Death at Greenway by Lori Rader-Day

Author:Lori Rader-Day [Rader-Day, Lori]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2021-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

33

Bridey

No, I never was,” Gigi said. “There. That’s one true thing about me.”

Bridey, stunned, could only think the children were cared for by not one but two fraudulent nurses. They’d be sacked and rightly so.

“I tried to tell you,” Gigi said.

Her shock boiled over into anger. “When? When you nearly fainted at the sight of blood? I should have known. Your fingernails.”

Gigi held out her hands. “What of them?”

“They’re rather hard to maintain if you’re working a busy ward in wartime,” she said. “But you didn’t know that.”

“I would have trimmed them, at least.”

Her disinterest in the children and their care. The money sewn into her cloak. Her cloak! It was not a nurse’s cape at all but a fashionable version for ladies who might want to pretend.

“Why did you say you were the other nurse?”

“I needed to be on the train. It was a matter of—well, grave national importance.” She sounded like someone still playacting. “And personal, as well. I had to get out of London—honestly, Bridey, I understand how Mrs. Mallowan must have felt, running off as she did.”

“You? You think you know her desperation? Her pain?” Hadn’t the woman lost her mother, her husband, and her security, all? If anyone should know Mrs. Mallowan’s state of mind—

She braced herself for the wave of grief she knew would come, sucked herself in, deep within her own skin.

“Look at you. At least I’m capable of feeling someone’s pain,” Gigi hissed.

Bridey held her guts in, hand over her mouth.

“You pulled me up into the train, and rescued me,” Gigi said. “You believed I was the other nurse and I went along with it. For one reason or another, I’ve kept going along, rather successfully—”

“You haven’t. You’re a rubbish nurse,” Bridey said. “I only noticed you at all because I thought you were Mrs. Poole—”

“Who?”

It was her fault. Gigi would still be on the platform and maybe she should be.

“Mrs. Poole. The woman who took her son back and she’s just been at the door—oh.” She sank, shaking, on the low battery wall. Through the opening created by Gigi’s deception and by the memory of Sam Poole, her little brother had climbed through, whole, her sisters, and her mam.

“What is it? Should you see the doctor?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered. Her girls came around to see she was fine, hand her leaves and stones they had collected.

“Thank you,” she said to the girls and held the gifts in the palm of her hand. “I’m fine—I keep forgetting what it means, truly. Her little boy. The same age as—” Her youngest sister. “As James,” she said instead. But her sister was too much there, playing alongside them, and now Sam Poole, too.

There was no room for him here or within her, or for Gigi to ruin everything.

The girls set a table of pebbles at her feet, ladies at tea. “Why did you stay?” she said.

“It was safe,” Gigi said. “From the man I mentioned. That’s why I had to leave London immediately.” She sighed.

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