by Gill Paul
Dorothea folded the letter and stuck it back in the envelope, greatly distressed by what she had read. All those months, Lucy must have thought she had been abandoned by her family. If only she had been curious enough to look inside the box – but Charlie probably kept the key on his person. He must have assumed Lucy would find it and open the box after his death, and for some reason she hadn’t. Why hadn’t she? She guessed he used to keep cash in there as well, and that whoever had forced the lock had pocketed the money. She was livid with Charlie, but she felt guilty too. She should have paid more heed to that letter from Charlie’s family warning that he would not make a good husband. She should somehow have forced Lucy to stay in London.
Mrs Jenkins saw Dorothea’s distress and misunderstood the reason: ‘You can’t blame folk if they helped themselves to a few bits and pieces. We’re all short here and it’s not as if Mrs Harvington needed her clothes any more. She’d gone off without them.’
‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Dorothea said. ‘Lucy would want you to have them. Thank you so much for these few items.’ She took out a handkerchief to wipe her nose, determined not to cry in front of these strangers.
‘She was a lovely lady,’ another of the women said. ‘One time she brought us a bag of coal. Everyone was short of coal and she could’ve kept it to herself but she didn’t, she shared. She was a generous sort but too young and too green for a place like this.’
‘Yes, she had a lovely nature,’ Mrs Jenkins agreed, her previous defensiveness melted by Dorothea’s emotional state. ‘Can we offer you a cup of coffee? It’s not very good coffee, mind. They give us green coffee beans and no grinder to make use of them but we’ve found a way of pounding them with a stone … Jane, get the lady some coffee.’
Mrs Jenkins appeared to be the boss, because a woman rose to do her bidding.
‘You’d probably rather have tea,’ Mrs Jenkins continued, ‘and so would I. But we ran out of that months ago, along with sugar, and there’s never been any milk. We’re lucky to get bread or dry biscuits and the occasional stringy bit of meat.’
‘Was Lucy going hungry?’ Dorothea asked. ‘How did she manage? She can’t cook.’
Mrs Jenkins chuckled. ‘She was all fingers and thumbs in the kitchen but after Mrs Cresswell left she would come and sit with us most days and she peeled a potato or two. She must have a strong constitution because she didn’t get the cholera or any of the fevers going round up here in Crimea. Her husband, on the other hand … well, it’s not my place to say.’
‘You can speak freely with me,’ Dorothea said, eyes narrowed at the thought of him. ‘How did Captain Harvington cope?’
Mrs Jenkins wrinkled her nose. ‘He was a fair-weather soldier: fun to be around when the going was good but as soon as things got hairy he was hiding in the bushes and taking to the bottle. Your sister was the stronger character, for sure.’
It did not surprise Dorothea to hear Charlie had proved a coward, especially now she knew the extent of his selfishness. He was all frivolity and no backbone, she thought bitterly. How could Lucy have fallen for him?
As the woman called Jane handed Dorothea her coffee – a watery greyish drink – she noticed she was wearing one of Lucy’s gowns beneath her coat, a shell-pink silk one with cascading skirts and a decorative flounce up the centre of the bodice. ‘Why do you think Lucy left her clothes behind?’ she asked. ‘Did she depart in a great rush?’
Jane quickly wrapped the coat around her to hide the gown. ‘I expect she heard there was a ship leaving and she wanted to catch it. No point hanging round here a minute longer than you have to.’
They all nodded and seemed convinced that must have been the reason. Dorothea stayed an hour, asking the women about their experiences in Varna and then here, trying to understand what her sister’s life had been like this past nine months. She got the sense there was something they weren’t telling her. Why did Lucy not say her goodbyes? Why did she leave both her own and Charlie’s possessions behind? It didn’t seem right and she felt a knot of worry.
Later, back at the hospital, Dorothea described the scene to Elizabeth Davis. ‘They appeared shifty, as though they were hiding something, but I couldn’t get them to admit what it was.’
