“Yes.” She thought she was.
“Get training in a hospital. Then I can use you.”
“How shall I apply?”
“Why, use the penny post girl! What a question.”
She blushed.
“I shall.”
“A great empire needs many dedicated servants,” the great woman smiled. “Good luck.”
Empire and service.
A British empire that stretched all round the globe; a British empire that, directed by strong men like Palmerston, would swiftly humble any who failed to show respect to her citizens; an empire where Englishmen grew rich, thanks to free trade and Mr Gladstone’s low taxes. Empire and free trade: this was the combination that most English towns, even sleepy Salisbury, favoured.
Service and empire: serving the mighty East India Company, and living well besides; serving as officers, administrators, missionaries: these were things the Shockleys of Sarum did. Nothing thrilled her more than to receive the letters from her brother Bernard on his plantation in India, or her Uncle Stephen the missionary, from Africa – messages from the empire, that wide and exciting world.
Her upbringing in Salisbury close had been conventional. Though her father, Ralph’s elder son, had died of consumption when she was only nine, old Frances Porteus had conveniently died the same year and left them the tenancy of her house in the close and a modest fortune besides.
“There’s nothing to stop you marrying well,” her mother always told her. And certainly Sarum was not short of pleasant society – Wyndhams, Jacobs, Husseys, Eyres – good county or near county families with educated menfolk into which a well brought up girl with a little money should be pleased to marry.
“Why must you always want something more?”
“I don’t know, mama.”
She had insisted on going to the training college. This was well enough. The regime was strict. Young gentlewomen were given a training that enabled them to teach, if the family circumstances were so poor that they had to work, or to manage their households with great efficiency if all went well and they married.
She had insisted upon teaching. There were twenty-five private day schools in Salisbury now. Her mother had shaken her head. The girl was getting eccentric.
And then, six months ago, her mother died.
She was twenty-three. She had a pleasant house in the close, five hundred pounds a year, a cook, a housemaid, two horses stabled in the town, pleasant neighbours, and had turned down two perfectly acceptable offers of marriage. She enjoyed her work. She should now, of course, find a companion since it was not proper for an unmarried woman to live alone. But she hesitated.
Why was it she read those letters so avidly from overseas? Why was it she scanned the newspapers for news when other young ladies quietly did their needlepoint? Why must she, as her mother used to complain, always have opinions?
“Men have opinions. Women listen.”
“I suppose,” she said to her mother, a month before she died, “I am looking for a cause.”
“There are any number of them, my dear.” There was the College of Matrons by the close gate, Eyre’s almshouses, Hussey’s almshouses, Blechynden’s almshouses for poor widows – the list of charities and needy folk in Salisbury, to which Mrs Shockley never failed, like every other Sarum lady, to devote herself was endless.
“No. Something more.”
“In Sarum, Jane? What could there possibly be? And why?”
There had been no answer.
After her mother’s death she had thought of going to visit her brother. Or even her missionary uncle. “Madness,” she had been told of the latter idea.
Now Florence Nightingale.
Beside her bed, as always, two books: Wordsworth’s poems and the love sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
She knew them all by heart. She loved the moving story of how the poet Browning had rescued Elizabeth from her father and eloped with her.
“But no Browning comes to elope with me from the close,” she laughed sadly to herself.
It was morning. Outside, the sun was already well up. The leaves were falling from the trees around the choristers’ green. Below, she could hear Lizzie the housemaid scurrying about.
Sarum. Life was slow. But it was pleasant.
But today was a day for decisions. She knew they must be made now, while the spirit of adventure was still strong. Was she to go to London to train? If so, how soon? Difficult decisions, uncomfortable ones. She lingered lazily for a moment in bed before beginning such a fateful day.
There was a knock on the door: Lizzie with a letter, from Bernard.
Before the girl had even closed the door, she had slit it open.
My dear Sister,
With the loss of dear Mama you are entirely alone at Sarum and this perturbs me. Harriet joins me in suggesting most warmly that you come to spend at least half a year here. Your two nieces and nephews long to see their aunt – we have made you out to be a dragon so don’t disappoint us on any account. You will find amusement here and some society, a change of air, I need hardly say. There are some young fellows here too, quite gentlemen, who perhaps . . . but I run on.
This war in the Crimea is already having a remarkable effect upon our fortunes – for the better! Here in Hoogly District, as you may know, we have a large crop of desi – jute as it’s called in England. We do an excellent trade with America already, even with a firm called Bradley and Shockley – isn’t that a coincidence? But more important, this war in the Crimea has cut off the supply of Russian raw flax and hemp to Dundee, and we are quite supplanting them with our jute instead. The profits are remarkable. However, I shall tell you more when you come here, and you can see for yourself.
There was much more, but she broke off. Dear Bernard. Ten years her senior. Ten years in India now; he always wrote her letters full of his practical business, just as though she were a man, which was why she so loved to receive them. She would keep the rest until later.
She dressed quickly. Then she made straight for the cathedral.
