Hope - Lesley Pearse [212]
It was six in the morning and not yet light, but even so they could see tents, planks of wood, buckets, camp kettles and items of clothing flying around in the wind.
‘Heaven help us!’ Bennett exclaimed. ‘Are we to be swept away by wind now?’
‘But what of the wounded in the tents behind the hospital?’ Hope gasped. ‘It’s more exposed there! They might be lying in the rain!’
Bennett was hanging on to the tent pole, afraid it would snap in two. ‘Get dressed while I hold this,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Pack all our loose stuff into boxes and then we’ll go.’
‘What is that cracking sound?’ Hope asked as she struggled into her dress and put on her boots.
‘It will be the ships in the harbour banging against one another,’ he replied. ‘They will break up, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Leaving their tent as secure as they could make it, they headed for the hospital. The wind was so strong that Hope would have been blown over if Bennett hadn’t kept hold of her hand. But once they came away from the protection of the buildings, the wind blowing straight from the sea caught them, knocking them back against a wall.
Others arrived to help them get the sick out of the most exposed tents and in through the back door of the hospital, but it was a long, hard job, with refuse blowing into their faces as they worked.
It was after nine before they were able to go to the windows at the front of the building and see the damage in the harbour. The sight that met their eyes was truly appalling. The waves outside the harbour wall were so huge that spray was going over the clifftops and bucketing down into the harbour like a flood. The tightly packed ships were grinding into one another and the sides were slowly being torn apart. The Star of the Sea had already lost most of her stern and many ships had lost their masts, causing damage to others as they came down. And the sea was boiling and heaving as if it intended to devour every last vessel in the harbour.
‘But what of the ships outside?’ Hope asked Bennett.
Only a few days earlier in a high wind, several ship’s masters had asked permission to enter the inner harbour, and been refused. They were still out there at anchor, and in real peril.
It was the blackest of days. At ten in the morning the word went round that the Prince had sunk with all hands outside the harbour. Other ships suffered terrible damage too and many lives were lost. When the wind dropped later it began to snow.
The following day was very cold, but fine, and only then could the full extent of the hurricane be counted. Up at the siege, far more exposed than Balaclava, tents, clothing and equipment had been blown away, never to be seen again, including the tents that were being used as field hospitals, and the sick and wounded within them had been left exposed to the wind and rain.
The harbour was full of wreckage, roofs and windows had been torn off buildings, and there was hardly a ship bobbing on the now calm water that hadn’t received extensive damage.
But it was the loss of the Prince that left grown men weeping. For she was laden with all the goods they so desperately needed: warm clothing for the troops, supplies of medicine, brandy, blankets, palliasses, tea and sugar. Ironically, one of the passengers to lose his life when the ship went down was Dr Spence, the Deputy General of Hospitals, who had come out to make an inspection following libellous reports about the medical conditions in the Crimea.
‘Dr Meadows!’
Bennett looked up on hearing his name shouted and saw Angus Pettigrew waving to him from behind some heavily laden bullock carts. The quay was as crowded and chaotic as usual – even a recent order for the filth to be cleared away, a new site built for slaughtering animals, and the decomposing bodies in the water to be towed out to sea, hadn’t made much difference. It was still a disgrace.
Bennett wasn’t anxious to talk to Angus. Although it had been three weeks since he’d shown Hope his letter from Nell, Bennett was still smarting at what had been said to him. He knew Angus had a point. If he had been a real man