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1.
"She cried 'Laura,' up the garden,
'Did you miss me ?
Come and kiss me.'"
Laura sits on the edge of Ethel's bed and watches her squeeze the sodden sponge over her neck. Since she is already half-dressed, the thin material of her shoulder straps grows soaked, then grows translucent. It is early in the morning, but Whitechapel is already full of heat. The water lies on Ethel's skin like pearls.
Ethel throws back her head and her whole body shivers deliciously at the coldness. Then she turns, and opens her eyes: when she sees Laura sitting with her chin cupped in her hands, she feels that she really must cross the room and kiss the top of her head, pressing her lips to the soft brown hair. Ethel feels her linen petticoat crumpling between their two bodies: she runs her fingers through Laura's tidy hair, disarranging it. But they are awake early; there is time for Laura to put it up again.
After breakfast, Ethel goes down to the Receiving Room with her curls still damp beneath the starched cap.
Laura works under Miss Luckes, nowadays. When she touches Ethel's hands, and feels the rough skin on them – her own hands have softened – she knows that she has relinquished something that she valued immeasurably.
She was angry with him to begin with, but the feeling has ebbed, now that he is in the hospital less often. Laura hears a lot, working with Miss Luckes: the House Committee won't turn a blind eye to Mr Dean's instability for many more months. But as her wrath eases, with time, the disappointment turns inward: she is no longer angry with him, but (inexplicably) with herself.
Today Miss Luckes looks pale, to Laura. By the afternoon, when the heat is strongest, there are lines of pain around her eyes.
"The weather is very trying, Miss Luckes," Laura ventures.
"For the patients – yes, Nurse Goodley. But these eventualities are not to be considered in nursing. If we are – devoted, we will not submit to circumstance." Miss Luckes puts on her spectacles and bends her head to read a ward report. Laura hears Mr Fenwick singing as he passes the office door: "Take all these, you lucky man – Take and keep them, if you can, if you can!" Laura picks up the letters, and leaves Miss Luckes alone.
In the evening it is cooler. Stocks were planted outside the Nurses' Home, and now the open windows admit their scent. Laura leans on the sill. Ethel's chased silver box is lying there: she touches its cold sides absently, and says, "I hope we'll always be able to come to each other. I couldn't bear to think that – that we might grow so independent that – we'd always have to be lonely."
"Of course we don't have to be lonely, Laura," says Ethel, smiling. Laura's knees are sticking out sharply under her thin nightdress; she is biting her lip. Ethel puts down her book and says, "I mean – you're not Luckes, silly. Things are different, now. Nursing doesn't have to mean that you can't have anything else."
Laura remembers the first night duty, and how afterwards her arms couldn't seem to forget the shape of the hot little bodies they had held. No starched sleeves that night, just her skin and the children cuddled up to her. By the end of the night, the tall iron cots looked like cages, not beds.
At first, when she went into the sluice where the bodies were, it was difficult even to look at them – but she had got used to it. Now, nobody would need to tell her what to do. Straighten the legs. Fold the arms. Thread your needle, again and again. After a week, her fingers stopped hurting.
She has learned to walk silently. A lamp feels natural, in her hand.
Laura crosses the room, sits on the arm of Ethel's chair. She twists one of Ethel's thick curls around her finger. "Luckes says, you know – that nursing is an art. And people forget that. I think she's probably right, Ethel."
When Laura smiles, her whole face alters: all her uncertainty is gone, and only the loveliness remains.
"Laura most like a leaping flame."
2.
"Not the labour of my hands
Can fulfil Thy law's demands."
The second night, she is crisper and sharper than before with Probationer Bennett. She does not wish to rouse that swift kindness again: already the image of herself, weeping ignominiously into the porridge, is a sore place in her mind, to be avoided if she can.
Only she can't put it behind her. Her hands covered with the stuff, and the damned ring lost. The probationer's steadiness – while she, Sister Russell, was losing control of herself, or losing herself altogether, perhaps.
Shall we walk the wards? There is steel in Luckes, Ada knows that. At the end of the second night, she stands in the lamplight and writes out her report. She commends Probationer Bennett for her dutiful obedience to orders during the night. The windows of Wellington grow slowly pink with dawn. Then she is finished, and all the men are sleeping. Bennett is washing up in the sluice.
She remembers writing the letter to Probationer Eastwood's parents.
She worked under me in the Receiving Room, as you probably know, until she was taken ill. She performed her duties with great gentleness and diligence – I am certain that she would have been an excellent nurse. I am unable to tell you how much I wish that we had been able to pull her through: I can only offer you my deepest sympathy and regret.
The ward smells, comfortingly, of lysol.
Her head had moved so restlessly against the pillow, the fair hair darkened and bedraggled with feverish sweat. The bones of her face felt fragile under Ada's hand when she closed the girl's eyes: her skin, still warm. When the staff of the London comes together – all hands on deck, full muster, everyone – she catches herself looking for Eastwood's face among the rest.
Ada is not the woman who let James Walton catch her hand for an instant when – in the cool, tiled, empty corridors of the London – they happened occasionally to pass each other. She must offer something up, she thinks, and this is surely it.
When she undresses, there are red striations on her skin; every hour her uniform afflicts her. Her armour, her cilice: her choice. In the looking-glass, she sees her forehead crinkled with a distress that she does not understand. Nursing, Miss Luckes says, is a sacrifice.
She is not going to be friends with Probationer Bennett.
And now the night is over: it is time for her to return to the Nurses' Home. It is time to rest. She puts on her bonnet, tying the white ribbons under her chin, and goes downstairs.
She reaches the door just after Miss Luckes, who sees her and pauses, waiting for her. "Good morning, Sister Russell," she says. Ada watches her draw on the black gloves, sheathing her fine, strong hands in dark kid. And she is wearing jet ear-rings, small hanging drops of black.
Miss Luckes passes out into the morning, and Ada falls into step beside her.
"Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither."