The William Monk Mysteries Page 17

  “Well?” Callandra said at last. “What are your choices, Hester? I am quite sure you can find an excellent position if you wish to continue nursing, either in an army hospital or in one of the London hospitals that may be persuaded to accept women.” There was no lift in her voice, no enthusiasm.

  “But?” Hester said for her.

  Callandra’s wide mouth twitched in the ghost of a smile. “But I think you would be wasted in it. You have a gift for administration, and a fighting spirit. You should find some cause and battle to win it. You have learned a great deal about better standards of nursing in the Crimea. Teach them here in England, force people to listen—get rid of cross-infection, insanitary conditions, ignorant nurses, incompetent treatments that any good housekeeper would abhor. You will save more lives, and be a happier woman.”

  Hester did not mention the dispatches she had sent in Alan Russell’s name, but a truth in Callandra’s words rested with an unusual warmth in her, a kind of resolution as if discord had been melted into harmony.

  “How do I do it?” The writing of articles could wait, find its own avenue. The more she knew, the more she would be able to speak with power and intelligence. Of course she already knew that Miss Nightingale would continue to campaign with every ounce of the passion which all but consumed her nervous strength and physical health for a reformation of the entire Army Medical Corps, but she could not do it alone, or even with all the adulation the country offered her or the friends she had in the seats of power. Vested interests were spread through the corridors of authority like the roots of a tree through the earth. The bonds of habit and security of position were steellike in endurance. Too many people would have to change, and in doing so admit they had been ill-advised, unwise, even incompetent.

  “How can I obtain a position?”

  “I have friends,” Callandra said with quiet confidence. “I shall begin to write letters, very discreetly, either to beg favors, prompt a sense of duty, prick consciences, or else threaten disfavor both public and private, if someone does not help!” There was a light of humor in her eyes, but also a complete intention to do exactly what she had said.

  “Thank you,” Hester accepted. “I shall endeavor to use my opportunities so as to justify your effort.”

  “Certainly,” Callandra agreed. “If I did not believe so, I should not exert them.” And she matched her stride to Hester’s and together they walked in the wood under the branches and out across the park.

  Two days later General Wadham came to dinner with his daughter Ursula, who had been betrothed for several months to Menard Grey. They arrived early enough to join the family in the withdrawing room for conversation before the meal was announced, and Hester found herself immediately tested in her tact. Ursula was a handsome girl whose mane of hair had a touch of red in its fairness and whose skin had the glow of someone who spends a certain amount of time in the open. Indeed, conversation had not proceeded far before her interest in riding to hounds became apparent. This evening she was dressed in a rich blue which in Hester’s opinion was too powerful for her; something more subdued would have flattered her and permitted her natural vitality to show through. As it was she appeared a trifle conspicuous between Fabia’s lavender silk and her light hair faded to gray at the front, Rosamond in a blue so dull and dark it made her flawless cheeks like alabaster, and Hester herself in a somber grape color rich and yet not out of keeping with her own recent state of mourning. Actually she thought privately she had never worn a color which flattered her more!

  Callandra wore black with touches of white, a striking dress, but somehow not quite the right note of fashion. But then whatever Callandra wore was not going to have panache, only distinction; it was not in her nature to be glamorous.

  General Wadham was tall and stout with bristling side whiskers and very pale blue eyes which were either farsighted or nearsighted, Hester was unsure which, but they certainly did not seem to focus upon her when he addressed her.

  “Visiting, Miss—er—Miss—”

  “Latterly,” she supplied.

  “Ah yes—of course—Latterly.” He reminded her almost ludicrously of a dozen or so middle-aged soldiers she had seen whom she and Fanny Bolsover had lampooned when they were tired and frightened and had sat up all night with the wounded, then afterwards lain together on a single straw pallet, huddled close for warmth and telling each other silly stories, laughing because it was better than weeping, and making fun of the officers because loyalty and pity and hate were too big to deal with, and they had not the energy or spirit left.

