第5章 The Man Who Was Ryecroft

By the middle of September the push had moved north along the line, and the flood through Argentonne had narrowed to a trickle, and the clearing station settled into the strange, guilty quiet that came over a place when the killing was happening to someone else. The quiet did not suit Milly. She had grown used to the noise the way a person grows used to a limp, and without it she had too much room to think, and thinking in that place led always down the same road, past the same missing name. Ted had been missing for two months. She had written to the War Office twice and had received two printed replies and no news, and she had begun to do sums in her head at night, the kind of sums a person does when nobody will do them for her: how long a man can survive unwounded in a shell-hole, how long without water, how long before hope becomes a different word. On the twenty-first of the month a convoy of walking wounded came down from the dressing station at Vallencourt, seventeen men in single file along the duckboards, and among them, at the end of the line, with his cap gone and his tunic buttoned to the throat, was a man whose field card said Ryecroft. Milly read the card standing in the yard with the rain on it. Private H. Ryecroft. The same number. The same battalion. The same low four thousands and the same badge. She turned it over, and the name was on the back too, and a stamp that she knew, and no crossing-out, no second hand, nothing at all to mark it as any different from a thousand other cards. For a moment the yard tilted. She had a memory, sharper than memory should be, of the wax-pale face in the dark of the Ford and the two fingers at the throat and Dr. Lanning's thumb closing the eyes. Eight minutes past nine. Ninety-one. "Ryecroft," she said aloud, because she wanted to hear the man answer to it. "Sir," he said, and touched his cap where the cap was not. He was the wrong shape. That was the first thing. The man she had carried had been slight, narrow-shouldered, with a farm boy's redness about the neck; this man was taller and heavier and had a way of standing that suggested he expected to be looked at. His hands were soft across the palms. The dead man's hands had been a labourer's, horned with callus, and she remembered them because she had held one of them for a mile of the Brolincourt road while it closed. She took him into the schoolroom to Danforth and had him entered. There was nothing else to do with him. He gave his name and number without a flicker, and answered every question, and his answers were all the answers of a man who was what his paper said he was. He had been at the base, he said, with a septic finger, and had been sent up as a reinforcement, and his card must have gone astray in the posting; it happened; it had happened to a hundred men. "A hundred men do not come back from the dead," Milly said. She said it quietly, in the corridor, out of Danforth's hearing. "I carried Ryecroft. He died in my ambulance on the eleventh of August. I wrote the hour." The man looked at her. His eyes were calm and pale and not unkind, and there was in them the flat patience of a person who has rehearsed this conversation and is mildly disappointed to find it so easy. "You wrote the hour of a man who was brought in with no disc and a card covered in somebody's blood," he said. "Men get mixed up at the dressing station when it is busy. You carried a stranger and you wrote my name on him because my name was on the card. That is all. I am sorry for the stranger." "And who are you?" "I am whoever the papers say I am," he said, and smiled, and it was not a nice smile. "The papers say Ryecroft. The font at the depot says Ryecroft. The pay-book says Ryecroft. You have a book that says otherwise, and I am told it is a private book, and a private book is worth nothing at all." Milly did not answer. She was thinking about the dead man's last mile, and the friend's name he had not finished, and the half of a photograph with a stranger and a dog on it and *R. and me, Ashbourne, 1913* on the back. Lanning examined the man himself, because Milly asked him to, and because Lanning had learned in two years to trust the women who drove his ambulances. He took him into the schoolroom and looked at the finger, which had healed, and at the card, which was clean, and at the eyes, which were calm, and when he came out he was silent for a while and then said, "There is nothing here that I can arrest. He is a man with a wound that is better and a card that is in order. If I write him down as an impostor I must write a reason, and my reason is that a woman remembers a man's hands. The Army does not act on the strength of a woman's memory." "It has acted on less," Milly said. "It has," Lanning agreed. "It has also shot men on less, and I do not intend to be the instrument of either." The man stayed in the ward for four days with his septic finger that was not septic, and Milly watched him the way a farmer watches a strange dog. He was pleasant to the nurses and useful to the orderlies, and he knew exactly how much to say and when to be still, and it was the knowing when to be still that settled her beyond any doubt, because the man she had carried had been a talker who talked the whole Brolincourt road while his life ran out of him, and this man had the manners of a person who had never once been afraid of being overheard. On the fourth day she caught him alone in the corridor by the door to the yard, and she said, quietly, "You were a clerk." He neither denied it nor flinched. "I have been a great many things," he said. "What was your name before it was his?" The man looked at her for a long moment, and then he smiled his small, tidy smile. "That is an expensive question," he said. "I advise you not to spend anything on it. You have a brother, I hear. A brother is a very expensive thing to have, in wartime." And he walked out into the yard, and Milly stood in the doorway with the cold coming off the tiles and understood that the man before her was not merely a thief but a threat, that he had learned about Ted from somewhere inside the establishment, and that somewhere inside the establishment a man with a key was listening. She went to Danforth again and asked to see the admission slips for the twenty-first, and Danforth, who was by then her ally and her liability, brought them out of the drawer and spread them on the desk. There were seventeen, and every one was in order, and the slip for the man who called himself Ryecroft was clean and correct and signed in the same hand as the rest. The slip for the man she had carried on the eleventh of August did not exist, because no slip is made for a man who dies in an ambulance. There was only a line in Danforth's register, a line in her own book, and a cross with a word cut into it in a field behind a sugar factory. She was also thinking about the register. She went back to Danforth that afternoon and made him look, and there it was in the ruled columns, in Danforth's own neat hand: *Ryecroft, H., Pte, admitted 21 September, septic finger, returned to duty.* And nowhere, on any page, was there a Ryecroft who had died. ---