Carrie was with her. And Jane had been with Carrie. The two had grown very close during Sylvia Hale’s final hours and in the wake of the senseless deaths of Pat and Cain. The week past had been a particularly hard one for residents of the nearby London neighbourhoods that were being bombed night after night, filling the beds of the venerable St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with the injured until there wasn’t a single mattress left unoccupied. (This in spite of a good many of the victims having been removed to hospitals elsewhere in the city, and even outside of the city altogether, any place that offered some modicum of safety in a land in which no one—not even the already severely injured—was really all that safe.) During their leave of absence from the factory, Carrie and Jane were conscripted by the Sisters of St. Bart’s to help tend to the Blitz’s most recent casualties. The two had worked very hard. Their assistance to the many men, women, and children who, like Carrie, had lost both their homes and close family members to the air raids kept Carrie from thinking too obsessively about her own trials, and prevented Jane from reliving in her every waking moment what Tom Katz had done to her.
