The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  But nobody was much interested in my cholera. It was the Charon of the Thames, but it plied not for the hire of decent persons who kept clean houses. That Miss Nightingale should invade the wards of the Middlesex Hospital was seen by the gentry as perverse, disgusting behaviour for a lady.

  Its best effect was bringing me nearer to Miss Bancroft in the writing. I do not believe that I was in love with her, a condition which inflicts more widespread misery among young people than poor dentition. I was too full of innocently conceited joie de vivre readily to share myself with another. But I had overheard her name as Jane, and I was piqued at seeing no chance of advancing my intimacy with a pretty woman unadhesive from Miss Nightingale.

  Meanwhile, I had Harriet. That same Thursday afternoon, I lay on the lavender-scented bed amid the forget-me-not wallpaper in Brompton, when a loud double-knock sounded at the front door.

  Harriet sat up with a shriek. ‘Mr Larderton!’

  ‘What nonsense. It’s the butcher’s boy or the muffin man.’

  ‘My God! I’m done for.’

  She was scrambling into her drawers. I lay on the bed, unclothed and unconcerned. Last time, it had been the rag-and-bone man.

  ‘Tristram! The window – you always said you would.’

  ‘I should break the roof of the conservatory.’

  ‘Oh! Go, go! Please, please go!’ She was trying to clasp her stays, laces flying like whips. I was amused at the pretty frenzy of her response to a false alarm. The bedroom door opened, and Mr Larderton came in.

  He did not in the slightest match his image. He was skinny and short, with thin gingery hair and meagre whiskers, edging a peaky face. He resembled a jockey in a frock-coat and black cravat for a funeral.

  ‘Why aren’t you in Newmarket?’ demanded Harriet furiously.

  ‘My horse was scratched.’

  His glance transfixed me. I was already off the bed and into my trousers. ‘This is too much,’ he said quietly.

  ‘The gentleman is my cousin.’

  ‘I don’t think that makes any difference.’

  I was scrambling into my shirt. I was incapable of thought, my fright shameful. My youthful amours had been too hesitant, too clumsy or too scorned to lead me such a naked dance before. I expected Mr Larderton to draw a pistol and shoot me. Instead, he sat on a wicker chair and cupped his forehead in his hands.

  He said sorrowfully, ‘Harriet, you promised there would be no more.’

  ‘But lovey-dovey! There are no others. ’Pon my honour.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he responded more forcefully. ‘How did you meet this man?’

  ‘He is a gentleman who made himself agreeable to me, when you abandoned me for your betting and champagne drinking at Epsom.’ Harriet tried to sound dignified, as her stays slipped unheeded from breasts still warm with my attentions.

  I paused, collar half secured. ‘Harriet – ! Do I understand there have been others? Here?’ I glanced sympathetically at Mr Larderton, as he drew his handkerchief and started to weep. ‘You have not been faithful to either of us,’ I complained.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Harriet.

  I took heart. I was no single enemy of Mr Larderton’s but one of a platoon. To satisfy his honour, he would need not a duelling pistol but a Colt revolver. ‘As the cause of your present distress, I must apologize, sir. But may I ask you to share my point of view? Such beauty as you have chosen for your own is clearly too tempting for many a hot-blooded young man.’

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked bleakly.

  ‘A literary gentleman, sir.’

  ‘I should have thought as much.’

  Harriet began to cry, as piercingly as an ass at the full moon. She collapsed on the silk coverlet, head in hands, elbow on bare thighs, golden hair curtaining perfect shoulders, heaving with violent sobs. Only I seemed to have escaped the contagion of misery. I continued tying my white cravat in her dressing-table mirror.

  ‘You’re acquainted with others, I suppose?’ he asked me, looking at Harriet severely. ‘Harry, Billy, Andy, I don’t know.’

  ‘I am as ignorant of them, sir, as you were of me.’

  ‘You will quit this house immediately.’

  ‘That was entirely my intention.’

  Harriet shrieked. ‘Don’t leave me!’

