A Duty to the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

cup.”
    He laughed and came in, shedding his coat. He was not presently a serving officer, he’d retired in 1910, but they had found work for him at the War Office nonetheless. A tall, handsome man with iron gray hair, broad shoulders, and the obligatory crisp mustache, he wore his uniform with an air. We called him Colonel Sahib, my mother and I, behind his back.
    He made tea quickly and efficiently while I pored over the mail collected in the basket on the table.
    Three of the letters were for me, friends writing from the Front. I wasn’t in the mood to open them and set them aside. The war seemed too close as it was, the streets filled with soldiers, some of them wounded on leave, the drabness of late November feeling as if it reflected the drabness of another year of fighting. For a little while I just wanted to forget that somewhere bodies were being torn apart and people were dying. We could hear the guns as we disembarked in Dover, and I had no way of knowing whether it was our artillery or the Germans’.
    Something of what I was feeling must have shown in my face.
    My father misinterpreted it and said, “Yes, you’ve had a rough time of it, my dear. Best to think about something else for a bit. Your leave will be up soon enough.”
    “Soon enough,” I echoed, and took the cup he brought me.
    It was a souvenir from Brighton, with the Pavilion painted on it. I had never understood where Marianne, one of the nurses with whom I shared the flat, had found all of them, but the shelf in the tiny kitchen held plates from Victoria’s Jubilee, Edward VII’s coronation, and half the seaside towns in England. My father held a cup with Penzance on it.
    He raised his eyebrows as he noticed that himself. “Good God, your mother would have an apoplexy. No decent dishes?”
    “We do very well,” I answered him. “Didn’t you notice the teapot? It’s Georgian silver, I swear to you. And there are spoons in the drawer that are French, I’m told, and the sugar bowl is certainly Royal Worcester.”
    He joined me at the table, stretching his long legs out before him. “Bess.”
    I knew what he was about to ask.
    “It wasn’t bad,” I said, trying to put a good face on all that had happened to me. “Frightening, yes, when we first hit the mine, and then when we had to abandon ship.” I didn’t mention the boats pulled into the screws. “And worrying, because there were so many who were hurt. The papers said we were lucky in the circumstances that only thirty died while over a thousand lived. But what about those thirty souls who never came home? Some are buried near Piraeus, in the British military cemetery there. Others were buried at sea or never made it out of the water at all. I think about them. On the whole, everyone behaved quite well. And it was daylight, and sunny, though the water was cold. That made an enormous difference to those who jumped.”
    “Do you want to go back to duty?”
    He was offering to pull strings and keep me at home to work with convalescents.
    “Yes, I do. I make a difference, and that matters. There are men alive now because of my skills.” And one who died in spite of them…
    I changed the subject quickly. “Do you know the Graham family? Ambrose Graham? In Kent.” Too abrupt—I’d intended to broach the subject casually. But his concern had rattled me.
    He frowned. “Graham…Rings a bell somewhere.”
    “He had something to do with racing, I think—a horse called Merlin the Wise.”
    “Ah. One of the finest steeplechasers there ever was. That Graham. He died some years ago. His first wife was a cousin of Peter Neville’s. He lost her in childbirth, and Merlin had to be put down that same year. Neville wrote me that it turned his mind.” He finished his tea and sat back. “Any particular reason why I should remember the Grahams tonight?”
    My father was nothing if not all-seeing. His subalterns and his Indian staff had walked in fear of him, believing him to have eyes