The Private Life of Florence Nightingale Page 18

  The three of us argued the girl’s fate. She lay clasping Miss Nightingale’s feet, sobbing and moaning. Miss Nightingale announced that she would be merciful. It was sensible, to slip the girl away rather than pass fresh ammunition to Dr Hall in Balaclava. Major Sillery objected about the sanctity of government property, but Miss Nightingale did not appear to hear him, and the major appeared relieved that she did not.

  The miserable, squalling, hypocritical scene decided me. The next morning, I went to Miss Nightingale’s office behind the curtain in the Sisters’ Tower. She was writing at her table, Miss Bancroft beside her.

  ‘Miss Nightingale, I am going home.’

  ‘Oh? Like the Reverend Mother Brickbat? You know my opinion of officers who resign their commissions.’

  ‘But surely! What is the shame of quitting when the battle is over? The survivors are only extra mouths to be fed.’

  ‘My battle is not over.’ She jabbed her pen back into the pewter pot. ‘My battle is with the War Office and the Horse Guards. I have started by nursing the British army, by clothing it, by feeding it, by writing its letters home, by making its wills and by burying a good proportion of it. What do you expect me to do when the war is over? Go back to Embley House with Mama and Parthe, whose whole occupation is to lie on two sofas and tell one another not to get tired by putting flowers into water?’

  This was my first whiff of a burning ambition. I objected, ‘You cannot expect to direct the welfare of an entire army. In time of peace, everything will quickly return to normal.’

  ‘Normal? We all know what “normal” means at the Horse Guards. We all know what the “normal” system produced here last winter. How can anyone forget? I shall never forget. Our rate of mortality from disease exceeded that of the Great Plague of London.’

  ‘And now the mortality is little more than among healthy men in barracks at home,’ Miss Bancroft said proudly. ‘The result of Miss Nightingale’s untiring efforts and expostulations.’

  ‘But there may not be another war for a hundred years,’ I pointed out. ‘Perhaps for ever. Mankind is creating a world of so many good things, so much wealth, it becomes every year wilder madness to smash at it, like an ill-tempered child with its nursery globe.’

  ‘War will always come, like illness.’ She shifted on her campstool, elbow on table, as though lecturing me on rustling nurses’ dresses in Harley Street. ‘And success in war depends upon preparation in peace. You cannot improvise an army. You cannot improvise the sanitary care of an army in the field. Dr Andrew Smith searched St James’s in vain for precedents. Under the “normal” system, if he wished to supply Scutari with arrowroot or sago, he had to request the Horse Guards to ask the Ordnance Department, who would pass it on to the Admiralty, who would mention it to the Transport Officer, who would correspond with the shipowners, if they ever got to hear of the matter.’

  She looked up at me indignantly. ‘What does the soldier know of your good things, your world’s wealth? Or care? His capital is his courage. You cannot expect a soldier to become his country’s hero in war if he becomes his country’s victim in peace. I intend to change completely the way he is treated, and more importantly the way he is thought of.’

  ‘You will fail,’ I told her bluntly.

  ‘Why?’

  My attention was distracted. Something moved in a small, apparently empty, straw-filled box in the corner. I thought for an instant that she had made a pet of a snake. But it was a tortoise, called Jimmy. ‘Because you are for once letting your heart drive your mind. The only item in the world you feel in the slightest sentimental about is the British soldier.’

  How can anyone sentimentalize a man who enlists only for three causes – being either out of work, in a state of intoxication or jilted by his sweetheart? I suppose for a better army, the country needs more poverty, more drink and more faithless women? The officers may tell me that I am “spoiling the brutes”, but the men are more respectful to me than to them.’

  ‘And how do you suppose that advances you in the opinion of the officers?’ I was vexed with her conceit. ‘You will only break your fingernails against the stone walls of official indifference, I have seen the shabby mechanism that changes things in our country – a word or two in salons and clubs, between men who owe and repay favours as the coin of their own advancement. There is a clearer view from a newspaper office than a hospital ward.’

  ‘I stand by the altar of murdered men. While I live, I fight their cause.’

  ‘You may fight the good fight with the righteousness of St Paul himself, if you care. But I’m going home.’