  ‘But surely another protector will shortly be along, with the regularity of the penny omnibus?’ I asked. I was more furious than Mr Larderton with my temptress. She was nothing but a Haymarket whore. That at least spared me the moral obligation of averting her beating, or sharing it.

  ‘Tristram, my only love – !’ She crammed both sets of knuckles between her teeth, sobbing like a bellows at damp coals.

  ‘Sir, may I offer you my hand?’ I extended it to Mr Larderton. ‘We are brothers in misfortune –’

  ‘Go, go, damme, and don’t talk so much,’ he shouted.

  Little Nell was clutching the banisters at the foot of the stairs, eyes like oyster-shells. ‘Oh, lawks, sir! Is she dead?’

  ‘Mr Larderton is too sensitive a person to take away Miss Harriet’s life. Or even her living, I suspect.’

  ‘Are you hurt, sir?’ She was searching me for blood.

  ‘You never mentioned the others to me,’ I said accusingly.

  ‘It wasn’t my place, sir. Besides, I never mentioned you to them.’

  ‘Were there many?’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to say, sir.’ I handed her a silver coin. Turning crimson, she told me, ‘Yes, many, sir. And some not so young.’

  ‘No wonder the nights were denied me,’ I sighed.

  Little Nell bobbed, showing me out. I heard more sobs from upstairs. If Mr Larderton flushed Harriet from the nest, she had a comfortable supply of bird-seed.

  7

  About eleven o’clock the following night I left the Penny Pioneer office after handing my evening’s work to the editor. He was a fat, red-faced man called Horncastle, with the peculiarity of wearing country clothes in Town, giving him the excuse when necessary of carrying a riding-crop for solicitors’ clerks with writs. My copy was my customary gossip, gathered impartially from ballrooms and backdoors, fops and footmen, peeresses and parlourmaids. People are always free with malice about others, if sufficiently indebted to them.

  I crossed Salisbury Square as usual to Daley’s Rooms, part chop-house and part tavern, sawdust-floored with high-backed stalls, smoky gas and disagreeable waiters. My finery would have provoked in similar places ribaldry or a cheese-rind through the air, but Fleet Street even then was an area of quips and cranks, where anything passed.

  As I left after eating, a small man I had noticed staring in my direction, in poor clothing and with the look of a short-tempered ferret, rose, followed me, and laid a hand on my arm. ‘Guv’nor, I’ve a small proposition,’ he said in a hoarse Cockney voice.

  Propositions from the lower classes were my bread and butter. I asked his name, but he replied predictably, ‘Never you mind.’ He jerked his head. I followed him towards an alley guarded by a gas-lamp, which tumbled downhill to the blackness and stink of the river.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘About a Member of Parliament.’ He led me into the dark. ‘Listen, Guv’nor –’

  He stopped, looked furtively up and down the empty alley, and it was too late, the knife was already in his hand.

  I instinctively kicked, but he jumped back on his toes like a pugilist. For a second which lasted to eternity, I felt the fear of death. My life would certainly have ended that night, were not a window thrown open above and the contents of a chamberpot, destined for the gutter, emptied on our heads.

  I ran headlong for the gaslight, faster than from Angus and his whip. Breathless I found a cab, arrived home still shaking, to spend a trembling night empty of sleep. Who was my thwarted assassin? A common footpad after a dandy’s watch? The paid executioner of Mr Larderton? He could easily have forced my name from the shattered Harriet. Or of Mr Wakley-Barlow? That seemed most likely, fro
m the man’s careless reference to an MP. Or someone else I had hurt with my pen? My occupation grew enemies like a wheatfield tares, though it was not one worth the life of a harvest mouse.

  The timorous hour of dawn saw my decision to abandon the life of a tattler. My existence had been spared for something more worthy. But what? My uncle Peregrine had long offered the post of steward to his Berkshire estate, but there I should die only more lingeringly of boredom. More immediately, I must buy new clothes. I could hardly attend Lady Canning’s soirée that same Saturday evening smelling of piss. I knew Miss Nightingale would be there, and – I particularly hoped after losing Harriet – Miss Bancroft.

