Exhaustion took my body, but my mind was alive with all I’d seen. Something in me was shifting, changing. I felt as if I’d been touched with an electric wire. I’d never sleep. I rolled over and reached down, finding the book and the locket under the bed.
I pulled both of them onto the bed next to me and propped myself up on an elbow, opening the book. Practical Nursing: An Everyday Textbook for Nurses. I ran my finger down the table of contents.
Nina had told me there would be no time to read at Portis House, and she’d been right. I owned no books myself, but I had perused the shelf of books in the common room—Ethan Frome, The Thirty-Nine Steps—and silently selected the ones I wanted. Books were a means to an end, even novels; for the more a person knew, the less she could be taken in.
Treatment of infectious disease. Bandaging practices. The lancing of boils. On disinfection. Correct suturing. I’d been caught unawares earlier when Dr. Thornton had expected me to inject a patient and I’d hesitated. I’d been lucky neither man had noticed. I turned to the chapter titled “Intravenous injections” and began to read.
Footsteps approached from the hall and I flipped the book shut, shoving it under my pillow just as Martha came to the door. “Matron sent me,” she said. “Do you want the curtains shut?”
“No,” I said. “I won’t sleep.”
“It doesn’t help much anyway,” she agreed. “Matron says I’m to bring you supper if you like.”
I’d been sent away before supper. Matron wanted to get rid of me that badly. I had no wish to put yet more work on Martha, who had handled night shift already. “I’m not hungry.”
Martha sat on the edge of the bed and groaned as the weight came off her feet. “I’m sorry about night shift, but I can’t say I’m sorry for my own sake. I’m so tired. I’ll appreciate a good sleep tonight— that’s for certain.”
I was still lying on my side, propped on an elbow, and from my position I could see the thin bones of her shoulder blades through the back of her blouse. How someone as small and thin as Martha accomplished the monumental workload at Portis House was rather surprising. “What do I do on night shift, then?” I asked.
“Oh, yes.” Martha rubbed her ankles, not willing to go quite so far as to remove her shoes. “Well, there’s a desk next to the stairwell door in the men’s hallway—you’ve likely seen it.”
“Yes. In the nook built into the wall.”
“That’s the one. That’s the night nurse’s desk. You sit there, though you make rounds once per hour, checking on the men. Their doors should be open, or at least ajar, except for Patient Sixteen. Those are the rules. You go as quietly as you can and you check to see they’re sleeping.”
“It sounds dull.”
Martha rubbed her eyes. “Perhaps. It’s easy, unless any of the men has a bad night. Then it gets more exciting than you’d like.”
I thought of the sessions I’d listened to earlier that day. “They have nightmares?”
“If it happens, you get the orderly—I think Roger is on duty tonight. Though you likely won’t have to fetch him, because he’ll hear and come on his own. You shouldn’t approach the patient without an orderly, because when they’re in that state, they tend to thrash. You probably know all of this from London.”
“Just tell me.”
“Well, all right. Most of them calm down nicely once they’re awake. If a man wakes and he doesn’t calm down, there are hypodermics in the nurse’s desk, locked in the drawer, for emergencies.”
I lay back, feeling the hard edge of the book under my pillow. I’d have to study before I went on duty tonight, and pray that things were calm. “And what do I do the rest of the time? When the men aren’t having nightmares?”
“You count linens,” said Martha. “The inventory lists are in the top drawer of the nurse’s desk, as well as a pen and ink. Both the upstairs and the downstairs closets. Make sure to count the linens on each man’s bed, or the count will be off.”
I stared at her. “We count the linens every night?”
Martha yawned. “Yes, and the inventory goes to Matron in the morning. She always checks, so you can’t cut corners. Write a nightly report and leave it in the desk drawer; Boney takes it to her every day. Oh, goodness—I have to get up or I’ll fall asleep where I’m sitting.” She moved to rise, but when she put her hand down on the mattress, she stopped. “What’s this?” She picked up the locket and peered at it.
“I found it,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “It was under the bed. It isn’t mine.”
“This was Maisey’s.” Martha turned it over in her hands. “She must have left it.”
“Is that Nurse Ravell? The one who was here before me?”
Martha nodded. “Her initials are engraved on the back, just here.”
I looked closely as she showed me. “Martha, don’t you think it strange that she left her boots and her locket behind?”
Martha frowned, uneasy. “Perhaps. She was an odd girl.”
“What did she say when she left?”
Now Martha looked away. “Nothing. She didn’t speak to us, that is. We didn’t see her when she left.”
“What does that mean?”
“She went on night shift one night, and in the morning she was gone.”
I could do nothing but stare.
Martha glanced at me, caught the look on my face. “I’m sure there was nothing strange about it. She kept to herself, that’s all. Perhaps she’d just had enough.”
“Martha, for God’s sake. She left in the middle of the night?”
“Not necessarily.” She bit her lip. “She could have gone at dawn.”
Something uneasy turned in my stomach. Portis House was far from anything, deliberately so. How would a girl get out of here alone, in the dark or in the first reaches of light? Had she walked all the way across the bridge? What made her want to leave so badly that she would walk out during a shift, leaving her boots, her locket, and her book behind?
After Martha had gone, I pulled the book from under my pillow again. A page at the front featured a drawing of Florence Nightingale treating the wounded in the Boer War, etched in ink. She was a female silhouette in long sleeves and Victorian skirts carrying a lantern across a battlefield, its light shining from the folds of her cloak. On the ground before her a wounded man reached up, begging for help, his gaze on her benevolent face. The Lady with the Lantern, the caption read. And beneath it: The angel of the battlefield, which every nurse should aspire to be.
I looked at Florence for a long time. She was as perfect, as impassive, as the statue of Mary outside, but there was something about the way she stood, the confident sway of her cloak, that I found myself liking. They drew her as pretty, but I imagined her as tough as old leather. I scoffed at myself and turned back to the chapter on hypodermics.
The first time I read the chapter, I stumbled over words I didn’t know, so I read it again. I stared at the diagrams, memorizing them, and then I read the chapter yet again, sentence by sentence. I’d never had much education, but education, in my experience, was no match for doggedness. If I wanted to learn something, I was capable of studying it in a book until I understood it, no matter how long it took. In the end it was a matter of winning over the words that refused to obey, of comprehending them through sheer determination.