A Nightingale Christmas Promise

by Donna Douglas

  ‘Liesel!’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise. Now go to sleep.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Liesel’s voice trembled. ‘I’m too scared to sleep.’

  ‘Oh, Liesel.’ Anna put her arm around her sister, pulling her close. ‘What if I stayed awake and kept watch?’

  Liesel lifted her head from the pillow. ‘And what good would that do? You’d be no good against a murderer, would you?’

  Anna smiled. Now she sounded more like the old Liesel. ‘Go to sleep,’ she ordered. ‘Or I’ll be the one committing murders!’

  She turned down the lamp and lay in the darkness, her arm around Liesel’s slim shoulders, stroking her hair. It was comforting, like being a child again. At first the sound of the wind whistling through the eaves made her jump, but as her eyelids grew heavy, soon the sound became almost soothing.

  ‘Christmas Day is over, and no one came to get us,’ were the last words she murmured to herself, as she drifted off to sleep.

  The next thing, she was sitting bolt upright, shaken out of sleep by a cry in the darkness.

  She sat there listening hard. Somewhere in the distance she could hear a faint crackling sound, and a smell, acrid, burning …

  ‘Fire!’

  Anna shot out of bed, tripping over the hem of her nightgown.

  ‘Liesel!’ She shook her sister roughly, half dragging her out of bed. ‘Liesel, wake up!’

  Her sister stirred blearily. ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s a fire. We’ve got to get out.’ Anna ran to the window and threw it open, letting in the cold night air. She looked down at the ground below. It was too far to jump, and the drainpipe was out of reach.

  ‘A fire?’ Liesel was instantly awake, throwing off the bedclothes and springing out of bed. ‘Where’s Mother?’

  ‘We’ll find her.’ Anna pulled a blanket off the bed and draped it around both of them, pulling it over their hands. ‘Come on.’

  The landing was thick with swirling black smoke. Anna felt it filling her lungs, choking her. She doubled up, coughing. Liesel screamed in panic.

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘We’ve got to get out …’ Anna gasped, but her legs seemed paralysed. The stinging smoke blinded her; tears streamed down her cheeks. Beside her, Liesel was clinging to her hand, coughing and choking and crying out for their mother.

  Suddenly, a figure staggered out of the smoke towards them.

  ‘This way,’ Anna heard Tom’s gruff voice calling to them. ‘Cover your mouths, and try not to breathe too much.’

  Next thing his hand was on her arm, pulling her into the nothingness. Anna resisted him.

  ‘I need to find Mother first.’

  ‘You need to get yourselves to safety.’

  ‘Not without Mother!’

  Tom was silent. ‘I’ll fetch her,’ he said at last. ‘You get yourselves out. The stairs are here … Just another step …’

  Groping ahead of her, Anna found the banister rail. Pulling Liesel behind her, she slowly and carefully inched her way down. The heat seemed to rise to meet them, scorching her skin.

  ‘We’re walking into the fire!’ Liesel screeched.

  ‘Shhh, don’t talk! Here, keep this over your mouth.’ Anna pressed the blanket to her sister’s face. ‘Now, stay close to me. We’ll get out through the kitchen …’

  The smoke was acrid on the back of her throat as she pushed her way down the hall. Liesel had gone very quiet. Too quiet. When Anna glanced around, she saw her sister’s eyes were half-closed, her body limp.

  ‘Liesel! Try to stay awake, please.’ Propping her up with one arm, Anna reached with the other hand to open the back door, but it wouldn’t give. Then she remembered her mother had bolted it.

  She fumbled in the darkness for the bolt, but couldn’t quite stretch far enough to get her fingers round it while supporting her sister. And all the while the smoke was getting thicker, blacker. It seemed to have seeped into her brain, too, filling her head with fog. But this was a warm, comforting fog, like a cloud. She was so tired, all she wanted to do was close her eyes and surrender to it …

  A sudden splintering crash from overhead brought her back to her senses. Liesel woke up, screaming out for their mother. She pulled away from Anna and tried to run back towards the stairs, but Anna grabbed her by her hair, yanking her backwards until they fell in a heap on the tiled floor.

