Shadow of a Lady

by Jane Aiken Hodge

“Very good then. I’ll just come and give the word.”

  When she saw the officers’ room, Helen wondered what hope in the world there could be for the men. This was an inferno of crowd and noise and stench, where the conscious cried vainly for water, and the unconscious were to be envied rather than pitied. She only just recognized Charles Scroope on his pallet at the end of a line of beds. Flies were crawling over his blanched face, and the bandages on his right leg were dirty and black with blood.

  No hope for him here. If taking him away killed him, it would merely hasten the inevitable. She had taken the precaution of bringing with her one of the boys who served as scullions and, on occasion, as pages. Now she sent him to the carriage to bring the men back instantly. “You will hold the horses.”

  “Yes, signora.” He was only too glad to escape from that horrible place.

  Helen had forgotten him already. She was kneeling by Charles Scroope’s inert body, fanning away the flies, feeling anxiously for a thread of pulse.

  “He has no fever.” This was a ragged-looking, red-faced woman in a bloodstained gown. “Get him away from here, signora, and he might even live.”

  “You think so? Oh, God bless you.” Helen realised that the tears were streaming down her face and brushed them away with one impatient hand while the other went to Charles’s forehead to confirm the nurse’s diagnosis. It was true; he was not fevered, but cold as death. “He’s cold,” she said.

  “Then keep him warm. You best know how.” A bawdy wink confirmed Helen’s guess that this was a woman of the streets, who had dwindled into the profession of nurse. She looked past Helen. “Here come your people, signora. Take your husband away, and good luck to you.”

  Scarlet in the face, Helen turned to see coachman and footman grinning widely at this mistake. “Good.” Her voice was cold with anger. “Pick him up carefully. You’ve got the coach as near as possible?”

  “Right outside.” The coachman had never seen her angry, and it shook him. “We’d best lose no time, or they’ll make the boy move it.”

  The only comfort of that nightmare journey was that Charles Scroope remained unconscious. But Helen, watching more and more blood seep through the filthy bandage, had to remind herself that nothing could be more certain than death in that horrible hospital. Anything was better than that. And there was comfort, too, in that sordid nurse’s last words. “No fever,” she had shouted down the crowded, stinking room. “While there’s life, there’s hope.”

  And at the Palazzo Trevi, there was Angelina to report that all was ready in the room Helen had selected as a sickroom. “Hmm,” she, too, put a quick hand on that cold brow. “No fever. He must have the strength of an ox, this one. Bring him in, you, and if you so much as touch that leg, I’ll have words with your wives.”

  All the other servants, Helen knew, looked on Angelina as more or less of a witch, and a threat like this from her was worth any number of exhortations from their employers. They carried Charles in as if he was made of Venetian glass and laid him down tenderly on the bed Angelina had prepared. “Right.” Angelina had rolled up her sleeves. “Now send one of the maids to help me.”

  “No,” said Helen. “I will help you.” She and Miss Tillingdon had acted often enough as emergency nurses at Up Harting, but then she had been the chief nurse. It was an immense relief to yield this responsibility to Angelina. Their own doctor, for whom she had sent the boy running from the hospital, had still not appeared when they gently got the last blood-soaked layer of bandage clear of the wound.

  Angelina seemed rather pleased than otherwise that the doctor had not come. “Ah,” she said with apparent satisfaction, while Helen turned away to fight a momentary fit of faintness. “It could be worse. A glancing shot from a cannonball, I would say, and with luck not much lodged.”

  “Not much?” Helen was horrified that anything should be.

  “Not the ball.” Angelina was working rapidly at a curious compound she had brought with her. “Shreds of clothing. Sure to be, signora. Just be grateful it was a ball, and not splinters of wood. Then we would have trouble. As it is, he may have been right to refuse to have the leg off. Since he’s survived so long, there should be a chance.” She had been carefully smearing her compound on a clean cloth. It was greenish grey and added a strange smell of its own to the stench Charles Scroope had brought with him from the hospital.

  “What are you doing?” Helen could not believe her eyes as Angelina prepared to put this strange dressing on the wound.

