He went back out again, and Eleanor slumped, suddenly bereft of all her strength, onto the edge of the cot. The exertions of the past few hours had been too much. She felt as if she were about to swoon, and lay back, still bundled in her coat, on top of the coarse, striped blanket. The room was swimming around her. She closed her eyes, with her hands clutching the sides of the cot, just as she had done on the awful voyage to Constantinople so many years ago. The ship, a steamer called the Vectis, had pitched and rolled in the heavy seas, and after leaving the port of Marseilles, it had lost its engines altogether for a time. Moira had been convinced that they were all about to die, that the ship was sure to break up in the storm and drown them all, and Eleanor had had to console her until the next morning, when the weather abruptly changed and the ship regained its power. Many of the nurses had been seasick or worse, and the sailors had to carry them up onto the stern deck where they could recover themselves in the fresh air and sunshine. Moira had dropped to her knees by the rail and offered up a volley of prayers.
Miss Florence Nightingale, herself a victim of the rough voyage, had passed right by them, simply inclining her head in their direction, as she leaned on the arm of her friend, Mrs. Selina Bracebridge. Selina was married and Florence was not (indeed, she was the most famous spinster in the British Isles), but it had been decided by the military board of governors that it would be unseemly for unmarried women to be employed overseas, attending to the wounded soldiers. So with the sole exception of their leader, all thirty-eight of the women in the nursing contingent, regardless of their actual marital status, were given the honorific title of “Mrs.” They were also given uniforms expressly tailored to render the wearers as unappealing as possible and to obscure their figures completely. The dresses were gray and shapeless and hung like woolen sacks, and the bonnets were silly white contraptions that deliberately complimented no one’s features. One of the nurses, in Eleanor’s hearing, told Miss Nightingale that she could put up with all the other hardships of the job, but “there is caps, ma’am, that suits one face, and some that suits another’s, and if I’d known, ma’am, about the caps, great as was my desire to come out to nurse at Scutari, I wouldn’t have come, ma’am.”
They were an unusual bunch, the nurses who had signed on to the mission, and Eleanor was well aware of the suspicion they engendered in many of the people back home. In some quarters of the British public and press, they were lauded as heroines, going off to do grim but honorable work under the most appalling conditions. But in others, they were written off as immodest and opportunistic fortune seekers, young women of working-class backgrounds hoping to romantically ensnare a wounded officer at his most susceptible moment. And though fourteen of the nurses had been recruited from public hospitals, as were Eleanor and Moira, Miss Nightingale had also selected six holy sisters from St. John’s House, eight from Miss Sellons’s Anglican sisterhood, and ten Roman Catholic nuns—five of them from the Norwood Orphanage and five from the Sisters of Mercy at Bermondsey. While many of the soldiers were themselves Roman Catholic, the idea that these nuns might be closely tending to wounded men who were not so inclined—men who followed the Protestant faith, for instance—was shocking to many back home. What if, under the guise of nursing, the sisters used this golden opportunity to proselytize in secret for the sinister Church of Rome?
As the Vectis approached the Dardanelles, Eleanor observed Miss Nightingale steady herself at the ship’s rail and gaze off at the passing land. Her dark hair was neatly done, with a severe part down its center, and her long face, paler than usual, wore an uncommon expression of rapture. Eleanor looked off in the same direction, but all she saw were arid, yellow fields. The ocean breeze picked up some of Nightingale’s words, and Eleanor heard her extolling to Mrs. Bracebridge “the fabled plains of Troy, where Achilles fought and Helen wept.” She looked transported by the sight. Eleanor knew that Miss Nightingale was from a fine family, and had been educated at the finest schools, and she envied her for it. She herself had gone to London in hopes of improving herself, but the hard and unending work at the Harley Street hospital had left her little time, or money, to pursue such ends.
Sinclair had briefly changed that.
But how would he have reacted, had he known that she was coming over to the theater of war? He would, she felt certain, have warned her not to do so. But the thought that a time might come when he would need her—and she would be thousands of miles away, unable to help—was too much to bear. When the word had gone out that volunteers were needed for the field hospitals, Eleanor had jumped at the chance, and Moira—whose attachment to Captain Rutherford was, perhaps, more practical than ardent—said, “Birds of a feather flock together,” and blithely signed an application of her own.
What, she wondered, had become of Moira? Long gone now, of course.