Blossom of War

by May Woodward

  ‘I’m sorry to hear of the troubles you’ve encountered, Miss Nightingale,’ Clemence said. ‘My brother the baronet is in Parliament as you must know. I will write to him…’ If it would do any good. Probably not.

  ‘And what brings you to Scutari, Miss Somerlee?’

  Clemence crossed to the window before she answered. She looked out over a choppy harbour. Scutari lay on the eastern bank of the Dardanelles – a narrow channel which connected the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean. Wars had been fought over this, God’s strategic masterpiece. On a clear day, she had been told, you could see the minarets of Constantinople on the far shore.

  ‘Well… I thought I might assist here, Miss Nightingale. I would like to volunteer… if you will have me.’

  ‘I see!’

  That sure didn’t sound a very enthusiastic take-up. And why should it? Clemence was seventeen years old and had zero training or experience.

  But now she had been here for some hours, she thought she maybe could bandage, bed wash, basic things like that. What Aunt Lizzy had said was also true – that she might hear word of her brother from one of the incoming wounded.

  ‘Well… I did observe you tending that fellow back there, Miss Somerlee. You did rather well I suppose.’ Florence Nightingale regarded her. ‘Do you know that I was a young lady of society once? Yes, does that surprise you? Oh, my family are socially inferior to the Somerlees, but respectable enough to all-but disown me when God called me to nursing. The grisly injuries are naught,’ she added with a wry smile. ‘Please expect a great deal more of the language you just heard.’

  Clemence grimaced.

  ‘Well, yes, if you don’t mind, I would like to stay. And I won’t be a nuisance. I feel…’ she wrung her hands, grappling with the thought, ‘responsible. We sent these men here over a quarrel which is none of their making or understanding.’

  ‘Bosh, Miss Somerlee! Eight months ago, these same men were dancing in the streets, calling for the Czar’s head! The people chose to fight this war, not the government. To the people it means cheering over how great their country is. Not a thought do they give about whether it’s in their country’s better interests, or how prepared we were for it, or that our only experienced military commander is a hard-of-hearing sexagenarian. You owe them no pity. Duty is what I owe, to my God and my country. But whatever your motive, Miss Somerlee, I am sure I will be glad of a willing volunteer.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Nightingale. I shan’t let you down! And it might do me good, too, to be usefully employed at this time.’ And hide from my shame… that I’m not sorry James died.

  ‘Very well. I shall show you fully around. Come.’ Miss Nightingale held out an arm. Clemence laid a hand upon it.

  ‘So, you came from Balaclava?’ Florence said as they returned to the ward. ‘You could be as useful to me there as here, you know, Miss Somerlee. A murmur – or bellow one daresay – in Lord Raglan’s ear… we could use a few more bandages and blankets.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve already been charged with one message for His Lordship.’ Clemence eyed the person on whom she had bestowed part of her frillies.

  ‘You saw the Charge of the Light Brigade?’

  ‘Yes… from Saupon Hill.’

  ‘It was a noble victory in the public imagination,’ Miss Nightingale said. ‘Brave men charging to their deaths and capturing the Russian guns in spite of the odds. Of course, being the British, we weep more for three hundred dead horses than two hundred dead men.’

  ‘My intended, Captain Swynton, died in the charge. My brother too probably… Eleventh Hussars, both…’ Clemence clasped her hands over her face, fighting tears. ‘Ah, Miss Nightingale… we don’t know what became of my brother, Cornet Aubrey Somerlee! The dead were all brought back in the days which followed, but Aubrey was not among them. Yet when Prince Menshikov sent a list of his prisoners to Lord Raglan, Aubrey’s name was not there either! One of the reasons Aunt Lizzy suggested I come to the hospital was that I might hear word from one of the wounded… one of the Russian wounded maybe.’

  ‘Even so – you might still be better in Balaclava.’ Florence Nightingale faced her. ‘Here in Scutari you are four days away from any news.’

  ‘No, really! Keep busy and keep the megrims away.’ Clemence wiped her eyes.

  Each night, Florence Nightingale would inspect the wards. She glided through rows and rows of beds, the beam from her lamp falling on each for a few heartbeats before she passed on. To the patients she looked, by this bleak light, as endearing as the workhouse matron. Few liked this harridan or her stroppy nurses – intruding where females had no business.

