The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  The night before, Soyer woke us all up, complaining that he was dying of brain fever. It was from seeing our immense number of wounded, and the number of dead bodies passing before the windows to be buried. Newbolt prescribed a purge. The next morning, he buzzed with health like a midsummer bee. At eleven o’clock, Miss Nightingale and Miss Bancroft, Major Sillery and even Newbolt, appeared respectfully in the kitchen. Lady Stratford could not come, but sent a kind message.

  Like William Howard Russell, Soyer joined Miss Nightingale in making a new point to the world – that all men are important, even soldiers. We have entered the century of the common man, as I continually tell my readers of the Daily Pioneer. Miss Florence Nightingale was his midwife.

  17

  May came. Newbolt and Handshear were permitted by standing orders to change their trousers from blue cloth to white linen. On a Wednesday morning in the middle of the month, Miss Nightingale, Miss Bancroft and myself sailed in the steamship Robert Lowe from Constantinople to the Crimea.

  The hospital had changed unbelievably, like a battlefield from the carnage of action to pastoral peace. The most terrible of the Czar’s commanders, Generals January and February, had retreated from the defence of Sebastopol. Scutari had only a thousand patients, only a hundred of those bedridden. The hospital killed only twenty-two men from every 1,000. In January, it was forty-two in every hundred.

  The day was warm, the air soft, Constantinople wore a vaporous golden tint, the foaming current of the Bosphorus seemed buried in its bed. Amid the skimming caiques, under the squawking gulls, we watched the gorgeously silk-hung caique of the Sultan leave the marble steps of Dolma Bachi Palace to the beat of a dozen oars and the bang of fifty guns. My excitement of quitting my pestiferous lodging for the seat of the war was lessened only by Monsieur Soyer coming with us. I had the notion that he thought the Crimean campaign engineered only for his benefit. Though at least we should eat well.

  ‘What a glorious mine of subjects for a Claude Lorraine, mademoiselle!’ Soyer appeared on deck in a gold-braided waistcoat, blue-and-silver striped trousers, white burnous, and wide-awake hat flowing with red and white ribbons. He looked more important than General Canrobert. The two ladies wore heavy shawls over their black dresses. My Mayfair clothes having disintegrated, I had written to uncle Peregrine and received promptly a box of shooting-jackets, leggings, comforters, boots and a gutta-percha coat from Gibbys & Haines. ‘It is much to be regretted that Claude Lorraine never visited these Moslem shores,’ sighed Soyer.

  ‘We are near Therapia,’ remarked Miss Nightingale, who saw the world with a different eye. ‘Where the naval hospital is situated so beautifully and so very unhealthily.’

  I said, ‘I heard a shave today that Miss Stanley has gone home.’

  Miss Nightingale’s eyes flashed. ‘That is perfectly correct. Miss Stanley has been very unwell for some time.’

  Miss Stanley did not recur in our conversation.

  ‘I bear an unofficial letter from the War Office to Lord Raglan,’ announced Soyer, as though it would solve all our travelling problems, and even force the Russians into surrender. ‘I had the honour of knowing his Lordship some ten years ago. He called me one of his great benefactors, for giving his Lordship’s cook my receipt for pot-au-feu. I had of course the honour of sailing out with the distinguished Turkish commander Omer Pacha from Marseilles. He imagined that I was coming to open a hotel!’ He quivered with laughter at so ridiculous a misconception. ‘Hello! Here is your “man”, mademoiselle,’ he continued boisterously. ‘A regular enfant de troupe.’

  Miss Nightingale’s latest adherent was Robert Robinson, who everyone called Thomas, a drummer invalided from the 68th Light Infantry. He declared often that he had quitted his instruments and sticks ‘to devote my civil and military career to Miss Nightingale’. He was twelve years old.

  ‘Bravo!’ Soyer greeted him. ‘Are you a good sailor? Are you, Mademoiselle Nightingale? You know, the Black Sea is called in French La Mère Noire, who safely bears her children upon her tranquil bosom in the morning, and at night rocks the cradle with such furious love that she changes the smile of comfort to sickness and tears.’

  ‘There’s not a sea the passenger e’er pukes in, Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine,’ I quoted Wakley-Barlow’s favourite poem.

