The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

Should I join her with a laugh of reassurance? But it would ring mockingly in her heart. She meant what she said. She did not know that a man who loved Florence Nightingale was a dog barking at its reflection in a millpool. Sidney Herbert and Dr Sutherland were both convinced they loved her, when all they felt was awe, fascination, fright, a longing to be part of her, to creep comfortably under those arms which incessantly and painfully punched and pinched. When I followed Florence’s coffin, carried by six sergeants of the British army to a Hampshire grave, I felt only that she was a woman with the predominant quality of being immutably unlovable.

  ‘Will you take down Lady Violet Conquest, Mr Darling?’ Liz Herbert broke into my meditations. It was dinner-time. Lady Violet was the Earl of Gravesend’s youngest daughter, pretty, talkative and incalculably rich. I spoke all the meal about Scutari, to the fascination of us both.

  All society was at my meeting in the Willis Rooms, furred, silken, diamonded in the flaring gaslight. Even The Times had to concede it ‘the most brilliant, enthusiastic and unanimous gathering held in London’. The Nightingale family themselves remained in the Burlington Hotel. They feared overcoming by emotion.

  I had seen more of them, and the more disliked them. WEN was like a worm threaded with whalebone. Mother Fanny and Sister Parthe were like two cold-blooded lizards basking on Neapolitan rocks, inanimate save for the sun of Florence’s fame. Florence Nightingale herself wore her reputation like her plain black dress, not for decoration but practical use.

  ‘Too much has been made of Miss Nightingale’s sacrifice of position and luxury,’ said Sidney Herbert from the platform, between the crimson plush curtains, amid the aspidistras and maidenhair fern. ‘God knows that the luxury of one good action must, to a mind such as hers, be more than equivalent for the loss of all the pomps and vanities of life. I contrast the crowded and brilliant scene before me with the scene which met the gaze of that noble woman, now devoting herself to the service of her suffering fellow-creatures on the black shores of Crim Tartary, overlooking the waters of the inhospitable sea.’

  He held up a soldier’s letter home, with which I had furnished him. ‘What a comfort it was to see her pass, even,’ he read out. ‘She would speak to one and nod and smile to as many more, but she could not do it to all, you know.’ Miss Nightingale had taken my advice, offered on her night round. ‘We lay there in hundreds, we could but kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content. Before she came, there was cussing and swearing, but after it was holy as a church.’

  These rough sentiments strongly stirred polite hearts beneath delicate linen and muslin.

  ‘There is no part of England,’ Sidney Herbert continued, unhealthy face uplifted, ‘where some cottage household has not been comforted amidst its mourning for the loss of one who had fallen in the war, by the assurance that his last moments were watched, and his worst sufferings smoothed, by that care, at once tender and skilful, which no man, and few women, could have shown. True heroism is not so plentiful that we can afford to let it pass unrecognized – if not for the honour of those who show it, yet very much for our own. The best test of a nation’s moral state is the kind of claim which it selects for honour.’

  Sidney Herbert was one of the most elegant and most heeded orators in the House of Commons. Such beautiful sentiments, beautifully expressed, were tarnished for me by remembrance that Herbert shared responsibility for throwing good lives into a wickedly unnecessary war, and then ensuring through his mismanagement that an excess of them were lost in conditions as wretched and painful as possible.

  He ended, ‘With the exception of Howard, the prison reformer, I know no person besides Miss Nightingale, who within the last hundred years within this island, or perhaps in Europe, had voluntarily encountered dangers so imminent, and undertaken offices so repulsive, working for a large and worthy object, in a pure spirit of duty towards God and compassion for man.’

  Everyone left feeling participation in Florence Nightingale’s mission, without the inconvenience of having to miss their suppers. The only sourness came from the self-important gentleman I had last seen at the Cannings’ talking to my uncle Humphry, and whose name for the instant I forgot.

  He touched my elbow as I was leaving hastily to write my copy. ‘A silly fad, sir, raising the status of the nurses. Lady Pam thinks so, anyway,’ he confided, referring to the Prime Minister’s wife. ‘She thinks the Nightingale Fund great humbug. She says the nurses are very good now. Perhaps they do drink a little, but poor people, it must be so tiresome sitting up all night.’ He nodded towards Herbert, who was delightedly defending himself against congratulations on the platform. ‘Newcastle was ignorant of military affairs, and not equal to his post. Sidney Herbert was not much better.’

