The Twisted Root (5 page)

Thorpe flushed scarlet. "I’m sure she means well," he replied in a tone he presumably intended to be placating, although it came through his teeth. "She simply does not realize that what was true in Sebastopol is not necessarily true in London."

Hester took a deep breath. "Having been in both places, she may imagine that, as far as the healing of injury is concerned, it is exactly the same. I suffer from that illusion myself."

Thorpe’s lips narrowed to a knife-thin line.

"I have made my decision, madam. The women who work in this establishment are quite adequate to our needs, and they are rewarded in accordance with their skills and their diligence. We will use our very limited financial resources to pay for that which best serves the patients’ needs—namely, skilled surgeons and physicians who are trained, qualified and experienced. Your assistance in keeping good order in the hospital, in offering encouragement and some advice on the moral welfare of the patients, is much appreciated. Indeed," he added meaningfully, "it would be greatly missed were you no longer to come. I am sure the other hospital governors will agree with me wholeheartedly. Good day."

There was nothing to do but reply as civilly as possible and retreat.

"I suppose that man has a redeeming virtue, but so far I have failed to find it," Callandra said as soon as they were outside in the corridor and beyond overhearing.

"He’s punctual," Hester said dryly. "He’s clean," she went on after a minute’s additional thought.

They walked hastily back towards the surgeons’ rooms, passing an elderly nurse, her shoulders stooping with the weight of the buckets she carried in each hand. Her face was puffy, her eyes red-rimmed. "And sober," Hester added.

"Those are not virtues," Callandra said bitterly. "They are accidents of breeding and circumstance. He has the opportunity to be clean and no temptation to be inebriated, except with his own importance. And that is of sufficient potency that after it alcohol would be redundant."

They passed the apothecary’s rooms. Callandra hesitated as if to say something, then apparently changed her mind and hurried on.

Kristian Beck came out of the operating theater, but he had his coat on and his shirt cuffs were clean, so apparently he had not been performing surgery. His face lit when he recognized Callandra, then he saw her expression.

"Nothing?" he said, more an answer than a question. He was of barely average height. His hair was receding a little above his temples, but his mouth had a remarkable passion and sensitivity to it, and his voice had a timbre of great beauty. Hester was aware that his friendship with Callandra was more profound than merely the trust of people who have the same compassion and the same anger, and the will to fight for the same goals. How personal it was she had not asked. Kristian was married, though she had never heard him speak of his wife. Now he was regarding Callandra earnestly, listening to her recount their conversation with Thorpe. He looked tired. Hester knew he had almost certainly been at the hospital all night, seeing some patient through a crisis and snatching a few hours’ sleep as he could. There were shadows around his eyes and his skin had very little color.

"He won’t even listen," Callandra said. She had been weary the moment before, and angry with Thorpe and with herself. Now suddenly her voice was gentler, and she made the effort to hide her sense of hopelessness. "I am not at all sure I approached him in the best way...."

Kristian smiled. "I imagine not," he said with mild humor, full of ruefulness and affection. "Mr. Thorpe has not been blessed with a sense of humor. He has nothing with which to soften the blows of reality."

"It was my fault," Hester said quietly. "I am afraid I was sarcastic. He provokes the worst in me—and I let him. We shall have to try again from a different angle. I cannot think of one yet." She looked at Kristian and forced herself to smile. "He actually suggested that we should busy ourselves with discipline in the hospital and being of comfort to the patients." She gritted her teeth. "Perhaps I should go and say something uplifting?" Her intention was to leave Kristian and Callandra alone for one of the few moments they had together, even if they were only able to discuss the supply of bandages or domestic details of nurses’ boarding allowances, and who should be permitted to leave the premises to purchase food.

Callandra did not look at her. They knew each other too well for the necessity of words, and it was far too delicate a matter to speak of. Perhaps she was also self-conscious. So much was known, and so little said.

Kristian’s mouth curled in acknowledgment of the absurdity of it. Hospital discipline was a shambles where the nurses were concerned, and yet rigidly enforced upon the patients. Patients who misbehaved, used obscene or blasphemous language, fraternized with patients of the opposite sex, or generally conducted themselves in an unseemly fashion, could be deprived of food for one meal or more. Alcohol was banned. Smoking and gaming incurred discharge altogether, regardless of whether the person in question was healed of his or her illness.

For nurses, drunkenness was a different matter. Part of their wages was paid in porter, and they were largely the type of person of whom no better was expected. What other sort of woman scrubs, sweeps, stokes fires, and carries slops? And who but a maniac would allow such women to assist in the skilled science of medicine?

Hester marched off, actually to the apothecary’s store, leaving Callandra alone in the corridor with Kristian.

"Have you heard from Miss Nightingale?" Kristian asked, turning to walk slowly back towards the surgeons’ area of rooms.

"It is very difficult," Callandra replied, trying to choose her words with care. The entire country had a burning respect for Florence Nightingale. She was the perfect heroine. Artists painted pictures of her bending over the sick and injured heroes of the recent war in the Crimea, her gentle features suffused with compassion, lit by the golden glow of a candle. Callandra knew the reality had been very different. There was no sentimentality there, no murmured words of peace and devotion. Miss Nightingale was as much a fighter as any of the soldiers, and a better tactician than most, certainly better than the grossly incompetent generals who had led them into the slaughter. She was also erratic, emotional, hypochondriacal, and of inexhaustible passion and courage, a highly uncomfortable creature of contradictions. Callandra was not always sure that Hester appreciated quite what a difficult woman Florence Nightingale was. Her loyalty sometimes blinded her. But that was Hester’s nature, and they had both been more than glad of it in the past.