‘You must speak to Major Dodds.’
‘He was at the front so I left a note for him. I hope he’ll reply soon. Something is wrong; I know it.’
Lying in bed that night, Dorothea tried to distract herself from her worry by focusing on the positive things the women had told her. Lucy hadn’t been ill in Varna, thank God. She had tried to help with the cooking. But the camp had been so dismal, with no comforts to speak of, and she must have been lonely if Charlie had taken to the bottle. She prayed the women were correct in thinking that Lucy had caught the first ship home. In that case, she should hear from her soon. If she had not, where could she be?
The days passed, and every time Dorothea saw a mail sack arrive, she prayed that it would include a missive telling her of Lucy’s safe arrival in London. Her imagination began to run away with her: what if Lucy were stuck in Scutari with no money for the onward voyage? Would she be driven to prostitution? Dorothea couldn’t believe this. And then she worried that she might be ill somewhere, or even – unthinkable – that she had perished.
Her fears multiplied when she received a letter from her father saying that Lucy had not returned to the Russell Square house. She saw it was dated 7th February, Lucy’s birthday; if Lucy left Crimea straight after Christmas, she should have been home by then. Where was she? Her father said there had been a letter from her just before Christmas, which had been delivered personally by a very charming lady friend of hers named Adelaide Cresswell. Mrs Cresswell, a recent widow, had apparently accepted a glass of negus and stayed for a long conversation, but he had no news of Lucy after that. Dorothea wrote back immediately asking if her father could undertake to obtain Mrs Cresswell’s address. Perhaps she might be able to speculate on Lucy’s whereabouts.
‘Charlie died just before Christmas,’ she told Elizabeth. ‘That’s two months ago. How could it have taken her so long to get back?’
Elizabeth had a suggestion. ‘These ships have various disembarkation points. She could be in Malta, or Piraeus, or even Constantinople, waiting for another passage.’
Dorothea shivered at the memory of the soldiers’ wives in the cellar at Scutari. She knew Lucy would rather die than sell herself; pray God it hadn’t come to that.
Chapter Twenty-five
Dorothea purchased some goods from the hospital store – a jar of preserved fruits, a chicken, some potatoes, a bag of sugar and a tin of tea – and sent them up to the 8th Hussar wives, thanking them for looking after Lucy. As she wrote, it occurred to her to wonder if any of them could read; they had clearly lacked curiosity about the letters in Charlie’s box. She signed her name and asked the supply wagon driver to explain the gift was from her.
They were still short of fresh vegetables at the hospital but since the shipment arrived they were far better off than those at the British camp. They at least had clean, lice-free clothes and bedding, and meals three times a day. Elizabeth worked wonders with the ingredients to hand, making jellies from the preserved fruits, and somehow managing to serve a nutritious broth or stew every lunchtime. She had a temper, and any orderlies who got around her barricades and stole food from her larder caught the rough edge of her tongue, but she was good company and most of the medical staff dropped by to listen to the latest gossip when they had time.
‘I hear in the Turkish camp they are eating the meat of their dead horses,’ she told Dorothea. ‘They’re nothing but heathens. An orderly told me they cut off the ears of their enemies and pin them on their tents as decoration.’
‘The Turkish patients in my ward seem perfect gentlemen,’ Dorothea objected. ‘If they eat horse meat, it is perhaps because they are starving. Remember that we would be short of provisions had it not been for the recent shipment.’
‘The French, on the other hand – they import delicacies such as foie gras and champagne.’ Elizabeth Davis affected an aristocratic accent.
Dorothea raised an eyebrow, thinking this must be an exaggeration. Elizabeth Davis tended to be critical of any nationality but her own.
‘It’s true!’ she exclaimed, noting Dorothea’s scepticism. ‘They are sold by the vivandières. Have you seen them parading around, thinking they are so special? They’re the ones in short red skirts over red trousers, with the blue fitted jackets and wide-brimmed hats. Mr Russell of The Times calls them hors de combat and I don’t doubt he’s right about that.’
