Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

It was the longest speech he had ever heard her make, and she must have been surprised at her own volubility, too, because she suddenly stopped herself, and a faint flush came into her cheek. It was clear to Michael, though he would have guessed as much, that she had taken her duties as a nurse quite seriously.

“What am I saying?” she mumbled. “Miss Nightingale is long dead. And everything I have just said has no doubt sounded foolish. The world has gone on, and here I am telling you things that you must know have been proven right, or utterly wrong, years ago. I'm sorry-I forget myself.”

“Florence Nightingale was right,” Michael said, “and so are you.” He paused. “And you will not be confined to these quarters for long. I'll see what we can do.”

She'd already been exposed to him, and whatever germs he might carry, so what harm, Michael figured, could further contact cause? And as for her being encountered by others on the base- grunts and beakers alike-well, there were probably plenty of ways to get around without too much interaction. Point Adelie was not exactly Grand Central Station.

Eleanor sat down on the edge of the bed, facing Michael. The sedative must have started working, for she had stopped crying and was no longer wringing her hands. “It was after the battle,” she said. “That was when I caught the fever.”

Michael ached to take out his tape recorder, but he didn't want to do anything that might puzzle her or disturb the fragile mood.

“Sinclair-Lieutenant Sinclair Copley, of the Seventeenth Lancers-was wounded in a cavalry charge. It was while nursing him that I succumbed myself.”

There was a kind of faraway look in her eye, and Michael realized that even the mildest tranquilizer might have an inordinate effect on someone who had never had one before.

“But he was fortunate, really. Nearly all his fellows, including his dear friend Captain Rutherford, were killed.” She sighed, her eyes dropping. “From what I was told, the Light Brigade was utterly destroyed.”

Michael nearly fell out of his chair. The Light Brigade? Was she talking about the famous Charge of the Light Brigade, the one immortalized in the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson? And was she talking about it from firsthand experience, yet?

Was she suggesting that her frozen companion-this Lieutenant Copley-was a survivor of that charge? Whatever all this was-a sustained fantasy, or an historical account of unimaginable, firsthand authenticity-he had to get it down.

Slipping a hand into his backpack, he deftly removed his small tape recorder. “If you don't mind,” he said, “I'm going to use this device to keep a record of our conversation.” He pressed the ON button.

She looked at it pensively, the little red light glowing to indicate that it was running, but she seemed otherwise unconcerned. He wasn't sure she'd grasped what he'd said, or what the machine actually did. He had the sense that so much was new to her-from black, female doctors to electric lights-that she chose only certain things, one at a time, to process and engage.

“They were told to attack the Russian guns,” she said, “and they were annihilated. There were artillery pieces on the hills, on every side of the valley. The casualties were overwhelming. I was working night and day-so was my friend Moira, and all the other nurses-but we could not keep up. There were too many battles, and too many wounded and dying men. We could not do enough.”

She was back there now, reliving it; he could see it in her eyes.

“I'm sure you did everything in your power to help.”

A rueful cast came over her face. “I did things that were beyond my power,” she said, bluntly. Her eyes clouded over at the recollections of events that manifestly haunted her still. “We were forced, all of us, to do things we could never have prepared for.”

And then Michael could see she was swept away on that tide of memory.

It was the night after she had found Sinclair-she remembered it well-and she had secretly appropriated several items, including a vial of morphine. The latter was more valuable than gold, and Miss Nightingale accordingly kept a sharp eye on the supply. It was after her rounds, when Eleanor was supposed to be in the nurses’ quarters, fast asleep, but instead she crept down the winding stairs with a Turkish lamp in her hand, and made her way back to the fever wards. Several soldiers, mistaking her for Miss Nightingale herself, whispered blessings in her wake.

“This was after what battle?” Michael gently prompted her, his voice startling her from her reverie.

“Balaclava.”

“What year was that?”

“Eighteen fifty-four. It was late October. And the Barrack Hospital was so crowded, the men were lying on straw, shoulder to shoulder.”

The Highlander, she recalled-the one who had warned her, in his delirium, that Sinclair was a bad one-had been stowed close beside him. If he, too, was suffering too much, she had resolved to share out the contents of the vial between the two of them. But when she got to the ward, it was clearly unnecessary. Two orderlies with kerchiefs over their faces were bending over the Highlander's body, tossing the two sides of his filthy woolen blanket over him… but not before Eleanor caught a glimpse of his face. It was white as a whitewashed fence, and the skin looked like a piece of dried fruit from which all the juice and pulp had been sucked.

“Evening, Missus,” one of them said. “It's me, Taylor.” She recognized his protruding ears, from the day of Frenchie's fatal amputation. “And Smith there, too,” he said, indicating the burly fellow hastily stitching the two sides of the blanket together. The filthy covering, she knew, would serve as both the dead man's shroud and casket, and his body would be heaped into one of the communal graves dug in the nearby hills.

On three, they lifted the body from the floor, and Taylor laughed under his kerchief. “This ‘un's light as a feather.” They shuffled out of the ward, the blanketed body swaying between them, and she had knelt in the newly cleared space, to tend to Sinclair, who looked, to her relief, unexpectedly improved.

“And you, and the other nurses under Miss Nightingale-how many of you were there?” Michael prompted her.

“Not many-a couple of dozen at most,” she said, wearily. “Many fell ill and left. But Moira and I stayed. I had found a fresh shirt, and a razor, for Sinclair. I used the razor to cut his hair-the lice were running wild in it-then I was able to help him shave his face.”

“He must have been very grateful.”

“In my pocket, I had the vial of morphine.”

“Did you give him that, too?”

A doubtful look came over her. “I did not. I thought he looked so much recovered that I should save it… for fear he might have a relapse and need it more then.” She raised her eyes to Michael. “It was very hard to procure.”

“It still is,” Michael said. “That's one thing that hasn't changed. But obviously he recovered,” Michael said. “You must have been very glad of that… and proud, too.”

“Proud?” Proud of what? Eleanor would never have used that word. Once she knew his dreadful needs-and once she had actually helped him to satisfy them-she had never in her life felt pride again.

And after she had come to share those needs, she had felt nothing but an all-abiding disgrace.

“What did you do once he was well, and the war was over? Did you both return to England?”

“No,” she said, her thoughts drifting away for a few moments. “We did not go home, ever again.”

“Why was that?”

How could they given who-and what-they had become? For as Sinclair had recovered, she had declined. The fever ward had done its work, and by the next morning Eleanor had felt the initial symptoms. A slight dizziness, a sticky warmth to her skin. She did her best to dissemble, because she knew that once she was relieved of her duties, she would not be able to see Sinclair, but when she went to his side, carrying a bowl of barley soup, she had tripped over her own feet, spilling the soup and nearly collapsing on top of him. Sinclair had clutched her in his arms and called for help.