“That’s good,” Charlotte said, encouragingly. “That’s very good.” She patted Eleanor on the back of her hand. But if she isn’t the woman from the ice, if she isn’t Sleeping Beauty, who else could she be? And how else could she have gotten here—to the South Pole? Charlotte chased the thoughts away. Focus. “We’re going to get your body temperature up, and you’ll be feeling a whole lot better in no time.”
Charlotte used her stethoscope to listen to her heart and lungs. The woman’s dress, done in a Victorian style, gave off a briny, icy odor. Almost as if she’s been underwater. Charlotte asked Michael to go to the commons and get “something nice and hot, maybe hot chocolate,” while she completed the cursory examination. She proceeded with caution, so as not to do anything that might shock a patient with an antique sensibility. Whoever she really was, and wherever she’d come from, she obviously lived, even if it was only in her own head, in another century. Charlotte had once seen a patient who thought he was the Pope, and she had always been careful to address him as Your Holiness. As might have been expected, Eleanor appeared mystified by the blood-pressure cuff, and the penlight, used to peer into her eyes, also occasioned astonishment. The whole time, she was watching Charlotte with a gradually increasing awareness, shaded with perplexity. What, Charlotte wondered, would she be making of her—a big, black woman in a boldly patterned sweater, purple pants, and braided, streaked hair piled up in a messy knot on top of her head?
“You are…a nurse?” she finally whispered.
Oh well, it could have been worse, Charlotte thought. “No, I’m a doctor.” She did have an English accent.
“I too am a nurse,” she said, one pale hand lifting toward her bosom.
“Is that right?” Charlotte said, glad to hear her talking, as she readied a syringe for a blood sample.
“With Miss Nightingale.”
“How about that?” Charlotte said, before the words had really sunk in. Eleanor had said them as if she hoped they might make an impression. And of course they did. Holding the needle up to the light, Charlotte paused and said, “Wait—as in what? Are you talking about Florence Nightingale?”
“Yes,” Eleanor replied, apparently happy to hear that this name was still familiar. “In the Harley Street Hospital…and then the Crimea.”
Florence Nightingale? The lady with the lamp? From…when? History had never been Charlotte’s favorite subject. It had to have been, what, a couple of hundred years ago? More or less?
Concentrate, Charlotte reminded herself yet again. Concentrate. And don’t do anything to alarm the patient, or—in a case like hers—upset a belief system that might be crucial to her mental stability.
“Well, then, Miss Ames, you’ve come one very long way to get to a place like this.” Charlotte rolled up a sleeve of the dress—the fabric was coarse and stiff, and felt like a stage costume. “Even today, it’s not easy getting here.” She swabbed a spot with alcohol. “Now you just hold real still—you’re going to feel a little prick—and it’ll be over in a few seconds.”
Eleanor’s eyes went down to the needle and watched the blood being drawn, as if she had never seen the procedure before. Had she, Charlotte wondered? Could she have? Out of curiosity alone, Charlotte planned to look up Florence Nightingale as soon as the exam was over. Purely, she told herself, for academic reasons.
Just as she was removing the needle, Michael came in, carrying a tray on which he’d placed not only a cup of cocoa, but a blueberry muffin and some scrambled eggs under tight plastic wrap. While he looked for a place to put it down, Charlotte opened the minifridge, where the perishable meds and the red plasma bags were kept, and deposited the blood sample inside for safekeeping. Eleanor, she noticed, was still following her every move. For someone who claimed to be well into her hundreds, she was certainly looking more alive by the minute.
But frozen, in an iceberg, for centuries? Hard as that was for Charlotte to believe, there was only one thing even harder—and that was coming up with some other explanation—any explanation—for who she was or how she came to Point Adélie, one of the most remote and inaccessible spots on the face of the earth.
“Are you hungry?” Michael said, finally finding a place for the food on a standing instrument tray. He rolled it over toward the examining table, and asked, “Can you sit up?”
With Charlotte’s help, he was able to put his arm around Eleanor’s frail shoulders and lift her into a sitting position, her back cushioned by the pillows. She regarded the food with a kind of polite disinterest, as if it were something she had seen once before but couldn’t quite place.
“Try the cocoa,” he said. “It’s hot.”
As she lifted the mug to her pale lips, Michael said to Charlotte, “Murphy’s outside—he wants to talk to you.”