In the Shadow of the Lamp (30 page)

Authors: Susanne Dunlap

BOOK: In the Shadow of the Lamp

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Will courted me properly for a few months while I worked at St. Thomas’s. It took some convincing, but he agreed eventually I could work after we got married. I promised I’d stop if a baby came, though. They’d not let me work if I was in the family way anyhow.

I took him home to see my mum and dad. They were so proud of me they invited all the neighbors in just to wish us good luck.

I never told Will about Dr. Maclean, what really happened. I think about him now and again, though. I imagine him looking down, happy for my happiness. That would have been like him.

I didn’t see Miss Nightingale in London, but I knew she was there after the war ended. They said she was sick. I would have gone to visit her, only she was a fine lady and I was just a parlormaid turned nurse. But every night in my prayers I thanked her, more than even the rest of England thanked her for all she’d done for the soldiers. I thanked her because she understood me more than anyone else ever had, and she still let me be what I was.

Will did too, in his way. I’m as happy as a body has a right to be. We expect our first little one soon, sometime around my nineteenth birthday—my real nineteenth birthday.

But happy as I am, I’ll never forget Dr. Maclean and how he made me understand what love was. I know now it could never have been. There was so much more separating us than keeping us together. But it was Dr. Maclean who taught me there were different ways to be and to do things, that taking a chance could have good results if it’s done for the right reasons. Most of all, he taught me how love could bind two people across oceans and through walls, living or dead, forever.

A
cknowledgments

I would especially like to thank my wonderful editor, Melanie Cecka, who was not only instrumental in making
In the Shadow of the Lamp
the best it could be, but whose fascination with Florence Nightingale was the true inspiration for this book.

Thanks are also due to the staff of the Florence Nightingale Museum, who were forthcoming with information that would have been difficult for me to find.

Finally, a huge thank you to my agent, Adam Chromy, with his army of astute readers who always manage to see the big picture; to Stephanie Cowell, a superb writer, who despite her own busy schedule of writing and promoting her books is ever ready to read and give thoughtful advice; and to all my cohorts of writers, fans, friends, and supporters on Facebook and Twitter, who shared the gestation of this novel with me.

A
uthor’s
N
ote

In the Shadow of the Lamp
was as much a discovery for me as I hope it will be for the reader. Finding out about the life of the famous Florence Nightingale, who established modern nursing practices as we know them, was a revelation. She had a powerful effect on everyone around her, was unflaggingly energetic, but was also abrasive, single-minded to the point of obsession, and self-sacrificing in the extreme. Her ideas about nursing were no-nonsense and entirely based in practicality at a time when the idea of contagion and germs was hardly understood. Pain was thought to be an important part of surgery—evidence that the bad was being purged—and the idea of cleaning surgical instruments unheard of.

Nightingale’s common-sense precepts of cleanliness, nourishment, and fresh air revolutionized nursing. She strongly advocated for the use of chloroform in surgery and for shielding patients from other patients’ views while being treated. Most remarkable of all, she was a well-bred, upper-class lady whose family initially resisted her call to nursing as a profession. In Nightingale’s day, nursing was practiced by low-class women with no skill and little inclination for the work.

One of the things that made writing this book a challenge was that when the British government asked Nightingale to go to the Crimea and improve the care systems for injured and ill British soldiers, she did so only on the condition that she could choose her own nurses. The ones she selected had to be older than twenty-four, have nursing experience, and preferably not be too attractive or marriageable. This does not describe a heroine I’d necessarily like to read about! And Nightingale herself was in her thirties by this time and had turned down a very good marriage proposal to dedicate her life to nursing, making her unsuitable as a teen protagonist.

Enter Molly Fraser, a character entirely of my own invention. There was no question that everyone’s imagination was fired up by reports of the conflict in the Crimea and especially of Nightingale and her nurses going to save the day. So why not a young parlormaid who finds herself in a difficult situation? There’s no evidence that anyone stowed away to go with Nightingale, but stranger things have happened in history.

