In the Shadow of the Lamp

by Susanne Dunlap

“So,” Emma said as we got ready for bed that night, “you’ve got two beaus, it seems.”

  “Don’t say that! I haven’t got any.” Sometimes Emma’s teasing really annoyed me. Especially when she was so wrong and I couldn’t find any way to convince her of it.

  “That’s not what Mrs. Drake is telling everyone she sees. How ‘poor you’ sent your fiancé off to the front.”

  My fiancé! How would I squash that rumor? “Don’t poke fun at something you don’t understand. I’m just grateful to Will is all. And he is not my fiancé.”

  “I suppose that depends on how you show your gratitude.” She nudged me with her shoulder.

  “I showed it by paying him back the money he lent me so I could get to Folkestone and come here. Nothing else.”

  She pursed her lips into a kissing shape but didn’t say anything. Just before we blew out the lamp on the table between our beds, Emma said, “You know it’s just a bit of fun, Moll, don’t you? I don’t want you to feel hurt by what I said.”

  I rolled onto my side and propped my head up on my hand. “I know. But I wish you wouldn’t tease sometimes. It’s complicated with Will.”

  “Was it always? I mean, what if you hadn’t met Dr. Maclean?” She leaned forward so we could talk more quietly.

  “Dr. Maclean is nothing to me! He’s a doctor and I’m a nurse.”

  “Haven’t you noticed that he always manages to be in the wards when you are?”

  “All of the doctors are in the wards.” I rolled onto my back. Was it true, what she said? I had noticed but didn’t want to make anything of it. And he always greeted me and asked me about cases.

  “You may be blind, but I’m not. You watch yourself, Miss Molly. Or you’ll be the one who gets sent home for fraternizing. And I wouldn’t like that one bit.”

  Maybe Emma said that just because if I went, she wouldn’t have anyone to cover for her when she broke the rules. Even so, I was glad she said it.

  Chapter 19

  Our short reprieve from the shiploads of wounded didn’t last long. But Miss Stanley’s new nurses were still not employed.

  “We expect to receive another seven hundred men by ship any day,” said Miss Nightingale. “As you all know, the wards are completely full and all that are able to be discharged have been. And despite the efforts of Lady Stratford de Redcliffe, work in the wards has not progressed because the men she had hired went on strike almost immediately. Therefore, I have taken matters into my own hands and hired two hundred Turkish workmen to repair the dilapidated hospital wings, which have enough room for an additional eight hundred men.”

  Miss Nightingale walked up and down in front of us in the common room like she was giving orders to a battalion of soldiers. Lady Stratford de Redcliffe was another one of her personal skirmishes. She’d come from the embassy, sweeping in as if she could accomplish everything Miss Nightingale still hadn’t got to. But everyone underestimated Miss Nightingale’s strength of purpose. If she couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done.

  “Mr. Macdonald has graciously been supplying us with much needed materials, and I have requested hair mattresses and more wooden beds. I have no intention of returning us to the task of stuffing mattresses.”

  A sigh of relief went round the room.

  “Because I shall be much occupied with supervising the reconstruction of the dilapidated wards, I have decided that some of the new nurses, the ones who arrived without my sanction, can be employed in the hospital. In addition, a new hospital is being built a short distance away, at Koulali, and I have every hope that they will find adequate employment there once it is completed.”

  Although I didn’t know everything that was going on, I could tell Miss Nightingale was pleased that she had stopped the others from interfering with her. Sometimes I worried that she was trying so hard to get things done that she made more enemies than she needed to. And yet she cared very much about everything and everyone. I never begrudged her for it, not like some of the others—including Emma. Thinking back to when we arrived, the hospital was now a completely different place thanks to her. Who else would have been able to bring such order to the mess? Men’s wounds were now cleaned and dressings changed regularly; everyone had mattresses and most also had beds for the mattresses to lie upon; everyone got the food they were supposed to, three times a day. Even the rats obeyed her and were much less bold than they were when we first arrived. The latrines, too, had been dug deeper so the stench didn’t come into the wards. She seemed to have power to do things beyond a normal lady’s abilities. I adored her.