  But everything would read inspiringly in the maiden edition of Candour on Saturday morning.

  We got £44,000. I arranged a concert with Jenny Lind, which brought another £2,000. I was becoming an indispensable young man, a most prized status. Through Sidney Herbert, I contrived that Lord Panmure in the War Office should proclaim the fund in Sir William Codrington’s General Orders to the army in the East. (The reluctant, red-nosed newly-promoted General Sir James Simpson had resigned, succumbing like everyone else in the Crimea to diarrhoea.) All ranks would volunteer a day’s pay. Dr John Hall refused.

  Then I began to read with disquiet in the newspapers that Miss Nightingale, like all saviours of mankind, had fallen for the temptation of improving her handiwork. She had nursed, clothed, fed and buried the army. Now she would educate it. Corners of the horrendous hospital became reading-rooms, here was the Inkerman Café without wine or women, lectures, classes, schoolmasters sent from England, amateur theatricals, dominoes, chess. She encouraged the men to send pay home instead of drinking it where they were, and Panmure growled, ‘The soldier is not a remitting animal.’ The repatriated Miss Salisbury complained of ill-usage to the War Office – incited by Mary Stanley, hell having no fury like a woman scorn’d by another woman. The War Office sent an accusing letter to Miss Nightingale, which encouraged Hall to describe her in his confidential report as a dishonest and insubordinate female, heading a rabble of rude, shifty, drunken, immoral and useless others. The enemy was retreating, the fusillade of the British army could be concentrated upon Miss Nightingale. She had ceased to be essential, and became only useful.

  Two springs buried the bleak vestiges of Balaclava and Inkerman. The ranks were full, the hospitals empty. The arcades of agony at Scutari bore only vestiges of the British, a few shelves and bed-numbers, the lingering names of surrounding streets. The barracks was claimed back for the Orient, Monsieur Soyer’s kitchen cooked pilaff for the Turkish Imperial Guard.

  Peace was signed in Paris on May 30 1856. It had been a war of few heroes. Three of them were doctors, with the new Victoria Cross. Miss Nightingale sailed from Constantinople in the Danube on July 28, as Miss Smith.

  I was preoccupied in Candour with blood-chilling reports of murderous mutiny brewing among Her Majesty’s Indian subjects. But I busied myself and my Lords Stanley and Landsdowne to stage-manage a fitting welcome. There were to be triumphal arches, addresses from mayors and corporations, her carriage drawn by massed orphans, the Coldstreams and the Grenadiers with their bands, a man-of-war at her disposal. Our difficulty was Miss Nightingale’s concealment of her timetable. Fanny, Parthe and WEN were in their dear little fifteen-bedroomed house at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, excitedly discussing my florid plans, when a slight, pale lady in a black dress with lace at the cuffs came wandering into the garden from the railway station. After two years, Miss Nightingale was home.

  20

  ‘But your Candour is an absolute succès de scandale, Mr Darling,’ exclaimed Lady Violet Challenger. ‘Everybody is talking about it. In the clubs, in the House, even – so I hear – in the Palace.’

  I sighed. ‘I fear that the readers swallow my camel of gossip, but spit out my gnat of political edification.’

&nb
sp; ‘On the contrary, the only way to make people think is by deceiving them that they are being amused. The British feel no guilt over pleasure, but are horribly embarrassed by the taint of philosophy.’

  It was early in the New Year of 1857. We were in the same party at a ball.

  ‘But how do you find these items you print, which public men hardly dare to utter?’ she asked, eyes wide with admiration. ‘Or sometimes, I believe, hardly dare to think?’

  ‘An easily-recruited battalion of spies, working for the wages of spite. They eat with guiltless appetites at powerful dining-tables, some soldier more daringly in boudoirs. I employ a bruiser on my office door, and I have a card engraved, “Mr Darling thanks you for your challenge, and is placing you on his waiting-list”.’

  She laughed. We were crushed together in a corner at supper. As Lady Violet seemed to move everywhere amid a crowd of swells, conversation alone with her was valuable. We drank our champagne and ate our eggs with truffles, which I mentioned as a favourite creation of Monsieur Soyer.