  ‘Even being without a tart for five months,’ one infantryman grumbled to his neighbour, ‘I’d rather shaft me colonel’s horse than ‘er!’

  As the days passed, though, resentment of Florence and her staff became toleration, and then grudging admiration. When the Chief Medical Officer paid the Scutari hospital a rare visit, he was astonished to be told:

  ‘Hope to be back in the trench outside Sebastopol and mended soon, doctor. All new bandages now, changed regular like. And a drop o’ brandy to wet a sore mouth. Best thing Parliament done us – sending the lady with the lamp.’

  ‘Drunken harlots!’ muttered Sir John Hall. ‘What was Lord Aberdeen thinking of?’

  The year’s first frost had fallen that night. Clemence looked out on a dawn sky streaked with crimson scars, remembering that winter would soon be here. In only weeks the sea crossing could be treacherous. She would get no news from her aunt in Balaclava if the storms swept in and ice bound the harbour.

  Somewhere out there in the cold wastes was her brother. Aubrey – the handsome charmer of the family – dead and unclaimed; or in some hospital like this on the enemy side where no-one spoke his language. She went to the ward with a sorry heart.

  It was the day the boats brought in the first casualties from the battle of Mount Inkerman. They piled in: too many for the beds… the less grave left to groan on the floor.

  ‘It was Sunday, miss. All the bells of Sebastopol was ringing.’ Clemence listened to the prattle of a trooper from the Cambridgeshire’s as she unwound the strap from his head. ‘Russkies attacked in the mist at dawn… our siege lines outside the city. Up on the slopes of Inkerman in the pines and vineyards. There was buzzards and falcons circling all around!’

  ‘Tell me later, private.’ Beneath the bandage lay a crusty, four-day-old gash from a bayonet. It had exposed the cranium. ‘Ahh… this needs cleaning… and dressing!’

  ‘But we drove ‘em back, miss.’ A feverish hand pawed her upper arm. ‘I was defending the sandbag battery. I’m telling you – there was dead all over the field when I come away. But they died brave, like, and we won the day. My mate Harry fell at Inkerman, bless him.’

  ‘I’m sure it was a brave death.’

  The soldier looked bemused.

  ‘Oh, he ain’t dead, miss. I mean, he fell. His bootlaces was undone. ‘Ere! You sound like a lady, miss.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure about that,’ Clemence said, ‘but I know Lord Raglan if you want me to tell him where he can stick his bayonet.’

  Clemence finished putting on the fresh dressing. She slipped an arm around his shoulder.

  ‘Afraid you might have to wait for a bed. You’re not as bad as some,’ she said, and then moved on to the next in line.

  She could see two of the Nightingale nurses nattering as they leaned against the central arch. One took a furtive swig from a gin bottle which she’d had concealed beneath her apron. Florence’s staff were not well-bred ladies: she’d recruited women who were used to dirt and roughness. If Clemence enquired of them the meaning of some new word she’d heard from the men in the ward, they would cackle. ‘Ain’t you never seen a bull on the back of a cow, miss? Well, folks does it too. That’s how we got ‘ere. And that’s what that word mea
ns. Trooper was paying you a compliment saying he’d like to do it to you.’

  Eventually, she went to seek out the first ungrateful patient she’d treated on her first day and shook him awake.

  ‘You might have to quit today, private. We’re expecting boatloads of casualties from Inkerman. You’re well enough, I believe.’

  ‘What would you know, Miss La-di-da never had to scrub for your supper? Bugger-all, like toffee-nosed officers.’

  Clemence began to tug at his blanket.

  ‘You’re fortunate you don’t get a flogging, private.’

  ‘Only ever had one in our battalion that I recall, miss. Chap got a flogging for sleeping with the regimental mascot. Our colonel says, says ‘e, “Let that be a lesson to you, my man. No-one but me sleeps with Flossy!”’

  Clemence crossed to a bed opposite where a man lay groaning, bending close to hear his words.

  ‘Ada? Is that you?’ Troubled grey eyes sought out hers. ‘Ada? Thought you was safe back in England, waiting for me.’

