Read Chapter 3: The Surgeon's Rules

The chapel reeked of iodine and wet wool. Dawn came grey through shattered windows, painting the altar in stripes of weak light. Élise knelt beside a stretcher, pressing lint into a wound that would not stop weeping, when James Ashford's shadow fell across her.

“Moreau.” His voice was clipped, surgical. “My tent. Now.”

She finished the dressing, tied it off with a knot she'd learned a week ago and now made in her sleep, and followed him through the maze of wounded men. The chapel had become their hospital overnight—pews stacked against walls, hymnals used for kindling, the altar itself serving as an operating table. The priest had blessed it before leaving and no one had thought to ask if God objected.

James's tent was a lean-to of salvaged timber and canvas, no larger than her father's woodshed. Inside, he had a fold-down desk, a map weighted by a pistol, and a single photograph turned face-down. He did not sit.

“You’ve been here nine days.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nine days, and you've assisted in four amputations, held retractors for two abdominal explorations, and talked a boy of nineteen out of his own hand with a story about a horse that kicked him.” He looked at her properly and the coldness in his eyes was not cruel. It was careful. “You have steady hands and a softer manner than most of my orderlies. That is useful. But you're a civilian, and worse, you're a woman who sees faces.”

Élise's jaw tightened. “I see what's in front of me. I don't see how that's a liability.”

“It is the greatest liability there is.” He stepped closer. The tent smelled of him—cigarettes, carbolic, exhaustion. “Here are my rules. One: you do not learn their names. You learn their wounds. Two: you do not write letters for men who cannot, because the letter you compose will be the one their mothers read and you will burn with every lie. Three: you do not attend funerals. You will work through them. Four.” He paused and his voice dropped to something almost quiet. “You do not keep mementos of the dead. No crosses, no locks of hair, no letters found in pockets. Death is already heavy enough. You will not carry its baggage.”

Élise's hand went, of its own accord, to her apron pocket. Pierre's letter crackled beneath her fingers. James's eyes followed the motion.

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Moreau.”

“No, sir.” She held his gaze. “It is not from a dead man. It is from my brother. He is missing, not dead, and the letter wasn't finished, and I will keep it until it becomes one I can read all the way through.”

Something flickered in his face—a recognition, perhaps, of a wall he also knew. He exhaled. “Then you will keep it hidden. And you will follow the other rules, or I'll have you driving ambulances to the railhead. The men you'll transport there will be dead before you reach Calais. That is not the work I want for you.” He turned back to his desk. “We're done.”

He thought they were done. That afternoon, triage proved him wrong.

The bombardment began at two o'clock. A direct hit on the forward dressing station sent a flood of wounded back to the chapel—men on stretchers, men carried on doors, men crawling with their own intestines held in place by their hands. Élise worked the intake table with Matron Beaumont at her side, sorting walking wounded from the dying, and the chapel swelled like a wound of its own. She had just tied a tourniquet on a boy whose leg was a ruin of bone and cloth when she saw the man in the ditch.

He was wearing a child's coat.

The man was a sapper, judging by the mud-caked badge on his shoulder, and he lay half-collapsed in the drainage ditch beside the road, cradling a bundle wrapped in a cavalry shirt. Élise waded through the chaos and knelt. “Let me see.”

“No. He's breathing. He's breathing, miss, I've kept him breathing.”

The sapper opened the shirt and Élise saw the child—a girl, perhaps six or seven, with a face bleached white and a thin stream of blood at the corner of her mouth. A shard of shell casing was buried in her ribs. Her eyes were open and glassy and Élise felt the world tilt.

“Gone,” the sapper said, catching her face. “What day is it? The shelling—the church—she was selling bread by the wall, and I've kept her breathing, but I don't know what day it is anymore.”

“Where's her family?”

“Gone. The cellar.” He swallowed. “I dug what I could. She's all that's left.”

Élise lifted the girl. She weighed nothing—a sparrow's weight in wool and blood. She carried her into the chapel and laid her on the altar, which had become their clean table, and James was already there scrubbing his hands in a basin of boiled water.

His eyes took in the child, the fragment, the shirt. “The fragment's in her lung? No. Her lung is on the fragment. I can see it.” He picked up a scalpel. “Moreau. Hold her.”

“She's dying.”

“She's dying, and I am the surgeon, and you are the hands. Hold her.”

Élise pressed the girl's shoulders to the altar's scarred wood. James worked quickly, without hesitation, without eyes for anyone but the wound. She watched his hands—steady, brutal, precise, the hands of a man who had learned to make peace with the destruction of flesh in order to save it. The fragment came free with a wet sound. He packed the cavity, closed, stitched. He laid his palm flat on the girl's sternum and felt for breath.

“More gauze.” His voice cracked. “She's seeping. More gauze, and don't tell me we're out.”

Élise pressed the gauze down. Beneath her fingers, the girl's chest rose—a shallow, trembling tide of air.

James exhaled and did not look at the child. He looked at Élise. “She'll live or she won't. That's all we get.” He stripped his gloves and left, and the coldness in his manner was a mask she could now see the seams of.

That night, Élise wandered the ruined village alone. The chapel's rectory had been reduced to a hollow frame. In the rubble, something glinted—a tube of brass, a twisted bell, rubber gone rotten and dry. A stethoscope.

The chest-piece was cracked. The ear tubes were bent at a painful angle. But the earpieces were intact, and when she held them to her ears and pressed the bell to her own wrist, she heard her heart—sturdy, unforgiving, stubborn.

She tucked it into her apron pocket, opposite the letter.

Back in the chapel, Matron Beaumont found her. The woman's face was grey with exhaustion, and in her hand she carried an envelope of coarse paper. “For you, child.”

Élise took it. The telegram was flat, official, and it did not need to be long. *MOREAU, PIERRE. MISSING IN ACTION. PRESUMED—* The last word had been crossed out by a pencil, as if someone at the desk had hesitated. “Presumed” standing alone spared nothing and promised less.

She folded it small, into the size of a seed, and did not put it in her apron. She put it in the pocket over her heart, against the cracked brass bell of a dead man's stethoscope.

Pierre would not write the rest of his letter.

She would write her own.