  ‘Miss Bancroft, kindly leave us.’

  The sharpness of her exit indicated her irritation. Miss Nightingale waited for the footsteps to fade. She smiled. ‘You still have my pendant, Tristram?’

  ‘May I keep it? A memento of you.’

  She looked arch. ‘A keepsake from a woman a dozen years your senior?’

  ‘A bewitching woman – after her fashion.’

  ‘I take heart you think me open to flattery, like any other woman. After my confessions about my English countesses and Prussian peasant girls…I am not ashamed of them. You shall have the names of the English ladies if you like. Those of the farm girls I fear I have forgotten. What should be shameful about it, in the least? I am far less disreputable than the society ladies in your newspaper, who repeatedly share their bed with different men.’

  She nodded towards the door-curtain. ‘Jane is fearsomely jealous of any person I take a fancy to, feminine or masculine. Which would be flattery of the most delightful sort, were she not so unintelligent. But she is pretty, and a competent player of Sappho’s lyre. You may keep my little gold cross. Should I remain here for eternity –’ She nodded now towards the cemetery. ‘And you know the chances of that, please carry out my instructions. Go home if you must. Call at my bootmakers in St James’s, and order me another stout pair. Tell them the last went quickly at the seams.’

  Jane Bancroft was waiting near the far door of the kitchen. ‘So you’re going home, Mr Darling? Think of me in London between waltzes, won’t you? I shall envy you, when winter comes again to us in Scutari.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall envy you? I shall be living among trivia, but every hour of the day you are useful to Miss Nightingale, or to your country, which is the same thing.’

  ‘She calls you “Tristram” in private, doesn’t she?’

  ‘I’m known to her family.’

  ‘You’ve got that cross she wears, the one on the black ribbon.’

  We were walking down the narrow stairs, twisting in the barracks’ massive walls.

  ‘If the Queen gives Miss Nightingale a jewelled brooch, surely Miss Nightingale can recognize my own services on a comparable scale?’

  ‘She gave it you, that you might give it to Madame Mohl,’ Miss Bancroft said blackly.

  ‘Only in the unfortunate event of Miss Nightingale’s death.’

  ‘I want it.’ We stopped. She was close to me, eyes afire, breathing heavily. ‘Give it me.’ I tried to move down the stairs. ‘Give it!’ Quickly as a serpent, her hand was in the pocket of my coat. I seized her wrist, and pushed back her fingers hard. She gave a cry, stifled it, stood looking at me, scarlet, two tears in her startled eyes. ‘That’s not the behaviour of a gentleman.’

  ‘It is, towards a lady who is robbing him.’

  ‘Florence is mine, not yours. Nor Madame Mohl’s. Nor Mary Stanley’s. Nor Marianne Nicholson’s. Nor anybody’s,’ she said furiously. ‘I possess her.’

  ‘Then why do you complain? I’m leaving her to you.’

  ‘I can complain. Because…because now you know about us, Flo and me. And anyone who knows, intrudes.’ She began to repossess herself. ‘Well, give it to Madame Mohl. Give it to any crossing-sweeper. I don’t care. If Flo died, it would be a puny thing to bear her memory. Even the greatest memorial in London could not.’

  ‘Oh, I agree. But the world generally forgets its martyrs quic
ker than it remembers its heroes.’

  I dropped her hand. We descended the stairs looking reasonably composed. She gave me messages for the Harley Street nursing home, which was continuing in business despite the absence of its proprietor abroad.

  Soyer had moved to a house in a village lane renamed by the army Cambridge Street. He complained that it overlooked the Grand Champ des Morts, but so did everything in Scutari. Three nights later he came to dine, making us superb rognons à la brochette, apologizing for the lack of a proper silver skewer, which held the heat better, and which any Reform Club gourmet would insist on. ‘Partaking over-done kidneys at night is the forerunner of the nightmare,’ he warned us solemnly. He mixed his Crimean cup of maraschino, cognac, curaçao and champagne. Handshear gave me messages to countless young women in Haymarket. Wiley sang Alabama with Soyer’s frying-pan as his banjo on his knee, several times. Soyer talked about his dead wife, cried, laughed, gesticulated, sang. Had the shell over the Balaclava mortar-battery blown his head off, only that would have simmered down his ebullience. He declared us three capital fellows, whom he would remember to his dying day, though as we had no titles I doubted it.

