The Rose of Sebastopol (47 page)

After another fortnight Nora was sometimes strong enough to perform light nursing duties such as feeding the weakest invalids beef tea or sago pudding and applying poultices to their skin. In another week she was able to clean and dress wounds. Since her recovery meant that I had now lost even the most spurious excuse for my presence at the hospital I lived in daily expectation of being sent away, but instead Mrs. Shaw Stewart handed me the keys to the linen store and put me in charge of the heaps of sheets, pillow-cases, towels, bandages, aprons, and nightshirts that were daily required at the hospital. In addition I was expected to give needlework lessons to soldiers’ wives who wished to make a living on their return to England. We began unambitiously with button-holes and as a reward for diligence graduated to lazy daisy, so that after a few days my pupils had black and white flowers sprawled along the battered hems of their petticoats.

Meanwhile the now-familiar mantra boomed in my head. Find Rosa. Find Rosa. Each time I’d reached the same dead end: Henry banging on the door of her hut, and the Inkerman cave from which he came back alone. If I could only go there to see for myself and understand the lay of the land, but more than ever I was pinned to the hospital, and since Newman’s death and Max’s banishment I had no escort.

In desperation I consulted the list Nora and I had made on our first morning in Balaklava:
Item Three. Go among the troops
. In fact this was much easier than I’d ever imagined. We didn’t need to go among the troops, the troops came to us in their dozens, driven up to the hospital by heat-stroke, wounds received under fire from the Russian bastions, dysentery, typhus, or cholera. We talked to everyone about Rosa: my sewing women, orderlies, tradesmen, peddlers, patients, visitors. Always the same story: “Wasn’t she the one who went up to the cave and never came back...?”

Late one afternoon Mrs. Whitehead appeared in the doorway of the linen store and beckoned me outside. Though I was now reduced to wearing the least number of clothes possible in order to remain decent, I was soaked in perspiration while Mrs. Whitehead’s face was beetroot-red because she still had to wear the heavy gown and sash that marked her out as one of Miss Nightingale’s nurses. We stood in the shade, covered our faces with muslin scarves, and fanned ourselves vigorously, because, as if the rats were not plague enough, the hospital, like everywhere else in the camps, was under attack from swarms of flies.

She said: “I think you should come up to my ward. I have a patient there who claims to have seen your cousin Rosa.”

When I threw back my veil a couple of flies the size of collar studs smacked onto my lips. “Did he say when?”

“A week ago.”

“Did he say where?”

“He’s been on picket duty up by the Tchernaya line. You should come.”

“Wait while I find Nora.”

The patient, O’Byrne, was a gaunt Irishman whose feet dangled several inches beyond the end of his hospital bed. When I asked in a whisper what sickness had laid him low Nora shrugged and said: “Later, Mariella.”

Though the windows of the hut had been covered in nets, and doors at either end were open to encourage a draught, poor O’Byrne was still the victim of a concerted attack by flies, which zoomed down in droves onto his swollen hands and cracked lips. Nevertheless, when he saw me he smiled appreciatively, revealing just two rotten teeth. “Well now, miss, aren’t I the lucky one to be receiving such a lovely-looking visitor as you.”

“I was wondering if you would repeat to Miss Lingwood and Mrs. McCormack the story you told me earlier,” said Mrs. Whitehead.

“Mrs. McCormack is it? Now what part of Ireland might you be from?”

“Sligo.”

“Is that right?” His eyes were misty. “And which of your family was lost?”

“None that I’ll be talking about with you,” was her reply. “Now what’s this you’ve been saying about Miss Rosa Barr?”

He was not one to be hurried in front of a captive audience. “Of course we’d all heard of this girl who’d gone missing up by Inkerman. Your cousin now, miss, was it?” The tip of his tongue came out to moisten his lips and six fat black spots landed on his mouth. “We’d been given a description of her: tall and slender, with a head of golden hair. And we’d heard that she’d had a lover’s meeting up in some cave and never come back.” His eyes flickered over my face. “So, anyway, it’s a warm night and I’m mighty bored waiting to see what might be hurled at us next from them Russian bastions, so I takes myself for a stroll beyond the French pickets by the Tchernaya. It’s cool up there, looking over the river, with the sun going down.” Pause, while he closed his eyes and passed his hand across his face. Then he stared up to the ceiling, as if a vision had suddenly appeared. “Far below me, I see her, by the water. A girl in a blue dress. She is just standing there, in her bare feet, with the water rushing over the hem of her skirts, and her hair lifting in the wind that’s blowing. She’s so still, and it’s such an odd sight after so many weeks of being in the camps among the men, that I say nothing and do nothing, but after a while I look about me, to see who else might be noticing her. It’s not safe down by the water, you could be picked off any moment by one of them Russian sharpshooters up on the hills. And then I thinks to myself, well, I do believe it’s her, the girl that’s gone missing. I shall make my way down there and see what I can do for her. I notices that she holds her hands behind her and is walking back and forth just there in the shallows of the river, and I can’t see her face.”

I disliked the man’s maudlin blue eyes as he glanced up at me slyly from time to time to make sure that I was drinking in every word, but my hands were shaking. When he was silent I found myself both applauding his art and furious that I had fallen into his trap.

“So I begins to wind my way down to the river, though it’s dangerous, with the French pickets watching me on one side, the Russkies on the other. And just for a minute or so the woman is out of sight, as I take a bit of a tumble on a difficult piece of terrain. And when the river again comes into view, she is gone.”

He closed his eyes, as if in a reverie. Only a fool would have anticipated any other kind of ending but I was limp with dashed hopes.

“So I suppose you went looking along the river and couldn’t find her,” said Nora.

