Band of Angel (37 page)

“Oh come on, Sam,” they said, “now you are making up a story.”

“I am not!” he said with heat. “You ask Miss Whatsit. He keeps a yacht in the bay, and the soldiers went home to dry biscuits and tents under a foot of water. Oh, don’t let me start, ladies, I’ll spit blood just to think of it.”

She thought of Deio and felt a cold terror. If he’d decided to come, she would never forgive herself. Barnsie, who had a soft spot for Sam, patted his arm. He looked at her and tried to control himself.

“I should never have come out here,” he told her. “I’m too old and I’ve been a silly old fool. I volunteered you know.”

Barnsie put her arm around him. She sat and talked to him in a low, crooning voice, while Catherine sat and suffered. His story confirmed her worst fears. Nobody told the truth here; nobody could be trusted. Miss Nightingale, who they’d been invited to think of as a kind of saint, was in the end a government official, and if there was a choice between the government’s line and the unvarnished truth, there
was
no choice. Then Sam gave them the bale of cotton that, like most of the linens in that hospital, was spotted with green damp in some places. He told them to cut it up into bandages and slings.

“There isn’t enough bandages in the world to stem all the blood down there,” he said quietly. “It’s a knacker’s yard, and if you want Sam Parker’s opinion you’ll be on the wards next week.”

* * *

That afternoon a lump of gristle and a bare piece of bone came close to ruining Catherine’s life. She was sitting sailor fashion on the floor next to Lizzie, who was sewing a length of canvas that she was stuffing with damp straw. Their hands were so cold they took turns warming them under the blanket. Catherine had finished three mattresses and Lizzie, with her quick neat gestures, was putting the final row of stitches at the end of the fourth, when the entire seam came apart in her hands in a moldy hopeless little puff of air, and then she exploded.

“I’m sick to death of sewing,” she shouted. “I’m going downstairs.”

“Watch out!” Lizzie saw the accident coming before she did. Catherine’s hand came down on the point of a sharp canvas knife, blood surged and a flap of skin below the ring finger of her left hand dangled.

They were always short of water, but Lizzie immediately poured half of her pint-ration into a bowl and put some iodine in it. And then everybody was very kind: Clara Sharpe helped Lizzie staunch the blood and bandage the wound; Barnsie hauled herself up from the floor and patted her shoulder.

Freezing cold and unable to sew, she passed the afternoon waiting and watching, trying not to hear the cries of a new crop of wounded men being unloaded outside their window. The sky outside looked perfectly blank and she felt as pointless as the snowflakes drifting down. At four o’clock, the redheaded orderly arrived with lunch.

Catherine looked into the dirty pail of food he’d left on the floor, and something snapped. The dish of the day was a dark gray stew, shiny with globules of fat, and composed mostly of bone and gristle. With a spoon in her good hand, she poked through the bones and the fat and found at the bottom of the burned pan a piece of blue rag tied to a chunk of raw meat. She shrieked with rage, speared the piece of meat with a fork, quit the room, marched down the stairs, and knocked with her foot on Miss Nightingale’s door.

She could hear voices inside, then a silence, and then shadows underneath the door rearranged themselves. When the door opened, Miss Nightingale stood in the light, a sheaf of papers in her hand. Behind her was a middle-aged man sitting at the desk in a frock coat.

“Miss Carreg?” Miss Nightingale said coldly, “what are
you
doing here?”

“Miss Nightingale,” she said, “we can’t work and now it seems we can’t eat either.” The piece of meat hung in her hand, dripping its gravy on the floor.

“What are you doing? What is that?” Miss Nightingale was livid.

She heard herself say, “We have had enough.”

“Enough!” Miss Nightingale was one of those people who grew quieter as they grew angrier. “How dare you stand there and say that.”

“Miss Nightingale,” she said, “we cannot work on food like this?” There was a lamp on the desk. She held the raw meat under it.

