Band of Angel (34 page)

At the end of a steep rutted track they came to a pair of large iron gates.

“My God,” gasped Clara Sharpe, squinting through the gates. “In’t it horrible?”

* * *

The Barrack was one of four British hospitals run by the British army in Turkey. The others were the Turkish Military Hospital—accommodation for a thousand patients—the General Hospital, half an hour’s walk away, and the Palace Hospital, once the Sultan’s summer palace. The Barrack Hospital was the worst of them.

The hospital consisted of miles of dilapidated corridors running around three sides of a quadrangle; the fourth side had been burned down by fire, so it was a building with no heart. In the empty spaces left by the quadrangle, where fountains, trees, even benches might have been, there was a sea of gray slime, stuck here and there with rubbish—broken beds, a chair, a drum, a line of washing broken down and caked with mud.

There was a sense of almost willful ugliness about the place. It came from the rotten basement, from the mudflats of the quadrangle, the long freezing corridors with their broken windows and filthy floors. Even the windows were designed for ugliness. They did not point, as they could have, toward the Bosphorus or Constantinople, or to the beautiful cypress-covered hills beyond, but inwards to the gray slime and the other dirty windows and everything that was wretched and ugly and broken and could not be mended.

The nurses walked through the main gates in appalled silence. There was a smell of eggs and drains and ingrained dirt that wafted up from the huge cellars underneath and hung about the place. Catherine wanted to clutch Lizzie’s arm but feared it might look unmilitary.

“This is called the Sultan’s Gate,” said the young captain. “
To your right turn!
Your quarters are in the tower at the end of this corridor.”

They pushed their feet through the dirty snow. The sky above looked milky and curdled; it would snow again before dark. The officer, anxious to be rid of them, bundled them through the door and up a short flight of narrow stairs. At the top of the stairs was a small semicircular room, a tower with three windows looking out onto a pale sky.

“Right!” he said. “Let’s get
mobile.
Room allocation.”

Her heart sank to her boots as he showed them around. The
tower was divided into six freezingly cold, damp, and smelly rooms. The room that the officer suggested as a kitchen had no fuel, no food, no tables, and no chairs. The bedrooms were tiny, no more than ten feet square, and as dank and moldy as underground cellars. But their main problem, it was obvious from the start, would be overcrowding. The officer told them that the three doctors who had lived here before had asked for a transfer because it was too small. Now it was to house forty nurses; you could barely fit a sheet of paper between the beds.

To everyone’s relief, Miss Nightingale now reappeared on the scene. She’d taken off her bonnet, rolled up her sleeves, and seemed to be in remarkably high spirits as she looked at them and squinted at their quarters as if she had nothing more troubling on her mind than the placement for a dinner party.

“Silence please, ladies,” she said. “I’m thinking.” She pressed her gloved hand briefly against her temple. “I am trying to think how best to arrange this.”

After a while she said, “I shall have my ten Norwood nuns to the right of me.” One or two bridled at the “my,” for they were still wary of accepting her authority.

“And my nurses to the left. Follow me, please.”

They followed her into another freezing room, which had a curious forest of white fungus growing through a carpet of dust. In the corner of the room was a bed, sheets rumpled from its previous occupant, and a po filled to the brim with pee.

Sarah Barnes, the widow, looked at the room and said it was all right, she’d lived in much worse than that, and quite a few of the other women agreed, but one of the nuns, Sister Agnes, saw the expression on Catherine’s face. She put her hand on her shoulder and said they must not mind the room but must keep their minds on how wet and weary the soldiers must be in their lines, and what an honor it would be to nurse them soon.

Miss Nightingale walked into the room during this brave speech, and with that fierce flash of temper that had so surprised Catherine when she had seen it on the railway station at London Bridge, asked Sister Agnes on whose authority had she told Miss Carreg when and where she would be working?

“The strongest of you,” she repeated, “will be wanted at the washtub.”

