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Callandra started to speak, and then stopped again.
“Is there nothing we can do to help Marianne Gillespie?” Hester persisted, her fists clenched, leaning forward in the chair. She glanced at the roses. “Is there nobody to which one could appeal? Do you know Sir Herbert said his own daughter had been assaulted and had become with child as a result?” She swung around to Callandra again. “And she went to a private abortionist in some back street who maimed her so badly she can now never marry, let alone bear children. And she is in constant pain. For Heaven’s sake, there must be something we can do!”
“If I knew of anything I should not be sitting her listening to you,” Callandra replied with a sad smile. “I should have told you what it was, and we should be on our way to do it. Please be careful, or you are going to put your arm right through my best garden chair.”
“Oh! I’m sorry. It’s just that I get so furious!”
Callandra smiled, and said nothing.
The following two days were hot and sultry. Tempers became short. Jeavis seemed to be everywhere in the hospital, getting in the way, asking questions which most people found irritating and pointless. The treasurer swore at him. A gentleman on the Board of Governors made a complaint to his member of Parliament. Mrs. Flaherty lectured him on abstinence, decorum, and probity, which was more than even he could take. After that he left her strictly alone.
But gradually the hospital was getting back to its normal routine and even in the laundry room they spoke less of the murder and more of their usual concerns: husbands, money, the latest music hall jokes, and general gossip.
Monk was concentrating his attention on learning the past and present circumstances of all the doctors, especially the students, and of the treasurer, chaplain, and various governors.
It was late in the evening and still oppressively warm when Callandra went to look for Kristian Beck. She had no real reason to speak to him; she had to manufacture one. What she wished was to see how he was bearing up under Jeavis’s interrogations and less-than-subtle implication that Beck had had some shameful secret which he had begged Prudence Barrymore not to reveal to the authorities.
She had still no firm idea what she was going to say as she walked along the corridor toward his room, her heart pounding, nervousness making her mouth dry. In the heat after the long afternoon sun on the windows and roof, the air smelled stale. She could almost distinguish the cloying smell of blood from bandages and the acridness of waste. Two flies buzzed and banged blindly against the glass of a window.
She could ask him if Monk had spoken to him, and yet again assure him of Monk’s brilliance and his past successes. It was not a good reason, but she could not bear the inaction any longer. She had to see him and do what she could to allay the fear he must feel. Over and over she had imagined his thoughts as Jeavis made his insinuations, as he saw Jeavis’s black eyes watching him. It was impossible to argue or defend oneself against prejudice, the irrational suspicion of anything or anyone who was different.
She was at his door. She knocked. There was a sound, a voice, but she could not distinguish the words. She turned the handle and pushed the door wide.
The scene that met her burned itself into her brain. The large table which served as his desk was in the center of the room and lying on it was a woman, part of her body covered with a white sheet, but her abdomen and upper thighs clearly exposed. There were swabs bright with blood, and a bloodstained towel. There was a bucket on the floor, but with a cloth over it so she could not see what it contained. She had seen enough operations before to recognize the tanks and flasks that held ether and the other materials used to anesthetize a patient.
Kristian had his back to her. She would recognize him anywhere, the line of his shoulder, the way his hair grew on his neck, the curve of his high cheekbone.
And she knew the woman also. Her hair was black with a deep widow’s peak. Her brows were dark and unusually clearly marked, and there was a small neat mole on her cheek level with the corner of her eye. Marianne Gillespie! There was only one conclusion: Sir Herbert had denied her—but Kristian had not. He was performing the illegal abortion.
For seconds Callandra stood frozen, her tongue stiff, her mouth dry. She did not even see the figure of the nurse beyond.
Kristian was concentrating so intently upon what he was doing, his hands moving quickly, delicately, his eyes checking again and again to see the color of Marianne’s face, to make sure she was breathing evenly. He had not heard Callandra’s voice, nor the door opening.
