The Rose of Sebastopol (44 page)

 

Her last note of all was written in very thick script, as if she’d pressed too hard on the pen.

I put the notebook aside and held the green silk bundle on my lap. Then I lay back and pressed it to my breast. Finally I unfolded the silk so the papers fell out in a sheaf across the bed. But when I picked the first one up I realized that the handwriting was my own, not Henry’s as I’d expected. I unfolded another. Again, a letter from me. In fact all the letters were written by me and were my dutiful accounts of life in London since Rosa went to join Miss Stanley’s party in the Crimea. And then there were earlier letters, in ever more childish handwriting, including my first-ever note to Rosa, sent long ago on my return from Stukeley:

 

One final item had been wrapped in the green silk, an envelope folded over and over to protect its contents: Rosa’s sapphire locket containing the little plait of hair, hers and mine, and the graying lock that had been cut from her dead father’s head.

The night was surprisingly cold and I had grown used to sleeping next to Nora, so in the end I wrapped myself in Max’s sheepskin, which enfolded me in stifling animal heat. A similar coat hung, reeking, in Henry’s room in Narni. Poor Henry, if he wore it now the weight of it would crush him.

Then I lay on Max’s bed and listened to the shifting boards of the hut and the crack of gunfire, which, being so close, jolted me wide-awake time after time. My hand rested on Rosa’s notebook and the locket was clasped round my neck but my senses were so troubled that between waking and sleeping I swam through a river of images. The bed linen, sheepskin, and the hut itself smelt disturbingly unlike anything I was used to: Max, presumably, earthy, masculine, a hint of aromatic oil. By now he must have gone under the knife and his amputated leg would be lying in a heap of other butchered limbs. Perhaps pain and shock had already killed him. I rubbed my cheek against the wool of his coat as if I might somehow force the blood to keep on pumping in his shattered body.

I wrenched my thoughts away and began to puzzle over the simplicity of Rosa’s possessions. There had been not a hint of an illicit relationship in her box, in fact no secrets at all. Perhaps Max had found other evidence and destroyed it. But if Rosa had betrayed me, if she had fallen in love with Henry, why had she kept all my letters? The locket was more significant. She had taken off the locket, the most poignant reminder of her past, perhaps as a sign that she had discarded me.

Again my mind strayed, this time to the battlefield and to Newman under the smoky stars. Alive or dead? Poor boy, what had he been thinking about when he ran away from Max into a hail of bullets?

I curled into Max’s sheepskin, my right leg aching in sympathy with his as I remembered the swing at Stukeley, the pair of them swooping out over the little ravine, their laughing eyes turned on me. We dare you, Mariella. That easy, confident stride of his, the forcefulness with which he had hauled me up the path to the ruined fortress and held me against the wall.

DERBYSHIRE, 1844

 

 

 

A
week or so after Max’s revelation
that he was to join the army, Rosa took me on a long walk along the blowy top of the valley, down into a dip, across a little stone bridge above a peaty stream, up the other side, and round to the hill opposite Stukeley Hall so that we could gaze across at the house in all its complicated glory, amidst its gardens, walks, and plantations. The weather was overcast and perhaps threatened rain but Rosa insisted it was high time I saw more of her stepfather’s estate. “If we go a little further we’ll have a view of the lead foundry and that I do want you to see.” I could tell by her relentless grip on my wrist that she had something disturbing in mind.

Even from a distance the foundry, a brick shed with a pitched roof, vibrated with noise. Above us on the hilltop was a high, round chimney, billowing smoke funneled up through the soil from the furnaces.

“Have you ever been inside the foundry, Rosa?”

“I wanted to but my stepfather said no. Of course.”

“I wonder why. You’d think he’d be proud, as he owns it.”

“He said it would frighten me. He took Mother there once and she was ill for a week afterwards because of the heat. But
she
would be. I would be perfectly all right, even though it’s an evil place. I wanted Max to do something about it. My plan was that one day he would manage the lead and Horatio the cotton but Max will have nothing to do with any of it.”

“Is that why you were so angry with him that day we built the arbor?”

“Of course. If he joins the army I’ll never see him. And what if he gets killed? But anyway, Max says Sir Matthew will never split his estate and even if he did he wouldn’t trust Max with his precious business.”

“So you can’t blame Max.”

“I can. He should try and change things. Nobody else will.”

I squinted down at the opaque windows. “Well, I can understand why he wouldn’t like to work there.”

“I want to have a look inside.”

“Even if Sir Matthew gave me a special invitation,
I
wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t dare. Listen to the noise.”

“Well, that’s just as well, because he won’t ask you. Why would he?” She sat for a while looking down intently at the foundry, hunched forward like a cat about to spring. “In fact, why don’t we go now?”

“Now? We can’t. Oh, no. Oh, Rosa, it’s too late, it’s almost teatime.”

“Yes now. Let’s go. Come on. Follow me.” And she was on her feet, flying down the hillside to the little nick in the wall wide enough to allow a person through but not a sheep.

