Nathan left the kitchen and went into the hall. He opened the door to the ward. Anna was sitting at the Nightingale desk. She looked up at him.
‘Do you need me, sir?’
‘I might later, Anna, if I do I’ll send for you. You can cope here?’
‘Of course, sir. I checked the injured girl when she came in. When I realised there was nothing I could do for her I asked Yulia and Miriam to take over so I could watch over the wards. The two patients you operated on today are restless. I gave both of them laudanum.’
‘Are they sleeping now?’
‘Sleeping but restless, sir.’
‘Let me know if their condition deteriorates.’
‘Of course, sir.’
Nathan returned to the kitchen in time to hear Vlad say, ‘If the girl is from the hole houses she might not even be missed for a few days. From what Bogdan and Maxim said she’s unrecognisable and there was nothing on her to indicate who she is.’
‘How was she found?’ Nathan asked.
‘An officer from the Fire Brigade thought he saw someone moving behind Mr Edwards’s fence.’
‘A shadow?’ Nathan guessed.
‘Someone in dark clothes, that’s all the description he could give. When he went to take a closer look he literally fell over the girl. He picked her up and carried her straight here.’
Maxim ran in, his arms full. ‘We just discovered these behind Mr Edwards’s fence not far from where the girl was found, sir.’ He held out a soiled, torn nurse’s dress and apron and pieces of china.
Vlad took the china and dropped the fragments into the sink. ‘These could have been thrown away by a servant who broke a dish and didn’t want to be blamed for it, but the nurse’s dress…’
Nathan stared at the pattern on the china.
‘You’ve seen these before, sir?’ Kolya asked.
‘When the dish was whole. Naomi Rinskaya was washing a cake plate with that pattern when I looked into the kitchen just before I went home for the evening. She should have left at the end of her shift, but she’d stayed to wash the plate because she wanted to return it to Yelena in Glyn’s house.’
‘What time was that, sir?’ Vlad asked.
‘I reached home about seven o’clock. Vlad, take those pieces to Yelena. It could be a common pattern but I’ve never seen another dish with it. Ask Yelena if Naomi called on her this evening. Kolya, check with all the nurses to see if they know anything about a missing nurse’s dress. We can hope, but everything indicates the girl who was attacked is Naomi Rinskaya.’ Nathan took the pieces of china and wrapped them in one of the towels used to dry dishes before handing them to Vlad.
‘What if Naomi didn’t call to see Yelena and the dish is hers, sir?’ Vlad ventured.
‘Borrow one of Mr Edwards’s carriages. Go to the shtetl, find Naomi’s family, and bring them here as quickly as possible.’
Nathan thought rapidly. Yulia and Miriam were already upset by the condition of the girl; they’d be even more upset if she turned out be someone they knew. As for Anna – she’d been correct when she’d said there was nothing she could do for the dying girl, but the fact that she’d handed care of the patient over to Yulia and Miriam and remained to oversee the wards suggested she couldn’t bear to nurse the victim of such a vicious rape, whoever she was.
‘Vlad, while you’re in Mr Edwards’s house ask Mrs Parry if she’d be kind enough to come here and help. Tell her … tell her I need her. And hurry, Vlad,’ he added. ‘If our patient is Naomi, her family don’t have much time to say goodbye.’
Madam Koshka’s salon
December 1871
‘There seems to be a great deal of activity outside the door,’ Edward commented as he sat with Xenia in her room.
‘People coming and going. You get used to it. To return to our conversation about the Russian winter, you’ll need fur-lined boots as well as a fur coat and hat, Edward. There are two excellent cobblers in the Jewish shletl,’ Xenia recommended.
‘I’ve already ordered them, and paid in advance, but the cobblers warned me it will take them about six weeks to make them given the tide of orders they’ve received from the latest influx of people into the town.’
‘You should have offered them a bribe to move you up the list.’
‘I tried to give them double the asking price, they wouldn’t take it.’
‘That’s the Jews for you, they’re born with integrity.’