As to which characters are historical and which are not: the names of all the nurses, except for Molly and Emma, appear on the lists of nurses who were at one time or another with Nightingale in the Crimea. Volumes of Nightingale’s writings and letters exist, and she has been the subject of many biographies and studies. Yet very little information about the nurses who accompanied her remains, apart from the journal of Sarah Anne Terrot, one of the Sellonite Sisters of Mercy. She did not remain long in Turkey, having been sent home as an invalid after a few months.

While Nightingale wrote numerous letters to the authorities and to her family, they rarely mention the nurses unless it is to complain of their incompetence and bad behavior. She was primarily occupied with the big picture: managing the ambitious enterprise of getting supplies to the hospital, caring for the men, laying down rules, establishing schedules and systems, and recording data about illness.

As to the doctors featured in this book: a real Dr. Menzies was in charge of the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, but my Dr. Menzies is an amalgamation of several doctors Nightingale dealt with there. Dr. Maclean is an invention, as are the doctors at the front in Balaclava.

Another important historical figure whom I touch briefly upon is Mary Seacole. She was a Jamaican nurse who went to London in hopes of traveling to the Crimea with Nightingale, but after finding that the services of a black woman were not wanted, raised enough money to get there on her own. She established an outpost near Balaclava that was part infirmary, part general store, part tavern. Nightingale probably met her, and is reported to have said that Mother Seacole did some good for the soldiers—although she also said her establishment was little better than a brothel. Seacole arrived in March 1855, and so would have been very new to the soldiers at the time of my story. I have taken the small liberty of establishing her there a little earlier so that Molly and Emma could meet her.

In the annals of Nightingale’s time at Scutari there is almost no mention of the individual soldiers she came into contact with, and so Thomas and Will are also fictional. The conditions they faced, however, are not.

Particularly fascinating is the mystique that attached itself to Nightingale despite her pragmatic, businesslike approach. “The lady with the lamp” became a common figure in the newspapers and magazines of the times and showed a caring Nightingale with a lamp that looked a bit like the kind a genie might pop out of. In 1858,
The Ladies Repository
wrote:

“She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.”
(p. 361)

Nightingale did indeed patrol the wards at night with a lamp, but the true irony is in her reason for those nightly vigils: she didn’t trust any of her nurses to check on the wards at night because they might make mischief with the men. Her solution was to take that duty upon herself.

One historical fact about Nightingale that I took license with was the trip to Balaclava. Nightingale did go there, but not with the first group of nurses who established the Field Hospital. Mrs. Langston led that party with a few nurses on her own, with Nightingale’s sanction. Nightingale went out some months later to inspect the facilities, and it was there that she first became very ill.

Despite her iron will and unflagging efforts, the illness Nightingale contracted in the Crimea was debilitating and stayed with her for the remainder of her life. Not long after returning to London when the conflict was over, she became bedridden and remained a virtual prisoner in her room for the rest of her days. Astonishingly, although she was an invalid, she lived to the ripe old age of ninety, dying peacefully in her sleep in 1910. The British government offered to have her buried in Westminster Abbey, but her relatives declined.

Her legacy lives on. The rolling screens used in hospitals to give patients and doctors privacy during examinations are called Nightingales. Many schools of nursing owe their beginnings to her, and the original Florence Nightingale School of Nursing, established in 1860, remains today as the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at King’s College London.

The Crimean War—the scene of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade—is perhaps most remembered for the reforms brought about by Florence Nightingale and her nurses. It remains a rarity among bloody conflicts for having had such a lasting and positive effect on humankind.

A
LSO BY
S
USANNE
D
UNLAP

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published in the United States of America in April 2011
by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers
E-book edition published in April 2011
www.bloomsburyteens.com

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Bloomsbury BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Dunlap, Susanne Emily.
In the shadow of the lamp / by Susanne Dunlap. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.

Summary: Sixteen-year-old Molly Fraser works as a nurse with Florence Nightingale
during the Crimean War to earn a salary to help her family survive in nineteenth-century
England.

ISBN 978-1-59990-565-5 (hardcover)

1. Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910—Juvenile fiction. 2. Crimean War, 1853–1856—Juvenile fiction. 3. England—Social conditions—19th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910—Fiction. 2. Crimean War, 1853–1856—Fiction. 3. England—Social conditions—19th century—Fiction. 4. Nurses—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.D92123In 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010021158

ISBN 978-1-59990-566-2 (e-book)