  She looked at me, puzzled. ‘Why do you always speak about the war, Mr Darling?’

  ‘Do I? Then I’m sorry. But it was an experience which I cannot shake off as easily as a terrier which has fallen into a river.’

  ‘But it’s over! And Miss Nightingale is dead.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘If so, her ultimate task was her most difficult, in keeping the event from the notice of Fleet Street.’

  ‘But isn’t she? Everyone seems to think so. One never hears a single word about her these days. It’s like those other people – Lord Lucan, Lord Cardigan, whose names were on our lips every breakfast-time two years ago. Of course, I was dreadfully sorry for the soldiers – you know how mamma and I knitted and sewed – but it is all past, like a bad dream. There are much more important things to think of.’

  ‘What things?’

  She looked amused. ‘Well, there’s the dreadful spread of Puseyism. The whole country is shaking in its shoes about that. Or there’s…the persistence of the crinoline? Should clerics wear beards? We cannot be deadly serious for ever. That’s why everyone prefers listening to the scandal rather than the speeches of Cabinet ministers.’

  ‘Were Miss Nightingale to enter this room this moment, Lady Violet, would you not stare at her?’

  ‘Only as I should stare at last season’s fashionable opera singer.’

  I nodded. ‘The Crimean war was a disaster, a textbook for every succeeding British general of how not to fight a war. Its end would seem a disaster for Miss Nightingale. I agree, when a quarrel is over, everyone has a healthy eagerness to forget it. Except for the vengeful few who keep grudges like vampires in the nooks of their souls, the dull few who find in war the only excitement and importance of a lifetime, and the few clever enough to learn its lessons. I don’t think I am any of those. But I cannot forget Scutari. Its sights are mixed with the quicksilver of my shaving-mirror.’

  ‘You were brave to go out there, Mr Darling. But you still suffer from one terror.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Of being thought a compassionate man.’

  To be young, good-looking and talked about, opened doors and hearts to me all over London. I tentatively courted Lady Violet – an outrage upon our difference of station, but she seemed amused with the upstart, and I had a deft tongue to lap the cream of society.

  I consorted with other ladies whose company was more accessible and intimacy more immediate. I supped extravagantly in private rooms with actresses whose performances upon the boards were considerably fewer than upon the bedsprings. One midnight that January, Handshear’s charge at Scutari flitting into mind, I wandered curiously into a deeper pool in London’s underground rivers of vice. I had barely turned the corner of Pall Mall into the Haymarket, when a voice shrilled urgently, ‘Sir! Sir! Mr Darling!’

  An alarming greeting for a man in that place at that hour. The girl who knew my name was faintly familiar. She hurried up, ashen and rouged in the gaslight, pale hair straggling under her bonnet, her body so slight I thought her one of the children pressed into this work by their satanic families.

  ‘Sir! You remembers me? Don’t you, sir? Down in Brompton. You used to call me “Little Nell”.’

  I could say nothing for several moments. ‘How long have you been at this game?’ I asked shortly.

  ‘About a year, sir. After Mr Larderton sent Miss Harriet packing, there was another lady. But we didn’t get on, sir. And one day she dismissed me without a character.’ She told me as cheerfully as recounting some misfired childish prank. ‘Mr Larderton would have kept me on, sir, I’m sure. He was such a nice gentleman.’ She giggled. ‘Don’t you remember, sir, that afternoon, when he caught you with Miss Harriet –’

  ‘Miss Harriet is dead.’

  ‘Oh? Fancy that. Well, it’s a surprise, upon my word. What did she die of?’

  ‘She died in the war. She went to nurse the soldiers in Scutari, had the cholera and died of it in a day. I put her in her grave.’

  ‘To think of Miss Harriet nursing soldiers!’ she giggled again. ‘More likely, she’d be up to something else with them.’

  ‘Aren’t you sorry?’

  My irritated tone surprised her. ‘Course I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry when anyone’s dead and buried. But it’s all over and done with now, ain’t it, sir?’ She hesitated. ‘Come home with me, sir? I’ve a nice place.’

  ‘What are you intending to do with yourself? This? For the rest of your life?’

  ‘I might find some nice chap.’