‘And talking about money brings me a question I’ve been meaning to ask you…’
‘It’s as well to get it out of the way,’ she agreed. ‘Ten roubles for the first hour of my time, fifteen for two, thirty for an entire night. You pay the house, not me, but as it’s your first night in Koshka’s salon, shall we say twenty for all night? And, like your brother, Glyn, I’m sure Fritz would be delighted to open an account for you that will also cover the bar and any other expenses you incur, that you can settle at the end of every week.’
‘Madam will pay you from my account?’
‘Madam meets all her employees living expenses, which are not inconsiderable. Some of our clients leave small presents on their pillows when they leave, some don’t. It’s by no means obligatory and depends on the goodwill of the client and the size of their purse. There’s no need for us to discuss this matter further unless you are unhappy with my services and do not wish to pay for them. Another brandy?’ She picked up the bottle.
‘I should be getting back to Glyn’s house.’ Embarrassed by her directness, Edward took his pocket watch from his waistcoat and checked the time. ‘It’s after midnight.’
‘Bedtime, and mine is very comfortable.’ She dropped to her knees in front of his chair and ran her fingers lightly and expertly over the front of his trousers.
Embarrassed, he squirmed as she unbuttoned his flies, slipped her hand inside his trousers and underpants, and teased his burgeoning erection.
‘I … it’s been a long time,’ he stammered.
‘Which is why we’ll take things slowly. Here, in the chair, or the bed? It’s your choice.’ She rose, stretched her arms behind her back, and flicked a button at the nape of her neck. Her gown fell to the floor, the gold fabric forming a puddle at her feet, leaving her naked apart from a pair of flesh-coloured silk stockings fastened by white lace garters.
‘That’s incredible.’
‘The dress is madam’s own design. It’s quite unique and everyone who works here has at least two of them.’
Edward had a sudden image of his wife Judith. He could even feel her presence, tight-lipped, disapproving. In over fifteen years of marriage he’d never seen her unclothed, and now a woman he’d only just met had disrobed solely for his benefit and was standing before him, proud, entrancing, and unashamed.
‘The bed?’ Xenia looked back over her shoulder at him as she turned down the covers. Her back was long, slim, her skin as white as the alabaster figures in the hall of the Crawshays’ mansion in Merthyr. Her buttocks, full, rounded at the top of her thighs, were alluring globes he longed to caress.
Weakening at her smile he nodded. One night – just one night of female company – what harm could it do? Judith was dead and even before her death she’d been frail – too frail for years to ‘meet her wifely obligations and fulfil his demands’. He’d been without a woman for so long…
He left the chair, his trousers supported by his braces. Xenia helped him remove his jacket and waistcoat, and unbuttoned his shirt. He shed his braces, trousers, and underclothes.
She fingered his erection. ‘Perhaps we won’t need to take it slowly after all, Edward.’ She led him to the bed and lay beside him.
‘I … never knew it could be like this,’ he murmured as she stroked his lips, his chest, and his nipples with the tip of her tongue before moving slowly, sensually, down his body.
He ran his arms down her sides, fingered her breasts, felt the full rounded weight of them in the palms of his hands, but he couldn’t rid himself of the fe
eling that she was toying with him, using her knowledge to play him like a musician. Yet her tune was so beguiling – he allowed her to do exactly as she wanted.
Later he lay quietly in her arms, his head cushioned on her breasts, his hand nestling between her thighs.
‘Comfortable?’ she murmured.
‘And tired.’ He could feel himself drifting off as he closed his eyes, but the novelty of his situation wouldn’t allow for sleep. He was in a brothel. He’d only ever heard about them until today. Glyn and Peter had talked about them often enough when they’d visited the ‘gentlemen only’ bars in the Merthyr pubs. It had been obvious to him that Glyn had frequented many ‘houses’ in the various countries he’d visited while working for Mr Hughes, and Peter’s duties as a relief police doctor in London had included carrying out medical examinations on whores.
Whores: even the word sounded foul. It conjured images of the filthy, pox-raddled, brawling drunks who plied their trade on the outskirts of ‘China’, the vice area of Merthyr.
But this house was as far removed from the rough and ready doss houses in China as Xenia was from his image of a “lady of the night”. He felt warm, comfortable, cosseted, and domestic – that was it, domestic. He suddenly realised that he felt more at home in Xenia’s bed with her lying next to him than he had done in all the years he’d lived with Judith.
