The Rose of Sebastopol (38 page)

“I know there are risks. I know the cholera—”

“I’m not talking about cholera. Cholera is a quick death. There were times last winter when I thought the poor bastards who died of cholera in Varna last summer were the lucky ones. I’m talking about the war, Mariella. Your death here, like everyone else’s, will be utterly meaningless. They fling us about like handfuls of sand. Please, go home.” He had changed tack and now stood beside me with his back to the wall, eyes closed, his face a series of slashing vertical lines and hollows. “Mariella, I beg you, go home.”

“I will, Max, I will go when I’m ready.”

He gripped my chin and turned my face towards him. I tried to jerk away but he wouldn’t let me; I clawed at his wrist but each time I came close to breaking free he seized my shoulder or upper arm to draw me back, his mouth inches from my face. “Do you remember I told you about a woman at Kerch who reminded me of you?”

“I remember.”

“Well, let me tell you a little story. Kerch will be billed as a great victory for the British, just you wait and see. I can imagine the headlines. We sailed up to the town with our flotilla of smart modern ships, and our hand-picked allied forces of Turks, French, and British, and the place fell with barely a shot fired. We lost only one man in three days as we disabled their guns and burnt their munitions warehouses. Good old allies, got something right for once. Meanwhile I saw the woman I told you about twice. The first time was just after we set foot in the town. She had obviously decided that the only way to deal with the fright of our invasion was to carry on with life as usual, so she had taken her washing down to the sea. She had a young child with her, maybe three or four years old, a boy with brown hair and a high crown to his head. He was tied to her wrist with a long length of striped fabric, same as her skirt, so he wouldn’t stray as he paddled in the water. I remember the woman because of her skirt, which had a most unusual orange and green stripe to it and because her hair was the same color as yours and very long, tied back with a kerchief.

“Kerch was a beautiful town with white warehouses along the beach, and the streets, as I’ve said, were very busy. There was an uneasy atmosphere, not hostile, not friendly, but watchful. The shops were open and the residents were eager to please, because they knew they were in our hands.

“The next morning we marched on to Yenikale, which we also took easily. Our job was to disable the Russian supply route through the Sea of Azov. In all we destroyed about two hundred boats and their military supplies, and in addition, mostly because of the actions of the retreating Russians who didn’t want their stores to fall into enemy hands, mountains of wheat and flour went up in flames.

“So then a couple of days later I was sent back to Kerch by our commander, Sir George Brown, because he’d heard that some kind of trouble had broken out. He didn’t want our soldiers to get too involved, because he said it wasn’t our job to govern the town, simply to ensure that no more supplies got through to Sebastopol, but he said I was to take a few good men and check that all was well.

“The place was so unrecognizable that at first I thought I’d taken a wrong turn. The shops, the mosques, the church, the synagogue, the warehouses had all been stormed by the allied troops and their contents ransacked. Anything too big or valueless to be carried back to the ships had been dragged onto the streets and smashed. I met an officer from our merchant navy, with a bundle of green silk under one arm, who boasted that he and his cronies had broken into one of the richest houses of the town, found it empty, and penetrated even to the ladies’ bedrooms. He’d carried off, of all things, that length of silk and a bundle of hair stashed into a sequined evening bag, which he thought must have been chopped from the lady’s head before she left. He said that fortunately the hair was the very same color as his sister’s, and that she would be glad to have it as her own was rather thin and she wore false fronts. The silk, on the other hand, would make an excellent dress for the lady he hoped to marry.

“I let him go, because I’d glimpsed a bit of familiar striped fabric. It was the young woman I’d noticed before on the beach, only this time she was in an alley with her back to a wall, surrounded by three Turkish soldiers. One had wrapped her long hair round and round his fingers so that he could pin her to the wall and hold her upright while he raped her. The skin on her forehead was stretched thin and her eyes were staring, he dragged so hard at her hair. That’s when I understood why a lady might choose to have her hair cut when a town got invaded. Lying at the woman’s feet, with his neck broken and his head smashed like a little egg, was her boy.

“We beat the men off and I had them marched to their ship, where they may or may not have been court-martialed. Then we took the body of the child outside the town and buried him. His mother could barely stand. Afterwards I escorted her back to the beach and insisted that she be put aboard a steamer and taken to Constantinople, for her own safety. She didn’t say much but I understood that she was a German Jew; not that it mattered what nationality she was—the Turks, on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting this war, were indiscriminate about what they took and whom they hurt. Likewise the French, or the British for that matter. Later I was taken to the museum, where I found one of our officers picking through a broken glass case and stuffing his pockets with jewelry from the ancient world. The rest, the statuary, anything that couldn’t easily be carried away, had been shattered. Two thousand years of history smashed up due to the fact that the allied commanding officers just don’t pay enough attention to detail. I can’t blame the men. After all, they aren’t taught that war is the lowest common denominator, but those who have been educated should know better. And now you, Mariella, have come tripping here in your little boots, on a personal mission to find Rosa, who matters less than a straw in the wind out here, as she quickly discovered. And nor do you, so go home.”

I watched a white cloud drift by, then another. It reminded me of the morning room in Fosse House, the curtains blown in a summer breeze, a puff of muslin for a tucked nightcap. Max folded up suddenly and sat on his haunches, head down. I pushed myself away from the wall and walked past him, back towards the hospital, my skirts blowing far out behind me, Balaklava to my left, the sea to my right.

Orange-and-green-striped fabric, calico probably, thickly gathered at the waist. A week earlier and the woman might have been in Constantinople among those I had passed on the dock-side.

