I surprised myself with my stoicism over the blood and guts and gore that routinely appeared in the ward. The other nurse aides, mostly well-bred girls like myself, couldn’t tolerate the state of the wounded, and more often than not, I had to assist them when they’d become nauseated from the sight of the soldiers’ injuries. The experienced, professionally trained nurses who actually ran the hospital took note of me, and I soon became a regular in the surgeries and amputations and the requested caretaker of the more seriously injured.
Mummy, to my astonishment, did not object to this unsavory work, although she found curious the stride in which I took this nursing. “For goodness’ sake, Agatha,” she exclaimed with a shudder one evening over tea. “You treat these horrors matter-of-factly.” I guessed that she tolerated my work because she hoped I’d stumble across a more suitable young man in the hospital who would distract me from Archie. But she had no understanding of the reality of the wards and the state of the soldiers—the unlikelihood that the boys I tended could think about anything but survival—or the omnipresence of death.
In fact, spending my days in the presence of injured soldiers and watching the more seriously harmed only knitted me more tightly to Archie. The boys reminded me how tenuous one’s thread to life really was. For each wound I cleaned and each amputated limb I dressed, I said a silent prayer that Archie stayed safe as he soared and swooped in the European skies.
Days turned into weeks, and those weeks built into three months before Archie had a leave. As I packed for our chaperoned meeting, I thought about how those three months might as well have been three years for all that I’d experienced. I felt utterly changed by what I’d seen and done. But if the war had altered me from the sidelines, I could not imagine how it had transformed Archie, who lived amid terror, bloodshed, combat, and death every day. Would I recognize the man with whom I’d fallen in love?
Chapter Twelve
Day One after the Disappearance
Saturday, December 4, 1926
The Silent Pool, Surrey, England
The cluster of police blocks the view of the Silent Pool. But Archie doesn’t need to see the stagnant body of brackish water to know that it lies down the hill just beyond the men, past where he’s been told the Morris Cowley sits near the rim of a chalk pit next to Water Lane. Archie has been there often enough to know its precise location.
His wife had found the dark, unreflective pool—a small, spring-fed lake about three hundred yards from a picturesque plateau called Newlands Corner—oddly inspiring. Its gloomy aspect, ringed so thickly with trees that sunlight could scarcely penetrate, had provided fodder for her writing, she’d claimed, as had the legends surrounding the Silent Pool. Local lore had linked the site to the legendary King John, who’d allegedly abducted a beautiful woodcutter’s daughter. It was said that King John’s unwelcome amorous advances had forced the girl into the pool’s deceptively deep water, where she drowned. But the drowning hadn’t silenced the girl, local folks claimed; if one was unlucky enough to be in the pool’s vicinity at midnight, one could witness her rise from its depths. It was nonsense, of course, and he’d told Agatha so.
In their early days living at Styles, Archie had begrudgingly accompanied her for walks around the pool. She’d wanted him to understand its allure. But in recent years, he’d refused to join her in those strolls, preferring the order, tradition, and wide spaces of the golf course and his companions there. Now, in recent months, Agatha had taken to visiting the Silent Pool alone.
“Colonel Christie, over here,” Kenward calls to him.
He doesn’t want to see what the police have found, but a man desperate to find his missing wife would rush toward any sign of her whereabouts. The letter has made him constantly cognizant of how he must act and in fact specifically instructed him to join in any searches that might arise. Consequently, he races to Kenward’s side.
The uniformed men part to allow him entrance into their ghastly circle. There, at its center, is a gray, bottle-nosed Morris Cowley. The vehicle sits halfway down a grassy slope leading toward the Silent Pool. Thick bushes conceal the hood and keep it from sliding headlong down the steep hill toward the chalk pit.
“Can you confirm that this is your wife’s car, Colonel?” Kenward asks.
“It certainly is the make and model of her vehicle. Whether it is hers, I cannot say.” His voice quivers, and his legs feel unexpectedly spongy. He hasn’t anticipated that the sight of his wife’s car would cause him to shake. She’d purchased the Morris Cowley with the proceeds of the first of her three published novels, and she adored prowling about the countryside behind its wheel. He himself has only recently purchased a car—the sportier French Delage, albeit a secondhand one—which isn’t as well suited for rural drives. But then, he doesn’t really use the Delage for that purpose, does he? He travels back and forth to his job in London and back and forth to the golf course.
“A pricey one, that Morris Cowley,” one of Kenward’s right-hand men remarks.
The deputy chief constable shoots a displeased look at the man. “There seems to be very little damage to the car, Colonel. The glass windscreen is unbroken, and the folding canvas roof is unpunctured. The only part that seems to have been impacted is the hood. From the skid marks leading up to the car, it appears as though some unusual circumstance led to the car careening off the road, if you can call that dirt path back there a road. And the only thing that stopped the car from plunging into that chalk pit was those bushes.”
Kenward calls over to his men. “Let’s have a look at the glove box to make certain about the ownership.” He directs two men to search the front seats and glove box.
As Archie watches the police officers rummage through the car, he asks a question that had been niggling at the back of his mind. “How did you ever find her car in this remote spot, Detective Chief Constable Kenward? And so soon after we discovered her disappearance?”
“The headlights of the car must have been left running when your wife dis—” He stutters a bit as he realizes he must choose his words carefully. “When your wife left the vehicle. They were still running at seven o’clock this morning when a local fellow on his way to work noticed them shining out from the wooded area surrounding the Silent Pool. The sighting was called in, and while we’d planned on checking on it later today, we got caught up with your wife’s disappearance, only now connecting the two events.”
Archie nods, still watching the police search the car. At Kenward’s instruction, the officers poke about in the back seat of the car while Archie and the deputy chief constable stand by. The men find nothing of interest at first, but soon one of them calls out, “Chief, there’s a bag underneath the back seat. And a fur coat.”
Archie feels as though he cannot get a proper breath, watching these strangers pawing around his wife’s Morris Cowley, but he knows he must maintain his composure. The officers eventually crawl out of the car, each carrying a parcel carefully wrapped in some sort of plain, official fabric.