It's no secret that I love (torturing) Evelyn Napier. What's less well known is that I take particular interest in soldiers and their journeys, and I really wanted to explore that sans the often times overwhelming effects of the romantic subplot. Also I've never written anything in first person and wanted a go.
Dusk
The final memories were vivid. Fierce wind rattling my pack, the alert jumpiness of my mount, and a sharp, desperate voice barking out a suicidal command: "Capture the farm, at all costs." Heed not their higher ground nor superior armaments. Whether life or limb, sacrifice it all to the devouring head of God, King, and Country.
I rode in the lead, unable to see my men as they were felled like insects by the mighty slaughterer, the killing machines that had ushered in the horrors of modern warfare. My mount skid over a patch of slippery mud and I perceived the high pitch whistle of an incoming mortar to my right flank only a second before impact, the blast radius enough to knock me from my saddle and catapult me to the ground.
The packed, sodden earth greeted my face with an underwhelming thud. I was hardly cognizant of the immediate swelling blinding my left eye, for the sheer volume rendered me deaf in a moment, the heavy brisance exploding like luminescent confetti in my distorted vision. And then – an acute and localized numbness: I could not feel my right leg.
I would never feel it again.
Darkness claimed me. I can recount explicitly the dreams and fancies that danced through the fog of my unconscious. Ladies attired in gowns of white lilies, their raiment shredded till they were nothing but tattered flags of surrender, their purity tarnished with rich spatters of blood. Friends of months or weeks or minutes felled by a single, unlucky shot, or blasted to slivers by an endless fusillade of bombs. Lady Mary running fast after the hounds, unmindful of the mud spewing around her. We wore blood red jackets and hailed, "Tally ho!" as the dogs tore their furry flesh to pieces.
When I finally awoke it was to a striking face, young yet haggard, but both features working in unison to assemble an overall visage that was strangely not at war with itself. Her brows were drawn, I could see, and I initially mistook her visible concentration as in pursuit of some frivolous endeavor, before I realized what she was thinking so deeply upon was how to keep me alive.
My opened eyes did nothing to slow her ministrations or detract her eyes from my wound. I watched her painstaking work for several minutes, feebly rebuffing the smears of red lining her elbows, before falling again into slumber.
Days passed as though swimming through clouds, her face the one constant in the flooding pain. Towards the end I began to think of her as something of an angel, and I in purgatory, waiting for her to escort me to heaven. This scenario I would later deem as preferable when I at last awoke firmly on the divide of complete awareness, and learned the truth.
Her name was Dorcas, the third daughter of a clergyman in Derbyshire. Her fiancé had been killed within the first few months of the war. She explained to me curtly my condition.
"You'll stay here for a few weeks until we can stabilize you." The next part came out as comfortably as if she were administering an aspirin. "We'll try and spare the leg if we can, but it all depends on how the healing goes."
By then I had ascertained, though not yet internalized, the cruel reality. I had forced myself not to dwell on it, but now I dared a single glance downwards. My eyes lingered on the remains of my limb. It was shredded, unrecognizable – useless.
It ended in a compromise. Everything above the knee was spared, and everything below sawed off and tossed into the mud to feed the worms and creatures that dwelt there.
I was a cripple, and in those moments of despair I could have wished myself a corpse.
In a months time I was considered stable, fit for the strenuous crossing over land and sea, and they packed me into the back of a lorry with other fellows whose condition also warranted a one-way ticket home. We journeyed ever West, to the coast, to Merry Olde England, driving through the rabble over the now red-soaked lands which appeared as though existing in an eternal sunset, muted browns and reds blotting out any of the lush green that must have once thrived there. This once ample land full of vineyards and dairies had been converted to a pockmarked and furcated mineshaft. What little earth remained unspoiled by shovels was littered with the debris of war's natural casualties.
It was a barbarian's paradise, and I prayed that I would never lay eyes on it again.
