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It was only after a tedious but dutiful hour with the black-coated treasurer discussing finances, donations, and gifts that Callandra encountered one of the other governors, the one of whom Mrs. Flaherty had spoken so approvingly, Lady Ross Gilbert. Callandra was on the landing at the top of the stairs when Berenice Ross Gilbert caught up with her. She was a tall woman who moved with a kind of elegance and ease which made even the most ordinary clothes seem as if they must be in the height of fashion. Today she wore a gown with a waist deeply pointed at the front and a soft green muslin skirt with three huge flounces, scattered randomly with embroidered flowers. It flattered her reddish hair and pale complexion, and her face with its heavy-lidded eyes and rather undershot jaw was extremely handsome in its own way.
“Good morning, Callandra,” she said with a smile, swinging her skirts around the newel post and starting down the stairs beside her. “I hear you had a slight difference with Mrs. Flaherty earlier today.” She pulled a face expressive of amused resignation. “I should forget Miss Nightingale if I were you. She is something of a romantic, and her ideas hardly apply to us.”
“I didn’t mention Miss Nightingale,” Callandra replied, going down beside her. “I simply said I did not wish to lecture the nurses on honesty and sobriety.”
Berenice laughed abruptly. “It would be a complete waste of your time, my dear. The only difference it would produce would be to make Mrs. Flaherty feel justified that she made an attempt.”
“Has she not asked you to do it?” Callandra asked curiously.
“But of course. And I daresay I shall agree, and then say what I wish when the time comes.”
“She will not forgive you,” Callandra warned. “Mrs. Flaherty forgives nothing. By the way, what do you want to say?”
“I really don’t know,” Berenice replied airily. “Nothing as fiercely as you do.”
They came to the bottom of the stairs.
“Really, my dear, you know you have no hope of getting people to keep windows open in this climate. They would freeze to death. Even in the Indies, you know, we kept the night air out. It isn’t healthy, warm as it is.”
“That is rather different,” Callandra argued. “They have all manner of fevers out there.”
“We have cholera, typhoid, and smallpox here,” Berenice pointed out. “There was a serious outbreak of cholera near here only five years ago, which argues my point. One should keep the windows closed, in the sickroom especially.”
/> They began to walk along the corridor.
“How long did you live in the Indies?” Callandra asked. “Where was it, Jamaica?”
“Oh, fifteen years,” Berenice answered. “Yes, Jamaica most of the time. My family had plantations there. A very agreeable life.” She shrugged her elegant shoulders. “But tedious when one longs for society and the excitement of London. It is the same people week after week. After a time one feels one has met everyone of any significance and heard everything they have to say.”
They had reached a turn in the corridor and Berenice seemed to intend going into a ward to the left. Callandra wished to find Kristian Beck and thought it most likely that at this time of day he would be in his own rooms, where he studied, saw patients, and kept his books and papers, and that lay to the right.
“It must have been a wrench for you to leave, all the same,” she said without real interest. “England would be very different, and you would miss your family.”
Berenice smiled. “There was not so much to leave by the time I came away. Plantations are no longer the profitable places they used to be. I can remember going to the slave market in Kingston when I was a child, but of course slaving is illegal now and has been for years.” She brushed her hand over her huge skirts, knocking off a piece of loose thread that cling to the cloth.
With that she laughed a little dryly and walked away along the corridor, leaving Callandra to go the other way toward Kristian Beck’s rooms. Suddenly she was nervous, her hands hot, her tongue clumsy. This was ridiculous. She was a middle-aged widow, of no glamour at all, going to call upon a busy doctor, nothing more, nothing of any other meaning.
She knocked on the door abruptly.
“Come in.” His voice was startlingly deep and touched by an almost imperceptible trace of accent she could not place. It was mid-European, but from which country she did not know, and had not asked him.
She turned the handle and pushed the door open.
He was standing at the table in front of the window, papers spread out in front of him, and he looked around to see who it was who had come in. He was not a tall man but there was a sense of power in him, both physical and emotional. His face was dominated by dark eyes that were of a beautiful shape and a mouth both sensual and humorous. His expression of preoccupation vanished when he saw her and was replaced immediately with one of pleasure.
“Lady Callandra. How good to see you again. I hope your visit does not mean that there is something wrong?”
“Nothing new.” She closed the door behind her. Before she came she had formulated a good excuse for being here, but now the words escaped her. “I have been trying to prevail upon Sir Herbert to have the nurses cover the slop pails,” she said rather too quickly. “But I don’t think he sees much purpose to it. He was on his way to the operating theater, and I had the feeling his mind was on his patient.”
“So you are going to persuade me instead?” His smile was sudden and wide. “I have never yet found above two or three nurses in the hospital who can remember an order for more than a day at a time, never mind carrying it out. The poor souls are harried from every quarter, hungry half the time and drunk the other half.” His smile vanished again. “They do their best according to their lights, for the most part.”
His eyes lit with enthusiasm and he leaned against the table, engaging her attention. “You know, I have been reading the most interesting paper. This doctor, sailing from the Indies home to England, contracted a fever and treated himself by going out on deck at night, stripped of his clothes, and taking a cold shower with buckets of seawater. Can you believe that?” He was watching her, searching the expression in her eyes. “It relieved his symptoms marvelously and he slept well and was restored by morning. Then in the evening his fever returned and he treated it the same way, and was again restored. Each time the attack was slighter, and by the time the ship docked he was fully himself.”
She was astounded, but his eagerness carried her along.
“Can you imagine Mrs. Flaherty if you tried drenching your patients with buckets of cold water?” She tried not to laugh but her voice was shaking, not so much with amusement as with nervousness. “I cannot even persuade her to open the windows in the sunlight let alone at night!”
“I know,” he said quickly. “I know, but we are making new discoveries every year.” He grasped the chair between them and turned it so it was convenient for her to sit, but she ignored it. “I’ve just been reading a paper by Carl Vierordt on counting human blood corpuscles.” He moved closer to her in his keenness. “He has devised a way, can you imagine that?” He held up the paper as he said it, his eyes alight. “With this kind of precision, think what we might learn!” He offered her the paper as if he would share with her his pleasure.
