Scorpion Sunset Read online

  Treading carefully to avoid the worst of the waste that carpeted the floor Dira walked around to the far side of the hut. He held his hand in front of the faces of the other three men.

  ‘They are all breathing and alive, sir, but close to death.’

  The man closest to Dira spoke without opening his eyes. ‘Please, I beg you, let me die.’

  ‘We’ll soon have you clean and feeling better,’ Dira consoled him clumsily.

  ‘Please, I can’t stand this pain any more.’

  John looked at Dira. ‘Get the morphine, and bring Jones and Williams here. We need to get these men clean and comfortable.’

  To John’s surprised Dira returned with the men, and with the two Armenian women: Mrs Gulbenkian, and a younger woman, Rebeka.

  ‘You haven’t recovered from your ordeal or regained your strength,’ John warned the women. ‘These men are filthy, they could be carrying disease.

  ‘Like we were before you healed us and took care of us?’ Mrs Gulbenkian challenged.

  ‘Like you were,’ John agreed.

  They set to work washing and cleaning the men, and wrapped them in blankets before carrying them outside the hut.

  Evans and Greening had erected all the tents they hauled with them and they carried the sick men into the one John rather grandly referred to ‘as the hospital tent’. Once the men had been settled on clean sheets and blankets, John sat on a stool just inside the flap and waited for the inevitable.

  He’d done what little he could, given the men morphine to dull the pain and cramps that came with dysentery, moistened their dried, cracked lips, and applied cream and dressings to the worst of their sores. It wasn’t enough to save them but he doubted any of them would have survived even if he’d been able to take them into the military hospital in Basra, which was equipped with all the latest medical aids.

  ‘Am I dying, sir?’

  John looked down at the boy. Notwithstanding the stubble that covered his chin and cheeks, he looked about twelve years old.

  ‘I’m doing my best to care for you …’ he read the boy’s name tags, ‘Wilkinson.’

  ‘I don’t mind, sir. Anything has to be better than that hole they put us in. No food … no water …’ The boy turned his head and, without another word, sighed and died.

  John was ashamed when the first thought that crossed his mind was whether he’d wasted a dose of morphine that could have eased someone in an even worse state out of life.

  He looked at the other men. Their breath was shallow, barely perceptible. He stretched his legs, climbed to his feet, and went outside. The sun had set and darkness loomed dense and threatening outside the circle of light surrounding the cook fires. He lit a Turkish cigarette. Their tobacco was much stronger than the one used by British manufacturers and tasted foul, but he couldn’t break the habit of reaching for a pack every time things didn’t go as he wanted them to.

  Greening joined him. ‘Burial party, sir?’

  ‘The only man I thought had a chance of living until morning has just died. Please ask Jones and Williams to dig a grave for four and leave it open and ask Baker and Roberts to remove the body to the grave site.’

  ‘I’ll do that, sir.’

  Greening left and John saw a group of men from the village staring at him. There was no sign of any local women and he assumed they were in their huts making the evening meal.

  ‘Tea, sir.’ Rebeka walked towards him carrying a tin mug.

  ‘Thank you, and thank you for your help, and Mrs Gulbenkian’s, earlier.’

  ‘We are glad to do something for you, sir, after you have done so much for us.’

  John stepped away from the tent when he saw Baker and Roberts approach.

  ‘You want us to put the body in the grave when it’s dug, sir?’

  ‘Please.’ John saw a villager still watching him. ‘Put a guard on the grave as well, change every two hours so no one misses too much sleep.’

  ‘Will do, sir.’

  Greening joined him with Mitkhal and two Arabs. ‘I’ve been given permission by the captain to go out with the auxiliaries and look for any more of our men who’ve been left behind, sir.’

  ‘I offered Sergeant Greening a camel but he prefers to drive your cart,’ Mitkhal didn’t meet John’s eye. They’d been careful to avoid all but the most essential contact lest they arouse the Turkish captain’s suspicions.

