The Nightingale Girls - By Donna Douglas Page 0,146

joy. ‘You are brilliant!’

‘It’s Helen you should thank,’ he said. ‘If she hadn’t mobilised the porters to help, I doubt we would have found him.’

‘When you’ve quite finished, I think I can hear Sister Holmes coming up the corridor,’ Dora interrupted them.

They had barely managed to get rid of William and the porters with their trolley when Sister Holmes came through the doors with Staff Nurse Lund at her heels. Her face was grave.

‘Benedict. My office, immediately,’ she said.

Millie and Dora exchanged anguished looks.

‘Do you think she knows?’ Millie whispered. Dora could only shrug helplessly in reply.

‘Benedict!’ Sister Holmes called from her office doorway.

Millie trailed in miserably, already preparing her excuses.

‘Sit down, Benedict.’ Millie did as she was told, still mystified. Reprimands were usually delivered standing toe to toe, bellowed at a level deafening enough to make your ears ring. But Sister Holmes’ voice was softer, almost as if she were talking to a patient.

‘Is there something wrong, Sister?’ Millie asked.

Sister Holmes sat down opposite her, her eyes full of compassion.

‘It’s about your father,’ she said. ‘There’s been an accident . . .’

Chapter Forty-Seven

IT WAS A miracle Henry Rettingham had survived, the doctors said.

Millie had helped comfort many distraught families on the wards. She had ushered them to a side room, plied them with hot sweet tea while the consultant delivered his bad news, and listened to them weeping behind the screens around their loved one’s bed. And yet no matter how desperately sad she felt for them, she had never really understood the depth of their despair until now, when she herself sat with her grandmother in a consultant’s office, listening to him tell her she might lose her precious father.

She already knew the details of the accident. Felix had explained it when he’d picked her up from the station an hour earlier. While out riding early that morning, Samson had taken fright at something and thrown her father off. The horse must have kicked him in the head as he galloped off, knocking him out. When Samson galloped back into the yard alone, the stable lad had raised the alarm.

They’d found her father staggering back down the road. He’d seemed fine, if a little groggy. But a few hours later he had complained of a headache, and by the afternoon he had collapsed.

The consultant explained that her father’s unconsciousness was due to a build up of pressure in his brain. Cerebral oedema. Millie saw the words swimming in front of her eyes as if they were printed in a textbook. They had never meant anything to her as she’d yawned her way through Sister Parker’s lecture. Now they meant life or death.

‘Is there any sign of haemorrhage?’ she asked.

The consultant’s brows lifted. ‘How do you know . . .?’

‘I’m training to be a nurse. I would appreciate your being frank with me, Mr Cossard.’

She saw his frown, and understood his irritation. Consultants did not like to be questioned, especially not by silly young girls who thought they understood medical matters just because they’d washed a few bedpans.

But she was not about to be fobbed off either. This was her father, and she intended to keep asking questions, no matter how much it irked Philip Cossard.

Finally, he said, ‘Thankfully there is no sign as yet. However, we must be prepared for such an eventuality.’

Millie nodded. ‘And in the meantime, all you can do is control the cerebral oedema and intercranial pressure.’

‘Indeed.’ He looked at her consideringly. ‘I do not need to tell you, Lady Amelia, that the next few hours and days are absolutely critical. If we can keep the swelling and pressure controlled and your father regains consciousness, then there is a good chance he will make a full recovery.’

‘And if he doesn’t, we must prepare ourselves for the worst,’ Millie finished for him. She looked at her grandmother, stiff-faced in the chair next to her. She could tell it was taking every ounce of self-control the Dowager Countess had not to weep for her son. ‘May we see him?’

‘Of course.’ The consultant nodded to a nurse, who stood by the door.

Her father was in a small private room off the main ward. Seriously ill patients were often ‘specialed’, as it was called. Only qualified nurses or the most senior students were allowed to tend to them.

Everything looked familiar to Millie – the drip stands, the metal bed, the overpowering smell of disinfectant, the muted sounds of a busy ward close by. But somehow it felt so very