Chapter Nineteen
Hospital, Hughesovka
December 1871
Sarah moved her chair behind the door of the treatment room so Mr and Mrs Rinski could sit close to the bed. Miriam and Yulia had done their best to mask the marks of violence on Naomi, but her face was unrecognisable as that of the pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl she’d interviewed and taken on as a trainee nurse only a few months before.
Naomi’s mother sat, crouched, pale faced, and tense. She was holding one of her daughter’s bandaged hands between her own and Sarah could almost feel Mrs Rinskaya’s concentration as she willed her child to live with every fibre of her being. Her eyes were focused on Naomi, her lips bloodless. If she was aware of anyone’s presence in the room beside her daughter, she gave no sign of it.
Sarah had diagnosed Mrs Rinskaya’s silence as shock, but the woman had refused to take anything to alleviate the symptoms. Mr Rinski had fallen to his knees when he’d first seen his daughter, alternately crying and praying to God to preserve her life. He hadn’t calmed until Nathan had given him laudanum.
The laudanum had done more than dull Mr Rinski’s pain. It had taken away his capacity to feel any emotion. He sat at the foot of the bed, dull-eyed, mouth slack, his hands folded loosely in his lap.
The door opened and Anna entered with two cups of tea. She offered one to Mrs Rinskaya, who shook her head without looking away from Naomi. Anna pressed the other into Naomi’s father’s hand. Anna handed the cup Mrs Rinskaya had refused to Sarah.
‘Dr Kharber asked if he could see you.’
Sarah relinquished her chair to Anna. She left the room and closed the door softly behind her. She felt as though she had been sitting with Naomi and the Rinskis for weeks not hours.
Yulia and Miriam were in the kitchen preparing breakfast trays. She looked in. ‘Miriam, can you take over from Anna please.’
‘Of course, Mrs Parry.’ Miriam was surprised but she left.
‘How are you coping on the wards?’
‘We’re coping, Mrs Parry,’ Yulia answered.
‘The patients?’ Sarah asked.
‘Are all sleeping or resting at the moment. Naomi …’
Sarah shook her head. ‘Look after Anna when she gets here and don’t allow her to return to the treatment room.’ Sarah didn’t know if Anna had told her fellow nurses she’d been raped before she’d left Merthyr. But they all knew she’d taken a gun from the office drawer and shot and killed a Cossack soldier who was attacking Ruth. She was afraid that Naomi’s condition would rekindle horrific memories for Anna. Memories, Sarah suspected, that had never been buried far beneath the surface of Anna’s consciousness. To her relief Miriam didn’t ask any questions.
When Sarah passed Anna in the corridor she held out her hand.
Anna grasped it. ‘The Paskeys did that to Naomi.’
‘You can’t possibly know that, Anna.’
‘I know it,’ Anna contradicted stubbornly. ‘The marks on her arms, her wounds, they relieved themselves on her, treating her like a lavatory …’
Sarah held out her arms but Anna didn’t embrace her. She stared at her, white faced, defiant. ‘It was the Paskeys. I know it was the Paskeys,’ she reiterated stubbornly.
‘The men are out looking for whoever hurt Naomi.’
‘They’ll find the Paskeys and when they do, I want to see them.’
Sarah nodded. ‘If they find them and that’s what you want, Anna, you will.’
‘You’re not just saying that to keep me quiet?’
‘If it was the Paskeys who hurt Naomi, and if they’re found, you have every right to see them.’ Sarah watched Anna walk into the kitchen before knocking the office door.
Nathan was at his desk, staring at the window. He hadn’t closed the blinds and although a medical textbook was open in front of him, Sarah knew he hadn’t been reading.
‘Will it be much longer?’
‘I’d say minutes rather than hours,’ Sarah diagnosed. ‘But you know as well as I do, prophesising death is not an exact science.’
‘Should I send for Rabbi Goldberg?’
‘In my opinion, yes.’ She looked through the window into the darkness. A light burned on Glyn’s porch, and further back a lamp flickered on the doorpost of Alexei’s house.
