In the Shadow of the Lamp (9 page)

We sat quiet for a minute or two, me listening to the creak of the wooden walls around us, wondering just how long they might hold up if the storm kept on, Emma picking at the damp blanket on my bunk.

She leaned in a little closer to me. “Can you keep a secret?”

I shrugged. “I expect so.” No one ever asked me that, but there was plenty I knew that didn’t tell anyone.

“I weren’t really no nurse before I came.”

That surprised me so much I almost fell off the bunk. How many of the other stories she had told were lies? “What were you then?”

She screwed her mouth up, like it had something bad tasting in it. “Nothing good. But it weren’t my fault.”

“Were you in service?”

She laughed silently, her shoulders shaking. “I s’pose you could call it service.”

“Did you work in a great house then?”

“A house. Not so great. And they beat me if I didn’t do as they said. Serious, Moll, don’t you know what I’m sayin’?”

She worked in a house. A— “Oh my God!” I almost shrieked out the words. One or two of the others shifted, but no one woke.

“Shh! You’re the only one what knows. I ran away. Got one of the gents to write me a reference, saying I was a nurse.”

This was ten times worse than what happened to me. “How did you manage it? I’ve heard tales that girls who ended up in those houses were kept like slaves and never got out till they died.”

“Like I said. One of the gents, he was a doctor. I just told him I’d rat on him at the hospital, and he was willing enough to write me a letter. Then we pretended like we was going out on the town for a lark, only I skipped and got myself signed up for this.”

So Emma was running away too, and from something much worse than what I was running away from. “What about your mum and dad?”

“Never knew ’em. I was brought up in a orphanage, turned out to make my own way when I was thirteen. Now, I’ve been straight with you. What about this young man of yours?”

I sensed this time she had told me the truth. Who would make up such a thing? Nonetheless, I still wasn’t ready to tell her my story. “Like I said, he’s just a friend.” No matter how she questioned me after that I wouldn’t say more. I wouldn’t tell her that every time I saw something new, or learned something by listening to Mrs. Langston or Sister Sarah Anne, who’d been trained proper as nurses, not just done it—every time something important happened, the only person I wanted to share it with was Will. I wouldn’t tell her that each morning on that pitching and rolling boat I woke up feeling as though Will had just kissed me on the forehead again, and brushed my lips with his. And that sometimes, in my restless dreams, I imagined what it would feel like for Will to put his arm around my waist, or hold me close to him, or even kiss me long and hard on the lips. Then I’d wake up so suddenly with an ache right in my middle, longing to be back in London.

I imagined all that before I remembered where I was, and that I was going off on an incredible adventure with Miss Nightingale. Then the excitement of what was ahead would overcome my feelings, and I’d fall asleep again.

The storm stopped on the fourth day, and several of the others began to feel well enough to get out of bed and come up on deck with Emma and me. The sea was calm and the sky bluer than anything I’d ever seen, like it was trying to make up for treating us so badly before.

The other nurses were all a little nicer to us than they’d been at first, calling us by name, saying, “Molly, dear, could you fetch us a cup of tea?” or “Emma, give us a hand with this, will you?” I hadn’t done much more than just be there—like the lowest housemaid. But I began to see that it somehow made a difference.

Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge were up on deck too, looking not too poorly, though I guessed they’d had their bit of sickness. Mrs. Bracebridge shared a private cabin with Miss Nightingale. I overheard Sister Sarah Anne say Miss Nightingale was violently sick. I imagined Mrs. Bracebridge had spent all her time looking after her.

“Molly, I hear you got some practice nursing in the past few days,” the lady said to me after our salt cod and biscuit breakfast.

“Don’t know as I’d call it that, exactly,” I said. “I was just helping out.”

She looked over at Mrs. Drake, who smiled at her. “That’s not what I heard.”

The praise made me feel strange. If being able to stand people around me who were sick and trying my best to ease them a little was nursing, then it was a powerful lot easier than being a parlormaid and I hardly deserved to be thanked for it. In any case, I was glad the storm was over, and when the sailors told us we’d be coming into the Dardanelles the next day, with port just a day or two after that, I found I was relieved. Caring for the others had distracted me. Although the storm hadn’t made me ill, it did frighten me. Doing something, working, was what made the fear bearable.

C
hapter 11

A very pale, rather wobbly Miss Nightingale came up on deck as we passed through a narrow channel into a wider stretch of water that was smaller than the Mediterranean. She stood a little away from us. No one dared go near her. Something in her face told us she was thinking private thoughts or maybe of someone far away. Perhaps she’d been at that place before, perhaps not alone. Mrs. Bracebridge told us that despite her seasickness, Miss Nightingale traveled a lot, even to Egypt, and that her Christian name was Florence after the city in Italy where she was born. And there were whispers among the nurses that she turned down a marriage proposal from Mr. Monckton Milnes, a very good catch.