“Exactly so. Up and down I went. I even called her name, since we all knew it.
Rosa. Rosa
. But there was no sign. In the end it grew dark and I felt my life to be in danger, so I came away.”

“It could have been anyone,” I said. “A Russian woman from Sebastopol.”

“It could that. But I swear it was the English girl. There was something about her, the way she moved, her hair falling across her back and face, the ragged nature of her gown, that made me sure it was her.”

“And that’s it, is it?” said Nora.

“That’s it.”

I gave him a coin and thanked him. It was a great relief to leave the stifling hut and emerge into the warm, salty air where Nora and I parted from Mrs. Whitehead and walked past the last of the hospital huts. She was still quite weak and slow, and when we reached the fortress we sat with our backs to the broken wall facing the sea, our legs stretched out before us and our skirts tucked up to cool our calves and ankles.

“He’s the sort to give the Irish a bad name,” said Nora.

“What was the matter with him?”

“I suspect he’s been over-friendly with the women up at Kamiesh, Miss Lingwood, and the association hasn’t agreed with his constitution.”

“And what about his story?”

“Well now, I’d say it was stuff and nonsense. Can you see Rosa all airy-fairy down by some river? What he didn’t mention was the amount of liquor he’d taken before he went on his late-evening stroll.”

“Yet there were some details that sounded like her. The fact that she was by the river... the blue dress...Perhaps I should go up there, just in case.”

“You’ll do no such thing. You’re to wait until I’m a little stronger and I’ll come with you, if you must go.”

We were silent for a while as the indigo sea sighed and shrank back and a slight, cool breeze got up. “While you were ill, Nora, I wished I had asked you more about Rosa. Sometimes I think you must know her far better than I do, having lived with her all those years.”

“Well now, is it too late?”

“What was Rosa like, when you knew her at Stukeley?”

“Probably as she had always been. I have found that with her, over the years, she never changes. She is insatiable to know what is going on in people’s lives, and how she might be a part of them. We used to talk a great deal about the opportunities that might one day open up for her. She always said that you, Mariella Lingwood, her truest friend, was far away in London, but one day she would get back to you and make a life.”

“I cannot surely have been her only friend.”

“She had no time for most of the other young ladies who came to call. I fear she did not put herself out much for them. And of course try as she might she could never make friends among the village girls, it was too unequal.”

“She had Max.”

“Ah, but he was seldom there. By the time I arrived at Stukeley he was nearly ready to take up his commission in the army. He used to come home in bursts, and he and she would go galloping off together away from the valley or spend whole nights in front of the fire talking and talking and then he’d be gone, leaving her more desolate than ever.”

“What did they talk about?”

“Well, how would I know? Her usual obsessions, I would imagine. You. London. The future. What work she might do. But he was not a reliable companion. He was a wild boy, what with his drinking friends and his love affairs.” I caught her sideways glance at me.

“I thought Rosa was the one Max loved.”

“So she was. He always came back to Rosa. But that didn’t stop him casting his eye about. And he nearly died that time in Australia, you know. One of his fellows did perish, of thirst. Some lunatic idea of setting off to find a source of water in the western desert. At any rate, that little experience seemed to satisfy his wanderlust for a while and he came back to Stukeley more often.”

“He certainly thinks a great deal of you, Nora. He was very angry with me because we had come to the Crimea and you had fallen ill.”

“Well, so he should think a deal of me. The welcome Rosa and I gave him each time he came home. Our own private parties we used to have, when nobody was about late at night in the kitchens. Those were the best times.”

“And were you happy at Stukeley?”

“As I have said, I developed a fondness for those two. And Lady Isabella became very dependent on me, which is something, I suppose. But I had no liking for Sir Matthew Stukeley, or his other son, and generally I loathed the house—I could not get used to its extravagance.”

“So how was it you came to be there in the first place?”

“I needed work. My great-grandmother had been from a family of Derbyshire lead miners, but then she was sweet-talked by a roving Irishman name of McCormack, who carried her across to Sligo. We’d heard nothing of the old family over the years but when the ship docked in Liver-pool it seemed to me that Derbyshire was the one place in England where I might find a little kindness among people of my own. So I went on and on walking and asking directions until at last I found someone who’d heard of these relatives of mine, name of Fairbrother, and that’s how I came at last to Stukeley.”

Fairbrother. When I closed my eyes the Crimean sunset played across my lids and the warm stone at my back was soothingly immutable. What was it Henry had said about the invisible soup of the dead? Now it seemed to me I was jostled so close by the absent, both living and dead, that they almost suffocated me.

“I found no comfort among the Fairbrothers, that’s for sure. One poor widow and two living children, one of those half dead.”

“Only two children.”

“It was clear that I could not stay with them in my penniless state, so I ups to the great house and I says who I am and where I’m from and whom I’m connected with and at that moment it is Rosa who comes to the kitchen and sees me there with my head in my hand. I remember the scent of her to this day when she touched my arm though I had the dirt of a hundred roads on me. She said what could I do and I said that I was best at nursing the sick and she said well then you might be just the person we are looking for. Then she made me tea and sat beside me while I drank and those blue eyes of hers never for one instant left my face.”

For several minutes longer we stayed side by side under the fortress. The sea rolling against the cliff and the quiet bustle down at the hospital were less vivid to me than the kitchen at Stukeley Hall, where every utensil was large and new, the servants ranged about in their starched uniforms, hostile or suspicious, while Rosa, with her unerring nose for an opportunity, seized a pot-holder, grasped the kettle, asked a dozen questions, and broke as many unwritten rules.

But then Nora put her heavy hand on my shoulder to lever herself up and told me it was time to go back, the men would be clamoring for their suppers.