Band of Angel (42 page)

Then Catherine heard herself commit a great disloyalty. “My mother blamed my father all her life.” She’d never said anything like that before.

Their group came to a sudden halt. Lady Bracebridge had taken a wrong path and they were passing a bar and the sound of distant music. A group of soldiers came to the windows and made yelping sounds as they went by.

“Do you have any feelings for him now?” Lizzie said, after Lady B had told the men off. “Does it feel like a strong attachment?”

“I would hate anything bad to happen to him.” She was exhausted at having said so much and wanted to draw back.

“Well, naturally.” Lizzie was brisk. “I haven’t even met him and I wouldn’t want that.”

“Well, I do feel I know more about men now,” she said cautiously, “and that must be a good thing.” This amused Lizzie, who gave her a pinch.

“Did you hear from your gentleman, Lizzie?”

“No.” Her face was shut. “I told you, I didn’t expect to, but I know what you mean about your life feeling separate.”

As they turned to face the harbor, a gust of wind dragged Catherine’s hair from her bonnet and flung it against her face. White caps were breaking and boats skimmed about at what looked like immense speed. She remembered the Water Horse
and all the stories Deio had told her about it: how beautiful it was coming out of the water, gleaming and magical, and how badly you wanted it, to ride it, to own it, to take on all its power and beauty. Sometimes it let you; sometimes it took you as far out as it possibly could and drowned you.

Turning back toward the hospital again, she shivered with fear. Many of the men she’d seen today were young. They had imagined war and life to be a splendid adventure and look what had happened to them. The soldiers were no longer shadows behind the windows. They were human beings: they had names, faces, feelings; some had already tried to talk to her about their sweethearts and mothers. They would show her in the weeks to come what she was made of.

December 1854. The system was falling apart—any fool could see that. As the days went by there was less food, less water, smaller and smaller buckets of fuel for the fire. Little problems loomed large: no rags, for instance, for your monthlies, so you had to keep washing them if you could and wear them damp, which made your thighs chafe. The big things were worse, and after three weeks on the ward without a break, they were all beginning to feel strange and slightly mad. Sometimes at night, when they weren’t too tired to talk, Clara Sharpe, painfully thin now and covered in fleabites, would start the game.

They’d pretend to get all dressed up and go to their favorite chophouse; they’d order pea and ham soup for starters, hot rolls, fried fish, potatoes, treacle pudding and custard, roasts of beef, jugs of porter, steak and kidney pudding, spotted dick . . .  Although they were tired beyond anything they had ever known, they could go on like this for hours and sometimes, if they had the energy, they’d go on to the music hall and sing,
I had a dream, a happy dream,
or a dirty song with the chorus of
I gave him what he didn’t like and sold his silver spoons,
which still made her blush.

At Scutari there was no bath at all for the nurses and her skin was driving her mad. At nights, particularly, it felt like armies of ants, stinging and hot, crawled over her and settled in odd places, like the webs of her fingers or behind her knees. Once a week when the modesty curtain went up, the nurses shrank behind it trying to wash bodies, hair, and clothes in the quarter of
an hour allotted to them, and in half a bucket of water, but that didn’t help and now everything—skin, hair, dresses—felt sticky and smelled of mold.

Her fantasy was of Mair, lighting the fire in the upstairs bedroom at Carreg Plâs. She was taking off her bloodstained apron, her dress, the gray liberty bodice, pantaloons. Adding a dash of lime essence to hot steaming water, lying in it up to her chin, watching the fire and listening to the rooks outside and, if she could bear it, she’d think of him and feel the ache in her thighs from galloping the ponies.

She
had
to cling on. Now, waking in the dark mornings, the sight of her uniform made her heart thump. Gray with dirt, its cuffs mottled with mud, it hung on a hook next to Lizzie’s and Barnsie’s, above a row of neatly polished shoes (shoe polish mysteriously, was one thing they had boxes and boxes of).

Blood was the hardest thing of all to wash out; all of them wore it like a permanent stain. They spent most of their time on the wards trying to take it from tangled hair and old bandages, from faces and dolls and pictures and handkerchiefs; strange what the men carried closest to their hearts.

Blood and fear were with them all the time. Now that the patients in the hospital had swelled to three thousand, even getting to your ward was a kind of torture. You had to close your ears, eyes, and nose and push your way through four miles of men in the corridors, crammed bed to bed, with no more than a foot or two between them.

Each morning after breakfast, Miss Nightingale, neat as ever but paler than before, said prayers with them, and tried to tell them only cheerful things: that they had managed to feed two hundred men the day before with beef tea or with jellies, or that she’d given lice combs to sixty men in the main ward, or that a new lady helper had been sent by the ambassador to help with the soldier’s wives. But now they had to comfort the two thousand men who may not have been fed. They could see it, everyone could: the hospital was like a large and icy pond where soon all the faults and the
weaknesses would join up and with one almighty crack drag them all under.

They all broke rules now, cut corners.
Never work on a ward without being supervised by a doctor. Don’t address the men directly.
Ridiculous. The wounded poured in like an avalanche and all of them rushed about doing what they could. Sometimes she and a nun, or a young orderly, would be left in sole charge of upwards of fifty men, all gravely ill. No time to ask Lizzie “Is this right?” or, “Shall I do that?” Mostly you just did it and faced the possibility of being an instrument of torture, or ending a man’s life when a better-trained person might have saved it.

Dr. Cavendish frightened her, too; he was around so much. She tried to put herself down for duty on wards where she didn’t think he’d appear, but, in the end, she went where she was sent.

