"The Lost Angel"

As the day remained sunny and not entirely unsummery, I got off the 76 around Southgate Road and began the walk back home. I was eager to read the Rutledge manuscript, but if my inner six-year-old would sit still a lot longer if I tired her out a bit first. Like a true New Englander, I could feel rain in the wind, which would mean confinement to a fug-filled bus full of damp and grumpy Londoners, so I decided to enjoy the open air as long as possible.

My cell phone began buzzing in my backpack, rattling against my keys and causing a racket loud enough to make a passing jogger turn and regard me warily as I swung the bag over my shoulder and fumbled to extract the phone.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?”

“Nearly home. You?”

“Just finishing up here.”

“Where is here?”

“Covent Garden.” The blare of a truck horn bellowed down the line and I heard Mitch’s muttered curse before he continued. “Some American family gave me fifteen pounds!”

I giggled. “Someone didn’t read the exchange rate properly, me thinks.”

“I’m not complaining, but I don’t want to be around when they figure it out for themselves. Anyway, you want burritos for dinner?’

“Have I mentioned to you lately that I think you are wonderful?”

I could hear him snicker. “Not in the past few hours, ungrateful thing that you are.”

“How about I let you pick the movie, then?”

Neither of our families had seen it as worthwhile to pay for a TV license in a house in which they were no longer residing, and the two of us decided we’d be damned—or starving—if we forked over it. So we watched one hell of a lot of movies. And ate a great many burritos from this new place in Islington that had given out free food the day it opened and got us both hooked. In the seven or eight weeks we’d been—co-habitating, I guess is the best word—Mitch and I had watched nearly a hundred movies and I’m sure the mail-rental company was kicking themselves that we were getting charged a flat monthly rate to rob them blind.

“Whatever came in today is fine. Chicken for you?”

“Yuppers. No beans, extra cheese.”

“Sounds good. I’ll probably be back by seven—ok?”

“Perfect.”

“I think I’m about to be hit by a bus.”

And he hung up.

Thanks, Mitch.

I pushed open the door to the house and gathered up the mail that had accumulated on the floor, adding it to the trash bag hanging behind the kitchen door, tossing the next delivery of DVDs on the living room coffee table, and put the kettle on for tea. Ten minutes later saw me in my ratty black sweatpants and an enormous t-shirt I had inherited at some point in my wanderings, curled up on the sofa beside a large mug of tea and tucking into the photocopies of what looked to be Barnaby Rutledge’s last manuscript.

I should have known I was in for something strange as soon I read the author’s note on the second page:

Author’s Note:

These stories, like so many of the others, are all true, for there is no story written that is not in some way the confession of a truth. The face of the confessor is unimportant, for in revealing his tale, he ceases to become unique and instead joins the procession of human smoke that rises from the ashes of history and disappears without trace. It is only I, who am watching you now, as ever, who remains.

BR.

“Holy hell,” I muttered, laying the sheet face down on the coffee table before looking down at the one beneath it.

Dedication:

For the one who has never left me.

I pulled the blanket on the back of the couch over my legs and shimmied down beneath it, as if hiding.

The stories were all set in a ward in a national hospital somewhere in London. A nurse on the night watch was walking from bed to bed and checking on the men who slept—or didn’t—on each. As she looked at them, another story began, whether of their childhood, their wartime experience, or whatever specific memory defined them and defined the cause of their madness.

They were beautifully well-written, with long, elegant sentences that made you feel like there was someone, tall and thin and wasted, who was curled up beside you and whispering in your ear. And because it was so graceful, it was all the more frightening. The beauty of it transfixed you, and by the time you realized what this crazed man had done to his characters—or what they had done to him, since it seemed that it was their combined madness that had sent him to this imaginary hall lunacy—it was too late to look away. Despite the residual heat of the day, I was curled up under the blanket and the fringes of it were dusting my face by the time I was a third of the way through the stories.

