Free In the Shadow of the Lamp by Susanne Dunlap

to Emma over the din of the waves and wind.
    A huge splash came and drenched us and Sister Sarah Anne.
    “Close it ’fore we all drown!” Emma screamed, trying to grab the rope to pull the hatch back into place.
    I latched onto one of her arms and Sister Sarah Anne took the other. “No! Wait just a bit longer!” My heart raced too, though, and I wanted to close us up tight again, but the thought of Mrs. Langston out there stopped me.
    A moment later, a soaking wet foot stepped on the top rung of the ladder. We reached up and helped Mrs. Langston back in. She tugged the rope and closed the hatch almost on her own head.
    She heaved and shivered with cold. All around us the nurses and nuns were crying. Mrs. Langston held up one hand and put the other to her ribs. “Shh!” I said to everyone. I wanted to hear what she had to say.
    “It’s all right,” she gasped. “Nothing to worry about. It sounds much worse than it is. There’s some damage, but it’s a good boat and we’re fine, so the captain says.”
    I didn’t know if she was telling the truth, but it was enough to quiet everyone down.

    The constant vomiting stopped by the third day, partly because although the storm continued it wasn’t quite so fierce, but mainly because no one had any food left in their stomachs. I was afraid some of the worse ones might die. One or two looked so pale and thin I couldn’t see how they would live. There wasn’t as much for us to do with everyone mostly sleeping quietly, so Emma and I sat on our bunks and talked some.
    “You weren’t writing to your mum, were you?” Emma asked me later that night after we’d eaten a little supper of cold salt cod and stale bread. If I’d ever written more than one letter in my life, I might not have known what she was talking about. I wasn’t sure what to say. The last thing I wanted was to tell Emma my story—even though she had already told me about her father who beat her and her mother who was always drunk, and that she’d run away when she was my age and the only job she could get that wasn’t on the streets was nursing in a hospital. Something about how she told it all made it sound like a story, like even that wasn’t the truth. It was the way she looked sideways during the most dramatic parts. But if she had secrets to keep, who was I to stop her?
    “I was writing to a friend,” I said at last. Since the envelope was directed to Lucy, I hoped she wouldn’t suspect anything more.
    “A man friend, I’d guess.”
    I tried hard not to, but the way she said it made me blush. “It’s not what you think at all. Will’s just a friend who helped me get to Folkestone,” I said in a way that I was sure would end her line of questioning.
    “Oh, don’t be shy with me! I won’t tell anyone.”
    I wasn’t so sure about that. After what Mavis did to me at the Abington-Smythes, I didn’t think I’d ever trust a girl again. And Miss Nightingale had made it very clear that she wouldn’t tolerate any nonsense of that kind. That philandering, as she called it, would be cause for immediate dismissal. Emma could get me fired just like Mavis did. “There’s nothing to tell. I just wanted to thank him and let him know I was on my way to Turkey.”
    We sat quiet for a minute or two, me listening to the creak of the wooden walls around us, wondering just how long they might hold up if the storm kept on, Emma picking at the damp blanket on my bunk.
    She leaned in a little closer to me. “Can you keep a secret?”
    I shrugged. “I expect so.” No one ever asked me that, but there was plenty I knew that didn’t tell anyone.
    “I weren’t really no nurse before I came.”
    That surprised me so much I almost fell off the bunk. How many of the other stories she had told were lies? “What were you then?”
    She screwed her mouth up, like it had something bad tasting in it. “Nothing good. But it weren’t my fault.”
    “Were you in service?”
    She laughed silently, her