  “There is another small matter that also demands our attention. That is that I have been made aware of certain needs of the soldiers’ wives, who have followed their husbands to war. It seems there are a number of imminent births. I have requested a separate basement ward for the purpose of creating a lying-in hospital.”

  She assigned two of the older nurses to be ready to assist at births if necessary.

  I supposed it must have been so she could give the lowest duties to the new nurses, but Emma and I found ourselves suddenly on shifts where we had to do more of what you’d call real nursing. And I was quite surprised that first day to find I’d been assigned to follow Dr. Maclean on his rounds in a ward that had some of the most critically injured men.

  “I’m glad it’s you, Molly—Nurse Fraser,” he said when I arrived with an armload of towels and a basket of clean bandages.

  I didn’t dare really look at him. I hoped we could simply be two people working together, instead of that frightening state where we weren’t quite friends, but almost something more.

  “This fellow’s had an amputation and we must see how his stump is healing,” Dr. Maclean said, talking to me as if I were another doctor. I tried to pretend I was used to it, that there was nothing more normal to me than being on an equal footing with a medical man, and said nothing. “Kindly unwrap the wound for me, Nurse,” he said.

  The fellow’s leg had been removed just above the knee. I folded the blanket back so it only revealed the bandaged stump and set my fingers to untying the tight knot the surgeon had made in the gauze. It was stiff with dried blood.

  “Use these,” Dr. Maclean said, handing me a pair of scissors with angled blades and a dull edge on one side. “They’re made so you can slip them under a bandage and cut without hurting the patient.”

  My hands trembled a little, but I snipped the tied gauze and then unwound it. As I got closer to the wound, I could see that the blood had seeped through and I thought it might pull at the man’s skin. I looked into his face.

  “Don’t mind, miss. You can’t hurt me.”

  He had stubbly growth on his face and his cheeks were ashy gray. Despite what he said, I was afraid. Dr. Maclean gently took the bandage out of my hand and continued the job.

  “There, it’s healing well, my man,” he said. “Take a look, Nurse Fraser.”

  He stood aside so I could see. After standing by when so many open wounds were being treated, I didn’t hesitate to look. And it was a very clean-looking stump. I could see the stitches criss-crossing in the middle.

  “Let’s clean it off and then wrap it up again,” Dr. Maclean said, handing me a soft cloth soaked in fresh water.

  I gently patted the wound, cleaning away the dried blood until it looked almost like the edges of a torn sheet that had been sewed together with black thread.

  “Now watch while I put a fresh bandage on.”

  I was so intent on what we were doing, really fascinated by seeing how a wound could heal and someone who had been badly injured could be made nearly whole again, that I didn’t hear anyone walking up to us and jumped at the sound of the voice.

  “Maclean! What do you think you’re doing?” It was Dr. Menzies.

  “I’m taking care of this man’s stump, sir,” Dr. Maclean said, continuing what he was doing without so much as looking round.

  “Do you suppose we have an excess of bandages and can afford to wrap a perfectly go
od surgery more than once?”

  I shrank back out of the way, leaving the two doctors near the patient. I saw that the bandage had been dirty and needed changing. Would they really have left him in his original, bloody bandage until it was time to fit him with a wooden leg?

  “I’m nearly done here, then we can go and discuss this—that is, if you consider it important enough to take me off the ward where there is much to do.”

  The muscles in Dr. Menzies’s jaw tensed. Any minute now he’s going to bellow, I thought. But instead, he turned on the ball of his foot and marched past me, so close he brushed my skirt, without so much as a glance in my direction.

  Dr. Maclean said nothing. I continued to follow him on his rounds for the next two hours. By the end, I was binding up wounds myself.

  The next day I was assigned to him again. And again he took me around, showing me how to do things, letting me watch as he administered poultices, checked pulses, removed bandages, and bound them up again. Every so often he’d ask me to do something as if I’d been doing it all along.