The one that stuck with me the most was the one in the middle, a kind of intermission in this insane literary circus. It was the story of the nurse herself, who looked in at each of the men in the ward. Rutledge described her as “too tall for delicacy and eyes just a little too wide-set and wide for beauty, with a tide of dark hair curling behind her ears and small, childlike hands. Standing in the doorway, a man might be fooled into believing her an angel of mercy in that hall of tormented spirits. But one look at those eyes showed that she was nothing more than a ghost herself, a soul, like all the others, frozen in another time and forced forever to hide in the darkness of memory.”

The other stories told of violence, of angry death or shouted curses that had chased these men into this ward. The Nurse’s story (we never learn her name. She is only referred to as “The Nurse”, or “The Lost Angel”, which is also the title of the story) was different. She had grown up nearly mute, speaking only when there was no other way of communicating, and no one was nearby to speak for her. It wasn’t that she was afraid or unable to speak, it was that “words held no power over her”, which seemed utterly contradictory to me. That a woman created with words could refuse the power of them made her somehow disturbing, and yet, infinitely more real than the other characters. It was as if she had managed to break free of the author’s control and was wandering around the book of her own free will. Anyway, she was loved by a man (who also had no name) who had written her a tune on the piano, since she refused to hear any spoken declaration of his feelings for her. They had been engaged when the war broke out, and had both enlisted, he as a Captain and she as a nurse. He was lost in “the great fire of 1917”, which I could only assume was 3rd Ypres, more commonly known as the Battle of Passchendale.

The man who loved her had written her several letters from the battle, telling her of the horrors of the trenches and of the lunatic beauty of shells exploding at night and the “exquisite horror of treading the circles of the damned”. In truth, he sounded like the maddest of them all. When she had opened the letter, she had begun to hear his song playing on the air, and assumed him to be dead. When no telegram arrived, and no news of his injury or capture was forthcoming, she had burned the letter. The music had sounded from the flames. Now, wherever she went, “she was followed by the cadence of a melody she knew better than her own soul”. The reason she was in the ward, peering in at all these men, was in the hopes of finding her fiancé among them. But there was no recognition in any of the dull eyes before her. She never spoke—indeed, it was assumed by most of the men that she was unable to speak.

“But what use were words,” Rutledge asked at the end of the story, “crude, useless words that could speak only of mud and of death and of pain, when in her head played endlessly the promise of paradise and the lost wonder of eternity?”

It was melodramatic, yes, and perhaps a little more dated than the others because of the nature of its subject matter, but I was shivering when I had finished reading it. The room seemed filled with ghosts and with ghostly music and try as I might, I couldn’t help but hear the footsteps of that silent, haunted nurse, forever treading the halls, searching for something she would never…

“Do you want to eat in here or in the kitchen?”

I let out a yelp and tumbled off the couch.

“What the—are you alright?”

“When the hell did you come in?”

“Like, five minutes ago—didn’t you hear me say “Hi Kip, I have dinner?”

The smell of spiced chicken and peppers began to waft across the room and I sat up, disentangling myself from the blanket and blinking at Mitch.

“No, actually. Jesus, you scared me.”

“Sorry. What are you reading, then?”

I held up the book and gave him a brief explanation of the stories while we carried plates and glasses into the living room. I tucked Mr. Rutledge back into his folder, slid him back into my bag, and settled back down on the couch with Mitch’s laptop on the coffee table between us.

“My, my. Sounds like a charming subject matter. So—what’s come in, then?” He asked, tucking into his burrito with gusto.

“Umm…” I giggled. “My Fair Lady and The Green Mile. What the hell?”

“Mmm…My Fair Lady. Audrey Hepburn’s better looking than Tom Hanks.”

“Fair enough.”

We sat, chewing and singing along at intervals, and I expressed the wish that all lower-middle class workers in England really did burst into song at every opportunity. The group dances would make economic history much more interesting. Mitch snorted and turned up the volume to drown out my ruminations.

Do you know the scene where Higgins brings Eliza to the races and she goes on and on about how her aunt died of influenza—“fairly blue with it, she was”? If you do, take a look at the way Freddie looks at her while she’s giving that little speech. That, I realized belatedly, was the same way Ned had been looking at me while I was rambling on earlier that afternoon. And I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it, even as I felt a furious blush rising to my cheeks.

