Father Ambrose smiled, but added, “This quarter is the last place for those with nowhere else to turn.”

  But I wasn’t convinced. My training had taught me to look at a patient, observing his condition, any changes, anything that was unexpected, worrying. I didn’t think twice doing it—it had become a habit with me over the years. But I couldn’t explain why a man with clean boots and a butcher’s assistant with a bloody apron stayed with me, even as Captain Jackson changed the subject.

  “This was a vicious beating. In your parish have you come across such a thing before? Do you know anyone capable of doing this?”

  “Even the poor steal from their brothers. I have seen every kind of cruelty and meanness. But if I’d suspected one of my flock, I would have said as much to the policeman. Still, I have been watchful.”

  We had barely touched our coffee, but Father Ambrose had drunk his own to the dregs. I asked if he’d like another.

  “Thank you, but no. I must be about my duties. If anything new comes to my attention, how will I let you know of it?”

  I was about to give him the address of Dr. Moreau, but the Captain stepped in quickly. “My name is Jackson. I’m staying at the Hotel Royale. You could leave a message at the desk.”

  He thanked him and was about to rise when I reached into my pocket and drew out some francs. “Father? A donation? To help those like Lawrence?”

  He took them gratefully and graciously. We sat there, watching him limp away, watched people passing him acknowledge him with a little bow of the head.

  “A good man,” the Captain said. “What shall I do with this weapon?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. “Could you keep it? I know, it isn’t very nice to have in your rooms. But I don’t know that the police will find it very useful. Not yet.” I didn’t want Madame Moreau to know what had been used to attack the Lieutenant.

  He looked around, saw a crumpled newspaper in the doorway of the shop next to the café, and carefully wrapped the rolling pin in it. “Much better, don’t you think?”

  “I’d like to find that butcher shop in the next street,” I said. “Or failing that, the vegetable vendor.”

  The Captain grinned. “You don’t give up easily, do you, ma’am?”

  “I do wish you’d call me Bess,” I said as we walked toward the corner.

  “I try not to presume, ma’am.” But there was a decided twinkle in his eyes.

  We found the butcher shop easily, although one would hardly know what it sold, for the trays in the counter were mostly empty.

  I let the Captain ask him what we’d come to find out, but the man pointed to the trays.

  “I have hardly enough meat to open each morning. I can’t afford an assistant. My wife helps when she can.” His manner was brusque, and watching him, I couldn’t be sure he was telling the truth. Yet there was no way to prove he was lying.

  Captain Jackson thanked him, and we left the shop.

  And although we went up and down several more streets, we never saw the vegetable vendor again.

  Dissatisfied, wanting to do more, and not really sure how to go about that, I finally said, “I must go back to the house. I don’t like to leave Lawrence alone for very long. The doctor has his surgery hours.”

  “Surely his care isn’t all on your shoulders.”

  “No, there are other nurses, but I feel better if I can keep an eye on his condition.”

  “That’s admirable of you, ma’am. Is there no one else who can help?”

  “We manage well enough. For now.”

  He found a taxi for us, but we had to cross to the Right Bank first. And then I was home, thanking him for his help.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. Answers have a way of popping up when you least expect to find them,” he said, seeing me to the door as the taxi waited. And then he was gone.

  I lost track of time, watching over the Lieutenant’s care. His recovery was slow, painful. He slept much of the time—or pretended to—but at the end of the week, it was obvious that not only would he live, if there were no surprises like infections or blood clots or even brain damage, but he was also sleeping less.

  But he refused to respond to questions, or even talk to either the nurse or to me about such simple things as what day of the week it was, how long had it been raining, whether it was ten o’clock or eleven in the morning. He still looked like a man who’d been beaten within an inch of his life.

  We ought to summon Matron. She was a nurse, she’d seen severe beatings before. This was her son.

  But there was more to it than her feelings when she saw what had happened to her son. She would have to be told what else I knew, and I wasn’t sure of anything at the moment. I had begun to realize that Matron must have her own suspicions too. She had not written to ask for a report on my progress.

  It did occur to me one night in the dark hour before dawn that his beating had been retribution for what had happened to me on the brink of the river. But somehow I couldn’t see Captain Jackson finding a man he didn’t know and had never seen before, and nearly killing him. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

  I toyed with the idea of the nonexistent butcher’s assistant and the clean-shaven vegetable vendor, and got nowhere. I’d felt I’d seen the vendor before, but where? I went over all the places I’d been, but of course it was impossible to remember the faces of everyone I’d encountered on any given day. I tried to remember faces from the train, or shops where I’d looked for food, or anywhere else I could think of, but it was hopeless.

  I walked into the room on a day when the nurse was having her meal downstairs—now that the patient was out of danger—and Lawrence was lying there, pretending to sleep. But I’d thought I’d seen him looking at the door as I stepped in, before closing his eyes and changing the rhythm of his breathing.

  It was only right to find out what sort of person he really was, before his mother came to collect him. The question that had been worrying me of late was what I would do if he confessed to attacking me. Or harming someone else. I couldn’t just let him go home to England, could I? If there was a dark streak of violence in him? What if he blacked out, as a result of that earlier concussion, and had no memory of what he’d done to me or anyone else?

