In the Shadow of the Lamp

by Susanne Dunlap

  “He died,” I said, too shocked to think of a better way to say it, reeling with the knowledge that Will had thought enough about me to write of me to Lucy.

  Lucy stopped with her mouth open, closed it, and poured us both tea. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. We were never anything but friends. Will was mistaken. We didn’t get married.” What point would there be in saying anything else?

  “I don’t …” Her voice faded off and her cheeks went red.

  I didn’t want her to be embarrassed or uncomfortable, so I thought I’d better make conversation. “I hear that Will has been very helpful to my friend Emma, a widow. Please wish them joy for me the next time you write to him.” I looked down. Much as I’d thought about it, I’d never said the words aloud before. It hurt me more than I expected to let them go like that, as if putting them out there gave them power, made them real.

  “Emma? He’s never mentioned any Emma.” A dawning look came across Lucy’s face, like a cloud cleared away and light spread all over.

  At that moment the little girl started crying again, perhaps because I was so caught up in what Lucy was saying that I’d stopped bouncing her on my knee. Lucy reached her arms out and I gave the warm, cuddly body back to her, sorry I couldn’t hold on to her longer. “I’ll just put her down for her nap. Wait here … Come, Arthur!” She reached out her hand and little Arthur took it, with a sad backward glance at me as they went through to the kitchen.

  I sat in the quiet for a few moments, the muffled sounds of children playing outside making me feel wistful for my home. I’ll have to leave soon, I thought, and reached in my valise for the money I meant to give to Lucy.

  “Molly?”

  I stood up so fast that I dropped the purse with the coins and they scattered over the wood floor.

  “Will!”

  There he was, in front of me, plain as day. He leaned on a cane. “Will, I thought—”

  He walked right up to me, matching each step of his right foot with the cane. “You thought wrong, from what Lucy tells me. The question is, did I?”

  At first I couldn’t look into his eyes. I didn’t expect to see him, and yet it seemed so natural that I would. I wondered if I was talking to a ghost, like that time with Mrs. Drake. “I didn’t … I mean, it’s not …”

  Will reached out and touched my chin with his fingertips, tilting it up so I’d have to look right at him. His hand was warm. This was no ghost.

  And his eyes. They were clear and blue, as I always remembered. But didn’t I also remember that look in them that reached out to me without any tricks, with no hiding or deceit, nothing complicated or shadowy, only something honest and true?

  I let my eyes answer his. I felt my heart overflow, like it was reaching out for his, across the space that separated us. How could I not have seen this before? How could I ever have thought that Will wasn’t the one, the only one, who cared enough about me to follow me to Turkey, and who I cared enough about to come to the one place in London where I would find him, if he was home?

  “The answer, Will Parker, is yes.”

  He smiled. His lips touched mine, like he was afraid I’d change my mind all of a sudden. But I put my arms around his neck and held him to me. I heard his cane drop to the floor as he leaned into me and wrapped his arms around behind my back, pulling me close. We kissed so long I nearly lost my breath.

  “You’re not going to go off to Turkey again, are you?” he asked, gently pushing a curl of my hair out of my eyes when we’d separated enough to look at each other again.

  “No. I don’t think Miss Nightingale would have me, for one thing!”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.” He nestled his nose into my hair, tipping my hat off and onto the ground.

  “But she gave me a recommendation. I can work at St. Thomas’s.”

  Will pulled away from me enough to see me. “Very impressive. We’ll have to talk about it, decide what to do.”

  “I thought this called for a celebration,” Lucy said, walking back in with a tray, three glasses, and a bottle of beer. She was smiling so wide her eyes crinkled up.

  Will courted me properly for a few months while I worked at St. Thomas’s. It took some convincing, but he agreed eventually I could work after we got married. I promised I’d stop if a baby came, though. They’d not let me work if I was in the family way anyhow.

  I took him home to see my mum and dad. They were so proud of me they invited all the neighbors in just to wish us good luck.

  I never told Will about Dr. Maclean, what really happened. I think about him now and again, though. I imagine him looking down, happy for my happiness. That would have been like him.