  “Dressing the wound,” said Angelina. “You told me to care for him, signora. This will save him if anything can. I’ve used it often enough for wounds like this.”

  “It looks like mould,” said Helen faintly.

  “It is mould.” With a definite gesture Angelina laid the dressing on the gaping wound above Charles’s left knee, then let Helen help her bandage it in place. “Now one of my herbal draughts,” she said when they had finished, “and I hope we can snap our fingers at the doctor.”

  “He will want to see the wound,” said Helen.

  “He can’t. That dressing stays on till it dries. Remove it, and you might as well send for the undertaker.”

  “How long?” asked Helen faintly.

  “God knows. He’s lost so much blood. And that’s another thing. If the doctor wants to bleed him, turn him out of doors.”

  The doctor, arriving at last to find his patient lying apparently lifeless in a cool dark room through which a slight breeze blew, was horrified at everything he saw. “You’ll kill him with all this air. I’ll have those windows closed at once. And now,” he moved towards the bed, “let’s have a look at the wound.”

  “I’m sorry.” Helen moved between him and the bed. “I do apologise, doctor, but we did not dare wait. The wound has been dressed. It’s only a flesh wound, though deep enough. . . .” She shuddered, remembering.

  “Oh.” The doctor had crossed swords with Angelina before, after Ricky was born, and lost. He thought it over for a moment. “In that case,” he said, “I’ll just bleed him, to be on the safe side, and leave you a cooling draught.”

  “No,” said Helen and Angelina at once. And then Helen, pacificatory: “The draught, if you please, doctor. There is no fever yet, but we may be glad of it by night.”

  “Madness,” said the doctor. “I wash my hands of the whole crazy business.”

  It made Helen notice his hands, which were filthy. She looked from Angelina’s scrubbed brown hands to her own equally clean white ones. “Very well, doctor,” she said. “I can only apologise again for troubling you.”

  “And pay my fee,” said the doctor.

  “Well, of course.” Helen saw him to the head of the stairs with relief, and was turning back to the sickroom when her husband appeared in the doorway of his own apartments.

  “Doctor satisfied?” he asked.

  “Not altogether. Angelina had dressed the wound already and did not want it opened again.” Best not let him know that she herself had helped in the operation.

  “Old hag,” said Lord Merritt. “Well, your affair.” He looked her up and down. “Disgusting.” He summed up her appearance. “Clean yourself up. Double quick. Everyone’s up at the Hamiltons’. I’ll wait ten minutes.”

  He (or Price) was absolutely right. This was one occasion when they must put in an appearance together. “Thank you.” She allowed herself one backward glance to the sickroom, where Angelina caught her eye and nodded encouragement. “I won’t keep you.”

  “I won’t wait,” said her husband.

  For once, Helen would have been glad of help in her quick change. But Angelina was far better occupied where she was. Certainly, her own reflection in the glass told her that her husband’s comment, if rude, had been justified. Ripping off her filthy, bloodstained dress, she washed quickly in cold water, pulled another white muslin from the closet, tied it high with a blue sash, ran a comb through her curls, and was ready.

  “Plain, aren’t you?” Lord
Merritt was waiting for her.

  “Lady Hamilton will be dressed like this.” It was answer enough.

  But, “Jewels,” he said. “Great occasion. Diamonds.”

  The diamonds had been a present from his uncle on the occasion of Ricky’s birth; a present, she had often thought, that Lord Merritt resented. She had tended not to wear them as a result, and thought them wildly unsuitable to her simple muslin, but this was no time to be quibbling over trifles. “Very well.” She returned to her room, donned sparkling necklace and dangling earrings, and joined her husband in the courtyard.

  “Better.” He held the carriage door for her.

  Arriving at the Palazzo Sessa she was surprised to find that he had been quite right. Lady Hamilton, as she had predicted, was in white muslin, but she, too, was wearing the diamonds Sir William had given her, while all the other women were in full court dresses of silk and satin. And very hot they must be, Helen thought. So must Sir Horatio and Sir William, also in full dress and decorations. But she had remembered something. She held Lord Merritt back, for a moment, as he took her arm to lead her formally into the room. “Captain Scroope,” she said, “best if you mention him?”

