Silence for the Dead by Simone St. James Read Free Book Online Page A

all the new nurses.”
    â€œShe leaves them alone with the men to test them? Does Matron know about this?”
    â€œIt’s Matron’s
orders
,” said Nina, landing heavily on the edge of her own bed. “Boney would never think up anything on her own.”
    I rubbed my feet. The bed was hard and the mattress thin, yet my body nearly groaned aloud in relief. We had spent the evening cleaning the dining room, mopping the floor in the front hall, polishing the banisters, carrying baskets of clean linens up the stairs from the laundry, checking the lavatories, closing the windows in the bedrooms, and making sure the men behaved in the common room. The only real nursing we’d done was for Mr. West, the soldier with the bad legs—it turned out he’d had both legs blown off below the knee, and sometimes needed medication for the pain. The sight of those two shortened legs, the empty expanse of trouser pinned carefully over them, had made me almost wish for my twelve-hour shifts at the factory.
    â€œIt’s really for the best, you know,” said Martha, drying her hands. “Not everyone can handle it here. It’s best to know right away.”
    â€œWe’ve seen enough of them come and go, God knows,” said Nina. “You won’t be here long yourself, Martha, if you keep repeating the orderlies’ scary stories to Matron.”
    â€œHe wasn’t lying,” Martha protested. “He was
scared.
”
    â€œIt’s this place,” said Nina. “Anyone who stays here long enough goes just as mad as the patients, with the exception of you and me. And sometimes I wonder about the two of us, working here as long as we have.”
    â€œThat’s not fair. This is a good job.”
    I listened to them and remembered Matron’s words.
I think that someone desperate might do.
I wondered what made Martha and Nina—and Boney—so desperate that they were the only girls to stay.
    Money, perhaps. Or perhaps, like me, they were girls with nowhere else to go.
    â€œThis was the nursery,” Martha said to me, gesturing around the room, her eyes shining just a little. “This room here. Isn’t that nice? It’s so pretty.” She looked up and down the long room, taking in the grandness of it despite the shabbiness of the current furniture. “I like to imagine what it was like to grow up here. The children, tucked in their beds. There were only two, you know, and they had this room all to themselves. Wouldn’t it be lovely, to grow up in a room like this?”
    She was smiling, and her eyes were sweet and kind, but her skin was sallow, her bones sticking through the shoulders of her dress like broomsticks. She’d grown up, like me, where children didn’t live in grand houses, and now she worked a job with madmen—a job in which I’d seen her carry linen baskets twice her weight up two flights of stairs—and she called it “good.” She dried her thin, chapped hands, and I knew that deep down she was hard, but she wasn’t hard enough. No one ever was.
    â€œThe children sound like spoiled brats to me,” I said.
    â€œNow there’s a bit of sense,” said Nina from her bed. She was untying her apron, her head bent down, her stringy hair coming loose from its bun and dangling. “Besides, who wants to grow up in a damp old house in the middle of nowhere, no matter how rich you are?”
    â€œYou’re just not picturing it,” Martha persisted, her eyes half closed and looking somewhere far away. “I like to imagine Christmas. The whole room decorated and lit with candles. Gifts of oranges and wooden toys. The children on Christmas morning. It must have been wonderful.”
    â€œChristmas!” Nina snorted. “You’re out of your mind. It’s only June. And why aren’t you undressing, anyway?”
    Martha shrugged. “I’m working night