  Our spirits stayed as bright all the voyage, though the ship was slow, crammed with officers, Government officials and 420 of Florence’s convalescents, sent to be shot at again. On Saturday after breakfast we anchored at Balaclava. It was barely a creek between steep hills with a village at the far end, the water a picket-fence of masts. Every rigging was alive, every ship’s side strained with men giving sporadic cheers, calling, ‘Miss Nightingale! Miss Nightingale!’ At Scutari, we felt her renown no more than celebrated explorers still in their jungle. That morning, I realized that she was truly famous. My catch-phrase The Lady with a Lamp was a trump to take a trick on the public imagination.

  The smell of Balaclava was terrible. Everyone spoke of the storm the previous November, when the harbour looked like a forest in an earthquake, ten hours when no one dared go out for fear of blowing into the sea. The sailors of the Prince, lost with the supplies to Scutari, were buried so shallowly on that beach of Leander Bay that parts of them were still clearly visible, preserved by the shovelfuls of lime which constituted their interment. The army had power above the high-water mark. The navy’s sway began beyond the low-water one. The tidal shore was outside the authority of everyone. The only beneficiaries of this mortal muddle were men pressed into reburial, who had an issue of brandy whenever the stench made them feel faint, which it did repeatedly.

  We arrived to find that we did not exist.

  Dr John Hall was still smarting from a slap by Lord Raglan’s military glove. An officer had been so appalled by patients laid under a blanket in mid-November on the bare deck of the Avon, awaiting transport to Scutari, that he had galloped at midnight to General Headquarters. Hall tried shuffling blame on the Balaclava local medical officer, Lord Raglan clapped it round his own shoulders, in his Orders of December 13, Hall was further infuriated by the women intruding into the seat of war, as if into the Army and Navy Club in Pall Mall. His eye picked from Sidney Herbert’s original instruction that Miss Nightingale’s powers lay over the female nurses in Turkey. In the Crimea, he refused to provide any of us with rations, roof or riding-stable.

  I borrowed a horse, and rode through the muddy, uneven streets of Balaclava to remonstrate. Hall lived in Kakikoi, a village where the plain, white little church with its fancy portico and lantern atop its red roof, had been turned from the service of God to that more immediate of man, as a hospital during the agonized winter. His house was tiny, the living-room hardly big enough for two sitting comfortably. This was the General Headquarters of the Army Medical Department, which conducted all hospital business between the trenches of Sebastopol and Scutari. Dr Hall was not at home.

  We had to live on the Robert Lowe. It became Miss Nightingale’s floating drawing-room, military and medical bigwigs pouring aboard. From over the hill, we could hear the cannonade and fusillade of the siege. We inspected the crammed hospitals. Mrs Davis at the General Hospital was rude, and greeted Miss Nightingale, ‘I should as soon have expected to see the Queen here as you.’ Mrs Shaw-Stewart (sadly, really Miss) at the Castle Hospital on the Genoese Heights was an enthusiastic martyr, wasting our visit with complaints of her ill-treatment by the army. We went to the war itself. We looked down at Sebastopol across the fascines of a mortar battery, a popular spot for the ‘TG’s’, including the feminine ones. An officer’s field-glasses showed the white stone warehouses against the quays, Fort Paul by the main jetty, men-of-war stranded in the harbour, the double line of British and French ships blockading the mouth of the roadstead, the intimidating Star Fort beyond.

  ‘I had always heard that Balaclava was pretty,’ observed Miss Nightingale. She picked a few blades of grass. ‘Fields watered by
my soldiers’ blood.’

  The adhesive Soyer insisted that Miss Nightingale sat in her riding-habit astride one of the massive, squat mortars. ‘Gentlemen, behold this amiable lady sitting fearlessly upon a terrible instrument of war!’ he cried to the gunners. ‘Behold the heroic daughter of England, the soldier’s friend!’ The men cheered three times.

  I had noticed uneasily the black fingers of guns poking at us from the Russian fortifications. Now black smoke puffed from a muzzle, and with the noise of a railway train, a shell passed over our heads, protected by nothing more substantial than Thomas’ parasol. ‘They have the range very well,’ remarked the officer with the glasses mildly. ‘Though they don’t usually shoot at lady visitors.’ Thirty years later, when his story Sebastopol was translated into English, I discovered that behind the embrasures opposite that morning was Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Perhaps I had the honour of his trying to kill me.

