The Twisted Root

private nursing cases she had taken after being dismissed from hospital service for insubordination. He was developing a good practice as an agent of enquiry for private cases after his own dismissal from the police force—also for insubordination!
    For him to have moved would have been unwise. People knew where to find him. The house was well situated, and the landlady had been delighted to allow them an extra room to make into a kitchen, and to give up having to cook and clean for Monk, a duty she had done only from necessity before, realizing he would probably starve if she didn’t. She was very pleased to have both the additional rent and more time to devote to her increasingly demanding husband—and whatever other pursuits she enjoyed beyond Fitzroy Street.
    So Hester was, with some difficulty, learning to become domestic and trying to do it with a modicum of grace.
    Her real passion was still to reform nursing, as it had been ever since she had come home from the Crimea. Lady Callandra Daviot shared her feelings, which was why Hester was standing in the North London Hospital now waiting for Callandra to come and recount the success or failure of their latest attempt.
    She heard the door opening and swung around. Callandra came in, her hair sticking out in tufts as if she had run her fingers through it, her face set tight and hard with anger. There was no need to ask if she had succeeded.
    Callandra had dignity, courage and good humor, but not even her dearest friend would have said she was graceful. In spite of the best efforts of her maid, her clothes looked as if she paid no regard to them, merely picking up what first came to her hand when she opened the wardrobe door. Today it was a green skirt and a blue blouse. It was warm enough inside the hospital for her not to wear whatever jacket she had chosen.
    "The man is a complete idiot!" she said furiously. "How can anyone see to diagnose what ails a person for any of a hundred diseases and still be blind as a bat to the facts before his face?"
    "I don’t know," Hester admitted. "But it happens frequently."
    The door was still wide open behind Callandra. She turned on her heel and marched out again, leaving Hester to follow after her.
    "How many hours are there in a day?" Callandra demanded over her shoulder.
    "Twenty-four," Hester replied as they reached the end of the passage and went through the now-empty operating theater with its table in the center, benches for equipment, and the railed-off gallery on three sides for pupils and other interested parties to observe.
    "Exactly," Callandra agreed. "And how much of that time can a surgeon be expected to care for his patient personally? One hour if the patient is important—less if he is not. Who cares for him the rest of the time?" She opened the farther door into the wide passageway that ran the length of the entire ground floor.
    "The resident medicine officer—" Hester began.
    "Apothecary!" Callandra said dismissively, waving her hand in the air.
    Hester closed the door behind them. "They prefer to call them resident medicine officers now," she remarked. "And the nurses. I know your point. If we do not train nurses, and pay them properly, everyone else’s efforts are largely wasted. The most brilliant of surgeons is still dependent upon the care we give his patients after he has treated them."
    "I know that." Callandra hesitated, deciding whether to go right, towards the casualty room, or left, past the postmortem room to the eye department and the secretary’s office and the boardroom. "You know that." She decided to go left. "Dr. Beck knows that." She spoke his name quite formally, as if they had not been friends for years — and not cared for each other far more than either dared say. "But Mr. Ordway is very well satisfied with things as they are! If it were up to him we’d still be wearing fig leaves and eating our food raw."
    "Figs, presumably," Hester said dryly. "Or apples?"
    Callandra shot her a sharp look. "Figs," she retorted with absolute certainty. "He’d never have had the courage to take the apple!"
    "Then we would not be wearing the fig leaves, either, heaven preserve us," Hester pointed out, hiding her smile.
    "Marriage has made you decidedly immodest!" Callandra snapped, but there was satisfaction in her voice. She had long wished Hester’s happiness, and had once or twice alluded to fears that her friend might become too wasp-tongued to allow herself the chance.
    They reached