On their fourth night in Scutari, Miss Nightingale had come upon Eleanor refilling her water jug from the trickling fountain in the hospital—the water was a cloudy yellow, and barely potable at all—and asked her to accompany her on her nightly rounds. She was wearing a long gray dress, with a white kerchief gathered around her dark hair, and holding a Turkish lantern by the curved handle on its flat, brass base. “And please bring the jug with you.”
Eleanor, who was seldom spoken to directly by Miss Nightingale, filled it to the brim, tucked a roll of bandages under her arm, and followed obediently a few steps behind. Eleanor was exhausted—it had been another grueling day—and although she knew that she would now be on her feet for hours, still she would not have given up this chance for anything. The Barrack Hospital was vast, and a tour of all its wards, which Miss Nightingale conducted nightly, was a journey of four miles. Wherever they went in the hospital, even the most antagonistic surgeons and impudent orderlies stood aside in Miss Nightingale’s presence, and the two women were greeted instead by murmurs of thanks and signals of respect from the suffering soldiers. A boy who could not have been more than seventeen lay weeping in a cot, both of his legs gone below the knee, and Miss Nightingale stopped to comfort him and kiss his brow. Another soldier, missing an arm and an eye, she offered a cup of water, which he held in a shaking left hand, and for a moment Eleanor had to wonder if he was shaking from physical infirmity, or from the shock of having such a well-bred lady tending to the likes of him.
Most of the wards were dark, save for the moonlight slanting through the broken windows and loose shutters, and Eleanor had to watch her feet lest she step on a sleeping, or dead, body. Miss Nightingale, a slight woman of erect carriage, seemed to move un-erringly among the cots and patients, the glow of her lamp falling like a benediction on the dirty, bruised, and bloodied faces. More than once, Eleanor saw a soldier lean forward on the stump of a missing limb and bend his own lips to the air after she had passed. Why, they are kissing her shadow, she thought.
Several times, Miss Nightingale stopped to offer a thirsty soldier a drink from the jug, or to replace a filthy bandage with a fresh one, but given the immensity of the hospital, and the bottomless well of need, she could only offer a smile, or a word, to most of those she passed. But it was clear to Eleanor that this visit was a kind of covenant, a holy pact between Miss Nightingale and the soldiers, and she felt privileged to witness it.
At the same time, her heart was forever in her throat. At each ward they entered, and in every bed they passed, she was looking for Lieutenant Sinclair Copley—desperate to see him again, terrified of what she might find once she did. Each morning she checked the rolls, but she knew that they were fragmentary and sloppy at best, and Sinclair could be suffering and speechless, unconscious from a blow or delirious with fever, just a ward away. She had made what inquiries she could, and she had learned that his brigade, the 17th Lancers, had been dispatched under Lords Lucan and Cardigan to aid in the siege of Sebastopol. But news traveled slowly from the front, and even when it did come it was no more dependable than the hospital rolls.
They had nearly completed their circuit and were passing through the last of the wards, when Eleanor thought she heard someone mutter her name. She stopped, and so did Miss Nightingale, who obligingly lifted the lamp up to cast a wider glow. On iron bedsteads, a dozen soldiers raised their heads or turned their eyes, but none of them spoke. The voice came again, and now Eleanor could see, in the farthest reach of the ward, below a window whose empty panes were stuffed with rags, a figure lying under a soiled sheet, his face turned toward them.
“Miss Ames?”
His face was so filthy she would not have recognized him, but the voice she knew.
“Lieutenant Le Maitre?” she said, moving closer.
The figure chuckled, then coughed. “Frenchie will do.”
“This is an acquaintance of yours?” Miss Nightingale said, following Eleanor to his bedside.
“Yes, ma’am, it is. He is one of the Seventeenth Lancers.”
“Then I will leave you to visit,” she said, in a gentle voice. “We are nearly done, anyway.” Taking a candle stub from the windowsill, she lit it with the flame from the lamp and left it with Eleanor. “Good night, Lieutenant.”
“Good night, Miss Nightingale. And God bless you.”
Miss Nightingale modestly inclined her head, then turned away, her long skirt rustling as she navigated past the other cots and patients.
Eleanor put the candle on the window ledge and knelt by the narrow bed. Frenchie, who had always been so smartly groomed, was wearing a torn white shirt crawling with lice; his hair was long and unwashed, and hung down over his fevered brow. He was unshaven, and his damp skin, even in the feeble candlelight, displayed a greenish pallor.
Eleanor had seen hundreds of men in such condition, and she knew it did not bode well. Quickly, she dipped a clean bandage in the remaining water and used it to begin mopping the sweat from his forehead. She only wished that she had a clean shirt with her, so that she could rip the lice-ridden one from his limbs. The sheet clung wetly to his lower body.