by Kate Hewitt
The next few weeks kept Ellen too busy to dwell on her feelings for Jed or the events over Christmas which had made her aware of them. There were lectures to attend, ward duties to perform, and the general hectic affairs of life at the hospital and in the Nurses’ Home.
Halfway through January, Ellen was called upon by Dr. Trowbridge to assist in surgery. She quelled under his imperious summons, for she’d never been in the domed Fenwick operating theater, with its rows of wooden seats for the medical students, the operating table below as if on a stage.
“It’s a simple amputation, Nurse,” Dr. Trowbridge informed her briskly. His normally spotless gray suit was now covered with a white coat and apron, and the surgical instruments, bathed in carbolic acid, lay gleaming in their tray.
In the last decade Pasteur’s Germ Theory had gained wider acceptance, and Kingston General Hospital had been practicing sterilization techniques for several years. It made Ellen feel strange to think of all those little germs flying through the air, like some kind of invisible yet deadly poison, yet she’d seen herself the positive effect of washing hands.
“Nurse Copley, you will hold the appendage.”
Ellen, standing quietly to the side, looked up, startled. “The...?” she began, and then realized what he meant. She was supposed to hold the leg that Dr. Trowbridge planned to amputate.
Swallowing the acidic taste that had pooled in her mouth, Ellen grasped the patient’s swollen leg as another doctor dripped ether into the cone above the man’s face.
“The right leg is gangrenous,” Dr. Trowbridge intoned to the medical students leaning forward in their seats, their faces bright with curiosity, “and will be amputated above the knee. I expect the amputation to take no more than two minutes.”
There was a murmur of admiration, and the assisting surgeon announced that the patient was unconscious.
Dr. Trowbridge brandished his metal serrated saw, and Ellen closed her eyes. She didn’t dare look as she heard the doctor’s methodical sawing, first a soft, easy sound and then with a loud, harsh grinding noise as he cut through the bone.
Her hands grasping the leg were slippery, and she felt lightheaded. In her six months of nurses’ training, she’d had to do a fair number of unpleasant and menial tasks, but nothing quite as bad as this.
Standing there, trying not to sway as spots danced before her eyes, Ellen wondered what she was doing there... in the theater, in the hospital, in Kingston. Had she chosen this path simply because it was safe? Familiar?
Nothing about this moment felt either of those things. She swallowed the bile in her throat, determined not to make a fool of herself, or worse, endanger the operation.
Then it was finished. Ellen stumbled backwards, the bloody appendage still clutched in her hands, the swollen, putrid skin already cooling.
The students were clapping, Dr. Trowbridge was smiling easily, and Ellen was left holding someone’s leg. She felt faintly ridiculous as well as sick.
The assisting surgeon mopped up the blood as Dr. Trowbridge began to sew the wound, and another nurse nudged Ellen towards the bucket in the corner.
It looked like a slop bucket, and she dropped the leg in dubiously, wincing as it landed with a dull thud.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
She hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud until the nurse, one of the second years, grasped her by the elbow and steered her towards the door.
Ellen stumbled out of the theater, gasping in lungfuls of air that did not smell of blood and rot, overlaid with carbolic.
“I don’t think I was meant to be a nurse,” she told Amity as they sat in the parlor that evening. “I nearly fainted when Dr. Trowbridge amputated that poor man’s leg.”
“I’d faint if I were near Dr. Trowbridge,” Amity replied, and Harriet rolled her eyes.
“It happens to all of us. It’s a shock, the first time. You’ll get used to it.”
Ellen shuddered. “I’m not sure I want to get used to it.” She thought of the students, craning to see Dr. Trowbridge’s handiwork, the smell of antiseptic covering the sweet rot of gangrene. Just the memory was enough to make her stomach turn over unpleasantly.
“You will, though,” Harriet said with the confidence of someone who had already endured this particular trial and succeeded.
Ellen leaned back against the settee and closed her eyes. She wasn’t sure she wanted to admit to either Amity or Harriet how much the experience in the operating theater had shaken her, not simply because of the nature of the operation, but rather because it made her question her vocation.
