A Murderous Malady_A Florence Nightingale Mystery by Christine Trent

Author:Christine Trent [Trent, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, amateur sleuth, Historical, General
ISBN: 9781683319306
Google: e_NwDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Published: 2019-05-07T02:26:18+00:00

CHAPTER 13

What a sight the four of us—Nurse Lambert, Nurse Hughes, Mary, and I—must have made, marching determinedly down New Cavendish Street to Middlesex Hospital. The nurses wore the apron-topped uniforms that I had designed and Hughes had created last year. Mary was in her usual plain, solid-color dress—today a muddy brown. For myself, I wore a day dress in the silk taffeta of which I was so fond, this time a naval-blue jacket over a corresponding blue skirt with two horizontal ebony stripes encircling the lower part of the skirt. I, too, wore an apron over my dress, unsure of what spills and mess the day might bring.

Behind us was Charlie Lewis, dragging a small cart loaded up with hospital supplies, such as clean sheets, pillows, feeding cups, and the like.

I had sent John Wesley off to the grocer’s to order the food supplies we needed and to request that the grocer deliver it all to the hospital as soon as possible. There had not been time to send a list to Middlesex to have them do it.

Despite Dr. Goodfellow’s assurances otherwise, I was not going to assume that all had been done according to my wishes and figured my nurses and I would likely have to make things right once we arrived.

There were still victims sprawled about on the lawn—thank goodness it was late summer and not one of our country’s damp winters—although I noticed that most of them were now females. How curious. I was glad Mary carried her notebook with her, stuffed full of Reverend Whitehead’s and my own charts. I would have to make note of all Middlesex’s inmates.

Dr. Goodfellow greeted us in the hospital’s entry and had an orderly assist Charlie with bringing in everything on the cart. Along with the hospital’s nursing staff, we went straight to work. I quickly walked through the hospital again with Mary and my nurses, showing them the deficiencies I had noticed the previous day. Unfortunately, the slop buckets and water closets still overflowed, the kitchens hadn’t been touched, and not a single inmate’s bed had been freshened.

In fact, of all the instructions I had left with the hospital’s leadership, the only task accomplished had been to open the windows. Even that had been executed poorly, with someone having lifted just a single window in large rooms containing six or eight of them.

I was mentally furious, but it would do no good to upset the inmates nor the nurses or orderlies, who all looked at me expectantly once I returned to the hospital’s lobby with Lambert, Hughes, and Mary. Also awaiting me were the physicians I had met with the previous day. It seemed as though an eternity had passed since my first visit.

Goodfellow introduced the hospital staff members I hadn’t met before. There were too many names to remember, but I did take note that most of them looked as bedraggled as the members of my own staff had a year ago. I worried how many thieves, drunks, and swindlers dwelt among this group, but there was nothing to be done about that now.

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