Band of Angel (36 page)

“When we are asked to” came the firm reply.

“And when will that be?”

“Don’t push me,” Lady B’s voice had risen almost to a scream. “It’s not up to
me
.” And then she left, her shoulders high, the back of her skirts rimmed with dirt. She wasn’t quite a lady and they were certainly not nurses, but all that would change.

It was Higgins who, during the long hours shut in their room, read to them from books, or told them the plots of the penny dreadfuls she adored. One afternoon—they were sewing and it was snowing outside, a dreaming, drifting, muffling snow that seemed to emphasize their isolation—she told them about a book called
The Diary of an Idle Woman in Constantinople.
They jeered and laughed bitterly at the title. “Don’t laugh,” said Higgins, “it’s about a real lady and the sights she saw there. Come here.”

She took them to the window and pointed across the misty water.

“The palace of Topkapi is over there,” she said in a mysterious voice, and to Barnsie, whose face was covered in flea bites, “stop scratching!” “Listen!” she went on. “The people who lived across
there were once part of a very rich country.” Sounds of derision from the floor where the nurses were sitting—the chairs still hadn’t come.

“It’s true,” Lizzie chimed in, “Lady B told me. It’s beautiful inside that palace, the walls are covered in mosaics, the cellars crammed with jewels. There are beautiful pavilions and hanging gardens and water splashing everywhere and horses with saddles encrusted with pearls, and sumptuous feasts with thirty courses.”

It tugged at Catherine’s heartstrings to see her friend’s pale face so lit up by a silly story.

“Here,” said Higgins, “who’s telling this? The food was something wonderful,” she went on in her important voice.

“I’ll thump you if you talk about food,” said Barnsie. “I’m so hungry I could cry.”

But Barnsie was shouted down with cries of “What food?”

“There was sumptuous feasts, all night: roast pigeons, pastries dripping with honey, fresh fruits, sherbets.”

“And the harem, Anne Higgins,” said Clara with a nasty snigger, “tell us about that.” They all knew about the two sailors.

“There were three hundred women locked up in the Sultan’s harem, and if he liked them they slept on silk beds and had a bath in milk and then he stuck it in them!” Whoooo! from the women. “But if he got sick of them it was off to the dungeons with you, or they sent you to the Palace of Tears.”

“How do you remember all this, Anne?” Catherine was impressed.

“I read it in a book.”

Catherine saw Lizzie dip her head and wince, she so wanted to read. And Catherine wanted to teach her, but it was a delicate matter.

“Wonderful life, ain’t it?” said Clara Sharpe, “being a fucking woman.”

Then a discussion about whether they’d rather be a nurse or in the harem broke out, and the thought of Higgins or Barnsie being odalisques was so rich, they all started to laugh.

“Oh, the nuns wouldn’t like this.” Clara Sharpe wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. “Oh it’s a bit too rich for them. I shouldn’t
like to see Sister Agnes in a . . .” she was gasping at her own wit, “in a . . . milk bath,” she exploded.

Her shout of laughter got them all going, and soon, hooting and cackling, they were collapsing on the floor, holding their sides, giving way to that kind of wild laughter that feels so strangely close to tears.

It was a week later, after morning prayers, that their real work seemed to begin. First, Mr. Ware, the chief purveyor of the Barrack Hospital, a pompous man in his seventies, turned up puffing at their door to say he would take them on a walking tour of the hospital that morning. He had closed his eyes and pursed his lips when he said good morning to them, and when he opened his eyes again Catherine caught a look of immense weariness as if to say, “This lot are one more problem I have to face.”

Then, at a surprisingly fast pace for such a stout man, he led them down the series of muddy tracks that crisscrossed the hospital square. First stop was the gate they had come through on the first day. “Hospital entrance!” he barked, and then pointed toward a honeycomb of dirty windows on his right, only just visible through the gloom. “Troop depot,” he rattled out, quickly speeding up his pace. “Stables.” He was almost running. Catherine found she could not bear to look at the horses, it hurt too much. “Accommodation for almost two hundred horses. Two-o-o horses. And the kitchens . . .” A blur of steamed-up windows, the silhouette of a huge pot, but Ware told them there was no time to look around.

