‘Night duty?’ Caroline said. ‘Oh Pheemy, you can’t work at night. It will make you ill. And besides, we shall never see you.’
‘It is only for four weeks,’ Euphemia said, ‘and four weeks in three months is very little. If I’m to be a nurse I must work in a hospital, and if I work in a hospital I have to take my turn on night duty. You do see that, don’t you?’
‘Oh I see it,’ Caroline agreed, ‘but I don’t like it. Can’t you just work during the day and come back here at night?’ She and Henry were dining at Bedford Square and the four of them were still sitting at table over the brandy.
‘People are ill at night too, you know, Carrie.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose they are. I’m being selfish, I daresay.’
‘The arrangements are all made,’ Nan said weighing in to help Euphemia who was beginning to look beleaguered. ‘No going back now, eh Pheemy?’
‘You’ll be as far away as Will with his wretched revolution,’ Caroline complained. ‘We don’t even know where he is.’
‘His letter said he was going to Vienna first,’ Nan told them, ‘but that don’t mean much the way things are going.’
‘I hope he has the sense to stay well away from gunfire,’ Henry said. Will’s last report from Paris had been very alarming. ‘It all sounds jolly dangerous to me.’
‘Well, of course it’s dangerous,’ Caroline said. ‘That’s why he does it, ain’t it Nan? Danger is exciting.’
‘To you maybe, miss,’ her grandmother said, grinning at her, ‘but not to your brother. You’ve a deal too much daring, always did have, but he’s a cautious crittur. He goes where the work takes him, and if there’s danger to face, he’ll face it, but he don’t court it. He never has.’
‘Thank heaven for that,’ Henry said, teasing Caroline. ‘It’s as well we’ve one sensible member in the family.’
And got pinched by the least sensible.
It had been an excellent meal, a sort of farewell party for Euphemia who was off to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the morning. It was a sad occasion nonetheless, for it marked such a change, and for once it was a change that Caroline didn’t welcome. Euphemia had lived with her at Richmond for ten months now, ever since young Harry was born. The child doted on her and was never so good as when she was cuddling him and carrying him about on her shoulder. Who would pacify him when she was gone? And especially now when there was so much work to do in the firm. The regional managers had been sending her books by the crateload, and with the March meeting rapidly approaching she soon had to make her mind up which ones to order. It was going to be very difficult.
‘Come now, my workers,’ Nan said. ‘Time we were off to Sadler’s Wells. An evening of laughter, that’s what we need, before we all buckle down again in the morning. ‘Tis my opinion we all work too hard, but that’s in the nature of the Easters I suppose, and there en’t much I can do about that. Howsomever, tonight, is for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Even Mr Brougham has promised to stop poring over that dratted case of his for this production. I have his solemn word he’ll meet us in the foyer. So hassen you up.’
And she was right of course. The evening did them good, lifting Frederick from his preoccupation with a difficult case, Henry from his irritation at Caroline’s continuing passion for work, Caroline from her sadness at losing Euphemia’s company, and Euphemia herself from the secret apprehension that had been disturbing her dreams ever since she agreed to be a nursing assistant at St Bartholomew’s. Not that she had any doubts about her ambition. It was just that tomorrow she would be walking into the unknown, out of the cosy certainties of domestic life into another world where she would be learning and entirely on her own.
* * *
Next morning she drove off to the hospital in a state of inner turmoil.
St Bartholomew’s stood on the east side of the rough open space of Smithfield. It was a well-proportioned building of three classically graded storeys, surmounted by a balustraded parapet and topped by a tiled roof on which chimneys smoked in obedient ranks. Its principal front opened onto a quadrangle that faced the chaos of the market but since it was a building that knew how to impress and how to keep its distance, neither the drovers nor their terrified beasts, nor the eager butchers who awaited them ever dared to encroach upon its premises, venturing inside the building only when an accident or their own knives had turned them bloody. In short, it was a daunting place and just the sight of it made Euphemia’s heart leap in her bosom.
She took her travelling bag, thanked the coachman and walked into the hospital, keeping her face calm even though her hands were trembling.
The entrance hall was an enclosed oaken space dominated by a magnificent staircase that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a palace. The ceiling above it was ornately decorated and the stairwell consisted of two huge murals in which classical figures struck bronzed attitudes or languished palely, according to their sex.
There were several doors leading out of the hall, and although they were all shut they were helpfully labelled, ‘Counting House’, ‘Committee Rooms’, ‘Admission’, ‘Examination’, ‘Discharges’, so she was able to walk around them until she found the one she wanted: ‘Matron’ in stern black letters.
