Svetlana caught glimpses of the train through the teeming bodies. Of people standing cheek to jowl inside. Of men kicking women off the ladder as they attempted to board the crammed cars. All of Petrograd was fleeing, but not all would make it. Fear curled cold and hissing in Svetlana’s stomach. They would make it. She would ensure her sister and Mama made it.
The crowd thinned to allow for a gasping draw of breath as the engine belched its black smoke. A whistle trilled. The crowd screamed and plunged toward the train in final desperate flings to find space.
Sergey pushed them to the front car. Grabbing Marina, he shoved her onto the ladder before hoisting up Mama. The train wheels started to turn.
Tweet! Tweeeet!
Soldiers with red arm bands flooded the platform, striking at men and woman alike with clubs and trampling anyone knocked under their black boots. The Bolsheviks. “Get them! Don’t let them flee like rats.”
The soldiers rushed forward and ripped people off the train as it started to move. Sergey grabbed Svetlana, kissed her on both cheeks, and threw her up the ladder. “Paris. I will find you.”
“Sergey!” Svetlana hoisted herself to the rail and held out her hand, begging him to take it. “Sergey!”
Arms striped with red bands locked around him and dragged him back where he was swallowed into the rioting of chaos.
Chapter 1
July 1918
Paris, France
Edwynn MacCallan poised his scalpel over the beating heart. A wonder of sheer beauty with its miraculous chambers and thin veins coursing with life. The bullet pointing directly at the left ventricle threatened to end it all.
“Heart rate is falling, Doctor.” Gerard Byeford, Wynn’s colleague and surgical assistant, shifted uneasily on the opposite side of the operating table.
“A minute more.”
“We don’t have a minute.”
“Fifty seconds, then.”
“Wynn. You arrogant—”
Wynn heard nothing more as the bullet slipped free from its place of intended death, captured in the forceps’ unrelenting grip. It clanged a solid peal of demise as it dropped into the sterile metal tray, rolling back and forth until it came to a final stop among the smears of blood.
Gerard wiped the blood trickling from the incision as Wynn handed the forceps to a nurse who then placed a needle driver with a suturing hook into his hand. Wynn made quick work with the catgut thread in a neat row of stitches that would leave the patient with a slightly puckered scar for his Blighty badge. Proof of honor earned on the battlefield. Lucky blighter. Too many of the Tommies claimed theirs with an eternity box or a mud pit in no-man’s-land.
The next patient was not so lucky. Sent from a casualty clearing station near Amiens, his tag reported shrapnel to the abdomen, but with the mass moving of the wounded at such places his kidney contusion had been missed. The soldier, no older than twenty, died before the first incision was made.
Wynn ripped off his surgical mask and gloves and tossed them into the bin of soiled linen, then made his escape from the taunting smells of death and failure. And thousands more coming as the wretched war dragged them into its fourth year of death and destruction.
If he allowed the sobering thought to settle for too long, it would drive him straight out of his senses. A batty medical officer was the last thing the army needed at the moment, so he would have to reserve his mental breakdown for another time.
He slipped out the back door of the Parisian hotel turned hospital and dropped onto the stone steps. The bright orange ball of sunlight hung low in the sky, skimming the tops of Parisian buildings that had yet to crumble beneath the weekly barrage of Hun guns. Most days he couldn’t tell if the sun was rising or falling as each day blurred into another. Only the smell wafting from the kitchen—congealed eggs to announce breakfast or boiled beans for supper—kept him straight. Neither a pleasant marker of time, but at least the food was hot.
“Here you are.”
Wynn scrounged up a grin at the familiar voice. “Thought I smelled carrots.”
Hair blazing like the ripened root vegetable, Gerard plopped next to him on the step. His once bleached surgical apron was covered in all manner of operating byproduct. Then again, so was Wynn’s. “Ha-ha. That joke never gets old, does it, my lord?”
Wynn scowled at the title he tried to shuck off every chance he got. As the second son of the very wealthy Duke of Kilbride he never had to worry about the pressures of title and land hefted onto his brother, Hugh, the first born and heir. Surgeon was the only position Wynn cared about. “Told you not to call me that.”
“Pardon me, Doctor Marquess.”
“Another joke that never gets old.”
“Never. Just when we uppity surgeons start to think too highly of ourselves, we find our elbows rubbing against nobility. Come to find out, you’re not such a bad lot. In small doses.”
“Don’t let the others in the rank and file hear you. They’ll think I’m not pulling my weight to keep the commoners down. As if we need one more thing.”
Gerard hunched forward, his freckled hands clenched between his knees. “How many today, Wynn?”
The question had become common enough among the doctors at the end of their shifts. Not because it was some sick competition or morbid curiosity, but so they could spot who most needed a break. So busy caring for others, medical staff often forgot to care for themselves. This was one small way they could look out for each other.
Wynn took a deep breath of the humid evening air that hung over the small garden. Once a fashionable patch of grass for hotel guests to stroll, the area had quickly filled with hospital supplies and cleaning tents. Hopefully the smell of jasmine and orange trees would blossom again here soon instead of canvas and bleach.
“Six. Two hemorrhages. Kidney contusion. One loss of blood during an amputation. Seizure under the knife, and another infection. That lad had been left in a mud pit carved by a mortar for seventy-two hours. He didn’t stand a chance when they put him on my table. I didn’t even have morphine to give him.” He rubbed a hand over his bleary eyes. “They keep coming. Wave after wave, and half of them never reaching my table. The ones who do . . . Well, you know.”
“Yes. I know. Lost two myself.”
After four hard years, there was nothing left to say. All that remained was the hope that it would end soon.
Wynn slapped Gerard on the shoulder, jostling the thinner man who not only had the misfortunate of carrot-colored hair but the build of one too. “Tomorrow will be better. Bet my best retractor on it.”
“Retractor, you say? I could use a new one.”
“Tired of having the nurses hold incisions open with their fingers?”
“We do what we must, mate. Pardon, my lord.”
“That’s Doctor Lord to you, commoner.” Wynn yawned and stretched to his aching feet, checking his wristwatch. Nearly eight hours since he last sat down. Once he stepped into the operating theater, time no longer qualified for concern. All that existed was the patient before him. A moment off duty was quick to remind him of the mundane aches and pains of mere humans in need of rest. “I best be off to my bunk. Nestor needs to know where to find me when the cases start piling up in a few hours.”
Gerard rolled his eyes at the mention of the hospital’s administrative director. “I’ll keep him at bay long enough for you to get a few minutes of shut eye this time.”