What vocation? An inner voice mocked, and Ellen forced herself to listen to it, to acknowledge that she might not, after all, want to become a nurse.
“I’m going to get some fresh air.” She stood up, to the surprise of the other nurses cozily ensconced in the parlor.
“Go outside?” Harriet squeaked. “It’s got to be well below freezing and pitch dark! You wouldn’t!”
“I would,” Ellen replied firmly, and Amity, watching her with a rather knowing expression, simply said,
“Don’t forget your coat, then.”
Outside it was every bit as cold as Harriet had said, and Ellen strode through the hard, frozen snow until she came to the shore of the bay. It was strange to think this icy little bay was part of the same lake that surrounded Amherst Island so many miles away, that Rose and Dyle, yes, even Jed, might at this moment be gazing at its flat, frozen surface, the moonlight casting the untouched snow in silver.
A wave of homesickness and longing swept over Ellen so she had to blink back tears. It wasn’t longing for the island, which had been made strange by her new feelings for Jed, or Seaton, which had never been a home. It wasn’t a longing for the stuffy little flat in Springburn, or any home she’d known.
Rather, it was a longing for a home she’d never had, a sense of belonging she’d never felt anywhere, perhaps not even at Jasper Lane. She wanted to be known and loved completely, utterly, without regret or shame or fear. She wondered if it ever would happen.
He’s been good to me, Ellen. Don’t doubt it.
“Oh, Mam,” Ellen whispered. “Did you feel that? Even then?” If only she could feel it too. Yet in the cold silence of that icy shore she felt nothing. “It’s too late to want that now,” she said aloud, trying to be sensible even though she felt far from it inside.
Inside she felt as lost as the little girl coming off the train with a Scottish burr and tangled hair.
Perhaps she hadn’t changed so much after all.
And then she thought afresh what she really wanted—Jed. Jed’s love, the security of his arms around her, his face smiling down into hers. Surely that would be a proper home, and it would never, never be hers.
Yet the force of wanting it did not subside, and for a moment it seemed as if her whole body would shake with a terrible, desperate longing before Ellen straightened her shoulders, as she had so many times before. She’d had dreams die before, knew what that felt like. Perhaps not the pain of this, but she’d felt it when Da had left or when she’d seen that her life in Seaton wouldn’t be as rosy as she’d hoped, or when she knew high school was not for her. She couldn’t travel any farther down this road, so she would choose another.
And yet what path could she follow? The thought of being a spinster nurse, living in the Nurses’ Home and spending her days changing sheets and slop buckets, assisting in surgeries as she grew older and lonelier, made Ellen shudder. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
So what would she do? By this time the moon had gone behind a cloud, and the bay was in shadow. Ellen’s feet were numb and her gloveless fingers were stiff with cold. There was nothing for her out here, no one, no answers. Slowly she turned back to the dormitory, her future as uncertain and undecided as ever.
The next few months passed in a bleak yet busy blur of work and duty. Ellen had started taking night duty once a week, and she walked the lonely corridors of the wards checking on sl
eeping patients, her heart leaden within her.
In February a year old baby with a wasting disease, abandoned by her parents, came into the charity ward. Ellen gazed down at her scrawny, scabbed body, her heart twisting in pity.
“Poor mite,” a low voice said next to her, and she turned in surprise to see Dr. Trowbridge. His face was unshaven, his cravat loosened; he must have been up at night as well.
“Yes, sir,” Ellen said after a pause, for she was still a bit intimidated by the handsome and proud doctor. He shot her a surprisingly wry smile.
“We needn’t stand on ceremony at this hour of the night, Nurse—?”
“Copley, sir.”
“Ah yes, Nurse Copley. You are friendly with Nurse Carwell, are you not?”
Surprise shot through Ellen at this observation. She had no idea that someone such as Dr. Trowbridge noticed any of the nurses. “I am, sir.”
“She has a kind heart,” Dr. Trowbridge murmured. “She rocked this poor child the last time she was on night duty. It’s likely the only time the wretched creature was held.”
