Band of Angel (47 page)

Oh, good God Almighty,” said Barnsie when she got back to Scutari. “You’re for it now. Mrs. Clark came in here two hours ago, shouting ‘Where is Nurse Carreg?’ She was doing a roll call and she went down to the ward to look for you. . . . Catherine, are you all right? You look dreadful.”

“I’m all right.” She sat, empty as a puppet, while Barnsie wiped her face and straightened her gown.

“Your lip’s bleeding, Catherine, whatever’s the matter with you?”

“I’m all right. I must go down to work.”

“Ouch!” Barnsie bared her blackened teeth and started scrabbling under Emma Fagg’s bed. “Here, have a drop of brandy—it’s an emergency. The Fagg won’t mind.”

“No, I can’t. I’m on duty.”

“No, you’re not my love.” It was Barnsie’s turn to look stricken. “Mrs. Clark said you were to be sure to stay here. We’ve got to tell the orderly as soon as you come in, and he’ll take you down to see her.”

Catherine lay down on the bed and closed her eyes.

“Don’t go to sleep, love.” Barnsie gazed down at her anxiously. “It’ll only make things worse. You’d better take your dose of medicine. But where were you?”

“I’ll tell you later.” It seemed important to stay in this stonelike state.

“Oh Catherine, something’s very wrong. I know it is. Please try to tell me if you can.”

“I can’t. I can’t. I will.”

“Bullies, fucking bullies.” Barnsie took a brush from under the
mattress and brushed Catherine’s hair with it. “Is it them that’s done this? They’re always so bloody sure they’re in the right. But where
were
you? I was out of my mind with worry.”

“Please Barnsie, I can’t. Don’t make me.”

“I’m sorry. Tell me when you can, but don’t you ever forget you’ve got a good friend here. You can always count on her.”

“I know. Put your arms around me, Barnsie. I’m so horrible.”

“Oh no! Oh no no, no no.” Barnsie held her tight. “You’re the sweetest, prettiest, oh Catherine, for God’s sake, what’s happened? Please try and tell me.”

But Catherine had fallen blankly into her arms and only looked at her.

The day was getting dark, and a loose pane was clattering in the window. Barnsie hauled her to her feet again and pointed her toward the stairs and the orderlies’ room. An orderly took her on foot up a path that led from the hospital without saying a single word to her. She didn’t mind, she was shatteringly tired, and she felt her body move in an odd, jerky way and she kept thinking of her name: Carreg—from stone.

“This is it,” said the orderly. “Mrs. Clark’s quarters. You are to go inside. I’ll wait for you here.”

Mrs. Clark rose to her feet when she walked in.

“You’d better sit down there”—she pointed toward a wooden chair with no arms—“and tell me where you’ve been.”

A pause, like a sigh at all the unpleasantness to come. A clock ticked.

“I know you weren’t on ward four, so don’t bother lying to me.”

“I was ill. I was in my room.” She felt sweat break out on her forehead as she said this and she wondered if she was telling the truth.

Mrs. Clark advanced toward Catherine, her stout, bombazined waist at eye level with her, her corsets creaking. She was shouting now.

“Where were you? And who were you with? Don’t waste my time with lies.”

“I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”

Mrs. Clark looked at her, a temper rash creeping up her throat and mannish chin.

“Do you know, this is quite horrifying to me,” she said at last in a different voice—the refined one she used when she was trying to be Miss Nightingale. “Do you have no memory at all of that evening, sixteen months ago, when we all sat in Sidney Herbert’s house, and he told us that the eyes of the world were upon us?”

“I do, ma’am.”

“Did that not mean anything to you? And sit up straight and open your eyes when you talk to me.”

“It meant a great deal.” A terrible burning sense of shame—childlike, absolute, red-faced shame—was creeping over her. She was dirty and bad.

“So it meant a lot to you?”

Some sensations: a throb, a bruising ache between her legs making her feel nauseous.

“It meant a lot to me,” she repeated.