But here we were, a convoy of lucky blighty ones, escaping these God forsaken lands for that wonderingly whispered Eden – civilization – to which we were all to return, once and for all. I wanted to scoff at the notion, for out of my window indeed did I see the human race at its epoch, every fine display of our power to create, and our even more terrible power to destroy.
And destroy we did – with delight, with pure relish. Soft, murmuring applause and a crisp "Hear! Hear!" when it was first declared that our German ancestors would soon feel the crush of superior English boot heels on their slithering heads. Those cries of glory have since faded to distant echoes of mortar blasts and men screaming in the night. In two years time we have kept our Machiavellian façade, tickling the ears of the populous with brightly colored posters and the weak illusions of inevitable, God-ordained victory.
I gazed out of the window, and forced my mind to empty. Such chilling despair had a tendency to creep deviously upon me, rendering me mute and immobile for hours at a time, and for the most part I staved its attacks by simply refusing to contemplate my life as yet to come. For now and always I would exist in this single moment.
A flutter of color teased the edges of my vision. I stole my eyes from the passing countryside and looked down as a brightly colored set of wings chanced to alight on the outer edge of the stump that once stretched to a full and useful leg. I cocked my head as I lowered a cautious finger. It did not attempt an escape, and I graced its wings with a feather-like stroke. As a child I used to chase after the flighty creatures, my father decrying the pastime as overly effeminate, my mother lauding it as naturally endearing. At the time the only person's opinion on the matter that I truly valued was that of my gentle nurse, who never passed any judgment other than to warn me of their delicacy, to be careful lest I obliterate what I fancy in my exuberance. I wondered what she would make of the scene now, its wings drawn downwards in full extension, bright yellows and oranges stark against the clinical white of my adorning bandages.
One of my compatriots, a Major in the Fusiliers, laughed at the grotesque sight. The harsh bark sent the butterfly flittering away, and broke my nostalgic contemplation. Shaking my head to rouse myself, I looked up to see the man sitting beside me with a deck of cards.
"Care for a round?" he asked.
"Of what?" I answered.
"Gin rummy, if you like."
I frowned at the deck that lay in his hand.
"I don't care for cards," I said.
He began idly shuffling, a small smile tugging his lips as he asked, "Then what do you care for?"
The answer leapt out of my throat without thought:
"Riding."
He laughed. Heartily.
"And hunting as well, I suppose?" He shook his head. I watched it sway from side to side, somewhat mesmerized as I envisioned the painted glass marble that would soon be lolling about under the patch covering the empty right socket. "You'll have to let go of those, I'm afraid. Come now, chap, you must learn to appreciate other pastimes." He proffered the deck once more in my direction. "Cards may very well be a start."
I was not sure why, but in that moment I set my face into my hands, and began to weep.
My friend withdrew his hand holding the smiling face of the joker, and ignored me the rest of the way to the port.
Blue waters rolled unseen beneath me. Concealed as they were by layers of wood and metal, I could still feel their effects, the swelling amplitude – rise and fall, rise and fall – as if posting the trot, and even this trifling observation was enough to undo me for most of the voyage home.
Confined to a chair below decks, the journey over sea was marginally less bearable than the one over land. I had never been an accomplished sailor, and felt a sickening throb on several occasions.
An attending nurse noticed my discomfort. A pretty girl, she vigorously recommended the fresh, salt-drenched air to cure the ill effects of the waves. But I could not brave the sights above deck: the freedom of the mottled blue sky, the gulls circling loudly overhead, and the ocean that had once been my accomplice in achieving my dreams, which would now bear me back home a literal fraction of myself.
We arrived on the shores, and I touched one foot upon English soil for the first time in nearly a year. My body was processed more quickly than my mind, and I was immediately checked into a temporary facility. Housed overnight in a suffocating atmosphere of moribund soldiers awaiting their final deployment, my body again exchanged hands, and I was taken to a hospital for officers in Middlesbrough.
The hospital was clean, not overcrowded, and well equipped. I settled in as mindlessly as I had managed the rest of the journey, and it was there that I received the first letter from my father after my injury.