When they got back, their heads were swimming, their skirts and boots covered in mud, and all of them had been startled by what a large and confusing place the hospital was. “It’s more like a blooming town,” commented Clara Sharpe, scarlet from her run in the snow.

Later they learned that, like all towns, the hospital had its dark secrets. Ware had not, for instance, taken them into the network of cellars under the hospital where close to two hundred prostitutes lived. They’d made their homes around the shadowy pipes and on top of the sewers and here they met their customers and had their
children and, in many cases, starved to death unseen, like rats under the floorboards.

Clara Sharpe had pointed out another strange omission. “Mr. Ware,” she said, “where are the patients?”

“My dear madam”—Mr. Ware clutched his head as if it was a precious box full of secrets—“If you expect to just walk into a ward and start work you are to be sadly disappointed. There are procedures to be followed.”

“Which ones?” Sharpe was not impressed.

“Well,” he said, “picture yourself in that ward over there.” He pointed to the left. “A young infantryman is admitted. He is wearing the uniform he fell in. His leg has been shot off. You must procure for him a bed, a blanket, a meal, a nightshirt, and some medical attention. How, and in what order are you going to do all that?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Clara. She had her hands on her hips and was giving him a lemony look. “You’d better tell me.”

“I will tell you.” Mr. Ware was magnanimous. “For his bed, he needs a pink slip of paper, to be taken to the ward officer and countersigned by me. For his meal you go to the ground floor and stand in line for a spoon diet or, if meat, line up for a blue slip that must be countersigned by his ward officer and an orderly. If he needs a special diet, stand in line on the second floor. As for his nightshirt, knife, fork, and spoon, it is army regulations that he provides same for himself.”

It was Catherine’s turn to glare at Mr. Ware. All the men they’d watched land at the hospital had done so half naked, half starved, and with no possessions at all.

“What happens to men without full kits?” she asked clearly.

“And if he is without them,” continued Ware glassily without bothering to look at her, “the man for him is Mr. Gumpney from stores, and only then with the correct paperwork. Stores have a habit of marching off and when they do, men like Mr. Gumpney from stores are held responsible and have to pay for any deficits from their wages.”

An orderly came in holding up a fistful of papers for Ware to sign, which he did hurriedly, with one knee held up and used as
a desk. While his pen was darting, Miss Nightingale came in and waited until the pen was wiped and put back in his pocket.

“Mr. Ware,” she said at last, “thank you for interrupting a busy morning on our behalf. You have so many pressing things to do.” She smiled at him. Ware was bowled over. He bowed jerkily and almost backed out of the door, promising more of his time at a later date.

Clara Sharpe was not charmed. “Well, that was all clear as mud, wasn’t it?” she muttered when he was gone. A nun standing next to her frowned gently, but Clara was off.

“Miss Nightingale,” she said, “I beg your pardon, but I do have one question: What are we going to do today?”

“Soon,” said Miss Nightingale deliberately. Her smile had gone.

“Not today?”

“I have given you my answer, Miss Sharpe.”

“But we see those soldiers landing, it’s . . . horrible, terrible.”

“Miss Sharpe”—an edge of steel in her voice—“when I give an order, you must trust it’s the right one. And if you find this impossible, you will have to go home, and the sooner the better.”

An old man with a sweet face and a gammy leg came through the door at this moment with a piece of paper in his hand. He gave them all a friendly smile and told them they’d surely be needed soon—all hell had broken loose outside, and an order had come through for them to move their bedrooms up one floor.

“They’re landing a lot of men, and they want the ground floor for stores again.”

