The Rose of Sebastopol (35 page)

I fell back on the bunk and clutched my head. It simply wasn’t acceptable for a cholera victim to be faced with three urgent demands all at once, two of them entirely contradictory.

In the end all I could do in the face of these peremptory orders was turn my head on the infested pillow and try to sleep.

DERBYSHIRE, 1844

 

 

 

D
espite, or because of, the prohibition
on going near the village children after the head-lice incident, Rosa insisted on visiting them again.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Ella. But I promised poor Mrs. Fairbrother I would look after her. Nobody else will.”

“But your stepfather...your mother said...”

“Which is the greater good, to obey one’s stepfather blindly or to try and help a woman who’s been abandoned by everyone else? Her husband died last year. She’s got nothing.”

“I’ll ask Mother what she thinks.”

“Mariella, you’ve got to make up your mind whose side you’re on. After all you’re the secretary of our society. What if your mother tells you not to go? Miss Nightingale visits the cottages in her village and my mother thinks it’s a social triumph to have the Nightingales to dine. So if Miss Nightingale is allowed to nurse sick babies, even when they have scarlet fever, why can’t we?”

“Is there scarlet fever in the Stukeley cottages?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“But what can we do for this family?”

“Well, the first thing is to show that we haven’t forgotten them. And then look, I’ve collected a few things from the kitchen. Cook thinks we’re having a picnic. And we have nearly three shillings to give them. That should go a long way for the Fairbrothers.”

I never broke rules and did not want to go to the cottages. Aside from the head-lice, the Fairbrother children had been singularly unrewarding company compared to the bright-eyed Sunday school pupils I helped with after church in Clapham. We had to take a circuitous route across the Italian Garden, down through the water garden with its series of fountains, flights of steps, and waterfalls, through the kissing gate, and along the stream in the woods so that nobody would guess where we were going.

We came out high up in the valley above Sir Matthew’s lead-smelting works and had to drop down over dry stone walls and across fields of sheep until the air was rank with smoke from the factory and there were some cottages beneath us.

From a distance they looked picturesque, misted in brown smoke, made of local stone, and huddled deep in the valley by the river but as we came closer I saw that the roofs were bowed and the windows unglazed. Beneath the eye-smarting stench from the lead works was the distinctive smell of poverty—I recognized it from the beggars who sat in the church porch and occupied the back pews on wet Sundays.

It seemed to me that the dereliction here was willful. The yard was full of litter and the assorted children who stood about watching us were dirty-faced, with sores on their mouths and tangled hair. I longed to take their clothes, have them boiled in a wash-house, and then spend a day patching and darning. Nobody seemed pleased to see us.

Rosa tapped at the door of the nearest cottage and after a moment it creaked open. Outside, the light was brownish; inside, behind Mrs. Fairbrother, it was almost pitch-dark. She was a little creature with a bent back, a bare, almost bald head, and the same dull expression as her children.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Fairbrother. We’ve come to see how Petey is getting on. This is my cousin Mariella, from London.”

When Mrs. Fairbrother stood aside to let us in I didn’t think it appropriate to shake her hand so dodged past without meeting her eye. The first thing I noticed was the drop in temperature, even though there was a fire in the hearth. Then the smell hit me; it was so bad that I covered my nose and mouth: a smell of old, dirty things, unemptied chamber pots, rotting potatoes. No, oh no, I thought. We shouldn’t be here. This is not right. We can’t do anything about this.

“How is your son, Mrs. Fairbrother?” asked Rosa, and her bell-like voice was the only clean and beautiful thing in the cottage.

“Very poorly.”

In one corner a heap of rags revealed itself to be a small boy lying flat with his head thrown back. His mother stood at the hearth and looked across at Rosa, as if resigning all responsibility for her son. I was cowed by the knowledge that all we had to offer were three shillings and a parcel of cake.

Rosa knelt by the bed. “Petey. Petey.”

“’E can’t hear you. ’E’s not woken up for more’n a week now. ’E’ll take a bit o’ sommat now and then but I can’t rouse him.”

“Has the doctor been again?”

“There’s nought he can do, ’e says.”

“Mariella, why don’t you come and talk to Petey? He might be glad that someone new is visiting him,” said Rosa.

I took three paces across the room and looked into the pinched little face. The child’s eyeballs were visible under half-closed lids and his long hair was clotted on his forehead. A dribble of vomit had dried on his chin and every breath was an effort.

As Rosa stroked his hand his eyelids fluttered. Very softly she repeated his name, over and over.

“You try, Mariella,” she said.

The child’s hand was limp and cold as a bit of dead fish. “Petey,” I quavered. He drew in a prolonged, mucus-filled snore and when he breathed out, a trickle of yellow stuff came from his mouth.

The sight of him made me so nauseous that I got up, headed for the door, and burst outside, where I took deep breaths of the rancid air. The little girl who had given us head-lice was hanging about nearby.

I was so ashamed of how I’d behaved in the cottage that I wound my hair into a tight coil, thrust it deep under my sunbonnet, and offered to mend her pocket. She approached a step at a time as I took out my needle and thread. The poor little thing smelt very bad so I kept my head to one side. “Do you remember you came to play with us?” I said.

