Band of Angel (26 page)

There was only one question Catherine wanted to ask. Mrs. Clark beat her to it.

“How many nurses will you be taking, Miss Nightingale?”

God’s teeth,” said Lizzie when they talked about it later. “How many did you say she was taking?”

“About twenty-five, but she said she couldn’t be sure.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Yes, Lizzie, I do.”

She had a vision of herself at the moment she said it, bending over a soldier in a hospital bed with Mr. Holdsworth’s instrument case in her pocket.

“Are you soft in the head? Didn’t you hear what they said about it?”

She had, and had felt a rising commotion within her. This was the waited-for moment, when everything changed and there was no turning back, when you committed yourself to a big jump.

“I want to save lives. I want to see the world. I want to be a proper nurse; I expect that all sounds very naive to you.”

“It might do if I knew what it meant.”

“Childish.”

“Yes and no.” Lizzie looked as stunned as she did. “Nobody knows. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

“Will you go?”

“I dunno.” Lizzie looked puzzled and unhappy. “I really don’t. Let’s talk about you first,” she said almost aggressively. “What about that young man who is going to come and see you? What will he think on it? Or your father, or your sister?”

She hated Lizzie for bringing up Deio at a time like this. She wanted to enjoy the clear feelings for a while longer.

“For the last time, Lizzie, he is not my sweetheart and I’m not here to run away from him. He was a childhood friend; I don’t know what he is now.”

Lizzie made a sarcastic lah-di-dah sound. She sat down on her bed with her head in her hands and her battered shoes turned inward. Catherine sat down beside her.

“Poor Lizzie, you’ll miss someone won’t you, if you go?”

“Yes, I will.” She wiped a tear away with the back of her hand and looked about her. “And my room here and all.” She looked tiny suddenly, and vulnerable. “But he’s not going to leave his wife and I’ve got to go anyway, haven’t I? I can’t leave those soldiers like that and you cannot imagine how bad some of those nurses will be, handpicked by Miss Nightingale or no. She doesn’t have a clue, Catherine.” She cried a little more, her spare little frame tensed with misery, and said, “So now what are we going to do?”

“Oh Lizzie,” said Catherine, “dear Lizzie, you are so good.”

“Poppycock,” said Lizzie, “but I still don’t get you going.”

So Catherine told her what she hadn’t really explained to anyone in any detail before: all about market day, and Mother going into labor, the blood, the screams, her feelings of helplessness. “All I did was panic and run around. I really do think I could have saved her and this was the promise I made to her. I’ve got to try.”

“But she didn’t ask you to go to war.” Lizzie was holding her hand tight.

“I know, but if I stay here and you go, all I’ll be is a maid for the governesses and what’s the point of that.” Lizzie gave a deep sigh and let go of her hand.

“We don’t have much time,” said Catherine, “so we must go and see Miss Nightingale straightaway and tell her we want to go. If Mrs. Clark stops us on the stairs, we say that we have been asked to go.”

“Oh lord,” said Lizzie, “it’s been so lovely here, I knew it wouldn’t last.”

Catherine looked sympathetic but in her heart of hearts she felt a huge release and a strong new emotion. “I’m really looking forward to it,” she said suddenly.

“What are you brewing there, missie?” Lizzie was looking
at her with deep distrust. “Look, I understand what happened between you and your mother, but women die all the time in childbirth and there’s nothing you can do, so are you really sure? You can be an awful silly girl sometimes, so talk it out loud, don’t be nave or whatever the word is. Think before you jump. You have a bed here, three meals a day, an occupation, and your family and your young man to run home to if it all goes arse upwards.”

“Language, Lizzie, and for the last time, he is
not
my young man. He disapproves of all of this. He hates it. That’s why we shall never really ever get along.”

“Well, my love, you can wave good-bye to him if you go to war—no man would want that.” She felt sick and wanted to stop talking.

“Well, I’m going downstairs, Liz, even if you won’t. Please come.”

They went clattering downstairs together. Mrs. Clark was sitting on a chair outside Miss Nightingale’s locked door. “I’ve had a morning and a half,” she told them. “Ladies upstairs in hysterics, Sidney Herbert coming at three; Lord Lane for tea and dinner, and if I know her, she’ll be up all night.” Mrs. Clark’s proud stare said she did indeed know her—better than any of them did.

Miss Nightingale did sit up for the entire night. She wrote thirty-seven letters.

She sat underneath a pretty green-grass lamp, working past the last sleepy chirp of the sparrow in the laurel tree, and the single rumble of the water cart in Harley Street, and the green light of dusk, and the blue light of morning, as if her whole life must be organized by the time dawn broke. She fired off tender, amusing, determined letters to her family. She finished a Sunday school sermon, promised long ago to local children, in which she asked them to consider humility and obedience to be the greatest of all virtues. She organized the future welfare of the governesses, and wrote to an ex-inmate in Kent, regretting that her navy blue merino cloak had not been left in the cupboard of room nineteen.

No detail was too small; no dark corner of her mind unswept.

She wrote to Messrs Wright and Cox, asking them to quote by
eleven o’clock the next morning for supplying one hundred yards of flannel and twenty-five of thick wool for the nurses’ uniforms. She did the wages, wrote several checks, balanced the books, and finally, just as the first cret began to tinkle its dawn chorus in the lime trees that lined the avenue, drew a thin red line at the end of the accounts book and wrote: “On September 25th 1854, Miss Florence Nightingale resigned her position as Superintendent of the Governesses’ Home.”

Catherine and Lizzie stood outside her room the next morning. They knocked, and called out, “Miss Nightingale, may we come in please?”