I assume you have arrived safely. Fellows at the War Office had you placed in this hospital at my request. Heard from a doctor friend of mine that is was one of the best. Glad to have you back in England.
My father had a method for letter writing that more closely resembled the truncated verse of a telegram. Never an effusive man, while mother yet lived he still made use of the fully formed sentence; but since then his missives have been reduced to a collection of informatory fragments, leaving no room for eager sons to input any perceived sentimentality.
I read through the letter twice. Two beds over a patient was besieged with a bloody, hacking cough. I turned my back towards him, and tossed the letter onto a thickening pile of unreturned correspondence.
Mabel Tanners stooped over me with a sturdy clipboard. She was evaluating, as she always did on her morning rounds, poking and prodding my stub, asking highly personal and embarrassing questions, and generally being a nuisance.
She was stodgy, young, and very plain. A mousy girl who could never answer a question directly, she was also one who never once recoiled from even the ghastliest of procedures. As a self-avowed student of the human specimen, I was often amused at how these wartime nurses were all a course in contradiction, Mabel being perhaps the prime example. I once saw her remove a man's arm with unflinching aplomb, and then waver when asked if she preferred clotted cream to butter.
She smiled rather prettily down at me, full lips somewhat ameliorating the severity of the cap pulled taut across her scalp.
"You'll be recovered enough to be transitioned to a convalescence hospital soon," she informed me.
"How much longer?" I asked.
Mabel hesitated. "I shouldn't like to say. Dr. Carrington would know better. But it will be soon, I should think."
Her heels clacked away as I pondered this news. There was no doubt as to my intended destination, Leslie Manor being the closest convalescence hospital and not three miles away. My sensibilities were strangely perturbed at the idea of my future removal. The hospital, however upgraded it was for a man of my rank, had a rawness to it, a rusticity that I had become accustomed to over the long years of residing in a battlefield's habitat. Ornate crown moldings and priceless heirlooms – these would now be foreign lands to tread, however much a native I was to them by birth.
The next morning Dr. Carrington, a tall, middle-aged man who looked the very picture of a professional, confirmed Mabel's prediction. He examined me closely, declared me adequately healed for discharge, and began scribbling something onto a lengthy form.
The pen's ferocity did not abate as he said, "We'll notify Leslie Manor tomorrow morning. You should be moved there within the week." He ignored me a few minutes more as his hand traced down to the bottom of the page, and then, at last glancing up, chuckled. "Old Sir Stanly still grumbles with every new arrival."
Miss Tanners gave her shy smile. "It must be a terrible inconvenience for them."
"Nonsense!" the doctor scoffed. "We must all do our bit, whether fighting over there or taking care of our own back here. They've lived long enough in that big house without inconveniences; I say it's high time they became reacquainted with the real world, and now that they've taken over Downton –"
"Downton?" I interposed unthinkingly. "Downton Abbey? Lord Grantham's seat?"
It was certainly not my business to interject into their conversation, but the doctor humored me. "That's right. It's the latest casualty – I heard Sir Stanly bemoaning it just the other day, says Grantham is somewhat put out by the whole affair." He smiled as if sharing a private joke. "Well. You know those types. I hear it's been requisitioned only a few weeks ago, and that they're still in the process of sorting out all the arrangements."
The doctor and nurse went on to discuss the technical details of such an undertaking. I strove to attend, not wanting to appear ungrateful; but my mind wandered elsewhere – thirty miles southbound, to the majestic structure of Downton Abbey, imposing rooftops rising up as a lone sentinel in the midst of an emerald plain. My last visit to the estate – could it be only five years ago? It felt to be fifty, so much did I feel removed from the benign, staid man that had dined on filigreed china and bathed in porcelain tubs.
"Would it be possible for me to spend my convalescence there?" I suddenly asked.
Mabel blinked, gape mouthed, while the doctor narrowed his eyes, though more in puzzlement than irritation. They were clearly surprised, having long moved on to other topics.
"You mean to Downton Abbey?" he asked.