‘It’s strange how so many people die the hour before dawn.’ Nathan left his chair.
‘The matron in the London hospital where I trained used to say it was because the body’s defences were at their lowest ebb at that point.’
‘One of the Catholic nuns who nursed in the Vienna hospital I worked in for a few months said it was because God reaped the souls of the dying along with the night’s shadows.’ He buttoned his coat. ‘You go back in. I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve sent a porter to fetch the rabbi.’ He sank his head in his hands.
‘You should get some sleep.’
He shook his head. ‘I keep thinking back to last night when I saw Naomi in the kitchen. She told me she was going to return the dish to Yelena in Glyn’s house. I should have insisted that one of the porters went with her.’
‘She was about to go home, wasn’t she?’ Sarah checked.
‘She didn’t say as much but I assumed so as her shift had finished for the day.’
‘The porters don’t walk the nurses home at the end of their shifts. If they did, they’d be so busy walking the girls back and forth, they’d never do any work.’
‘But Naomi wasn’t going home …’
‘No, she crossed the road to Glyn’s house to return the dish. The fact that she was found alongside the outside of Glyn’s garden fence with the broken dish suggests someone grabbed her and dragged her out of sight of the road. That is hardly your fault, Nathan. No doctor or member of staff could possibly watch all of our nurses day and night.’
‘If she cried out …’
‘If she’d cried out someone in Glyn’s house would have heard her. There are enough of us living there. You can’t possibly blame yourself for this attack on Naomi. Please, Nathan, you have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.’ Sarah looked him in the eye. All her instincts told her to hug him but she held back. Nathan was not a demonstrative man and given the Jewish taboo on men touching women who were unrelated to them, she sensed he would find the gesture disturbing. ‘I’ll go in and relieve Miriam. Naomi may not have worked here very long, but all the nurses regarded her as a real friend and understandably they’re having trouble coping with what some evil brute has done to her.’
Sarah returned to the treatment room. Naomi’s breathing was lighter, shallower. She sent Miriam out, moved next to t
he bed, slipped her hand beneath the bedclothes and monitored Naomi’s heartbeat. It was slowing, its beat fading, diminishing in strength and intensity.
Mrs Rinskaya looked at Sarah. Her eyes were bleak, pleading.
Unable to bear the sight of Mrs Rinskaya’s grief, Sarah concentrated on the dying girl. She had no idea how long she stood there monitoring Naomi’s heartbeat. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. Every time she heard a step outside the door she expected to see Nathan open it. But the footsteps always moved on.
When Naomi’s heart beat for the final time, Sarah pulled the sheet to the girl’s chin and withdrew from the bed. ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Rinskaya.’
Mrs Rinskaya’s only reaction was to tighten her grip on Naomi’s hand.
Naomi’s father clutched Sarah’s arm and stared mutely at her.
‘She is with your God, Mr Rinski.’
He began to sob, making harsh violent sounds that seemed to tear from the very depth of his being.
The door opened and Nathan appeared with Rabbi Goldberg. Sarah didn’t blame him for waiting to enter the room until the rabbi arrived.
Feeling like an interloper she crept out, leaving the Rinskis with Nathan and the rabbi. She went into the office. A few moments later Anna appeared with two glasses of tea.
‘Thank you.’ Sarah took the tray and sat in the visitor’s chair in front of Nathan’s desk.
‘I thought Dr Kharber would be here.’
‘I have no idea how long he’ll be. Why don’t you drink the tea? You look as though you could use it.’
‘I will, thank you.’ Anna perched on the edge of Nathan’s desk.
‘Are you all right?’ Sarah asked solicitously.
‘Fine,’ Anna snapped, tight-lipped.
‘You don’t have to be brave, and you can talk to me about anything, any time you want.’
‘I’m not being brave. I’m angry that men like the Paskeys can do the things that they do to women and no one seems to be able to stop them.’
‘They’ll be stopped as soon as they’re caught.’ Sarah refrained from adding, ‘if it was the Paskeys’. Unlike Anna, she was far from convinced, despite Edward’s assertion that the Paskeys were headed for Hughesovka.
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