  By now, Clemence had grown to know that rattling sound in the throat which presaged the end. She laid a hand on the man’s brow.

  ‘Yes, my love, it is your Ada. I heard of your injury, my dear one, and hurried here to be with you.’

  ‘You look different, Ada.’

  ‘I’ve fashioned my hair a new way. But it’s your Ada, my love, here to look after you.’

  ‘Gor blimey…!’ His head rolled to one side and he fell silent.

  Her old enemy pushed himself upright. But for his bandaged thorax, he was able-bodied and lively.

  ‘Ere! Miss Somerlee! Summink you should know, darling. Ada was his pet dog!’ he guffawed.

  Clemence began to strip the covers from the new dead.

  ‘Miss Somerlee – next time you’re sniffing Lord Palmerston’s arse, bite him in the balls, eh, until he agrees to send us some decent ammo. Better still…’ The doggy diatribe continued.

  Clemence hastened to dispose of the blankets before the orderlies could dump a further victim in the same berth.

  Outside, she watched the boats bringing in yet more from Inkerman. She had met the sailors often enough now for one of the captains to know her.

  ‘Sorry, miss, I don’t bring news of your brother.’

  So! Another restless night was to come. Could she bear the sound of those waves all through the hours of darkness…?

  She bustled on, helping the orderlies lay out the stretchers on the quay.

  ‘I’m not dead, Clemmie… I told you I’d come home. And I will… one day…’

  The girl whipped around to look behind her.

  No-one was near. The wind was making a huffing, whistling noise. Sailors in the boat. Orderlies the far end of the jetty. Soldiers… the only ones within speaking distance were lying unconscious on the planks.

  Yet she’d heard a voice… somewhere close…

  Aunt Cassandra used to claim she’d heard voices like that… And she’d been shut away in a lunatic asylum because of it, poor old dear…

  Clemence hurried back to the hospital. Along the corridor the girl ran, knocking a pile of bed pans clattering… up the stairs, into the ward.

  She rested a hand on the nearest bedpost. Was that a giggle she heard coming from three Nightingale nurses standing nearby? Did they all snicker at her… patients too? A ballroom miss playing at nursing? A drawing-room poppet wanting a bit of rough? She could almost hear their thoughts…

  And, well! Her brother’s one of the politicians who started all this… see how she likes it, now she’s lost two loved ones of her own… has to watch the common soldiers retch and heave… see the wounds her own people have struck…

  EIGHT

  She caught sight of the yacht as it was just mooring. A bed pan clattered to the ground as it dropped from her fingers. Down the stairs from the ward she dashed, and out to the end of the jetty. Yes, it was the Oriflamme.

  Lord Brandon Fanshawe stepped ashore.

  He gave a start of surprise to see her, and then smiled a greeting.

  ‘You for certain look like a nurse!’

  ‘Yes. Hard to credit, isn’t it, that just two years ago I was in the palace throne room in my presentation gemstones and ostrich feathers!’ She forced a smile. ‘Florence Nightingale doesn’t really approve of charming young gels. I suspect she suffered me to stay because Richard is close to Lord Derby – who might soon be in Downing Street in place of Aberdeen the way this war is being run.’ Clemence turned towards the path. ‘Come see the place, Brandon! I’ll introduce you to Miss Nightingale.’

  Her eyes went up to the hospital building on the headland ahead, overlooking the harbour.

  What about that bed pan she had just discarded in so unprofessional a way? How patient would Miss Nightingale continue to be? Well, Clemence had a visitor from Balaclava. Nightingale knew how anxious the girl was for news. She’d understand.

  And yet… whose had that spectral voice been which Clemence had heard when she’d met the Balaclava boat yesterday…? Where had the words she’d heard come from? Was she losing her mind?

  She quickened her pace, as if it was pursuing her from the sea, whatever it was. Brandon was forced to hurry too, calling out to her not to leave him behind.

  Clemence halted beneath the awning which flapped over the door, while he caught her up. He was asking if she was all right.

  ‘Yes.. yes…’ She glanced his way. He had removed his hat. Hair blowing to and fro over his brow with each shift in the wind direction. A dimple in his cheek when he smiled.