Sister Agnes, blinking like a child about to be struck, promised Miss Nightingale she would do whatever work she was asked to do. Miss Nightingale became serene and kindly again. But the warning was clear: two queen bees at Scutari would be one queen bee too many.

After Miss Nightingale left, a medical orderly—a lad of no more than seventeen with a cheeky smile—brought in two copper basins filled with weak tea, and some stale, sour-tasting bread. There was no milk, but a small paper twist with brown sugar in it.

“Thank you, handsome,” Clara Sharpe’s voice was tired, “your mum must love you.”

“She do,” he said, but now he seemed resentful.

They fell on the tea as though it were champagne—they’d had nothing since breakfast, and some, due to seasickness, had not eaten properly for nearly two weeks.

The boy brought mattresses and a small pile of thin, gray blankets marked with an arrow and with B.O. stitched in the corner. They counted the mattresses: only six for ten of them, so Lizzie politely asked if it would be a bother for him to get them some more, and maybe a few more blankets. Two panes of glass were broken in the window and snow was puffing through it. Their hands were blue with cold.

“Yes.” The boy scratched underneath his filthy smock. “It would be too much trouble.” He followed this with a long recitation about how the purveyor, “let’s call him Mr. X,” would “hang him up by the ears” if he gave them beds that had not been countersigned by Mr. Y, who would also need to get documentation from Mr. Z. If the thought of sleeping ten to a room with only six beds had not been so depressing they might have laughed, the list of names he had to consult was so droll.

“And I’m not supposed to talk to you lot without Miss Nightingale’s permission neither,” he scowled, “she just told me that.”

“Well, you’re a stuck up little bumwipe,” said Emma Fagg.

“Miss
Fagg!
” One of the nuns clutched her rosary.

“Well he
is
stuck up,” Fagg muttered. “I’d have him up by his ears, too, if he was mine.”

The boy, who was young enough to be her son, set his jaw.

“That’s my orders, old lady, and if you don’t like it . . . go home,” he said softly.

That first night, Catherine lay down on the floor with the other women around her, saw their breath puffing into the air, smelled them. Her whole body was still rocking with the motion of the boat, and she was drifting in and out of an uneasy dream about a horse, when she snapped to, instantly awake, her ears aching with cold, and had a painful moment of truth. This was going to be too much for her. She’d already crossed the line. Shocked and frightened by the dilapidated hospital, humiliated by her dreams, she felt half broken before her work began. But there was Lizzie, sleeping serenely no more than two feet to the left of her, and Widow Barnes (making sucking and bubbling noises) to the right. They could sleep; some of them even thought the room an improvement on the places they had left.

It’s my fault.
She sat up in the freezing air and thought of how Deio’s arms had wrapped around her when she was cold.
He said this would happen and it has.

At about three o’clock, rain fell hard against the windows and what shreds of curtains remained were sucked into the broken panes of glass. The whine of the wind rose to a howl and rain began to drip on the floor with a noisy plopping sound. She sat up again in bed, shivering with cold, and thought to herself almost calmly, “I am in hell and this is all my fault.”

She got out of bed to look for buckets; they’d been given one for washing, and one for slops. The ground under her bare feet was furry with dust and freezing. She walked around the sleeping women toward the drip-drop sound and found the leak underneath a fireplace where a knifelike draft came down the chimney. She stood on a square of straw matting that, as she put her bucket down, tore away like paper. Feeling breath on her feet, she looked
down and saw Emma Fagg’s long jaw on a pillow, her head half in the fireplace. She disliked Emma Fagg: her irritating voice, her complaints, and for one irrational moment wanted to stamp on her.

“What is it?” Emma sat up, a woolen hat half over her eyes.

“Nothing,” she said crossly, “go back to sleep.”

As Catherine raised her candle toward the ceiling, a loud rustling made her blood freeze with horror. “There’s a Russian soldier up there,” she thought. “He’ll put a dagger through my heart.” And then, a soft commotion above her head like stockinged feet running. She looked up into a pair of bright yellow eyes. Too scared to scream she blundered back to her bed, tripping over her nightdress.

