Band of Angel (25 page)

She told Catherine that in hospitals there were often men and women sleeping on the wards together, sometimes the men demanded it, sometimes not, and there was the human side to be considered, “a nurse giving out all the time and needing something back. A touch, a kiss, human affection, Catherine.” It was nice, she told her, to find the right man and it’s—Lizzie thought hard to find the right words—“well, it’s all right really. Mind you some of them nurses are dreadfully low. I could tell you stories but I won’t now. But as for falling once, which you haven’t, but even if you had . . . it’s nothing.”

Catherine was astonished. Lizzie, so small and clean and self-possessed, drinking brandy and telling her these things. Her face burned and she developed an overpowering interest in the pattern of the bedspread.

“But you, Lizzie, surely . . .”

“’Course.” Lizzie’s eyes were full of rich memories. “Me too.”

One day, she said, she might tell Catherine her whole life story, but not now, it was too long and not all very nice, but about this, “I’ll tell you if you like, a little bit to help you feel better.”

This was so embarrassing, but so wonderful, a stone lifting off her heart. Catherine sat more comfortably on the bed and tried not to grimace at the taste of the brandy. Lizzie, whose voice had dropped a tone, was telling her in a dreamy voice that, at St. Thomas’s Hospital, there was a gentleman, “a mature gentleman, in his forties, a doctor if you must know, happily married and with three children of his own. He has a house in the country, and lodgings near the hospital where he stays for two days a week. Once a month on my day off,” Lizzie was whispering now, “I go to see him—don’t look so shocked, it’s nothing—he smokes a small cigar in the downstairs room. I go upstairs, I have a bath. He buys me lemon oils that he gets for me specially, he comes upstairs and I lie down with him, and I’ll tell you something else, Catherine, he makes me feel like a princess. He never says he loves me, but he says such nice things.” She repeated them solemnly: “ ‘You’ve made me happier than I have ever been in my life, Lillibell,’ and ‘you’re my little queen.’ He works so hard that man, and his wife was took very poorly after her third confinement and can’t have nothing more to do with him; he deserves some pleasure.”

A flash of sunlight rippled through the room, illuminating the curtains. A shared tremor passed between the two women. Catherine smiled, glad that Lizzie had known love. And Lizzie, the sunlight making gauzy patterns across her small pale face, seemed quite transported.

“And let me tell you something else, Catherine Carreg,” she said. “I’m proud to know him. He’ll never marry me, but I don’t mind.”

“Why not?” Catherine touched her hand. “Why don’t you mind?”

“Because I’m a nurse, madamoysal,” said Lizzie. “There’s plenty that hate the job and would do anything to go into service or get married to escape from it, but I like it. I like the people, I like the excitement. I like the stories you hear. My gentleman says his own wife can’t think how to fill her days, and longs for evening to
come. Why should I want to be like that? Blimey!” Lizzie leaped to her feet. “Look at the time!” It was quarter to eight. “You’re late already.”

She patted Catherine’s hair and gave a tug to her skirt and said, “Tell her to boil her head.”

She winked and, watching Catherine go downstairs, thought, “This is what it must feel like to have children of your own. She’s got so much to learn it breaks my heart.”

Because she worried so continuously about her brother, Simon, and his regiment, and the fact that he was sure to fall off his borrowed horse and be bullied by his fellow officers, Amelia Widdicombe paid from her own slender purse for a copy of
The Times,
which was delivered to the Home each afternoon and from which she often read aloud in the evenings. She took a great interest in politics and often searched after supper for someone to explain her views to.

“Here is Turkey and here is Russia, and here,” she explained to Miss Sugg one night, “are some of our more important trade routes.”

“Yes, hang on a mo.” Miss Sugg, who was knitting mufflers for the poor soldiers, held some blue wool up against the light then wound it around her needles. “Sorry, sorry, do go on.” She put her glasses back on her nose and tried to look intelligent. Miss Widdicombe sighed. “You see the Russians are now rampant. They want to seize Sebastopol, which is in the Crimea, which is here.”