Dorothea blushed at the lewd double entendre. She suspected that although her fiancé had died before their wedding, Elizabeth possessed more experience of adult sexual relations than she.
‘So was there never a gentleman caller you considered marrying?’ she asked, adding a pinch of salt to her broth and stirring.
Dorothea blinked, taken aback by the abrupt change of subject and unused to discussing such personal subjects. ‘It was difficult with Mother’s illness. I didn’t like to invite anyone to the house. I was twenty-six when she passed away and that’s when I started nursing.’
‘I’m surprised one of the doctors at your Pimlico hospital didn’t snap you up.’
Dorothea smiled shyly at the compliment. ‘There was one man, a barrister, who called on me for about a year. He proposed the night before I came out here but I turned him down.’
‘What was his name, and how did you meet him?’ Elizabeth blew on a spoonful of soup, tasted it and made a face before adding more salt.
‘William Goodland. He was the brother of a friend.’
‘But you weren’t in love with him.’ Elizabeth said it as fact.
‘When he proposed, I was more surprised than anything else. Our conversation was always awkward and we knew so little of each other that I wondered how he could dream of spending his life with me. We were perfectly cordial, but …’
‘There was no passion,’ Elizabeth finished the sentence for her and Dorothea blushed again. She cared for men on her wards and had often seen their most intimate parts, but talk of passion led her thoughts back to those rough men who had attacked her in Scutari. If that was passion, she wanted none of it.
The doctors and nurses at Balaklava Hospital pooled their medical knowledge and invented ingenious remedies to circumvent the lack of supplies. Dorothea found many of the nurses used poultices of their own design. Kate Anderson recommended that the area of the heart be kept warm with a mustard poultice whenever the pulse was weak. Another nurse, Mrs Evans, mixed mustard powder with warmed oil and rubbed it directly onto the stomach and back, but she favoured linseed oil poultices for frostbite. Elizabeth Davis cooked up her own brew of bitter herbs for digestive disorders and made it more palatable by mixing in a little port wine or brandy. ‘Back home I use rhubarb but chance would be a fine thing here,’ she commented. Many favoured herbal remedies, such as meadowsweet for fever and pennyroyal for gastric complaints, and they had all brought their own supplies in wooden medicine chests similar to Dorothea’s.
Kate Anderson arrived in the kitchen one day in some distress, her apron spattered with fresh blood. ‘I do wonder about the side effects of chloroform,’ she cried, looking shaky. ‘I just had a patient who retched so violently when coming round from surgery that the stitches in his belly burst, ripping the flesh around and creating a much greater, more ragged hole than that caused by a Russian bullet. It was horrible.’
‘It does take some worse than others, but if you’ve ever seen an amputation without chloroform, the poor man biting down on a rag against the excruciating agony, then there’s no going back …’ Mrs Evans was the speaker, but all the older nurses nodded in agreement.
‘They have such pounding headaches from the chloroform. You can see in their eyes how foul the pain.’
‘I think the trick is to administer as little as possible. Two or three drops at most,’ Elizabeth Davis said.
‘Isn’t it good to feel we women are so useful here?’ Kate asked, and there was a general murmur of agreement and nodding of heads.
‘You can always give opium for the headaches,’ Mrs Evans contributed. ‘Most of ’em ask for it.’
‘But it can prove fatal if the constitution is already weak,’ Dorothea volunteered. ‘It doesn’t work for all. And I worry about those who become dependent on it.’
She told them of a patient named Captain Roderick Lethbridge, who arrived at the hospital on foot complaining of severe stomach pain. ‘Help me!’ he yelled so loudly that the entire ward awoke from their slumbers, and he bent double, leaning against a wall. ‘Bring me opium,’ he demanded of Dorothea, grabbing her arm.