  ‘We need … to get out …’ she murmured. But even as she said it she knew escape was impossible. The smoke was filling her head like fog, making it harder and harder for her to breathe, to think …

  Anna could smell the stench of charred wood and smoke in the air, even before they turned the corner into Chambord Street.

  She stole a worried glance at her mother walking beside her. Dorothy Beck had aged overnight, face drawn and haggard, body stooped inside the borrowed clothes the Lady Almoner at the hospital had given her. She stared straight ahead of her, stumbling like a sleepwalker towards the wreckage of what had once been their home.

  Anna steeled herself for what was to come, but nothing could prepare her for the sight of the bakery in the grey, chilly dawn light.

  It was ruined beyond recognition, a blackened, splintered mess, dripping with water after the firemen had put out the flames.

  Their neighbours stood in a huddle on the pavement, staring at the wreckage and talking amongst themselves. As Anna and her mother approached, they fell silent, parting to let them through.

  ‘It’s a bad business,’ Mr Hudson mumbled, staring down at the pavement, his hands in his pockets.

  Dorothy Beck didn’t seem to hear him as she moved past, picking her way over the debris. She stood still, staring up at the ugly, jagged hole where once the shop doorway had been.

  ‘I’m glad your father isn’t here to see this,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  ‘Or Liesel,’ Anna murmured. Her sister had recovered well, apart from her hacking, painful cough. She had been kept in hospital for observation.

  This would have broken her heart, Anna thought. It was all she could do not to cry herself.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ Mrs Wheeler called out.

  Anna turned to look at her and her husband. This was a couple who displayed a sign saying ‘Proud to be British’ in the window of their café. A couple who this time last year had drunk beer with their family to celebrate her engagement.

  ‘Where were you last night, when we nearly died in our beds?’ she called back.

  Mrs Wheeler’s face reddened. ‘I – I’m sure I don’t know what you’re implying!’ she spluttered.

  As Anna turned away to follow her mother into the shop, she heard Mrs Wheeler muttering to her husband. ‘Did you hear the way she spoke to me? I was only trying to be neighbourly.’

  There was nothing left of their home, just a charred husk. Everything that hadn’t been destroyed by the fire was soaked through. Anna could scarcely make out their furniture among the burnt remains that littered the floor. Only glimpses of her mother’s cherished wallpaper remained on the walls, the rest consumed by creeping black stains.

  Anna picked up the remnants of a photograph. ‘It’s all gone,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ Her mother’s voice was faint as she looked around her. ‘Yes, it’s all gone.’

  ‘How will we tell Papa?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dorothy was silent for a moment, then she pulled herself together with an effort and said, ‘But we’re all alive, and that’s the main thing.’

  ‘Thanks to Tom,’ Anna said.

  ‘Yes.’ Her mother put her hand to the wall, staring for a moment at the rose-patterned wallpaper she had loved so much. ‘We owe him our lives.’

  Don’t trust Tom Franklin.

  Edward’s words came back to Anna’s mind, startling her. She looked around at the blackened room.

  ‘I wonder how it started?’ she said.

  ‘It must have been one of the ovens in the kitchen.’
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  ‘We don’t light the ovens on Christmas Day.’

  ‘A gas lamp, then.’

  Anna watched her mother carefully. ‘Liesel showed me the note,’ she said.

  Dorothy Beck’s face paled. ‘What note?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about, Mother.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ her mother said firmly. ‘And I don’t want you saying any different in front of your sister. She’s upset enough as it is.’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘And I certainly don’t want you mentioning it to your father. He’s worried sick, without all this.’ She gestured with her hand then allowed it to fall by her side.

  They spent a few minutes searching the rooms, looking for anything they could salvage. But there was nothing. Everything they owned had been destroyed. It was as if someone had tried to erase them, their memories and everything they had achieved, from the face of the earth.

  As the enormity of their situation hit her, Anna’s legs buckled and she sank down on the floor. First her father, then Edward, and now her family home. She felt as if she was deep in the bowels of the earth, with nowhere left to sink.