“So tell me,” Mitch said, as the ‘intermission’ played, “how did you manage to find this mad Mr. Rutledge?”

“I met a guy in one of my classes who is working on his as part of his dissertation. He said he’d loan me some, but we had this at the museum and I figured I’d—“

“Wait, wait, wait. You ‘met a guy’?” I thought Mitch’s eyebrows were going to raise themselves right off his forehead. “As in ‘met a guy’?”

“What?”

“You know what I mean!” He poked one absurdly strong finger into my arm.

“Ow, you maniac! No—I mean…well, we did go out for coffee.”

“Alright, do you want me to alert the media, or just your mother?”

I swatted at him. “It’s nothing! Just—“ and he burst out laughing.

“Whatever you say, Miss Philby.” The ‘intermission’ scene faded and Rex Harrison began stalking across the screen once more.

“Funny,” Mitch mumbled through the last few bites of burrito. “I would have assumed poetry or something to get a nice girl to notice you, not a bunch of awful madmen in a war hospital.” He sniggered. “This bloke must have you down to a tee.”

Meeting Mr. Rutledge

Since work was just up the street from the coffee shop, I managed to get to my desk just south of on time, and by the time Rich, the head archivist, came back from his stint in the reading room, I was hard at work on the next diary in my stack of pending documents.

When I say ‘hard at work’, I really mean ‘making a genuine effort at appearing interested at the words before me’—in order to hide the fact that I couldn’t get the idea of this Barnaby Rutledge character out of my mind. It wasn’t that the diary I had in front of me wasn’t interesting—on the contrary, actually. It had been written by a 19-year-old private who had been trying to make a career in journalism before the war, and saw his diary as the prototype for a series of articles, or possibly a biography, when he returned home. Consequently, his entries were full of exclamation points and underlined phrases and some delightedly lurid descriptions of rats and corpses, up until mid-September 1915, just after his battalion had been sent to Egypt with the that it would assist with the attack on the Dardanelles. Then came the entry:

Found the body of Lieutenant Allington outside the camp this morning. His clothes were singed and filthy and the skin below his nose and around his lips was black with soot. According to Captain Fitz., he had a leave pass last night and was going into Cairo. Final verdict is that he was killed by Arabs, dirty dark scoundrels. Though where he received the burns, no one could say.

It is odd that the sight of corpses by the stacks has had little effect, but the sight of one man who one has respected and regarded and who was kind to one and perhaps, in a different world, a man who one might call ‘Friend’—the sight of that can turn one completely cold and sick. That he should fall even before the battle seems like an injustice beyond measure. Such a brave man, too. The fellows were telling me of his work in the pyramids before the war and how he was to be married next year.

Am thoroughly sick of this whole business.

Shortly after this incident, the battalion was returned to France without seeing action at Gallipoli. After that, Pte. Sheldon really did seem to lose most of his fighting spirit, though his eye for detail made the rest of his experiences quite interesting reading. He never did get to publish them, if you’re wondering. He was killed during the German Spring Offensive, sometime after March 25, 1918, as that was the last entry. He had given his diary to his best friend to hold for him, and it was because of the friend that the diary was returned to the family. The author’s body was never recovered.

As much as I tried to give him the attention he deserved, with every turn of the page, every pause to decipher a scrawled phrase, my mind turned back to Damien and, more importantly, to the mysterious Barnaby Rutledge. Personally, I was intrigued. Professionally, I was furious. There were few things in this world that I can say for a fact that I know. Up until that day, the First World War was one of those things. To have this near-stranger upstage me was galling, to say the least.

Finally, I was forced to make my apologies to Private Sheldon and turn my attention to my cinder-block of a computer that was wheezing and grumbling on the corner of my desk. I opened the internet and something inside the massive monitor whirred angrily. Eventually, the homepage of the Museum wavered into view and I typed “Barnaby Rutledge” into the little search bar at the top.