  “Friend of Lady Shelburne’s, are you?” General Wadham said automatically. “Charming—charming.”

  Hester felt her irritation rise already.

  “No,” she contradicted. “I am a friend of Lady Callandra Daviot’s. I was fortunate enough to know her some time ago.”

  “Indeed.” He obviously could think of nothing to add to that, and moved on to Rosamond, who was more prepared to make light conversation and fall in with whatever mood he wished.

  When dinner was announced there was no gentleman to escort her into the dining room, so she was obliged to go in with Callandra, and at table found herself seated opposite the general.

  The first course was served and everyone began to eat, the ladies delicately, the men with appetite. At first conversation was slight, then when the initial hunger had been assuaged and the soup and fish eaten, Ursula began to speak about the hunt, and the relative merits of one horse over another.

  Hester did not join in The only riding she had done had been in the Crimea, and the sight of the horses there injured, diseased and starving had so distressed her she put it from her mind. Indeed so much did she close her attention from their speech that Fabia had addressed her three times before she was startled into realizing it.

  “I beg your pardon!” she apologized in some embarrassment.

  “I believe you said, Miss Latterly, that you were briefly acquainted with my late son, Major Joscelin Grey?”

  “Yes. I regret it was very slight—there were so many wounded.” She said it politely, as if she were discussing some ordinary commodity, but her mind went back to the reality of the hospitals when the wounded, the frostbitten and those wasted with cholera, dysentery and starvation were lying so close there was barely room for more, and the rats scuttled, huddled and clung everywhere.

  And worse than that she remembered the earthworks in the siege of Sebastopol, the bitter cold, the light of lamps in the mud, her body shaking as she held one high for the surgeon to work, its gleam on the saw blade, the dim shapes of men crowding together for a fraction of body’s warmth. She remembered the first time she saw the great figure of Rebecca Box striding forward over the battlefield beyond the trenches to ground lately occupied by Russian troops, and lifting the bodies of the fallen and hoisting them over her shoulder to carry them back. Her strength was surpassed only by her sublime courage. No man fell injured so far forward she would not go out for him and carry him back to hospital hut or tent.

  They were staring at her, waiting for her to say something more, some word of praise for him. After all, he had been a soldier—a major in the cavalry.

  “I remember he was charming.” She refused to lie, even for his family. “He had the most delightful smile.”

  Fabia relaxed and sat back. “That was Joscelin,” she agreed with a misty look in her blue eyes. “Courage and a kind of gaiety, even in the most dreadful circumstances. I can still hardly believe he is gone—I half think he will throw the door open and stride in, apologizing for being late and telling us how hungry he is.”

  Hester looked at the table piled high with food that would have done half a regiment at the height of the siege. They used the word hunger so easily.

  General Wadham sat back and wiped his napkin over his lips.

  “A fine man,” he said quietly. “You must have been very proud of him, my dear. A soldier’s life is all too often short, but he carries honor with him,
and he will not be forgotten.”

  The table was silent but for the clink of silver on porcelain. No one could think of any immediate reply. Fabia’s face was full of a bleak and terrible grief, an almost devastating loneliness. Rosamond stared into space, and Lovel looked quietly wretched, whether for their pain or his own was impossible to know. Was it memory or the present which robbed him?

  Menard chewed his food over and over, as if his throat were too tight and his mouth too dry to swallow it.

  “Glorious campaign,” the general went on presently. “Live in the annals of history. Never be surpassed for courage. Thin Red Line, and all that.”

  Hester found herself suddenly choked with tears, anger and grief boiling up inside her, and intolerable frustration. She could see the hills beyond the Alma River more sharply than the figures around the table and the winking crystal. She could see the breastwork on the forward ridges as it had been that morning, bristling with enemy guns, the Greater and Lesser Redoubts, the wicker barricades filled with stones. Behind them were Prince Menshikoff’s fifty thousand men. She remembered the smell of the breeze off the sea. She had stood with the women who had followed the army and watched Lord Raglan sitting in frock coat and white shirt, his back ramrod stiff in the saddle.