“Oh rubbish! How could it?” There was gathering contempt in Mrs. Clark’s expression. “You’re making no sense to me now. You see, missy, I will speak to you plainly. I warned Miss Nightingale right from the start that you were too young and too inexperienced for work like this, and now you’ve proved me right. You’ve been flitting around, doing whatever you wanted to do, and I could have been in a great deal of trouble myself. I could have lost my job.”

Dimly it came to Catherine that there was a smidgen of self-interest in Clark’s fury: she’d been careless with the roll call for weeks and was in danger now of being found out.

“So now, you’d better tell me where you were.”

For one mad moment she tried to imagine herself explaining the events that had led up to this catastrophe to Mrs. Clark—the day she’d taken her cut finger into Cavendish’s room; his behavior with her on the wards, his promise that Miss Nightingale knew all about the trip to Constantinople. And knew at once that Mrs. Clark (who had an awe, it bordered on the simpering, for anybody in trousers and in power) would never believe her. She would be the one sent
home and publicly branded a whore and a liar. And what pleasure the Mrs. Clarks of this world, tutting and shaking their heads, would get from saying
too young and too inexperienced. We told you so.

A coldness rose up in her. If she were to survive this, she must tell some lies of her own.

“I was in my room, Mrs. Clark; I cannot think how you missed me.”

“Carreg, you are starting to make me very angry.” Mrs. Clark clenched her fists. “I’m going to smack you one if you don’t stop this impertinence. I can easily get you sent home on the next boat without pay and without a letter.”

“That you can. But, you know, all of us have been confused lately by the lack of roll calls.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking to me about.”

“Don’t you?”

“All right. I’d better tell you something that was reported to me about
you
only a few days ago.” Mrs. Clark’s face grew foxy and vindictive.

“One of the medical staff, very senior and well respected, told me that, in his opinion, you were a fantasist; in case you don’t know what that means, it means
you make things up
. He also said you were overfamiliar with the men.”

Catherine put her head in her hands. So Cavendish had covered his tracks: how typical and how cunning.

“So what do you make of that?”

“Whoever said that is a liar himself.”

“Don’t you dare raise your voice to me, missy.” Mrs. Clark was herself again, shrill and judgmental. “And don’t you dare say that of him. D’you know you are wonderfully lucky not to be a man, for you should be flogged for this, and no, I’m not finished with you yet. None of us can afford a scandal now.
None of us.
And from now on you must present your monthly rags to me for my inspection; else you
will
be on that boat home.”

Catherine looked at her for a moment, appalled.

“I can if you like,” she said, “but I haven’t come on for months.” How disgusting it was having to talk to Mrs. Clark like this. “It’s been too cold.”

“Oooh! I’ve had enough.” Mrs. Clark sat down again breathing heavily. “Quite enough. She’s got an answer for everything and thinks I have nothing more to do with my time today than to bandy words with someone who tells lies, and quite a lot of them.”

“I’m very tired,” said Catherine suddenly. The pain was too sharp and she could feel her body leaking. “And I’m on duty, tonight. Can I please go back to the hospital now?”

“I still haven’t decided what to do with you yet,” said Mrs. Clark grandly, “and won’t for a day or two—it might be the detention center, it might be the nurses’ tower, or it might be the first boat home, but in the meantime, there must be one little word you wish to say to me?”

“I don’t know which word you are talking about.”

“Aren’t you sorry?”

Not sorry at all you wretched bully, you fraud.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” she mumbled. She felt a kind of bright heat surge through her body, a corkscrewing sensation in her skull.

“Well, if you’re not sorry, you can stand up now, you chit,” Mrs. Clark’s bulldog face was scarlet, “and go straight to that door and call the orderly. He will take you to the detention center.”

She woke up in a small, drafty hut close to the hospital. A pale young woman, wearing a pair of men’s boots and with a bad cough of her own, told her she was a soldier’s wife and that she had been sent to look after her.

