Band of Angel (22 page)

Mrs. Clark’s stout, bombazined back led the way upstairs, Catherine and the governess trailing behind her. The door, on the first floor, opened on a charming room with a comfortable bed, an embroidered chair, and high sash windows with a view of a laurel tree. Miss Widdicombe, however, who sat down immediately on the bed, seemed too tired to notice.

“It’s a very nice room, isn’t it,” said Mrs. Clark pointedly. “That chair was brought up especially from Hertfordshire by Miss Nightingale.”

“Oh.” Miss Widdicombe was bewildered by this thought—a chair brought especially for her or for the home?

“Yes it was,” said Mrs. Clark. “Put those cases in the cupboard Miss Carreg, and watch your boots, I think you have brought mud in with you.” A small grain of dirt was lifted from the polished floorboards and inspected between red fingertips.

“Yes, that particular material,” she continued, her voice taking on the upper-class drawl of her mistress, “came from the family home at Lea Hurst, which was small—only fifteen bedrooms.” Mrs. Clark often slipped in a speech like this to new inmates when they arrived. Some of the governesses, she considered, had acquired airs and needed to be taken down an instant peg or two.

“It’s a very nice chair,” said Miss Widdicombe, feeling the air chill around her and searching for a reason. “I’m very sorry that I was late, but there was so much traffic on the roads, lots of cows and farmyard animals and things.” She cleared her throat, a nervous habit much imitated by her pupils. “Hmmm . . . I meant to arrive at one-thirty sharp, but . . . hmmm . . . the coach driver got lost.”

“Well, you’ve missed your lunch anyway,” said Mrs. Clark. “There’s nothing to be done about that. You’d better get into bed and wait until the doctor comes at five-thirty. Miss Carreg will bring a cup of tea and some bread and butter at four.”

Catherine went scarlet; she was being treated like a chambermaid.

“Oh, thank you so much,” said Miss Widdicombe, “this is . . .” but a slight trickle of blood had started in the back of her nose and would soon further annoy Mrs. Clark if she didn’t get a handkerchief to it. “I’m so sorry,” she said indistinctly, “and I am very much obliged to you, ma’am.”

Mrs. Clark was slightly mollified, and after warning Miss Widdicombe not to put her suitcases on the chair, and informing her that her night for the bath was Wednesday, headed for the door.

Miss Widdicombe half lay on the bed as soon as Mrs. Clark was gone, and produced a small wad of cotton. “Can you? Would you frightfully mind?” she asked, and Catherine helped her pack her nose with it. Then they unpacked her two clean but ancient nightdresses, a few pieces of soap, and a gloomy-looking jet brooch. Miss Widdicombe looked so pale and tearful that Catherine caught a kind of panic from her. She hadn’t a clue what she was doing here, or what she was supposed to be doing, and Miss Widdicombe seemed as embarrassed by her presence as she was.

After dithering around her room, Miss Widdicombe eventually went behind a screen and took off her dress, put on her nightgown and cap, and, helped by Catherine, got into bed with a little tearing cry of relief. Two minutes later, when she thought Miss Widdicombe was asleep, Catherine whispered, “Are you all right now?”

“No.” Miss Widdicombe’s red-rimmed eyes looked up from the bed. She shook her head; she seemed to be talking mostly to herself. “I’m so worried about everything.”

“Is there anything in particular?” Catherine, unused to confidences from older women, hardly knew where to look.

“I’m worried about my brother, Simon,” said Miss Widdicombe in a sad voice from the pillows. “He’s a junior officer in Varna.”

And now came an unexpected flood of talk. She explained he was her only brother, who had been a small asthmatic child with red hair that she wound around her fingers to make baby ringlets. He’d been in the Crimea six months now, and hated it. Father had insisted he go and won in the end by begging and borrowing enough to get Simon into a regiment, and off he’d gone, to Turkey,
with two hunters borrowed from the family next door that he would not enjoy riding.

“He hates it,” she said. “He spares me nothing in his letters home. The food is foul and everyone in the camp is getting ill. Poor Simon, he really is a fish out of water, he was terribly bullied at school—oh dear, I’m sorry.” Blood and tears were mixing now in her handkerchief. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about it for months. I’m so sorry.”