“Lizzie, wake up!”
she whispered. “There’s someone on the roof watching us.”

Lizzie sat up instantly. Long years of practice had taught her to wake up sensible.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she pleaded. “Please come and look with me.”

“If this is nothing you’ve had it.” Lizzie, shivering in her nightdress, looked green with fatigue. Catherine led her back toward the fireplace, a faint light from the window outlining the shape of her nightcap. A chilly wind from the fireplace swirled down its hole, ruffled their nightdresses, and blew out Lizzie’s candle. She swore softly.

“It’s all right,” said Lizzie in a trembling voice, but before Catherine could find her tinderbox she shrieked out loud. Sarah Barnes sprang up in her bed saying “Wahiawa” under her nightcap like a great big terrified baby. Then they all shrieked together, until Lizzie said, “Be quiet, you soppy dates. It’s only a rat.”

They lit another candle and held it up and there it was: the size of a lapdog and blacker than any rat Catherine had seen in England, with a long shaggy coat and lemony-green eyes. Lizzie picked up a broom and banged the beam, and it lumbered off into some dark hole between the roof and the rafters.

It would have been all right, as Fagg kept saying, if it had been a normal-sized rat, the kind they were used to, but as dawn came over the windowsill, lighting their wan faces, all any of them could talk about was the size of that foreign rat. Fagg, her voice even
more bunged up than usual first thing in the morning, told them of a rat “almost as big as a pussy cad” that had crept up on her mother as she lay abed in her house in Seven Dials, “in Lundudd. It bit her on her chind.”

Loud sniff.

And then everybody else told their rat stories and seemed to cheer up, except Catherine, who didn’t have one. In her world, rats lived in barns outside the house. She thought of her bedroom at Carreg Plâs: the pretty eiderdown with its cabbage-rose pattern, the faint smell of pomander and furniture polish. The muscles on her neck stood out like organ stops and at that moment she would have given everything in the world she had ever owned to leave this frightful place and go home.

The next day they were moved to a new room in the same tower, and directly above Miss Nightingale’s quarters.

Catherine was to share with Lizzie, Emma Fagg, Anne Higgins, Sarah Barnes, Georgiana Barry, a nurse from Bermondsey, and a Mrs. Wilson, a gray-faced woman who had suffered dreadfully from seasickness on the way out.

The room had three large windows, one overlooking the Sea of Marmora, the other the faint outlines of Constantinople, and from the third, if you stood on your tiptoes, a large graveyard and the General Hospital, with snowcapped mountains behind it.

Catherine, staring out, saw she was living on an isthmus again, and the memory of her mother, trapped and bleeding in her bedroom at Carreg Plâs, cut like a knife and brought an unpleasant swooping sensation in her body as though she were going to faint. She gripped the wood of the windowsill; it was soft and crumbled in her hands.

“All right, love?” Lizzie’s face swam into view.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, dazed and nauseous. “What’s everyone doing?”

“Cleaning.” Lizzie raised her eyebrows. “What else?”

The floor was sticky with dirt, and in the corner were piles of half-gnawed rags and some rat droppings. She was working up a sweat, when Emma Fagg came at her with a mattress in her hands.

“Out of my way,” she said, “pip, pip. I want to put this down.” She planted her feet in the middle of the small pile of dirt Catherine had swept.

“Bide your time,” Catherine said sharply. “I haven’t finished the floor yet.”

“Bide your time yourself, you stuck-up madam,” said Fagg, thrusting her jaw out. She had thick eyebrows that met in the middle and a weak smile.

Catherine felt her fists clench, she wanted to hit her very hard. “I must be careful,” she thought. “I’m as angry as she is.”

The redheaded orderly arrived with a tray of breakfast—a weak tea that was barely warm and had an unpleasant aftertaste, and sour black bread. They sat down on the floor to eat. The orderly had told them there wasn’t a solitary table in the whole hospital, not even for operations, and no chairs either. After breakfast they put a box over a hole in the carpet, and sat down crossed-legged on their rolled up clothes.