Miss Sugg, who had to put her wool down to see Miss Widdicombe’s quite complicated map, glared at her bent head.

“And once that’s done,” she drew another decisive line, “they’ll block many of our trade routes to Turkey. I really should read you some of Simon’s letters.”

“Oh yes, I see.” Miss Sugg’s needles were clacking again and her voice trailing off; her powers of concentration had not been good after her illness. “Well, I expect we shall win anyway, shan’t we?” she said.

“Oh heavens yes.” Amelia gave an odd little snarl. “The war in the
Crimea will be another Waterloo.” Miss Sugg’s eyes went blank for a moment and she thought of how many sad sounds were embedded in the word “cry,” “crime,” “mea,” “mea culpa.” She was going to mention it to Amelia, but forgot and ate her biscuit instead.

But quite soon something strange happened that made them all sit up and take notice. It started in October, when large, wet leaves gathered outside the windows and there was a fire every day in the dining room, and the first sign was the number of important people who began calling to take tea with Miss Nightingale. This caused some private heartaches, too, among the governesses, who felt excluded from the excitement. Although sometimes they were allowed to finish up the half-eaten cakes and the transparently thin slices of bread and butter, mostly they hung about the banisters like large, wistful children and could only listen to the rat-tat-tat of committee meetings and the clink of the visitors’ cups, and wonder who was there. Later, holding the special visitors’ cups (blue Spode) like holy relics, they took them back to the pantry to wash and put away.

Then there came a week that put Mrs. Clark in the foulest of moods, for she was never out of the kitchen, and the blue cups were continuously in and out of the pantry, the doorbell never stopped, and the governesses all put on a pound or two from their extra teas.

Now came the wonderfully handsome Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War, a particular friend of Miss Nightingale and one who made her laugh quite girlishly. He was so tall and blond and firm of jaw that all of them were half in love. Elizabeth, his spirited and beautiful wife, often came separately to drop off a new pamphlet on London’s workhouses or some Belgian chocolates. Then Fanny, Miss Nightingale’s mother arrived. She was wonderfully dressed and very popular with all of them because she brought peaches from the greenhouse and fresh eggs from the country, and sometimes game from local shoots.

“Her mother calls her Flo,” Miss Sugg whispered reverently to Catherine. “Too sweet. And she brings her hampers from Fortnum and Mason’s, and once, an owl in a cage.”

When she came, Florence’s voice reverted to the firm tones she
used with the governesses. Her mother was often, they also noticed, shown the door within half an hour. And then, on a particularly wet Thursday, one of those dreary days when you don’t expect anything to change, everything did. When Catherine looked back on it, what she remembered most was the rain that fell all morning, sheets of it, and the mud that had grown to six inches deep in the streets outside. And then her automatic fear that Deio would be out in this downpour, soaked to the skin on top of the mountains.

They were in the dining room when the news came. Nurses and governesses had finished their porridge and toast, wiped their mouths, put away their napkins, and were asking God to forgive them their trespasses when Miss Nightingale, breathless and pink and with a drop of rain on her cheeks, burst into morning prayers and stood by the door. She was fiddling with her gloves, almost stamping her foot with impatience. “Good morning, Miss Nightingale,” they chorused.

“Good morning, ladies, nurses.” She smiled, showing her perfect little teeth.

“Sit down, sit down. I have something extraordinary to tell you which affects us all. Try not to be too upset.”

She seemed at a sudden loss for words, and sat with her head down, a rolled-up newspaper in her lap.

“Give me a second.” She opened the paper. “It is about the war,” she said at last. “Today, in
The Times,
there is the gravest news from Turkey, and the Crimea.” Every eye was trained on Miss Nightingale’s face and nobody noticed how pale Miss Widdicombe had become. “It comes from the paper’s correspondent, William Howard Russell. I can do no better than to read the whole report.”