  That day felt the first dank breath of autumn. The slates ran damp, and by evening the mist was clinging round the chimney-pots with the promise of lodging there, and in the lungs of Londoners, till next Easter. A fire leapt at both ends of the Cannings’ cream and gold reception-room. It was already full when I arrived, gas glittering on diamonds and orders, three pale musicians in the corner intruding Chopin diffidently upon such splendid company. I had only few invitations to such great houses, generally from politicians seeking a puff, like the Crystal Palace removers with their free tickets. I was received as a gentleman, which I was, if not acting as one. From practice, my eye first sought the liberality of the supper-table, then the footman with the champagne. It met next that of my uncle Humphry, in full episcopal fig.

  He was staring at me in amazement, past a man holding him in conversation, who was about sixty, with a Roman nose, a strong chin, short curly grey hair retreating from a noble brow and an air of importance.

  I could not fly. I did not wish to. It was going to be amusing. I listened to their talk, out of habit. My uncle’s companion seemed a friend of Sir Peregrine.

  ‘I was taken to St George’s Hospital to see the chloroform tried,’ he was saying. ‘A boy two years old was cut by Sir Peregrine for a stone. The stone was so large, and the bladder so contracted, he could not get hold of it, and the operation lasted above twenty minutes. Being performed under chloroform, it was exactly the same as operating on a dead body. A curious example was then shown of what is called the étiquette of the medical profession,’ he continued in a comfortably amused voice. ‘Sir Peregrine could not extract the stone, so handed the instrument to Keate, who is the finest operator possible, and he got hold of it.’

  He did not appear to notice having lost his hearer’s attention. ‘Sir Peregrine begged to have the forceps back that he might draw it out, but he let go of it, the whole thing had to be done over again, not of course without increasing the local inflammation and endangering the life of the child. I later asked Keate why. He said that Sir Peregrine’s “dignity” would have been hurt, if he had not been allowed to complete what he had begun.’

  He laughed. The bishop frowned. He had been entirely distracted by the mystery of sharing the same nobleman’s reception-room as myself.

  ‘All the great discoveries of science sink into insignificance compared with chloroform,’ the surgical onlooker ended floridly. ‘Wonderful as are the powers and feats of the steam engine and the electric telegraph, the chloroform far transcends them all in its beneficent and consolatory operations. Sir?’ he added sharply and disconcertingly, fixing my intrusive face with a resentful glare.

  The bishop had no choice but introduce his nephew. He indicated to me grudgingly, ‘Mr Charles Greville, Clerk of the Privy Council.’

  I had heard of Mr Greville. I knew that he was connected with the Cannings. He was connected with all the most powerful families in the land, which combined sadly with his comparatively lowly official post, but happily with his avidity for talking about everyone behind their backs. A useful man for me to know. But I could not. I was too far below him in both social standing and his own estimation.

  He went to sow anecdotes in other ears, leaving the bishop staring at me blankly. I observed politely, ‘I suppose it was inevitable, sir, that you and I should meet some time in society?’

  ‘Inevitable? Why?’

  ‘By the by, I hope you found my notes on Mr Darwin’s conversation adequate?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. Quite adequate.’ He continued to frown. ‘I am reassured that he is about to attack the Book of Genesis with nothing more savage than a pair of Equatorial finches.’

  The next instant, the bishop could have been in the Galapagos Islands himself. I was facing Miss Bancroft.

  ‘Mr Darling! Great things are happening tonight. Mr Sidney Herbert is coming –’ She stopped, aware of her impetuous impoliteness. I rapidly introduced His Lordship the Bishop of Chelsea. She bobbed. ‘Mr Darling’s pen has been at the disposal of Miss Nightingale, my Lord,’ she explained.

  My uncle looked even more puzzled. ‘It is good to hear of a young poet so much in demand.’

  ‘Poet, my Lord? Oh, but you must read the Penny Pioneer –’

  ‘I certainly shall not!’

  ‘Mr Darling is the newspaper’s clever gossip writer. Everyone in society knows that, and is frightened to death of him,’ she said smilingly.

  ‘Tristram! Is this right?’

  ‘Miss Bancroft is incapable of uttering untruths, sir, as I am sure you can tell from her angelic expression.’