  I didn’t see Miss Nightingale in London, but I knew she was there after the war ended. They said she was sick. I would have gone to visit her, only she was a fine lady and I was just a parlormaid turned nurse. But every night in my prayers I thanked her, more than even the rest of England thanked her for all she’d done for the soldiers. I thanked her because she understood me more than anyone else ever had, and she still let me be what I was.

  Will did too, in his way. I’m as happy as a body has a right to be. We expect our first little one soon, sometime around my nineteenth birthday—my real nineteenth birthday.

  But happy as I am, I’ll never forget Dr. Maclean and how he made me understand what love was. I know now it could never have been. There was so much more separating us than keeping us together. But it was Dr. Maclean who taught me there were different ways to be and to do things, that taking a chance could have good results if it’s done for the right reasons. Most of all, he taught me how love could bind two people across oceans and through walls, living or dead, forever.

  Acknowledgments

  I would especially like to thank my wonderful editor, Melanie Cecka, who was not only instrumental in making In the Shadow of the Lamp the best it could be, but whose fascination with Florence Nightingale was the true inspiration for this book.

  Thanks are also due to the staff of the Florence Nightingale Museum, who were forthcoming with information that would have been difficult for me to find.

  Finally, a huge thank you to my agent, Adam Chromy, with his army of astute readers who always manage to see the big picture; to Stephanie Cowell, a superb writer, who despite her own busy schedule of writing and promoting her books is ever ready to read and give thoughtful advice; and to all my cohorts of writers, fans, friends, and supporters on Facebook and Twitter, who shared the gestation of this novel with me.

  Author’s Note

  In the Shadow of the Lamp was as much a discovery for me as I hope it will be for the reader. Finding out about the life of the famous Florence Nightingale, who established modern nursing practices as we know them, was a revelation. She had a powerful effect on everyone around her, was unflaggingly energetic, but was also abrasive, single-minded to the point of obsession, and self-sacrificing in the extreme. Her ideas about nursing were no-nonsense and entirely based in practicality at a time when the idea of contagion and germs was hardly understood. Pain was thought to be an important part of surgery—evidence that the bad was being purged—and the idea of cleaning surgical instruments unheard of.

  Nightingale’s common-sense precepts of cleanliness, nourishment, and fresh air revolutionized nursing. She strongly advocated for the use of chloroform in surgery and for shielding patients from other patients’ views while being treated. Most remarkable of all, she was a well-bred, upper-class lady whose family initially resisted her call to nursing as a profession. In Nightingale’s day, nursing was practiced by low-class women with no skill and little inclination for the work.

  One of the things that made writing this book a challenge was that when the British government asked Nightingale to go to the Crimea and improve the care systems for injured and ill British soldiers, she did so only on the condition that she could choose her own nurses. The ones she selected had to be older than twenty-four, have nursing e
xperience, and preferably not be too attractive or marriageable. This does not describe a heroine I’d necessarily like to read about! And Nightingale herself was in her thirties by this time and had turned down a very good marriage proposal to dedicate her life to nursing, making her unsuitable as a teen protagonist.

  Enter Molly Fraser, a character entirely of my own invention. There was no question that everyone’s imagination was fired up by reports of the conflict in the Crimea and especially of Nightingale and her nurses going to save the day. So why not a young parlormaid who finds herself in a difficult situation? There’s no evidence that anyone stowed away to go with Nightingale, but stranger things have happened in history.

  As to which characters are historical and which are not: the names of all the nurses, except for Molly and Emma, appear on the lists of nurses who were at one time or another with Nightingale in the Crimea. Volumes of Nightingale’s writings and letters exist, and she has been the subject of many biographies and studies. Yet very little information about the nurses who accompanied her remains, apart from the journal of Sarah Anne Terrot, one of the Sellonite Sisters of Mercy. She did not remain long in Turkey, having been sent home as an invalid after a few months.

