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tempted to use my title and my father’s name, but in the end perseverance paid off. After nearly a week of talking to Matrons, Sisters, a hawk-eyed woman who saw to the financial arrangements, and one doctor who was to assess my steadiness and commitment to this training, I was accepted for the course.
    What I hadn’t known was that probationers were given the worse possible duties to perform. It was degrading work, but I could see that a young woman who rebelled at cleaning up vomit and excrement and carrying soiled linens to the laundry, who found the old and the dirty and the demented impossible to deal with, would soon be out of the program. And so I rolled up my sleeves, metaphorically as well as literally, and got on with it. I’d been taught from childhood that my title brought with it certain privileges, and that these included certain responsibilities and duties. Was nursing so very different?
    If I wished to become a Sister, I must accept the hardships that accompanied that training with whatever grace I could muster.
    Once or twice I wondered what my governess would say—she who had taught me to walk with a book on my head, to sit without fidgeting, and to address my elders and my betters in the proper manner—if she could see me cajoling an old and infirm man to eat his pudding. I was comfortable with the aristocracy, I could address an archbishop without flinching, and I knew half the House of Lords. I had made my curtsey to the King and Queen when I came out, and danced with foreign princes. And here I was, washing a woman with bed sores, holding a child with croup as she coughed and gasped for breath, helping a man with one leg to the toilet, and scrubbing surgical theater floors on my hands and knees.
    I wore the uniforms I was provided with and was so tired when I got to the flat each night that if I had owned a hundred evening gowns with matching slippers, I’d have never taken them out of the wardrobe. I had books on various medical conditions to read, and when we made rounds with Matron and doctors or watched surgeries, I was expected to answer questions put to us by those whose task it was to decide if the probationers were learning anything at all.
    I seldom saw my flatmates. Indeed, we seldom had the same hours free. Bess met me the third morning as I came in from hospital and she was just leaving for it. I learned later that her father was a retired Army Colonel. Mary I met on the weekend, when she had twelve hours off duty and had just slept through ten of them. Diana was always talking about the men in her life, but I soon learned that while she was popular, she was as devoted to nursing as the rest of us.
    They accepted me as I was—or seemed to be. A young Scotswoman who wanted to serve her country as much as they did.
    We qualified in almost the same order—Bess first, then Mary, and finally Diana. I was not far behind. When the day came that I had earned the title Sister, I felt a surprising surge of pride. I had not inherited this title, I had worked for it. Lady Elspeth Douglas was now Sister Douglas, and her skills were saving lives and comforting the dying.
    Amazingly, I had been good at nursing. What I’d seen and done along the road to Ypres had helped me face surgery with an iron will if not an iron stomach. And I had a purpose in this war now. I could do something that counted. My Highland ancestors had never been afraid of a good fight, and they’d won their fair share of them. The women of my family had patched up their clansmen and sent them out to fight again another day.
    And here I was, in 1914 doing precisely the same thing. Only there were no pipers to skirl me through the ceremony, but I hoped that the men and the women in my family would be proud of me. Once they recovered from the shock, of course.
    All this time, I had heard nothing from Alain. Madeleine had written several times, but I received only one of her letters, and it was filled