  ‘You’ll need it if you find anyone.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, sir.’

  ‘You have plenty of water bottles in case you come across any men.’

  ‘I do, sir. Jones and Williams are digging the grave.’

  ‘You told them to make it large enough for four?’

  ‘I did, sir. See you when we get back.’

  Baker and Roberts removed the body of the man who’d died and John returned to his stool. A deathly hush hung over the village and the surrounding desert. It was so quiet he could hear the rattle of spoons as the men ate around Dira’s cook fire.

  Rebeka pushed back the tent flap. ‘I brought you food, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She handed him the bowl and sat cross-legged on the floor beside him.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be eating?’

  ‘I’ve finished my meal, sir. Mrs Gulbenkian says it’s not ladylike to eat quickly, but I can’t help it. After being starved for so long, I’m afraid I can’t eat slowly.’

  ‘Your English is very good.’

  ‘My father taught me. He was the English and French professor in the school in our town.’

  ‘Do you know where he is now?’

  ‘Dead. The Turks ordered all the Armenian men in the town to report to the church at nine o’clock in the morning. They had a list and any man who didn’t report was hunted down. When they had gathered all of them, they marched them outside town and shot them. An American missionary visited the valley where they’d killed them. He was a friend of Mrs Gulbenkian. He recognised my father’s body and that of my sister’s husband.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. That must have been devastating for you and your family.’

  ‘It was, sir, but we had no time to mourn him. A few days later all the women and children were ordered to report. Just like with the men, those who didn’t, were hunted down. Then we were marched into the desert and made to keep on marching until we started dying. The rest you know.’

  He wanted to ask if she’d been with anyone else from her family but he recalled Mitkhal saying that she and her two companions were the only ones found alive. No matter how tragic Rebeka’s story, he was no position to help her or any of his fellow prisoners.

  ‘Your town?’ He hoped to prompt pleasanter memories. ‘Was it here or in Turkey?’

  ‘In Turkey, sir, on the Kharpert Plain. Have you been there?’

  John shook his head. ‘I’ve travelled very little. Here, India, Britain, a few holidays in France before the war, and that’s it.’

  ‘The Kharpert Plain is very beautiful, endless fields of wheat, barley, and crops, surrounded by mountains, some softly rolling covered by woods. Others rocky and craggy. Even the buildings are beautiful. All the houses and churches in the towns and villages are painted white. And inside the churches are colourful paintings of the saints and Jesus and the Magdalene.’ She looked up at John and her dark eyes glowed, bright with tears in her thin pale face. ‘Tell me to be quiet if I’m talking too much, sir. My family at home were always telling me not to talk so much.’

  ‘I like to hear you talk. It gives me something other than my patients to think about.’ John left the stool and checked the pulses of the three remaining men. Like their breathing, all were low, barely perceptible. He moistened their lips, wiped their faces, and returned to his stool. Rebeka was still sitting cross legged on the floor.

  ‘Was your family large?’

  ‘I was the second of four girls, sir. Our father’s parents lived with us until they died. My mother said she was glad that my grandfather didn’t l
ive to see what the Turks were doing to us. My grandmother was old and confused, the gendarmes made us leave her behind in the church with the other old women. We heard the shots as we were marched away.’

  ‘You said you father was an English professor. What about you and your sisters?’

  ‘I worked with my aunt in the family’s goldsmith’s business. We designed and made jewellery.’

  ‘That sounds like hard work.’

  ‘I loved it. After my eldest sister Anusha married everyone looked to me to marry, but being the plain one in the family …’

  ‘You’re not plain,’ he interrupted.

  ‘I am, sir, and I really don’t mind. My sister Anusha had many boys who wanted to marry her, as did my younger sister Veronika. They could take their pick. The only men who asked to marry me were widowers with large families who needed looking after. After I turned down the third proposal, there was a family argument. My aunt, who’d never married, suggested I join her in the business my family owned and she ran. I loved the work. Within two months I was designing and making my own pieces.’