  I said, in a ward Matron’s voice, “You aren’t asleep. I’m a nurse, remember? I know the difference. Sleep isn’t just closed eyes and steady breaths. So you might as well stop playacting.”

  His eyelids tightened. But they didn’t open.

  I pulled up the day nurse’s chair, and sat nearer to the bed.

  “There is a lot I don’t know about you. Probably will never know. You can keep secrets. I’ve seen how well you do that. But there is one question I’m going to put to you, and I won’t give up asking it until you answer me.”

  There was silence from the bed. But I saw the toes move on his good leg. He was bracing himself. For what? My question? Or—the question he was afraid I was going to ask?

  “Did you try to drown me?” I asked him.

  He opened his eyes then. His lids were still puffy, his eyes bloodshot. “No.”

  It was short, unequivocal. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

  Finally I said, “It’s time to tell me the truth. I have to know what to do about you. Whether, as soon as you’re well enough, to hand you over to the French National Police or the Foot Police. Are you a murderer?”

  Taking a deep breath, he said, “Do whatever you have to do. I don’t really care.”

  “But why don’t you care any longer? You asked to be sent to Paris, you wished to stay in the Army. And then you’ve walked away from the conference, you’ve abused Marina’s trust, you’ve disgraced your regiment. There has to be a reason why.”

  He turned away from me. “You should have let me die in that hospital ward. I would have been buried in a pauper’s grave, without a name, forgotten.”

  “And what do you expect me to tell your mother? That you were too much of a coward to face the consequences of what you’d done? Did you hire someone to beat you to death because you didn’t have the courage to kill yourself?”

  That was terribly harsh, I wanted to call back the words, but somehow I had to break through his wall of silence. And he still wasn’t well enough to hand over to the police.

  Something flared in his eyes, then died away, almost a recognition of what I’d called him. A coward. Then he simply shut them, shutting me out as the lids closed. He completely withdrew, as if I didn’t exist.

  Defeated, I went away, after trying to find a way through the wall he’d thrown up, blocking all my efforts.

  Later that evening, my mind made up, I went downstairs to look for Dr. Moreau.

  He was just winding the case clock in the parlor before going up to bed. I said, “Could we talk?”

  Turning, he glanced at me, then his gaze sharpened. “Yes, of course, my dear. Let me finish here, and we’ll go into my surgery. We won’t be disturbed there.”

  I stood in the doorway until he’d put the key away and shut the case, then I followed him to his surgery. Neither of us spoke on the way, but when he’d settled me in a chair and given me a blanket against the chill—there wasn’t enough coal to keep this part of the house warm all night long—he took the chair opposite me rather than going behind his desk.

  It was a signal that this conversation was to be personal, not professional.

  He said quietly, “Now then, tell me what is worrying you.”

  “It’s Lawrence Minton. I don’t quite know what to do. Or where to turn.”

  “Begin at the beginning.”

  But I couldn’t, not really. After a moment, I said, “Let me report to you, a Sister reporting her findings about a patient of yours.”

  “Very well.”

  “There’s something that happened to the Lieutenant some weeks after he came to Paris. I don’t know what it was. But it appears to have changed him almost overnight. The capable career soldier was gone, and in its place, he was lost, unable to regain control, wanting oblivion. Peace. I don’t know what it was. I have my suspicions. But I don’t think he will be well again until he accepts it instead of running from it.”

  “Had there been any symptoms before this change?”

  “I—don’t know, you see. But there was a medical condition. That concussion in the early days of the war. There were serious gaps in his memory then. There may be other gaps now that he doesn’t wish to remember. And it’s the gaps that worry me. There are no witnesses to these gaps.”

  “He was separated from his men during the retreat, and he was thought to be missing, most likely captured,” Dr. Moreau said. “Do you believe that he was taken, and it’s this experience as a prisoner that changed him? In that advance the Germans did some appalling things, but I have not heard that they tortured prisoners.”

  “He was an English officer. He could provide valuable information they could use. There was some suspicion that he’d been a spy, remember.” Many Germans had lived in England, gone to school there, spoke excellent English. “He does speak the language. What if it was more than a suspicion?”

  “After he was released, Helena wrote to us about the strange, rather terrible dreams he’d had as a result of the concussion. But that’s not unusual.”

  “What if they weren’t dreams, but memories he couldn’t accept?”

  “My dear. As far as I know, he went on to have an exemplary career. Mentioned in dispatches, given a medal in the aftermath of the Somme for bringing back three of his men who’d been wounded before they’d reached the trench. Even I would have to say that he was completely recovered.”

  I realized, sitting there, listening to Dr. Moreau, that perhaps Matron, Lawrence’s mother, had sent me to Paris because she wasn’t certain he was recovered, and she wanted a nurse to find him and evaluate him medically, and report to her before the Regiment learned of it. That it wasn’t the fact that he hadn’t written in some time that made her uneasy. She feared something else. But what was it?

  I’d only had glimpses of it in St. Ives. Something haunted him.

