Kristian glanced at Callandra questioningly. He knew little of the realities of the Crimea. He was from Prague, in the Austrian principality of Bohemia. One could still hear the slight accent in his speech, perfect as his English was. He used few idioms, although after this many years he understood them easily enough. But he was dedicated entirely to his own profession in its immediacy. The patients he was treating now were his whole thought and aim: the woman with the badly broken leg, the old man with the growth on his jaw, the boy with a shoulder broken by the kick of a horse (he was afraid the wound would become gangrenous), the old man with kidney stones, an agonizing complaint.
Thank God for the marvelous new ability to anesthetize patients for the duration of surgery. It meant speed was no longer the most important thing. One could afford to take minutes to perform an operation, not seconds. One could use care, even consider alternatives, think and look instead of being so hideously conscious of pain that ending it quickly was always at the front of the mind and driving the hands.
"Oh, she’s perfectly right," Callandra explained, referring back to Florence Nightingale again. "Everything she commands should be done, and some of it would cost nothing at all, except a change of mind."
"For some, the most expensive thing of all," he replied, the smile rueful and on his lips, not in his eyes. "I think Mr. Thorpe is one of them. I fear he will break before he will bend."
She sensed a new difficulty he had not yet mentioned. "What makes you believe that?" she asked.
Even walking as slowly as they were, they had reached the end of the corridor and the doorway to the surgeons’ rooms. He opened it and stood back for her as two medical students, deep in conversation, passed by them on their way to the front door. They nodded to him in deference, barely glancing at her.
She went into the waiting room and he came after her. There were already half a dozen patients. He smiled at them, then went across to his consulting room and she followed. When they were inside he answered her.
"Any suggestion he accepts is going to have to come from someone he regards as an equal," he replied with a slight shrug.
Kristian Beck was, in every way, intellectually and morally Thorpe’s superior, but it would be pointless for her to say so, and embarrassing. It would be far too personal. It would betray her own feelings, which had never been spoken. There was trust, a deep and passionate understanding of values, of commitment to what was good. She would never have a truer friend in these things, not even Hester. But what was personal, intimate, was a different matter. She knew her own emotions. She loved him more than she had loved anyone else, even her husband when he had been alive. Certainly, she had cared for her husband. It had been a good marriage; youth and nature had lent it fire in the beginning, and mutual interest and kindness had kept it companionable. But for Kristian Beck she felt a hunger of the spirit which was new to her, a fluttering inside, both a fear and a certainty, which was constantly disturbing.
She had no idea if his feelings for her were more than the deepest friendship, the warmth and trust that came from the knowledge of a person’s character in times of hardship. They had seen each other exhausted in mind and body, drained almost beyond bearing when they had fought the typhus outbreak in the hospital in Limehouse. A part of their inner strength had been laid bare by the horror of it, the endless days and nights that had melted into one another, sorrow over the deaths they had struggled so hard to prevent, the supreme victory when someone had survived. And, of course, there was the danger of infection. They were not immune to it themselves.
Kristian was waiting for her to make some response, standing in the sun, which made splashes of brightness through the long windows onto the worn, wooden floor. Time was short, as it always seemed to be between them. There were people waiting—frightened, ill people, dependent upon their help. But they were also dependent upon being adequately nursed after surgery. Their survival might hang on such simple things as the circulation of air around the ward, the cleanliness of bandages, the concentration and sobriety of the nurse who watched over them. The depth of the nurse’s knowledge and the fact that someone listened to what she reported might be the difference between recovery or death.
"I wish he wasn’t such a fool!" Callandra said with sudden anger. "It doesn’t matter a jot who you are, all that matters is if you are right. What is he so afraid of?"
"Change," he said quietly. "Loss of power, not being able to understand." He did not move as another man might have, looking at the papers on his desk, tidying this or that, checking on instruments set out ready to use. He had a quality of stillness. She thought again with a hollow loneliness how little she knew of him outside hospital walls. She knew roughly where he lived, but not exactly. She knew of his wife, although he had seldom spoken of her. Why not? It would have been so natural. One could not help but think of those one loved.
A sudden coldness gripped her. Was it because he knew how she felt and did not wish to hurt her? The color must be burning up her face even as she stood there.
Or was it an unhappiness in him, a pain he did not wish to touch, far less to share? And did she even want to know?
Would she want him to say aloud that he loved her? It could break forever the ease of friendship they had now. And what would take its place? A love that was forever held in check by the existence of his wife? And would she want him to betray that? She knew without even having to waste time on the thought that such a thing would destroy the man she believed he was.
Nothing could be sweeter than to hear him say he loved her. And nothing could be more dangerous, more threatening to the sweetness of what they now had.
Was she being a coward, leaving him alone when he most needed to share, to be understood? Or being discreet when he most needed her silence?
Or was friendship all he wanted? He had a wife—perhaps all he needed here, in this separate life from the personal, was an ally.
"There are still medicines missing," she said, changing the subject radically.
He drew in his breath. "Have you told Thorpe?"
"No!" It was the last thing she intended to do. "No," she repeated more calmly. "It’s almost certainly one of the nurses. I’d rather find out who myself and put a stop to it before he ever has to know."
He frowned. "What sort of medicines?"
"All sorts, but particularly morphine, quinine, laudanum, Dutch liquid and several mercurial preparations."
He looked down, his face troubled. "It sounds as if she’s selling them. Dutch liquid is one of the best local anesthetics I know. No one could be addicted to all those or need them for herself." He moved towards the door. "I’ve got to start seeing patients. I’ll never get through them all. Have you any idea who it is?"
"No," she said unhappily. It was the truth. She had thought about it hard, but she barely knew the names of all the women who fetched and carried and went about the drudgery of keeping the hospital clean and warm, the linen washed and ironed and the bandages rolled, let alone their personal lives or their characters. All her attention had been on trying to improve their conditions collectively.
"Have you asked Hester?" he said.
Her hand was on the doorknob.
"I don’t think she knows either," she replied.
His face relaxed very slightly in a smile—humor, not happiness. "She’s rather a good detective, though," he pointed out.
Callandra did not need to tell Hester that medicines were missing, she was already unhappily aware of it. However, it was not at the forefront of her mind as she left Callandra and Kristian and went to the patients’ waiting room. She resented bitterly Fermin Thorpe’s admonition to her to go and offer comfort to the troubled and moral guidance to the nurses, although both were tasks she fully believed in and intended to carry out. It was their limitations she objected to, not their nature.