Band of Angel (23 page)

“So,” she said, after five minutes of chitchat with the governesses, “where is our guest of honor?”

Miss Bowliss, who’d come to the Home one month ago after a bout of pneumonia, was pushed toward the front, where she stood simpering and blushing. She wasn’t born for the spotlight. She had worked for some minor aristocrats up north, had arrived at their house as a Yorkshire lass with a broad accent and straightforward views—often involving socks and the necessity for pulling them up—but long years of mingling with the gentry and with children had mixed in with her accent a widdle-tiddle way of talking that she’d used for so long in the schoolroom, that she could no longer remember to turn it off. And now, little finger crooked above a glass of lemonade, she stood up in the middle of the circle of governesses around Miss Nightingale and said, in her baby voice and with her head on one side, “I’ve had a lovelee, lovelee time here, Miss Nightingale. Thank you evsa mooch. It’s been like paradise.”

A small smattering of applause here, and Miss Nightingale stood up and took her hand. “I wish you all good luck, Miss Bowliss,” she said in her low musical voice, “and I hope for your dear sake that you are now fully restored to health.”

“Thank you, Miss Nightingale,” replied Miss Bowliss. Her chin was wobbling and her eyes filling with tears. “I’ll remember it my whole life long.”

“Good,” said Miss Nightingale briskly. Her lips made a smile.

Catherine noticed that all the governesses were gazing steadfastly at Miss Nightingale and not at Miss Bowliss. Miss Nightingale, with her fine face, her exquisite clothes, her air of breeding, inspired adoration, whereas Miss Bowliss—poor Miss Bowliss with her affectations and her strange figure—was like a Russian carriage: everything seemed ever so slightly wrong. Life was not fair to plain women.

Now Catherine sensed Miss Nightingale had grown bored with
the governesses: she wanted them to stop staring at her and go back to their rooms. She could see through the window that the lamps had been lit in the street outside and a swarm of gnats swam in the greenish light. It was time for prayers, and for baths for those on the Friday-night roster. Miss Nightingale made a special point of telling them that she would be at her desk, working on their behalf for most of this night. Her voice became a shade more distant as she agreed with Miss Sugg that, yes, there always was a great deal to do.

Five minutes later, she bade them good night, “With the exception of Miss Carreg, who I would like to stay.”

When they were alone, she waited nervously while Miss Nightingale composed her desk again to pristine neatness, and covered the milk with a little mob-cap of net with beads hanging around it.

“Sit down,” said Miss Nightingale. She stood against the large window and, giving her a long and penetrating look, said it had dawned on her over the last day that she knew very little about her, and that was a worry. She sat down behind her desk, got out a sheaf of papers, and confirmed that Catherine came from Wales and that she was a farmer’s daughter, then wondered if Catherine had fully understood what was meant by the term “being on probation.” She said that she was probably unaware that in a sense they were all probationers at this home, which had only been going for six months and was under continuous and close scrutiny by the authorities, for whom it was very much an experiment.

“I’m telling you this, Miss Carreg, for a particular reason.” Miss Nightingale’s voice was pure steel now, and her look frightening. “A young man came to the door last night asking for you in what I consider a very impertinent manner. He said your father had given him the address. If you are married, or in any other kind of trouble, you had better tell me right away.”

Catherine bit her lip and felt herself blush as she told Miss Nightingale that she was not.

“Are you now going to tell me now that you have no idea who he was? If you are, save your breath.”

Catherine, now feeling a strange mixture of exhilaration and mortification (so he had come for her after all!), asked if he was a young or an old man, and was told he was young and, as she had already been told, impertinent. Catherine then imagined how
Deio, who never cowed or excused himself, would enter this room, with a faintly swashbuckling air as though he carried a dagger in his boot. He would have looked Miss Nightingale in the eye and, amused and cautious, taken her on like another kind of wild beast whose secrets he would discover. Most women found this irresistible, Miss Nightingale clearly had not. Her heart jolted and for a mad moment she wanted to laugh. It was so naughty of him to have come here.

“I’m sorry. I think he may have been a friend from home. My neighbor.”