  “What if in those missing hours, when no one could find him, something terrible happened? Something real, not imagined. And he shut it away so tightly that he went through the war without remembering. Then here in Paris, something unlocked those events. And now he thinks he knows what happened.”

  “Are you suggesting he broke under the stress of the retreat and surrendered to the enemy? Betrayed the positions of his own men?” Dr. Moreau took off his glasses, vigorously polishing them on a clean handkerchief. He was looking down, I couldn’t see his face or judge whether he knew something that I didn’t. Something that Helena had confided in him?

  And upstairs, I’d accused Lawrence of being a coward . . .

  Had he encountered someone who was here in Paris, someone who knew the truth about him? The city was filled with people who had come to confer about the terms of the peace treaty. Someone from his past could have confronted him.

  I remembered the carpet as he knelt on the staircase. Had he tried to drown that person? And half asleep, had he tried to drown me as well, thinking it was the same person? Was that person the one who’d found him again and beaten him nearly to death?

  Clutching at straws, I asked, “Surely there is something we can do, to get at the truth? Before his mother comes to Paris? Dr. Moreau, she ought to know what is wrong with him.”

  There was a silence. He put his glasses back in place before saying, “The truth is, I have known Lawrence for some time, and I haven’t seen anything that would make me suspect him of doing anything—disgraceful. He’s not that sort of man, there’s no weakness of character to explain it.”

  But Dr. Moreau hadn’t been in St. Ives. He hadn’t seen the bouts of laudanum and then brandy, the way Lawrence treated Marina—the incident on the stairs when I watched him with the carpet.

  The doctor sighed. “I must confess. I’ve written to Helena—I know, we had discussed when best to do that. In my opinion as Lawrence’s doctor, the time had come. She is presently arranging matters at the Queen Alexandra’s, so that she can spend as much time with Lawrence as necessary. She could be here tomorrow. Or the next day.”

  I was horrified.

  But this was his house—Matron was his friend. I was here as a guest. There was nothing more I could do. Frustrated, I said in despair, “If only we could open up his head, as we might probe a wound—or do exploratory surgery in the abdomen. If only we could somehow search his memory.”

  “Is it truly so important to you?”

  “I should think it would matter to his mother.”

  He looked at me, and I thought he was about to ask me to walk away from this problem, to let Lawrence go back to what he was before. But he couldn’t. I couldn’t.

  Then to my shock, Dr. Moreau said, “There is a way.”

  I couldn’t quite believe it when he told me what he had in mind. Dr. Moreau had learned how to hypnotize the wounded when they were in great pain.

  “It has helped them in situations where opiates couldn’t be given in high enough doses or not at all. In Lawrence’s case—if you are correct—it isn’t the physical pain that is so upsetting to him.” He fiddled with his glasses again.

  I was beginning to realize that it was a habit he wasn’t aware of, a way of hiding his own uncertainties.

  “If he can accept what happened to him, bring it out of the darkness into the light, so to speak, it will lose its power over him. That at least is the theory.”

  “Does it always work?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever had it fail, and leave the patient worse than before?”

  “If done by a responsible person, it is safe. We are not asking him to make a fool of himself onstage, for the amusement of the audience.”

  “And what if he says something while in this trance that horrifies you—disgusts you?”

  He took off his glasses again and rubbed his face with his hands. Putting them back on, he looked at me straightly. “I cannot believe that of the young man I know.”

  It was late, well past midnight. But Dr. Moreau urged me to start now, because Lawrence would be more vulnerable, awakened from sleep.

  That was a risk in itself.

  “Surely we need his permission?”

  He turned, gazing at me for a moment. “He will not answer what he doesn’t want us to know. We cannot make him act against his will. As his doctor, it is my duty to do whatever is in his best interest. Treatment is not always a powder in solution.”

  But I thought he was convincing himself, not me.

  The house was quiet as we walked back into it from the surgery. I led the way up the stairs and down the passage to the door of Lawrence’s room, and opened it as softly as I could.

  The night nurse looked up, surprised to see us.

  Dr. Moreau whispered to her, “I would like to sit with him awhile. Why don’t you go down to my wife’s sitting room, and rest until I call you?”

  It was unorthodox, and she looked from one to the other of us before rising, collecting her bag of knitting, and tiptoeing to the door.

  The only sound in the room now was the regular breathing of the man on the bed. But I thought to myself that it was his way of keeping us at bay, that he couldn’t be that deeply asleep.

  We waited until we were sure she was gone, that she hadn’t forgot something, and then Dr. Moreau began to speak quietly to the man on the bed.

  I watched from the nurse’s chair by the hearth, listened in the semidarkness of the room, lit only by the spirit lamp on a table by the window. Lawrence didn’t know I was there, he hadn’t opened his eyes. I prayed it wouldn’t break the spell if he saw me.

  “Can you hear me, my boy? Of course you can. And you are glad of my company after having to deal with the nurses. You feel safe with me here. And you find you are very relaxed, hearing my voice. You can sleep in peace, a deep, healing sleep that will free you from fear and despair . . .”