Page 65 of The Moonlight Healers

“I did what you did. Once. I brought someone back. I brought so many of them back.” She fingered the rosary around her neck. “When I was your age, even a little younger. Working as a nurse in a field hospital in Belgium. I was sixteen. They sent me to Étaples, a field hospital called St. John’s. I had been there only a few weeks when the battle of the Somme began.”

Cecelia stopped for so long Helene wasn’t sure if she would continue.

“There were so many of them,” she said with a deep breath. “Thousands of them. They never stopped arriving. And so many of them were… There was nothing we could do for them. I couldn’t even… I couldn’t even help them, because there were so many other men who needed us, the ones who might actually survive it, and so they were alone, usually, when they died, calling out for us, or for their mothers, or home.

“I helped who I could. I prayed for it to end. I believed it would end. But they kept coming. Boys, most of them. Not much older than me. By winter everyone was sick, even the other nurses. I would go days without sleeping, or eating, because there weren’t enough of us, and there wasn’t enough time.”

Cecelia cleared her throat. “And then, one morning, when there was snow on the ground, we received a transport of men from the front. I just couldn’t watch any more of them die. And so, I brought them back. One after the next. I didn’t care if it wasn’t permanent. I mended tissue and bone, repaired organs and arteries. I felt such a fire inside of me, all those months of fear and grief the fuel.” She paused. “I always wondered. Where they were. When they did die. Sent back to the front most likely. Cold and muddy and afraid, bombs exploding over their heads, alone. You see, I didn’t do what I did to help those men, Helene. I didn’t even know them. I did it because I was afraid to watch more people die. I did it for myself.”

Helene didn’t want to absorb the truth of Cecelia’s words, but she couldn’t help think of Thomas, of how much she haddone for him had been selfish. What if he had been at peace, and she’d wrenched him back to a world set afire?

“Is that why you think this is wrong? Because of what you did in the last war?”

Cecelia exhaled deeply. “I was so lost in shock after that war. I didn’t know who I was, or what to believe. But I knew my mother was waiting for me, that she would find a way to help me understand, as she always had.” She hesitated. “I had written to her, about what happened. My…my father found the letters.” Her features hardened.

“He claimed to be a religious man,” Cecelia said in a low voice, her eyes distant, as though remembering what had happened all those years ago. “He was also a controlling one. My mother was terrified he would find out about the healing. She would never speak of it unless he was out of the house. He wouldn’t let her work, help people in town. After they married, he forbade her from even using herbs at home. I suppose he had loved her once. But all I ever saw was his cruelty toward her. And he was furious, and horrified, when he found out what I had done.”

Louise thought of her own father, his kindness. He had never known about healing, but he was such a gentle soul, always ready to dance with Louise balancing on his toes, or twirl her in the air. She knew he would have accepted her.

“He disowned me. Told me I wasn’t welcome in his house. Told my mother he would kill her if she tried to help me. And I was completely alone.”

“Why didn’t you come back to Cordon?”

Cecelia fingered her rosary again. “I was penniless. And even if I could have found a way back there, I also… My father was right. That there was something evil in me. I wanted to be forgiven, because I couldn’t forgive myself, for bringing all those boys back from the comfort of eternity only to die again in the mud. I needed… I needed absolution. And this place—” shemotioned around the chapel “—offered that to me. They took me in, gave me shelter, and a purpose.”

“They know about healing?”

Cecelia shook her head. “Only the mother superior who was here at the time. I confessed to her, and was ready to confess to the priests, seek absolution for my sins. But she told me not to.” She smiled weakly. “She was so full of grace, and compassion. She told me I was a child of God, and that I could live a righteous life. But she also wanted to keep me safe, and she knew enough of the world, and the men in it, to know that a confession could be dangerous. She told me God knew my confession. And that was enough.”

Helene felt like she was seeing her cousin for the first time, not the strict, unyielding force, but the terrified girl, cast out of her family, desperate to find a new home.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry that happened to you. But your father was wrong. You have to know that now.”

“Perhaps,” Cecelia said into the quiet. “After Dieppe. After I helped so many boys die with peace, it’s harder to accept that it’s not of His making. Honestly, Helene, I’m certain of so little these days. But I am certain that life is sacred. But so is death. As nurses, we protect both, hold both within us. To betray one is to betray the other. We help a soul live, if it’s their time to live, and we help a soul die, if it’s their time to die.”

Her cousin’s words echoed her mother’s, but Helene had never seen death as sacred. She had only ever seen it as an enemy. She was still the same scared little girl she was all those years ago. Resistant to her mother’s teachings that there could be beauty at the end of a life. It was why Agnes brought Helene with her to all of those quiet houses, showed her how to bathe a body, place flowers on their chest, close their eyes so it would appear like they were simply sleeping. “It’s not the end you think it is,” she always told Helene. “There’s peace here. They’re safe. Theirpain is gone. And the living are the ones who carry it now. As healers, we must carry it, Helene. Always.”

She had been so sure, after Dieppe, that she was now the healer her mother was. But when it came time for her to face the death of someone she cared for, once again she hadn’t been able to accept it.

Helene looked up at Cecelia. “Do you know where he is?”

Outside the chapel, the hospital was still caught in the swirl of activity from the aftermath of battle, footsteps and voices sounding deep in the night.

“Yes,” Cecelia said as she turned to face Helene head on.

“You helped get him out.” Agnes’s face flashed in her mind, all that she had risked, so much danger that was yet to come. “It’s not the first time you’ve done something like that.”

Cecelia didn’t answer, but Helene saw the confirmation in her eyes.

“Can I…would I be able to see him?”

Cecelia pursed her lips. “Would it change anything?”

Helene shook her head. She knew that she couldn’t save Thomas’s life, and in so many ways, it would be simpler to never see him again, not to have to say goodbye.

“Then why? If I take you to him, you will be putting yourself at enormous risk.”

Helene held Cecelia’s stare as resolve settled into her chest. She thought of her mother and grandfather, who’d chosen resistance, Cecelia and the nuns who risked their lives to hide Irene. And Thomas, who fought for the world even when it would have been so easy to stay safe an ocean away. So much of her own life had been about hiding behind her mother. But it had always been an illusion that she could hide. Even Thomas’s dream for her had never been a real choice. For Helene, for the women like her, she would always carry the weight of duty, the infinite, fragile beauty of humanity. All she could do now was move forward, the way she had on the beach in Dieppe, findways to be useful, even in the darkest night, and trust that the sun would rise again.

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