  ‘You won’t and you know it.’

  ‘Oh, well, a girl has got to live. What else is there? For me?’ We stood looking at each other in silence. She said pathetically, ‘Why are you so angry with me, sir? I didn’t think you was the sort to read a sermon.’

  I had been needlessly callous. If I condemned her, I wore the shadow of the condemnation myself. ‘I could find you a respectable position in a good household,’ I offered.

  Little Nell wrinkled her nose. It reminded me of Harriet, ‘I don’t think I should care for it, sir. A servant girl can’t call her soul her own these days. There’s plenty of them to be found up and down the Haymarket.’

  I put my hand in my pocket. Her eyes lit. For the second time in a London street, I handed a woman all the money on me. I hurried away. It would give her a week or two in idleness, if some bully was not waiting to take it off her.

  So Harriet was washed from living memory by the lethal currents of the Bosphorus. And Miss Nightingale was a diamond which had been tossed back down the mine. I walked preoccupied across Piccadilly, to my chambers in Albany. A woman who could run the Barrack Hospital that first winter of the war had a genius for administration and diplomacy out-rivalling Downing Street. Candour would say as much. I needed a cause, a cast-iron case for the furnace of public anger. If my weekly degenerated into a popular gossip-sheet, my career would be following Jack o’Lantern down a familiar path in the wrong direction.

  Two weeks or so later, Miss Nightingale arrived from Derbyshire at the Burlington Hotel. I had not seen her since saying farewell in the tiny room behind the curtain in the Sisters’ Tower. I wrote seeking an interview, granted by return of the messenger.

  It was a customary fog-soaked London winter’s afternoon, my hansom clopped warily from Fleet Street, horse snorting steam, others emerging and disappearing in the choking yellow billows like sea-serpents. Link-boys with flaming faggots, coachmen in cockaded hats waving oil-lanterns, cleared a path for their masters with curses. The citizens risked coughing out their lungs, or knocking out their brains on lampposts, the omnibus drivers swore more colourfully than usual and the pickpockets did brisk business. I arrived at the Burlington Hotel with my linen specked by soot as though suffering an attack of black measles. London prides itself on its fogs, as upon Big Ben. I wish some scientific person could puff them into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for ever.

  Miss Nightingale was with Mother Fanny
and Sister Parthe. They had as usual taken the first floor, overlooking Burlington Street. I had been asked to tea.

  The valet showed me into a small sitting-room. Two gentlemen in the middle of the Turkish carpet stood deep in conversation. One was Dr Sutherland, who had renounced his tweed coat for seemly black. The other was Mr Arthur Clough, who had seen us off at London Bridge. He had a large brown paper parcel under his arm.

  ‘Miss Nightingale is ill,’ imparted Sutherland solemnly, after the reminiscent greetings of old campaigners.

  ‘Dear me, yes,’ said Clough, miserably, bald head shaking above a high shirt collar. ‘Most ill.’

  ‘But this is sudden?’ I exclaimed. ‘I was invited only yesterday.’

  ‘The onset of symptoms was shortly after she returned from the East.’

  ‘Six months ago? Then it is hardly as dangerous as Crimean fever.’

  ‘It is an illness of remissions and relapses,’ explained Sutherland, with his professional expression. ‘Only a woman of Miss Nightingale’s spirit and constitution could stand it. I am led to believe there must be a foundation of truth under the old myth about the Amazon women somewhere to the East. All I can say is, that had she been Queen of that respectable body in olden days, Alexander the Great would have had rather a bad chance.’ He smiled, elevated by his elegance.

  A bell tinkled briefly behind an inner door.

  ‘It is hard to diagnose exactly the condition,’ Sutherland continued in a reverential whisper. ‘There is involvement of the cardiac and respiratory systems, which were exhausted by her unsparing work in the East. Sometimes she seems nigh unto death, at others her recovery is miraculous,’

  ‘The bell!’ Clough’s face was a mask of terror.

  ‘Was it? Dear me, I didn’t hear. I am getting so deaf –’

  The handbell rang again, noisily and urgently. Without a word to excuse himself, Sutherland shot through the door.

  ‘I must take Miss Nightingale’s parcel to the post.’ Clough set it on an imitation ormolu table, augmenting the substantial knot.