“Rosa. Rosa.”

“Hurry up. I don’t think Stepfather’s there today. He said something about Sheffield, so it’s a perfect time.”

There was no resisting her; the steep slope pulled me downward and the valley floor lurched ever closer until we were level with the cottages in Stukeley village. “I’ll stay here,” I cried, but the thought of waiting in a wind-swept field surrounded by sheep and stared at by more Fairbrother-type village children was unnerving, so we went on down the mud track, alongside a river, to the lead works. The air was full of metallic smoke and the scant leaves on the few trees were smutty and parched. A line of carts stood waiting in the yard and we passed heaps of slag twice as high as the building. Half a dozen or so small children were spread across the bottom of one of the mounds, bent double, plucking up handfuls of mud and sifting through it.

“Rosa. Rosa,” I whispered urgently but she took my hand and drew me towards a little door set in a much larger one. The tension in her fingers and the gleam in her eye meant there was no stopping her, in she would go.

The noise this close was already deafening but when she opened the door it was as if we stepped into the thumping heart of hell. Heat and violent movement and the bone-rattling clang of metal seized my body and shook it out of its muscular shell until I was limp and viscous as a worm. Even Rosa was transfixed as the reflection of flames from the furnace leapt in her face. We saw dark figures move against a fury of metal, a gaping furnace, pipes and chutes, and coal plunge in a black shower into the fire with such a noise and stink that I was sure our hair would be singed off our heads and our eyeballs seared wide-open forever, so I screamed: “No, no we must go,” and dragged her back to the door and out into the Derbyshire afternoon where even the dank air of the valley bottom smelt sweet.

None of the children seemed to notice as we passed, though Rosa paused for a moment as if tempted to speak to them. Then she marched away along the lane. “Come on, I haven’t shown you everything yet.” The ground was sodden, the mud had been churned up by cart wheels, and on our left the river, as it emerged from the lead works, was a sullen brown. And then, after a few more yards, we came within sight of a familiar group of cottages.

“Now do you understand?”

“It’s the Fairbrothers’ house.”

“And look at the water.”

“It’s very dirty.”

“When Stepfather built the lead works he still allowed people to stay in the cottages. It’s usually the poorest, who can’t work. Most of them get sick, like the Fairbrothers.”

I was afraid that she would make me visit the Fairbrothers but instead she led me up the hill, through a gap in the wall, and back towards Stukeley. “You see. That’s what bought Stukeley. That horror. You couldn’t even bear to stay there one minute but children half your age are there twelve hours a day picking through the slag. I hate him. That man.”

We plodded on in silence, because I had no idea how to comfort her, especially as it seemed to me that she had brought this latest misery on herself by going to the foundry. First I gripped her skirt, then tried to link my arm through hers, but she shook me off. By the time we reached the hilltop we were panting and a drizzle was falling on our dirty faces. I wiped hers clean with my thumbs and at last she relented, held me tight, and kissed me. “Nothing you do hurts anyone. But I wanted you to realize. I hoped that if Max took over the foundry he would manage things better, but he won’t. You saw Petey Fairbrother. He’ll be dead soon, and all because of me.”

“Of you?”

“Oh, yes. I live at Stukeley, don’t I, and the money that paid for that monstrous house and those ridiculous gardens was from other people’s misery. Sir Matthew says there’s no proof that the children are ill because of the lead, he says some children are just born weak. He could move them out of the cottages where the water and air is so bad, or he could clean up the lead works, there are new ways of lining the pipes, Max says, or he could divert the water from the Stukeley gardens so they had a clean supply—there’s lots he could do but he won’t do a thing without proof. In fact he hates me because I tried to talk to him about it one day. He wouldn’t listen and in the end I shouted at him and called him a murderer and that was it. So now you know. How can I live like this? What can I do?”

I stood beside her, head hanging, unable to work out whether what she told me was true, and quite sure that the kind man who gave me Latin lessons couldn’t be knowingly responsible for all this.

Rosa stroked my head. “I’m sorry, Mariella. Don’t be angry with me. I was wrong to take you there and frighten you. But you mustn’t be afraid. You are not to blame for any of it.”

“Nor are you, Rosa.”

“I
am
to blame. I am because I know about it and I eat at his table and sleep under his roof. And yet I do nothing. Nothing.” She clenched and unclenched her fists and her eyes were brilliant with rage.

“What could you do? What?”

“I don’t know. Be clever. Know more. Run away.”

“Where to?”

Suddenly she laughed. “To you of course. Now I have you. One day, I’ll run away to you.”

The CRIMEA, 1855

 

 

 

T
he next morning the entire camp was up early
and surging towards the trenches: officers, soldiers, stretcher-bearers, orderlies, some still in yesterday’s soiled uniform, eyes bloodshot, hair disheveled, some with wounds dressed in bloody bandages. Regimental doctors, soldiers’ wives, and hangers-on all hurried out of the camp and stood waiting behind the allied defenses. I tagged along with the other women, who carried baskets containing water and bread.