Band of Angel (55 page)

“What was that?” said Catherine. All her movements felt stiff and unnatural.

“So very silly of me to jump after all this time,” said Miss Weare, “it’s only target practice.”

Late in the afternoon, a message came to her via Miss Weare: at six-thirty, she and Sister Veronica were to report back to the bed of Private Willis, the young soldier with frostbite. She had no option but to do as she was told and, at the appointed time, stood by the bed. It was bitterly cold now, even though the fire and the lamps had been lit; Willis’s lips were blue. While they waited, he slipped in and out of sleep, talking to her when awake about what had worried him for days: his parents were tenant farmers from Warwickshire. He was the eldest and only son and if he lost his leg, they’d lose their livelihood.

“What’s this? What’s this?”

Cavendish, in a black muffler, and with the arms of his frockcoat sodden with blood, was walking toward them, determined as usual to take center stage.

“He’s frightened about losing his leg,” Catherine warned him.

“Well, nobody’s said he would yet,” he grumbled. “Let me have another look.”

He unwrapped the bandages. Willis was asleep again, his calves
black and ulcerated, his toes as white as candle wax and looking about as useful. He sent Sister Veronica away for a bowl of warm water.

“And so, Nurse Carreg,” he said when she was gone, “how did you contrive this?”

“Contrive this!” She leaped away from him.

“To follow me here.”

She gave him such a look of dislike that even he looked startled.

“That’s a lie,” she said, “and you know it.”

He drew in his breath. “Still so fiery. How interesting.” The sight of his damp mouth made her flesh crawl.

He drew a curtain around the man, and brought his lamp closer. “I’ve thought about you, Catherine,” he said in a low, urgent voice, quite different from his facetious one. “I really can help you, just be a little bit nice to me. I have a house, quite close to the hospital, and Miss Weare is a pussycat compared to Miss Nightingale. No one will know or care. I want this,” he said flatly. “I don’t have time to argue about it. I’m tired. I have it all set up for us now.”

“What are you talking about? What are you doing?” She looked down pleadingly at Willis, but he was semiconscious and had no interest in either of them. She was shaking. “Please, please stop this.”

“Oh, don’t worry about him”—he followed her eyes—“he’s gone or nearly. Worry about yourself, Catherine.” He straightened up, and all the light had gone out of his eyes.

“You don’t know how things work here and I do, so don’t make me cross, Catherine, or I will do things I might regret later. Do I make myself clear?”

Never clearer, only this time, there was no Lizzie or Barnsie to confide in, only herself in a new room and in a new bed and with a new set of colleagues, who probably wouldn’t believe her anyway. The only good bit of news came later that week when Sister Veronica told her that Cavendish had been sent to assist at a frontline regimental hospital opposite the defenses at Sebastopol. It was about
as dangerous a position to be in as could possibly be imagined, and for the first time in her life, Catherine hoped that another human being would die.

Then, when the duty rosters were put up for the next week’s work, came something else that seemed like a fortuitous change of scene. It was part of every nurse’s routine to go down every five weeks to the kitchen and do a stint with Miss Davis. Her turn had come.

On her sixth day of working in the kitchen, it occurred to Catherine that, for the first time in a long time, she felt safe, and that this was entirely due to Elizabeth Davis: she ran the kitchen with a rod of iron and was, in her own way, every bit as powerful as Dr. Cavendish.

In a world where food meant life or death, Betsy Davis, with her genius for culinary improvisations, her sudden furies, her dimpling smiles, and her astounding energy was as treasured and pampered as a goddess. They worked together, with two other orderlies, with barely a break from five-thirty in the morning to nearly midnight, when Miss Davis retired to her “room” near the kitchen: a cubbyhole with a calico curtain between her and the supplies she trusted with no one. Nobody entered her kitchen without her permission, or left without her noticing.

Fortunately, and maybe because she was from Wales, too, Davis seemed to take a shine to Catherine from the start. She told her she was a good hard worker, and that she could make a decent “Cry-am-mean” cook out of her.