Matron turned out to be a stout woman in her forties, with a florid face and rough hands and a strong smell of onions on her breath. Her dress was a sober blue wool but she wore no apron and no cuffs and her cap, far from being the neat covering that Miss Nightingale advocated and Euphemia fully intended to wear, was a luxury of lace-edged frills.
‘Miss Callbeck?’ she said disapprovingly. ‘Well, I suppose I must welcome you to the hospital, since that is my function, or one of my functions, but pray allow me to tell you, my dear, you are making a great mistake. A hospital is no place for a lady. Unless you’re an actress or some such. You ain’t an actress by any chance?’
Euphemia admitted that she wasn’t.
‘No,’ the Matron said. ‘I thought not. Ah well. You’ll learn, I daresay. Follow me.’ And she set off at a brisk pace out of the hall.
The oddity of the welcome cheered Euphemia as nothing else could have done. To be met with such disapproval was an encouraging sign, clear evidence that Miss Nightingale was right, that there was a battle ahead of any woman who wanted to change the system, and most important of all that the system was ripe for change. She followed the Matron’s blue gown into her very first ward, squaring her shoulders for what lay ahead.
It was a dismal place, as far away from the grandeur of the hall as Saffron Hill was from Buckingham Palace. There were twenty narrow beds ranged on each side of the long room, about half of them occupied. The floorboards were poorly cleaned and there was a slatternly woman slumped in a chair in the middle of the room with her cap over her eyes, fast asleep. She woke with a start when the Matron kicked her shins in passing, but it took her a long time to get her eyes into focus and even longer to struggle to her feet.
‘Where is Mrs Rumbold?’ the Matron asked her sternly.
‘If you please, mum, in the office, mum,’ the woman said.
She was swaying where she stood and, as Euphemia noted with distaste, she smelled strongly of spirits. But that was only one unpleasant smell among several very much worse. Plainly slops weren’t emptied often enough, and patients weren’t properly washed. Many were lying most uncomfortably without any bed linen apart from a dirty blanket. Yes, Euphemia thought as she followed the Matron to the office at the end of the room, ‘you will see what ought not to be done’ right enough.
They found a tall woman arranging kidney dishes in the office. She was introduced as Mrs Rumbold, and it appeared that she was in charge of the ward.
‘Miss Callbeck will be with us for three months,’ the Matron said. ‘She wishes to learn how to be a nurse.’ And her expression showed how little she thought of that for an ambition.
Mrs Rumbold was surprised by it too. ‘Are you sure that is what you want, my dear?’ she asked when the Matron had gone.
‘Yes,’ Euphemia said firmly. ‘It is. What would you like me to do?’
‘There is not much needs doing this morning,’ Mrs Rumbold said, returning to the kidney dishes. ‘They’ve had their breakfast, those who could eat it. We don’t do much till the doctor’s been. The other nurses have gone off to have theirs. They’ll be back presently.’
‘I could talk to them, perhaps.’
‘I feel I should warn you, my dear, you will learn very little from such women.’
‘Then perhaps I could wash some of the patients.’
‘Ah!’ Mrs Rumbold said. ‘If only you would.’
So Euphemia took herself off to the office and unpacked her white apron and her neat starched cap, and put them on as well as she could without a mirror. Then she went off to meet her first patients. She was most upset by what she found.
The beds were allotted to children with fevers, mostly measles and scarlet fever which she could recognize, although some had rashes she’d never seen before, and two looked suspiciously like typhus. According to the books she’d studied, fever cases should be sponged down at least twice every day, and once an hour when the fever was at its worse. But most of these poor children hadn’t seen soap and water since they arrived. They’d been left to sweat and suffer on their own and they were consequently very uncomfortable and very dirty, tossing about on their narrow beds and groaning in their sleep.
To make matters worse, there was no water in the ewers, and the slatternly woman was fast asleep again.
Very well, she said to herself, the porter shall get some.
But the porter wasn’t prepared to do any such thing and was most affronted to be asked. ‘That ain’t my line a’ country,’ he said. ‘Not water ain’t. Whatcher want wiv water anyways?’
While he was protesting, the other four nurses sauntered back from their breakfast. They were a motley crew, an elderly woman with uncombed grey hair escaping untidily from beneath her cap, two younger women, equally poorly dressed and dishevelled, one dark and surly and the other fair and vacant, and a skinny girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen and looked woefully undernourished. But at least she was friendlier than her three companions and when Euphemia explained why she wanted the water, she offered to lead her down to the courtyard and help her carry it back.
