In the Shadow of the Lamp (21 page)

I would have to stay out of his way, make sure he didn’t smile and wave at me, or Miss Nightingale would be furious. I knew the best way would be to stay as much as I could in our cabin below. He would never go there.

But I didn’t want to close myself up in the little room that’d no doubt be crawling with vermin and stinking of old rum. I liked to be on deck where I could feel the wind and look out over the waves, even though last time it had been so frightening. The time holed up in the cabin stuck in my mind even more; the smell of it, and not knowing what was happening outside. At least for this voyage all the nurses except Miss Nightingale claimed to be good sailors, so with luck I wouldn’t spend my time mopping up vomit.

I stayed out as long as I could and watched Scutari and Istanbul disappear behind us. Dr. Maclean went below, I was relieved to see, but also disappointed. Perhaps I had offended him by not nodding to him or saying hello. But I couldn’t. Surely he’d understand that.

After not more than a quarter of an hour my fingers got so cold I worried I’d get frostbite, so I made my way to the hatch that led down to the cabins.

“Pssst!”

I thought it was the ship’s cat hissing at me, so I kept walking.

“Pssst! Molly!”

No. Not a cat. I turned around, looking to see where the voice came from. The wind, the ship creaking, and the sails flapping put up quite a din of their own. And at first I didn’t see anyone.

“Over ’ere!”

Then I spotted something. A hand, poking out from under a tarpaulin covering one of the lifeboats that were lashed to the deck. A hand I recognized. I quickly glanced round. The sailors were all busy with the tasks of managing the sails and navigating us out into the open sea, and I was the only passenger that hadn’t yet gone below out of the cold. Except for Emma, who’d managed to get herself into the lifeboat without anyone knowing.

“What are you doing here?” I had to speak loudly enough for Emma to hear me but didn’t want to alert any of the sailors to the fact that we had a stowaway. Meanwhile I untied one or two of the ropes that held the tarp down so I could see her. She was wearing her nurse’s uniform and had even brought her valise.

“You think I was goin’ to let you go off all on yer own to see my Thomas and maybe flirt with him?”

I knew she was just joking. She wanted to see Thomas. That was her reason. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before, it was so obvious. That explained why she was so mad at me when she found out I was going. “Emma, why didn’t you say?” I asked. “It’s going to be dangerous, and you won’t probably run into Thomas anyway in Balaclava. He might be miles away.”

“I have to see him. I just have to.”

Tears sprang to Emma’s eyes. “Emma, what’s wrong?” It wasn’t like her to cry so easily.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Well, whatever it is, you can’t stay here for three days. You’ll freeze to death. You’ll have to come below and own up.”

She looked down. “Miss Nightingale won’t half be cross.”

If she was just cross, Emma would be lucky. Fortunately, not even Miss Nightingale would throw someone overboard because she disobeyed her. “I’ll try to make things right with her. She might be too sick to care right now, anyway.”

I helped Emma crawl out of the lifeboat and straighten her uniform, then we went down to the cabin. When the two of us walked in, Mrs. Langston’s mouth opened wide.

“At the last minute Miss Nightingale asked Emma to come along,” I said. With Miss Nightingale in her cabin and not likely to come out for a while, I decided it would be better to lie just a little. How bad was it, after all, that Emma was there? There were plenty of nurses at the Barrack Hospital to manage, even if another few hundred wounded arrived. And things had slowed down a lot lately anyhow. We were in the middle of the Siege of Sebastopol, or so I’d heard. That meant a lot of waiting and hiding in trenches for the men, and not too many actual battles. More men came back sick with dysentery and low fevers than wounded.

We had a quiet sail across the Black Sea. No storms. It wasn’t icy—the water was too salty for that. Just cold, so we stayed mostly in our stuffy cabin. I was glad Emma came in the end. We played cards and guessing games to pass the time. The others mostly read. Mrs. Langston and the other Sellonite sister prayed a lot and talked about nursing. Mrs. Drake, once she got over her disapproving looks at Emma, spent her time knitting and sleeping. I only saw Dr. Maclean once, when we went up on deck for a breath of air on a day when the wind died down a little. Something made me turn toward the stern and I saw him there, staring in my direction, smoking his pipe. He raised his hand to wave, but I turned away, just like last time. It would be folly to be friendly with him. Still, it pained me not to let him see that I knew he was there, and that I was mostly glad to see him. It would be much simpler if he paid no attention to me at all.

We didn’t see Miss Nightingale until we got to the peninsula, the Crimea. This was the place all the fighting was for, so Mrs. Langston told us. We needed to beat the Russians back, not let them get a foothold past their borders. I asked her why.

“It’s very complicated. As far as I understand, things are balanced now, with England, France, and Austria powerful in the west of Europe, and Russia in the east. We don’t want Russia to get too powerful, especially if she unites with Austria. It’s a way of keeping the peace all over Europe.”

“So we are at war so we may have peace?” I asked, still not understanding.

“In a sense.”

I didn’t ask her anything more after that. It all seemed pointless. So many already dead or maimed, and it wasn’t even England we were fighting over. But as we approached shore we would see where the battles were firsthand. Everyone came on deck for that. It was a sight I’ll never forget.

“Look at all them ships!” Emma exclaimed. I made sure she was on the side of me that was away from Miss Nightingale, who stood farther down the deck. But everyone was so amazed by the sight of all the British, French, and Turkish ships carpeting the sea, bobbing up and down at anchor or slowly moving closer or farther away from shore, that I’d have been surprised if anyone noticed her.

