Band of Angel (29 page)

Deio wrote Catherine a brief reply, with the suggestion that they meet at the Pimlico Barracks in London. His plan was to take a few horses up, she could watch them work, see him ride the moves on Cariad and Moonshine. They’d have a laugh about the cavalry officers; she hated pompous twits as much as he did, but she would respond to the setting: the beautiful stables, the sand school, the undoubted brilliance of some of the riding. England had the finest cavalry and horses in the world, and it meant something that they now saw something in him that they wanted. He imagined her eyes widening when he told her, and how his news might change everything, and make her hand go around his waist or tears come to her eyes. They might even make a plan about what they could do when he got home, assuming always that he survived. It annoyed him how much he still needed her blessing before he took off into the blue yonder.

For a few days after Miss Nightingale’s astonishing news, everything at the Home felt chaotic and somehow illogical. Nobody, for instance, remembered to ask her if the reference from Ferdinand Holdsworth had arrived, which was lucky since he, appalled by the idea, had refused to write one. Then Mrs. Clark had appeared in her room, put two official-looking letters on her bed, and said, “Well, it looks like you’re off, too,” but in a flat way, as though she’d asked her to go to the pantry for a cup of sugar. She said that two older, better-qualified nurses had dropped out. Mrs. Clark was permanently in flight nowadays and far too grand to explain anything to nurses or governesses. When Catherine reported this conversation to Lizzie later on, she said, “That’s a laugh—better qualified in what? Drinking gin and sleeping rough?”

But now she had two upsetting letters to write:

Dear Father,

October 17, 1854

Trust me and try to love and forgive me. Sidney Herbert, the secretary at war, has asked our superintendent, Miss Nightingale, to take a party of nurses east and I have been chosen. We leave on October 21st from London Bridge. We will stop in France, Malta, and Egypt, and arrive in Constantinople two or three weeks hence.

You do not have to send me money. We will receive twelve to fourteen shillings a week for board, lodgings, and uniform,
and after three months good conduct this will go up to between sixteen and eighteen shillings.

It grieves me deeply to take this decision without being sure it is what you would want, but everything has happened so fast. Try to be proud of me. I long for your blessing.

Posts to London are much improved at the moment, pray God I may hear from you before I leave. After that, letters can be sent to me at The Barracks Hospital, Scutari.

I am ever your loving daughter.

Catherine

To her sister she wrote

Dear Eliza,

October 17, 1854

Do you remember Tramp, that old dog who loved to bring dead rabbits to the door and drop them there for us? He was always so sure that what pleased him would please us. Well, I know that my news may shock you and make you unhappy (I have resigned myself to the idea that Father may not write to me at all), but I beg you to try and understand at least some of my reasons for going to Scutari.

Your last letter made me so proud of you and made me bless again your good fortune. Gabriel Williams is the luckiest man on earth. I can so imagine you planting your orchard, laying up your chutneys and jams, and making your farm as neat and welcoming as a new pin. As for me—so few of Mother’s domestic arts rubbed off onto me that even if I could come home and settle happily down (assuming any man would have me) I would not feel happy or settled.

There was a time when my restlessness made me unhappy, but that time is gone. Ever since Mother died I knew what I wanted to do in life, and although the nurses’ training has been hard it has been what I needed. But why must every joy bring pain? I am already thinking of our separation, of your sadness, of the dear animals, and how much I will miss you all.

The posts to and from Constantinople are quite good, and
letters to us are free, so please lay in a good supply of pens and wax and end papers and write to me, everything, and anything.

Thank you for your locket. Thank you for the woolen blanket. Thank you for your love. You should see me in my uniform—it was so enormous I had to take in the side seams.

Good-bye my love, I will write to you soon,

Catherine

And then time simply flew and it was only a few days before she left, then six, then three, and suddenly she had a day to pack and be gone from the Home to join the other nurses in temporary lodgings. When she was a child, her mother had once told her that some leave-takings felt like little deaths. An odd thing to tell a child and yet, on the night before she left the governesses’ home, she knew what that meant. With Lizzie gone—she’d taken half a day off to say good-bye to her gentleman friend—she felt dreamlike and unreal, already half gone. She rolled up her dresses, straightened the counterpane on her bed for the last time, felt how quickly a life could be folded up and put away.

When Catherine was finished, she sat on a chair near the window. Outside, the branches of the ash tree were bare and the pale pinks and blues of the autumn sky were breaking up. She sat with the lapwing carving in her hand. She was meeting Deio in two days’ time to say good-bye. She put the wooden bird aside and unwrapped the small portrait Eleri had done of her mother, which she’d tucked between the folds of a dress rolled and ready to go. She stared at it. She would never properly understand now how her mother had thought or felt, what her good memories had been. Mother was half smiling in the picture, but those tawny eyes looked watchful, wary. Once she had stood on the lawn at Clytha, laughing, in a white dress with pearl buttons. What had happened to all her hope and happiness, to Father’s love for his stunning bride?

When did one stop believing?

Hold me, Mama. Tell me I am doing the right thing.
She closed her eyes and smelled the faint sweetness of tea rose in her mother’s hair.

