by Gill Paul
Elizabeth woke, grumbling. ‘Where is it?’ Dorothea pointed, trembling, whereupon Elizabeth got up to look, only to find it had escaped through a narrow gap between wall and floor.
‘Goodness, all that fuss for a little rat. We’ll block the hole later.’ She poked the embers in the stove then crawled back into bed for a last snooze. But Dorothea knew it hadn’t been little; its body had been almost a foot long and its tail the same again. She’d seen rats in London but none that size, and certainly hadn’t woken to find them sitting on her arm. It seemed an ill omen. Life here was going to be tough.
When Dorothea and Elizabeth tried to open the door of the Russian house next morning, they had to push hard. Two foot of snow had fallen, blocking their exit, and their ankle-high galoshes were of little use in keeping their feet dry as they hurried across to the hospital. They went first to the kitchen and found an impromptu meeting taking place between the purveyor, Mr Fitzgerald, some hospital orderlies and the other women who had travelled with them.
‘We need a system, with each responsible for particular areas,’ Miss Langston said. ‘Mrs Shaw-Stewart is happy to manage the laundry and I believe you are managing the kitchen, Miss Davis? Now, Mr Fitzgerald, can we give you a list of our immediate requirements? Perhaps you would be so good as to fulfil them.’
He looked flustered, obviously unused to being given orders by a bunch of women but too polite to object: ‘I don’t know … it’s hard to find fresh food here. And we’re completely out of laundry soap.’
‘You’ll do your best to find more, I’m sure. The shortage of medicines is particularly alarming. All I could find was castor oil and Epsom salts, which would be fine if all our patients need purgatives – but I doubt that’s the case. We need some digitalis for heart problems.’ She ticked the medicines off on her fingers. ‘Quinine and antimony for fever; squills for coughs; ipecacuanha to induce vomiting. And we need more opium. Have I forgotten anything?’
Elizabeth Davis chimed in: ‘Perhaps some salep. They grow it in the Turkish lands, and it makes a good sedative drink for those who are anxious.’
Everyone had suggestions based on their own nursing experience and Mr Fitzgerald looked worried. ‘You will write this down for me, won’t you?’
‘Certainly.’
Next, Miss Langston announced she had compiled a rota whereby each of the nurses was responsible for seven wards, with sixteen beds in each, and they would work in twelve-hour shifts with a day off every three weeks. All agreed that was a sensible distribution of responsibility and took note of the designated mealtimes: breakfast at eight, then dinner at noon, tea at five, supper at seven or eight, drinks at ten, and bed around midnight. Dorothea checked the rota and was disappointed to see that she would not have a day off for three weeks. She was anxious to go to the British camp and find some of Lucy’s friends – she needed to know exactly what had happened to her sister before she could rest easy – but it would have to wait for now.
After a quick breakfast of coarse bread and tea, Dorothea entered the door of ward seven, the first of the wards she had been charged with looking after. A new patient had arrived during the night with a gunshot wound to the head. There was a hole the size of a threepenny bit in his skull, and it had bled copiously so he was white and weak from blood loss. A surgeon had tried but been unable to retrieve the bullet, which was lodged somewhere within the brain tissue, where it would inevitably spread sepsis. There was little chance of him surviving the next twenty-four hours. Astonishingly, the patient was able to talk to Dorothea, telling her that his name was Donald Leekie and that he was twenty years of age. As she washed him, she asked about his family.
‘We’re from the North-West, near Lancaster, Sister. Me ma works in a laundry and Pa’s down the mine.’
‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’
‘Oh, aye. There’s six of us; I’m the eldest and the youngest is only four. Money’s tight so I try to send some home to help out, although it’s not easy on army pay, Sister.’
‘Would you like to write a letter to your mother?’ Dorothea asked. ‘I can give you pen and paper.’
‘It wouldn’t be much use, Sister. I can’t write and me ma can’t read.’
‘I will write the letter for you if you tell me what to say. I’m sure your mother can find someone to read it to her.’ Dorothea felt strongly that he should send a last message to bring his mother comfort, so she fetched pen and paper and waited for him to speak.
‘Dear Ma,’ he said. ‘I am in the Crimea. It is very cold here with snow on the ground. I hope you and Da and my brothers and sisters are all well.’ He closed his eyes. ‘That’s it.’
