Band of Angel (24 page)

The room lurched, and she tried to focus on a pair of battered shoes under the bed as she saw him tighten the string and then the blood leap as he plunged the knife, which he held like a pen, into Miss Dwyer’s arm. His sausagelike fingers, with their clumps of red hair above the knuckles, handed a lancet to Lizzie who gave him a bowl. He pinched the skin of the wound for a while, and then directed the flow of blood into the bowl.

“Don’t move your arm,” he warned Miss Dwyer, “I’m going to take several pints, and then Nurse Smart can bandage you.” He handed Catherine a wad of bloody dressings without a word. She took them into the medicine room and threw them into a wastepaper basket, and then sat down heavily, feeling sick but pleased with herself—at least she hadn’t fainted.

When she came back, Miss Dwyer, pale and relieved, had her eyes closed.

“That’s the fourth time I’ve been bled in the past year,” she told the doctor. “Two in one arm and two in the other—quite the old hand.”

“You’ll need to wash that arm nurse.” The doctor had turned his back on her and spoke to Catherine. “And give me a pledget.” He held the two flaps of skin together.

A pledget?
She looked at Lizzie imploringly.

Lizzie handed her the bowl of water. “I’ll get them,” she said. She came back with a small, flattened mass of lint. The doctor pulled it in two and then, pressing the smaller one into the wound, put the larger one on top and told Lizzie to start bandaging, which she did, winding the material around the arm in a deft figure eight and then tying a bow.

“Well done, nurse,” said the doctor pleasantly when she was finished. He yawned, and then winked at her. “Tell the night nurse she is to keep her arm still for twenty to thirty hours. No gadding about,” he boomed at Miss Dwyer, who thanked him for his time and his patience.

Catherine’s heart bounced with happiness. She had survived her first operation.

They looked like an odd pair, the slim, tawny-eyed, tallish girl and the small, plain, frizzy-haired woman with her square hands and her frank gaze, but from that time on they were inseparable.

Perhaps because there is nothing so gratifying to an expert as
being able to hand on knowledge, painfully acquired, to an eager and admiring pupil. In this respect, Lizzie was as susceptible as the next, and from that day on began to train a willing slave. Whenever possible, they worked together, and if Mrs. Clark was about and there was an important procedure to be learned, Lizzie signaled it by a look or by saying out of the corner of her mouth, “Take a note, Miss Carreg.”

By the time six weeks had passed, Catherine knew how to bandage efficiently; how to poultice, cup, and bleed; how to keep elementary notes on a patient’s condition. She had helped Lizzie inject warm water up the back passage of a Miss Munroe, admitted for severe and chronic constipation, and helped get leeches out of a box—horrible gray, dead-looking things—and affix them to a pale woman from up north. Every day, she and Lizzie went to room six on the second floor and bandaged Miss Pond, whose arm had been badly burned trying to cook a Welsh rarebit on a schoolroom fire.

Sometimes it all seemed appallingly intimate: the dimpled white backs of Miss Munroe’s legs; Miss Widdicombe’s sobs and nightmares and all the rest. Without Lizzie, who was funny and kind and who seemed to know what to do, it would have been intolerable.

On duty, Lizzie wore a belt around her waist very like the ones the drovers had worn. Inside was her bandaging kit, wound powder, wadding, and sharp scissors. To watch her use the tools of her trade with quiet deft gestures and the neatness and precision of her cutting, was to see a craftswoman at work. Sometimes she handed the kit to Catherine and said, “Nurse Carreg, you do this,” and Catherine’s hand would tremble and her heart stir.

That first month she learned how a person could split themselves in two. She was haunted by the idea that Deio had come to the home and she hadn’t seen him, and she was confused. Why, considering how badly he’d behaved, did his absence feel like an ache? Was she so very depraved? She longed to ask Lizzie’s advice on this but thought she would shock her too much, and these thoughts wouldn’t go away even at night, particularly at night, when her feet hurt and her head ached from studying too much by candlelight, and she forbade herself to think of home or anything connected with it.

She had a few rows with Lizzie, who could be a brusque and exacting teacher. And sometimes, a burst of laughter, or music from
the street would make her prick up her ears like a stabled horse, and throw her into a kind of panic. What was she doing here?

