In the Shadow of the Lamp (19 page)

“I’m nearly done here, then we can go and discuss this—that is, if you consider it important enough to take me off the ward where there is much to do.”

The muscles in Dr. Menzies’s jaw tensed.
Any minute now he’s going to bellow
, I thought. But instead, he turned on the ball of his foot and marched past me, so close he brushed my skirt, without so much as a glance in my direction.

Dr. Maclean said nothing. I continued to follow him on his rounds for the next two hours. By the end, I was binding up wounds myself.

The next day I was assigned to him again. And again he took me around, showing me how to do things, letting me watch as he administered poultices, checked pulses, removed bandages, and bound them up again. Every so often he’d ask me to do something as if I’d been doing it all along.

At the end of the ward lay a man as still as death. At first I thought his soul had already fled to heaven, but Dr. Maclean took hold of the man’s wrist and pressed it for a few moments.

“He’s alive, but very weak. I don’t know what could have happened to the fellow. I admitted him myself a few days ago with a clean bayonet wound.” As he spoke he took my hand and, using his own as a guide, pressed my fingers around the soldier’s wrist just as he had done before. “Feel it?”

I did. It was a soft pulsing, rather slow.

“Let’s check his wound.”

This fellow’s injury was low in his belly. Dr. Maclean whisked the sheet off quickly, exposing the unconscious fellow’s privates. I looked away quickly, but not before my cheeks burned.

“Come now, Nurse Fraser! It’s only the human body.” He was teasing me, but he pulled the sheet up so the soldier was partially covered. “And there’s no time to be modest. Something’s gone wrong with this fellow.”

The wound was bandaged and it didn’t look like blood or pus seeped through it. “You unbind it while I check the rest of him.”

It was different taking a bandage off the tender part of a soldier. As was the usual practice, someone had wrapped the gauze right around his back, so I could only snip through all the layers and let the orderlies—or Dr. Maclean—lift him to remove the gauze later.

It wasn’t long before I revealed his scar. Most of it looked clean and was stitched up nicely. But a little bit down lower, toward his right side, looked funny. His belly was swollen around it. “Dr. Maclean, I think something’s wrong here.”

He left what he was doing and came right over. “You’re right. There’s some infection. The only thing to do, if my tutors were correct, is to open him up and drain it. The man’s burning with fever and unconscious. Will you help me?”

I should have been more afraid than I was, but all I could think of then was doing something to help the suffering soldier, who’d survived a bayonet wound only to have it go septic. “I’ll fetch the screen,” I said, heading down to where they were kept at the end of the ward to use for surgeries.

By the time I struggled back with the folding wooden frame with fabric stretched over it, Dr. Maclean had taken a scalpel from his bag. I quickly shielded us from the view of the other patients. “Won’t you need chloroform?” I asked as he put the point of the scalpel just below the wound, where the soldier’s belly bulged out the most. “And a basin?”

“There’s no time for chloroform,” he said, “but fetch a basin, quickly!”

Again I hurried, this time to the supply cupboard, where I also grabbed a few more towels. I hoped Dr. Maclean had all he needed in his kit to stitch the fellow up again when he was done.

“Steady now. You can look away if you want to,” he said. I shook my head and stayed staring at the razor-sharp blade as it pierced through the skin. The soldier gave a shudder but didn’t wake up.
Thank God
, I thought.

At first, nothing happened. Then, as he stuck the blade in deeper, all manner of liquid and blood started pouring out of the slit. I tried to position the basin to catch it, but there was an awful mess. It wasn’t long before the oozing stopped. Dr. Maclean straightened up. “That’s not right. There should be more. How is the man’s pulse, Nurse Fraser?”

I took his wrist and felt it the way Dr. Maclean had showed me. If anything, the pulse was weaker than before. “I can barely feel it.”

“He’ll die if we don’t get to the bottom of this,” Dr. Maclean said, and without hesitating he made a much longer and deeper incision with the scalpel. “That’s it!” he said, sounding as if he’d discovered treasure. “The appendix. It’s nearly ruptured and must be removed immediately. Use these clamps to hold the skin apart.”

He gave me two instruments that looked like scissors, only they weren’t sharp and when I pressed them shut they locked. Without hesitating I took each side of the new wound with the instruments, locked them, and opened up the cavity farther. Blood flowed freely. “Won’t he bleed to death?” I asked.

“I have to be quick.” Plunging his fingers in confidently but gently, Dr. Maclean teased something out that looked like a mottled sausage, and in seconds had cut it away. Then he mopped up as best he could. I released the clamps when he told me to. “While I hold the wound shut, get the thread and needle, the curved one, from my kit. You’ll have to sew it together.”

Except that I wouldn’t have wanted to do the holding the way he was, I felt queasy thinking about what he was asking me to do.

I found everything he described and threaded the needle. I was about to put a knot in the end like we did for sewing stump pillows.

“Don’t knot it first,” he said. “Leave the end hanging and tie it tight after you’ve made the stitch.”

With Dr. Maclean’s soothing, calm voice in my ear, I put a dozen stitches in the soldier’s abdomen. They weren’t all the same size but they worked. The wound was closed, and the blood stopped.

Between the two of us we made short work of bandaging the fellow again. Only after we’d finished completely did I look up at Dr. Maclean. Drips of sweat still trickled down from his hairline to his chin, but he glowed. “We did it, Molly!” I tried not to notice the change from Nurse Fraser to Molly. “I’ve only seen that procedure done in textbooks, although it’s not uncommon. Not really the kind of thing we normally have to deal with here.”