They each found two pails and set off on their errand.
The child said her name was Taffy Biggs, ‘daft, innit, when I’m so little’, and that she ‘come out the orph’nidge’. But for all her lack of weight and inches she was extremely helpful, struggling back to the ward with her two full pails, and showing Euphemia where the flannels were kept and even finding two bowls, while the rest of the nurses sat about the table in the middle of the ward playing cards with the slatternly woman.
It took Euphemia and Taffy the rest of the morning to wash just five of their patients, and at twelve o’clock they had to stop what they were doing because Mrs Rumbold suddenly came out of the office looking brisk and efficient to announce that it was doctors’ rounds.
And after the doctors had walked solemnly from bed to bed prescribing leeches and aperients as they went, it was time to serve the children their mid-day meal, which was a very watery stew containing shreds of vegetable and the occasional lump of rather gristly meat. After which the nurses retired to their office to eat a bowl of the concoction themselves. It was every bit as unappetizing as it looked.
Never mind, Euphemia comforted herself, as she ate what she could of it, when we’ve finished here I can clean up that poor little mite in the next bed. But unfortunately for the poor little mite, Matron had other ideas. As Taffy was filling the bowl with fresh water, a porter arrived with ‘a message for Miss Callbeck’. She was wanted in ‘Admissions’, so he said, and would she please to follow him down.
‘Admissions’ was a long, chill, empty space more like a corridor than a room, and as sparsely furnished as the ward. It contained a wash stand on which there was a rather dirty bowl and a ewer full of cold water, a wall cupboard where cotton wool and dressings were kept, and a row of cane chairs ranged against the wall for the patients, two of whom were slumped upon them, waiting for her.
They looked like dockers or butchers, but it was difficult to tell because they were both so bloodstained. One was supporting the other, who had a dirty cloth clutched to his forehead and was dripping blood from it onto the sawdust on the floor.
‘I brung ‘im ‘ere, ye see,’ his friend explained, ‘on account of ‘e was ‘ere before, when ‘e cut ‘is ‘ead on a cleaver. Show ‘er the scar, Tommy. See. All dahn that side.’
It was an ugly scar but Euphemia hardly glanced at it. Her attention was drawn to the gaping wound she revealed on the man’s forehead when she lifted up that blood-soaked pad. It was six inches long and spurting blood alarmingly.
She stayed calm with an effort. ‘How did you come by such an injury?’ she asked the man.
‘Trafalgar Square,’ the man said, wincing as she eased the last section of the pad away from the edge of the wound. ‘The Grand Assemblage. Me an’ Charlie got copped. Is it bad, miss? Was we right ter come?’
‘Of course you were,’ she said, wondering how she could stem that dreadful flow.
‘Is it bad?’
‘No,’ she said, and was pleased to hear how convincing she sounded. ‘It’s nasty, but we’ll soon have you patched up.’
He let out his breath in a great sigh of relief. So it was beneficial to give comfort and reassurance, as the books claimed. ‘I think you might need a stitch or two. I will give you a clean dressing and then the doctor will look at you. Meantime I will clean the wound for you.’
That was an amazing idea. ‘Clean it?’ the man asked, squinting up at her. ‘Wash it, you mean? Whatever for?’
‘To help it to heal more quickly,’ she said. ‘Dirty wounds are more likely to turn septic.’
‘Well, blow me down. I never knew that.’
She sent the porter to ask one of the doctors if he would be so kind as to attend a patient. Then she found a bowl and filled it with water from the ewer, took a little cotton wool from the cupboard, and set about her first attempt at nursing. She was very clumsy, which shamed her, and he endured stoically, which made her feel even worse, but by the time the doctor arrived, smelling strongly of cigar smoke and none too pleased to be taken from his meeting, the wound was clean.
Then four other casualties arrived, all from the same demonstration, two with head wounds, one with a broken arm and one who said his foot had been run over by a cart.
‘Why, it looks like a battle,’ she said, joking to cheer them. ‘You have been in the wars.’
‘We have that,’ one man said. ‘You should ha’ seen it. The cops come down on us like ninepence. So you know what we done. We took up the fence round ol’ Nelson’s column and we set about ‘em good an’ proper.’
‘And what was it all about?’ she asked, as she examined the second gash of the afternoon.
