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things were bound to change, as things did from sheer familiarity. Perhaps the only thing that kept them quietly resigned was the one thing they would lose if they returned to the Rectory: heated rooms. With winter upon them, it was so beautiful to live in warmth, no matter how enormous the indignities and insults of their nursing life might be. And, Edda was sure, once they proved themselves to the cruel women who ruled them, the rewards would come: like chairs with soft seats, the chance to make toasted sandwiches, a little kindness. For at the end of their first three months tuition would begin, they would be called upon to do something with their brains as well as their hands and voices. April, May and June had seen them no different from the West Enders.
    Their tutor was Dr. Liam Finucan, the staff pathologist (and also Chief Coroner of the Shire & City of Corunda). He had agreed to take on tutorial duty for two reasons: the first, that he regarded nursing brain-power as wasted; and the second, that he had noted the quality of the four new-style trainees as they were shuttled around the hospital on some kind of speedy orientation program.
    A Protestant Ulsterman, Liam Finucan had taken his medical degree at St. Bartholomew’s in London when Matron Gertrude Newdigate was there, so they were old acquaintances; his love for pathology had led him to the great Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and his qualifications were such that he could have headed the pathology department of any hospital in Sydney or Melbourne. That he had chosen a minor post at Corunda Base was due to his wife, Eris, a Corunda girl he met and married in London. In 1926, when the Latimer girls commenced nursing, he had been in Corunda for fifteen years.
    Typical of many pathologists, he was quiet and shy, owned no bedside manner, and found the dead more interesting than the living. However, by the middle of July, after two weeks of instructing the new nursing trainees, Liam Finucan developed a side to his personality hitherto undetected by anyone who knew him, and that included himself. Out of a mental stables came a war horse, and out of a cobwebbed cupboard came a suit of armour; mounting the one and donning the other, Liam tilted his lance and rode off to make war. His quarry wasn’t that miserable skinflint Dr. Frank Campbell; it was Matron Newdigate.
    “You’ve given these four girls absolutely no kind of help or support, Gertie, and it has to stop,” Liam said, his softly lilting voice steely, foreign. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! When one of the old-style nurses starts here, she’s taken into the West End fold, overwhelmed with advice and many kindnesses. Whereas these four young women have no one to turn to at all. I don’t care how new you were to your own job when they started, you had a duty to them that you shamelessly ignoredbecause their presence upset the West End majority. D’you think I’ve forgotten how much you grizzled to me during your first week at the thought that you were going to be lumbered with the new trainees after all? Here it is, the middle of July, and you’ve acted as if they don’t exist. You saddled them with a quarter of a dilapidated house, gave that fat and lazy crawler Marje Bainbridge charge of them, and rewarded her with half of the same house!” His eyes had gone the same dark grey as a stormy sea, and pinned her contemptuously.
    “Your new-style trainees are even more tired than they should be,” he went on. “Their accommodation is pure Frank Campbell — hard chairs and two-foot-three beds, a kitchen they’re forbidden to use. By the sheerest accident their house is on the steam line, so at least they’ve been warm, but they have to chop wood and feed it to their boiler to have hot water, and that’s unconscionable! Hear me? Criminal! In spite of their privileges they’ve been brought up to think of themselves with humility — it’s just your good luck that their mother is a selfish