‘Have you been shot?’ she asked, and he shook his head, grimacing. ‘We should wait for the doctor to examine you. What brought on this illness?’
‘Damn you, I’ve had it before and the doctor always gives me opium. He said the stomach is ulcerated and pain relief is the only course.’
As Dorothea led him to a bed she smelled arak, the local spirit, on his breath. A fug of it permeated his clothing. ‘Will you change yourself into a nightshirt?’ she asked. ‘I’ll fetch you a clean one.’
‘For God’s sake, woman, I can’t stay here. I’m needed back on the line. Just get me some opium NOW.’
His pupils were tiny pinpricks and he was sweating profusely, although his skin was cool to the touch. Dorothea took his pulse and was alarmed at its unsteadiness. ‘Let me find a doctor.’
‘Be quick about it. I haven’t got all day.’ He was a most unpleasant character, she decided, but even the worst sorts deserved care.
She walked the corridors until she spotted the kindly Dr White doing a round in ward nine. She hurried up and as soon as she told him the name of the patient he nodded. ‘He’s an opium addict. Since your friend Miss Davis barricaded the store cupboards, he hasn’t been able to top up his supplies.’
Dorothea was astonished. ‘But he’s a captain, in charge of a hundred men. And he stinks of alcohol.’
‘He probably drank alcohol when he ran out of opium but found it was a poor substitute, so he came here.’
‘Do you think he is pretending to have stomach pains? He is certainly making a lot of noise about it.’
Dr White shook his head. ‘No, I expect he’s genuinely in agony as his system craves more of the drug. How much stock do we have?’
‘I believe there is plenty for our needs. A consignment arrived last week.’
‘In that case, give Captain Lethbridge half a bottle and tell him to take nine drops of tincture in a glass of water. As you know, the normal dose is ten. You could also dose him with Miss Davis’s bitters, for their laxative effect – but leave out the port wine.’
‘Should I recommend bed rest?’
‘No, send him back out. When he comes here again, as he assuredly will, give him a smaller amount and tell him to reduce the dose to eight drops. It’s for his own good, although I doubt he will see it that way.’
Four days after Dorothea’s visit to the 8th Hussars’ camp, Major Dodds called at the hospital to speak to her, in response to the letter she had left for him. She was overwhelmed with relief when he poked his head round the door of her ward and introduced himself. He was a tall, slender man with a decorative squiggle of moustache and curly locks like a girl’s.
‘Thank you so much for taking the time to see me,’ she said, and walked out into the hallway to talk in private with him.
‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I can’t tell you how deeply saddened I was by Charlie’s death. I miss him every day. He was a good friend.’
Dorothea wondered if Charlie had told him about her, the sister-in-law who tried to prevent his wedding? If so, nothing in Major Dodds’ manner gave it away. ‘I am anxious to hear how my sister fared after receiving news of his death. She has not yet arrived back in London and I’m worried.’
‘Lucy was very ca
lm,’ he replied. ‘I don’t believe I saw her shed a tear, but she wanted to sit vigil with Charlie, and after we buried him she refused to leave the graveside. I did my best to persuade her, of course, but was forced to return to camp on urgent business. We left her with a horse so she could make her own way back. I’m sorry, but I didn’t see her after that.’
Dorothea pursed her lips. Lucy had never been a confident rider. ‘And the horse?’
‘It was in camp the following morning. I assume she came back in the dead of night then got a lift down to Balaklava for the first ship out of here. I’m told she left most of her possessions but perhaps that’s because she couldn’t carry them.’
‘Is it possible the horse could have thrown her and she lay injured and undiscovered?’ She felt a surge of anger that no one had cared enough to check she was safe.
Major Dodds was adamant this could not have been the case. ‘The track between the camp and our officers’ graveyard on Cathcart’s Hill is a very well-trodden one, I’m sorry to say. I suggest you ask the Balaklava harbourmaster, who will most likely have a record of finding her a berth that morning. Your sister is a memorable lady.’