‘Are you sure that is all you want to say?’ Dorothea urged. ‘Will you not tell them that you have been shot?’
He screwed up his nose. ‘I wouldn’t want them to worry.’
‘Nothing else then?’
‘Ermm … You could ask Ma to say hello to Mary Burton for me.’ He gave a shy smile, which he immediately tried to repress.
‘Is she your sweetheart?’ Dorothea smiled back.
‘I wish she were my sweetheart. I always liked her but I never got around to telling her. When I get home the first thing I’m going to do, after seeing Ma, is visit her.’
Dorothea felt her skin prickle with gooseflesh thinking of his lost chance at love. ‘Is Mary Burton very pretty?’
‘Not really. She’s got bad teeth and a round, freckled face, but she is the best-natured girl you’re ever likely to meet. I reckon she’s a girl as could make a man a good wife.’ He smiled his shy smile again.
‘Well, I will definitely ask your mother to tell her you said hello. I’ll send this letter later today. I have one of my own to send so it is no trouble. If you think of anything you want to add, call me over.’
She carried on with her ward rounds, feeding patients who could not feed themselves, changing dressings, shaving men, administering medicines and poultices, assisting the doctors with cupping, blood-letting and blistering. There were men with pneumonia, scurvy, typhus, dysentery and fever as well as battle wounds and injuries from the debilitating cold, and all appeared malnourished. When they heard she had only left England two months earlier, lots of them asked what the public back home felt about the war.
‘They are following every step of it in the newspapers and there is enormous pride in our brave soldiers.’ Dorothea was glad to be able to answer truthfully.
‘Queen Victoria herself is said to read reports from the front avidly, and every man serving is hailed as a hero.’
‘Do they know we don’t have winter uniforms, or enough food? Do they know we live in tents in the snow?’
Dorothea assured them that the shortages had been reported, especially by Mr W.H. Russell of The Times, and she had no doubt that the necessary supplies would be on their way already. The news they had not been forgotten seemed to cheer the men and almost did more good than medicine.
Every time Dorothea went into ward seven she glanced over at Donald Leekie, who spent the day asleep in a sitting position with his head resting on the wall behind. In the early evening, Dorothea came to feel his forehead and offer food and it was only then she realised he had died where he sat, quietly and without fuss, and that rigor mortis was already setting in.
She fingered the letter in her apron pocket and remembered that he hadn’t given her his mother’s address. She would get it from his commanding officer. She decided to add a note of her own so that Mary Burton could learn there once had been a soldier who dreamed of making her his wife.
Chapter Twenty-four
The sight of Miss Langston politely haranguing Mr Fitzgerald became a daily one. Despite Dorothea’s assurances that news of the shortages of food and medicine had reached Britain before she left, the situation in Balaklava had shown no sign of improving. It often seemed to her that bureaucracy at higher levels got in the way of common sense. In Scutari she had heard of a shipment of cabbages sent to feed the injured
soldiers that sat in anchorage for so long that by the time the necessary paperwork was signed they were completely rotten. Men succumbed to the old-fashioned disease of scurvy while a cargo of lime juice intended to prevent it turned mouldy at a mooring in the Bosphorus. It was no wonder that Florence Nightingale had sometimes taken matters into her own hands, Dorothea mused, infuriated on behalf of the fighting men who were being let down. In mid-February, the same kind of muddle occurred in Balaklava harbour. A shipment of supplies arrived and pulled in to port, but the captain refused to unload his cargo because no one had paid him for it. Mr Fitzgerald argued vociferously, enlisting the harbourmaster’s help, but the captain was adamant. When this news was relayed to the women, Mrs Shaw-Stewart asked that she be taken to meet the captain and the next thing they knew the cargo was being unloaded.
‘What on earth did she do to change his mind?’ Dorothea asked Elizabeth, all kinds of ideas flitting through her mind. Threats? Seduction? Both were unthinkable.
Elizabeth chuckled, as if she could read Dorothea’s thoughts. ‘She wrote him a cheque for the whole lot from her personal bank account. Oh, to be wealthy!’
