Hope - Lesley Pearse [137]
Hope smiled. ‘That sounds as if you don’t believe in God.’
‘I’ll believe in Him if He chooses to end this epidemic,’ he chuckled. ‘Or taps me on the shoulder and shows me how it starts. I have had many an argument with Mary Carpenter about faith. She tells me I should be ashamed for having none. But what about you, Hope? Are you a believer, or a doubter like me?’
‘It depends,’ she smiled. ‘When I was selling kindling I’d offer up a little prayer each time I approached a front door. I believed if they bought some wood, I doubted if they didn’t. Betsy used to say that gin worked better than religion. One glass and your troubles fade away.’
She watched his face, expecting a look of alarm which would quickly be followed by a little sermon on the evils of drink. But he only smiled.
‘I should go back to the ward now,’ she said. ‘And you have patients to see.’
‘Yes, I have,’ he nodded, ‘a great many of them. Look after yourself, Hope. Don’t despair, will you?’
Hope often thought of that request from Bennett in the following two weeks, for it was hard not to despair, surrounded as she was by suffering. Every day patients died, and as fast as they were carried away to be buried, new ones were brought in. Often these new victims’ names were unknown, and to Hope it seemed the cruellest stroke of all to die without an identity.
Sal and Moll took an almost fiendish delight in reporting the panic in the town, and how people were fleeing in droves, the rich in their carriages and the poor trekking out to sleep in fields rather than risk catching the disease. They said that at night the streets were deserted, and many ships were refusing to come into Bristol docks because of the epidemic.
They sagely said that when the weather turned cold and wet there would be hundreds of poor and desperate people turning to the workhouses for shelter and food. They would be too frightened to return to the infected rookeries they’d run from, and they’d have no money for anywhere else.
But the hot weather continued relentlessly and the stink from the river behind the hospital was overpowering. Hope found herself daydreaming more and more often of walking in the coolness of Lord’s Wood. She would remember the clean smell of damp earth, the way the sunlight filtered down through the canopy of leaves, and the utter peace; she wanted to be there so badly it hurt.
At night when she retreated to her little room she would bury her nose in a sprig of lavender or rosemary bought from a young girl who stood by the hospital entrance, and remember the garden of her childhood home. She wished she could see her brothers and sisters, be a child again and feel the warmth of their love for her. It wasn’t right that at only seventeen she was shut away in this death house.
Bennett was what stopped her running away. However hard and disgusting her work often was, he was counting on her and she couldn’t let him down. Thanks to him she had a few remedies at her disposal now. When new patients were still in the early stages of the disease she spooned syrup of rhubarb into them every few hours, put mustard poultices on their bellies, gave them ginger or cinnamon tea and put more blankets on them to keep them warm. Six of these patients didn’t sink into the second stage, which delighted her, but she had no way of knowing whether it was the result of her nursing or merely God’s will. But, determined they should recover and defy the legend that no one ever left the hospital, she fed them arrowroot mixed with boiled milk until they were able to manage soup.
But six recoveries out of seventy or more that had either already died or would die soon wasn’t good enough, and she had to battle against the apathy of everyone else involved with the cholera ward.
Sister Martha was so weak that everyone took advantage of her. Moll and Sal did as little as possible, only stirring themselves when someone died to rob them of their trinkets. Even the man in the stores often refused Hope more supplies of soap, soda and vinegar. Once he said it was a waste to lavish such things on