  ‘Do you bring me news?’ she asked. Unlikely. He would have said at once.

  ‘Of Aubrey?’ Brandon turned his gaze seaward. ‘I’m afraid not.’ He was smiling, though, when he looked back. ‘But your aunt has been in contact with the Russians. She’s hoping to speak with someone on Prince Menshikov’s staff. I’m sure we’ll hear something soon. He wasn’t among the dead, like old James… I really came to see how you are, Clemmie.’

  Could none of them credit her with being capable of looking after herself?

  ‘There are more pressing things to worry about than whether I’m suitably chaperoned, Lord Brandon Fanshawe!’

  ‘Gosh! Sorry…’

  Clemence turned indoors. She remembered how she’d almost fainted the first time she had stepped through this portal. She giggled to herself as she saw the effect on Brandon when he followed her in. He stumbled against the doorframe and clapped a hand to his mouth and nose.

  ‘Yes… that’s Private Williams you can smell I believe, Fanny. Or maybe Private Godwinson. Survived Inkerman, and the boat journey here both of them, but not the cholera. Goodness, they do go off quickly, don’t they?’

  ‘My brother must be a prisoner, mustn’t he?’ she said. ‘If Aubrey wasn’t among the dead or the survivors, that’s the only possibility, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Maybe he was overlooked when the first list of prisoners was drawn up. Mistakes are easily made in war… as we’ve seen proved!’

  Volunteer Nurse Somerlee had come off duty at sunset. She was walking the sandy track along the headland, Lord Fanshawe by her side. The surf could be heard down in the channel of the Dardanelles.

  Clemence gazed across the straight towards Constantinople. A brigantine, its sails billowing back and forth, was dipping and rolling its way to port.

  How long had she known Brandon Fanshawe? Forever, it seemed. One of Dickon’s friends who he’d wanted her to marry. She’d rebelled… who do you think you are, Dickon Somerlee, ordering me, Clemence the great, about? So, she’d taken James what-was-his-name instead… fiddlesticks to you, Dickon… only to discover that it was the one she’d turned down who she really wanted to walk with.

  And now James was never coming back. Was it safe to own, then, that she had not loved him as a sweetheart should
? Mistaken for love her pride in the pretty attentions he’d paid her? If so… she and her vanity had done James a wrong. Given encouragement where there should have been none.

  You are a traitor, Clemmie!

  She swung around at sound of that voice again.

  ‘Clemence? What’s wrong?’ Brandon stopped and faced her, a startled look in his eyes.

  ‘I… I…’ Clemence twisted one way then the other. ‘I thought I heard someone calling.’

  ‘I don’t think so! There is no-one near.’

  She looked from Brandon to the hospital buildings further down the brow. Nurses and orderlies were going about their business in its precincts. At the jetty in the tiny hamlet, a fishing vessel was mooring. There came words shouted in Turkish as the sailors and stevedores disgorged the cargo.

  ‘No, it was real… I heard it, I know I heard it. Voices, I hear voices!’

  Silence of a kind fell. The activity of the hospital, of course, went on uncaringly. A nurse giving someone orders in upper-class tones. Babble of the fishermen down on the quay, and hiss of the waves dragging on the pebbly shore. Cawing of a seabird on his way home to nest for the night. Gate rattling in the wind. But it seemed an unending moment before Brandon stepped closer and laid a hand upon her arm.

  ‘Clemence. What do you mean when you say you hear voices?’

  ‘Nothing! I didn’t mean anything. Please forget I said anything, Brandon.’

  ‘Clemence…’ Brandon looked into her eyes for a long moment. ‘How long have you been toiling on the wards? How many hours? How much rest do you take?’

  ‘I work as long as I’m needed! The casualties never stop coming in, you know,’ she said with a strained smile. ‘One man dies, two more come in for the same bed! Wounded men, blind men, men without hands, men whose feet have rotted in the dampness of the trenches, men burning with fever… they never stop, never stop, never stop…’

  ‘Clemence!’ Brandon’s light touch became a grip. He opened and closed his lips several times before he spoke. ‘I think it’s time you left for England. Me too! Came here as a jolly young blood to enjoy the fun, didn’t I? Well, I’ve grown up now, and want to go home!’