When I got back to Nora’s hut she was still asleep. I knelt down by her bed and rested my head against her knee. The wooden box was clasped in her hand; I guessed that it must contain another unbearable fistful of history.

N
ext time the little nurse hut-sharer
came back I had a list of questions. “What is your name?” “How can I boil water?”“Where may I wash laundry?” “Could I, for the next couple of days, rest on your bed while you are working in the hospital?”

She stared at me as if I had spoken a foreign language, her lower lip disappeared under the upper due to a pronounced overbite, then slowly, in a thick Lancashire accent, told me that her name was Mrs. Whitehead and that I might take a tin kettle to the diet kitchen for boiled water, buy arrowroot from the purveyor, and get Nora’s sheets boiled in the laundry hut. She said they were desperately busy because of all the wounded who had suddenly arrived, really the first in any numbers since the hospital opened in April. There’d been an amnesty—hence the silent guns—when the allies had been allowed to go and collect their casualties from beneath the Russian bastions and now they were all turning up at the hospital in what she called
a bit of a state
.

By the time Mrs. Whitehead returned some hours later the guns had started up again in the distant trenches above Sebastopol. She brought a jug of hot water and a wad of flannel so that we could apply a stupe to Nora’s chest to draw out the fever, and showed me how to feed her sips of arrowroot mixed with boiled water to build her up. Mrs. Whitehead, whose every movement was calm and measured, told me that she was an experienced nurse grown sick of working with rich patients in stuffy country houses. The Crimea, she said, was something of a change.

When I mentioned Rosa’s name she shook her head. “Rosa Barr? Wasn’t she the one who disappeared in the Inkerman cave? I’ve heard of her, of course, but I never met her. I wish I had. But I was with Miss Nightingale at Skutari and then when she came over last month she brought me to add to the numbers. So I never met Rosa Barr, who was gone by then.”

“You actually worked with Miss Nightingale. What was that like?”

“Well, till then I had been used to deciding my own activities as a nurse, so I found it very strange to be commanded by another. But we were one body of women, those of us who did as we were told, and I liked that.”

Next morning I found that my bags and boxes, last seen onboard the
Royal Albert
, had been dumped outside the hut. There was no further note from Barnabus and I realized that Max had been right; in the scheme of things, Miss Mariella Lingwood’s decision to stay in the Crimea against her father’s wishes was of no importance.

The first item I unpacked was my writing case, so that I could send a business-like note to Henry telling him that although I was up at the Castle Hospital I had no firm news of Rosa. My dispassionate tone reflected rather the great distance between us and the hurt he had done me than the sympathy due to a mortally sick man, but I couldn’t help myself—the act of writing even those few lines was almost unbearable. In a longer letter to my parents I thanked Father for the trouble he had taken, apologized again for the worry I had caused but said that it was impossible to leave the Crimea without having discovered what happened to Rosa.
You see,
I wrote,
compared to this, everything else seems insignificant. And I am here in part for Henry, whose one thought was Rosa. Please forgive me if I have caused you pain.

Once these were written and put into the post bag I was so frightened by the coolness of my own words that I rummaged in my trunk, took out poor Aunt Eppie’s sewing case, and, in the intervals when Nora slept, set to work. My first task was to detach a tier from a muslin petticoat and construct a sun hat with a veil that would serve the double purpose of shading and hiding my face. Any patient capable of getting out of bed spent his time smoking, drinking, and staring at everything that moved, particularly me. Sometimes a man’s expression when he glanced at my bosom was so voracious that I envied the nuns their habits and the nurses their repellent uniforms.

Next I removed several yards of stuff from my skirts and broadened the waistbands so that I could dispense with a corset, and remodeled the sleeves of my blouses to allow my upper arms and wrists freedom of movement. Suddenly I was in demand. Mrs. Whitehead said that the wounded men often had perfectly good jackets in need of a little repair and she would look some out, if I wasn’t too pushed. Within an hour a mound of clothes had accumulated beside me. At first I was repulsed when I picked up bloodied trousers or coats but I gritted my teeth, soaked away the stains, dried the fabric in the sun, and darned the tears. The nuns and nurses brought strange nether garments and gowns damaged by over-wear and strenuous washing. I had never sewn so many plain seams, exercised such ingenuity in recovering fabric from hems, sleeves, and gathered skirts, or been so thankful that one of Aunt Eppie’s first lessons had been invisible darning.

The Crimean fever washed through Nora in wave after wave. Sometimes she slept like one in a coma, then she’d wake up and thrash about or shake with the chills. When Max came back he found me piling every item of clothing she and I possessed onto the bed. He had brought her a bottle of French wine, and lavender water, which he sprinkled on her pillow, and then he sat by the bed stroking her hand. I waited outside the hut with my sewing, somewhat mortified that his touch seemed to soothe her more than mine.

After nearly an hour he emerged and doffed his cap. “Still here, Miss Lingwood? There’s a sailing tomorrow, I believe. The
Hollander,
bound for Gibraltar. I could arrange a berth for you in a trice.”

I went on with my darning but out of the corner of my eye I noted that he had folded his arms and was lolling against a nearby hut, watching me. “So Clapham meets the Crimea. What an unnerving sight.” Next minute he was striding away to talk to a group of rough-looking women, who had appeared from nowhere and were waiting for him at the top of the path.

An hour later, while I was still smarting, a young soldier came to the hut with a parcel containing two soft blankets. “From the British Hotel, as ordered by Captain Stukeley.”