“I warn you, Miss Carreg, if that drips on my papers I shall be very angry indeed.” She walked across the room and found a plate, a knife and a fork, apologizing to the doctor, who was smiling, for holding him up; she cleared some papers from her desk, put the meat on a plate under the circle of lamplight. She sliced the meat in half, exposing a red tangle of uncooked veins and yellow fat.

“Delicious!” The doctor’s whiskers twitched, he was enjoying this scene like a man at a cockfight. “This is the way we feed our men.” Then he looked at Catherine, a full look that seemed to sweep from the top of her head to her toes.

“Perhaps she does have a point here,” he said, “it is a bit of a dog’s dinner.”

“She has no right to say so,” said Miss Nightingale in a confidential aside. “If the meat is good enough for the men it is good enough for us.”

Catherine knew there was no question of Miss Nightingale and Lady Bracebridge’s eating the same food as they. Theirs was cooked separately by Mrs. Clark. But now Miss Nightingale was cutting a flap of meat from the edge of the gristle. She put it in her mouth and chewed it neatly until it was swallowed up.

“Perfectly edible, Miss Carreg,” she said when she was finished, “take it up to the other nurses and tell them it’s that or nothing.”

The doctor stood up.

“Before you leave,” he said, “show me your hand. It looks sore.”

“It’s nothing,” she said shortly, “it’s just a cut.”

“Miss Carreg, if Dr. Cavendish wishes to see it,
show it to him
. He knows what the risks are.”

Miss Nightingale smiled at him, one professional to another, and Catherine held out her hand. When the doctor leaned over her, she saw the stained rim of his collar, the full damp mouth above the bristling whiskers.

“I can’t see well in this light.” He squinted at the bandage. “She’d better come into my dispensary, Miss Nightingale—I’ll send her back upstairs afterward.”

“Oh, would he indeed,” Catherine thought, “like a child to be sent packing.”

“Thank you so much, Dr. Cavendish, for all your help this morning. We are of course entirely in your hands.”

The doctor was taller than she had expected and strongly built. His dark frock coat had a greenish mold growing on top and was stained with rusty spots of blood. He gestured toward the door and she had no choice but to follow him.

A gray day outside, the hospital looked gloomy in the later afternoon light. They passed three soldiers in the corridor wearing a strange collection of clothes—a tattered fur hat, a dressing, a flapping blanket. She held her breath as they passed; their smell was frightful and they knew it; they looked the other way as though
ashamed. Farther up the corridor, where a gust of snow blew through an open window, a group of orderlies, almost as ragged as the soldiers, were washing dishes in an incongruously beautiful marble basin set in the wall. They stopped and stared at her in amazement.

“Yes, it’s a woman, and she is injured,” Dr. Cavendish snapped. “Let us pass.”

He opened a door to the left of the fountain and ushered her in. “My consulting rooms.” He bowed.

The room was small, dark, and showed signs of a hasty conversion. A shirt hung from a rusty nail and a divan, which ran Turkish style around the room, was covered in an untidy tangle of bandages, papers, and medical implements. There was no table and no chairs.

“Sit down.” He took a bundle of papers from the divan. “Not very grand is it?”

He put a match to the wick of a brass oil lamp and light flared up over both of them. He had peculiar eyes, she noticed: they were large and veiny, slightly protruding, and curiously blank. You thought of eyeballs rather than eyes when you looked in them. He was looking at her now.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said impatiently, “let me take a look at you. I wish our orderlies could dress a wound this well,” he murmured, as he untied Lizzie’s expert bandaging. His fingernails were thick with dirt.

Catherine was shaking. She didn’t like this. Her finger, bloodstained and grimy, lay in his hand.

“Does it hurt?”

“A little, but it’s nothing.”

“Things that hurt”—he moved his hand down the pad of hers, and made a little circle with his thumb—“are not good for you.”

“I feel,” her voice sounded strange to her, “like a perfect fool. You must be so busy here and I am wasting your time with a silly cut.”

He drew his forefinger down the lifeline of her palm.

“Cuts like this are always to be treated seriously, especially in a pisshole like this.”

“Sir!”

“Forgive me. I’ve been living with men too long.”

