Hope - Lesley Pearse [211]
‘Yes you are. It’s hardly surprising, she’s a great prize, and when you are the only person in her life, you can have all of her. But take some advice from me, don’t cage her. Let her fly!’
‘And am I supposed to believe that you understand anything about married love?’ Bennett said with icy sarcasm.
‘Sometimes those on the outside can see it clearer than from the inside. But Bennett, I’ve said enough for one day, and you are as exhausted as your wife. Go to bed now before you keel over.’
Bennett was sorely tempted to lift Hope from the bed and take her home, just to show Captain Pettigrew that he cared nothing for his advice or opinions. But he was too tired for protests and Hope looked far too comfortable to disturb.
‘But where will you sleep?’ he asked.
Angus gave a wry smile. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll find another bed.’
In the cold, wet days that followed, the general euphoria in Balaclava which had come with the Russian retreat at Inkerman faded quickly. The almost constant gunfire up at Sebastopol, and the received reports that little or no damage had been done to the town defences, made it increasingly clear that it could not be taken quickly. The harsh reality was that the troops would almost certainly be in the trenches all winter.
Anxiety grew daily in the hospital. Forty or fifty men reported sick every day and were sent down there. Another twenty or thirty would be wounded – in fact there were only 16,500 men fit for service when initially there had been 35,000. Cholera was still with them, along with typhus, typhoid and malaria, although the last three were usually just classed as general fever. With few medicines, and not enough nutritious, easily digestible food available for the sick, their chances of recovery were poor.
Bennett was often filled with white-hot rage, for the urgently needed goods and provisions would come into the port, but bureaucratic bungling made it impossible to get them to the appropriate destination. Men were building a railway for a siege train which when it was finished would make transportation to the Heights much easier. But this monstrously hard work was enough to kill men already weakened by sickness and hunger.
Had it not been for a black Jamaican woman called Mother Seacole by the men, the wounded lying for hours on the icy quay in stretchers waiting to be taken aboard a ship bound for Scutari would have perished. She was one of the army of sutlers who had turned up to sell their goods to the men. But although she was in the Crimea for business, and had a store outside the town where she sold everything from hot meals to new boots, she was a genuinely kindly woman who had good nursing skills, and she was there on the quay most days, doling out cups of tea and other little comforts.
Up at the siege, warm clothing and blankets were desperately needed, the food was scarce, monotonous and barely edible, and it was hard to find fuel for fires. The sick sent down from there spoke of sitting in a water-filled trench all night, then going back to their leaking tents without a change of clothes to put on.
Hope and Bennett might not have to sit in the rain all night, but they too had found how miserable a home a tent could be in bad weather. With no chairs, table or other comforts, they had to make do with medicine crates, and when it rained they couldn’t even light a fire to cook something to eat.
On the night of 14 November, Bennett had managed to get hold of some chicken from the butcher, and they’d fried it and baked some potatoes in the fire. Washing this down with rum and water, they felt they’d had a banquet. For once, instead of falling asleep immediately from exhaustion, they’d chatted, about Captain Pettigrew’s good recovery, of how long it would be before Hope got a letter from Nell, and whether Alice would send out the foodstuffs and warm clothes Bennett had asked her for.
They woke with a start to the sound of wind hauling at the tent, threatening to rip it to shreds, and when they looked cautiously out they saw what could only be called a hurricane.