Band of Angel (44 page)

Through a small vineyard, across a river, and then they were in the center of a small village near Kadikoi. Chalk said he didn’t know its name and couldn’t care less. Some of the houses had been boarded up, and outside in the few acres surrounding them, the skeletons of vines lay on the ground, their supports stripped away.

In the main street, cannon balls were strewn about, and halfway down it the decomposed body of a donkey, still in its shafts, which for some reason made Chalk laugh. The wheels had gone from the cart and someone had cut a neat hunk from its quarters. Vultures circled above them in the sky.

Although Midnight was a bold horse, Deio had to give him a couple of sharp ones to get him past the donkey—he did not like it at all. They trotted down the street, and at the next crossroads Chalk stopped outside a dismal little house, where he dismounted and went through the front door.

The dwelling was tiny and low-ceilinged. In the primitive kitchen was a fire blackened picture of a Russian Christ on the wall, above a small cooking fire. A spilled bottle of olive oil lay on the floor, and a loaf of bread with a muddy footprint in it.

Chalk already had his ax in his hand. His spongy red gums were smiling.

“Help yourself, boyo,” he said.

Deio, surprised and confused but determined not to show it, wandered through the house for a while. In the kitchen—presumably the main room, where the family had eaten and drunk and cooked—Chalk was already making a fearful din, banging and ripping.

“How do you know we can do this?” Deio asked.

“I just know,” said Chalk mysteriously, “you hear about these places.”

In the bedroom there was a cupboard near the window. Deio looked inside it—everything had been taken except an embroidered blouse on a hook at the back, half wrapped in a newspaper with strange foreign-looking print on it. Underneath he saw a pair of thick leather boots well preserved, carefully polished. Poor people, he guessed, who learned to look after what they’d got. He laid the boots and blouse on the bed. For a second he thought of keeping the blouse for Catherine—she needn’t know. Then the idea struck him as disgusting, degrading, and he felt a flash of anger. He must stop thinking like this. Stop thinking, full stop. Taking the ax, he ripped the door from its hinges.

She was learning, slowly, to control her fear, to think of life as being a series of actions not feelings, and to learn that sleep and black jokes (there were lots of these; they laughed until they cried at the craziest things) were the best cures for the jitters. She was getting good at it until something happened that broke through all her defenses.

It happened on a night when the wind had got up early outside the nurses’ tower and built to a deafening roar. They could see from their window the tossing boats, the rough black sea, and the blur of lights from Constantinople.

A pane of glass had broken in Miss Nightingale’s extra-diet kitchen and part of the floor had flooded. Catherine and Emma Fagg had been sent down to help clear up and were humping around sacks of sago and arrowroot when a stricken-looking Barnsie burst into the room and clutched Catherine’s arm.

“Cafrin!”

“What’s the matter, Barnsie?” she said, “you look awful.”

“Come up quickly my love. Lizzie’s calling for you—she’s not very well.”

Lizzie had been off-color all month with a bad cough that had hung around, followed by a bout of dysentery, but apart from a day in bed she’d insisted she was well enough to work.

Catherine flew out of the kitchen and up the winding staircase that led to the top of the tower and the damp room reserved for sick nurses, praying all the way:
Please let her be saved. Don’t let anything happen to her.

She found Lizzie lying on a straw pallet with a torn curtain around it. The wind this high in the tower thumped and screamed like a mad person outside, and it was so cold inside the room that a layer of ice had formed on the inside of the window. Catherine, half running into the room, saw immediately the dark mulberry spots, the half-closed eyes.

“Lizzie.” She knelt by her bed and held her boiling hand. Lizzie closed her eyes tightly—the lids were speckled with the same dark spots, her hair was damp.

“Catherine.” A tear trickled out. “Never
run
into a room, Nurse Carreg,” she said suddenly in a dry, faraway voice. “It alarms the patients.”

“Oh Lizzie.” She drew closer. “Tell me what you need. A drink? A foot rub? We’ll get you on your feet again.”

Lizzie moved her head slightly on the pillow. She gave her one of those level looks she’d so depended on, and the truth passed between them.

“No, we won’t,” she said.

There was a wooden bucket beside her bed with half an inch of brackish-looking water inside it. Catherine poured it into a tin cup and held it to Lizzie’s lips.

“Drink Lizzie, please.”

She opened her mouth and took a painful sip; when half the water dribbled down her chin, she opened her mouth convulsively again like a baby cuckoo. When Catherine saw her tongue she turned to stone.

“Take a note, Nurse Carreg,” Lizzie had told her one day when they’d been nursing a soldier on the wards. “A tongue with white fur on it is typical of typhus.”

She stayed for a while, rearranging the bedclothes, sponging her friend’s head, holding her hand, and occasionally they conversed in low murmurs. Lizzie told her not to fret when she was gone, that nobody could have had a dearer friend. “I’m proud of you, Catherine. You’ve really grown up.” And even now, she tried to tease. “You were quite a little madam when I met you.” Then she started gasping and trying to throw the bedclothes off.

“Dear Catherine,” Lizzie clutched her hand and kissed it, “what a pickle.”

Two hours later she was dead.

Two orderlies arrived with a canvas stretcher to take her away.

“Bugger me, it’s cold in here,” one of them said.

When they put the stretcher down beside Lizzie’s bed, one of the poles broke, so they had to take out a huge needle and sew her in it. Catherine looked away, she couldn’t bear it.

“We’re rushed off our feet,” he told her. “We had sixty go in the night and nowhere to put them anymore. Stacked up outside like you wouldn’t believe.”

He was a young man with a chirpy manner, he meant her no distress.

She smiled back at him, at first feeling nothing more than a large and not disagreeable blankness.