  ‘So you were an independent woman. What else did you do beside work?’

  ‘Help my mother to keep house. She taught me to cook and clean and my grandmother taught me to sew, but most of all I liked to read my father’s books. He had a fine library of English and French classics.’

  ‘What authors did you like?’

  He sat back and listened while she told him of her admiration for the Brontës, Jane Austen, Dickens and Dumas and Flaubert, and while she talked he watched her slowly come to life again.

  He couldn’t help but think of the incongruity of the situation. Here he was, on the borders of Turkey, discussing European literature with a young woman, almost as if they’d met in a civilized drawing room. Yet she was destitute and had lost her entire family. It made the suffering he’d endured seem inconsequential.

  ‘Sir.’

  John jerked upright. He looked around. The oil lamp he’d lit when the sun was setting was flickering low. Rebeka was still curled at his feet and Greening was shaking his shoulder.

  ‘Greening?’ he mumbled finding it difficult to focus on the sergeant.

  ‘We found more men, sir.’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘Only one survived the trip here, sir. Private Evans.’

  ‘Private Evans from the Dorsets?’

  ‘That’s the one, sir. The Welshman with the peculiar sense of humour. Jones and Williams are cleaning him up now, sir. They’ll bring him in when they’ve finished.’

  ‘Thank you, Greening.’ John kneeled and examined the men on the floor. He checked their pulses and laid his hand in front of their mouths.

  Greening read the expression on his face. ‘They’ve gone, sir.’

  ‘While I was sleeping,’ John shook his head in dismay. ‘So much for the care I gave them.’

  ‘If any of them had made a noise you would have woken, sir. No man can expect more than a clean place to lie down and something to take the pain away. Dira was making tea when I came in. Go and have a brew, sir, while the boys take these men out.’

  ‘Thank you, Greening.’ John reached down and shook Rebeka awake. Like him she woke with a start.

  ‘Mrs Gulbenkian will be wondering where you are. I’ll walk to your tent.’

  She rose to her feet and yawned. He saw her to the small tent Greening had allocated for the use of the women and went to the cart. Corporal Baker was washing Evans, but like all the men they’d found who’d been abandoned, he was comatose.

  John checked Evans’s pulse and pinched his skin.

  ‘Dehydration, dysentery, and sunstroke, sir,’ Baker announced.

  ‘You’ll be a doctor by the time this war finishes, Baker.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind, sir. I’d like to put some of the things I’ve learned from you to use.’

  ‘You regular army, Baker?’

  ‘Me, sir? Not ruddy likely, begging your pardon for the language, sir. I was dull enough to volunteer when the call went out for conscripts. Thought I be a hero in France killing Fritzes, sir. Never crossed my mind I’d be a prisoner of these heathen beggars.’ He glared at the Turks who were clustered around their own fire.

  ‘I don’t think any of us thought we’d end up here, Baker.’

  ‘Why did you ask if I was regular, sir?’

  ‘If you were I could recommend you for medical training. The RAMC are looking for good men like you.’

  ‘Kind of you to say so and kind of you to offer, sir. Although if I’m lucky enough to survive this war and get back home in one piece I’m hoping my old man will take me into the family business. It will seem heaven after this.’

  ‘What’s the family business, Baker?’ John asked.

  ‘Butchers, sir.’

  Baker didn’t even smile.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Convent of St Agnes and St Clare, India

  August 1916

  Maud brushed the flies from the table in her cell and re-read what she had written.

  Letter I

  Dear John,

  I am sending this care of the Red Cross. I have heard that they don’t always succeed in passing letters on to the Red Crescent, but I hope this will get through. I will date and number all my letters and copy this paragraph at the beginning of each one. As I intend to write to you three times a week until you reply, you can check how many of my letters have reached you, which may be useful in gauging how much of your other mail gets through.

