one of them came over to talk to her. It was as though she didn’t exist, and as though they believed that if they didn’t acknowledge her, she’d disappear.
An ancient man in an even more ancient tailcoat called them in to dinner, and the groups then shifted into the dining room and sat down at three long refectory tables that were as old as the chateau. Everything there was worn and threadbare, but it had a kind of faded grandeur that looked very much Old France.
Dr. Graumont, the head of the school, came to greet her and invited her to sit down next to him. He was extremely polite when he introduced himself, but then spent most of the time speaking to the young man on his other side, who looked to be about thirty. They were conversing about an operation they had both observed that day, and made no attempt to include Annabelle in the conversation. She felt like a ghost, invisible to all.
Later in the meal, Dr. Graumont spoke to her briefly of Dr. de Bre and asked how he was, but he said little more to her than that, and then he bade her good evening, and the others went to their rooms. Not a single one of her fellow students had introduced themselves to her or asked her name. She went up to her room alone, and sat down on her bed, not sure what to make of it, and not nearly as sure as she had been about her decision. It was going to be a long six years if no one ever spoke to her at the chateau. It was more than obvious that they were not pleased to have a woman in their midst, so they had decided to ignore her. But she wasn’t there to socialize, she had come to learn.
She was in the dining room the next morning, at precisely seven o’clock, as she had been told. Breakfast was sparse, due to the war, and she ate very little. The others came and left without a word to her, and she found her classroom in time for her eight o’clock class. The entire chateau had been dedicated to the school, which had allowed the family to keep it, and support its upkeep. And once the class began, she remembered why she was there. It was fascinating. They were studying diseases of the kidney, and were shown diagrams of surgeries. And they were to go to the hospital in Nice the next day, where they did all their surgical observations and work with patients. She could hardly wait.
She was still excited by the lecture when they went to lunch, and she was more grateful than ever to Dr. de Bre. And forgetting how unfriendly her classmates had been, she broke into conversation with the Englishman, and commented about the lecture. He stared at her as though she had just taken off all her clothes.
“I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?” she asked innocently.
“I don’t recall speaking to you,” he said rudely, looking down his nose at her in an icy way, which told her in no uncertain terms that he had no interest whatsoever in her comments.
“No, but I spoke to you,” she said calmly, refusing to be daunted. She had heard him say that he came from four generations of doctors. He was obviously very full of himself, but like her, he was only a firstyear student, although considerably older than she was. He mentioned to someone else that he had gone to Eton and then Cambridge, which explained the discrepancy in their ages. He clearly thought he was a great deal better than she was, and had no desire to waste his time talking to her. The fact that she was also beautiful seemed to have made no impression on him whatsoever. He was far more interested in being unpleasant to her and putting her in her place.
“I’m Annabelle Worthington,” she continued pleasantly, refusing to be bested by him. She wanted to hit him over the head with her plate, but she smiled politely and then turned to the student on her other side, and introduced herself to him. He looked at the young man across from him, as though waiting for a cue from the others, and then smiled in spite of himself.
“I’m Marcel Bobigny,” he said in French, and with that the others looked at him like a traitor, and stared into their plates as they ate.
Annabelle and Marcel struck up a conversation about the lecture they’d had that morning, and for most of lunch there was silence in the room. She was clearly not welcome, and even the head of the school ignored her. She took her notebook and pen, and went to her next class, after thanking Marcel for chatting with her. He bowed politely, and she could hear his cohorts scolding him for talking to her, as she walked away with her head held high.
“I don’t give a damn if she’s great-looking,” she heard one of them whisper to the others. “She has no business being here.” But she had as much right to be there as they did. She had paid her tuition, and was as anxious to be a doctor as they were, possibly more so. But clearly they had made an agreement among themselves to stonewall her.
Their shoddy treatment of her continued through four weeks of classes and three-times-weekly visits to the hospital in Nice, where they heard lectures and saw patients, and she saw that she was being keenly observed by professors and students alike. She sensed that any mistake she made, or incorrect statement she uttered, would be used immediately against her, so she was extremely careful of what she said. So far, she had made no obvious mistakes, and the two papers she had written about diseases of the urinary tract and kidneys had gotten perfect grades.
And it was when visiting patients, and speaking to them, that her jealous classmates hated her most. She had a gentle, compassionate way with them, asked them intelligent questions about their symptoms, and made them feel comfortable with her immediately. The patients much preferred speaking to her, and looking at her certainly, than her colleagues, and those patients who saw her more than once were delighted to see her again. It drove her male classmates insane.
“You’re far too familiar with the patients,” the Englishman, who was systematically unpleasant to her, criticized her one day.
“That’s interesting,” Annabelle said calmly. “I think you’re very rude to them.”
“How would you know? When have you ever been in a hospital before?”
“I just spent three months working near the front in Asnieres, and I’ve worked as a volunteer in hospitals for six years, the last two with newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island in New York.” He said nothing to her after that, and wouldn’t have admitted it to her, but he had been impressed by her three months at Asnieres. He had heard from others how rough it was. Marcel Bobigny caught up with her after class, and asked what it had been like working at the Abbaye de Royaumont. It was the first real conversation she’d had with anyone there in a month. And she was grateful to have someone to talk to at last.
“It was hard,” she said honestly. “We all worked about eighteen hours a day, sometimes more. It’s run and staffed by women, which was the original concept, but a few male doctors have come from Paris now. They need all the help they can get.”
“What kind of cases did you see there?” he asked with interest. He thought the others were wrong to give her such a hard time. He liked her. She was good-humored, a good sport, worked hard, and lacked their pretensions.
“We saw mostly lost limbs, a lot of gangrene, explosions, nerve gas, dysentery, cholera, pretty much what you’d expect so close to the front.” She said it simply and matter-of-factly, with no attempt to impress him or brag about herself.
“What did they let you do?”
“Chloroform in the operating theater, once in a while. Mostly I emptied surgical pans, but the chief surgeon was very nice about showing me things as I went along. The rest of the time I was in the surgical ward, taking care of the men after surgery, and a couple of times I drove an ambulance to pitch in.”
“That’s pretty good for someone who has no official training.” He was impressed.
“They needed the help.” He nodded, wishing he was there himself. He said as much to Annabelle, and she smiled. He was the only one of her fellow students who had been civil to her, and even nice. Most of them ignored her.
In February, a month and a half after she’d gotten there, everyone was animated at dinner, discussing the Battle of Verdun, which had begun several days before, and already caused enormous loss of life on both sides. It was a vicious battle that upset them all, and Marcel drew her into the conversation. The others were so involved in the discussion, they even forgot to frown when she spoke, or ignore her.
The Battle of Verdun was the main topic of conversation every night at dinner, until two weeks later, in early March, the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo, in Italy against Austria-Hungary, took precedence. The conversation ricocheted equally between medical issues and the war. It was a cause of deep concern to all.
Eventually the Englishman asked her about when America might join the war. President Wilson was still assuring everyone they wouldn’t, but it was an open secret that the United States was supplying both sides, and being criticized heavily for it. Annabelle said clearly that she thought that that was wrong and so did they. She thought the U.S. should get into the war, and come to Europe in aid of their allies. The conversation led to the
