Band of Angel (54 page)

The women whimpered with pleasure, and although their hands still felt like boulders, they put their heads down and ate like animals. The cook had the good sense only to fill their bowls and leave them to eat and thaw and not think.

When the scrape of their spoons stopped, they were sent to bed: Sister Clara to share with the two other nuns on the first floor, Catherine and Porter to follow Miss Davis’s stout outline up the stairs to the nurses’ room. At the top of the stairs she took a key from a bundle around her waist and gave the keyhole a vicious stab. “The flamer’s iced over again,” she told them, and Catherine, still shivering with shock and cold, found herself smiling. It was good to hear a Welshwoman again, just comforting like the soup.

A kick opened the door onto the dormitory: a long narrow room with four beds, one already occupied by a sleeping woman who did not stir. There was a blackboard at the end of the room with Russian characters written on it. (Davis had explained on the way up that the hospital had once been a school.) Catherine’s bed had a pile of children’s crutches and an old wicker wheelchair on one side; on the other was a sleeping woman, whose mouth was wide open, air streaming from it like smoke. She hadn’t stirred.

All of them undressed without a word. The day had finished them.

Grateful for one good thing, she lay down in a proper bed again, limbs still rocking from the motion of the ship. She was longing for oblivion, to shut down, to stop caring, but there was a new noise outside to try and ignore: the whirr and crump of distant artillery fire. On a night as light as this, the enemy could attack as easily as in the middle of the day.

Before she went to sleep, she rubbed some cream into her face and hands. The little pot of lemon and glycerine that Eliza had sent her from home was running out.

“It doesn’t matter,” she thought, “I may not live long enough for wrinkles.”

She was calm in the thought, but as soon as she closed her eyes black thoughts flew about her mind like bats: the harbor,
the swollen corpses, the staring eyes, the bits and bobs of human flesh floating around.

And then, she couldn’t help herself, she thought of Deio.

What had made her so sure that he would live when so many others had died here? And if he had lived, how? How in God’s name could you land horses in that terrible harbor? Or feed them? Or house them? This felt like a place with an infinite variety of ways to kill you.

Frozen and heartsore, she tossed and turned under the prickly blanket. Her fault—her foolishness, her pride had led him here: into all this squalor and hopelessness, and here she was herself, in the eye of the storm.

Olive Purdey, the sole occupant of the dormitory the night before, woke first and looked at her new companions without interest or surprise. Most of her life had been spent in the St. Giles Rookery in London, where she’d worked as a maid, a whore, and a cook in a brothel; rats, lice, and cold were taken in her stride, also the sudden appearance of strangers in her room.

It was minus ten degrees indoors and she’d worn her shoes to bed to stop them icing up. She took a nip from the small flask of brandy hidden under the mattress and put her dress over the bloomers, chemise, and petticoats she’d slept in.

The creaking of her bed woke Catherine, who sat up in hers and looked around her with her heart pounding.

“Good day.” She extended her hand toward the large woman, now struggling into a selection of gray woolens.

“Morning.”

“Did we give you a shock when you woke up this morning?”

“No,” said the woman, “I was told you was coming. All right, are you?” Her tone implied she didn’t want Catherine to go into any detail.

“Yes, thank you,” she replied politely. “It will take us a while to learn the ropes, but quite well thank you. Are you on duty today?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask a question before you go?”

“Yes, you can.”

Her heart was going like a hammer.

“Is there— Do you— You see, we’ve come from the Barrack
Hospital at Scutari,” Catherine whispered, “and there are people we know who are here and who you might know.”

“No, there’s been no women come yet from Scutari but you lot. There’s been some from Miss Stanley’s lot, but they’ve been sent away again. Yes, that’s right.” Any moment now Olive’s foghorn voice would wake the others up.

“Oh no, hang about, some of the ladies did stay,” repeated the stolid Olive, “and some is already gone.” There was a malicious gleam in her eye. “Some of them thought us nurses would work for them as lady’s maids so we had to sort that one out.”

“The thing is, I’m not really sure if the person I’m talking about has been here and gone home, or not come here at all, or has stayed here. Are there lists with the dead on them?” She turned away.

“I dunno,” said Olive. “I’ve never thought to ask. But it’s needle in a haystack time, you’d be lucky to find her if she isn’t here.”

“It’s a him.”

“Well, you’ll have to get more information than that.” Olive put her knuckle in her nostril to dislodge a piece of frost. “Where’s he from?”

“From Wales.”

“So many have gone I’ve lost track of their names.” Olive’s eyes were vacant, she’d given up trying to help. “Ask Miss Davis in the kitchen, she’s Welsh and she’s a know-it-all.”

And so no cheese there. Nothing. It was stupid to expect news so quickly she told herself. After breakfast (hot porridge and some good homemade bread) taken in the kitchen, the superintendent, Miss Weare, arrived to show them around.

Neatly dressed and middle-aged, she seemed, with her nervous darting manner and quick smiles, very anxious not to be shown up in front of people who knew Miss Nightingale. She spent a good hour in what she called a “getting to know you meeting,” in which she questioned them keenly about their experiences in Scutari: What kind of work had they done on the wards? Had any nurses been sent home? What improvements had been made? “They’re like cocks in the ring underneath it all aren’t they,” Porter said later.

They were taken down to ward two, a long, airless, narrow room where Miss Weare briefed them. The hospital had space for two to three hundred patients and beds for only half that number. There had been some local skirmishes during the night, she said, and thirty new patients were expected later in the day. Fifteen of them were on the operations list.

“Most of our patients are in for bowel problems,” Miss Weare’s pale eyelashes blinked rapidly, “and of course the low circulation that comes with dysentery has led to more and more frostbite. Our numbers for scurvy are also rising far more quickly than we would like.”