  I hope you won’t tear this or any letter up that I send you before you read it. I want you to know that I am abjectly ashamed of my unforgiveable behaviour. I didn’t realise how precious your love was until the last time I saw you, when told me you wanted a divorce.

  I am full of regret, remorse – and hope. Hope that when this beastly war is over we can meet again, put the past behind us, and make a new life for ourselves together in that West Country village you used to talk about. Where you would be the village doctor and I would be just a housewife who cares for our children and our home.

  I think of you constantly and can’t bear the thought of you locked up in a Turkish prison. I hope and pray that you are in stronger and better health than the survivors of the siege of Kut who were returned to the hospitals in Basra. Angela Smythe told me most of the men were so weak and thin they couldn’t even rise from their beds.

  My father returned from Kut in remarkably good health compared to the other officers who were sent downstream. He asked me to move in with him but changed his mind when heard the gossip about me and ordered me to leave his bungalow. Given what people were saying about me I couldn’t return to the Butlers. Michael Downe offered to help me, but rather than impose on the few real friends I have, like Angela and Michael, I thought it best to leave Basra and make a new life for myself elsewhere.

  As you see from the return address, I am in India, living and working in the convent where I was educated. Mother Superior was kind to me when I was a pupil. The nuns run an infirmary alongside the school that cares for local people. I nursed in the Lansing for a short while and once Mother Superior realised that I’d received some training she agreed that I could work there in return for my keep.

  Given the gossip about me in military circles both in Basra and here in India I am using the name Maud Smith, but I never leave the convent nor venture into the convent school that has officers’ daughters among the pupils. I see and speak only to the nuns and the locals who seek treatment in the infirmary.

  I gave birth to a boy last December. I asked Mrs Butler to place him in an American orphanage. I hope she will do so and that he will find adoptive parents who can give him a better life than I am able to. I am writing this so you realise that if you could bring yourself to consider taking me back, I would come unencumbered by further responsibilities.

  As long as I remain in the convent I will be financially self-sufficient, and have no need to draw on my wife’s allowance.

&n
bsp; As I haven’t heard anything from you, I have no idea whether you have divorced me or not, or intend to divorce me in the future.

  If you are, I beg you with all my heart to reconsider, John …

  Maud stopped writing and considered how best to fill the space that still remained on the official Red Cross POW form. After gauging the number of lines she could squeeze in, she dipped her pen into the ink and continued.

  So, as you see, I am supporting myself and hope to redeem myself in your eyes. I know what I am asking for when I plead with you to forgive me. All I can say is I am not the woman I was when you last saw me. It was hard to live in Basra in full knowledge of what was being said about me. I have suffered, but I know my suffering is nothing compared to yours. I will understand if I do not hear from you, but please, John, try and write even if it’s only a few sentences to tell me that you don’t want to see me again.

  I send all my love, your own very sorrowful Maud who’s only hope is that you allow her a second chance to be the wife she should have been.

  Maud folded the letter, sealed it, and went to her washstand. She washed and dressed in the uniform she’d been given and covered her hair with a nurse’s veil. When she looked at herself in the mirror she appeared more novice nun than nurse.

  She resolved to have her photograph taken in the uniform. It was an image she wanted to project and imprint on John’s consciousness. She wanted – no, she needed – to believe that she could make amends. That if she kept writing to John and sending him Red Cross parcels like the one she’d used Michael’s money to buy, he would forgive her and take her back.

  He simply had to. Because when she considered her life up until that point, she realised that John was the only person who’d loved her unselfishly and with all his heart.

  Smythes’ Bungalow, Basra

  August 1916

  ‘Thank you,’ Angela took the tea tray from the maid and set it in a low table in the drawing room. ‘And thank the cook for us. That was a lovely dinner.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am Smythe.’

  ‘It was a very good dinner,’ Georgiana complimented. She rearranged the cushions at her back, and lifted Robin from his crib. ‘You’ve no idea how welcome this blissful domesticity is after the day I’ve had in the hospital.’