At last she moved. She backed out and pulled the door after her, closing it without sound. Her heart was beating so violently her body shook, and she could not catch her breath. For a moment she was afraid she was going to choke.
A nurse passed by, staggering a little from fatigue, and Callandra felt just as dizzy, just as incapable of balance. Hester’s words came back into her mind like hammer blows. Sir Herbert’s daughter had gone to a secret abortionist and he had maimed her, operated so clumsily she would never be a normal woman again, and never be free from pain.
Had Kristian done that too? Was he the on
e she had gone to? As Marianne had? Funny, gentle, wise Kristian, with whom she had shared so many moments of understanding, to whom she did not need to explain the pain or the laughter of thoughts—Kristian, whose face she could see every time she closed her eyes, whom she longed to touch, though she knew she must never yield to the temptation. It would break the delicate unspoken barrier between a love that was acceptable and one that was not. To bring shame to him would be unbearable.
Shame! Could the man she knew possibly be the same man who would do what she had seen? And perhaps worse—far worse? The thought was sickening, but she could not cast it out of her mind. The picture was there in front of her every time she closed her eyes.
And then a thought came which was immeasurably more hideous. Had Prudence Barrymore known? Was that what he had begged her not to tell the authorities? Not simply the Board of Governors of the hospital, but the police? And had he killed her to keep her silent?
She leaned against the wall, overwhelmed with misery. Her brain refused to work. There was no one she could turn to. She dared not even tell Monk. It was a burden she would have to carry silently, and alone. Without realizing the full enormity of it, she chose to bear his guilt with him.
6
HESTER FOUND hospital routine increasingly difficult. She obeyed Mrs. Flaherty because her survival depended upon it, but she found herself grinding her teeth to keep from answering back, and more than once she had to change a sentence midway through in order to make it innocuous. Only the thought of Prudence Barrymore made it possible. She had not known her well. The battlefield was too large, too filled with confusion, pain, and a violent, sickening urgency for people to know each other unless they had had occasion to work together. And chance had dictated that she had worked with Prudence only once, but that once was engraven on her memory indelibly. It was after the battle of Inkermann, in November of ’54. It was less than three weeks after the disaster of Balaclava and the massacre resulting from the Light Brigade’s suicidal charge against the Russian guns. It was bitterly cold, and relentless rain meant that men stood or marched in mud up to their knees. The tents were worn with holes and they slept wet and filthy. Their clothes were growing ragged and there was nothing with which to mend them. They were underfed because supplies were in desperate straits, and they were exhausted with constant labor and anxiety.
The siege of Sebastopol was achieving nothing. The Russians were dug in deeper and deeper, and the winter was fast approaching. Men and horses died of cold, hunger, injuries, and above all disease.
Then had come the battle of Inkermann. It had been going badly for the British troops to begin with, and when they finally sent for the French reinforcements, three battalions of Zouaves and Algerians coming in at a run, bugles blowing, drums beating and their general shouting encouragement in Arabic, it had become a rout. Of the forty thousand Russians, over a quarter were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. The British lost six hundred killed, the French a mere hundred and thirty. In each case three times as many were wounded. The whole battle was fought in shifting, swirling mists, and as often as not men stumbled on the enemy by chance, or were lost, and injured their own men in the confusion.
Hester could recall it vividly. Standing in the warm sunny London hospital ward, she did not even need to close her eyes to see it in her mind, or feel the cold, and hear the noise, the cries and groans, the voices thick with pain. Three days after the battle the burial parties were still working. She could see in her dreams their bent forms, huddled against the howling wind, shovels in their hands, heads down, shoulders hunched, trudging through the mud; or stopped to lift another corpse, often frozen in the violent positions of hand-to-hand fighting, faces disfigured with terror, and gored by terrible bayonet wounds. At least four thousand Russians were heaped in communal graves.
And the wounded were continually being discovered in the scrub and brushwood, screaming.