“Poor Lizzie’s gone,” she told Emma Fagg and Clara later, when they walked into the nurses’ room. “It happened very quickly. Try not to cry too much. She had a hard life. She’s gone to a better place.”

“Oooohhhh,” Emma Fagg sat down heavily on her own bed, and annoyed her very much by moaning and wringing her hands. She stood up and put her arms around Catherine.

“Oh God! Oooooh! Where’s it all going to end?” she cried.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Catherine shook her head and smiled at them again. She really didn’t feel too bad.

“A better place,” she repeated again. Emma Fagg stank. She wished she would stop holding her.

Waking the next day, she tried to hold on to her blankness. After breakfast, the hospital vicar said prayers and she wished the other nurses wouldn’t cry so. She went down to work on ward four and got through her duties like a sleepwalker. She smiled at people, she fetched things, gave answers, but, as the day progressed, she grew heavier and heavier as pain began to seep into her like water in a leaky ship.

As usual at two o’clock, the two special orderlies the nurses called the Black Boys went through the wards to collect that day’s crop of dead. They wore no special clothes, observed no ceremonies, and were now such a familiar sight that no one even stopped talking as they passed. Or if they did, it was only to make grim jokes: “Business brisk, governor?” or “Good haul today, lads?”

As she watched them leave the ward and close the doors behind them, she felt the full impact of the blow. Soon they’d throw Lizzie, like a useless bag of bones, onto a bullock cart with a heap of others. It was unbearable that Lizzie, who was so singular, so fine, who had been born with nothing and loved by nobody as a child, should leave the world like this after having been so brave. She’d miss everything about her: the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed, how she told you things that mattered, and listened when you spoke to her. Lizzie was so much fun to tell your stories to. She’d been like a mother to her and her dearest friend.

They’d trundle her across the plain to the makeshift graveyard where they’d dug the big pits, and the Black Boys would whistle and sing as they slung her out with the others. No gentleness, no prayers, no ceremony; nothing but a body being tumbled into the frozen earth.

“Miss? Nurse? Are you all right?” She was sitting on the bed of a patient who’d been half blinded by a bayonet wound. A nasty scar from his lip to his nose, gave him the appearance of having a harelip.

“I’m all right. Are you all right? Do you need anything?” Her voice sounded choked and shivery.

“Miss, if you please, I would like you to read the newspaper to me.”

The men loved these accounts; they seemed to set them alight.

“I don’t have a paper,” she answered in the same strange voice.

“I’ve got one here, miss,” he said. “I’ve heard it before, but I wouldn’t mind hearing it again.” From under his mattress he took a filthy newspaper, still warm and curved from the contours of his body.

“Which part do you want?” she asked.

Now part of her was split off, she was walking beside Lizzie, her
pallbearer across the plain.
Thank you Lizzie. Thank you, for being my friend.

“That bit there.” A shy grin like a boy asking for a wicked treat. “I was in the Ninety-third you know. I played the bugle.”

“I know.”

The brown paper had been ripped a bit under the mattress and the date was rubbed out, but she’d read it so many times before she almost knew it off by heart. The Battle of Alma.

“The story is torn,” she told him through stiff lips, “I can’t read the beginning.”

“I know the beginning: the river, the battle, and the horses. Will you start there?”

“Then the Russians,” she began, “wavered, steadied, advanced and a second volley was fired.”

“Miss, could you give it out a little louder, if you don’t mind”—he wagged his head up and down encouragingly—“I can’t hardly hear a word.”

“A second volley was fired, the men wished to run out and take on the cavalry hand-to-hand, then Sir Colin cried, ‘Ninety-third! Ninety-third. Damn all that eagerness.’”

“Damn all that eagerness.” He was loving this.

Damn all that eagerness.
She could have howled like a wolf. How could he lie there, his one good eye gleaming?
Damn you and damn the government for bringing you here and neglecting you and for killing Lizzie.

“That’s the good bit,” he told her with satisfaction, “
that’s
the good bit.”

She shook her head and wrung her hands.

“A bit louder, miss. It’s nearly over.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t . . . I’m very sorry.”

He was so caught up he didn’t notice. She looked down at him, lying on his pillow. His face, with its ugly lip and slack expression, was not a very nice or a very bright face. But he did not deserve her moment of hatred, or to be seen in that short, terrifying moment as the natural enemy of woman, the enemy of life itself.

* * *

She’d hardly slept for five nights because her skin itched so badly, but oddly enough she did sleep that night, a deep, deep, dreamless sleep that knocked her out as soon as her head hit the pillow. But when she woke the next morning she could not get out of bed. She saw, as though through an immense pane of glass, the other nurses bending over her, moving their lips, buttoning their boots and putting on their aprons. Barnsie’s china doll eyes swooped down on her for a second.

“Come on, Cafrin, bell’s gone twice.”

Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well.
Then Emma Fagg saying, “Everybody knows that,” to Clara Sharpe who said she wasn’t born yesterday.

If she kept her eyes closed, she thought it might not have happened and Lizzie might come. But it was Sister Ignatius, swooping down like a white seagull to tell her Miss Nightingale had said she was to go to the room in the tower to rest for a day or two. She didn’t want to go, but had felt herself being moved up and then put down. She hated that room with its torn curtain and the sound of the howling wind outside. She wanted to stay with her herd.

She heard Sister Ignatius sigh. Above her head, she could see blank sky.

“Poor Catherine,” the nun said. “Of all the people to go.”

Catherine shook her head.
Go away! Go away, if you start telling me about God on his white cloud I’m going to scream.

“You know I loved her, too.” Sister’s eyes gleamed through her wire spectacles. “She was one of the best people I ever met,” she said quietly.

Catherine moaned softly.
Don’t talk to me about it. Don’t talk, don’t.

“Where are her things?” she asked as the tears poured down her face. “I don’t even know who to send them to.”