  The next morning, I sailed from the Golden Horn in the Himalaya, feeling that I had just recovered from a terrible illness.

  19

  I arrived in London on Saturday, September 1 1855, to find that my uncle Peregrine was dead. He had cut his hand badly while operating, and contracted the hospital gangrene, which had slaughtered so many who were wounded on his surgical battlefield. He had died while I was at sea, and I learned about it from his obituary in the newspapers which came aboard with the pilot at Plymouth.

  ‘I think he would have been content with his funeral,’ decided my uncle Humphry, now the Right Reverend Sir Humphry Darling, Bt, a baronetcy being heritable sideways. I had presented myself for thin tea and thin bread-and-butter on the Monday afternoon. ‘I took for the text of my sermon St John, 5, 8 – “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk”.’

  ‘It is a sharp blow, sir. It knocked from my head any delight at coming home from Scutari. You must have observed, sir, how uncle Peregrine and myself had a close feeling for each other? He was always ready with a kindness in my direction, and he saw my scurrilous occupation only as amusing.’

  The bishop leant back in the horsehair-stuffed, buttoned-leather armchair of his study, well brushed head on antimacassar, gaiters crossed on footstool. ‘I must confess, you hid it from me most successfully. Were you as careful with other people’ secrets as your own, you would not have gone very far.’

  I was uneasy. He said this without his usual acidity. There was a slight smile on his fleshy lips. I should have thought him twinkling, had he not been as incapable of it as some cold, dead planet.

  ‘I am done with parlourmaids’ whispers, sir. I find to my surprise that I have landed from Scutari on a high tide of reputation.’

  When Miss Nightingale was ill with the fever, your name was on everybody’s lips hardly less than hers.’ I grew more puzzled. He was treating me with affability, almost equality. Perhaps the loss of both brothers left him with the feelings of paternity. ‘So what are your plans?’

  ‘Towards my career, indefinite. First, I must buy some clothes. I apologize for my tweed.’

  ‘Why apologize? It is the equivalent of an officer’s tunic.’

  I decided that he wanted me to edit his collected sermons. ‘I must move from my hotel in Jermyn Street to inexpensive lodgings.’

  ‘Why inexpensive?’

  ‘Well, sir, I saved money in Scutari, because for once I had nothing to spend it on. But it will not last for ever, and I need a long holiday.’

  The bishop bit a triangular sandwich with precision. ‘You may take a holiday for the rest of your life, if you care. You were not appraised by your late uncle of his will?’

  ‘He never mentioned such melancholy matters.’

  ‘He has left his entire fortune to you. There is of course the estate in Berkshire, a large number of houses in London and Ascot – I never believed him a landlord on such a scale, he could be irritatingly secretive – shooting and fishing in Scotland, a good sheaf of securities at his brokers and a solid balance at his bankers. I had no notion that surgery was so profitable.’

  He finished his sandwich.

  ‘Is this a jest, sir?’

  ‘I am not a jester. You have an appointment with his lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn, ten tomorrow morning.’

  I sat forward like a jockey winning the Derby. ‘But what am I to do with such wealth?’

  ‘Give it to the Church,’ he replied promptly.

  I planted but one seed in the cold fields of ecclesiastical charity. On the south wall of Brompton Church, you may see a marble plaque which says in gold,

  Harriet Catchpole

  1834–1854

  Nurse at Scutari

  RIP.

  If my world wore a Panglossian lustre, I did not care to risk the uncomfortable disenchantments of Candide. My fortune was substantial but not ducal. I could have lived a country gentleman in Berkshire, but my reasons for refusing the job of the steward applied equally to that of the master. I could have travelled the world, but Scutari would have put Marco Polo off voyaging for life. I could have spent it on gambling, drink and women, which would have been agreeable. But Scutari was a classroom which taught severe lessons. I had seen misery imposed by incompetence and ignorance, and I itched to cure all three human afflictions.

