Free The Secret of Raven Point by Jennifer Vanderbes Page B

I’ve never met you before, would, I think, be well served by finding your way to your tent. I’m no doctor, but I’d say some rest is in order.”
    The mere thought of sleep made Juliet break into a yawn. She felt as if she’d been awake for days, moving and working and worrying for months. “Rest would be good,” she said. “Chaplain’s orders?”
    The chaplain nodded. He took her elbow and walked her quietly through the drizzle to her tent, where finally Juliet slept.

CHAPTER 5
    NEWS CAME THAT the division had pushed the Germans farther north and several battalions were being rested. The rain ceased, and a pleasant silence settled over the landscape. In the distance, the trees were thick and green, and the mountains beyond looked beautiful against the sky.
    Assigned to a seven-hour daytime shift, Juliet took her breakfast at dawn in the Officers’ Mess, and as the sun’s rays, like the limbs of a waking sleeper, stretched slowly over the encampment, she began her rounds.
    By noon the glare was hard and bright, and inside the Recovery Tent the canvas walls gathered the hot air and held it very still. Juliet moved slowly; with each step her ward dress stuck to her sides. She fanned patients with magazines, laid wet folded cloths above their brows, flicked flies from their wounds. The worst off were the men in casts, whose necks and chests she doused hourly with a pitcher of water. “Holy Mary,” exclaimed a man in a full-body spica cast, “I’m cooked like a casserole!”
    Slowly the mud dried and the bald patches of earth grew cracked and dusty; a tan soot rose from the ground and found its way into the creases of her clothing.
    The most critical patients were trucked to Naples for evacuation, and soon the hospital took on the feeling of a resort; two by two, patients on crutches hobbled together around the lush grounds, speaking in low, intimate tones, smoking cigarettes while staring off into the mountains; young Italian girls waved empty baskets over the hospital fence, eager to do laundry for pay. A female reporter from a Chicago newspaper arrived; having been denied access to the front lines, she huffed around the recovery ward trying to coax patients into dramatic quotes—“You must have been terrified. . . . You must have felt trapped. . . . You must have been feverish”—which, theoretically, would bring home to her readers as palpable an experience of the front as did Ernie Pyle’s reports. Feeling sorry for her, the men invented tales of reckless heroism, of distant cousins reunited on the battlefield, ridiculous yarns that they referred to, among themselves, as must-ofs or, soon, mustaff s . “I’ve got a good mustaff.”
    Members of the nearby British air force squadron visited, including a pilot Glenda knew from North Africa who arrived one evening in a jeep with two friends and a bottle of grappa, insisting the nurses come to an Officers’ Club dance.
    Returning from her rounds, Juliet found Glenda on her back, studiously penning a black web of fishnet stockings across her legs.
    “I hope it doesn’t rain,” Juliet laughed.
    “Want me to do yours?”
    “I’m not going.”
    “A little roll in the olive grove could do you good. It gets my circulation going, and that, sugar, does wonders for the complexion.”
    Juliet bent to unlace her shoes. “You’re forgetting my special patient.”
    “Private Cyclops?” Glenda pointed her toes and examined her handiwork. “He won’t know if you’re gone.”
    “Mother Hen will.”
    “Then we’ll sneak a chum back for you! One for you and one for me! Share alike for Victory.” Glenda scissored her legs. “Just give me some guidelines. Tall and dark? Short and athletic? Freckled? Bookish, I bet.”
    “Hunchbacked and pockmarked,” said Juliet. “With a speech impediment.”
    “Hell, that’s my first husband. Come on, I’m offering you my extraordinary powers of discernment.”
    “Thank you, but it’s unnecessary.”
    Glenda