Band of Angel (41 page)

“Twenty-four new men admitted last night, sah! All of them in need of mattresses, spoons, forks, and a nightshirt, but we have run out of dockets. Sir, can you supply same?”

“No.” Perrett had a strange habit of feeling his head and face carefully, as though for a tumor, before he spoke. “Nothing here. Ask stores.”

“Died in the night,” continued the old man, “Bevan, Carstairs, Dannerly, and Smythe. In the corridor outside awaiting tags.”

Sister Ignatius crossed herself and murmured. The boy shot her a strange, almost gleeful look, as if to say,
Just you wait—worse where this came from
.

“On the operation list today,” he went on, “Flannery, amputation; Jones, amputation from frostbite; Wilson, a bleeding; Bendon, the same. We are short on leeches and wadding. Mr. Ware says there are none in store, and they are waiting for some to come from Constantinople.”

Then a list of those suffering with cholera, typhoid or dysentery, frostbite or pneumonia, some with a combination of these.

“Await your orders, sir.” said the old man at last.

“None.” Perrett fingered his head. “Let’s do the rounds.” He seemed to remember the nurses were there and tried for a smile that didn’t come.

“Don’t forget, none of these men are used to seeing women in a hospital and some of them will find your presence disturbing. Stay behind me in a line and try not to look directly at them. We are all going to have to get used to you.”

He carried on rubbing his head.

Back in the ward, the smell hit them like a wave again. One of the orderlies was lowering a scrawny-looking chicken into some boiling water on the stove. Catherine’s head swam and a sick-tasting saliva filled her mouth.

“Please God,” she prayed, “don’t let me faint.”
This, too, will pass.

They walked in a line down the narrow corridor between the beds; one or two of the men turned their faces to the wall and groaned as if the sight of them was the last straw. One young lad with a dazed expression sat up in bed, smiled, and waved.

“Begin at bed one,” said Dr. Perrett when they’d reached the end of the ward. “Name,” he consulted a tag at the end of a nest of gray rags on a wooden pallet bed, “Jenkins, Scots Hussars.”

A middle-aged man, mustache caked with blood and mud, hauled himself up on his elbow and gave them the polite, eager smile they would see on the faces of so many of the desperately ill. The orderly said the man had come in the day before. He’d spent two weeks on one of the transports from Sebastopol. During this talk, the patient looked from one face to another like a quarried animal. Perrett told him to stick his tongue out. He felt it, said it was freezing, and confirmed he had cholera.

“Show me your feet, Jenkins,” Perrett said in the same flat
voice. The man’s feet jerked feebly under the bedclothes as if he was embarrassed. The orderly told him sharply to do as he was told, took the soiled blanket from his feet, and revealed a pair of boots that looked as if they’d been soaked in water for some weeks.

They took the boots off, releasing another cloud of noxious fumes into the air. Jenkins’ feet were gray and rotten, and looked as if some animal had made its dinner out of them. Catherine’s mouth filled again; she was going to be sick.

“Frostbite,” said Perrett. “Let them dry out for the day—that left one may have to come off old chap.”

The soldier’s eyes registered no change of expression at this, he seemed beyond caring. Catherine saw the young orderly give them that strange challenging look again.
This is it; can you bear this?

“How do you register the instructions for each case?” she heard Sister Ignatius ask.

“Those of you who can write, should write them in a notebook. Provide your own of course, there are none in store.” Perrett had the same bright and bitter way of repeating the three favorite words in the hospital.

The man in the first bed started to retch and cough as they moved on, then he was sick. Catherine closed her eyes again.
Breathe, breathe.
It was upsetting to hear him mumble that he was sorry.

“Shall I—?” Sister Ignatius, who had worked as a missionary in Africa, was quite happy to help.

“No,” said Perrett, “Wilkes will do that later.”

The next bed. “Forrester.”

Forrester, a waxen-faced man of about forty, was suffering from frostbite and exposure, Perrett told them, the after-effects of having lain in a ditch for over a fortnight. The man’s teeth looked large and ghastly, like tombstones. His arms were gray and hugely swollen. He tried to turn his face to his pillow when he saw them, but after Perrett told him to stay at attention until his examination was over he stared at the ceiling where you could see the curdled sky through the broken rafters and the beginnings of a snowstorm.

He was asked if he thought he was getting better.

“What I need,” he said, “is a bullet through the skull.”

His eyes flickered briefly toward Perrett.

“You see, this is what worries me most about having you women here,” Perrett said to the nurses. “That you will start to mollycoddle the men and put up with that sort of thing. The best thing that can happen to people like”—he checked the label again—“like Forrester here, is to rejoin their regiments.”

Forrester listened carefully as if Perrett was talking about somebody else.

Catherine already knew that this was a cruel remark. Sam had told her that for most men the bitterest of all pills was being taken ill before they had a chance to fight.

“Fucking women. Wonderful,” the man said clearly as they left, and everyone ignored him.

Their last patient was a young boy with very blond hair and a thin face. The doctor, who was starting to cough again and to yawn, told them he’d been wounded in action during a Charge by the Heavy Brigade and had taken a lance at the base of his spine; he’d lost the use of his legs and sometimes wandered in his mind at night, thinking he was back in battle.

When the boy saw women looking down at him, his face broke into a beautiful, hopeful smile and he muttered, “Bless their faces.”

“Turn over,” said Perrett.

He was examining the wound, which smelled rusty like old blood, when a tall young man appeared. He had tied his bootlaces together and wore his boots around his neck. His feet were blue with cold on the muddy floor. He was crying and said he didn’t have a bed. The young orderly led him off, very gently Catherine noticed, and helped him onto an empty bed, where he lay with snow fluttering down on his face.

“There you are, old man.” He patted him on the shoulder. “You need a bit of shut-eye don’t you?”