“Come in,” answered the clear voice, “come in.”

Her room was perfectly neat. A spread fan of addressed envelopes lay on the desk ready for posting.

“We wish to volunteer for the Crimea.” Better to say it quickly.

“Do you indeed!” Something glacial and remote in her expression suggested this was something you waited to be asked to do. “I have made no decisions yet,” she said.

Catherine heard Lizzie, who was standing slightly behind her, give a sigh. She trod on Catherine’s toe.

“Congratulations, ma’am, on your new appointment. Both of us feel sick to our stomicks about the sodgers, and if there is any small thing we can do to help we would like to.”

“Thank you, Nurse Smart,” she said, and smiled. “But as you can see”—she pointed toward the envelopes—“a busy night, and today will be busier still. Elizabeth Herbert and Lady Bracebridge will conduct the initial round of interviews. I think it only fair to warn that all of you must submit to the same process.”

Perhaps she regretted her slight loss of control the day before. Today she seemed far less approachable.

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you very much, ma’am. We await your orders, ma’am.” Lizzie curtsied but Catherine, who was not in the habit, couldn’t. Miss Nightingale’s glance swept over her before she addressed Lizzie.

“But I would be a fool not to recommend you, Nurse Smart,” she said. “You’ve made a very favorable impression.”

“Miss Carreg is a pretty fair nurse, too,” said Lizzie in a rush. “I’ve been training her up and she’s all right.”

“Training her up?” Miss Nightingale frowned and straightened her paper knife. “I don’t remember asking you to do that, Nurse Smart?”

The rebuke was lightly delivered, but Lizzie hung her head.

“No, ma’am, you didn’t, ma’am.”

“I didn’t think I did, so can you not do that again unless expressly asked. Now, I’m afraid, I’m running out of time.” Miss Nightingale stood up and looked at her watch. “The interviews take place tomorrow at the Herberts’ house”—she scribbled on a piece of paper—“forty-nine Belgrave Square. From two-thirty onward. I won’t be there for all of them, but will put in a good word for you.” She looked at Lizzie.

“You, Miss Carreg,” she delivered her
coup de main
swiftly, “are too young, and too inexperienced, and you will thank me one day for turning you down. Good-day to you, ladies.”

Well, that’s that then,” said Lizzie after the door closed behind them. “What a shame.”

“It’s not a shame,” said Catherine. “I’m going and that’s the end of it.”

Lizzie bit her bottom lip and looked at her apprehensively.

“And how are you going to do that, madam?” she asked. Miss Tidy was peering at them through the banisters.

“Come upstairs,” said Catherine, glaring at Miss Tidy quite rudely, “please, Lizzie.”

They went up the back stairs into Lizzie’s room and closed the door. “You said yourself,” said Catherine, still whispering, “that most of the women who turn up will be unsuitable. Also, it has to be arranged so quickly that they may not come in the numbers Miss Nightingale expects.”

“Fair comment, Catherine,” said Lizzie, “fair comment. But what if Miss Nightingale sees you there after saying no?”

“She said herself that Lady Bracebridge will be there. If she chooses me and you put in another word for me, I surely have a chance.”

“Me! She won’t even recognize me,” said Lizzie, “they live in a world of their own and, to be honest, Cath, I think you do, too, sometimes.” She gave a deep sigh. “Look, it’s no skin off my nose if you try, but next time, don’t look so lah-di-dah and don’t look ’em so much in the eye, you’ll be marked down as an awkward customer.”

“Like this then?” Catherine pulled a baby face and cast her eyes to the ground.

“Perfect,” said Lizzie with a playful punch. “And put a cushion in your stays—you’re not fat enough.”

Torrential rain the next day—the day of the interviews. Three inches in two hours. It lashed against the windows and made the governesses shudder in their beds. Mrs. Clark, who’d been sent all over London on this and that urgent message, went off in a vast tarpaulin looking wild-eyed and important.

“Well, that’s a bit of luck,” said Lizzie, watching her go from the attic window. “I’ll leave now and get back as quick as I can. You can go later. Oh I’m nervous. Now don’t be upset, but I’ve told Miss Widdicombe your plan; she’s going to help you find some wheels.”

“Oh dear, was that sensible?”

Lizzie was swiping at her cloak with a clothes brush, and polishing her shoes. She plunged a hairbrush into the thick frizz of her hair. “Don’t worry, she won’t let us down. I’m going to look for her brother when we get there.”

At two o’clock that afternoon Miss Widdicombe, quite lit up by the drama, hitched up her skirts, pelted out into the street, and five minutes later returned with a cab for Catherine. “Good luck,” she mouthed as the cab pulled away, “good luck!”

The cab swished through the gunmetal gray light, swinging around Baker Street and then into Oxford Street, where there was such a downpour that she was temporarily plunged into darkness. She held on to a little leather strap on the side of the cab and felt quite strange at the thought of being out in the world on her own. All her life she’d had to tell people—Mother, Mair, Father, governesses—exactly where she was, and now all those ropes were being cut one by one. The carriage shushed around a corner, soaking a road sweeper; then, slowly, the shops came into focus and, on a corner near Hyde Park, two children jumped across a puddle laughing their heads off—and she thought of him. He could be in London, or Wales, or anywhere now, leading his own life as she was about to lead hers. Good for him and good for her, she decided: everybody,
eventually, had to grow up. The wheels of the cab stormed beneath her. She felt slightly sick.

Ten minutes later, the cabbie pulled up behind two carriage horses tethered to a row of beech trees in front of a beautiful house.