  ‘What shall we do, Mother?’ she whispered. ‘Where shall we go?’

  Dorothy Beck looked around the ruins of her home. She seemed utterly diminished, defeated.

  ‘There is only one place we can go,’ she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Rufus peered into the microscope. He was looking at the slide, but he was also aware of Kate’s light scent as she stood behind him. She smelt of flowers, overlaid with the pungent chemicals of the Pathology lab.

  ‘You see?’ she was saying. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  He squinted down the lens. ‘It’s difficult to say.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. So I asked for a sample of the patient’s sputum.’

  He straightened up. ‘You did what? You had no right.’

  Kate ignored him, replacing the slide under the microscope with another. ‘Have a look,’ she said.

  Reluctantly he bent to peer down the microscope. This time there was no mistaking the long, tubular strands he saw.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I? They are tubercle bacilli?’

  He couldn’t meet her eyes. How she must be loving this, he thought.

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered.

  ‘So the patient has phthisis.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  He looked back at the microscope, cursing himself. How could he have made such a simple mistake? He had been so sure the old man had a lung abscess, it hadn’t even occurred to him to do the simplest sputum check first.

  As if she knew what he was thinking, Kate said, ‘I imagine the symptoms would be very similar, at first glance.’

  He looked up at her. He expected to see gloating, but the serious grey eyes that looked back at him were free from any guile.

  She moved to the microscope again, and he stepped back to let her look down the lens.

  For a moment he stood watching her. She seemed to quite forget he was there, she was so fascinated by her discovery.

  ‘I wonder you didn’t go straight to Ormerod with this,’ he spoke up finally.

  Kate turned her head to look at him, genuinely mystified. ‘But it’s your patient, Dr French.’

  Was she playing a game with him? It was hard to say. Her bland expression gave nothing away.

  ‘It would have been an opportunity to prove yourself to him.’ And get me into serious trouble at the same time, he added silently. ‘I wonder that you missed such an opportunity.’

  ‘Is that what you would have done?’

  His gaze dropped. ‘Probably,’ he admitted, then added, ‘but it’s just the way everyone behaves at the Nightingale.’

  Kate gave a slight smile. ‘Yes, I’ve seen you all falling over yourselves to impress Dr Ormerod. But that isn’t the way I like to go about things. I want to succeed on my own merits, not by bringing someone else down.’

  A Carlyle, succeeding on their own merits? Rufus nearly laughed out loud.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t have to try as hard as the rest of us,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean your name allows you certain – liberties.’

  ‘Is that what you think? That I’m given an easy time because I’m a Carlyle? Have you seen the way I’m treated, Dr French? By Dr Ormerod, and the other students?’ She looked around the dusty shelves of the lab. ‘Look at me. Look at where I am. Do you really think I would be here if I were being given special treatment?’

  Put like that, he couldn’t deny the idea did seem foolish. ‘Perhaps not,’ Rufus conceded. ‘But the fact that you’re here, studying in this hospital at all, is surely because of your father.’

  Kate laughed. ‘Oh, Dr French, if only you knew!’ She faced him squarely. ‘My father didn’t want me to come here. I had to fight against him to do it. And do you know why I defied him? Because I wanted to prove I was good enough. It wasn’t some girlish whim, as you and the other doctors seem to think. I wanted to be tested, not just against other women, but against men too. I wanted to be a good doctor, the best I could be. And if I thought for a moment I wasn’t up to it, then I would leave.’

  Rufus stared at her. She stood before him, her hands on her hips, her face flushed with angry colour. Suddenly he felt deeply ashamed.

  Kate seemed embarrassed by her own outburst. She turned away, shuffling through slides, dismissing him.

  Rufus waited for a moment, but she didn’t look back.

  ‘Thank you, anyway,’ he said. ‘For the diagnosis.’

  ‘I was only doing my job.’ Her voice was sharp, the way he remembered it. ‘Besides, I wasn’t doing it for your sake. I merely wanted the patient to receive the correct treatment.’