  From Miss Nightingale I had learned the danger of good intentions. Unweighted with thought or information, they spread more hardship than they seek to relieve. My best start would be founding a weekly paper – liberal, humane, reforming, providing the Government with a weekly thrashing, like the policy for keeping the boys on their mettle at Rugby, but with amusing articles, theatre reviews, and a page of scandalous gossip to ensure that it sold.

  I hit on a title – Candour. I should shoot my shaft in the air on Saturday, December 1 1855. Miss Nightingale was to be its arrowhead.

  At the end of September, when the people who matter come back to Town from the moors and rivers, I dined with the Herberts, in Belgrave Square. It was for my news of Miss Nightingale, but the invitation was an important indication. I was making my way in the world, down the ringing grooves of ambition.

  I foreran myself with a letter.

  ‘That notion you wrote me was admirable,’ I was greeted by Sidney Herbert. ‘The country must certainly mark in some public manner its appreciation of Miss Nightingale’s services and devotion.’

  ‘I did not mean, sir, a personal testimonial of the teapot and bracelet kind. Miss Nightingale, I am sure, would accept only a gift which she could apply to carrying on her work for others.’

  ‘Some institution for the training and protection of nurses, Mr Darling,’ suggested Liz Herbert. We were standing in the upstairs drawing-room. I was startled how a year had marked her husband. His body was wasted, but his face puffy, the contrast between its tints of pink and white too sharp for health. ‘Always in Miss Nightingale’s mind was some English Kaiserwerth.’

  Sidney Herbert smiled. ‘But only if Miss Nightingale were its autocrat. Obviously, she cannot leave her work in the East to lay such plans now. We must let your idea rest until the end of the war, Mr Darling.’

  ‘May I disagree, sir?’ I ventured. ‘Miss Nightingale stands so high in the eyes of the whole world at this moment, it is the one to seize. The end of this terrible conflict is mercifully in sight.’ Sebastopol had fallen on September 8, but not to the glory of British arms. The enemy, like the hunter of the Snark, softly and silently vanished away. ‘The bubble reputation is easily pricked away from the cannon’s mouth.’

  His brow frowned disagreement, his eye acknowledged political truth. I suggested forming a committee. He shortly agreed. ‘I think I can get the Duke of Cambridge in the chair.’ He was the Queen’s cousin, then aged thirty-five. ‘And of course we must have the Duke of Argyll.’


  ‘And Lord Stanley, and Lord Lansdowne,’ said Liz Herbert. He nodded. ‘And I shall be a member. We need a secretary –’

  ‘Might I suggest myself, sir?’

  ‘You?’ He gave the look which had acknowledged my presence in Lady Canning’s reception-room the previous October.

  ‘I only dare to suggest it, because my close association with Miss Nightingale, which the whole public knows, would almost create her presence at the meeting. I should be happy to relinquish the task to one more worthy immediately afterwards.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a sound move, Mr Darling. But what meeting is this?’

  ‘At the Willis Rooms in St James’s, on Thursday, November 29. I took the liberty of provisionally engaging them. They are booked long ahead at this time of year.’

  So I had enmeshed myself with four of the land’s most powerful noblemen – I had naturally no intention of ever relinquishing the job, unless it was commandeered by Miss Nightingale herself. I wondered if Sidney Herbert agreed through thinking me a simple, pure-hearted young man – though whether that was flattering or unflattering, in his eyes or in mine, I do not care to decide.

  ‘I have known Miss Nightingale since we met in Rome, the year Mr Herbert and I were married,’ Liz Herbert recalled sentimentally, as her husband was drawn aside for deep discussion with a grave-faced man.

  ‘Yes, I knew that.’ I knew also that Sidney Herbert had been living the previous five years with Caroline Norton, who had already seen Lord Melbourne brought to court by her dissolute, green-eyed husband for her adultery.

  ‘You know how devoted I am to Miss Nightingale, how I helped her at the Harley Street nursing home.’ I nodded my appreciation. ‘And it is so delightful to witness my husband’s devotion to her, and to share her noble work by observing the assistance he is able to give her from official quarters.’ I murmured my approval. ‘But you know, Mr Darling –’ Her laugh was small and dry. ‘Mr Herbert’s family sometimes joke that he does not love his wife! They say that he loves only Miss Nightingale.’