It sounded like something Amity would do. “May I hold her,” Ellen asked tentatively, “if no one else requires my attention?”
“Of course, Nurse Copley. I think such action is needed, and not just welcome.”
She remained occupied for the next few hours, called away by various patients and tasks, but as dawn crept cold and gray-fingered across the sky, she found a spare moment and returned to the baby’s bed.
“Poor darling,” she murmured, and reached for the infant with her pale and scabby too-thin limbs. Superintendent Cothill had said the child would not last the winter. Ellen had not held many babies before, for she’d only been on duty on the maternity ward a few times, yet something about this unloved child made her heart ache and sudden tears spring to her eyes. When the little girl stirred and nestled against her, twining her scrawny arms around her neck and smelling—even in sickness—of childhood and innocence, something in Ellen broke.
She closed her eyes, tears trickling down her cheeks as she rocked the baby and crooned a wordless lullaby.
Oh God, wouldn’t anyone love this baby? Wouldn’t anyone want her? How could her parents have dumped her like an unwanted parcel—or had they been too burdened by grief and worry to care for her properly? Were their hearts aching within them at the knowledge of what they’d done, what they’d felt they had to do? The sheer misery of it made Ellen nearly shake with grief. Something in this child’s desperate situation called out to her, reminded her of herself and the lonely child she’d once been—and perhaps still was. And she felt another, fresher grief, not just for this poor creature, but for herself, and the child she would surely never have. Holding the baby’s warmth and weight against her made Ellen realize afresh just what kind of life would be passing her by should she remain a nurse. Should Louisa marry Jed.
Swallowing down that hot lump of misery, Ellen pressed a kiss against the baby’s forehead. How could she think of herself and her own small pain when this child’s life was near to ending before it had even properly begun?
Nearer than Ellen even realized, for three days later the bed was empty. Ellen skidded to a shocked halt, her arms full of freshly laundered sheets, as she stared at the stripped bed. She dumped the clean linens on a wheeled cart and hurried to find someone in charge.
Superintendent Cothill swept down on her almost at once. “Where are you going in such a careless fashion, Nurse Copley, with your cap askew?” She pointed one accusatory finger towards an escaped tendril of hair now looped around Ellen’s ear. “Repair yourself at once.”
Ellen barely heard her. “The baby,” she said. “The baby on Watkins Three. What happened to her?”
For a second Superintendent Cothill looked stern, but something of Ellen’s grief and desperation must have got through to her for her face softened slightly. “She died last night, Nurse Copley. Her body is in the morgue.”
Ellen let out a choked cry and whirled away. She barely knew where she was going, or why it mattered so much. Patients died every day. Yesterday she’d had to wash a forty-year-old woman’s body; she’d died of a tumor in her breast in the morning. Death was everywhere in a hospital, yet the life of that child seemed to matter more.
Knowing she was breaking just about every rule, Ellen left the linens on the cart and returned to the Nurses’ Home, now silent and empty in the middle of a busy working day. Alone in the little parlor with its sofas and books, she tore her cap from her head, her hair falling down from its tight bun as pins scattered across the floor. Her shoulders shook with the strength of her sobs.
“Nurse Copley.”
Ellen tensed, for she recognized the voice of the Superintendent. Miss Cothill must have followed her all the way back to the Nurses’ Home.
“I suppose,” Ellen said when she felt she could speak, “I will be dismissed.” Her mouth twisted as she added, “Immediately.”
“You have certainly broken enough rules to be so.” To her surprise she felt the Superintendent’s hand on her shoulder. “But I am not without pity, Nurse Copley. I see the death of that child affected you sorely.”
Ellen let out a shuddering breath. “She was so small, and nobody loved her.”
“Then we must thank God she is with Him now, in a far kinder place, where she will be loved forever.”
Ellen gave a choked cry. “How can you say that?” she demanded. “How can you believe that?” Miss Cothill did not answer, and dimly Ellen was aware of how rude as well as sacrilegious she was being. If the nursing superintendent hadn’t thought to dismiss her before, she would surely do so now.