‘Why, to support the French Revolution and win the vote, to be sure. We seen the coppers off, didn’t we Horace? Horace’ll tell yer.’
Horace was the man with the swollen foot. ‘They come back though, didn’t they,’ he said lugubriously. ‘They come right back, more of ‘em than ever. They was still scrapping when we come away.’
Sure enough, casualties continued to limp into the hospital all through the afternoon, and soon more nurses were sent for and the long narrow room was full of people. By the time her long shift ended, Euphemia was tired to the bone, her white apron crumpled and bloodstained and her feet aching as if somebody had been treading on them all afternoon. She could see why Miss Nightingale had told her to wear lightly soled shoes. And she was very glad indeed when Nan’s carriage arrived to take her home to Bedford Square to the luxury of clean clothes, scented soap and lovely warm water, to a well cooked meal, which was delicious even if she did have to eat alone, and to the eventual and superlative comfort of her well cleaned bedroom.
It wasn’t until she was in bed and almost asleep that she remembered Henry and Caroline and baby Henry and wondered how they’d been getting on all through this long, long day. At least, she comforted herself, it couldn’t have been as difficult for them as it had been for her.
But she was quite wrong. It had been very difficult indeed.
For a start the baby had been fractious all day, grizzling to be fed at the most inappropriate times, and refusing to settle to sleep no matter what anyone tried to do to placate him. Totty made things worse by explaining that he was missing Miss Euphemia, poor little man.
‘Don’t start that,’ Caroline said crossly. ‘If you’ve nothing more sensible to say you’d better take him away and see if you can rock him to sleep by the fire. I’ve got books to read. I can’t spend all day feeding babies.’
Books to read was an understatement. She’d never seen so many, piled up on her desk, and in heaps on two of her chairs, and even set down on the carpet. Cousin Edward seemed to have been bringing them in all day long.
‘I know you want to make your decisions quite soon, Carrie,’ he’d said when he arrived with the last lot. ‘Is there anything else I can get you?’
‘A bit of peace and quiet,’ she said, grinning at him ruefully. ‘I shan’t have time to look at all these, let alone read them.’
‘Then I’ll leave you to it,’ he said, giving her his most charming smile. ‘Mustn’t get in the way of business.’
‘I wish young Harry thought the same,’ she said, picking up a book from the nearest pile.
‘If I were you,’ he suggested, ‘I’d check the top and bottom one in every collection and leave all the others to fend for themselves. Two should be enough to show you the quality.’
‘If the worst comes to the worst,’ she said, ‘that might be a good idea.’
And the worst did come.
Harry was disconsolate without Euphemia. He grizzled his way through the next ten working days, stopping only when his harassed mother took time away from her decisions to hang a ‘Do not disturb’ notice on her door and sit behind a screen in her inner office and feed him into a better humour. The days passed far too quickly. Soon it was the day before the quarterly meeting and there were still six piles of books needing attention, the list of intended orders wasn’t drawn up and just when she was at her wits’ end and ready to scream at the next interruption, Mr Maycock came bumbling into her office with what he dared to call ‘a last minute addition’.
‘Impossible!’ she said. ‘There isn’t time for any more. I’ve still all these to look at.’
His fat face fell visibly. ‘Oh dear!’ he said. ‘I thought them quite excellent, upon my soul I did, or I wouldn’t have brought ‘em. You did say we were to show you all the books we considered suitable. It is written in the minutes. I have my copy here.’
‘I have half an hour,’ she told him sternly, looking at the clock.
Fortunately Edward came breezing in just at that moment. ‘Now, now Mr Maycock,’ he said, ‘you’re not plaguing our Mrs Henry at this late hour I hope?’
‘Just one last selection, Mr Edward,’ Mr Maycock spluttered. ‘That’s all. I’ve brought them up on Mr Jernegan’s instructions. I’m sure it won’t take a minute and they are truly excellent books. Art books, if you know what I mean. Beautifully produced.’
‘I’ve all these …’ Caroline began, gesturing at the six heaps.
‘I tell you what,’ her cousin suggested. ‘Let Mr Maycock leave his selection and if he’ll pop off and hold the fort in my office, I’ll stay here and help you with these. I haven’t got much else to do.’
‘Would you?’ Caroline said with surprise. ‘Oh, I’d be so grateful.’ How very kind of him and she’d always thought him such a selfish young man!
‘It’s the least I can do,’ Edward said, positively beaming at her. ‘Well, cut along, Mr Maycock. You can leave all this to me.’
