Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [574]
“They are coming for money.” A strong, pleasant face, piercing eyes, a mouth that twitched with amusement. “You look shocked,” she laughed. “None of them,” she went on, “save perhaps one, has dedication, a sense of mission,” she sniffed, “yet.” She gazed at Jane. “But they’re trained. I have Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Tractarians, and others who may be anything. But they are trained. Are you serious in wanting to nurse?’
“Yes.” She thought she was.
“Get training in a hospital. Then I can use you.”
“How shall I apply?”
“Why, use the penny post girl! What a question.”
She blushed.
“I shall.”
“A great empire needs many dedicated servants,” the great woman smiled. “Good luck.”
Empire and service.
A British empire that stretched all round the globe; a British empire that, directed by strong men like Palmerston, would swiftly humble any who failed to show respect to her citizens; an empire where Englishmen grew rich, thanks to free trade and Mr Gladstone’s low taxes. Empire and free trade: this was the combination that most English towns, even sleepy Salisbury, favoured.
Service and empire: serving the mighty East India Company, and living well besides; serving as officers, administrators, missionaries: these were things the Shockleys of Sarum did. Nothing thrilled her more than to receive the letters from her brother Bernard on his plantation in India, or her Uncle Stephen the missionary, from Africa – messages from the empire, that wide and exciting world.
Her upbringing in Salisbury close had been conventional. Though her father, Ralph’s elder son, had died of consumption when she was only nine, old Frances Porteus had conveniently died the same year and left them the tenancy of her house in the close and a modest fortune besides.
“There’s nothing to stop you marrying well,” her mother always told her. And certainly Sarum was not short of pleasant society – Wyndhams, Jacobs, Husseys, Eyres – good county or near county families with educated menfolk into which a well brought up girl with a little money should be pleased to marry.
“Why must you always want something more?”
“I don’t know, mama.”
She had insisted on going to the training college. This was well enough. The regime was strict. Young gentlewomen were given a training that enabled them to teach, if the family circumstances were so poor that they had to work, or to manage their households with great efficiency if all went well and they married.
She had insisted upon teaching. There were twenty-five private day schools in Salisbury now. Her mother had shaken her head. The girl was getting eccentric.
And then, six months ago, her mother died.
She was twenty-three. She had a pleasant house in the close, five hundred pounds a year, a cook, a housemaid, two horses stabled in the town, pleasant neighbours, and had turned down two perfectly acceptable offers of marriage. She enjoyed her work. She should now, of course, find a companion since it was not proper for an unmarried woman to live alone. But she hesitated.
Why was it she read those letters so avidly from overseas? Why was it she scanned the newspapers for news when other young ladies quietly did their needlepoint? Why must she, as her mother used to complain, always have opinions?
“Men have opinions. Women listen.”
“I suppose,” she said to her mother, a month before she died, “I am looking for a cause.”
“There are any number of them, my dear.” There was the College of Matrons by the close gate, Eyre’s almshouses, Hussey’s almshouses, Blechynden’s almshouses for poor widows – the list of charities and needy folk in Salisbury, to which Mrs Shockley never failed, like every other Sarum lady, to devote herself was endless.
“No. Something more.”
“In Sarum, Jane? What could there possibly be? And why?”
There had been no answer.
After her mother’s death she had thought of going to visit her brother. Or even her missionary uncle. “Madness,” she had been told of the latter idea.
Now Florence Nightingale.
Beside her bed, as always,