Silence for the Dead
“I scrubbed my face and looked out over the dark marshes under lowering clouds, the lonely clumps of trees bowing, the air as dense as cotton wool with oncoming rain.
“Hurry,” said Nina from behind me. “Get dressed or we’ll be late for inspection.”
She was in some kind of tizzy, and she pulled off her spectacles and polished them vigorously as we hurried for the stairwell. “The doctors come today,” she explained to me. “They’ll do inspection promptly at eleven. Everything has to be cleaned and ready by then. And I do mean everything.”
It was true. We had to wipe windows, wainscoting, the backs of chairs; we had to stack linens with mathematical precision and line up spare pillows in perfect piles. By the time the men had gone to breakfast and I’d polished each bedstead, I was already exhausted, as much by the keyed-up tension in the air as by the work.
The men were almost eerily quiet.
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