  The bishop’s face worked. I was condemned to Hell, if Mr Darwin left it intact. ‘I suspected that you were up to some such knavery. Will you kindly take note, sir, that I always thought your pretensions to be a literary gentleman were as false as the metre of your Virgilian verses. Good evening.’

  Miss Bancroft was amazed. ‘Why is he so cross?’

  ‘He is my uncle.’

  She put her hand to her mouth, blushed, but after a second laughed. ‘J’ai fait un faux pas,’ she apologized, sharing Miss Nightingale’s weakness for a French phrase.

  ‘He will never ask me to dine again,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Which is delightful, because his wine is as vinegary as his opinions.’

  We each took a glass of champagne from the footman’s silver tray. The band respectfully ventured a polka.

  ‘I know your christian name is Jane. May I use it?’

  ‘No, Mr Darling. You may not.’

  ‘We are surely too young to wear formality like the old wear rouge and whiskers? Do you still think me a monster?’

  ‘No, only a midge, which can cause exaggerated irritation from a tiny bite.’

  ‘Shall I buzz away?’

  ‘A midge can keep you amused on a dull summer’s day.’ I saw Miss Nightingale across the room, in a green silk gown which I felt sure to be incapable of rustle. Miss Bancroft’s was brown, hardly more showy than her working uniform. ‘But I have more serious work to do than encouraging a young man’s gallantry.’

  ‘There is no more serious work for any woman.’

  ‘Only for women so self-satisfied with their sex as you obviously are with yours.’

  The room abruptly fell quiet. Mr Sidney Herbert had hurried in.

  He was tall, brown-haired, handsome, with long straight brows and long soft mouth, clean-shaven, gracefully patrician, just turned forty-four and immensely rich. He wore dark day clothes with a high collar and black stock, and like all Government ministers the bustling air of tearing himself from momentous duties to which he must impatiently return. His fine eyes were saucered in shadows. I thought even then that he looked ill.

  He was Secretary at War in Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet. Secretary at occupied a different kennel among our dogs of war than Secretary of, who was the Duke of Newcastle. The Duke did the fighting, Mr Herbert balanced the ledgers. He was a senior accounting official, like several score others buried under the candle ends and cheeseparings of Whitehall.

  I had heard something whispered about Sidney Herbert. He was related to the enemy. His mother was the daughter of a Czar’s former ambassador to the Court of St James’s. There was a link of stranger metal. In the Crimea, the Worontzoff Road which ran across the Chersonese Peninsula, and in the autumn of 1854 was coming into the fight
ing and London conversation, led to the palace of his uncle. This road was shortly to edge the most concentrated disaster in British military stupidity.

  The room parted instinctively, as he made directly for Miss Nightingale.

  ‘You know how much Mr Herbert has ventured beyond his official responsibilities?’ Miss Bancroft said to me, face flushed with eagerness. ‘He has taken charge himself of the military hospitals.’

  ‘Then he is an angel who has rushed in where fools fear to tread. The whole Town is after his blood, since Mr Russell’s dispatches in this week’s Times.’

  ‘He has always had a philanthropic interest in the sick. And of course, he is well acquainted with Miss Nightingale, since they met in Rome five or more years back.’

  I edged away. I should have revelled in an evening chatting to Miss Bancroft, but my instinct for news was more compelling than a foxhound’s nose.

  Miss Nightingale met him with a delighted smile, ‘Did you have my letter?’

  I had to overhear what was said.

  ‘No. Had you mine? Then they must be crossing this moment in the post. That’s a promising coincidence.’

  ‘Should I believe The Times?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘Not wholly. Medical stores have been sent out East in profusion, I assure you. Lint by the ton weight, fifteen thousand pairs of sheets, medicine, wine, arrowroot, all comforts for the sick, in the same proportion. The only way of accounting for the deficiency at Scutari – if it exists – is that the mass of stores went to Varna in Bulgaria, and were not sent back when the army left there for the Crimea.’

  A silent, curious room recovered its manners and resumed chattering brightly, though I noticed that few listened to another. Even the band had meekly stopped.