“Mmm, so that’s how it was done. What are Eshana’s plans for this girl you kidnapped?”
“Depends on the girl’s recovery. We had to take the baby by surgery.... Dr. Kaur was brilliant. And, Abby, I’m sure our darling Eshana is smitten with him, and he with her.”
“No!” Abby leaned forward. “Not Eshana. Well, I wonder.” She tilted her head and studied Laine. “You got here late. I’d lined up a rather attractive man for you. Apparently he lives to dance. Still over there by the gramophone, putting on disk after disk of that Dixieland jazz you like.”
Laine bit into a curry puff and licked a glob of cream from the corner of her mouth. “Good gracious, save me from well-meaning match-makers.”
“Nonsense. You’ve told me for years you want a man.”
“Abby, an intelligent lady like you...you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
“Oh, Laine, do stop bantering. It was Reese dying like that, wasn’t it?” Abby lost her jovial tone. “Poor Reese, he’d made it through the war, and then to die in that stupid struggle with Afghanistan afterward. You and he really hit it off, didn’t you?”
Laine gave the only response she could, a slight shrug. Something had started to bud between her and Reese. Love? Perhaps for him. Given time they probably would have made it to the altar. Dear, riotous, red-haired Reese. He’d made her laugh. Almost made her forget her first love. Then dash it all, Reese’s plane had crashed in some desert in Waziristan. It had hurt dreadfully.
Abby’s teasing voice tugged her back. “Is that your goal in life, like Eshana, to be a single woman nursing the sick? Somehow I never saw this missionary spirit in you.”
“Missionary spirit, my eye.” A rare sigh escaped her. “Abby, I’m going to miss you. A whole year of you and Geoff and the children off in Singapore. Why does Geoff have to be so indispensible to the powers-that-be that they have to send him to another political hot spot? As if India isn’t hot enough already.”
“Will you write me, Laine?” An unfamiliar fearful tone entered Abby’s voice. “I’ll need to hear from you.”
“Of course, darling. You can’t possibly think old Laine will abandon you. But lead on. Take me to that damp-bottomed little princess of yours.”
She followed Abby into the club and down to the library where a pram took up a darkened corner. The pram jiggled, setting the toys and trinkets attached to the hood to jingle and clatter. In response, a soft coo issued from within, along with two woolen, booty-covered feet kicking and setting the toys to tinkle again. The little rascal was awake.
Abby leaned in and picked up Cam’s nine-month-old sister, Miriam. After kissing the corn-silk hair, she passed the baby to Laine.
Squeezing the chubby arms and legs, Laine breathed in the talcum-powder scent and sweetness of baby skin. “Miri, why are you going so far away?” She sent an accusing glance at the child’s mother.
Abby put up her hands. “Don’t blame me. It’s neither my desire nor Geoff’s to go to China.” She straightened Miri’s nightgown down over her nappy. “It’s only a year, and then we’ll be home.”
The baby snuggled closer, and a tight pain constricted Laine’s chest. Abby and Geoff’s offspring were the closest to a family of her own as she would ever get. But it was time to end this before she did something foolish and broke down in tears. At thirty, and the rate she was going, she was rapidly reaching the point of being too old to have the joys of children. Besides, who was there to marry? Thanks to the war to end all wars, there was an atrocious shortage of men.
Not that it mattered to a woman like her, who might find herself in jail come sun up.
FOUR
There were exactly twenty-three paces from the office to the window at the end of the hallway, and back again to the office of the Principal Matron, Ada McFarlane, of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Corp.
Matron couldn’t possibly have found out about yesterday’s abduction. It must be Geoff’s over-protective lecture that made Laine see tigers in the closet. Still, something was up, otherwise she wouldn’t feel as though a tribe of monkeys were using her stomach as a trampoline.
Laine rapped on the glass panel of Matron’s door and received the command to enter. With a quick straightening of her gray-sleeved ward dress, white bib and apron, and a twitch of her nursing veil, Laine stepped into the room. She stood ram-rod still, waiting for her superior to look up from reading a letter.
At last Matron removed her spectacles. With a nod she indicated Laine take a chair in front of her desk. “This correspondence is from the district commissioner. The Hindu population is alleging that yesterday an Englishwoman with an Indian missionary abducted a girl from the women’s quarters behind one of the Hindu temples.”
Laine kept her hands from fidgeting. Bluff it out, Laine, old girl, bluff it out, but for goodness sake don’t try the wide-eyed look of innocence you’d tried on Geoff last night.
“The description of one of the women fits you with startling accuracy, Lieutenant Harkness. This time it’s more than a rumor, such as the incident three months ago when another girl was kidnapped from the same temple and no one has seen that child since.”
Matron’s raised hand halted Laine from speaking. “I don’t have to explain to you how incidents like these create bad feeling between us and the Hindu population. I can turn a blind eye to a lot of nonsense, but I will not stand for anything that casts a bad name on the QAIMN.”
“Of course not, Matron.”
The look Ada sent across her desk would shrivel one of the younger nurses, but Laine raised her chin. Though perhaps it would be best to keep mum and listen.
Ada pushed her chair out from her desk and stood. Not a tall woman, but one whose starched confidence struck affection and a healthy dose of fear into the hearts of her staff. “Lieutenant Harkness, you are an excellent nurse. A decorated nurse. Not once have I had to lay a single fault at your door. But in reading over again the dispatches that accompanied the Royal Red Cross you were decorated with during the war, I am reminded that you are a brave woman. Not many could set up a dispensary for wounded infantrymen in a trench behind enemy lines until help arrived days later.
“It makes me ask myself—is this the same sort of insane gallantry that would sneak into the quarters of a Hindu temple and abduct not one, but two female occupants?” She quirked a brow. “Nothing to say? Well perhaps that shows wisdom on your part.”
Ada turned to look out her window to the courtyard below. “So, I ask you, Lieutenant, can you tell me where you were between the hours of two and three yesterday afternoon?”
Laine gouged the skin at her thumbnail. If she told Matron she was at the mission, this would place Ada in the difficult spot of having to pass this information along to the police. But she simply couldn’t lie. Any sort of lie would stick in her throat.
Outside the office, down the hall someone dropped a bedpan. The clock on the desk chimed half past.
Matron sat behind her desk and clasped her hands on top of her blotter. “I see.”
Laine leaned forward and started to speak.
“No, Laine, don’t. In the circumstances I wish to remain ignorant of your activities yesterday.” Matron dropped her gaze. “If this situation is not resolved to the satisfaction of the Hindu population, then you have no other option. You will have to resign from the Corp.”
Laine shifted in the chair. Matron’s disappointment in her weighed like a stone on her chest, but she wouldn’t cheapen her respect for Ada with excuses. “Yes, Matron.”
“What’s more, Lieutenant, I think it advisable you put considerable