After the rounds, Dr. Perrett gave them a list of jobs to do. Sister Ignatius and Catherine were to clean the floor at the end of the
ward and straighten any empty beds. Emma Fagg and Clara were to go with him and copy down the list of special diets for the men.

Before the doctor left, Sister Ignatius took a small black book from her habit and asked if she might say some prayers with the men. She gave the nurses a slightly defiant look as she did so—Miss Nightingale had expressly forbidden any such overtures.

The doctor sighed and said no. He said they should give the men time to get used to them and she would be in their way.

“Save your prayers, Sister,” he said. “This is only the beginning.”

Around three o’clock, Nobby took plugs of tobacco around for the cholera patients, who were ordered to smoke to stop the spread of airborne infections. Some of them were too ill to smoke and she saw one boy try to hide his ration. Others tried manfully to obey, and the sight of these obedient half skeletons trying to “smoke up, lads” was strange and sad. After this, the nurses were told that a dish of tea had arrived for them and was waiting in the orderlies’ room. There had been no time for lunch and, after inhaling so much smoke, they were thirsty and they hurried back as fast as they could. But when they got to the room, they found no tea had been left for them, and there were cries of disappointment.

Clara Sharpe collapsed like a puppet on the floor.

“I want my tea. I need it,” she moaned. “Go to the kitchen and see where it is, Cathy—you’ve got the youngest legs.”

She agreed, because she had a splitting headache and was longing for some fresh air. She left by the side door, crossed the quadrangle and walked down the track toward the kitchen door. It was shut with a large bolt across it. A soldier walking by told her it was closed for the day.

Running back to the hospital building through the late-afternoon gloom, she felt stiff and bruised as though shock had made her suddenly old. A knifelike wind tossed her hair and skirts around and made eerie sounds in the flagpoles at the hospital gates. At the end of the path, she took a deep breath: this was it, ward four. From now on it would be her test. She opened the door and
went into the orderlies’ room again, but the nurses had gone, leaving their empty cups behind them.

She went into the corridor to look for them. A door halfway up the hall was open, spilling a greenish light into the hall. She looked inside in case they were there. A tall man in a dark frock coat was sitting there. It was Dr. Cavendish.

“Nurse Carreg, how are you?” He smiled broadly when he recognized her. “How’s that hand?”

“Very much better.” She tried to avoid looking at those damp whiskers, those blank eyes. “Is Dr. Perrett here?” she said.

“Do you see him here?” he asked sarcastically, and then in a softer voice, “He stood in for me this morning. I had three operations to do.” She saw blood still under his fingernails.

To her relief there was a timid knock on the door. It was Sister Ignatius.

“Oh good, there you are Catherine,” she said. “We were worried about you. Forgive me doctor but she is our youngest and we thought she was lost.”

“No, she is not lost.” He kept his eyes on her and carried on intently as if they were alone.

“Yes, I do work here and in wards five to ten, too.”

Sister Ignatius, with the air of one who has blundered into a private conversation, took out a prayer book and began to read.

“There’s no need for that, Sister,” he said, “I can hear the men’s breakfasts arriving. Only seven hours late of course, but to a starving man it will taste better than nothing. Won’t it, Catherine?”

He smiled again, making her feel trapped and uneasy.

“Yes sir.”

“So do I see you tomorrow?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“No, we do know, Catherine, with respect,” interrupted Sister Ignatius, anxious to be of help. “The new lists have just gone up—we’re here for three weeks.”

“Well, that’s awfully good news, isn’t it?” he said blandly after the door had closed.

She hated how he looked at her, it made her flesh crawl.

“Sit down for a second.”

“Sir I—”

“All right, all right, leave me, go back to work,” he cried facetiously. “But I must say everything about you confuses me. You’re not fat, and you don’t look like a drunk and you have very good teeth. How did you slip through the net?”

He thought this a splendid joke. She wanted to strike him.

“I can only repeat my offer.” He swiveled his eyes, he looked her up and down. “I can be your friend here. Don’t turn me down.”

That night Lady Bracebridge took them on a chaperoned walk through the tombs and the willow trees and the quarter of a mile or so of rubbish that lay beyond the hospital gates. A high sea was running beyond the cliffs and the ground underneath them shook from the boom of the waves. It was a strange night to choose for an outing: most of them were dead on their feet after their first day on the wards, but this lack of logic was beginning to feel normal now.

Lizzie and Catherine linked arms, too tired at first to talk much.

Then Lizzie said, “Did you get a letter from him today?”

“Who?”

“You know! Him. That boy you rode across Wales with. Your sweetheart.”

“He is not my—”

“Oops, sorry I spoke.”

“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. I heard from my sister, happy and married and with child; thank heavens there is only one black sheep in our family.”

“Why did you leave him, Cath? I still don’t understand.” Lizzie was remorseless and Catherine was half glad of the forbidden luxury of talking about him.

“I didn’t leave him, Lizzie, I let my family separate us. That was my first mistake, except now I can see that. I loved him too much and would always have been his child. Does that make any sense at all.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.” Lizzie held her hand and the tears held back all day spilled over.

“No, no. Thank you for asking, I think about him so much. The
torture is to have loved like that and made such a mess of it and still to feel that I needed to do things like this, to prove to myself in a way that I could be strong on my own. Oh, it sounds quite stupid now, because now I don’t know if I
am
strong enough.”

Lizzie put her arm around her and gave her a look full of warm understanding.

“Falling in love too young is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you. Nobody would choose it like that. You’re unformed, like a baby’s head before the two halves of your skull have joined, and then they get their head stuck in yours and you don’t know where you end and they begin. Learning to think for yourself is one of the most important things in life, even if you think wrongly sometimes. That way you can’t blame people later for all the things you haven’t done.”