Miss Nightingale gave him an icy look. “I am taking my orders from Dr. Menzies,” she said. “I don’t remember him mentioning you.”

“Well, miss,” he was completely unoffended, “Private Sam Parker is my name, and if you do want me I am at your service and very happy to see to you, and your gels, too.”

She shut the door on him, blotting out his smile.

On the third of November, they woke to find a dead woman among them. Poor Mrs. Wilson, a quiet type, had never recovered from the journey and had caught dysentery soon after her arrival. Now, pale and looking peaceful, she lay on the divan, her face covered in fleabites. Two orderlies took her away in a cloth bag and buried her in a graveyard they could see from their window. None of them were invited to her funeral.

And then fear arrived like a new inmate in their room. They could feel it in the air, a quiet beating like trapped wings below the normal surface of things; a strained look in other people’s eyes. Sometimes it looked like anger and sudden shouts would erupt out of some trivial misunderstanding, and sometimes it felt like grief, and tears arrived as though they had stood waiting. At nights, Catherine couldn’t stop herself brooding over her mother’s death: the blood, the bed; herself at the window shrieking “Tell me what to do.”

Realistically, they knew that their hospital would not be invaded—the fighting, the Crimea, was over a hundred miles away—but dying was now a real possibility and irrational fears sprang up: a Russian could climb through the window and murder them; or they’d die from a rat bite or some foreign disease. It hardly mattered. Once fear was in the blood it raced around the body like a contagion.

In this mood, all of them were morbidly sensitive to news of the war and aware that no two people ever said the same thing. When, for example, they’d asked Miss Nightingale what had happened
at the Battle of Balaclava, she’d turned it into a sermon that they could learn from. She told them that during a charge by the Heavy Brigade, a few months ago, five hundred British men had fought against three to four thousand Russians. “That charge will go down as one of the great feats of cavalry against cavalry in the history of the world. Every man in that line,” she said, “expected to be killed, but they obeyed instructions to the letter; they rode in perfect formation through flank after flank of Russian forces. Do you see how important it was for them to stay in line?”

She gazed at each one of them intently.

“Yes miss,” a number of their ranks said meekly.

“And why, if I say to you ‘stay back until it is time to move forward,’ you must obey, as any good soldier must obey their commander?”

“Yes, Miss Nightingale,” they practically shouted.

She had them, for that moment, in her hand, united in an ecstasy of pride and emotion. Shame that, a few moments later, Miss Nightingale was interrupted by Sam Parker, the ancient pensioner who had become their favorite orderly. He limped through the door with another roll of linen for them to hem, smiling his gummy smile, and Miss Nightingale, who often in some strange way seemed to be in flight from them, left abruptly. He might have followed, but they pulled him back into the room and begged him to finish the story she had started—they were so starved for news.

Sam, who had served in the Peninsular War as a regimental drummer, was indiscreet and amusing and liked nothing better than to gossip.

“I’m too old to be flogged,” he said, “so I’ll talk to you gels.”

He held up a chilblained finger and closed the door. “A bit confidential this.”

He told them that after this wonderful charge by the Heavy Brigade, there was another charge, this time by the Light Brigade.

“A shambles,” he whispered. “A complete moog-up. Those men you see being lifted up the hills in the morning, you should hear what they say of it. Most of them, if they weren’t so weak and low in spirits, would die of rage. They say if you were to search
the length and breadth of England, you’d be hard put to find two greater muffs than Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan.”

The room went very quiet. Catherine saw Barnsie’s knuckles turn white.

“What happened, Sam?” asked Lizzie.

“The whole thing was no better thought out than a barroom brawl; our horses and men were starving before they went into battle; the Rooskies were snug as bugs in their silk underwear.”

Poor Sam, he was so cut up. They watched his mouth stiffening and swallowing.

“After Balaclava,” he said when he had found his voice again, “Lord Cardibag goes back to his yacht; has a bath and a bottle of Champagne.”