young war correspondent hanging around asking questions. I know they have to. It’s their job, and people at home have a right to know what’s going on. But he’s heard something about self-inflicted wounds, particularly to hands, and he’s pushing it.” The indecision was still in her face, the need to say more, or perhaps it was the will that he should understand without her doing so.
He remembered Sam’s fear, and his own. He had seen men paralyzed with terror, their bodies unable to move, or keep control of their functions. The underground tunnels were more than some men could take; the horror of being buried alive was worse than being shot for cowardice. He did not even know what Prentice was asking, or what he intended to write, and yet he came close to hating him already.
“I’ll find him,” he promised. “War correspondents don’t have any rights to be this far forward. They’re civilians; any officer can order them out, and I will, if he’s being a nuisance.”
She drew in her breath quickly to explain.
“I know,” he assured her. “We don’t know how Corliss lost his fingers, and I’m not certain that we want to.”
She relaxed. It was what she needed. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll take you to him.” She turned and led the way out of the door, along a path of wooden boards and into another hut with cots along either side. Joseph knew from the past that it was immediately next to the operating theater. He saw Corliss on one of the beds, lying on his side, his face turned away. The fair-haired figure of Prentice was easily recognizable in the middle of the floor, by his clean uniform if nothing else. He was talking to a soldier with his arm in a sling. He looked around as they came in and his face lit with anticipation.
“Ah! The chaplain again,” he said eagerly, dismissing the soldier and moving toward Joseph. “Have you learned any more about how the sapper came to lose half his hand?”
“He did not lose half his hand!” Marie O’Day snapped. “And will you please keep your voice down! In fact, you’d better get out of here altogether. This is a hospital ward, not a café for you to stand around in the way, chatting to people.” She was within an inch of his height and she was defending her territory and the men she cared about with a savage admiration and pity.
Prentice recognized that he was beaten, at least for the moment, and retreated.
Joseph gave her a beaming smile, then went over to Corliss’s bed and looked down at him. He was lying with his eyes open, staring blindly into the distance, his face without expression.
It was situations like this that Joseph knew he should have some answer for, words that would ease the pain, take away some of the fear that twisted the gut and turned the bowels to water, something to make sense of the unbearable. Only the divine could serve; there was nothing human big enough to touch it.
But what could he say? Looking at Corliss now, he knew at least that he was aware of being suspected, and that he could not prove his innocence. He had lost his hand, and it might even become infected and he could lose his whole arm. If he was found guilty of causing it himself, he would be blindfolded and shot to death in dishonor.