He kept her hand in his; she could see a muscle throbbing in his jaw.

“What’s this?” He touched her breast. “Nothing!” Her face was flaming. Looking down she saw stains from the meat she had carried had dropped on her bodice and looked like watery blood.

“So, no wound there?” He was teasing her and she couldn’t bear it. “Look,” his voice was quiet again, gentle. “Don’t look so startled. I’m not the enemy, I’m a doctor, and you’ll be on the wards soon. We need you fighting fit.”

“Why do you say that?” For the first time their eyes properly engaged.

“Well, you cannot sit up there forever like the Princesses in the Tower.”

“That’s not what we want! We want to work.”

“It was a joke, heavens! What a
spirited
girl. A dirty girl, too.”

She pulled away from him saying fiercely, “I hate being dirty.”

“Do you want a bath then? I could arrange it.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“She doesn’t want to.” He looked at her again.

“Oh dear.” She saw that his shirt was now splattered with her blood. “I’m sorry, but can I go back now.”

“Not before I’ve dressed your finger.”

She let him wash her finger with the sticky, tarlike substance that passed for soap in Scutari. He shook white powder on it and while he was tying the bandage he gave a huge yawn, his tongue rearing up in his mouth, his eyes squeezed shut. “He’s completely exhausted,” she thought.

“We’ll need you soon,” he murmured. “But they’ll wait for a catastrophe.”

“But we could have been helping these past few weeks, it seems so silly.”

“My dear Nurse,” he yawned again, “do you have any idea how terrified the hospital administrators are by you and by your Miss Nightingale? Half of them are convinced you are government spies, the rest are embarrassed by the very idea of women
in a men’s hospital. I’m quite”—he showed her the tip of his tongue—“excited.”

She blushed scarlet to the roots of her hair.

“I’m not surprised they’re frightened of your leader,” he continued in a more neutral tone. “She is very efficient.”

Here was her chance to leave. “I must go.” She looked longingly toward the door. “Please, Miss Nightingale is very strict on knowing where we go at all times,”

“I’m not finished yet”—his blank eyes glared at her—“and by the way, I don’t criticize the woman, although I’m not quite sure of the point of a woman who thinks like a man.” He sounded annoyed. He took his coat down from a hook.

“I have one last thing to tell you,” he said, “and I’d like you to think about it. Quite the worst wounds we treat here are to men shot or stabbed in the back as they run away. Injuries to the chest are nothing like as bad. What does that suggest to you, Catherine?”

“I don’t know.” She wished he wouldn’t call her by her first name.

“Life belongs to the brave. You’re a good-looking girl and I could make life a lot easier for you.” He took a step toward her but she sprang away. “Think about it, Catherine.”

She was conscious of his eyeballs again—flicking between her and the door.

“I don’t wish to die with a wound in the back or the front.” She felt dreamlike, not sure what she was saying.

“No,” he said, as she backed toward the door, “I don’t think you should either.”

Barnsie and the old orderly, Sam Parker, were out in the corridor when she left Dr. Cavendish’s room. He was helping Barnsie fill her pail from the dribble of brown water coming from the fountain.

“Catherine.” Barnsie’s eyes were full of concern. “Where on earth have you been? We was told you was at the doctor’s then you didn’t come back.”

“I’m all right, Barnsie,” she said, shaking still.

“Well, you won’t be for long. Miss Nightingale wants to see you in her room as soon as you get back. And she’s hopping mad.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Sam told me.” Her fond smile was returned by Sam sweeping off his fur cap and showing her his gums. “He’s my mine of information. She’s our baby,” she told him, “and Miss Nightingale is ever so strict.”

They escorted her to Miss Nightingale’s door and, as she watched them hobble back to the tower with their water pails, she felt an odd kind of need for both of them. They felt stable and secure, almost like parents, and, for better or for worse, she felt she could confide in Barnsie now and tell her about the doctor and how uncomfortable their meeting made her feel. But now she swallowed nervously and looked at Miss Nightingale’s closed door—she was in trouble again.