"Yes."
He hemmed and hawed for a few moments, Mabel mute at his elbow, before issuing his verdict. "I don't see why not. Of course you'll need permission from the Medical Officer overseeing the hospital at Downton, but you'll have no resistance from our end."
I nodded, blinking rapidly. In my past life I was not usually an emotive man, but the strains and stresses of living daily in the reaper's foyer had torn down my proper Englishman's barriers. Both sadness and happiness alike had an enlarged portion of control over my features, and it was the latter emotion that unhinged me now. It wasn't the grandeur of the place that attracted me and which spilled out a few unrelenting tears, but the familiarity. If I must be confronted with my good old life, the life before my gaping absence, then I would have it filled with the same good tokens: friendly faces; congenial, harmless chatter; Lady Mary's face, refreshing as autumn after the stifling heat of summer.
We had written often during the war. She was an able wartime correspondent, who knew exactly what not to say. No droning encouragements or empty platitudes. With her it was always the refreshingly mundane, who they had for dinner or her latest exploits in London. I had no need to have recapitulated the necessary cruelty of my and every other soldier's predicament, nor to be regaled with flat compliments on my supposed bravery. In moments of inactivity, when the quiet stillness abraded our nerves with a kind of bored apprehension, I would loosen my mind by rereading my letters from home – Lady Mary's quite regularly – often using the threads of memory to reconfigure her face, pale and fleeting as a ghost, as I imagined her laughing in that incisive way or rhapsodizing about her latest novel.
She had sent me exactly two letters since my injury, neither of which I had returned. Perhaps since then another had made its way South and had been sent back, un-received and unopened, and I wondered briefly if she worried for me.
The doctor left with Mabel in tow. I requested a paper and pen, and set down to write a letter to my old friend. Her reply came quickly, only two days later, in which she acquiesced with most pleasure to my request to convalesce in their home-cum-hospital. The words were neat and tidy in my blurred vision, and I let the tears fall freely onto the creamy pages as I smiled broadly – the first smile of the year.
Days more passed. My arrival at Downton was to take place a week thence, and I felt a low level of giddiness at the prospected relocation. Soon I would leave this bleached and sparse domicile to be among friends. Perhaps there good feelings could be rekindled enough to feel something like my old self again.
The day before my departure there happened a curious incident. The head nurse, a rather foreboding creature whose habit was starched stiffly enough to withstand a hurricane, informed us all in a clipped tone that someone was most certainly stealing from the morphine supply.
"Just how it's being done, I can't rightly say. But I've already questioned the nurses, and I find it highly unlikely that any of my staff would engage in such behavior." Her all-seeing eyes glared at us each individually. "I'll warn you all now – the doctor prescribes his dosages for a reason."
After she left, a silence falling thick and unsettling, the other invalids and I exchanged glances with varying degrees of confusion. The narcotics lived under lock and key, and it seemed almost impossible that one of us could find the means to pilfer them. And yet I could not disbelieve her.
Within a veteran's hospital there are those frank agonies, cauterized flesh and oozing stitches; but there are others more nefarious, those that go unspoken or hardly even acknowledged: "Phantom pain," the doctor once called it – an insidious torment reserved for the amputee. I only ever felt it on the rare occasion myself, and then only mildly. But there were others less fortunate – men soaked in sweat by the hour and shivering with the pain their minds refused to relinquish. I considered bleakly that perhaps that was our fate, to live on as such specters – minds that did not see fit to quit the battlefield, severed bodies haunting us till the day we die.
Perhaps one of these sufferers was the culprit? Or a kind-hearted nurse who in her tenderness could elevate one evil as preferable to another?
The next morning I had my answer. My belongings were packed neatly, placed at the foot of my bed, while directly across I saw my old friend, the Major from the Fusiliers, bright grins and barking laughs, his body lying dormant across his bed sheets. No explanation was needed. His face was awash in pallor, ashen arms stiff as lead and still with the needle dangling out of its limp flesh.
