The Nightingale Girls - By Donna Douglas Page 0,19

pose the question. She wished she hadn’t. Sister Parker had ranted for ten minutes about the importance of a regular hygiene routine – ‘Not just when you feel it warrants it, Benedict’ – and then made her copy out the whole lecture on basic asepsis, word for word. She had also made it very clear that a student nurse’s job was to answer questions, not ask them.

Millie had never spoken up in class since.

She sat back on her heels and examined the painful cracks between her fingers. The disinfectant made her chilblains sting so much she wanted to cry.

At times like this, she wondered why she had ever given up her old life. As the only child of the 7th Earl of Rettingham, she was accustomed to a world of privilege and ease. She mixed in grand society and was waited on by a retinue of faithful servants. Before she came to the Nightingale, she had never had to cook, clean or even dress herself, since she had a lady’s maid to do it for her.

She smiled to think what Polly, her maid, would make of her mistress now, on her hands and knees, scrubbing out cupboards. Even she had never had to face such drudgery – her most arduous trial was persuading Millie out of her riding clothes and into a dress occasionally.

‘Daydreaming again, Benedict?’ Sister Parker was standing behind her.

‘No, Sister.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it. Make sure you get into those corners.’

‘Yes, Sister.’ Millie picked up her scrubbing brush again.

And yet, hard as her new life was, she wouldn’t go back to her old one. She loved her father, and Billinghurst, and growing up in the Kent countryside. She would have loved nothing more than to become mistress of the house herself one day. But as she grew older, her grandmother had made it clear that her future lay elsewhere.

‘Billinghurst will never be yours,’ she had told Millie bluntly. ‘Under the terms of your great-grandfather’s will, the estate is entailed so that only a male heir can inherit.’

Which meant that unless Millie married and had a son before her father died, her beloved Billinghurst and the thousands of acres of prime Kent farming land around it would pass to an obscure cousin in Northumberland.

The Dowager Countess had put all her considerable energies into making certain such a disaster did not befall them. For the last two years, Millie had been groomed and paraded like a show pony before any number of eligible men, culminating in the biggest horse market of them all – the Season.

Millie had been looking forward to it. She loved parties and having fun, and hoped to make new friends. But the reality was very different; she had never known a more humiliating and tedious experience. Being chaperoned around endless dinners and dances, changing her clothes three times a day, making small talk with exactly the same people everywhere she went. And always under the critical eye of her grandmother, urging her to be more vivacious and charming to the biggest bores.

And as for making friends . . . Millie had found most of the other girls to be even more tedious than the men. Far from having fun, they were constantly caught up in petty squabbles and bitter rivalries, all of them as desperate as their ambitious mothers to be seen in the right places and to snare the right husband. It was all too pointless for words.

Millie had come out of the Season, not only unmarried and with no prospect of an engagement in sight, but with a conviction that she wanted to do something more worthwhile with her life than organising a household of servants and deciding what to wear for dinner.

Her grandmother was appalled when she first suggested going into nursing.

‘And how do you propose to meet a suitable husband in a hospital?’ she had demanded.

Thankfully, Millie’s doting father had overruled his mother’s objections. Although Millie suspected that both of them were expecting her to give up and come home as soon as she had her first taste of hard work.

Which was why she was so determined to see it through. If only to prove to her grandmother that becoming a nurse wasn’t just another fad, like her ballet or tennis lessons.

Once cleaning was over and all the mops, brooms and brushes had been put away, it was time for lectures in the classroom.

Millie felt like an old hand as she joined the new students who had gathered in the cramped