  At the end of the ward lay a man as still as death. At first I thought his soul had already fled to heaven, but Dr. Maclean took hold of the man’s wrist and pressed it for a few moments.

  “He’s alive, but very weak. I don’t know what could have happened to the fellow. I admitted him myself a few days ago with a clean bayonet wound.” As he spoke he took my hand and, using his own as a guide, pressed my fingers around the soldier’s wrist just as he had done before. “Feel it?”

  I did. It was a soft pulsing, rather slow.

  “Let’s check his wound.”

  This fellow’s injury was low in his belly. Dr. Maclean whisked the sheet off quickly, exposing the unconscious fellow’s privates. I looked away quickly, but not before my cheeks burned.

  “Come now, Nurse Fraser! It’s only the human body.” He was teasing me, but he pulled the sheet up so the soldier was partially covered. “And there’s no time to be modest. Something’s gone wrong with this fellow.”

  The wound was bandaged and it didn’t look like blood or pus seeped through it. “You unbind it while I check the rest of him.”

  It was different taking a bandage off the tender part of a soldier. As was the usual practice, someone had wrapped the gauze right around his back, so I could only snip through all the layers and let the orderlies—or Dr. Maclean—lift him to remove the gauze later.

  It wasn’t long before I revealed his scar. Most of it looked clean and was stitched up nicely. But a little bit down lower, toward his right side, looked funny. His belly was swollen around it. “Dr. Maclean, I think something’s wrong here.”

  He left what he was doing and came right over. “You’re right. There’s some infection. The only thing to do, if my tutors were correct, is to open him up and drain it. The man’s burning with fever and unconscious. Will you help me?”

  I should have been more afraid than I was, but all I could think of then was doing something to help the suffering soldier, who’d survived a bayonet wound only to have it go septic. “I’ll fetch the screen,” I said, heading down to where they were kept at the end of the ward to use for surgeries.

  By the time I struggled back with the folding wooden frame with fabric stretched over it, Dr. Maclean had taken a scalpel from his bag. I quickly shielded us from the view of the other patients. “Won’t you need chloroform?” I asked as he put the point of the scalpel just below the wound, where the soldier’s belly bulged out the most. “And a basin?”

  “There’s no time for chloroform,” he said, “but fetch a basin, quickly!”

  Again I hurried, this time to the supply cupboard, where I also grabbed a few more towels. I hoped Dr. Maclean had all he needed in his kit to stitch the fellow up again when he was done.

  “Steady now. You can look away if you want to,” he said. I shook my head and stayed staring at the razor-sharp blade as it pierced through the skin. The soldier gave a shudder but didn’t wake up. Thank God, I thought.

  At first, nothing happened. Then, as he stuck the blade in deeper, all manner of liquid and blood started pouring out of the slit. I tried to position the basin to catch it, but there was an awful mess. It wasn’t long before the oozing stopped. Dr. Maclean straightened up. “That’s not right. There should be more. How is the man’s pulse, Nurse Fraser?”

  I took his wrist and felt it the way Dr. Maclean had showed me. If anything, the pulse was weaker than before. “I can barely feel it.”

  “He’ll die if we don’t get to the bottom of this,” Dr. Maclean said, and without hesitating he made a much longer and deeper incision with the scalpel. “That’s it!” he said, sounding as if he’d discovered treasure. “The appendix. It’s nearly ruptured and must be removed immediately. Use these clamps to hold the skin apart.”

  He gave me two instruments that looked like scissors, only they weren’t sharp and when I pressed them shut they locked. Without hesitating I took each side of the new wound with the instruments, locked them, and opened up the cavity farther. Blood flowed freely. “Won’t he bleed to death?” I asked.

  “I have to be quick.” Plunging his fingers in confidently but gently, Dr. Maclean teased something out that looked like a mottled sausage, and in seconds had cut it away. Then he mopped up as best he could. I released the clamps when he told me to. “While I hold the wound shut, get the thread and needle, the curved one, from my kit. You’ll have to sew it together.”