  At one o’clock the bugle had sounded and the infantry advanced shoulder to shoulder into the mouths of the Russian guns and were cut down like corn. For ninety minutes they were massacred, then at last the order was given and the Hussars, Lancers and Fusiliers joined in, each in perfect order.

  “Look well at that,” a major had said to one of the wives, “for the Queen of England would give her eyes to see it.”

  Everywhere men were falling. The colors carried high were ragged with shot. As one bearer fell another took his place, and in his turn fell and was succeeded. Orders were conflicting, men advanced and retreated over each other. The Grenadiers advanced, a moving wall of bearskins, then the Black Watch of the Highland Brigade.

  The Dragoons were held back, never used. Why? When asked, Lord Raglan had replied that he had been thinking of Agnes!

  Hester remembered going over the battlefield afterwards, the ground soaked with blood, seeing mangled bodies, some so terrible the limbs lay yards away. She had done all she could to relieve the suffering, working till exhaustion numbed her beyond feeling and she was dizzy with the sights and sounds of pain. Wounded were piled on carts and trundled to field hospital tents. She had worked all night and all day, exhausted, dry-mouthed with thirst, aching and drenched with horror. Orderlies had tried to stop the bleeding; there was little to do for shock but a few precious drops of brandy. What she would have given then for the contents of Shelburne’s cellars.

  The dinner table conversation buzzed on around her, cheerful, courteous, and ignorant. The flowers swam in her vision, summer blooms grown by careful gardeners, orchids tended in the glass conservatory. She thought of herself walking in the grass one hot afternoon with letters from home in her pocket, amid the dwarf roses and the blue larkspur that grew again in the field of Balaclava the year after the Charge of the Light Brigade, that idiotic piece of insane bungling and suicidal heroism. She had gone back to the hospital and tried to write and tell them what it was really like, what she was doing and how it felt, the sharing and the good things, the friendships, Fanny Bolsover, laughter, courage. The dry resignation of the men when they were issued green coffee beans, and no means to roast or grind them, had evoked her admiration so deeply it made her throat ache with sudden pride. She could hear the scratching of the quill over the paper now—and the sound as she tore it up.

  “Fine man,” General Wadham was saying, staring into his claret glass. “One of England’s heroes. Lucan and Cardigan are related—I suppose you know? Lucan married one of Lord Cardigan’s sisters—what a family.” He shook his head in wonder. “What duty!”

  “Inspires us all,” Ursula agreed with shining eyes.

  “They hated each other on sight,” Hester said before she had time for discretion to guard her tongue.

  “I beg your pardon!” The general stared at her coldly, his rather wispy eyebrows raised. His look centered all his incredulity at her impertinence and disapproval of women who spoke when it was not required of them.

  Hester was stung by it. He was exactly the sort of blind, arrogant fool who had caused such immeasurable loss on the battlefield through refusal to be informed, rigidity of thought, panic when they found they were wrong, and personal emotion which overrode truth.

  “I said that Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan hated each other from the moment they met,” she repeated clearly in the total silence.

  “I think you are hardly in a position to judge such a thing, madame.” He regarded her with total contempt. She was less than a subaltern, less than a private, for heaven’s sake—she was a woman! And she had contradicted him, at least by implication, and at the dinner table.

  “I was on the battlefield at the Alma, at Inkermann and at Balaclava, and at the siege of Sebastopol, sir,” she answered without dropping her gaze. “Where were you?”

  His face flushed scarlet. “Good manners, and regard for our hosts, forbid me from giving you the answer you deserve, madame,” he said very stiffly. “Since the meal is finished, perhaps it is time the ladies wished to retire to the withdrawing room?”

  Rosamond made as if to rise in obedience, and Ursula laid her napkin beside her plate, although there was still half a pear unfinished on it.

