Summerset Abbey: Spring Awakening (Summerset Abbey Trilogy) by T. J. Brown

Author:T. J. Brown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2013-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

chapter

twelve

Victoria walked through the hospital, trying not to stumble from sheer exhaustion. Dame Furse apparently had the inhuman ability to stay awake for days on end without the need for sleep, but Victoria felt as if she had been awake for weeks. In reality, they had landed in Calais yesterday afternoon and had taken a train into Beauvais just last night. They’d had to wait for several hours for the train because the one they were supposed to take had been conscripted for military use. Victoria had half expected they would stay overnight in Beauvais after a day of travel, but it wasn’t to be. They had then climbed aboard a transporter wagon and rode a number of jolting miles to Chantilly, where the hospital was located. Now, instead of showing them where they would be staying, Dame Furse had one of the French nurses give them a tour of the hospital.

Victoria glanced at the four other women who were also on Dame Furse’s VAD team. Two were older women and two were about Victoria’s age. They all looked just as drained as she felt.

The hospital had hastily been built just outside Chantilly proper. It comprised half a dozen buildings with wooden floors, canvas walls, and tin roofs, none of which kept the cold out. Victoria shivered in spite of the woodstoves burning every twenty feet or so. They had gone through four of the buildings, each set up almost identically. As far as Victoria could tell, they were distinguished according to the wounds the soldiers in each had sustained, but she was too fatigued to be sure.

“Do you have any questions?” the French nurse asked in heavily accented English. She glanced at her wristwatch, clearly wishing she were somewhere else.

“Just one,” said the Yorkshire VAD on Victoria’s right. “Where are our beds and bathrooms?”

Victoria barely refrained from applauding.

The nurse laughed. “Not here, silly goose. You will be staying at a boardinghouse in Chantilly. You won’t live here . . . it will just feel like you do. Come. Let us go see your boss. Perhaps she will take pity and take you to your beds, oui?”

Oui, oui, please, Victoria thought. They sat on a bench as Dame Furse and the head of nurses talked. After one of the women fell asleep sitting upright, Dame Furse finally seemed to notice the state of her contingent. Victoria thought she spied disappointment cross the handsome older woman’s face, but couldn’t be sure. Was the woman even human?

They piled into a wagon that took them and their luggage back into Chantilly. It would be the only ride they would get to and from the hospital unless they could beg one off the soldiers going in those directions. Otherwise they would be expected to walk, no matter what the weather. The walk wasn’t so bad, less than a mile, and Victoria had often walked twice the distance to Nanny Iris’s home, but never after working a ten-hour shift.

She had a fleeting impression of a

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