Lady With a Lamp

Author’s Note

by Marina J. Neary

Crimea, 1854: Having botched the Charge of the Light Brigade, Lord Cardigan is hiding on his yacht, drinking himself into stupor. On the shore, at the hospital corps, a mutiny is brewing. Egotistical doctors, brutish surgeons and skittish nurses wage mind wars against each other amidst filth and chaos.

Florence Nightingale, the legendary “Lady with a Lamp” — a saint to her patients and a frigid spinster to her colleagues — finds solace in the company of Tom Grant, a haggard physician with a sinister reputation. Trading grim jokes and scientific facts, the two develop a cerebral romance that promises to mark a new era for British medicine.

Inevitably, Tom’s semi-criminal past surfaces, throwing him in the political crossfire between Cardigan and Lucan. In a luxurious stateroom, in the presence of England’s most corrupt general, Tom receives an offer no sane man could refuse — a life of prestige and prosperity on the condition is that he must break the Hippocratic Oath and permanently defame another man.

What is one more sin to a soul that is already beyond salvation? Above all, what does England’s most virtuous woman have to say about her lover’s dilemma?

Inspired by historical events, this play is a work of speculative fiction, a sequel to the previous tragicomedy “Hugo in London.”