  Except that I wouldn’t have wanted to do the holding the way he was, I felt queasy thinking about what he was asking me to do.

  I found everything he described and threaded the needle. I was about to put a knot in the end like we did for sewing stump pillows.

  “Don’t knot it first,” he said. “Leave the end hanging and tie it tight after you’ve made the stitch.”

  With Dr. Maclean’s soothing, calm voice in my ear, I put a dozen stitches in the soldier’s abdomen. They weren’t all the same size but they worked. The wound was closed, and the blood stopped.

  Between the two of us we made short work of bandaging the fellow again. Only after we’d finished completely did I look up at Dr. Maclean. Drips of sweat still trickled down from his hairline to his chin, but he glowed. “We did it, Molly!” I tried not to notice the change from Nurse Fraser to Molly. “I’ve only seen that procedure done in textbooks, although it’s not uncommon. Not really the kind of thing we normally have to deal with here.”

  I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know what he meant. Whatever it was, I could see that our soldier had survived it. He was breathing slowly. I felt his pulse. It was still there, although hardly stronger than before.

  “He’ll have to be watched carefully. Will you check on him whenever you can? I never know where they’ll make me go.”

  Dr. Maclean drew nearer to me until I realized we were only a breath apart from each other. His eyes shone with something—excitement, I thought, but perhaps something else. I searched them for an answer.

  Suddenly, he closed the distance between us and kissed me softly on the mouth. I felt his tongue tasting my lips and teeth. I did nothing, but I didn’t push him away. I was washed over with a warmth that came from deep inside me. Then he pulled away, turning to examine the patient again as if nothing had happened.

  I was about to say I didn’t know if my own schedule would allow me to check in on this fellow we’d just operated on, but at that moment I looked up to see the thunderous face of Miss Nightingale, holding her lamp high.

  Chapter 20

  “Miss Nightingale!” I was so shocked I almost yelled it out. How long had she been there? I knew I was blushing. I felt the blood beating in my veins.

  Dr. Maclean continued his examination of the soldier and only turned when I said her name. He responded to her angry look with a smile. “Ah! Your Nurse Fraser has been a valuable help to me. I have just performed an appendectomy. The poor fellow would have died. Now at least there’s a chance he’ll make it.�
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  Miss Nightingale did not alter her expression of fury, but she said nothing in front of Dr. Maclean except, “Nurse Fraser, your shift ended half an hour ago. If you do not return straight away to our quarters you’ll miss supper.” I could tell that she wanted to say a great deal more than that. I bobbed a curtsy to both of them and walked off, trying not to cower or run, both of which I dearly wanted to do.

  “Where were you?” Emma said in a hoarse, indiscreet whisper. Everyone at the dining table quieted down, no doubt so they could hear what I had to say.

  “I had to help a doctor with an emergency,” I said, unwilling to add any more details. No doubt it would get around quickly enough.

  Emma nudged me in the ribs. By the look on her face, I could tell she thought I was dallying with Dr. Maclean, not nursing. I wanted to explain it all to her, but I knew she’d think I was only making it up, so what was the use?

  The stew tasted dusty in my mouth, and I could feel every swallow trace its way down to my stomach. I hoped it wouldn’t come back up the same way, which sometimes happened when I was very upset.

  I don’t know where Miss Nightingale went or what she did, but she didn’t return until we were about to get ready to retire for the night.

  “Fraser, a word,” she said, not even pausing as she passed through on the way to her rooms in the tower. I didn’t look at Emma, just stood and followed Miss Nightingale, whose lamp was the only illumination for the dark stairs that led up to her office.

  I followed her in. “Close the door,” she said. “Sit.”

  Could it be that she would send me home when I was just beginning to learn something?

  “Tell me exactly what you did, what Dr. Maclean did, and how you came to be alone with him in that particular ward.”

  I wanted to say that we weren’t alone, because we weren’t. But I knew that in her view the soldiers didn’t count. I was the only female there. I should have realized and insisted someone else come along, but I forgot. But then there would have been no kiss …