The Rose of Sebastopol (43 page)

“You never used to.”

A spark flickered in his eye. “That’s it. Never used to.” His hand slackened on my neck and was about to fall.

“Max, drink this.” I raised him up so that his head was against my breast. His hand closed over mine on the flask and he drank thirstily. The weight of his helpless body, the sudden intimacy both moved and shocked me but my voice was calm. “What else can I do for you? Tell me.”

“Like I say. Couldn’t bear to think of Rosa’s things getting lost. Can’t bear to think of her out there somewhere. We argued on the last day. Usual story, parted badly. She was pig-headed, always thought she could be everyone’s savior. When she came to live at Stukeley it was like a burst of sunshine—should have taken more care of her. Not sure there’ll be anyone left back at the camp to keep an eye on her things.”

“I’ll fetch them, Max.”

“That’s it then. Off you go.”

“Nora said I must stay with you.”

“For God’s sake don’t talk to me in that dismal voice. Can’t stand it.”

“So there’s nothing else you need me to do?”

“Fetch Rosa’s things. Leave the Crimea. Go home. I’ve told you, time after time. Now you’ve seen for yourself what’s happening to us all.”

His head jerked and his eyes burnt with pain but I stroked his dry, hot cheek to make him listen to me. “Henry used to say that some doctors were too eager to amputate. He said if the bone broke cleanly and hadn’t cut through flesh, it would mend. Even though he’s a great surgeon, he said surgery isn’t always the answer. Nora said the same. Don’t let them take your leg unless they have to.”

“Not in a great position to argue. Would rather live, with or without a leg. Just about. Can’t think why. What’ll I do with one leg?”

“Any one of a hundred things.” At that moment I couldn’t think of any career suitable for Max that didn’t demand two legs. “Become a clergyman.”

A splutter of laughter. “Brilliant. An absolutely first-class Miss Mariella Lingwood solution. That’s it then. Problem solved.”

“Can you move your leg at all?”

“Rather not try. Thanks all the same.”

“Get them to use these dressings—I’ll leave them here, tucked under the pillow. And tell them what Henry said. Dr. Henry Thewell. Tell them. I’m sure they’ll listen if they hear his name.”

He gave my shoulder a weak push. “Mariella. Go. Now. I want you gone.”

“But I’m to stay with you. Nora said.”

“Leave. You’re bothering me to death.”

His eyes closed. I lingered another moment, watched the trembling curve of his eyelid, and remembered the boy who had shinned up the pillar of the new porch at Stukeley and tapped on my window, Nora’s fondness for him, how he had infuriated and enchanted Rosa in equal measure, and how he had stood beside the woman in the striped skirt at Kerch while her son was buried. I dribbled the rosary into his hand just in case, and then, because I couldn’t help myself, kissed his unconscious lips.

W
hen I left the hospital
I was so sick and shaken I hardly knew what to do but as Max had told me to collect Rosa’s things, off I set in the gathering dark, up to the camps.

The Crimea was a dangerous place and not just because of the shelling. I had learnt that no property was safe from criminals and vagrants, even at the hospital, where stores were kept firmly locked. Livestock that survived having its legs chewed by rats disappeared overnight and clothes left to dry on exposed washing lines were whipped away. Anyone might be out in the dark ready to strip the clothes from my back or worse. Mrs. Seacole’s British Hotel was well lit and a crowd of men had gathered outside—for a moment I considered asking to be taken in for the night; the hotel looked so comforting, surely I would be safer inside than out, whatever Lady Mendlesham-Connors might think.

As I moved onwards sporadic fire came from the trenches and spurts of light filled the sky but the night was otherwise quiet and after a while there was little traffic on the road. The vast camp rustled and murmured in its tents and huts while dark figures moved quietly about or stood over the fires. I was challenged once or twice but as soon as I spoke my English name in my lady’s voice I was allowed to pass. The Ninety-seventh camp was even further than I remembered, a long trek along worn paths. After a while a wagon lumbered by and I hung on to a metal bar and allowed myself to be dragged forward at a faster pace. The air was full of gunpowder and the stars above Sebastopol were lost in a pall of smoke.

By the time I reached the Derbyshires’ camp it was pitch-dark and I was hungry and footsore. A heavy-eyed sentry directed me to a mess tent, where a group of officers was dining. At first I was too shy to go in but someone spotted me, I explained who I was, and when I mentioned first Max then Rosa, the tent fell quiet. One or two of the men had half risen when I appeared—after all, I was wearing a narrow skirt and re-modeled blouse that made me look like a soldier’s wife—but by the end of my faltering introduction all were on their feet. Though they were polite and eager to please they were worn out and in low spirits. A junior officer was ordered to take a lantern and show me to Max’s hut, where I could spend the night if I wished.

As we walked between lines of tents he told me that Newman was unaccounted for. It was thought he’d made it to the abatis, the head-high barricade constructed of brushwood, rubbish, and torn-down trees—someone remembered him dashing ahead across the open ground beyond the trench—but he’d not been seen since. They believed he had been hit and was lying out on the battlefield, like a good many others in the regiment. Since no armistice had been agreed it would be suicide for anyone to step out under the Russian guns and try to fetch him.

