Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [573]
As she stood on the platform at Milford station, and looked back eastwards towards Southampton, the shining metal tracks seemed to promise a distant, brighter destiny, a larger world.
It would be hers, very soon.
Jane Shockley was going to leave Sarum. She was going to serve. She wanted it so passionately.
She was of medium height, her hair a very light auburn brown with, sometimes, a flash of red. Her blue eyes looked out with a directness that could be disconcerting. Her face was not beautiful. “My nose,” she used to lament with a laugh, “is too big.” But she was considered, by those at her school who knew about such things, very passable.
She picked up her small valise. The whalebone stays pinched her. “I wish our stomachs,” she often complained, “were not supposed to be quite so unnaturally small.” Where was the porter?
A thought suddenly struck her. Service or passion. Which had she really been seeking? She smiled at herself. Both, probably.
She moved along the train towards the engine, hissing by the station house.
She was back at Sarum – but not for long.
True, they had rejected her at the interview. She did not blame them. But they had also told her what she must do, and nothing was going to stop her now.
She looked up at the familiar scene – there they were, her childhood friends, the huge, bare chalk ridges in their great horseshoe, staring down at the city they enclosed. In the north, the mound of Old Sarum, and there, in the centre, was the spire, scraping the silent blue sky above. Sarum. She loved the place. It was and always would be part of her.
But yesterday she had seen Florence Nightingale.
Like everything to do with the remarkable expedition of Florence Nightingale, it had all happened so fast.
It was only ten days since the article by Russell in the Times – one of the most dramatically influential that august journal ever printed – had startled all England like a thunderclap. Wounded British soldiers, who had gone out to fight England’s just and necessary war to halt the advance of the despotic Czar Nicholas on the Crimea, were being treated worse than animals in the disgraceful hospital conditions in Scutari.
It was a challenge to the empire. Why, even her allies the French were sending out fifty Sisters of Mercy. In such circumstances, could England do less?
Jane Shockley had seen the letter in the Times appealing for nurses a few days later. She had hesitated. Was she worthy? Then in Wilton, by chance, she had met Mrs Sidney Herbert.
“Go and see them at least.” It was all the encouragement she needed.
The role played by the Herbert family in the expedition of Florence Nightingale was decisive. By God-given good fortune, it was a younger son of the old Lord Pembroke, Sidney Herbert, who with his wife chanced to be friends of the redoubtable Miss Nightingale with her little hospital for gentlewomen in Harley Street. He also happened to be a junior minister conducting the war.
He had acted completely on his own initiative – invited Miss Nightingale to go, though female nurses had never been used on campaign before, found funds, and provided the Herbert house in Belgrave Square as headquarters of the enterprise.
The Herberts and Florence Nightingale moved quickly. The interviews for nurses at Belgrave Square started three days after the Times article.
They had not taken long with Jane. She was interviewed by Miss Stanley and Mrs Bracebridge; they were friendly but frank with her.
“Your qualifications from the Salisbury Training College are admirable for a teacher, and we see you are sincere, but you are not trained as a nurse.”
“I hoped – I thought perhaps – you might have room for a few volunteers willing to learn,” she suggested. And then with inspiration: “Are not trained nurses hard to find?”
The two women smiled ruefully.
“Yes. But we shall find them.”
Jane sighed.
“Those that come must be very dedicated,” she said.
And it had been then that the unexpected voice behind her cut through the room like a knife.
“Not at all.”
She had not heard her come