"Gin rummy?" he would routinely ask of anyone at hand. How often he would beckon us to him, incapable of going anywhere himself on legs that no longer existed.
I cannot recall anyone ever taking him up on the offer.
Smallish hills and vales flowed in the distance. Like stationary waves, the pristine verdure passed through the window of the motor, untainted by the hallmarks of warfare that raged a short sea away. Much of the countryside remained unchanged from my last visit, and reminded me of happier times galloping through the green landscape as we pulled into the familiar drive of Downton Abbey.
The head nurse was there to greet me, as well as a Sergeant whose face I remembered. His change in uniform at first threw me off, and I had trouble recalling why I knew him. It came to me suddenly.
"Were not you the footman who attended to my late friend, Mr. Pamuk?" I asked.
"That's right Major Napier. Thomas – though it's Sergeant Barrow, now."
"I see. You're in the Medical Corps." I smiled. "How splendid." He must have noticed the sarcastic edge sharpening my tone, for instead of bowing in acknowledgement he smothered a smile.
They wheeled me inside and my eyes roved about the room as they calculated the differences. The luxuries of yore had been successfully merged with the necessities of a hospital. Tapestries were not quite hidden from view, but the unfinished cupboards and distressed tables marred the otherwise lavish home, lending to it a banausic atmosphere that made me feel more at home.
The sound of footsteps beckoned my eyes. I looked over to its source.
"Mr. Napier!"
Lady Mary's cool, crisp voice pervaded the hall, and the interminable layer of ice caking my heart substantially melted.
"Lady Mary," I replied in smooth tones, though the words still dripped more emotion than I intended. I watched her move forward as I examined her. The years had been mostly kind. She still maintained that otherworldly beauty, but the lines in her face were more pronounced and the flesh encasing it less supple. She had aged; this war had aged her – and perhaps something else as well.
"Mr. Napier," she said again after crossing the length of hall. She clasped her hands together. "Major Napier," she corrected herself with a nod.
"Please, "mister" will do just fine. I care not for that particular title." She released her right hand. I took it in my own and we shook in that familiar greeting. Her palm was as smooth as the day I first led her to the waltz at her debut, and I promptly let go.
"Of course. Mister, then," she said. I could sense her visible effort to train her eyes to my face. Lady Edith Crawley, who I just noticed was standing in her sister's shadow, was not as disciplined. Those green eyes strayed down and to the right, accessing my deficiencies, and only years of strict grooming kept me from cursing out loud the pity I saw there.
Lady Mary cleared her throat, and her sister's head snapped back to a more courteous position. "My mother had need to go to Ripon today. She sends her apologies for not greeting you properly."
"None are required, I assure you," I replied. "I am not a guest here, and I don't expect any special treatment beyond what is my due as a patient."
She smiled, eyes dancing. "Nonsense. I care not for what the ledgers say. This is still our home, and you are our friend as well as our guest, if we deem it so." The head nurse looked displeased at the pronouncement, but would not dare to contradict. I smiled. It was comforting to see that some things had not changed. "You must be tired, Mr. Napier. Please, let us show you to where you'll be staying."
Sargent Barrow wheeled me into a spacious, bright room – the former morning room, if my memory served me. Neat beds formed rows lining the length of the walls, a roomy corridor in between down which fresh-faced nurses bent low and walked hurriedly by.
With some prodding the head nurse detached herself to sort out my accompanying paperwork, leaving Lady Mary and her sister to escort me to my designated bed. To my surprise it was Lady Edith who gave me further instruction. "Luncheon is at half past," she said cheerily. "And perhaps afterwards you would like to relax in the library."
"And you must dine with us one evening," Mary added. "My mother absolutely insists upon it."
"You are too kind," I replied. "As I said before, I would not like the appearance of extra favors because I am friends with the family."
"And as I said before: This is still our home. We have our own family dinners, and we are free to invite whom we may to them."
"Yes, of course. I – thank you, Lady Mary. Truly, I thank you."