And he was splendidly helpful, taking the first collection onto his lap immediately, and rejecting it with equal speed. ‘Not very well produced,’ he said. ‘Look at that binding. It would come apart in seconds.’
She agreed that the books wouldn’t do.
‘You try those,’ he said, carrying the next pile across to her desk. ‘Top and tail ’em, like I did. That’s all you really need to do to get the feel of things.’
The top book he handed her was a properly written description of the Colosseum in Rome, printed on poor paper and with a nondescript illustration. She inched the last book from the bottom of the pile, and it was equally poor. ‘Well!’ she said.
‘No good?’ Edward asked. ‘Neither are these. I know I wouldn’t buy ‘em. I say Carrie, we’re getting through this lot at a rate of knots.’
Three piles had been discarded already. It was quite heartening. ‘Many hands make light work,’ she said, reaching for the next collection. It was the pile Mr Maycock had left on her desk just a few minutes ago. Goddesses of Greece, she said, opening the first book. ‘That looks familiar.’
It was a handsome book, full of well drawn sketches of Greek statues, and reasonably priced too.
‘These might do,’ Edward said, handing her a book from his pile.
It was a collection of etchings, mostly landscapes, and rather expensive. In fact, very expensive when she compared them to the Greek Goddesses.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I think I prefer these.’ And she took up the next book on Mr Maycock’s pile.
‘Top and tail,’ Edward laughed at her, ‘or we’ll be here all night.’ And he slid the bottom book from under the pile and handed her that instead.
It was called Roman Goddesses and was every bit as well produced as the first one. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’ll have these.’
‘Then I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said, picking up the pile at once and holding them against his chest. ‘We’ll let old Maycock order them for us. That will teach him to go pestering you at the last moment.’
‘What about the rest?’
‘These are no good,’ he said, nodding his head towards the pile he’d just been examining, ‘and that only leaves the three little green books on the chaise longue. Bit on the small side, but they might do.’
‘Leave them with me,’ she said, ‘while you attend to Mr Maycock. And thank you for your help. It was very kind of you.’
‘It was a pleasure,’ he said.
And so Caroline made her decisions in time and was able to tell the regional managers that the new books were on order and would be on sale at the stalls on Mr Chaplin’s London to Birmingham line before the next quarterly meeting. And Nan was happy to see that Henry and Edward were as pleased about the announcement as she was.
Edward was so excited about it that as he and Mirabelle dressed for the customary dinner that night, he couldn’t talk of anything else.
‘The time is coming, Mirry,’ he said, preening before the cheval glass, ‘when your husband will be the undisputed manager of the firm. What do you think of that, eh?’
He looked so pleased with himself, his fair hair burnished by the gaslight and his eyes dark and bold above the rich blue of his evening jacket.
‘You expect Caroline to stay at home now that Harry is crawling?’ Mirabelle said, adjusting her pearl necklace. ‘Well, it’s true she won’t be able to keep him in an office for very much longer, but I daresay she’ll leave him at home with Totty and go on with her work just the same.’
‘She should stay at home with him herself,’ he said. ‘It’s only right and proper. A busy office is no place for a woman. Think of the mistakes she could make.’
‘So far as I know,’ Mirabelle said, ‘she ain’t made any.’
‘But she might, eh? She might?’
What has he been up to? she wondered. He was far too eager for her to agree with him. Far too excited. ‘And what of Henry?’ she said, in her slow teasing way. ‘Do you expect him to stay at home with the baby too?’
‘He might find himself in a position where he would wish to resign,’ he said. ‘Oh Mirry! I am so near to success! And newspaper sales up for the third month in succession thanks to all this trouble in Paris.’
‘I’m sure they would be most gratified to hear how useful their sacrifice has been.’
‘Sacrifice?’ he asked, frowning at her. ‘Really Mirry, you do say the oddest things.’
‘Some of them were killed, were they not?’
‘Well, of course they were. You have to expect deaths in a revolution.’
‘Then let us hope that nobody gets killed in London when the Chartists present their petition. I’m sure poor Pheemy has dealt with enough broken heads to last her a lifetime. And it would be pleasant if we could send Will news of a well ordered English demonstration, would it not?’
But Edward wasn’t the least bit interested in such things.
‘The manager of the firm,’ he said, smiling at his reflection. It only needed one letter of complaint, and he was quite sure it wouldn’t take Mr Jernegan long to organize that.