Part I.
Summer, 1917
She remembers an explosion. Falling. Heat scorching her face and sticky liquid trickling down her cheek, soaking into her dress. There are screams.
"Flora!" Kitty's dark eyes appear above her own, her hair falling out from behind it headdress. Orange light sparkles through it like a halo. "Flora, can you hear me?"
She tries to form words, but she can't quite move her mouth. Kitty's face is growing blurry around the edges, and then another shadow joins her, another pair of dark eyes and there's a curious weight on her chest and why can't she breathe?
"We need to get her to theatre," the other-shadow-that-is-not-Kitty says. Flora knows the voice, she knows it, but her mind is going blank. Sleep beckons with welcoming arms.
"Flora, don't you dare shut your eyes, you mustn't shut your eyes, hear me? Don't you dare. Stay with us, please stay with us." Kitty's voice echoes as though she's calling from the end of a long, long tunnel.
Then there are footsteps running, and gentle arms lifting her and pain spears through her side and pain and pain and pain and then she's falling again, spiralling down into a darkness that is studded with stars.
She hears sounds long before her eyes open, the murmur of voices from afar and people talking near her feet. Where is she? Why is she here?
Well, she can't stay. She's got rounds to do, patients to see; there's no time to waste. The newer, greener VADs who arrived with the springtime need her to tell them what to do, they need her to help them.
"It looks as if hospitals are now fair game to the bloody Jerry. Are the men they kill on the battlefields not enough? Do they have to wound our nurses too?" The unfamiliar male voice is angry, loud.
"You must be quieter, Roland, you'll wake her." That is Matron, and Flora feels a small amount of comfort in the recognition.
"How can they do this, Grace? We're clearly marked with Red Crosses and this is the fifth air raid in as many nights! The Red Cross is bloody off-limits, they know that!"
There is a long moment of silence, and Flora struggles against the glue holding her eyelids shut.
Then the male voice speaks again, softer this time, resigned. "How are the others?"
"Several have died. The operating tent was not hit, but the mess will need repairs."
"Bloody hell."
"Colonel Purbright is coming. He's arriving this afternoon."
"I'll be in my office."
"Yes, sir."
There is flapping of canvas, the murmuring dying down. Weariness tugs at her with insistent hands and she lets herself fall.
The next time she surfaces, the glue is gone from her eyelashes and they flutter open like butterfly wings.
"Nurse, she's waking up!" Someone calls. Someone, someone – it's one of the younger VADs – Elizabeth someone or other, the one with the completely unpronounceable last name.
More footsteps and a rustle of skirts. Then a blurry shape is bending over her, clasping her hand. She blinks, and the shape swims into focus. "Kitty." She tries to speak, but all that comes out is a croak.
Kitty laughs tearfully, squeezing her hand. "Hello, Flora. It's good to see your eyes."
"Water," Flora manages.
"Yes, I know. I'll get some. Cholmoudery, fetch Captain Hesketh-Thorne, then Matron. Go, now, as quick as you can."
"Yes, Nurse," Elizabeth says.
Kitty turns, and then a cool rim of china is being held to her lips, water dribbling into her parched mouth like rain into a baking desert. When she is finished drinking, and Kitty takes the mug away, Flora tries to shift, to see how much pain there is when she does.
"Don't try to move," Kitty admonishes. "You'll only make it worse."
"What happened?" Her voice is stronger now, fuelled by the water and a desire to know.
Kitty looks uncertain, nibbling on her lower lip like she always does when debating what to do. "I really shouldn't…"
"Since when have you cared about rules? Please, Kitty. Please."
"The Germans bombed the hospital again," Kitty gives in. "You were on night duty. A bomb fell on the other end of the ward, sent jagged pieces flying and set the tent on fire. You were hit."
The shock hits Flora like a punch. The boys she'd been nursing, the ones she'd joked with and told off for flirting though secretly she was rather pleased with the attention, they were gone. No chance at getting better from their wounds, just gone, just like that. "How bad am I?" Flora asks, trying to keep the tremor from her words.
"Flora, I can't say. Not until Captain Hesketh-Thorne gets here."
"I heard my name." The flap dividing the room from what Flora presumes as the rest of the ward opens and the man himself ducks in, a clipboard tucked under his arm. He stops at the end of Flora's bed, smiling. "Nurse Marshall, it's good to see you awake. How are you feeling?"