  We had been in the Crimea a week, when Miss Nightingale fell dangerously sick.

  I had been riding round the camps all day, and returned to the Robert Lowe to receive Miss Bancroft’s agitated greeting, ‘Miss Nightingale was very poor this morning – but being Miss Nightingale, hardly complained. Then at two, I had to send in a great hurry for Dr Henderson from the General Hospital. He says she has the fever, and must be moved at once to the Castle Hospital on the Heights. He’s still with her.’

  ‘Why not the General Hospital?’ I asked impatiently. ‘It’s much nearer.’

  ‘It has the cholera raging.’

  As we spoke, Dr Henderson appeared up the companionway, looking glum.

  ‘How ill is she?’ I demanded.

  ‘She is suffering, I assure you, from as bad an attack of Crimean fever as I have seen,’ he told the pair of us. ‘But I should say the chances are in her favour, because she does not fret in the slightest degree, but is perfectly composed.’

  A procession was rapidly organized. Miss Nightingale lay almost motionless on a stretcher, with an escort of soldiers. Thomas the drummer-boy was on tiptoe holding his white parasol over her, weeping bitterly. The soldiers had to clear our path from the dockside. All Balaclava was in uproar at the news. Soyer was soon at the dramatic scene, galloping on a grey pony.

  ‘What do the doctors say of the case?’ he asked me breathlessly from horseback.

  ‘That the lady is most seriously ill. No one must go near her except Miss Bancroft and myself.’

  ‘Mon Dieu! ’ His fist beat his brow under his wide-awake hat. ‘She caught the fever from consoling that officer with it, up at the Heights. I warned her about the danger of exposing herself, several times.’

  There had been a rainstorm, the roads were muddy, it took us an hour, the soldiers carrying the stretcher in relays. The Castle was hardly a hospital, just a few rough wooden huts, filled with wounded from the Sebastopol trenches. She was taken to the hut nearest the stream, its plain plank walls containing only bed, table and chair, with one small high window and a view from the door across slopes bright with spring flowers to the overcrowded harbour. I at once left her to Miss Bancroft, borrowed a doctor’s horse, and hurried to the Balaclava telegraph office. I usually sent my dispatches to the Penny Pioneer by the mails. But I knew that Russell was visiting Constantinople. There was no other correspondent in the Crimea. I should get the news to London first.

  I rode up to the hospital early the next morning. The sun was already burning, the long grass which caressed the chest of my horse was full of buttercups, bluebells, poppies and birdseyes, the wind was soft, the butterflies sported in clouds. It seemed a ridiculously unseasonable morning for anyone to choose for being ill, or for fighting a war. Miss Bancroft had stayed overnight with Mrs Shaw-Stewart, and I found her waiting outside the hut.

  ‘How is Miss Nightingale?’

  Still in danger. Dr Henderson is attending her this moment.’

  As I dismounted, I noticed her surly look. ‘Why did you not remain and help me with her yesterday?’ she asked.

  ‘I had to telegraph the news home.’

  ‘So fortunate for your reputation, Mr Darling, that Miss Nightingale is so ill. I know that you came East only to send tales home about us. That you might find yourself less of a nobody when you return.’

  ‘How can you so accuse me of that?’ I asked resentfully. ‘Haven’t you seen enough of my work among the sick and wounded to know otherwise?’

  She gave no reply. I was mystified at her bad temper, though having to admit that her charge was reasonably justified. I did not then foresee the journalistic glory from my telegraphed words. I learned this a week or two later, from copies arriving of the London papers. Not just Balaclava had exclaimed in distress. Not just in the wards of Scutari had men wept. The words of Fleet Street leader-writers fell like the beat of muffled drums. At Windsor, the Queen had asked Lord Panmure anxiously about ‘that excellent and valuable person, Miss Nightingale’. In poor households throughout the country, the alarm and desperation of the past winter blew cruelly into the brighter spring days. Upon the health and safety of Miss Nightingale depended the health and safety of their sons and brothers, husbands and sweethearts.

  ‘Then you only came out to be with Miss Catchpole,’ Miss Bancroft continued slightingly. We strolled a few paces among the flowers, leading my horse. ‘It was distressing for you that death should put an end to your sport with her.’

