Free Nightingales at War by Donna Douglas

kind.’
    ‘Yes, Aunt.’
    ‘You’re nothing special. You just remember that,’ Aunt Freda warned her.
    ‘I – I know that, Aunt.’
    As they left the church, Eve risked a glance back over her shoulder. Muriel Stanton was still standing at the church doors, chatting to another parishioner. Her mother stood at her side. The look of smiling pride on Mrs Stanton’s face as she gazed at her daughter gave Eve a painful pang of envy.
    How she wished her aunt could love her like that. She longed for nothing more than to make Aunt Freda proud. And yet no matter how hard she tried, nothing she did was ever good enough.
    How unlovable must she be, Eve wondered, if her own flesh and blood could despise her so much?

Chapter Eight
    IT WAS ALMOST midnight on Sunday evening when James Cooper emerged from the basement operating theatre, exhausted and in low spirits. It always affected him badly when he lost a patient. After nearly twenty years as a surgeon, he knew he should have been used to it, but each time he felt the same sadness and frustration when he had to admit defeat.
    There was no shame in giving up in this case. The emergency appendix operation had been long and difficult, and no one but he had truly expected the patient to live. The appendix had perforated, and the entire peritoneal cavity was a toxic mess. But still James had battled on long after he sensed Dr Jameson and the nurses losing heart.
    Everyone thought it was his professional pride that refused to allow him to give up. But it was more than that. James dreaded facing his patients’ families. He hated to see the hope die on their faces when he had to explain that, in spite of his best efforts, he had failed to save their loved one’s life. They had put all their trust in him, and he’d let them down.
    It was particularly hard in this case, as the patient was a young father. James had sat rigid behind his desk, watching the man’s widow weeping and not knowing what to say or do to comfort her. All he could do was repeat the facts over and over again.
    ‘It was too late . . . the appendix had already perforated . . . too much damage . . .’
    He didn’t think she’d taken in anything he’d said, and he didn’t blame her. All the poor woman knew was that she’d lost the man she loved, and her children had lost their father. And there was nothing he could say to take away the pain.
    He wondered if Simone would cry for him the way that woman had wept for her husband. He doubted it. It would probably be a blessed release for both of them.
    He thought about going home, but couldn’t face it. Once upon a time Simone might have been waiting up for him, but after more than twenty years of marriage, he knew her bedroom door would be firmly closed. Unless she was in one of her argumentative moods, in which case he would face endless hours of questions and accusations about where he’d been and who he’d been with. Then there would be tears and bitter recriminations, and he would end up apologising just to make it all stop.
    No, it wasn’t worth going home. As he wearily climbed the stairs, James wondered how his life had gone so badly wrong that he preferred a hard couch in his office to his own marital bed.
    James Cooper had been just twenty years old and a young officer when he’d first met Simone in Amiens. She was a young girl then, helping her father run the village inn where many of the men went to escape during their rare periods of rest. After the horrors James had witnessed on the battlefield, she had proved a welcome escape, a breath of sweet, fresh air to chase away the stench of death and despair. Young and romantic as he was, James had fancied himself in love. He had married Simone as soon as the war was over, and brought her home with him to England.
    But it wasn’t long before he realised that the urgent passion fuelled by the intensity of war couldn’t be sustained in the quiet of peacetime. They were like strangers, unable to find any