“Here’s a fresh handkerchief,” said Catherine. She was terrified by the woman’s tears; her own seemed so close to the surface and she had to stay strong. Poor Miss Widdicombe. She felt a little sorrier for her once she was safely asleep and a little more blood was trickling out of her nose. She found out later that Simon died while Miss Widdicombe was at the Home. The war across the world, soon to change all their lives, was escalating.

While Catherine’s first charge slept, she and Lizzie were taken in hand by Millie. She told them their official hours were from seven-thirty in the morning until seven-thirty at night, but because two other nurses had been so recently dismissed (one for cheeking Miss Nightingale, the other for getting pregnant and sicking up on pillowcases in the linen room) they were very short staffed and not to be surprised if their hours were longer. Millie, who had clearly taken a shine to Lizzie, also told them it was wise to watch your back at Number One Harley Street: there were spies everywhere and you could be turned out for anything from sloppiness in the kitchen to cheeking the governesses.

Lizzie listened to all this with her usual calm cheerfulness—nothing seemed to faze her—and when Millie asked her what her hours had been at St. Thomas’s she said, “As many as you could put in without keeling over. No one was counting during the cholera epidemic. Everyone was wore out.”

Millie furled her lip back. “Oh blimey oh riley, it’s criminal. They don’t let anyone infectious in here, thank goodness.”

That afternoon, Millie showed Catherine how to empty and stack the chamber pots, which were left in the main lavatory on the first floor, rinsed, and then stored in a clove-and-ammonia-scented cupboard under the stairs. Bed-making was next, using hospital corners made with a sound like a pistol shot tight over hair mattresses. The white damask covers that came off the governesses’ beds were folded and placed exactly in the middle on the backs of a chair, their ends lined up with the first horizontal spoke of the chair.

“Miss Highandmightingale is a tiger for neatness,” Millie confided. “She tore me off a strip once for not doing a bed right.”

Catherine’s heart sank, and kept on sinking throughout the day. This wasn’t what she’d come for, to fall straight back into the petty rigors of women’s work, in a place where an inch either way in a folded bedspread spelled success or failure. And also—oh so horrible!—Father would have a fit: other people’s chamber pots, and governess night soil, steaming and shameful, covered with a chintz tidy.

“Don’t worry love, it’ll be a doddle,” Lizzie whispered when Millie’s back was turned. “I’ll show you what to do.” She did a little shuffling dance on the floorboards and waggled her hands on either side of her starched cap. Catherine was amazed by her: this small, nondescript person, the kind of person she would normally pass in the street without a glance; amazed at her vitality, her practicality, her attitude to the work, so shamingly different from hers. Lizzie saw this new life as a holiday, a blinding stroke of good fortune, a real laugh; she even admired the chintz po covers and thought them “very ladylike.”

In the late afternoon, Catherine ran upstairs with a cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter for Miss Widdicombe. She was fast asleep, her face buried in the pillow, her large, ringless left hand twitching on the bedspread.

“Don’t dither by the door.” Millie had come up behind her to check. “Close it, and let her be. Sometimes they sleep for twenty-four hours when they come.”

Millie, who was less warm with her than with Lizzie and said she thought she was “quite lah-di-dah for here,” took her into the linen room where bandages had to be rolled and stacked into neat rows, and where new nightdresses and sheets were cut out and readied for sewing. She gave her some needle and thread, hurled a few pieces of coal on the fire, and sat down beside it sewing and sniffing and sighing while the flames popped. At five o’clock, they ran up and down stairs again, putting on coverlets, taking food to bedbound patients, and returning clean chamber pots. Every bone in Catherine’s body was aching and she was exhausted.