Catherine was surprised to see Miss Pruitt and Miss Hibbert hold hands in evident terror. None of this shocked her any longer.

At the end of the ward, two young orderlies were throwing a packet of bandages at each other. They stopped to look at the women.

“Could I ask you to move those?” Miss Weare’s voice was high, breathless. She pointed toward two bloodstained stretchers propped against the wall. “Someone is bound to trip over them soon.”

She blinked rapidly at the nurses as she said this as though surprised at her own audacity. Not a born leader, thought Catherine.

They spent the rest of the day being shown the workings of the hospital: where to line up for food, where to collect the supplementary diets, where dirty linen was stored and so forth. After lunch, she helped one of the nurses, a Sister of Charity called Sister Veronica, change the bedding of a man in the last stages of typhus who was suffering from a continuous and profuse hemorrhage of the bowel. Then they were sent to find beds, bedding, and a hot meal for four men who had come in that morning with frostbite.

Sister Veronica, although she was plump was quite comely; she went from bed to bed with a male orderly, undressing the half-conscious men with a minimum of fuss and false modesty—a task that would have been considered unsuitable at Scutari. That done, she put them into clean shirts and bathed their lips with warm water and vinegar. No coyness there, just ordinary decent, human helpfulness.

Thank God for work. Catherine plunged herself into it again
and again that day. She told herself it was stupid to have expected news of Deio so soon.

After a drink of water and some bread and cheese at lunchtime, she and Nancy Porter went back on the wards and, because it was so busy, were trusted with the delicate task of unbinding the foul, curious selection of articles—bandages, old haversacks, bits of shoes—embedded in the men’s frostbitten feet.

“Some of the men haven’t taken their shoes off for months,” Sister Veronica told them. “They were frightened their shoes would ice over, or their feet would swell, but it’s done their circulation no good at all.”

She introduced them to a young man lying in bed wearing a woolen hat, and with his blue and white toes all stuck together. Gently, carefully, she separated them with warm water, then rubbed them briskly with her hands, even though the young man, who lay with his eyes shut, said he could feel nothing at all.

Again, the quiet competence of her gestures showed Catherine that this nun was not one of those helpless, spiritually flirtatious Roman Catholics that Miss Nightingale had warned them about. Another huge exaggeration, a lie even. This was a woman with years of experience, a professional nurse, someone like Lizzie, compared to whom Miss Nightingale was the rank amateur. Catherine was bewildered by this. Why had so many hardworking women been sold so short, and how many other lies had they been told?

Work. Sleep. Eat. Work. That was the pattern of her days for the next month. In early February, the temperature had dropped by another ten degrees and she understood what Sister Clara meant by Russian cold. Locks froze, the mud in the trenches froze, beards stuck to men’s faces, great lumps of snow hardened under horse’s hooves, turning them into ball bearings. When you went outside, cold smacked your face, made your ears ring, froze the roots of your hair and made it hurt. Everybody suffered from chilblains, from mild frostbite, from chapped skin. And when it wasn’t snowing, it rained steel needles of sleet and the streets became muddy ravines lined with the bodies of drowned animals.

This was the month when hundreds of men lay down quietly in the snow outside their tents and closed their eyes. Even for brave men, enough was enough. The month she had to accept that if she went out on her own to look for Deio, she would die. Rushing from bed to bed she learned to survive in a world in which there was only the moment—no past, no expectations of a future. Each day she helped young men face the loss of friends, of courage, of faith. False dreams died, but not hope or love, or something close to it. Extra sources of power seemed released in all of them, and although hysteria was never far from the surface, they were a team as they hurtled, frozen and exhausted, from bed to bed.

She knew that from now on whatever happened to her in her personal life—and oh, how she grieved quietly sometimes, seeing a man in a bed that could be him—there was another place that she could go where she felt competent and necessary. Sometimes—and this was the oddest, most disturbing thing—it even felt as if looking death in the face day after day made you feel startlingly alive.

And then, one afternoon, she was helping Sister Veronica in ward two with the same young man she’d seen three weeks ago with the woolly hat and frostbite. He’d been readmitted, and this time Sister Veronica thought his wounds were so bad that his leg might have to come off. The nun had gone to find a doctor; Catherine had stayed and was straightening the soldier’s bed when she turned round and saw him walking toward her.

He looked at her with the blank eyes of a man staring at himself in a mirror. The same stained frock coat, too, with the bunch of silk ligatures threaded through the top button ready for use. The desire to run or to scream was so strong she had to move away.

“Dr. Cavendish.” Miss Weare had appeared by her side. “Have you met our new nurses?”

“I am very pleased to meet you all,” she heard him say. “You look better Nurse Porter. Miss Carreg,” he bowed his head slightly.

They’d covered the man’s wounds with loose bandages. He laid them aside and peered at his gray and blue feet. He was so close to her, she could hear him breathing. He told Sister Veronica to go and mix up a linseed poultice, which he thought might raise the temperature in the man’s feet, and then, to her relief, he begged
their forgiveness for rushing off, but he had two patients in the theater, chloroformed and waiting, and five others to do that night. “Thank God for some new helpers,” he said amiably.

Miss Weare started to twitter as if he had paid her a very great compliment. He looked through her, and looked directly at Catherine.

“We’ve lost eight doctors in the last nine months from fevers alone,” Miss Weare explained as he walked off. “We are so very grateful to him for stepping in so promptly. He is a very fine surgeon indeed. Did you meet him at Scutari?”

“Yes,” said Catherine, “I met him at Scutari.”

Miss Weare waited for some other comment, but a loud bang from outside the hospital made them both gasp.