“I know very little about you,” Miss Nightingale repeated peevishly. “You’re an unknown quantity. I had no idea for instance that you were so young, and am very out of sorts with myself for forgetting to ask Mr. Holdsworth such a fundamental question. We’re all finding our feet here, Miss Carreg, and if there hadn’t been such a rush to replace the two nurses . . .” Her clean little fingers clenched themselves in frustration and then spread on the gleaming desk.

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“If he comes again, Miss Carreg, you leave. Is that absolutely crystal clear?”

It was. She looked at the stern set of her leader’s mouth, and felt her spirits fall. Outside in the streets she could hear carriages moving through darkening streets; the sharp cries of someone selling something. Some curtains rattled above her, someone coughed, and she felt the night and the unfamiliar rooms close around her like clothes that didn’t fit. When she’d been dismissed, Millie told her to go up to Miss Widdicombe’s room and check she was all right. She’d just woken up and asked if she dared ask for a little tea again. Five minutes later, Catherine put a tray beside her bed. Miss Widdicombe thanked her shyly and said it was the best sleep she’d had in months. The two women looked each other in the eye and smiled and, as she left the room and went upstairs, she told herself that once she became a proper nurse things would change and improve and she wouldn’t feel quite so far away from home.

Then work began in earnest. In the mornings, prayers and breakfast, emptying chamber pots, making beds, taking up trays, running up and down stairs twenty, thirty times a day. She rolled bandages, stacking them in neat rows, darned, sewed, put on coverlets, took them off again, and helped to cook lunches. Then it was returning chamber pots, more sewing and, in between sweeping floors, chopping cabbage, and emptying slops, running errands for Mrs. Clark, whose head always seemed to be in a cloud of steam, and whose temper seemed set somewhere between simmering and boiling, depending on how many governesses they had in.

Catherine was prepared for some menial work, but after two weeks of this, she went to Nurse Smart, whom she now called Lizzie, and complained in some distress that she was nothing but a maid. Lizzie gave her a sideways look and said, “Well, what did you expect? That’s what nursing is for most.”

“I thought Miss Nightingale would teach me things,” she said. “The things that you do: cupping and bleeding and bandaging.”

Lizzie, who was sitting on her bed resting her legs, screwed up her face and squinted at her. “Catherine,” she said, “sharpen up. How can she teach you what she don’t know herself? And how many times do I have to tell you? She’s a lady. She runs things, she don’t do things. I doubt she’s had more than three months experience in a hospital, and none of them at nursing.”

Catherine sat down beside her and gave a soft howl of frustration. “Well, how did
you
learn?”

“Fifteen years hard labor” came the reply. “St. Thomas’s, Doris Ward, Women’s Foul Ward, Surgical, Midwifery, Magdalene, cholera, etcetera.” She ticked them off on her small practical hands.

“Well, how can I learn?”

“I dunno.”

“Oh, don’t tease, help me. You teach me. I have an instrument case.”

“Eeehh, an instrument case! Ain’t she posh.”

“I have some books.”

Lizzie’s face turned red. “You’ll have to read them because I can’t, and don’t say anything else about that because I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Could you really teach me? Oh Lizzie,
please,
I’m feeling so hopeless, and maybe there’s something I could teach you, too.”

“Maybe. Now don’t tug at that pretty hair, missie, it won’t help you. ’Course I’ll help you. When do you want to start?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Why not? But take a note Miss Carreg: I am strict. Oh, and another thing, don’t shout it from the rooftops, in case Miss Nightingale and Mrs. Clark think . . . well, you know . . . they like the orders to come from them, and they’ve already got their eye on you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’m not daft. You’re too young and you don’t quite fit—and they’ll have your guts for garters if you irk them.”

“My what?”

“See Finemouth, you don’t fit.”

“Oh Lizzie.” Catherine shook her friend and groaned. “Don’t tease, I’m so grrrhhhh. I haven’t even been outside the door for two and a half weeks.”

“I know, love.” Lizzie gave her an innocent look. “Welcome to working.”