  ‘I came out not even knowing that Miss Catchpole was of the party,’ I returned patiently. ‘She was a lively and pretty woman, who was happy in finding satisfaction where she least expected it. If you do not feel her death, it must be because your heart is enamelled with jealousy.’

  ‘Jealousy? Of Miss Catchpole?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘In what single respect?’

  The morning had darkened like our words, one of the sudden Crimean storms was blowing up. I conceded her turning upon me, her callousness towards Harriet, to the effect of emotions disturbed by Florence’s sudden danger.

  ‘I wish you had never come to Harley Street that day,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Why? I wrote no tales about you then.’

  ‘You wedged between myself and Miss Nightingale.’

  This amazed me. The two women were always close – I sometimes felt that Miss Bancroft’s adoration provoked in Miss Nightingale indifference or irritation. I was too wise unduly to favour one from a pair of female friends more than the other. My work was different from Miss Bancroft’s, I saw Miss Nightingale far less. I was irritated, having put myself to such discomfort and risk at Scutari for both of them.

  Dr Henderson in blue undress frock-coat left the hut. ‘Ah, Mr Darling, there you are. Miss Nightingale wishes to see you.’

  ‘How do you find her?’

  He dropped his voice. ‘Her mind is wandering. Please remember as much. She asks to speak privately, by yourself.’

  I looked up at Miss Bancroft. She had turned her back.

  The wooden room had the sour smell of fever. Miss Nightingale lay flaccidly upon a bank of pillows, her face was scarlet and sweaty, her hair shorn like a convict’s, her eyes shining with white fire.

  ‘Mr Darling, how kind,’ she greeted me weakly, as though I were unexpected. ‘Did you see the Persian gentleman?’

  ‘Only Dr Henderson, Miss Nightingale.’

  ‘The Persian gentleman who had a draft of £30,000 for me…but perhaps I was mistaken.’ Her cropped head lay on one side. ‘I am going to die, Tristram.’

  My vehement denial went unheeded. It was the first time she used my Christian name. ‘I want you to do me a service. But you must tell no one in the world I asked it.’

  I nodded toward the door. ‘Even Miss Bancroft?’

  ‘I do not trust Miss Bancroft.’

  I sat on the chair beside the bed.

  ‘Take this –’ She drew from under the bedclothes a gold cross set in a mother-of-pearl ring, suspended on a black ribbon. I remembered it round her neck, that turbulent breakfast at Embley House. ‘Give it to
Clarkey.’ I frowned, for the moment puzzled. ‘You met her in Paris. Madame Mohl.’ I remembered the childlike Irish-Scotswoman with hair like a Yorkshire terrier’s. ‘She lives in the rue du Bac, No. 120. You can go home by Paris, when the war is ended. Give it her with my fondest love. Say I sent it from my death-bed.’ She handed me the pendant, her fingers hot. She added characteristically, ‘Take care of the contagion.’

  I wrapped the cross in my handkerchief, and put it in the pocket of my shooting-jacket.

  ‘You must not tell Miss Bancroft,’ she repeated. I promised. ‘Should anything happen to you, Tristram…and I pray to God it may not…hand it on to Dr Newbolt, or some man you can trust. Perhaps they can take it. But I should like you to give it Clarkey yourself, and to tell her how you see me now, to pass her my love from my own lips.’

  She fell silent. I wondered if I should steal away.

  ‘I have loved Clarkey since I was eighteen. Since I first met her in Paris. That was when we lived in the Place Vendôme –’ Her voice grew dreamy, she looked slowly round as though seeing it. ‘In those splendid rooms, all gilt mirrors and crimson satin, and the statue of Napoleon outside the windows…they had just had a revolution. I loved Clarkey more than Mary Stanley. Much more. It was for Clarkey that I never married Richard Monkton Milnes, though the family were desperate I should.’

  She stopped again. I waited patiently. Now I knew why Jane Bancroft hated me.

  ‘I loved Clarkey more than Marianne Nicholson. I was twenty-five then, I felt I had never loved but one person with passion in my life, and that was Marianne. She was so beautiful. The face of an angel.’

  She raised her large hand, but it fell back like a sick bird on her skimpy-bosomed chest.

  ‘Marianne was my cousin. Her brother Henry proposed marriage to me, you know. I refused him. My family thought I was being haughty and vain, and Marianne left my life. She was cruel.’