"Alright, I suppose," Flora says. He reads the lie in her expression.
"Nurse Trevelyan, if you would be so kind as to fetch another half-gram of morphine."
"Yes, Captain," Kitty says, standing and clasping Flora's hand again for a second. It's funny how Kitty addresses him so formally when Flora knows that off-duty, the Captain and Kitty are rather good friends. The canvas flap rustles and Flora closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them again, Matron is standing at the bottom of the bed alongside Captain Hesketh-Thorne.
Matron has never liked Flora, but now her expression is gentle instead of the usual steel-tipped glance. "How are you feeling, Marshall?"
"Nurse Trevelyan is fetching more morphine," Captain Hesketh-Thorne answers for her, saving Flora from speaking.
"Good," Matron says. "We'd better have a look at these wounds then, hadn't we? Cholmoudery, help Nurse Marshall onto her side would you?"
Flora bites her lip hard to keep from crying out as Elizabeth slowly rolls her over, propping her up on a pillow. She squeezes her eyes shut against the tears as careful, cool hands probe at the wound. She knows she should be embarrassed by being examined like this, but she can't bring herself to care with the pain and the pain and the pain…
It feels like hours until she is returned to lying on her back and the pain is receding like a wave. Captain Hesketh-Thorne is scribbling on his clipboard.
"How bad is it?" She breaks the quieting hush.
The Captain and Matron exchange a look, and she swallows. That's the expression Captain Hesketh-Thorne always wears when he has to deliver bad news; God knows how many of her patients have been the subject of it before.
"The wound in your side caused by a flying piece of the bomb is not infected, which is good. But there was severe internal bleeding, and whilst I think I patched it all up, you will need a specialist's examination and a long convalescence."
The implications of his words sink in and panic rises in Flora like a flood. "I-I can't! I can't go home to England, there's convoys arriving every day, you need me here – please don't send me away, please…"
Matron leans over to take her hand. "Calm yourself, Nurse Marshall."
"Please don't send me away," Flora whispers. This is her home, now, it's been her home for two long, gruelling years but she wouldn't leave it for the world.
"I'm afraid we must. There aren't the facilities here for an injured nurse. Go home, get better and perhaps you will be able to return."
Flora blinks several times and nods shakily. There's no point arguing with Matron – there never has been, she's as unmovable as a rock – and there's no point starting now.
Then Kitty's back with the morphine and she's sinking into sleep like a stone into a pool, her thoughts rippling out into nothingness.
A week later Kitty is tucking blankets around Flora's stretcher for the ambulance ride to Boulogne harbour. She was pronounced fit enough for travel two days ago, and people have been poking their heads in to say goodbye ever since. Corporal Foley. Sister Quayle even though Flora still can't bring herself to like the woman, the Cook, several patients that she nursed who are due back up the line soon.
And now it's just her and Kitty, the woman who's been like a sister ever since they arrived and Flora was new and green and silly.
"I'll miss you," Flora says quietly as Kitty steps back from the stretcher. Tears glimmer in her dark eyes like rain.
"I'll miss you too. Give my regards if you see Rosalie in one of the Blighty Hospitals, or if you see Tom in Boulogne. His casualty clearing station's up near there for a week."
"I will," Flora manages a nod. "Promise that you'll write?"
"Promise," Kitty says. "Promise that you won't run before you can walk and make that wound any worse?"
"Promise," Flora whispers. Two orderlies come into the little room on the end of the ward and lift her stretcher easily between them, carrying her down the ward.
"Bye, Nurse!" Men call from either side, and tears begin to prick at her own eyes like needles. Then she's being loaded into the ambulance; it's only her and two nurses who are taking home-leave as it's not proper for her to be with all the men. Captain Hesketh-Thorne appears taking her hand for a second and raising it to his lips as though she is a proper lady back in London, like she was going to be before the war started. "Stay safe, Nurse Marshall, and get better soon. The hospital will seem positively ghostly without your chatter."
"Thank you, Captain," Flora says before the two nurses climb in beside her and the gate is slammed and bolted.
As the ambulance moves off she can hear them all shouting. "Goodbye! Goodbye!" She sobs quietly like the wind soughing through the trees, and a terrible, lonely foreboding feeling hits like the explosion that put her here in the first place.
When she sees them again, the world will have changed, dramatically, irrevocably, and not for the better.
A/N This is a new, three-part story dedicated to two of my friends. Enjoy.