And now the sound of horse’s hooves passing in the street outside brought an extra surge of misery when she thought of Deio. A few
nights ago she’d had a dream in which she’d put on her new uniform and stood in front of him. He’d looked at her disgusted. He’d said, “Good God, woman, this gets worse and worse and worse.”

A few hours later, the hansom cab appeared, and she’d stood in the same strange disembodied mood on the steps with her bags around her and said farewell to Miss Poulter and Miss Sugg and the other governesses. The poor things had the mournful air of survivors on a sinking ship. They’d all have to move on soon, to new homes, new unsatisfactory jobs, new anxieties. They had been passed over for a more interesting idea.

Miss Nightingale and Mrs. Clark had gone already to their new headquarters—Sidney Herbert’s house in Belgravia—to make last-minute arrangements for the journey.

When the cab arrived, Miss Widdicombe came out of the house, quite pink under her bonnet from the exertion of carrying Catherine’s carpetbag in one hand, and a parcel and two pots of raspberry jam in the other.

“My dear,” she said, “could I trouble you to take these few treats to Simon? It would ease my heart to think of him having something personal from home. If only I could afford more, but, alas, I can’t.”

The pots were bound to leak, but seeing Miss Widdicombe’s long, sweet, horselike face work so desperately against tears, made it impossible to say no. “Of course I’ll take them,” she said, shaking her hand and finding herself hugged. “Oh, and give me the address of your employer. If I see your brother or hear of him I’ll write to you immediately.”

“It is not entirely clear to me yet whether or not I
have
an address or a situation,” said Miss W with sad dignity. “I have not actually heard from that gentleman since my illness.”

“So what will happen to you? Can you go home?”

“I think so,” said Miss W. “Yes, I am sure Father will have me back. Oh Catherine,” she suddenly burst out, “if I was braver and younger, I’d come, too—there’s nothing for me here.”

When the carriage drove off, Miss Widdicombe stood slightly apart from the other women; her high shoulders and her attempt at a jaunty wave was the last thing Catherine saw.

While Catherine moved across a London that was lighting its lamps and fires and drawing the curtains on another evening, Elizabeth Herbert, Lizzie to her friend Florence Nightingale, and her doting husband, Sidney, put the finishing touches to an evening that promised to be memorable and extraordinary. All day long, the house had thrummed with excitement: feet running up and down stairs and sharp, excited voices, but now, in that lull between the end of the working day and the beginning of evening, she was able to walk about and see that everything was in place.

Forty chairs for forty nurses were laid out in Sidney’s study; a small Chippendale desk, her place in history, had been carried to the hall. When the footman carrying the table had banged its leg on the door, she’d shouted at him, which was most unlike her. For a woman who regularly and skillfully organized soirees and dinner parties and complicated and subtle placements for prime ministers, foreign statesmen, poets, artists, and all kinds of extraordinary people, she was surprised at what a fever this whole evening had put her into.

The problem, bluntly stated, was that Elizabeth, though no snob, was not in the habit of entertaining servants in her sitting room. At Christmastime, it was true, in the servants’ dining room next to the kitchen, she distributed (to a chorus of “God bless you, madams”) punch and small presents to her own staff of fifteen. But forty nurses! Forty! And some of them quite, well, rough frankly. This was the problem that had vexed her all day and caused the darkening of her lovely eyes. The kitchen was out of the question—
too small and not suitable; the servants’ dining room would have done for the nurses, but not under any circumstances for Sidney. A statesman talking on a matter of national importance could not do so against a background of cooking odors and wet mops. He needed, in her opinion and at the very least, his study, with its oak paneling and bound books and Persian carpet, to set him off and to make him look, as he so instinctively did, like the
beau idéal
of an English gentleman.

That decision made, she’d had another uncharacteristic dither over food. Earlier in the day she had told Mrs. Jennings, her housekeeper, to organize bread and cheese and ale for the forty nurses and to lay it out on the long mahogany table in the dining room for seven o’clock. Mrs. Jennings had told her, and rather heatedly at that, that they would need extra staff in each room to keep an eye on all the nurses, who, as everybody knew, had a reputation for being light-fingered.

The impertinent manner in which her housekeeper had gone on to suggest that they feed the nurses downstairs made Elizabeth Herbert wonder if her own servants had not in some way already become infected by the sudden elevation of these forty nurses into objects of national interest. An hour later she changed her mind again and decided all nurses should be fed at the boardinghouse in Victoria where they were to spend their last night. But her performance throughout the day had unsettled and displeased her—she did not care to look indecisive in front of Mrs. Jennings or, for that matter, Sidney, who had so much on his mind.

Walking through the hall, she saw Sidney’s hat and whip had been flung on a chair. He’d come in late from his afternoon ride and now the door to his study was closed again. Last night he and Florence had worked until three in the morning, and the night before that until dawn. Flo’s energy was ferocious, almost freakish; he, on the other hand, looked wrung out. Last night he’d come into her room and flopped on the bed beside her, too tired to get undressed. She’d said into the darkness, “Give
me
something to do, surely I can help.”

She was surprised at how aggrieved she sounded.