One morning she was told to go with two of the nuns, Sister Patricia and Sister Maria, to ward four. Lizzie was supposed to go, too, but had caught a bad chest infection and been sent to bed by Miss Nightingale. Approaching the door, Catherine could see Sister Maria’s lips moving, steeling herself for the moment of reentering hell. They tried to block out the cries of suffering as they joined the unending stream of bodies, dead and alive, orderlies, medicine and stretchers, passing through the beds.

Only a few could be saved.

That morning, rain had fallen heavily in the night so there was a large puddle, almost a lake, they had to step around. Some of the men had abandoned their beds and lay in a lifeless pile by the door. At the bottom of this tangle, Catherine saw a young man staring at her, willing her to look at him. His eyes were gooseberry colored and his beard so matted it looked like the back end of a sheep.

She knelt down to talk to him.

“Where are you from?”

“Off a transport from Balaclava last night,” he whispered. “Thank God we’re safe.” The other men stared up at them, and when some tried to get to their feet, the smell of blood and diarrhea moved toward them. Then the calling out began, and this was the moment most dreaded because the men thought they had a chance now.

“Nurse, HELP ME! HELP ME!” from a boy with one arm hanging in a filthy bandage.

“A drink, for the love of God, miss” from inside a beard caked with frost and blood.

“I hate to trouble you, missus.” Heartbreaking when they were so polite and there was still nothing the nurses could do.

“Good-day to you all, you bootiful angels, could I trouble you for a chamber pot?” This man’s eyes glittered with delirium. “I don’t want to fire over me friend here.”

Sister Maria’s eyes rolled in terror like a horse about to bolt. They smiled, they nodded, they rushed by.

“Good-day . . . good morning.”

“Welcome . . . yes, yes, don’t worry we’ll see you comfortable.”

“We’ll be back in a moment.”

Lies. Perhaps the men knew already. They must have seen how many of them there were and the state of the wards.

First job: tidy up the beds. There were two kinds: wooden trestles with planks laid over them, and ordinary straw pallets on the floor for emergency bedding. Sometimes the straw pallets were so impregnated with blood and mess from the diarrhea patients that they had to be taken out the back and burned, but mostly they stayed—with no beds in store, no time to make new ones, and a flood of new customers coming in, you couldn’t afford to throw anything away. Most of the beds swarmed with lice—when a man died they simply jumped from his cold body to a warmer one next door.

Once the beds were done they did the floor. The orderlies were supposed to, but with women around they resented it and usually left it to them. It was a hopeless business anyway. The tiles broke away as you swept them, and on rainy days mud squelched halfway up your boots.

An orderly watched them while they swept. He had his arm around a young boy whose hair was full of twigs and dirt. When they were finished, he helped them put the boy on a mattress in the corner of the room next to a tub of night soil that, as usual, was brimming.

“There you are, lad.” The orderly’s big rough hands smoothed down the blanket. “Right as rain.”

The boy began to jabber in a bright, demented way. “My arm,” he implored Catherine and Sister Patricia, “it’s poorly. I’d like to get it off you see.”

The orderly went off shaking his head. He told them they may as well help the boy because Dr. Perrett and Dr. Cavendish were operating and the other duty doctor was ill. “D’you know what I tink about Dr. Perrett,” Sister Patricia whispered when they were alone. “I tink he’s as mad as a hatter.”

Catherine agreed. In the last week Perrett had stopped talking and now rubbed his head in that strange way of his almost all the time.

The boy gave a groan. Her hands were already shaking.

“If we leave him, he’ll die,” whispered Catherine.

“Will she mind?” Sister P was terrified of Miss Nightingale.

“No,” said Catherine wearily, “because she won’t know.”

“There now you poor ting, it’s not nice, not nice at all,” Sister P told him without looking. “Take that bandage off, Catherine, let’s have a look at it.” A flash of anger.
You do it,
she wanted to say. Sister Patricia looked ashy white, her lips were moving. Catherine glanced quickly at the swollen bandage and hated her fear of it.

Breathe in, block the mind off. Take the bandage off as gently as you can without prolonging the agony. Oh, how it stank. Parts of it were embedded into the skin and he shouted out twice.

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” she said.

“Go on,” he panted, “get it done.”

Slowly his hand appeared—bright red and hot to the touch. Then the elbow, swollen with water, and near the shoulder the upper arm blue and black like a monstrous sausage that needed pricking. The look, the smell, the sheer weight of the limb told her it must have been immersed in water for several days. She almost had the bandage off when a large part of the arm broke away from the socket and a crowd of maggots swarmed out.

The boy passed out. Sister Patricia clasped Catherine’s hand.

“Oh dear,” she softly moaned, “poor ting. Horrible. Horrible. Go and get the doctor. Quick.”

She raced down the corridor, and through another heap of
wounded men. Nobody in the duty doctor’s room, but next door in the dispensary, Dr. Perrett was sitting with his back to her, round-shouldered, smoking. He turned around in an eager, jerky way.

“Ah! Nurse, nurse, nurse, come in, come in,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about God. Do you believe in him?”

“I do, sir, but please could—”

“I think he’s a shitarse.”

He put his head on one side and gave her a sneaky infant’s grin as though he expected mama to be cross. There was a tear in his overall and she could smell brandy.

“He’s gone,” she thought, surprised at how little she cared. Sam had already told her two other surgeons had blown their brains out.

“I won’t be a second, Dr. Perrett,” she told him smoothly. She reached for a tincture of iodine on the shelf above his head and a small bag of wadding. “I’m on my way to pick up some bandages, won’t be long.” More lies, more rushing.

Was there a choice, she wondered as she made her way back to the ward? A small part of your mind that helped you choose between going mad and going on? She thought it might be like the cliff over the sea at Whistling Sands, on one side grass and sunlight and very close by on the other side, black rocks, black sea.

“Let me help you with those?” She hadn’t even noticed Cavendish coming up behind her.

“No, no thank you, no. I’m fine.”