"You've had a long day. We should leave you to rest and get settled." She smiled, thin sheens gathering across her dark eyes. "We are so…. pleased to have you here. Good day, Mr. Napier."
The sisters paced backwards as I nodded, not trusting my voice further than a perfunctory, "Lady Mary. Lady Edith."
My spirits buoyed, I observed my new home for the number of weeks required to rehabilitate me. The mood was much calmer then the frenetic speed of a hospital. People milled rather than rushed about. I could not place a single face, until scrutinizing more closely I realized that I could. I was mildly shocked to see the third Crawley daughter scurrying through the beds administering painkillers and changing out linen. I barely remembered the girl from my previous visit. She couldn't have been more than sixteen years old, said very little, and blended into the background like a beautiful vase. She still blended into the background, though this time it was more like an ice bucket or something other terribly convenient.
Face drawn, feet constantly on the move, she appeared absorbed in the busyness. I'd heard rumors concerning Lady Sybil before the war, something about pantaloons and wild adventures at liberal rallies. Third hand relays made her out to be quite a mad-cap sort of girl, but upon first hand conversation I was struck by her sweetness of nature.
Ours eyes met, mirroring recognition, and she halted her task to make her way over. "Major Napier? I'm Nurse Crawley," she said in a friendly albeit unsure manner.
"Yes, yes. I remember you."
"Do you? It was so long ago." Her face turned somewhat sheepish. "Of course I knew you were coming, but when I first saw you I wasn't even sure I had the right person."
"My ego shall not suffer unduly, I assure you. And if it at all helps, I don't remember you very much."
She smiled, and the clouds parted. A man could be ruined by that smile.
"You should know how happy we all are to have you staying with us. Mary especially was quite determined to have you here. As you can see I work at the hospital as an auxiliary nurse, and if there is anything you need that requires medical assistance, please don't hesitate to alert me or one of the other nurses."
"Thank you, I shall." Exhausting any mutual territory, we lapsed into awkward silence. I struggled for words, at last landing on, "I wasn't expecting such hands on assistance from one of the daughters of the house. Your presence here has taken me somewhat by surprise."
She smiled again. "Oh, yes. Well, it's not so terribly odd. So many other Ladies are helping out in some way, and I wanted to do my part."
"And do you feel you have?" I asked seriously.
"Yes, yes I do," she replied eagerly. "And even more, I feel…" Her aspect grew reflective. "I spent most of my life practicing piano and embroidery, but now, for the first time ever, I feel truly accomplished."
I nodded. I could understand. It was that very feeling of lethargic inadequacy that had propelled me into the foreign office, that drove me in my pursuit of the career I did not need. When I had first entered, my mind was full of travels and destinies. New and exotic lands enticed me from the dull interior of the British Isles, and what I always felt to be a sad reflection of my own staid persona. Mother, as usual, indulged me. Father opined in many a letter how much he wished I would settle in the country and learn to take after the estate.
It struck quite forcefully then that I would most likely be forfeiting any future travels.
My countenance clouded. Any lifting of spirits was quickly moored back down to harsh reality. Nurse Crawley began to fidget, smiling blithely on, lost in her own dreams, and did not seem to notice my spiraling mood. I discerned she was not a shrewd observer, nor one to suffer idleness for long.
"Please," I said, desiring solitude. "You must be busy. Don't let me detain you from your duties."
She smiled apologetically. "It's close to luncheon. We can bring you a tray here, or if you prefer I can show you to the dining quarters."
"A tray will do. Thank you."
She left. A tray was shortly brought up to me. The fare was hearty and sumptuous, far more than my dismal appetite deserved, and bore me swiftly into a blissful, dreamless doze.
I awoke near dusk. A large, rectangular window sat adjacent to my bed. It faced westward, towards the setting sun. Rays glinted through the panes, stinging my eyes. I did not rise, but watched prostrate as the bright globe shifted to a muted pink, then a dark red, until at last descending past the horizon.
The sky grew black, and I slept once more.
Thanks for reading :)