The shipment contained enough new clothing for each patient to have a fresh outfit. There were jars of preserved fruits from Malta, which would help to treat scurvy, and there were crates of wine and brandy to flavour the arrowroot they fed to the most poorly patients. Dorothea examined the cargo, hoping that there had been ample provisions on the ship that took Lucy home. There had still been no word, although she watched daily for a letter. Elizabeth was busy counting the bottles and storing them with great care to prevent pilfering. She had erected barricades in the store cupboards to exclude rats of both the animal and human variety.
The day after the shipment was delivered, Lord Raglan visited the hospital. He sashayed grandly from ward to ward in his army greatcoat, patting patients on the shoulder with his one arm (the other having been lost at Waterloo) and bellowing, ‘Hurry up and get well, good man,’ to those who had but hours to live, and, ‘Don’t waste any of that,’ to men who were so hungry they were wolfing down bowls of unflavoured arrowroot.
‘Don’t stint on the brandy and wine,’ he told Dorothea, as if it were his own largesse that had supplied them. ‘I am sure our country grudges nothing to such courageous men.’ She noted a liverish look about his complexion, a yellow tinge to the eyes, and guessed he didn’t stint on brandy and wine himself, although she was sure he chose more refined vintages than those supplied for his men. All told she found him arrogant and insensitive, and she worried that he was too old at sixty-seven years, and too lacking in human insight, to be overall commander of the British troops.
‘They’re saying if he had been more decisive and ordered the attack on Sevastopol last autumn, the war would have been won outright and he would have saved thousands of lives. He shilly-shallied and the moment was lost. At least that’s what I heard.’ Elizabeth Davis was a repository of strong opinions, not always plausible, but in this case Dorothea could well believe it.
At last, three weeks after her arrival at the hospital, it was Dorothea’s turn for a day off. She’d had Dr White draw her a map showing the whereabouts of the 8th Hussars camp where Lucy and Charlie had stayed, and got Mr Fitzgerald to organise transport for her on a supply wagon. They drove inland for seven miles following the tracks of a new railway that was being built to connect Balaklava with the British camp. So far it had only reached the tiny town of Kadikoi, where she saw navvies at work laying rails, but when it was finished, the wounded would be brought down from battlefield to hospital far more quickly, and supplies could be taken up to the soldiers more easily. After Kadikoi the road deteriorated and the journey was bumpy and slow, trundling up and down hills, until eventually they emerged onto a plain where Dorothea could see rows of tents stretching into the distance. Horses were grazing behind them and people shrouded in blankets huddled around desultory fires. The sky was a leaden grey, the ground marshy from snowmelt, and altogether Dorothea had never seen a more dispiriting place. She found it impossible to imagine her beautiful, well-dressed sister in such surroundings. How did Lucy cope, even before the tragic news of Charlie’s death? She felt a pang of love for her.
‘This is the British camp, Ma’am,’ her driver told her, and he added something else but it was drowned out by a sudden explosion that made the earth shake.
It terrified the wits out of Dorothea and she screamed. ‘Should we take cover?’
He shook his head, sucking his teeth. ‘The Russkies keep sending shells in our direction but they fall well short of the camp. They’re aiming at the men just over that ridge there.’
The fighting seemed devilish close as far as Dorothea was concerned. How awful for the women to listen to those explosions, knowing that any given shell could just have killed one of their menfolk not far away.
‘This is the 8th Hussars camp,’ her driver told her. ‘I’ll take you to the cookhouse. That’s most likely where the women’ll be. I’m heading back in an hour or so but you’ll easily catch a lift with someone else. There’s wagons going back and forth all day long.’
When they came to a halt, Dorothea clambered down and smiled at the five ragged women who were sitting round a fire with a bubbling pot hung over it. They looked up at her smart coat and hat with suspicion.
‘My name’s Dorothea Gray,’ she said. ‘I’m the sister of Lucy Harvington, the wife of Captain Harvington. You knew her, I expect?’
They looked at each other and one replied, ‘Yes, what of it?’
Dorothea was surprised at the lack of friendliness. Lucy had described these women as ‘salt of the earth’ types. ‘I came out here hoping to meet my sister but I understand I am too late. I wonder if you could tell me how she was when she left? Did any of you see her after the news of her husband’s death?’
