‘He is a photographer,’ she said.
‘Blow me down! How do you know that?’
‘His fingers. See these marks? Silver nitrate stains. It’s what they use to develop the photographs.’
She took advantage of the surprise generated by this news to work around the white handkerchief. She pressed gently into his abdomen, found no evidence of internal injury, and worked up, up, the light following her, until the white handkerchief receded into the darkness and the men could be reassured that Rita was safely back in the realm of decorum again.
With his thick beard half gone, the man looked no less ghastly. The misshapen nose was all the more prominent, the gash that split the lip and ran up towards his cheek looked ten times worse for being visible. The eyes that usually endow a face with humanity were so swollen they were tight shut. On his forehead the skin had swollen into a bloodied lump; Rita drew splinters of what looked like dark wood from it, cleaned it, then turned her attention to the lip injury.
Margot handed her a needle and thread, both sterilized in the liquor. Rita put the point to the split and drove the needle into the skin, and as she did, the candlelight flickered.
‘Anyone who needs to, sit down now,’ she instructed. ‘One patient is enough.’
But nobody was willing to admit to the need to sit.
She made three neat stitches, drawing the thread through, and the men either looked away or watched, fascinated by the spectacle of a human face being mended as if it were a torn collar.
When it was done, there was audible relief.
Rita looked at her handiwork.
‘He do look a bit better now,’ one of the bargemen admitted. ‘Unless it’s just that we’re used to looking at him.’
‘Hmm,’ said Rita, as if she half agreed.
She reached to the middle of his face, gripped his nose between thumb and index finger and gave it a firm twist. There was a distinct sound of gristle and bone moving – a crunch that was also a squelch – and the candlelight quivered violently.
‘Catch him, quick!’ Rita exclaimed, and for the second time that night the farmhands took the weight of a fellow man collapsing in their arms as the gravel-digger’s knees gave way. In doing so, all three men’s candles fell to the floor, extinguishing themselves as they dropped – and the entire scene was snuffed out with them.
‘Well,’ said Margot, when the candles had been relit. ‘What a night. We had best put this poor man in the pilgrims’ room.’ In the days when Radcot Bridge was the only river crossing for miles, many travellers had broken their journey at the inn, and though it was rarely used these days there was a room at the end of the corridor that was still called the pilgrims’ room. Rita oversaw the removal of her patient and they laid him on the bed and put a blanket over him.
‘I should like to see the child before I go,’ she said.
‘You will want to say a prayer over the poor mite. Of course.’ In the minds of the locals, not only was Rita as good as a doctor, but given her time in the convent she could stand in for the parson at a push. ‘Here’s the key. Take a lantern.’
Back in her hat and coat and with a muffler wrapped around her face, Rita left the Swan and went to the outbuilding.
Rita Sunday was not afraid of corpses. She was used to them from childhood, had even been born from one. This is how it had happened: thirty-five years ago, heavily pregnant and in despair, a woman had thrown herself into the river. By the time a bargeman spotted her and pulled her out, she was three-quarters drowned. He took her to the nuns at Godstow, who nursed the poor and needy at the convent hospital. She survived long enough for labour to commence. The shock of almost drowning having weakened her, she had no strength left to give birth and died when her belly rippled with the strong contractions. Sister Grace had rolled up her sleeves, taken a scalpel, sliced a shallow red curve into the dead woman’s abdomen and removed from it a living baby. Nobody knew her mother’s name, and they would not have given it to the child anyway – the deceased had been triply sinful, by fornication, the act of self-murder and the attempt at killing her baby, and it would have been ungodly to encourage the child to remember her. They named the baby Margareta, after Saint Margaret, and she came to be called Rita for short. As for her surname, in the absence of a flesh-and-blood begetter she was called Sunday, for the day of the heavenly Father, just like all the other orphans at the nunnery.
The young Rita did well at her lessons, showed an interest in the hospital, and was encouraged to help. There were tasks even a child could do: at eight she was making beds and cleaning the bloodied sheets and cloths; at twelve she carried buckets of hot water and helped lay out the dead. By the time Rita was fifteen she was cleaning wounds, splinting fractures, stitching skin, and by seventeen there was little in the way of nursing that she could not do, including delivering a baby all by herself. She might easily have stayed in the convent, becoming a nun and devoting her life to God and the sick, were it not for the fact that one day, collecting herbs on the riverbank, it occurred to her that there was no life beyond this one. It was a wicked thought according to everything she had been taught, but instead of feeling guilty, she was overwhelmed with relief. If there was no heaven, there was no hell, and if there was no hell then her unknown mother was not enduring the agonies of eternal torment, but simply gone, absent, untouched by suffering. She told the nuns of her change of heart, and before they had recovered from their consternation, she had rolled a nightdress and a pair of bloomers together and left without even a hairbrush.
‘But your duty!’ Sister Grace had called after her. ‘To God and the sick!’
‘The sick are everywhere,’ she had cried back, and Sister Grace had replied, ‘So is God,’ but she said it quietly and Rita did not hear.
The young nurse had worked first at an Oxford hospital, then, when her talent was noticed, as general nurse and assistant to an enlightened medical man in London. ‘You’ll be a great loss to me and the profession when you marry,’ he said to her more than once, when it was plain a patient had taken a shine to her.
‘Marry? Not me,’ she told him every time.
‘Why ever not?’ he pressed, when he had heard the same answer half a dozen times.
‘I’m more use to the world as a nurse than as a wife and mother.’
It was only half an answer.
He got the other half a few days later. They were attending a young mother, the same age as Rita. It was her third pregnancy. Everything had gone smoothly before, and there was no particular reason to fear the worst. The baby was not awkwardly positioned, the labour was not unduly prolonged, the forceps were not necessary, the placenta followed cleanly. It was just that they could not stop the bleeding. She bled and she bled and she bled until she died.
The doctor spoke to the husband outside the room while Rita gathered up the bloodstained sheets with efficient expertise. She had lost count of the dead mothers long ago.
When the doctor came in, she had everything ready for their departure. They stepped out of the house and into the street in silence. After a few steps she said, ‘I don’t want to die like that.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ he said.
The doctor had a friend, a certain gentleman, who called frequently at dinner time and did not leave till the next morning. Rita never spoke of it, yet the doctor realized she was aware of the love he felt for this man. She appeared to be unperturbed by it, and was entirely discreet. After thinking things over for a few months, he made a surprising suggestion.
‘Why don’t you marry me?’ he asked her one day between patients. ‘There would be no … you know. But it would be convenient for me, and it might be advantageous for you. The patients would like it.’