The young officer unlocked Max’s hut, hung the lantern from a hook in the roof, and told me he would send a man with tea and supper. Like Newman he was probably under twenty and had a drawling accent and immaculate manners, though he was in no mood for further conversation. After he’d gone I dropped down on a narrow bench set against one side of the hut, took a gulp of water from my flask, and closed my eyes. Outside there was a burst of firing so intense and close-seeming that had I not been exhausted I would have flung myself under the bed. As it was I remained slumped until there was silence again. Then I roused myself, opened my eyes, and found that I was staring across the hut at Rosa.

In all there were three pictures nailed above Max’s bed. The first was a near-perfect reproduction of the portrait of his mother that Rosa had shown me in his bedroom at Stukeley, except that in this version her two sons had been omitted though the sitter leant forward and looked into some distant place with the same abstracted, laughing charm that I remembered from the original. Next was an illustration from
Punch
, a cartoon of two miserable soldiers in a blizzard. And then there was a portrait of Rosa, captured in a posture that I knew well, cross-legged on the bed, head in hands, hair falling on either side of her face, and deep in a book. It was an accurate, hasty sketch, presumably by Max, who had caught the shape of her bones, the length of her nose, the fine, long fingers exactly, and it provided clear testimony that she had been in this hut. Behind her head in the picture hung the same two sketches, Max’s mother and the
Punch
cartoon, and even the planks of wood which made up the side of the hut behind the bed had been lightly drawn in, knots and all.

The picture had the most shameful effect on me; of all feelings, at such a time I felt a stab of jealousy because Rosa and Max had sat together in this hut while she posed for him, probably reluctantly, looked up into his face and smiled or sighed impatiently. They’d been closeted away from the war, quite alone.

An orderly brought a tray with tea, soup, bread, and a bowl of clean water. After he’d gone I closed the door and ate. Meanwhile Rosa’s head remained bent over her book. She was so immediate that I could almost hear her light breathing and feel the warmth of her scalp through her hair. I knew exactly how it felt to comb those long tresses, to lift their weight and slide hairpins among them. While she read I used to braid her hair, whiling away the time until she got just to the end of the page or chapter, forlornly excluded by her ability to lose herself in a story. I was frustrated by all the unreachable things that were going on in her head at that moment.

And what had she been thinking about while this picture was being drawn? Just the book? What else? Had she been thinking of me? Of Max? Of Henry?

Rosa. Rosa, look up.
Speak
to me.

Meanwhile other details of the little hut emerged from the shadows: the few books on one shelf—a military manual, a Bible, a copy of Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
, and Dickens’s
Bleak House
(probably the book Rosa was reading while being drawn); another on which were arranged a series of notes and papers, writing equipment, comb, soap, tooth-powder. A couple of chests were stacked in one corner, presumably to store Max’s clothes, and tucked under the bed but clearly visible was Rosa’s box with her name painted on the side in my own precise block capitals, last seen on the dirty pavement at London Bridge Station.

It was half an hour before I could bring myself to touch that box but at last I lifted it onto the bed, pushed back the latch, and opened the lid. The smell was so intense that I was blown back across the hut. It was as if essence of Rosa had been stored there: lemons, the fragrance of her hair and skin.

I knelt by the bed, gathered an armful of clothes, and sank my face into them. She was present in the texture of the soft wool against my skin, the under-garments I’d made her, the sleeve linings and collars. Each item was well-worn but carefully laundered and folded. I searched for marks left by her on the fabric but could only find her fragrance, citrus, musk, Rosa. My mind’s eye flickered again and again: her hair skimming my face when she turned her head suddenly, her bare legs gripped round the branch of a tree, her eyes shining into mine in the flickering green light of the box hedge. Rosa. Rosa in the garden at Fosse House, hands behind her back as she marched ahead of Henry and me, Rosa holding me tight in her arms and pressing her face into my neck: “I love you more than anyone else in the world.”

She was so nearly there in the flesh that I half expected her to come prancing out of the box but actually most of the contents were of such little value to anyone other than me that I wondered why Max had been so worried about them. Her life seemed to have been pared down to its essence—a few clothes, but not her heaviest skirt, a face flannel, a handful of handkerchiefs (the
RB
s embroidered by me), a few blank sheets of notepaper. We had packed so much more: pastels and charcoals for drawing, her sewing things, medicines chosen by Nora—arrowroot, laudanum, calomel, valerian, eucalyptus—plasters, soaps, salts, all were gone. And if I’d expected to find clues of her affair with Henry there were none except that right at the bottom there was a leather-bound notebook and a length of pale green silk that I used to wear as a scarf sometimes in the neck of my evening gown to avoid exposing my naked bosom. And this silk had been folded into a kind of packet to hold a pile of folded papers.

On the front page of the notebook in Rosa’s clear print were the words:

 

I turned the pages faster, faster. Surely now I would find mention again of Henry’s name.