At six o’clock, Millie told her to run upstairs quickly, wash and fix her
hair for the tea ceremony in Miss Nightingale’s office at six-thirty to say good-bye to Miss Bowliss. Miss Nightingale hated any form of untidiness or lateness. She ran upstairs, splashed her face with rosewater and did her hair and, when she came downstairs again, all the governesses were standing under a chandelier in the hall near the front door, listening to the beautiful sound of their superintendent laughing inside her office with an unknown woman. The sight of them, so eager and yet so tentative, like large, sad, grown-up children accustomed to being left out, was desolating. Catherine stood apart from them and tried not to mind. And she tried not to think about Deio, who’d been at the back of her mind all day. This was what she had left him for; this was what she had come for.

“It is Lady Bracebridge, I’m sure it is.” Miss Sugg tested the air knowledgeably. “She often comes on Thursdays and is a
particular
friend.”

“It could be Elizabeth Herbert,” said Millie, “she comes very regular. Her husband is prime minister.” She gave Catherine a proud look.

“No no, quite wrong, Millie,” said a fat governess. “He is the secretary of state for war. Have you not read a thing about the war in the Crimea?”

“Same diff.” Millie, who couldn’t read, and hated that fat bitch, made her tongue bulge through her cheek.

“It
is
Selina Bracebridge!” Sugg’s fat cheeks wobbled, and because Catherine was her only audience, explained to her in an excited, mint-flavored whisper that this lady was a key member of the Home’s committee, the wife of Sir Charles Bracebridge, a dashing statesman and an explorer, and a fine-looking woman herself.

“For goodness sake, shuussssh!” A small woman in a wooden wheelchair was eye-level with the keyhole. “Noise down! Are we eavesdroppers?”

“No we ain’t, she told us six-thirty sharp,” said Millie.

“Ssssh!!!” from three governesses.

“Thank you, darling,
bless
you for coming.” The door suddenly opened on a cedar-paneled room and Miss Nightingale walked out arm-in-arm with Lady Selina, who was tall and blond and
perfect in her coral silk hat, with a kind of ripeness to her looks that brought to mind bouncy thoroughbred horses, or corn-fed pedigree cows.

“Heavens above, you’re all very early, aren’t you?” A hint of irritation lurked behind Miss Nightingale’s breezy greeting. “If I might just have time to show Lady Bracebridge to the door.”

“Who is leaving today? Are we losing someone?” Selina’s voice, cooing and slightly husky, was like a pigeon at dawn.

“Yes we are: Miss Bowliss,” said Miss Nightingale. “Miss Bowliss from Yorkshire.” They exchanged a secret smile, for Florence, a celebrated mimic, did a killing imitation of Miss Bowliss—her head on one side, her pantomime horsey bustle somehow elongated. “She’s leaving tomorrow.” Miss Nightingale opened the door. “So, farewell Selina, and thank you again for my
presents
, so many of them.”

“Good evening, Lady Bracebridge,” chorused the governesses, drab as pond life as she darted between them.

When the door opened, Catherine saw a carriage at the gate with two well-matched bays, ready to take their owner, almost skipping down the path now, home to her handsome husband. Her life. Beautiful horses. Father would have approved of the elegant barouche, the harness soft and supple as skin, the varnished doors, too. She would have liked to run out into the street and stroke their faces and admire them, but even that kind of movement was out of bounds now.

“Do come in all of you.” Miss Nightingale returned and was kind enough to show them the contents of the two small packages she was carrying: tea, and some dark chocolate with knobs of crystallized violets on top. Selina had brought them from Fortnums.

The drawing room they filed into was large and well appointed, with a faint, reassuring odor of beeswax and potpourri. On a cedar table under the window someone had laid out a pile of Wedgwood plates, a large earthenware pot of tea, a jug of weak lemonade, and two plates of bread and butter and Madeira cake.

“Oh good-ey gumdrops,” Miss Bowliss gasped.

Tea was poured, and drunk with fingers held just so, and the good china given its due deference. Once again Catherine felt
nervous in the slender, even girlish, presence of Miss Nightingale, who looked well in an expensive, purple wool dress, very severely cut, and with a rim of white at the collar, and who handed out tea and encouraged cake-eating so kindly. Her clever, dark eyes seemed to miss nothing, and the intensity of their gaze and the intimidating neatness of her glossy chestnut-colored hair suggested high standards that might never be met.