  While Nightingale wrote numerous letters to the authorities and to her family, they rarely mention the nurses unless it is to complain of their incompetence and bad behavior. She was primarily occupied with the big picture: managing the ambitious enterprise of getting supplies to the hospital, caring for the men, laying down rules, establishing schedules and systems, and recording data about illness.

  As to the doctors featured in this book: a real Dr. Menzies was in charge of the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, but my Dr. Menzies is an amalgamation of several doctors Nightingale dealt with there. Dr. Maclean is an invention, as are the doctors at the front in Balaclava.

  Another important historical figure whom I touch briefly upon is Mary Seacole. She was a Jamaican nurse who went to London in hopes of traveling to the Crimea with Nightingale, but after finding that the services of a black woman were not wanted, raised enough money to get there on her own. She established an outpost near Balaclava that was part infirmary, part general store, part tavern. Nightingale probably met her, and is reported to have said that Mother Seacole did some good for the soldiers—although she also said her establishment was little better than a brothel. Seacole arrived in March 1855, and so would have been very new to the soldiers at the time of my story. I have taken the small liberty of establishing her there a little earlier so that Molly and Emma could meet her.

  In the annals of Nightingale’s time at Scutari there is almost no mention of the individual soldiers she came into contact with, and so Thomas and Will are also fictional. The conditions they faced, however, are not.

  Particularly fascinating is the mystique that attached itself to Nightingale despite her pragmatic, businesslike approach. “The lady with the lamp” became a common figure in the newspapers and magazines of the times and showed a caring Nightingale with a lamp that looked a bit like the kind a genie might pop out of. In 1858, The Ladies Repository wrote:

  “She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.” (p. 361)

  Nightingale did indeed patrol the wards at night with a lamp, but the true irony is in her reason for those nightly vigils: she didn’t trust any of her nurses to check on the wards at night because they might make mischief with the men. Her solution was to take that duty upon herself.

  One historical fact about Nightingale that I took license with was the trip to Balaclava. Nightingale did go there, but not with the first group of nurses who established the Field Hospital. Mrs. Langston led that party with a few nurses on her own, with Nightingale’s sanction. Nightingale went out some months later to inspect the facilities, and it was there that she first became very ill.

  Despite her iron will and unflagging efforts, the illness Nightingale contracted in the Crimea was debilitating and stayed with her for the remainder of her life. Not long after returning to London when the conflict was over, she became bedridden and remained a virtual prisoner in her room for the rest of her days. Astonishingly, although she was an invalid, she lived to the ripe old age of ninety, dying peacefully in her sleep in 1910. The British government offered to have her buried in Westminster Abbey, but her relatives declined.

  Her legacy lives on. The rolling screens used in hospitals to give patients and doctors privacy during examinations are called Nightingales. Many schools of nursing owe their beginnings to her, and the original Florence Nightingale School of Nursing, established in 1860, remains today as the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at King’s College London.

  The Crimean War—the scene of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade—is perhaps most remembered for the reforms brought about by Florence Nightingale and her nurses. It remains a rarity among bloody conflicts for having had such a lasting and positive effect on humankind.

  ALSO BY SUSANNE DUNLAP

  The Musician’s Daughter

  Anastasia’s Secret

  Copyright © 2011 by Susanne Dunlap

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

  whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief

  quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  First published in the United States of America in April 2011

  by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers

  E-book edition published in April 2011

  www.bloomsburyteens.com

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Bloomsbury BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Dunlap, Susanne Emily.

  In the shadow of the lamp / by Susanne Dunlap. — 1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Sixteen-year-old Molly Fraser works as a nurse with Florence Nightingale

  during the Crimean War to earn a salary to help her family survive in nineteenth-century

  England.

  ISBN 978-1-59990-565-5 (hardcover)

  1. Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910—Juvenile fiction. 2. Crimean War, 1853–1856—Juvenile fiction. 3. England—Social conditions—19th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910—Fiction. 2. Crimean War, 1853–1856—Fiction. 3. England—Social conditions—19th century—Fiction. 4. Nurses—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D92123In 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010021158

  ISBN 978-1-59990-566-2 (e-book)