He and the nurse began unhooking Fordham from his pulleys. “But how is Churchill the name of a mount?” Mike asked to stall.
“A mount is a hill…”
“Careful,” Fordham said as they put him on the gurney. “Don’t—Christ!—sorry, Mrs. Ives.”
“I quite understand,” she said and returned to the puzzle. “And the place one goes on Sunday mornings is ‘church,’ and together they spell out Church-hill. Churchill.”
“So the clues are riddles?” Mike said.
Mrs. Ives nodded.
Fordham yelped in pain. “Sorry, just a momentary twinge. Go ahead, driver. To the photographer’s studio!” and was finally wheeled off toward the ward’s double doors.
“I need to get word to someone,” Mike said as soon as the gurney was out of earshot, “and I was wondering if you—”
“Could write a letter for you?” Mrs. Ives said. “I’d be delighted.” She began gathering stationery from her cart.
“No, I wanted to send a telegram—”
“Oh, dear, no. Telegrams are such horrid things, always bringing bad news, especially now with the war. You don’t want to frighten the poor person you’re sending it to. A letter’s much better.” She picked up a fountain pen. “I’ll be glad to post it for you.”
“But I need to get word to this person right away—”
“A letter will be nearly as quick as a telegram,” she said, sitting down beside the bed. “Now, to whom is it to be sent?”
“I can write it myself. I just need—”
“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s my way of doing my bit for the war effort. And you mustn’t tire yourself out. You must conserve your strength toward getting well.”
There wasn’t time to argue with her. Fordham might be back any minute. “It’s to Commander Harold,” he said.
She wrote, “Dear Commander Harold,” in a neat, spidery hand.
“I am in the War Emergency Hospital in Orpington,” Mike dictated. “I was brought here from Dover for surgery on my foot.” And now what? He needed to phrase it so it didn’t give away the fact that he’d been feigning his amnesia, or that he was a civilian. If they found that out and moved him to another hospital, it would defeat the whole point of writing.
Mrs. Ives was looking up at him expectantly.
“I’m too tired to write any more right now,” he said, rubbing his hand across his forehead. “Just leave it, and I’ll finish it later.”
“I’ll be glad to come back,” she said, folding the letter and sticking it in her pocket.
No, Fordham would be there then, listening. “Just put, ‘Please write,’” Mike told her. The important thing was to tell the Commander where he was, and hopefully he’d write back and tell him if anyone had been there, looking for him. “And sign it ‘Mike Davis.’”
She wrote that, folded the letter in thirds, put it in an envelope, licked the flap, tore a stamp off a sheet, licked that, and pressed it onto a corner of the envelope. And it was just as well she’d written the letter for him—he’d have had no idea how to get the envelope shut or the stamp on. She wrote Mike’s name and the hospital’s address in the left-hand corner and “Commander Harold” in the center. “What’s the Commander’s address?” she asked.
“I need you to find that out for me. He lives in a village called Saltram-on-Sea. It’s in Kent. Or possibly in Sussex.”
“The postmaster will know,” she said. “Saltram-on-Sea will get it to him.” She wrote “Saltram-on-Sea” and, under it, “England,” and stuck it in her uniform pocket. “I’ll post it when I leave tonight.”
I hope she knows what she’s doing, Mike thought. “How long do you think it will take to get there?”
“Oh, it should arrive with tomorrow’s morning post, though with the war, one never knows. It might not arrive till the afternoon post, but it will definitely be there by tomorrow,” she said, which meant it would get there Wednesday or, since it didn’t have the Commander’s address, possibly Thursday. That meant the retrieval team could be here by Friday. Which meant he’d better work on getting better, and fast, so that when they showed up, they’d be able to get him out of here without having to resort to stealing a stretcher and an ambulance. To that end, he forced himself to eat everything on his tray, and practice sitting up in bed for longer than five minutes at a stretch.
It was harder than he expected. He was still incredibly weak, and even trying to sit on the side of the bed left him drenched in sweat. “There’s still