The House at Mermaid's Cove(37)

He paused. No doubt he was expecting me to say something, to express surprise at what he and she had so cleverly concealed from me. But I couldn’t speak. My throat was swollen inside, as if I’d swallowed a wasp.

“I suppose all this is something of a shock,” he said. “I hope you won’t take it to heart. Merle really likes you. She thinks you’d be perfect for the work we’re trying to do.”

I tried to shift the lump in my throat. “I . . . don’t think I could do it,” I mumbled. “The kind of thing you have in mind. I . . . I’m not brave enough. Just the thought of getting onto a boat . . . any sort of boat . . . terrifies me.”

“I can understand that, after what you’ve been through. But it’s like falling off a horse: the only way to conquer that fear is to get back on as soon as you can.” He fell silent again. I heard him take a deep breath. “You said you wanted to do some good, Alice. This is your chance.”

I knew that he was right—about overcoming my fear of traveling on water. But could a person like me really make a difference in the kind of clandestine mission he’d described? “What exactly would I have to do?” I asked.

“You’d be part of a fake French fishing crew,” he replied. “With luck, you wouldn’t have to do anything. You’d go ashore with the agents we send out and come straight back with the escaping airmen. If I could split myself in two, I’d do it myself—but I have to skipper the bigger boat.”

“So, I’d have to pretend to be fishing?”

“That’s right. If there was a challenge from an enemy craft, you’d have to convince them the only thing you’re landing is mackerel.”

“I’d have to dress as a man?”

“Yes.” There was a smile in his voice. “With that haircut, you’d be quite convincing.”

I was glad that it was dark. Glad he couldn’t see my cheeks burning with humiliation. Wasn’t it enough that he’d robbed me of the illusion that I’d made a friend? Did he have to add insult to injury by telling me I looked like a man?

“You’d be properly armed, of course,” he went on. “We’d teach you how to use a pistol. Do you think you could handle a violent situation? I don’t suppose there was much of that in a convent, was there?”

The burn of humiliation gave way to a flash of indignation. If he thought I’d been living in a bubble of serenity, he was very much mistaken. “If you want to know, I’ve twice seen violent death.” I kept my voice neutral, matter-of-fact. “First in Belgium, in a mental asylum where I was nursing: when I went to relieve the nun on night duty, I found her slumped in a chair with a knife in her back.”

I heard him blow out a breath.

“Secondly in the Congo, where the sister on ward duty with me was clubbed over the head by a native man whose witch doctor had told him that if he killed a white woman, it would drive away the spirit of the dead wife that haunted him.”

“Good God,” he whispered. “You saw that happen?”

“Yes.”

“Did he try to attack you, too?”

“He didn’t see me. I was in a side room, filling up the medicine trolley for the evening round. I heard a scream—not from the sister, but from one of the patients. It was a maternity ward for the wives of the men who ran the mines. Any one of them could have been killed.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to the woman who had screamed. I didn’t grasp what had happened at first, because Sister Beatrice—the one who’d been attacked—was still on her feet, walking toward the man, making him back off, away from the patients. I don’t know how she did that. It was almost supernatural, as if a spiritual energy was coming from a body that must have already been dead. When her body was examined, it was found that only the skullcap under her veil had kept the brains in place.”

It was a long time since I’d thought about that dreadful day, but the memory was as vivid and shocking as a sequence from a horror film. We weren’t allowed to talk about it at the mission house—but I remembered one of the nuns whispering that Sister Beatrice had been lucky, because she had died for Christ. I hadn’t cried until then, but I’d shed bitter tears in bed that night. How could such a caring, skillful, dedicated person be better off dead? I couldn’t, wouldn’t accept that.

“What happened to the man?” Jack’s voice brought me back to where I was.

“He disappeared into the bush,” I replied.

“Weren’t you afraid after that?”

I considered for a moment before answering. “I was more shocked than afraid,” I said. “The native men who worked as orderlies found the attacker the next day and dragged him into the hospital, trussed up like a chicken. They wanted to kill him in front of us, to do to him what he’d done to the sister they’d admired and respected. We had to stop them, of course.”

“Was that an order? Did you want to stop them?”

“If it had happened when I first arrived in Africa, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to, no. But I didn’t have to be given an order to know what was right in that situation. We were trying to win souls, you see. We had to set an example. Forgiveness. I told them that Sister Beatrice wouldn’t have wanted him to die and neither did the rest of us.”