“I say it,” Miss Cothill finally said quietly, “because I believe it. And in this profession I would hope you would as well, for it is very hard if there is no hope in this world or the next.”
“It is very hard,” Ellen agreed in a low voice. “And yet I’ve seen too much of suffering and pain to believe in anything else. God could have kept that child alive.” Her hands clenched into fists at her sides as old grief washed over her along with the new; perhaps they were one and the same. “He could have kept my mam alive.”
Miss Cothill didn’t speak for a moment. “He could have, but He chose not to.”
“Then I don’t have time for a God like that,” Ellen snapped, and she heard the Superintendent sigh.
“He still has time for you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does, Nurse Copley, whether you wish it to or not.” Miss Cothill sighed again, the sound sorrowful. Her fingers tightened on Ellen’s shoulder. “I do not profess to understand all of His divine ways. To expect to understand would be akin to asking a child splashing in a puddle to grasp the vastness of the ocean.”
“That’s very convenient, to simply say we can’t understand.” Ellen knew she was sailing dangerously close to the wind. She had not just broken rules; she was actively and willfully flaunting them, speaking so disrespectfully to her supervisor. Still she could not help herself. She’d denied her grief and anger at God for so long, and now these losses—Jed, this poor nameless child—had caused it all to rise up in her, a tide of anguish she could no longer suppress.
“It is strange, is it not,” Miss Cothill said after a moment, “that it is not those who suffer who rail at God, but those who witness the suffering.”
Ellen stilled, the Superintendent’s words seeming to hang in the air between them.
He's been good to me, Ellen. Don’t doubt it.
“Perhaps they are too weary and burdened to rail,” she said stiffly.
“Or perhaps God has given them the strength and faith they require in their hour of need.”
“Well, then,” Ellen said, bitterness lacing every word like poison, “I wish He’d give it to me.”
“Do you, Nurse Copley?” Miss Cothill asked quietly. “Do you really?” She withdrew her hand from Ellen’s shoulder and turned to the door. “I shall give you a few moments to
order yourself. Then I expect you back on Watkins Three to finish your shift.”
Alone in the little parlor the Superintendent’s words spun around in Ellen’s empty mind. Hugging herself, she knew she had no answers, as well as no faith, whether she wanted them or not.
FOUR
“There’s a visitor for you in the parlor.” Harriet’s face was flushed with curiosity and excitement as she came into the bedroom she shared with Ellen. It was a lovely April afternoon, the sun streaming through the window and sparkling on the lake. “He’s quite handsome, and he seems so eager to see you! Have you a beau, Ellen?”
“Not the last time I looked,” Ellen replied with a small smile. The only person who had called on her was Lucas, and she hadn’t seen him in months. Ellen had been too busy, and also too listless, to consider why he had not invited her out again. The months since Christmas had been filled with drudgery, and yet still provided far too much space and time to think and remember and frankly feel miserable. The ache in her heart had eased somewhat, but Amity and Harriet had both noticed that Ellen was not herself, if she even knew what that was.
Shrugging aside the familiar fog of those concerns, Ellen checked her appearance in the small mirror above the wash basin. Her reflection revealed that her hair hadn’t quite fallen from its pins after a long day on the wards, and quickly straightening her cap and skirt, she hurried downstairs.
“Lucas!” She moved forward warmly, surprisingly and truly glad to see him. Any familiar face felt welcome now. “I haven’t seen you in an age.”
“I know. I suppose we’ve both been busy.” Yet he didn’t quite look at her as he said it, and Ellen wondered if he were telling the truth. Ellen thought of her harsh words to Jed at Christmas. Had Lucas overheard as well? Could Jed possibly have told him? The thought sent a prickly heat spreading through her body, even as she silently acknowledged that just about the last thing Jed would do was to tell Lucas what she had called him.
“I’m sorry I haven’t come sooner, Ellen,” Lucas said after she’d pressed his cheek to his and stepped back. “I always meant to...”