But Lizzie kept her word. The next day, she drew Catherine aside, and said, “A surgeon is coming today to take some blood from Miss Dwyer, room ten. They’ve asked me to help with the bandages, and if you want to come, too, I won’t say nothing, only don’t get me into trouble by keeling over.”

“I won’t. I’m tougher than you think, Lizzie.”

“All right, all right, and if they ask you to go, don’t make a hoity-toity fuss. Tell them you got confused, that you’re a dim little Welsh girl.”

“Don’t tease. I will, I promise.”

“All right then, follow me.”

She followed Lizzie’s practical little figure upstairs, feeling, as she had so often already, profoundly grateful for her calmness. They went up to the first-floor landing and through the door of room ten. Inside the room, Miss Dwyer, a faded but pretty woman in her forties, was sitting up in bed looking anxious. She’d arrived at the Home a week before, suffering from boils, poor circulation, and general debilitation. She wore a white mob-cap, had her sheets drawn up to her neck, and, as soon as she saw them, put her book aside and began to talk in a nervous, nonstop stream.

“Upon my soul, Nurse Smart, I am so happy to see you—all I’ve heard from Mrs. Clark today is that they will, repeat
will
take blood today, but”—her large eyes bulging—“
when
is the real question, which Mrs. Clark didn’t address at all, and I’ve had no breakfast. I don’t like the idea of it at all, the bleeding, they’ve done it so many times and it hurt the last time, and look—it did me no good before, so why should it this time?” She leaned forward and bent her head; on the back of her neck were three angry-looking sores.

“I can give you a powder for those,” said Lizzie. “It will dry them out and stop the pain. Did they do the blistering here or somewhere else?”

“It was the doctor in Grantham, and he said it would positively do the trick. How much more blood do they need? I really am feeling so much better.”

“Not much more, I shouldn’t think, my love,” said Lizzie in a kindly, neutral voice. “You can’t go on and on, can you?”

While they were mixing up chalk powder in the dispensary room, Lizzie said that whoever had done the blisters on Miss Dwyer’s neck should have their own neck wrung for letting them get so sore—what was the point? And that some of the more forward-looking doctors at St. Thomas’s now forbade bloodletting for wounds and other lowering complaints, saying it cast a strain on the whole nervous system.

“That’s it, a small spoonful of that chalk powder, and put the rest back with the top on tight. You must keep your working areas tidy.”

“Are the other nurses allowed to mix medicine?” asked Catherine.

“Not all of them, no,” said Lizzie, “but Miss Nightingale knows I done it for years at St. Thomas’s, so without blowing my own trumpet, she knows she can trust me. I haven’t lost anyone yet.”

“You don’t blow your own trumpet, Lizzie, nothing like enough.”

While they waited for the doctor, Lizzie told Catherine what the medicines inside the bottles were for: “Opium for sedation. Senna. Castor oil for constipation and bringing babies on. Epsom salts: purging. Chalk and opium for diarrhea, quinine and antimony for reducing fever. To fortify patients doctors say brandy, port, and beef tea; to soothe them arrowroot and salep. Here.” She shoved a piece of paper in Catherine’s hand, and a pen. “If you can, write it down, never rely on your memory to carry you through.”

Catherine wrote notes in her book, and looking up, saw Lizzie watching her in admiration. “Writing’s nothing, Lizzie,” she said, “I could so . . .”

“Don’t talk about it.” Lizzie’s tone was distant. “One day maybe, not now. It doesn’t matter.”

The doctor arrived, a middle-aged man in a frock coat. His bursting face whiskers and clattery boots felt alarmingly male. His noisy boots made their way directly to
Miss Dwyer’s pillow, where she lay nervously twittering. He made her lean forward and had a look at her neck. He sent Lizzie off for some wadding, asked for a bowl, some string, and a cup, and with a sigh, strapped Miss Dwyer’s arm to what looked like a broom handle. Catherine felt sorry for Miss Dwyer who now, silent and bound, waited with her green eyes open wide. The doctor tied a piece of string under her elbow. He looked out of the window, waited for a while, then prodded and pinched until he could find a vein. Catherine knew from her reading that the vein the doctor had selected on the thumb side of the arm was the larger vein, and the one most usually selected for bleeding.