Again the women looked at each other. ‘I didn’t – did you?’ Each woman shrugged and shook her head.
‘We just heard that Captain Harvington was dead and then she was gone. She didn’t come to say goodbye or nothing.’
Dorothea addressed her: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Mrs Jenkins.’
Dorothea felt uncomfortable hovering above them but was reluctant to sit on the wet ground. ‘Perhaps you can tell me who were her particular friends? I’d be most grateful if you could direct me to them.’
Mrs Jenkins sighed, as if the question were an imposition on her valuable time. ‘Well, there was Captain Cresswell’s wife, a nice lady, but she left last September or October after her husband died. Then she got on all right with Mrs Williams, but she’s gone down to Scutari to nurse her Stan.’
‘So who comforted Lucy when she had the news of Captain Harvington’s death? Was anyone with her at the funeral?’
Another woman spoke. ‘Major Dodds would have been there. He and Captain Harvington were friendly. But I don’t know who else.’
‘And you didn’t see Lucy while she was packing for the voyage home?’
Mrs Jenkins hesitated, a sly look on her face. ‘Well, that’s the thing. She didn’t actually take her stuff with her. Just upped and went without it. We reckon she must have been so distraught she couldn’t bear to look at it.’
Dorothea felt her chest tighten with alarm. ‘She left her belongings? How very odd! I wonder if you might know what has happened to them?’
Mrs Jenkins got to her feet reluctantly. ‘I don’t know the whereabouts of all of them, mind. Just a few things.’ She hobbled off down the row of tents. The remaining women busied themselves stirring the cookpot or rearranging their coats without meeting her eye. Dorothea noticed they wore men’s trousers underneath their skirts and stout men’s boots on their feet.
They waited in silence till Mrs Jenkins returned with her arms full: there was a rectangular wooden box, an old summer bonnet of Lucy’s, a lace fan, and a ship in a bottle with a painted scene of Constantinople. She handed over the goods. Dorothea hesitate
d for a moment then sat down on the grass to examine them. Her coat would have to dry out later.
The box had a brass plate with Charlie’s name engraved on it and the lock appeared to have been forced, the wood splintered all around it. Dorothea opened the lid and gasped in surprise when she saw a thick bundle of the letters she had written to Lucy, none of them opened. Why would Lucy not have opened them? Was she still angry about their row? And then in a flash Dorothea understood: they had been stored in a locked box owned by Charlie. He hadn’t passed them on to her. Fury rose in her gullet. How unspeakable of him to come between two sisters. What a truly despicable thing to do.
Flicking through the pile of letters she saw they all bore her handwriting, bar one. On the envelope it read, ‘To my darling wife’. Dorothea had no compunction in tearing it open and reading it, even once she realised that Charlie had obviously written it for Lucy to find in the event of his death. ‘My dearest, I hope you know how deeply I love you and how very proud I am to have called you my wife.’ In some ways it felt wrong to read on, but Dorothea couldn’t stop herself. ‘I regret that we did not have time to bring children into the world, as you would have been the best of mothers,’ he wrote. ‘I hope that after a suitable period you will remarry and have children with another man, a better man than me. I don’t want our tragedy to overshadow your life when you are still so very young.’ Dorothea skim-read further down the page. ‘You will have found out by now that I withheld your sister’s letters from you and I beg you to forgive this action, which I know was wrong.’ Dorothea shook her head. You evil, selfish man, she thought, with a surge of pure fury. ‘I felt especially guilty when you told me how much you longed for word from home, and how sad and bewildered you were not to hear.’ If Charlie had been there, Dorothea would have attacked him physically; she felt rage surge around her veins. How could he have done this? Why? ‘The truth is that I was afraid your sister might still succeed in turning you against me. She might have persuaded you to return to Britain and leave me on my own out here. I wanted us to become the only family each other needed, but I know now it was very wrong of me. You should realise that Dorothea wrote many times and sent many parcels. Usually I opened them and pretended to you that the goods had come from the store, so you did not miss out.’ Dorothea read quickly, swallowing her contempt. He thanked Lucy for her love and understanding and finished by saying that it was a godforsaken war, that he should never have brought her there, and that with his last breath he would be praying for her safe return to London and wishing her all the happiness in the world for her future.