I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know what he meant. Whatever it was, I could see that our soldier had survived it. He was breathing slowly. I felt his pulse. It was still there, although hardly stronger than before.

“He’ll have to be watched carefully. Will you check on him whenever you can? I never know where they’ll make me go.”

Dr. Maclean drew nearer to me until I realized we were only a breath apart from each other. His eyes shone with something—excitement, I thought, but perhaps something else. I searched them for an answer.

Suddenly, he closed the distance between us and kissed me softly on the mouth. I felt his tongue tasting my lips and teeth. I did nothing, but I didn’t push him away. I was washed over with a warmth that came from deep inside me. Then he pulled away, turning to examine the patient again as if nothing had happened.

I was about to say I didn’t know if my own schedule would allow me to check in on this fellow we’d just operated on, but at that moment I looked up to see the thunderous face of Miss Nightingale, holding her lamp high.

C
hapter 20

“Miss Nightingale!” I was so shocked I almost yelled it out. How long had she been there? I knew I was blushing. I felt the blood beating in my veins.

Dr. Maclean continued his examination of the soldier and only turned when I said her name. He responded to her angry look with a smile. “Ah! Your Nurse Fraser has been a valuable help to me. I have just performed an appendectomy. The poor fellow would have died. Now at least there’s a chance he’ll make it.”

Miss Nightingale did not alter her expression of fury, but she said nothing in front of Dr. Maclean except, “Nurse Fraser, your shift ended half an hour ago. If you do not return straight away to our quarters you’ll miss supper.” I could tell that she wanted to say a great deal more than that. I bobbed a curtsy to both of them and walked off, trying not to cower or run, both of which I dearly wanted to do.

“Where were you?” Emma said in a hoarse, indiscreet whisper. Everyone at the dining table quieted down, no doubt so they could hear what I had to say.

“I had to help a doctor with an emergency,” I said, unwilling to add any more details. No doubt it would get around quickly enough.

Emma nudged me in the ribs. By the look on her face, I could tell she thought I was dallying with Dr. Maclean, not nursing. I wanted to explain it all to her, but I knew she’d think I was only making it up, so what was the use?

The stew tasted dusty in my mouth, and I could feel every swallow trace its way down to my stomach. I hoped it wouldn’t come back up the same way, which sometimes happened when I was very upset.

I don’t know where Miss Nightingale went or what she did, but she didn’t return until we were about to get ready to retire for the night.

“Fraser, a word,” she said, not even pausing as she passed through on the way to her rooms in the tower. I didn’t look at Emma, just stood and followed Miss Nightingale, whose lamp was the only illumination for the dark stairs that led up to her office.

I followed her in. “Close the door,” she said. “Sit.”

Could it be that she would send me home when I was just beginning to learn something?

“Tell me exactly what you did, what Dr. Maclean did, and how you came to be alone with him in that particular ward.”

I wanted to say that we weren’t alone, because we weren’t. But I knew that in her view the soldiers didn’t count. I was the only female there. I should have realized and insisted someone else come along, but I forgot. But then there would have been no kiss …

And so I told her about the man’s infection and how I saw the swelling below his wound. When I was describing the operation to her she leaned forward, as if she wanted to catch every word. She even interrupted to ask me questions now and again. When I’d said it all, she stayed quiet for a minute or two.

“Fraser, you have overstepped the bounds of our duties here in Scutari. We must not presume to take on the role of doctor to these patients. We are here to assist only, to nurse the patients back to health by obeying the doctors’ orders.”

I wanted to point out that I had been acting on a doctor’s orders, but something told me she wouldn’t take kindly to that observation.

“For the next week, you are not permitted on the wards. You are to help Mrs. Clarke in the kitchen and to clean our quarters. Only in the event of an emergency will I release you to perform nursing duties.” She took up her pen and a pile of papers and without looking up at me said, “You may go now.”

I stood, my knees barely able to support me. Not allowed on the wards! It simply wasn’t fair. How would I check on that soldier? What if he died? I thought I’d left all that misjudging and mistaking behind me in London, but it appeared that people were just as quick to jump to conclusions halfway across the globe.

As soon as I entered the room Emma came running up to me through the dark dormitory, where half the beds’ occupants already snored. “What happened? Tell me!”

I shook my head, threw myself down on my cot, and let the tears flow into my pillow.

The week passed more quickly than I thought it would, and without any fanfare I noticed that my name had reappeared on the roster. I wanted to go look for the man whose appendix Dr. Maclean had removed, but I knew if I did I’d risk Miss Nightingale’s wrath again, and I might not be so lucky to get only a week’s exile from the wards.

In fact I hardly saw Dr. Maclean, except from a distance. He always seemed to be with another doctor, although there were few enough of them to spare.

The next couple of months went on in a sort of pattern. Shiploads of wounded and sick arrived, were treated, and straggled out of the hospital by getting better or dying. The new nurses prepared to work in the new hospital in Koulali, while some of the nuns under Mother Bridgeman finally agreed to be split up and take shifts in the Barrack Hospital. Five soldiers’ wives had babies, making the lying-in hospital another triumph of Miss Nightingale’s.

With Mrs. Clarke to run things on a daily basis, we didn’t see much of Miss Nightingale in our quarters. She was always busy doing something, and it usually involved a dispute. There was a big to-do when the nuns were accused of preaching religion to the dying men, no matter their beliefs. Then Miss Nightingale went on a tear that the doctors weren’t following the rules of hygiene she’d set up, and the sick were mixed in with the wounded. Always there was an issue with supplies. They didn’t arrive on time. There weren’t enough of them. They were the wrong ones.