  Rufus turned to leave, then changed his mind. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘This is why everyone finds it so hard to like you.’

  Kate looked up, shocked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You push people away, keep them at arms’ length. You’re too – abrasive.’

  ‘Abrasive?’

  ‘You never smile at anyone, or try to make conversation. All you ever do is issue orders in your usual brusque fashion.’

  ‘I suppose you’d prefer me to simper and purr like a kitten?’ Kate shot back angrily. ‘Behave in a manner more fitting to my sex, is that it?’

  It was all he could do not to laugh. Somehow he could not imagine Kate Carlyle simpering or purring at anyone. She was more like an alley cat, hissing and spitting at everyone who came near her.

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt you to be nice to people,’ he said. ‘A bit of charm wouldn’t go amiss.’

  ‘Oh, and you’d know all about charm, wouldn’t you?’ Kate’s lip curled.

  He folded his arms across his chest. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’ve seen you on the ward, flirting with the nurses and the patients.’

  ‘It’s called being friendly. You should try it some time.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m perfectly friendly.’

  ‘Are you? I don’t think so. You know what they call you? The Ice Maiden.’

  Kate coloured. ‘They’re entitled to their opinion.’

  Rufus saw her set expression and sighed. ‘Look, you’ll never get anywhere until you learn to give people a chance. Not everyone’s against you, you know.’

  Kate raised an eyebrow. ‘You could have fooled me.’

  She had a point, he had to admit. ‘All right, perhaps you haven’t had the warmest of welcomes …’

  ‘Least of all from you,’ she murmured.

  ‘But you haven’t gone out of your way to be friendly either,’ Rufus continued. ‘And I’m not talking about purring or flirting or anything like that,’ he said, as Kate opened her mouth to interrupt. ‘I’m just talking about giving people a chance, treating them better. Let down those barriers, Miss Carlyle.’
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  For a moment she looked back at him, regarding him with those cool grey eyes of hers. Then she turned away.

  ‘Thank you for your advice, Dr French,’ she said coldly.

  He nodded to the slide. ‘And thank you for yours.’

  As he went to walk away, he felt something under his foot and bent to pick it up. ‘What’s this?’ He peered at the strange, crushed little sprig. ‘It looks like mistletoe.’

  Kate snatched it out of his hand before he had a chance to examine it further. ‘Nothing,’ she muttered, shoving it into her pocket. ‘It’s nothing.’

  Rufus looked at her furiously blushing face and smiled. Perhaps Miss Carlyle didn’t need his advice after all?

  After he had gone, Kate took the mistletoe sprig out of her pocket and gazed down at it, crushed in the palm of her hand.

  Poor Charlie Latimer, she thought. What must he have been thinking? She pitied his sore head this morning.

  She was more confused than offended by his blundering attempts to kiss her. No man had ever shown any interest in her before, even when they were drunk, and it had all come as a bit of a shock to her. She hadn’t known how to react.

  Probably not by pushing him and sending him flying, she thought wryly, smiling at the memory.

  Perhaps if she’d had sisters instead of brothers her life would have turned out differently, she thought. She would have learnt how to do her hair, and make small talk, and how to tell if a man was interested in her.

  She might have learnt to play with dolls, to have tea parties and dress them up, instead of bandaging their wounds or treating them for mysterious illnesses. She might have fitted in with the girls at boarding school, been able to talk about hats and getting married. As it was, they’d all thought she was odd because she wanted to become a doctor.

  And she got on with her brothers no better. They would never let her join in with them. Their games were for boys, they said, even though Kate taught herself to run faster and catch a ball far better than Leo ever could.

  So she was left in the middle, the odd one out, not fitting in with anyone. And she had been that way ever since.

  She could never explain that to Rufus, she thought. He was so sure of himself, his place in the world. He was a doctor, a man, and that gave him a certain position, one Kate struggled every day to achieve. He didn’t need to try as hard as she did to win people’s respect. She couldn’t afford to allow her guard to drop, not even for a moment.