And my embarrassment abated somewhat. Amid the almost humorously erroneous hits from Google (among them a law firm of Corliss, Whittemore and Rutledge, a Facebook listing for a Barbara Rutledge and a series of photos of someone’s one-eyed dog who was apparently named Barnaby), there was one Wikipedia entry headed ‘Barnaby Rutledge’. And I swallowed all my professional pride, and I clicked on the link.

I was met with two lines of information, with the disclaimer that the following information was a ‘stub’, but that I could help Wikipedia by expanding it with my own information. Muttering dark threats to whatever entity had conceived of truth by majority consensus, I read the following:

“Barnaby Rutledge (1892-1941?): Was a British writer and poet who wrote a number of short stories and novellas based on his experiences in the First World War, and later in several clinics where soldiers received treatment for shell-shock and neurasthenia. Though selectively popular in the inter-war period, Rutledge’s notoriety declined significantly following his presumed death during the Blitz in London. Though his death was reported, his body was never recovered and there were claims that he may have staged his own death.”

Below this was a list of anthologies of his works. There was one book that was published before the war entitled "Winds of Autumn", but no other information on it was availble. The rest had suitably ominous titles like “The Face in the Shadows” (1924) and “Whispers of the Dead” (1926).

“People don’t just disappear.” I snapped at the screen.

“What was that?” Rich’s coppery-blonde head leaned out from behind the stack of folders on his desk, and his eyes held a weary smile.

“Nothing,” I jumped slightly, forgetting there was someone else in the office. “Just looking for someone—say, have you ever heard of a writer named Barnaby Rutledge?”

“The crazy bloke?” And Rich’s face assumed that very solemn expression it always did when the conversation strayed to the First World writers. It was one of my favorite of his idiosyncrasies. “We have a few of his manuscripts, you know.”

“Am I the only person on this earth who has never heard of him?”

Rich laughed quietly. “Not at all. I don’t think they’ve ever been requested since…well, maybe once since I’ve been here, but that was at least—oh, a decade ago? Maybe?” He shook his head. “He was mad, that one.”

“How so?”

“Go get him off the shelf. Take a look for yourself.”

“I will. Do you know anything about what happened to him?”

“Oooh! What happened to who?”

Lily, the exhibition liaison, had bounced into the room, her auburn curls swirling around her ears, an enormous green mug of tea in her tiny hands.

“Did you ever hear of Barnaby Rutledge?” Rich leaned back in his chair so he could see both of us over the Babel of papers around him, and I knew that all work has ceased for the time being.

Lily shook her head and the eyes behind her glasses widened eagerly. “Nope. Don’t think so. Is it a good story?”

“Might just be at that.” Rich grinned. “He wrote these stories after the war, apparently from Maghull—“

“Oooh…that can’t have been fun.” She sipped her tea and tucked one leg beneath the other on her chair.

Lily is a master at the art of understatement. Maghull one of several national hospitals established to treat mental cases from the First World War. If you’ve heard of any of them, most likely you’ve heard of Craiglockhart, the immortal sanctuary of Siegfried Sassoon and WIlfred Owen and headed by the saintly William Rivers. But Craiglockhart was an exclusive hospital for officers that used what was considered at the time to be very avant-garde treatment methods (which included talking to the patient about his feelings and experiences). The vast majority of cases, mostly ordinary men of the ranks, were sent to places like Maghull—places that were overlooked by the authorities because of the nature of the patients who were treated there and disregarded by the press. Other hospitals could repair heroes, could give men back their arms and legs and heal their courageous bodies. Maghull, and Queens Square and others like then, by contrast, treated men whose minds were injured, and there is never a way to prove that a mind, once warped by trauma, could ever be healed—or that a man who had been sent home from war for nightmares and visions was not simply too cowardly to face reality. I remembered that Maghull had also gained attention because of its almost non-existent sanitation policies and that fact that patients were required to act as orderlies when the staff was struck by the influenza pandemic in the 1920’s.