Mrs. Clark was another sore point. She was starting to hate the woman’s cross chicken face, her stout scurrying figure. As far as Clark was concerned nurses had only four things to recommend them: two arms and two legs, and if these were not permanently engaged in making beds, turning patients, washing, ironing, and sewing, she would not be responsible for the havoc that would ensue. As for book-learning, in Mrs. C’s humble opinion—she’d never had the patience for it—it made a girl swollen-headed and rude to doctors.

Behind the scenes, Lizzie did a grand imitation of Mrs. C, and the legendary firings that were a staple of conversation in the dining room. “So, I says to her, pack up your things, and go!” In every institution she’d worked in, Lizzie told Catherine, there was one old and jealous animal like Mrs. C, “a bit too free with teeth and heels. Just keep your eye on her, that’s all,” she said, “and Miss Snootingale, too, for she is very watchful, and very very nervous.”

“Nervous!” exclaimed Catherine. “I’ve never met any woman in my life who seemed less so.”

“Catherine, oh Catherine, you are so wet behind the ears. She’s never done this before, it’s all new to her. Trust me on this.”

“Urggh,” said Catherine. “I’m tired of you knowing everything.” Lizzie threw a pillow at her and the muttered lessons continued.

“Keep all your lights on when you’re working,” Lizzie scolded her one day. “You walked into that room like a child with a hoop. Train your mind not to wander. When a man or woman ails, they’re like a frightened animal. Walk quiet, talk gentle, a heavy tread to a sick person is attached to a hand that might hurt him.”

On the Tuesday of that week they went up together to room eleven to see Mrs. Thompkins, a widow, operated on the day before for a prolapsed womb. Together, they undressed the blushing governess; they put her into a sitz bath, changed her padding, dressed her in a clean nightgown, and put her back into bed again. When they had left her room again, Lizzie said, “You did all right in there.” Her first compliment. “You seemed natural,” she continued. “If you’re doing sommat to them, like we did with Miss Philips for her piles or Mrs. Thompkins for her womb fall,
don’t go all grand on ’em like the doctors do, and don’t whisper at ’em like their mother has just died, but look them in the eye, treat them in a friendly way, say ‘how are you then?’ ‘How do you feel?’ Show it’s normal, and that’s better than all the medicines in the world to some.”

Sometimes they were joined by two other nurses—tired-looking middle-aged women with families, who came in on a daily basis and envied them the food. Then, when they didn’t get the same shift, they would pass each other on the stairs. Lizzie, bleary-eyed from the nightwatch, almost limping with fatigue as she climbed the stairs; Catherine, bright-eyed on her way down.

“Take a note, Miss Carreg.” She’d wag her finger solemnly. “Take a note.” Or she’d give her her Mrs. Clark look and make her laugh.

On one such morning, in early September, they were crossing on the stairs when Lizzie handed over a small bundle of letters.

“Mrs. Clark said these came for you.”

The top letter was in Eliza’s careful hand with its round, rather childish
o
’s and curling
y
’s and
g
’s. She’d written several times since Catherine had left; happy letters, full of details of dresses and furniture, and the only geraniums worth having. Her little sister, so grown-up and so clearly in love with Gabriel Williams, who had a farm close to Grandma’s and thirty acres of rich land with a river running through it. How proud Father must have been of her. Catherine hoped it might mean he would mind less about her, but there was no sign of it in his letter, which held his check and his usual curt note. Underneath this letter was another, in Deio’s handwriting. The sight of it communicated an almost physical fear and she let it lie in its string until she got to the third landing. He wrote, without preamble:

Dear Catherine,

My circumstances have changed and I come to London a great deal, to the Cavalry Riding School in Pimlico, who are starting to buy my horses to take to the Crimea. I am doing well
from it. I shall call on you again soon when I come up, to see how you are.

No mention of how he had got her address, no apology either to her or to Miss Nightingale. She stuffed the letter in her pocket and felt her mouth go dry.
How dare he do this to her?

The door to Lizzie’s room was half ajar when she walked in. Her dress and pinafore were hanging on the string and she was lying down, her eyes half closed.

“Are you all right?” Lizzie jumped to her feet. “You look as white as a sheet.”

“I don’t know, Lizzie. I’ve never felt so—”

She gave Lizzie a strained look; how much could she tell without shocking her?

“Oh Lizzie, I’m . . . can I talk?”

“’Course you can,” said Lizzie, “but sit down first before you fall down and mess up my bed.” She pushed Catherine down on the bed and quickly loosened the top button of her dress.