Her first lesson was to show Catherine how a few onions, a scrap of cabbage, some water, and bones if you were lucky, could, with clever seasoning, make a passable soup or a stew. The stew varied according to what was available: high meat went into it and game; even, when needs must, horses and dogs, and once, in desperation, rats. Spices, of which Davis had her secret supply (she’d been a nanny once in the West Indies) were jealously guarded. Nothing was thrown away, nothing wasted.

And when kitchen staff weren’t cooking, they cleaned. As far as Davis was concerned, the mucky, unpredictable world outside stopped at her window. In her kitchen, glass shone, curtains were clean and pressed, and, after fierce fights with the purveyors, she had stoves that worked, five glowing braziers, a large scrubbed table, and, best of all, food. No wonder the men fought to work down here.

Catherine, turning up for her seventh day of kitchen work, found the usual anxious crowd of pensioners and young boys standing outside the door with their bowls, pails, and tin cups, praying that when the door opened—at six-thirty sharp—Miss Davis would have no nasty shocks for them. Sometimes even this Welsh wizard could not conjure supplies out of thin air.

Inside the kitchen, the trays were neatly laid, the porridge turned and flopped with a lazy sound inside a large copper pot.

“Stir that, love, would you?” Davis handed her a wooden spoon. “There’s no milk for it mind,” she added. “It was sour as junket when it came and there are no greens: the bullock cart tipped over from Ballyclava, but you cut the bread up and tray up the porridge, then we’ll see what’s in that lot.” She pointed toward four wooden crates standing in the corner, with General Hospital Balaclava written on the side.

There was a strict order for doing everything in the kitchen: at eight o’clock soldiers’ breakfast, nine o’clock officers’ breakfast, lunch at one. Davis had taught the orderlies punctuality the hard way: if they were late for no good reason, she refused to cook their food.

After the breakfasts had gone upstairs, Davis took off her apron, Catherine wiped the table, and, as she had done every day for the past six days, dared herself to ask the question. If anyone knew, Davis, who knew everyone in the hospital, would, which was why her heart was bumping in her chest even at the thought of it. Asking the question felt like jumping a ravine: a final thing that could in one second obliterate her.

Several times, she’d lined up the words in her mind and almost said them, but the time never quite seemed right, and even now, a quick glance at Miss Davis—focused and looking furious as she
held a large chilblained finger on the tip of a knife while a pile of onions exploded into small fragments—was enough to put her off.

Around ten-thirty, when the kitchen got quieter, they both sat down for a bowl of porridge and a cup of black tea, and she almost came out with it, but then an old orderly, a stretcher-bearer, came into the room with an empty bowl. He kissed Miss Davis and called her his darling and his heart.

“Now don’t you cooch up to me,” she warned him with a mock blow, “see those over there?” She pointed toward the crates. “This young lady and I are going to open them this afternoon. They’re gifts sent by the good people of England to nasty old men like you.”

The man, cackling happily, seemed to love this ritualized abuse. She sent him off with a dried apricot and a prayer book, and when the door closed, pushed the crate toward Catherine and gave her a carving knife to cut the string.

Opening the free gifts with Miss Davis normally held all the fun of forbidden things, because in Scutari, where the boxes went to the purveyor and got lost along with boots and wooden legs and other useful things, they’d been the source of such enormous tension. Miss Nightingale had made lists of them in triplicate and kept telling the nurses that if they ever
ever
touched them they would be accused of stealing and be sent home. But, on this morning, she almost exploded with nervous tension. She
had
to ask today; next week she might be sent back to the wards. They carried on unpacking a mad assortment of goods: knitted muffettees, a box of dried peas, some bacon wrapped in brown paper, two ancient linen shirts with tide lines around their necks, the head of a doll, a smart leather case with a pair of scissors in it, a bag of tea.

“Oh, the ragman could make his fortune from this lot,” said Miss Davis, throwing out a broken egg timer and a few lines of knitting. “But as far as the food is concerned, I’ve told Mr. Fitzgerald that unless it’s actually crawling, I’ll use it.”