“Not so much,” Rich’s voice broke across my thoughts. “I don’t know who the hell published them—or, for that matter, who read the things, but they were apparently quite popular up until the mid-thirties or so.”

“But you know what happened to him?” I pressed, and Lily leaned forward, sensing more gossip.

“How do you mean?”

“Well,” I nodded at the computer, which clicked and hummed and belched overheated air in response, “the only thing I could find on him said he disappeared in 1941.”

“Really?” Rich’s brow furrowed. “I thought he was killed in the Blitz.”

“According to the omnipotent Wikipedia,” I lectured drolly, “he was ‘said to have been killed’ in 1941,” I made liberal use of air quotes, “but that some think he faked his own death.”

“Maybe he went mad.” Lily whispered dramatically.

“I doubt it was a long trip,” Rich’s flicked a sardonic glance over and she giggled. “I also think someone on Wikipedia had one too many before writing that. I do know that we got those manuscripts in—maybe ’82? From his housekeeper, I think. They were up in an attic and she wanted them kept safe. He was definitely dead by then.”

“His housekeeper? No family, then?”

Rich raised his eyebrows. “You read those stories. Then tell me if you think anyone would be mad enough to marry him.” Footsteps sounded in the hall and he leaned forward, giving the appearance to any who might pass by that he was far too busy to be interrupted. “But don’t complain to me if you have nightmares afterwards.”

I turned back to my computer and politely tapped the space bar to awake it. It blinked to life with a heavy sigh. I requested the museum’s catalogue and twenty minutes or so later, the query window opened and I typed in ‘Rutledge, Barnaby’.

I blinked.

There were two entries.

The first was the one Rich had described: A collection of five short stories, typed, but with handwritten notations, written presumably between 1918 and 1926, when the author was receiving treatment for neurasthenia at Maghull and Queens Square Hospitals, dealing with his memories of his service in several different battalions during the First World War (including a battalion in the Manchester Regiment), that were published in 1941 as "Watches of the Night".

The other was a pending collection that was not yet available to the public. The only information in the database was that it was a series of correspondence addressed to a Lieutenant L.N. Thomas from 1914 to 1917, that included letters from his family, several musicians whose names I didn’t recognize, and a few writers, including a number from Barnaby Rutledge.

“Rich?” I said without turning.

“Hmmmmm?”

“Do you have the Thomas Correspondence Collection around there somewhere?”

“Umm…” He began flipping through the folders on his desk, and then moved to the filing cabinet behind his chair. “The one that came in a few months ago, right? Yeah,” he held up a fat blue folder that was swollen with letters still in their envelopes and the hairy ends of torn sheets of paper. “You want it?”

“I think so. There’s a Rutledge listing in there.” I tapped the diary before me. “When I finished with poor Sheldon here—yeah. I’ll take it.”

“Fine by me.”

With this added incentive, I finished reading Private Sheldon’s diary by 4:15, and by 4:30 had written a catalogue description that would be added to the database once he had been put in a proper folder and settled on a shelf in the stacks. I spent the next half hour rummaging around for the Rutledge Collection, which turned out to be about 75 pages of surprisingly good-quality paper that were clearly intended for a publisher. The stack was headed by a letter, typed on the same typewriter and dated 17 October 1941:

Dear Melvyn,

Here, as requested, is the next batch of tales. Do what you will with them.

I have one more here—not like these. This is longer and a bit less horrid, but infinitely more true. There is someone else who must approve it first, but if you think there’s a market, do let me know.

Best Always,

B.R.

At the bottom, in a quick, angular hand was “Would lunch on Friday suit?”

I was able to photocopy the stack before the museum security came to turn off the lights at 5:30pm (the number of times one of us in the Department had left the lights on overnight and necessitated a security check in the wee hours meant that we were quickly relieved of that task). Carefully, I tucked the folder back into its box and shoved the papers into my bookbag before heading off to my bus stop by Waterloo Station. On the way, I passed the coffee shop where Damien and I had sat just hours before, and smiled, suddenly unspeakably grateful to the mysterious Mr. Rutledge.