“Hot in here, i’nt it?” she said quickly and casually, with her usual lack of fuss. “Not quite enough windows. Now come on love, let’s have it. Chickenhead will be upstairs and after us soon if you don’t hurry.”

“The thing is Lizzie,” she said, “I’ve been very bad.”

“Oh, this sounds good,” said Lizzie. She’d been brushing her hair and it stood out around her head like brown furze.

“The letters were from my family in Wales.” To Catherine’s humiliation, she had started to shake. Lizzie put the blanket around her and pulled it up to her chin.

“Oh, bother,” said Catherine, “this is all so silly.”

“Oh for lawk’s sake spit it out,” said Lizzie, “it can’t be that bad.”

And then she told Lizzie as much as she could. She could not speak about her mother, but she told her a bit about Deio, and how she’d run away with him and the drove, and what a saint her sister was, and how disgracefully she’d behaved, at least as far as Father was concerned.

“Hold on, hold on.” Lizzie’s eyes were shining. “Blimey, I’m impressed. What a life you’ve led, and still very wet behind the ears.”

“No, no, no, you don’t understand about Deio.” Catherine’s eyes were wild. “He is the reason I’m here; I mean, without him I couldn’t have come, and we’ve been friends our whole lives, and I worshipped him, and I . . . but then he, I . . . he . . . I don’t know what to think about it.”

“Come on, come on.” Lizzie put her own black shawl around Catherine and gave her shoulders a brisk rub. “Nothing is that bad.”

“Oh but it is. He tried to, well we did, and it was partly my fault. Maybe all my fault, he told me not to come here.” And all the pent up tears, unshed in Llangollen, burst out. “And now he says he is coming to London, and he’s already been and been rude to Miss Nightingale, and she says if he comes again, I have to go.”

“Now, now, now, now.” Lizzie held her for a while until the shaking and the tears stopped, and then calmly unloosed her hair and brushed it strand by strand as if to untangle all the snarls and distress in her head.

“I don’t know what is the matter with me,” said Catherine after a while. “I wanted this life, but I long for home. I’m so homesick, Lizzie, and so happy, too, sometimes. I wake up in the night, I think I must be mad, and then I go to work with you, and I’m so caught up in everything.” Her face glared comically through her hair. “I got a letter from my sister today who is getting married and a letter from Deio who I could murder.” She jerked her hair out of Lizzie’s hand.

“Calm down, madam,” said Lizzie, “have a little nip of this.” She produced a small jam jar of brandy from under the bed and a glass, and poured Catherine half an inch “courtesy of old chicken head, who was so busy telling off Millie, she didn’t see me. Don’t look so shocked, love; take your comforts where you can. Now, let’s talk about your young man first. How old is he? Twenty-three—oh the little lamb—all right, so he’s not a little lamb, but he’s a young man. A young man on a journey from Wales with a beautiful young lady, oh it’s quite romantic this, i’nt it? How did you sleep?”

“In taverns, or under the stars.”

“Oh, good God.” Lizzie could scarcely believe her ears. “Right then, in taverns, under the stars.” She sketched out a night sky with her sensible little hands. “Oh, it
is
romantic, Catherine, so what did
you expect him to do? Sit up at night and darn with you? I’m sorry, dear, but men is men. Now then, do you have a problem down below, or a little one on the way?”

“No!” Catherine was mortified. “Nothing like that. So you’re not shocked?” she said at last, raising her eyes above the blankets.

“Shocked!” Lizzie’s look was boldly frank. “By that? Look, Catherine, if we are to be friends, I had better tell you a thing or two about myself and some of the other nurses you’ll meet, otherwise you’ll have a fit of the vapors.” Lizzie poured herself a drink and sat down beside Catherine.

“I was born in the East End of London, Catherine, no more than six or seven miles from here, Stepney if you must know, and where I come from, London, not Wales, wherever that is—don’t laugh, Catherine, because I really do not know—there are a lot worse fates for a woman than losing her virtue, whatever your bishops or your whatsanames may tell you.”

Her face, as she calmly folded her hands over her apron, wore a new expression, mischievous and secretive. “A lot worse. In fact, I don’t think I know one nurse, except those who work for the Sisterhoods, who have not you-know-whatted. That’s why when they call us ‘The Band of Angels,’ they’re having a laugh—we’re real women not saints.”