  “Yes.” He did it, in fact, surprisingly well, choosing a pause in the conversation just after Lady Hamilton had been describing how tenderly she meant to nurse the victorious Admiral back to full health. “Doing a bit of nursing on our own account,” he said. “Least we could do. Old friend . . . Captain Scroope. May be dying, but at least, die in comfort.”

  If Price had coached him, he had done it well. “Admirable,” said Lady Hamilton. “Nothing is too good for our heroes.” She went on to describe, not, Helen thought for the first time, how she had arrived on board the Vanguard, been overcome by her emotions, and almost fainted in the Admiral’s arms. “Arm, I should say.”

  “Always at a lady’s service,” said the Admiral gallantly. He looked exhausted, Helen thought, and no wonder. Apparently he and Lady Hamilton had just returned from a private interview with the Queen, who was indisposed after the death of one of her daughters. But she also had doubtless wept, and exclaimed and called him, as her husband had, “Nostro liberatore.” Lady Hamilton might talk about nursing and asses’ milk, but she was doing little at the moment to protect her illustrious patient, who seemed to be making rather heavy weather of a conversation with Lady Knight and her daughter Cornelia. Joining them, Helen discovered that the subject of the conversation was Lady Nelson, whom Lady Knight was proud to call a friend. “If only she were here, our happiness would be complete.”

  “It would indeed.” Sir Horatio did not look as if the prospect entirely pleased.

  “Yes, yes.” Lady Hamilton had heard the remark. “It is all we want. Are we not the Trio juncta in uno, Sir Horatio, Sir William, and myself? All we need is a fourth to square the circle. But, come, Miss Knight, the musicians are tuning for you. You must sing us your new verse of ‘God Save the King.’ ”

  Miss Knight obliged the Ambassadress with proper reluctance and apology, and everyone stood as she sang:

  Join we great Nelson’s name

  First on the roll of fame

  Him let us sing.

  Spread we his praise around

  Honour of British ground

  Who made Nile’s shores resound

  God save the King.

  It brought a round of applause, and to Helen’s infinite relief, a gradual breaking up of the party. She longed to get back to that cool room, where Angelina sat quietly by the bed, away from this noise and bustle and confusion.

  She had seen Lord Merritt slip quietly away when the singing began, and was preparing to take her own leave, when Captain Forbes and Charlotte arrived. Charlotte looked tired and pale, and, Helen thought, cross. She soon learned why. After she and her husband had paid their compliments to the Hamiltons, Charlotte left him with a quick word and hurried across the room.

  “At last!” She kissed Helen warmly. “I thought we’d never get here. Really, I sometimes think John is the most obstinate man in the world. Only think of his insisting that he get all the wounded to hospital before he’d even begin to get ready. As if this wasn’t more important than anything?”

  “Well, I wonder.” Helen thought of Charles Scroope, lying so still. “I can see that your husband might feel the responsibility.”

  “He seems to feel nothing else. It’s always the same, ‘The good of the ship must come first.’ If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. Imagine him having me carried below, actually in a dead faint, on the night of the battle. I might have been a bit of furniture for all he cared. He thought only of getting the cabin cleared . . .”

  “Well, for action,” said Helen mildly.

  “He might have taken me down himself! Oh, Helen, I’ve never been so frightened in my life. That cable tier . . . There were rats.”

  “I know.” Memory rose in Helen’s throat like bile.

  “And Rose worse than useless. Crying and carrying on as if she was the one to be pitied. I could have slapped her.” Helen rather suspected that in fact she had. “And now she wants to leave me,” Charlotte wailed. “Just when I need her most. She says she can’t face another voyage.”

  “Another voyage? What do you mean? I thought you were coming back to me, dear.”