She stared at me.

“We sang a song. Shall we try it again?
Baa baa
...”

She looked blank. I gave up and went on with my sewing. By the time Rosa came out I had attracted quite an audience of gawping children.

“I didn’t know where you’d gone,” said Rosa as we walked away. She turned to wave at the children but none of them responded.

“I thought I’d be more use outside. I couldn’t bear it, I’m sorry.”

“Now you know why I have to go there. Someone has to do something.”

“It didn’t seem right. All we could do was look.”

“I wasn’t just looking. I was trying to be useful.”

“What about your stepfather? Can’t he help?”

“Their father used to work at the lead works but he’s dead. Stepfather says he provides them with a roof over their heads and when the children are old enough he’ll find them a job in the mill. Mrs. Fairbrother refuses to go in a workhouse and who can blame her?”

“What is the matter with the little boy?”

She was walking so fast up the hill that I couldn’t keep up with her. The further we climbed, the sweeter the air became until we were at the edge of the Stukeley woods and the cottages had disappeared from view altogether. Instead the valley lay in late-afternoon shadow like a scene in a painting.

“Rosa?”

“I can’t tell you what’s the matter.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want you to know.”

“Then why did you take me there?”

“Because it’s my
life
. Now you’ve seen it all, my life on top, my life underneath.”

BALAKLAVA, 1855

 

 

 

W
hen I woke it was still dark
and though my stomach hurt, my head ached, and my bones had been shaken half to pieces, there was otherwise not a great deal wrong with me and I therefore had no choice but to deal with the new day. I rang for the cabin boy to bring me clean water but it took him several minutes to appear and even longer to fetch the pitcher. He told me sullenly that it was scarcely past three in the morning. Poor boy, I had dragged him from sleep.

“The guns are still pounding then,” I said. “Even at this hour.”

“There is to be an attack, we think. We will storm the Russian bastions. Softening them up is what we’re doing, with our guns.”

“How long do you think the bombardment will go on?”

“Days and days maybe. Who can say? I wish I was up there. What I would give.” He stared at me with rheumy eyes as if it was in my power to grant him permission to join the troops.

I told him to go back to his bunk, unpinned the three messages from my wall, and lay watching the lamp tremble with the very slight movement of water in the harbor. Well, it seemed I had no choice: Nora’s things must be sent to the Castle Hospital and my own packed up and transferred to the
Wellington.
There was no arguing with the tone of Father’s telegram. Though his anger had never been directed at me, I had seen him in a rage, notably when one of his suppliers tricked him out of a large sum of money and again when Mother and I reappeared at Fosse House having been banished from Stukeley. His complexion had been purplish with fury and his eyes pinpoints of fire. “That’s it. You’re to have nothing more to do with him.
Sir
Matthew Stukeley. I won’t have my wife and child treated like that. I’ve a good mind to go up there myself tomorrow and knock his teeth into the back of his head. In any case, your sister’s little better than a...” Slam went the study door, but my parents’ voices, Father irate, Mother conciliatory, rose and fell on the other side for nearly an hour.

After the turmoil of my ride and the night of sickness I was like a shell scoured by the tide. But the noise was maddening, an incessant, irregular hack-hack of explosives and underneath the rumble of much bigger guns. No chance, therefore, of more sleep. The lamp-light flickered, the guns boomed, and my cabin revealed itself knee-deep in the mess of half-packed trunks and discarded bits of cloth from the riding habit.

In the end I decided to get up at once and start packing. I hadn’t the heart to disturb the cabin boy again but when I went up on deck to find a porter I discovered that the harbor at four in the morning was as full of bustle as in broad daylight. The air was still crackling, and beyond the white light of guns the sky had paled from deep purple to gray. The ordnance wharf was a hive of activity, lamps swaying, the rumble and smash of cannon balls being loaded onto trucks, the clang of metal. A couple of elderly men in ragged uniforms pointed to a steep, narrow path that wound between battered dwellings but I was so weak that I had to pause every few yards, put down the bags, and draw breath. The further I got from the harbor, the more orderly it seemed when I looked back—ships neatly moored side by side, the straight line of the railway, the straggle of carts on the harbor road.

When I reached the hospital, which appeared to be little more than a row of huts, I hovered about for a while then opened the door of one at random and found myself at the top of a long ward. The air was filled with the unmistakable whiff of male sickness, so I stayed on the threshold peering into the gloom. After a few minutes a lantern detached itself from deep in the interior and approached me. It turned out to be a simple lamp with a pleated paper shade to protect the flame, carried by a nun wearing layer upon layer of black; her homely, big-nosed face loomed from a vast white cap.

She told me that nurses and nuns slept in their own row of small huts, so I set off again under the now silver-gold sky and came to a collection of little sheds, like Rosa’s. The first three were empty but in the next one I found two women sleeping. The door to the last was shut but when I pulled it open I heard scratching and scurrying. As I pushed the door further back, the flood of thin dawn light gave me such a sudden, vivid picture of what lay within that later I found it had been printed onto my memory like a daguerreotype.