Whenever she had to make a major decision, Jane Shockley always walked in the cloisters. They were so quiet, so peaceful. In the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign, Bishop Denison had planted two cedars of Lebanon in the centre and already they were beginning to spread a small shade over the grass of the little graveyard there, making the place more delightful even than it had been before. She walked by the chapter house. Both cloisters and chapter house were being repaired that year by Mr Clutton the architect. Just recently the restoration of the wonderful series of low reliefs in the chapter house had been begun and, since the door was open, she walked in and spent several minutes admiring the lively carvings of the Creation and the other Old Testament scenes. She liked the silent antiquity of the place. During repairs to the walls recently, the workmen had found some coins from the time of Edward I, nearly six hundred years before.
It was hard to decide. Now that the prospect of travel to the Crimea had gone, to be replaced by several years’ grinding hard work at a hospital, probably in London – was she still certain she wanted to be a nurse? Why not go out to India: that was a more exciting prospect. Or even stay here in Sarum, here with her friends, amongst these quiet scenes she loved? It was tempting.
For once, she could not make up her mind. Annoyed with herself, she walked slowly out of the cloister and into the main body of the cathedral.
And there she saw it.
It was only a tattered object, on a stick: a single flag, hanging out at an angle just out of reach on the wall. They were the colours of the Wiltshire Regiment, and the little plaque beside them stated that they had been carried in Sicily in 1806–14, the United States of America, 1814–15, been lost by the Ganges 1842 and recovered eight months later. Placed in the cathedral April 1848.
Why should that flag suddenly move her? Was it the far-off places, the thought of the soldiers there and in the Crimea? Was it the reminder of empire and service? Might it be guilt at her own easy life? Perhaps.
Slowly she walked towards the door. A disused flag and a twenty-three-year-old girl. A strange combination.
“But trailing clouds of glory do we come.”
The line from her favourite Wordsworth poem, the
Immortality Ode
, suddenly came to haunt her. Clouds of glory. That was it. The tattered flag hanging so modestly there seemed, that morning, to bring her a fresh vision. A vision of service, and sacrifice, a vision of distant places and of her own heroism. She knew what she must do. It was time to write those letters to the hospitals.
Joseph Porters stood, erect but with his head slightly bowed, and stared at the drains.
“Progress, sir, and empire. That is our destiny. Make no mistake.”
Porters nodded absently as Ebenezer Mickelthwaite, agent to Lord Forest, expressed these trenchant views.
“And these drains, these houses?” he interposed quietly.
“Safe. Safe as the Bank of England.”
“I think not. They are pestilential. We shall have cholera here again.”
Mickelthwaite eyed him. The lengthy disquisition he had just made on the empire was for the purpose of making Porters change the subject and it had not worked.
“The expense of your improvements would be very great.”
Porters shrugged.
“It mainly falls on the council rates.”
“Not all. Anyway, we pay rates.”
They were standing in the middle of the chequer, looking up the centre strip into which the assorted refuse from some forty courtyards and tiny allotments seeped to form a black, muddy morass that was something between a drain and a swamp. It produced a dank, alkaline stench – a persistent presence in winter, in summer a vicious enemy that rose to strike.
“The water is utterly foul.”
“Yet I heard that when they sunk a new well hereabouts, they discovered a mineral spring.”
“So it was thought, from the colour and pungency of the water, which people were drinking. In fact, Mr Mickelthwaite, they had penetrated a cess pit.”
The situation in the city had become a scandal. The centres of the old chequers, where often no new drainage had been constructed in centuries, were disease-ridden. The water channels down the streets, though they seemed at high water to be clean, were in fact polluted and constantly drawing in more poison from the area around.
“They call this city the English Venice,” Mickelthwaite said defensively.
“I call it an open sewer.” He was getting impatient. “In any case, Mr Mickelthwaite, you have lost your battle, all of you, and I am recommending the complete drainage of this chequer, new sewers, drains for every house. It will be all dug up. And those workshops,” he pointed with disgust to a collection of buildings that resembled two lines of wooden hovels stacked one on top of the other – “those will have to go.”
“We get rent from them,” Mickelthwaite growled.
“Not any more. You’ll have to build again.”
He started to go. Behind him he heard the agent mutter: “That damn doctor.” He smiled, and turned. “This is progress, Mr Mickelthwaite,” he said softly.
The battle had been a fierce one. For many years, the water channels had been under the control of the city’s directors of highways, who had done little to improve them; as for the insides of the chequers, they were under the control of individual landlords who had usually done nothing at all.
In 1849, cholera struck Salisbury. There were some fifteen hundred cases, deaths in hundreds. A certain Doctor Middleton, visiting the city and seeing its sanitation, was appalled. He protested. Reluctantly the council commissioned a survey of the water sources. Deep drainage was recommended. But that would be expensive. The council clerk did not record the medical evidence and threw Middleton’s letter away. And so Doctor Middleton began his campaign.
There was one problem for the council: the Public Health Act of 1848 – another of the many acts that passed through the nineteenth century parliaments and began England’s modern education, sanitation and factory conditions. The council could be forced to appoint a board of health.
“And then,” Mickelthwaite had explained gloomily to Lord Forest, “the whole matter will leave the highway directors’ control – the health board will oversee not only the water channels but the chequers as well. And worse, if they recommend improvements, they can be levied on the general rates.”
“Which I pay.”
“Exactly.”
For Lord Forest, who had long since given up his grandfather’s house in the close, whose interests were all in the industrial north now, or in his Indian plantations, and who only twice visited Sarum in his life, still owned half of one of the city chequers.