Miss Tidy, a new inmate with bronchial pneumonia, began to cough, and Miss Nightingale drummed her fingers on the edge of the table. Catherine had never seen her more impatient.

“William Howard Russell,” she repeated. “Miss Tidy, I wonder if you could do your coughing in the corridor, this is quite important. William Howard Russell is a war correspondent who has been traveling with the British army in the Crimea. He has inspected army hospitals there, traveled on sick transports, talked to men on guard duty, and this morning, dropped a bomb of his own in
The Times
by revealing the frightful sufferings of our sick and wounded men in the Crimea. Listen.” Mrs. Clark stood up and shut the door firmly on Miss Tidy’s distant whoopings, and Miss Nightingale, her voice throbbing with anger, read:

It is with feelings of surprise and anger that the public will learn that no sufficient preparations have been made for the care of the wounded. Not only are there not sufficient surgeons, not only are there no dressers and nurses, there is not even linen to make bandages. Can it be said that the Battle of Alma has been an event to take the world by surprise? Yet, there is no preparation for the commonest surgical operations! Not only are men kept, in some cases for a week, without the hand of a medical man coming near their wounds, not only are they left to expire in agony, unheeded and shaken off, though catching desperately at the surgeon as he makes his rounds through the fetid ship, but now it is found that the commonest appliances of a workhouse sick ward are wanting, and that the men must die through the medical staff of the British Army having forgotten that old rags are necessary for the dressing of wounds.

Even if the news had not been quite so terrible, Miss Nightingale had the gift of a great actress in being able to make a low and intimate voice reach every person in the room. You could have heard a pin drop, and when she finished, the look of stupefaction on the faces of her audience was total. How could this be? What about the bands? The parades of honor? The music in the streets? Their country was a great fighting nation and they’d all played their part: praying and knitting and writing letters.

There was the scraping of a chair. Miss Widdicombe got up.

“Well, it’s all absolutely true,” she enunciated carefully. “Simon, my brother, says so, too. It’s a shambles.” She waved quite belligerently at Miss Nightingale and then sat down, her head between the butter and the marmalade, and made a low moaning sound.

“Miss Widdicombe,” cried Mrs. Clark. “Have a care!”

Lizzie was first to her. She loosened her collar and got her head down, talking to her softly until Miss Widdicombe, white-faced
and already apologetic, was well enough to be led from the room. The atmosphere became tense and charged again.

“There is more.” Miss Nightingale folded her hands and looked at them. “This morning, I received an extraordinary letter from Sidney Herbert, who some of you have met here. A number of ladies have immediately offered to go and nurse in Scutari and in the Crimea, but he says . . .” She took a letter from her pocket and began reading again, her voice almost inaudible with emotion.

“ ‘There is but one person in England that I know of who would be capable of organizing and superintending such a scheme and I have been several times on the point of asking you hypothetically, if supposing the attempt were made, you would attempt to direct it.’ He
wants me
to go.”

The governesses gasped. Miss Sugg burst into tears.

“And this morning—” Miss Nightingale’s eyes were gleaming. She held her hand over her heart as though it were in danger of jumping out. “I have decided to accept. It will be hard for me to leave the superintendentship of this Home, but I must. I must.”

Her face lost its customary control, and in the shocked silence that followed, more of the governesses started to cry. For all her fierceness, she had been wonderful to so many of them: lending them money, writing their letters, rubbing their feet when they were cold at night. So brave, so sure of things.

“When do you leave, Miss Nightingale?” Mrs. Pruitt sagged in her wheelchair.

“As soon as I can. There is no time to lose.”

“How will you get there?”

“By boat to Boulogne as far as I know, and then on some military transport to Turkey. The details are by no means worked out. I only heard yesterday morning.” She pressed both of her hands to her heart again. So young she looked, so beautiful and young and lit up.