  “Oh, I do wish I was. But that’s just it! That’s what I was trying to tell you. John is so obstinate. He has taken it into his head that it’s not safe for me here in Naples. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous? Now, when Sir Horatio has made the Mediterranean British at last! John doesn’t understand!” It was a wail that had all too evidently been bottled up for Helen’s benefit. “He says the place for a lady in my—” she coloured and brought it out—“in my delicate condition is with her mamma. If he would only listen! Oh, Helen, I’ve had such a letter from Mamma. I don’t know that she will even welcome me, supposing I get there alive, which I very much doubt. The voyage will kill me, I’m sure. John just won’t understand how ill I am. He seems to think I’m making a fuss! I don’t care how his sisters managed. Great country-bred horses of young women.” She put her handkerchief to her eyes, and Helen looked round nervously to make sure that Captain Forbes was not in earshot.

  The room was thinning of people. This was no place for Charlotte to make a scene. “You had best come home with me for the time being,” she said. “A cup of Angelina’s herb tea will make you feel very much more the thing. Perhaps Captain Forbes would let you stay with us until he is ready to sail?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Charlotte eagerly. “He urged it. He says a ship refitting is no place for a lady at the best of times. But I don’t sail with him.” Here was the heart of her grievance. “Oh, no! It makes him too anxious, he says. I must go home by the packet, or any old merchantman that is most likely to fall a prey to the French. I expect my child will be born in a French prison.”

  “Nonsense,” said Helen, and reminded herself of her husband. “You must see,” she went on, wondering as she spoke just how frightful a scene Charlotte had made on the night of the great battle, “that any husband would be specially anxious in these circumstances. Just suppose the Cormorant was in action again; it would mean the cable tier, and I am sure that would not be good for you.”

  “No,” said Charlotte doubtfully. “I suppose not. But why must I go home at all? I’d much rather stay here with you, Helen, and Rose says she’ll stay with me if I do. Why go back to England, and cold, and fog, when I can stay here? And, besides, there’s Mamma! You know her, Helen; you must persuade John that she’ll make my life wretched.”

  “But I’m not so sure that she will.” Helen had been thinking about this. “Had you considered, dear, that your case is very much altered since she wrote to you? Your John is one of the heroes of the Nile now, and goodness knows what he may not get in the way of prize money. There may even be a general promotion . . . Who knows? Another action like Aboukir Bay and you may find yourself Lady Forbes, and you know how
well your mother would like that.” She was ashamed of the arguments as she put them forward, and sorry for John Forbes as she recognised that, in her frantic self-pity, Charlotte had not even stopped to think how the victory had affected her husband.

  “Oh,” she said now, taking it in slowly. “I had not thought of that.”

  Chapter 19

  HELEN’S announcement that she was taking Charlotte back to the Palazzo Trevi won her a look of such heartfelt gratitude from John Forbes that she could not help feeling anxious for the future of his marriage. “I knew I could count on you,” he said. “Charlotte will be much the better for a rest on shore before she starts on the voyage home, and my poor Cormorant is no place for a lady just now.” That settled, he turned to a subject that seemed to interest him a good deal more deeply. “Lady Merritt, while I was at the hospital I learned what you have done for my friend Scroope. I want to thank you, on behalf of us all. It’s . . . it’s heart-warming.” And then, eagerly, “Do you think he has a chance?”

  “I don’t know,” said Helen slowly. “It would not be right to hold out a great deal of hope, but I’ve an old witch of an Italian woman, with methods of her own, and I think he stands a better chance with her than he would in that hospital.”

  “I’m sure of that,” he said warmly. “It’s wonderfully good of you, Lady Merritt.”

  “It’s the least one can do.” She was at once ashamed of the half truth and uncomfortably aware of Charlotte, all agog at her elbow.

  “What’s this about Captain Scroope?” she asked now. “I thought everyone agreed he was scuppered.”

  Helen and Forbes exchanged quick, shocked glances, then she spoke fast, before he could. “I do hope not,” she said. “I’ve got him at the Palazzo Trevi. Lord Merritt and I thought it the least we could do, with Lady Hamilton caring for the Admiral.”

  “But that means real nursing!” Charlotte clearly did not mean to be involved. “Not like seeing that Sir Horatio doesn’t overdo it. Not that she is,” she added spitefully.