  Fabia sat where she was, two spots of color in her cheeks, and very carefully and deliberately Callandra reached for a peach and began to peel it with her fruit knife and fork, a small smile on her face.

  No one moved. The silence deepened.

  “I believe it is going to be a hard winter,” Lovel said at last. “Old Beckinsale was saying he expects to lose half his crop.”

  “He says that every year,” Menard grunted and finished the remnant of his wine, throwing it back without savor, merely as if he would not waste it.

  “A lot of people say things every year.” Callandra cut away a squashy piece of fruit carefully and pushed it to the side of her plate. “It is forty years since we beat Napoleon at Waterloo, and most of us still think we have the same invincible army and we expect to win with the same tactics and the same discipline and courage that defeated half Europe and ended an empire.”

  “And by God, we shall, madame!” The general slammed down his palm, making the cutlery jump. “The British soldier is the superior of any man alive!”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Callandra agreed. “It is the British general in the field who is a hidebound and incompetent ass.”

  “Callandra! For God’s sake!” Fabia was appalled.

  Menard put his hands over his face.

  “Perhaps we should have done better had you been there, General Wadham,” Callandra continued unabashed, looking at him frankly. “You at least have a very considerable imagination!”

  Rosamond shut her eyes and slid down in her seat. Lovel groaned.

  Hester choked with laughter, a trifle hysterically, and stuffed her napkin over her mouth to stifle it.

  General Wadham made a surprisingly graceful strategic retreat. He decided to accept the remark as a compliment.

  “Thank you, madame,” he said stiffly. “Perhaps I might have prevented the slaughter of the Light Brigade.”

  And with that it was left. Fabia, with a little help from Lovel, rose from her seat and excused the ladies, leading them to the withdrawing room, where they discussed such matters as music, fashion, society, forthcoming weddings, both planned and speculated, and were excessively polite to one another.

  When the visitors finally took their leave, Fabia turned upon her sister-in-law with a look that should have shriveled her.

  “Callandra—I shall never forgive you!”

  “Since you have never forgiven me for wearing the exact shade of gown as you when we first met forty years ago,” Callandra replied, “I shall just have t
o bear it with the same fortitude I have shown over all the other episodes since.”

  “You are impossible. Dear heaven, how I miss Joscelin.” She stood up slowly and Hester rose as a matter of courtesy. Fabia walked towards the double doors. “I am going to bed. I shall see you tomorrow.” And she went out, leaving them also.

  “You are impossible, Aunt Callandra,” Rosamond agreed, standing in the middle of the floor and looking confused and unhappy. “I don’t know why you say such things.”

  “I know you don’t,” Callandra said gently. “That is because you have never been anywhere but Middleton, Shelburne Hall or London society. Hester would say the same, if she were not a guest here—indeed perhaps more. Our military imagination has ossified since Waterloo.” She stood up and straightened her skirts. “Victory—albeit one of the greatest in history and turning the tide of nations-has still gone to our heads and we think all we have to do to win is to turn up in our scarlet coats and obey the rules. And only God can measure the suffering and the death that pigheadedness has caused. And we women and politicians sit here safely at home and cheer them on without the slightest idea what the reality of it is.”

  “Joscelin is dead,” Rosamond said bleakly, staring at the closed curtains.

  “I know that, my dear,” Callandra said from close behind her. “But he did not die in the Crimea.”

  “He may have died because of it!”

  “Indeed he may,” Callandra conceded, her face suddenly touched with gentleness. “And I know you were extremely fond of him. He had a capacity for pleasure, both to give and to receive, which unfortunately neither Lovel nor Menard seem to share. I think we have exhausted both ourselves and the subject. Good night, my dear. Weep if you wish; tears too long held in do us no good. Composure is all very well, but there is a time to acknowledge pain also.” She slipped her arm around the slender shoulders and hugged her briefly, then knowing the gesture would release the hurt as well as comfort, she took Hester by the elbow and conducted her out to leave Rosamond alone.