She opened the lid of the stove and stabbed around viciously, making sparks fly, and then dived again into the cartons, this time coming up with a ham and a packet of sago.

“Shall I do that, Miss Davis?” said Catherine. They were alone together at last.

“No, love, you sit there, and as I said before, call me Betsy. I can’t have a Welshwoman bowing and scraping to me.”

Now or never! Now or never! Ask her quickly.

“Thank you, Betsy. Betsy?”

“Yes, love.”

“I want to ask you something.”

“That ham will cook up lovely.” Betsy’s face was glowing from the stove. “All right, so it’s only enough for a mouthful for most of them, but that might be the last mouthful a man will get and the sago’s very soothing to the stomach cases. Innit?”

She often ended sentences with “innit,” a sharp question needing no reply.

“Betsy?”

“Yes, love.”

She took a deep breath.

“I’m looking for a man. A young man, a drover from Wales called—”

“Deio Jones,” said Betsy.

“You know him!” Waiting for Betsy to tuck a carrot around the ham and some onions and some weevily corn, was the longest few seconds of her life.

“Yes I do. Poor love.”

“Why poor love?” Her voice was trembling.

The door opened and an orderly, looking green and colicky, came in. He told Miss Davis he was very sorry but he’d been “taken bad with the runs” and would have to stop working for the morning; if someone else could take the lunches upstairs, he’d be very glad.

Waiting for Betsy to finish what she’d been saying about Deio made her believe, as she had as a child, in a real hell again, with crackling flames and the cries of the damned.

This time, she grabbed Betsy by the collar. “Betsy, please,” she said. “Tell me where he is.”

“Ward six I think,” she said.

“What happened to him?”

“He was blowed up,” said Betsy simply. “It was a horrible thing. He was a handsome lad—so how
am
I supposed to get my dinners up to the ward?” She suddenly snapped at the orderly.

“When did he come in?” she said.

“I’m not sure,” said Betsy. “Was it last week or the week before? You get confused, don’t you. Oh dear, you do look pale. Stay down here for a while and help me tray up the veg and then, if you want to, take some to him—although I don’t think he’s eating mind,” she said as an afterthought.

Betsy consulted her lists; she said there were four others on ward six, the officers’ ward, who hadn’t had their lunches either so she could take up some ham and sago to them as well if she liked. She raced around in a daze, lifting trays and emptying soup pots, until at last Betsy handed her the tray and the covered bowls and said she could go.

The time was just before one o’clock, but it was dark as dusk outside the kitchen; there were purple shadows on the snow and a bitter wind darted through the trees. Ward Six was about two hundred yards from the hospital, up an inclined path. It was treacherous underfoot and she and the orderly kept slithering into the dirty snow on either side of the path. The wind caught the corner of her cape and flung it around; as she was wrestling it down she saw a Turkish man and his mule standing in their path blocking their way.

“Move aside, you silly bastard.” The orderly directed a shaft of pure fury toward the man.

“Don’t worry,” she was worried the two of them would fight, “we’ve got time.”

Her voice sounded reedy and unnatural.

“There we are, miss, he’s moving now,” he told her more gently, for she had started to shiver. “It’s only over there.”

He pointed toward a long, battered wooden hut with a plume of smoke coming from its chimney. There was a row of frozen bandages hanging on a washing line outside. When they’d reached the front door, the orderly wiped his feet ceremoniously on an old coconut mat. She stared at him blankly; what a pointless thing to do: the floor was as dirty inside as out. She could hardly breathe as they walked up a narrow corridor, smelling the sulphurous mixture of smoke and night soil. Through one door,
then another, and then into a long narrow room with eight beds crammed on each side of it. Each bed was separated from the next by about two feet, and an occasional torn calico curtain to give the illusion of privacy. In this gloom she saw only dark figures huddled under bedclothes, all bathed in the same copper-colored light. There were murmurings and occasional cries of pain, and then laughter from two officers sitting in their dressing gowns playing cards, one with a smeared bandage around his eye, the other with his trouser leg pinned up.