“You’ve been coughing summat fierce,” she told her, “and crying out. You’ve kept us all awake for two nights.”

She wanted to ask what was wrong with her, but her tongue felt too big and woolly and her mind slipped its moorings again. All night she’d been half dreaming and half hallucinating that she and Deio were in the stables feeding a starving pony. They had a big copper pan on a fire outside and they filled it with oats and bits of apple and rose petals and odd things like toffees and glasses of wine, filled with a tenderness that felt so sweet.
Poor horse. Darling little horse. We’ll look after you.

Then Cavendish appeared, his face old and baggy under a candle. He was doing some operation—a trepanning perhaps—holding the head of a woman, his drill creaking and groaning as it ground through the scalp making first a little hole, then one the size of a penny. Blood was trickling down the side of the woman’s face; the veins stood out on his forehead. “Nice and steady,” he kept telling her, “nice and steady. I’m making a space in the skull for the fluid to drain into. It’s one of the oldest operations known to man.”

It was horribly vivid: the way he put his finger in the hole; the geyser of blood spurting, him covering the bleeding hole with a wad of cotton and bandaging it tightly against her skull. Then he lifted the girl’s chemise. He put his hand around her girlish bosom.

“Heartbeat quite strong.” His hands kneading and separating the breasts. “Heartbeat quite strong.”

When she woke up, she had the absurd hope that everything had been a bad dream. She opened her eyes and felt a stabbing headache, and then, shuffling toward the half-boarded window, saw nothing had changed: mud and puddles, gray sea, mist. A dirty curtain gusted toward her and covered her face. The effort of moving it made her cough then gasp with pain.

She heard a door creak and turned round slowly.
Oh no.
Cavendish was standing at the door. He was holding a tray. “I’ve brought you some junket and a glass of brandy,” he said pleasantly. “One of your friends was on their way over, but I’ve saved her the trouble. We’ve all been quite worried about you.”

“Worried about me!” He was fussing with the tray now, finding a chair by the bed to put it on, while she tried pathetically to cover herself.

“Yes, you’ve got what I believe the men call a Crimean Corker—bronchial pneumonia—it’s an awful thing, it really drags you down.”

Just like that: no hint of awkwardness, or remorse, nothing. Just his soft, slightly sarcastic voice saying, “Well, this is a nice spot isn’t it, Nurse Carreg?” while he unpacked scissors, a jar of leeches, and some wadding and put them on the chair beside her bed.

She got back into bed as fast as she could.

“Who sent you here?” she said at last.

“Mrs. Clark—she’s as worried as I am.”

A shrilling in her brain like silent screaming.

“I’m much better”—she turned her face to the wall—“I just want to go back to work.”

She could feel him gently move the bedclothes. He sat on the chair beside her bed. He opened his bag, rolled up his sleeves. From the distance she could hear a murmur of voices, and the sound of a boy crying.

“I’m going to scream this place down if you do anything else to me,” she said.

“Catherine!”

“Don’t call me by my first name,” she said through clenched teeth. “It’s Nurse Carreg.”

“Good God!” He shook his head at the trivial pointlessness of her. “What a thing to worry about at a time like this.” And ill as she was, she could see this would always be his trump card: that war made its own rules, and within these rules, what he did was of epic importance and what wounded her was petty and inappropriately narrow-minded.

He looked at her for a moment, and put his hand on her forehead. There was a long silence.

“Catherine,” he said at last in a gentle voice, “I am not trying to hurt or harm you, I merely want you to listen to me and try and understand an unhappy man.”

He tried to hold her hand but she put it under the blanket. “I did like taking you to Constantinople, I thought we had a lovely day together, and it made me think you could change me as I could change everything for you.”

“Change what? For whom?” She shook her head in disbelief.

“For you. For
you
of course, and for me, too.”

He stopped and sighed. “You see for a long time now, due perhaps to the pressure of my work, the world has felt dead to me—pointless and dead and stale. I’ve been unable to enjoy even the simplest things.”