Read Chapter 20: The Well of Sorrows

The tremor started three days after Prudence left. Élise noticed it first while pouring boiled water into a tin cup—a fine, persistent shake in the fingers of her right hand. She set the cup down, pressed her palm flat against the trestle table, and watched the tremor travel up her wrist and into her forearm.

It stopped when she gripped something hard. Forceps. Scalpel. A man's shoulder while she held him steady for the amputation.

It returned in the quiet hours.

James had taken to sleeping in the corner of the surgical tent, a blanket over his thin frame, his tunic still on as if he expected the next convoy to arrive any minute. Élise watched him from across the room, the way his breath came in short, uneven gasps, the way his hands twitched even in sleep—those surgeon's hands, steady as iron at the operating table, now trembling in the grip of some unreachable nightmare.

She should wake him. She knew she should. But waking him meant confronting the sounds he made—the strangled half-words, the name he sometimes cried out that was not hers.

So she sat. She wrapped her own hands around a mug of cold coffee she had no intention of drinking, and she waited for dawn.

---

He woke with a choked gasp, sitting bolt upright, his eyes wild and unseeing for the space of three heartbeats. Then he blinked. Looked at the canvas roof. At the thin grey light creeping beneath the tent flap. At her.

"Élise." His voice was hoarse, scraped raw. "What time is it?"

"Just after five. Go back to sleep."

"Was I... shouting?"

"No more than usual."

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, and swung his legs off the cot. His hands shook as he reached for his boots, and he stopped, staring at them as though they belonged to someone else. Some traitor.

"James." She crossed to him, took the boot from his hand, crouched before him. He was barefoot—when had he taken his boots off? She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen his bare feet. She worked the boot over his heel, laced it, then the other. His stillness above her was total, a held breath.

"Stand up," she said quietly. "We'll walk a bit."

They went out past the triage line—empty for once, mercifully, the tents silent under the paling sky. The ground was wet with dew. Poppies grew in ragged clumps where the earth had been churned and then abandoned. They walked to the edge of the field where an old oak stood, its limbs shattered by shellfire, its trunk still rooted stubbornly in the mud.

She sat on a low stone. He stood before her, shoulders curved, hands shoved into his pockets.

"Do you dream of it too?" he asked.

"Of what?"

"The men. The ones we couldn't save."

Élise considered lying. She had become good at lying—had build her whole life on it. But here, at dawn, with the tremor in her hands and his shattered-looking face before her, the lie dissolved before it reached her mouth.

"I dream of their mothers," she said. "I've never met them. Never will. But I see their faces when they learn. I see what they feel, and I feel it for them. Every night. Every single night."

Something in James's face cracked open. He sat down heavily beside her, not bothering to avoid the mud, and stared at the ground between his boots.

"I was in an asylum," he said. "Before the war."

The words hung in the grey air between them.

"I don't understand," Élise said. She heard her own voice as if from a distance. Calm. Wait—no, barely steady.

"I trained at a hospital in Kent. Good surgeon. Better than good. My chief singled me out. Made me his protégé." He picked grass from the ground, shredding it between his fingers. "The summer of 1914. I'd been operating three days straight on a woman with—it doesn't matter. I made a mistake. Small. A clamp slipped."

"A mistake. Every surgeon makes mistakes."

"Not this kind. She was young. Fit to survive what I did to her. But it was the kind of mistake that was—" He swallowed. "I couldn't stop thinking about it. Days. Weeks. I'd close my eyes and see the clamp slipping. Then I started seeing it in operations I hadn't performed. Imagining myself making the mistake before I even picked up the blade. I stopped sleeping. Stopped eating."

"What happened?"

"They put me in the asylum. My own chief signed the papers." His voice was flat, stripped of inflection like a wound scraped clean. "Eight months. I didn't get better. I got worse. Then one night I climbed out a window and walked to London and enlisted as a volunteer surgeon. They needed men so badly they didn't check my papers closely. And once I was here, once I was in the mud with blood to my elbows, I found I could forget. For hours at a time. Sometimes whole days."

Élise's hand moved before she could stop it, finding his. His fingers were cold, rough with calluses. He gripped her like a drowning man grips a rope.

"That's why you operate until you collapse," she said slowly. "That's why you won't stop. If you stop—"

"It comes back." He turned to face her. His eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw tight. "If you stop, the edge is still there. The dark thing in the corner. It's always waiting. Sometimes I think the war is the only thing keeping me alive. Isn't that monstrous?"

"It's human."

"It's monstrous," he said again. "I've killed hundreds of thousands of men. Not with my hands—but I've dedicated my hands to putting them back together so they can be sent out to be killed again. How is that not monstrous?"

Élise's tremor worsened. She looked down at her own hands, at the fingers wrapped around his.

"I went to war for a reason too," she said. "Not to escape an asylum. To escape a wake. Every time I closed my eyes I saw—" Her throat closed. "I saw them lower the coffin. I saw the church packed with half the village. He was my father. He was everything. And he was a fraud."

"He was your father," James said. "A fraud who loved you."

"Frauds don't love. They collect."

"Élise."

He said her name—her real name, the one she'd given him in the stream's silver evening light—and she felt the tears coming at last. She'd held them back for days, weeks, months. Since Saint-Rémy. Since she'd buried a lock of her father's hair and ridden away from the only life she'd ever known.

He pulled her against his chest, her face against the rough wool of his tunic, and held her while she shook.

"Listen to me." His voice was rough in her hair. "You asked me once—that afternoon by the stream—what I wanted from the war. I didn't answer you."

"You said—"

"I said the wrong thing." He pulled back just enough to look at her. "I want a world where no woman has to bury her father because he was lied to. Where no soldier dies because we ran out of morphine. Where people like Prudence—people like her dead Étienne—get to have their whole lives ahead of them." He paused. "But I can't build that world. I can barely keep myself standing. All I know is I'm better with you. Sane-er. If we stay together—if we watch each other through this—perhaps we both make it through to the other side."

"I don't know if there is another side."

"There is," he said fiercely. "There has to be. We'll make each other believe it."

She leaned her forehead against his. The tremor in her hands eased. Not gone. But eased.

Behind them, the sun rose over the scarred field, turning the poppies blood red.

The thud of boots came first. Then the runner's voice, breathless and ragged.

"Sister Moreau! Captain! Orders from the field command."

James released her, and they stood.

"Division reports a new offensive building on the Somme. We're to break down the hospital and move south within forty-eight hours. And captain—" The runner hesitated. "Command says the surgeon billet at the new position will be filled. The field dressing stations need bodies. They're pulling nurses up the line."

James went still. "Which nurses?"

The runner looked at Élise. "Stations are crying out for experience. They want your best."