Hope - Lesley Pearse [130]
‘Come on in, Hope. Alice has done you proud,’ he said, smiling appreciatively at her appearance. Yet she had the feeling that the flush on his face was from anger at something his uncle had been saying.
Dr Cunningham was standing with his back to the fireplace. He looked at her with a sour expression and didn’t comment on her changed appearance.
‘So you think you’ll be a good nurse, do you?’ he said curtly.
That sounded like sarcasm, and she wasn’t sure how to respond. ‘I’m not sure, sir,’ she said, clasping her hands together in front of her. ‘But I shall try.’
‘To prove yourself, d’you mean?’ he growled.
‘Yes, sir.’ She glanced at the younger doctor, noting that he looked distinctly nervous.
‘Then I shall place you somewhere where your character and ability will be tested,’ he said. ‘This evening my nephew will be returning to St Peter’s Hospital, you will accompany him and he will hand you over to the head nurse there. As I am sure Dr Meadows has told you, they are in desperate need of nurses.’
Hope’s heart plummeted. If Dr Cunningham had said he was sending her to the general hospital by Bedminster Bridge she would have been scared but not horrified because it was a newly built hospital and a good one by all accounts. But St Peter’s was viewed with the same terror as the gallows. It was a well-known fact that most entering its doors came out in a coffin, and rumours abounded about the brutality and the squalor within.
She was just about to retort that she would sooner return to the woods to live, when she saw a wily look in the old doctor’s eyes. All at once she realized what he meant by testing her. He hoped she’d refuse; that way he could feel justified in ordering her out of his house and his nephew’s life.
‘I can’t say I’m grateful for such a position,’ she said with all the dignity she could muster. ‘But as I know you wish to test me, then I’ll go and prove I have some ability.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Dr Meadows blurted out, and when she turned to look at him she could see dismay written all over his face. ‘St Peter’s is a hell-hole; there is no other word for it. And with the cholera raging there you will be in danger yourself.’
‘Bennett!’ Dr Cunningham said reprovingly. ‘I will not have you making such remarks about our hospital; the board of health has spent a great deal of money on improving conditions there in the last few years.’
‘You haven’t set foot inside it since the riots eighteen years ago,’ the younger man spat at him. ‘If you had, you would know that the money allocated to it was siphoned off by greedy aldermen for their own pet projects. If I could have one wish it would be that the people of Bristol would riot again and destroy St Peter’s in the same way they destroyed the prison last time.’
‘You were only a child during the riots. What you’ve heard is greatly distorted,’ Dr Cunningham protested.
‘I was staying here,’ Bennett reminded him coldly. ‘I remember you returning covered in blood from patching up the wounds of those slashed by cavalry sabres. You wept about the carnage and the appalling conditions in the hospital. If what I heard was distorted, I heard it from you!’
‘Enough!’ The old man held up one hand to silence his nephew. ‘None of that is relevant. You brought this young woman here today because you believed she could be a nurse. Those poor souls in the hospital need a good nurse far more than a rich dowager with gout does. I say she should go where she is needed.’
All at once Hope saw how the land lay between the two men. Cunningham had probably once been as compassionate and dedicated as his nephew was, but age and perhaps wealth had changed him. Yet what he said made good sense, even if it was hypocritical to send her to a place he wouldn’t set foot in himself.
Hope knew that emptying the chamber pot of some rich and possibly cantankerous old woman would never give her any satisfaction or teach her anything new. But she had an affinity with the poor, and if she could offer a little