“This passage is called the Dardanelles,” Mr. Bracebridge called out to the lot of us who had come on deck to see the land so close again. “It’s very famous. It was called the Hellespont by the ancients. This is where the Trojan War took place. Many ships have been wrecked here. Easy to understand, with the weather we’ve had!” It was still blowing hard, and some of his words were torn away by the wind. I moved a little closer so I could hear all he had to say. “It leads us to the Sea of Marmara. Our destination is to the east, at the mouth of the Bosporus, which leads to the Black Sea.” Mostly everyone just nodded and leaned on the rail, maybe glad to be near shore but not so interested in the particulars of what was there. I wanted him to tell me more, not just about the water, but about the strange buildings that crowded the shore, with their odd shapes and fancy decorations like a lady’s lace collar. I didn’t dare ask, though, afraid the others would think I was trying to make myself special, be a pet of some sort. Emma was the one who gave me that fear, dropping hints the night before when I’d got that praise from Mrs. Bracebridge about nursing.

I couldn’t help wondering what Will would make of this. I wished I could paint a picture to send to him. With my bad spelling and handwriting a letter wouldn’t really say it all. Words are so different when you speak them than when you write them. What’s easy and natural when you say it comes out all lumpy and awkward when you try to think it onto paper. Still, I’d have to try if I didn’t want to wait until I saw Will again—if I ever did see him again. Perhaps they’d hire a new maid, and she’d be pretty and young, and Will would like her and forget all about me …

No use thinking about that. Here I was, so far away. Did my mum even imagine I could be where I was right then? She’d never been outside London her whole life. I hoped Will told her what I did, where I’d gone. The next letter I wrote would be to her. The man across the street could read it for her.
She’ll hardly believe it
, I thought.

And at that moment, even without seeing a penny of my wages or setting foot near the wounded British soldiers, I was glad I came, alone as I was. I would never, ever have been able to see anything like this if I’d gone to work in a dark factory. My eight shillings a week was near double what I earned as a parlormaid, and I’d be able to pay Will back and bring home money to my mum.

“I wonder what the food’ll be like. My stomach won’t take to strange things. Just give me plain mutton and spuds.” Emma leaned next to me. It felt good to have her warmth. It was almost as cold as London there, with the stiff breeze over the water.

“We’ll be in Scutari by morning,” I said.

As if that amazing fact—that we would finally set foot in a place so talked about in the newspapers, a place that seemed unreal only two weeks before—was the most ordinary thing in the world, Emma ignored me and changed the subject. “I heard Mrs. Bracebridge talking to the old man. He said the captain got news by telegraph of a terrible battle, but that our boys—the cavalry, he said—was very brave. Thousands killed and wounded.”

Emma’s words jolted me back to thinking about the job ahead.
Thousands
. I couldn’t get my mind around it. I thought of how I’d rushed about tending to twenty or so poorly women, and they were just sick in the stomach. What if there were thousands, and with mortal wounds and blood, and limbs having to be amputated like at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris? I imagined myself among them all, groans and screams coming from every direction, and me not knowing what to do or where to go first.

“What ho, Moll! You’re looking a little pale. You going to go get seasick now the boat’s not tossing us all over?”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. No sense getting worked up. What would be, would be.

“Look at that!” Emma exclaimed.

I thought she was talking about the small sailboat off to our port side that skimmed the water, a single sailor in a cap like an upside-down red bucket flinging a net out like he was shaking a silk sheet over a bed. “Beautiful,” I said.

“No, not the fisherman, silly! Look.” She pointed up ahead to a fleet of British warships in the distance. “Do you s’pose they’re bringing troops?”

“Dunno,” I answered.

Now, seeing how far away we were from England, I had to wonder what it was that made us fight here, for land that wasn’t even ours, alongside the French, no less, who used to be our sworn enemies. My dad still had nothing nice to say about the French, sometimes cursing them up and down when he’d had a skinful. I decided I’d have to ask Mrs. Bracebridge about it sometime, and kept on watching the fisherman, peaceful and calm and miles away from a war.

But I wasn’t the only one watching the fisherman. The other passengers traveling on the
Vectis
had come up on deck too, and though most of them also stared and pointed at the warships, one man kept his eyes where I did. I’d not had much time to notice the other people on board with everyone being so sick, but this man was young, I might say even handsome, and his face looked kind. In fact, I could’ve sworn I’d seen it before. He must’ve felt me staring at him, because he turned and nodded to me. It only took that moment for me to recognize him. He was the one who picked me up and thrust me below out of the storm when we first set out from Marseille. I felt something hot in the middle of me, just above my stomach. Not a pain, but a warning. I feared I’d see that man again. He could be one of the doctors Emma told me about.
Why feared?
I thought. It would give me a chance to thank him for helping me.

I could hardly sleep that last night on the boat, wondering, worrying about what was to come. I was one of the first ones ready as we arrived, on the side of the Bosporus where Istanbul sat, the west side. It was raining, hard. Not storming, the way it did when we left Marseille, but so gray everything looked hidden behind a curtain. The strange buildings that made the outline of the city so different from London were mosques, with towers called minarets. There was a huge mosque that Mrs. Bracebridge said was called the Blue Mosque. And another, called Saint Sophia, with its onion-shaped domes. It had once been a church, but long ago was turned into a mosque so the Muslims could worship there. The buildings in Istanbul didn’t look like anything I’d seen in London or even Paris.