Kristian glanced at Callandra questioningly. He knew little of the realities of the Crimea. He was from Prague, in the Austrian principality of Bohemia. One could still hear the slight accent in his speech, perfect as his English was. He used few idioms, although after this many years he understood them easily enough. But he was dedicated entirely to his own profession in its immediacy. The patients he was treating now were his whole thought and aim: the woman with the badly broken leg, the old man with the growth on his jaw, the boy with a shoulder broken by the kick of a horse (he was afraid the wound would become gangrenous), the old man with kidney stones, an agonizing complaint.

Thank God for the marvelous new ability to anesthetize patients for the duration of surgery. It meant speed was no longer the most important thing. One could afford to take minutes to perform an operation, not seconds. One could use care, even consider alternatives, think and look instead of being so hideously conscious of pain that ending it quickly was always at the front of the mind and driving the hands.

"Oh, she’s perfectly right," Callandra explained, referring back to Florence Nightingale again. "Everything she commands should be done, and some of it would cost nothing at all, except a change of mind."

"For some, the most expensive thing of all," he replied, the smile rueful and on his lips, not in his eyes. "I think Mr. Thorpe is one of them. I fear he will break before he will bend."

She sensed a new difficulty he had not yet mentioned. "What makes you believe that?" she asked.

Even walking as slowly as they were, they had reached the end of the corridor and the doorway to the surgeons’ rooms. He opened it and stood back for her as two medical students, deep in conversation, passed by them on their way to the front door. They nodded to him in deference, barely glancing at her.

She went into the waiting room and he came after her. There were already half a dozen patients. He smiled at them, then went across to his consulting room and she followed. When they were inside he answered her.

"Any suggestion he accepts is going to have to come from someone he regards as an equal," he replied with a slight shrug.

Kristian Beck was, in every way, intellectually and morally Thorpe’s superior, but it would be pointless for her to say so, and embarrassing. It would be far too personal. It would betray her own feelings, which had never been spoken. There was trust, a deep and passionate understanding of values, of commitment to what was good. She would never have a truer friend in these things, not even Hester. But what was personal, intimate, was a different matter. She knew her own emotions. She loved him more than she had loved anyone else, even her husband when he had been alive. Certainly, she had cared for her husband. It had been a good marriage; youth and nature had lent it fire in the beginning, and mutual interest and kindness had kept it companionable. But for Kristian Beck she felt a hunger of the spirit which was new to her, a fluttering inside, both a fear and a certainty, which was constantly disturbing.

She had no idea if his feelings for her were more than the deepest friendship, the warmth and trust that came from the knowledge of a person’s character in times of hardship. They had seen each other exhausted in mind and body, drained almost beyond bearing when they had fought the typhus outbreak in the hospital in Limehouse. A part of their inner strength had been laid bare by the horror of it, the endless days and nights that had melted into one another, sorrow over the deaths they had struggled so hard to prevent, the supreme victory when someone had survived. And, of course, there was the danger of infection. They were not immune to it themselves.

Kristian was waiting for her to make some response, standing in the sun, which made splashes of brightness through the long windows onto the worn, wooden floor. Time was short, as it always seemed to be between them. There were people waiting—frightened, ill people, dependent upon their help. But they were also dependent upon being adequately nursed after surgery. Their survival might hang on such simple things as the circulation of air around the ward, the cleanliness of bandages, the concentration and sobriety of the nurse who watched over them. The depth of the nurse’s knowledge and the fact that someone listened to what she reported might be the difference between recovery or death.

"I wish he wasn’t such a fool!" Callandra said with sudden anger. "It doesn’t matter a jot who you are, all that matters is if you are right. What is he so afraid of?"

"Change," he said quietly. "Loss of power, not being able to understand." He did not move as another man might have, looking at the papers on his desk, tidying this or that, checking on instruments set out ready to use. He had a quality of stillness. She thought again with a hollow loneliness how little she knew of him outside hospital walls. She knew roughly where he lived, but not exactly. She knew of his wife, although he had seldom spoken of her. Why not? It would have been so natural. One could not help but think of those one loved.

A sudden coldness gripped her. Was it because he knew how she felt and did not wish to hurt her? The color must be burning up her face even as she stood there.

Or was it an unhappiness in him, a pain he did not wish to touch, far less to share? And did she even want to know?

Would she want him to say aloud that he loved her? It could break forever the ease of friendship they had now. And what would take its place? A love that was forever held in check by the existence of his wife? And would she want him to betray that? She knew without even having to waste time on the thought that such a thing would destroy the man she believed he was.

Nothing could be sweeter than to hear him say he loved her. And nothing could be more dangerous, more threatening to the sweetness of what they now had.

Was she being a coward, leaving him alone when he most needed to share, to be understood? Or being discreet when he most needed her silence?

Or was friendship all he wanted? He had a wife—perhaps all he needed here, in this separate life from the personal, was an ally.

"There are still medicines missing," she said, changing the subject radically.

He drew in his breath. "Have you told Thorpe?"

"No!" It was the last thing she intended to do. "No," she repeated more calmly. "It’s almost certainly one of the nurses. I’d rather find out who myself and put a stop to it before he ever has to know."

He frowned. "What sort of medicines?"

"All sorts, but particularly morphine, quinine, laudanum, Dutch liquid and several mercurial preparations."

He looked down, his face troubled. "It sounds as if she’s selling them. Dutch liquid is one of the best local anesthetics I know. No one could be addicted to all those or need them for herself." He moved towards the door. "I’ve got to start seeing patients. I’ll never get through them all. Have you any idea who it is?"

"No," she said unhappily. It was the truth. She had thought about it hard, but she barely knew the names of all the women who fetched and carried and went about the drudgery of keeping the hospital clean and warm, the linen washed and ironed and the bandages rolled, let alone their personal lives or their characters. All her attention had been on trying to improve their conditions collectively.