“Why don’t they sail into the harbor and attack Sebastopol from the water?” I wondered aloud. The city came right down to the water, like Istanbul did, and from what little I knew it looked easy to attack that way. But the British and French ships were all clustered at the mouth of the harbor, like an invisible fence kept them away.

Mrs. Langston answered. “The Russians sank several of their warships on purpose, just over there”—she pointed to the harbor—“so our fleets couldn’t pass.”

Of course. There was a fence after all. A lethal trap under the water.

But not all of the vessels gathered around us were warships. One not far off—close enough for me to make out the women in deck chairs with binoculars, staring at the shore—would’ve looked like a pleasure ship in any other place. Banners flew from the masts, and I could see waiters serving wine in tall glasses to the ladies sitting on deck in their furs.

Nurse Drake was on my other side. “They’ve come to watch the lovely war,” she said. “See our brave men fight and get killed.”

If they never got closer than they were then to the battles, it might seem glorious
, I thought. They wouldn’t see the fear and pain on the men’s faces, just where they moved, like the painted lead soldiers rich children played with. The red coats of the British brightened up the gray countryside. Every now and then a puff of white smoke would come from above Sebastopol, followed by a distant boom. Like fireworks during the day, but instead they were guns. I saw up close what they did to soldiers, and it wasn’t glorious or pretty. I wanted someone to commandeer that sightseeing ship for a few hundred sick and wounded, and then see how thrilling the fine ladies thought it all was!

We had to sail around a small spit of land to get to Balaclava, a village on the other side of the hills that protected Sebastopol. We were able to dock at a sheltered harbor, but when the gangplank was lowered and the sailors scrambled down to help fasten ropes to the pier they sank ankle deep in mud. We could hear the squelching and sucking from on deck, not to mention the foul mouths of the men as they began to unload in the muck. How would we get through it ourselves?

The buildings by the dock were half fallen down, made of wood and stone with thatched roofs. Bony, underfed cows and oxen watched what went on around them with no apparent interest. Dock workers started laying planks over the mud so the passengers could walk up to where the ground was less muddy, though I couldn’t see that it would help much, and so I wandered to the other side of the ship to see what was there while we waited to go on shore.

There was nothing more than barren earth patched with snow, climbing into the hills that rose between Balaclava and Sebastopol. Dotted around everywhere were round tents, in rows and groups, in any spare bit of ground near the town. With just a stretch of canvas and a pole to hold them up in the middle, the tents couldn’t have provided more than the barest shelter against the winter cold. Here and there amongst them was a wooden hut with a chimney, so no doubt at least a stove inside. And soldiers wandered everywhere. Some were in smart uniforms, looking like they were on their way somewhere in a hurry. Others dragged themselves around, dirty and ragged, like they couldn’t find a place to stop and rest. Most of them had long, bushy beards. I guessed they didn’t have water and soap for shaving.

Beyond the camps, the houses in the town seemed to be thrown against the hillside, clinging however they could, only a few fitted with roofs that looked as though they wouldn’t let in a steady rain.

The narrow harbor was dotted with smaller boats going in and out, dodging obstacles in the water. At first I thought it was just odd bits of wood from fallen-down buildings. But it didn’t take long for me to see how wrong I was. Horse carcasses, sewage, dead fish, and things too rotten to identify. I suppose I’d got so used to the smell of death and illness that I hardly noticed how it hung over Balaclava.

The red coats of the officers and the highlanders’ kilts were the only colors I could see in that brown and dreary place. It made Scutari seem lively and thriving by comparison.

“Come, nurses!” Miss Nightingale called us all to gather and disembark at the same time. Emma stood behind me, looking down. But it was no use.

Miss Nightingale’s eyes rested on Emma, their expression impossible to read, but the corners of her mouth turned down just enough for me to know that she wasn’t pleased at all about this added body. She must have felt me staring at her, because next she looked at me. Our eyes met, and I saw a hard, accusing expression. I immediately felt hurt. It was like the Abington-Smythes all over again. She probably assumed Emma and I plotted together. How would I convince her that it wasn’t true without betraying my friend?

“Miss Nightingale! We are so grateful for the help of your nurses.” A man in the uniform of the army medical department met us as we stepped on the planks quickly before they too sank in the mud and made our way up to drier ground. He talked to her the whole walk to our quarters, on the other side of the town.

Our “quarters” consisted of a large tent with wooden sides and a stove in the middle. There were cots set up inside, but that was all. The stove hadn’t been lit.

“The field hospital building is completed, but we are still constructing huts outside of it for the nurses. When they are finished your nurses will have adequate—if not luxurious—accommodation.” He looked at us, silently counting. “Seven nurses. I confess I had hoped for one or two more. A woman’s touch can do more to heal than all the medical arts.”

“My understanding is that the field hospital will treat the most critical cases and those deemed to be slight enough that they could return to the battle. In which case, a woman’s touch could make little difference, and might even prove less efficacious than your medical arts.”

I had got used to Miss Nightingale’s way of knocking people off their guard, especially men. And I knew the doctor had—without intending to—touched on the one subject that disturbed her most about women nursing soldiers. Still, I had to stifle a laugh at the look of shock that crossed his face.

We had a meal of sorts outside, some kind of watery stew in tin cups. I was hungry enough that I didn’t mind. And it was better than what the men were eating—uncooked salt pork with sugar on it. I’d never seen such a vast crowd of soldiers in my life. They didn’t act like the ones in Scutari, the ones who were well, that is. They stared at us, but not with any kind of real interest. Even the ones who had clean uniforms looked exhausted, as if just picking up their feet to walk was more than they had strength for.