The Rose of Sebastopol (23 page)

Rosa’s hair was severely parted and gathered into a net at the back of her head under a dark bonnet with a white pleated lining. Hidden under her clothes was the sapphire locket, which now contained her father’s hair as well as our own. After much argument we had agreed that she should be the one to wear it as a talisman while she was away.

She immediately met up with Miss Stanley, who looked very anxious and held a sheaf of papers. Already Rosa didn’t belong to us but talked about the time of arrival in Boulogne, arrangements for being met in Paris, and the fact that their companion, a small, sandy-haired female who I feared would have a difficult time in a Turkish hospital, had brought far too much luggage.

When Rosa turned to us, just for a moment there was a look of detachment in her face. Then the old expression of ardent affection returned. “Good-bye my dearest, dearest Aunt Maria. Take care of Mother for me . . . But I know you will. Of course you will.” Then she embraced Father, for whom she had no words, just a tearful glance and a lingering kiss on each cheek.

Last, me. She held me at arm’s length and looked into my eyes. “I will write. I will tell you everything. I can scarcely bear it. I know what I am asking. I know. But I will be thinking of you all the time.” She showered me with kisses and I smelt her lemony perfume through the stench of soot and steam.

I kissed her smooth, high cheekbone. “You might see Henry. Oh, Rosa, if you do, tell him I am thinking of him.” The station was thronging with travelers, the train was chuffing and fuming, there were a great many officials, men dressed in stovepipe hats and black coats, a group of nuns, some rough-looking older women, and scurrying children. Rosa flung her arms around my neck one last time and I held her, the precious, warm, pliant length of her, then she pulled away and snatched up her two light traveling bags. “Mariella,” she cried, and couldn’t say anything else. Instead she ran between the skirts of her companions and drew them after her into the train. We next saw her in the carriage, standing at the window. “Go,” she mouthed, laughing through her tears. “Please go.” But we stayed until the whistle blew and the train at last began to jolt forward in a great commotion of smoke and stink and Rosa’s features became ill-defined at the window. Then I turned away and took Father’s arm.

ITALY, 1855

 

 

 

I
tried to dissuade Henry from the picnic,
because the overcast sky threatened rain, but he would have none of it. He hired a carriage and the three of us were driven along the wooded valley south of Narni and then began the slow climb up into the hills above the plains of Lazio. The fortified medieval village of Otricoli was perched high on a slope with bird’s-eye views from the parapets. Our carriage squeezed through the gateway, along a crazily winding street and then down to the valley of the Tiber, where wealthy Romans had once built their summer playground.

Henry and I sat shoulder to shoulder facing forward, with Nora opposite. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hands, because I was haunted by the memory of how his fingers had struggled with the buttons of my gown, and I was on fire with longing and suspicion. Had those hands caressed Rosa’s breasts and threaded their fingers through her silky hair?

At last the carriage halted amidst a clump of trees. Nora said she would stay put, it being far too muggy for looking at ruins. She had brought her knitting and there she sat, for all the world as if she were beside my aunt’s bed in England.

Henry and I walked at a tortuously slow pace, because he paused frequently, fighting for breath. Gradually what had seemed simple meadow-land reformed itself into the site of a city. A series of mounds emerged as an amphitheater with pillars and arches which had once supported tiers of seating. We rested on a bank where the Romans had crowded to watch plays, or athletes pitched against each other head to head. Now the only activity was the wind in the grasses and the flitting of a little brown bird.

Henry fell back on his elbows and took sucking breaths of the moist air as if he had run a mile. His forehead was knotted in concentration and his cheeks sunken under his eye sockets.

“We should go back,” I said, in my new, cold voice. “It may rain. The last thing you need is to get wet.”

He opened his eyes and brushed my elbow with the joint of his index finger. The blood juddered in my veins. “The last thing I need is a fretful Mariella.”

“Are you really feeling better today? ”

“I’m gaining so much strength that sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here. If I was working I wouldn’t have time to think about my health and then I’d get better instantly. I’ve a good mind to go back to the war.”

“Yes, I quite understand how difficult it is to be inactive when so much needs to be done. I’ve read in the newspapers that the summer is proving very difficult for our troops.”

“I like the heat. It was the cold that did for me. I should go back to the Crimea. In any case, is being healthy the most important thing? I need to be useful. If I can’t work, I wonder what is the point of being alive?”

“It seems that some of us must fling ourselves into whatever excitement the world has to offer while others must be content to stay at home and keep quiet.”

“My dearest girl, you sound very bitter. I don’t despise those who stay at home. Far from it. Each of us has his own vocation. But I can only tolerate myself when I am endeavoring to make things—people—better. It has been my mission in life to try and make a difference.”

“You sound like Rosa.”

After a moment’s silence he held out his hand. “I think you’re right, it really is going to rain.”

I pretended that I was drawing on his strength as I got to my feet though had I actually pulled on him he would have fallen over. We walked amidst a flock of evil-eyed goats through an orchard of young trees and down a lane that had definitely, said Henry, been made in the time of ancient Ocriculum, look at the way it had sunk beneath the level of the banks on either side. We found a well and the remnants of the old Via Flaminia, where Roman carts had left their wheel marks, and we saw across to the Tiber, where rich Romans had spilt out of their barges and sought shade and refreshment after their hot journey upriver.

“I’m trying to see them,” said Henry, “but I can’t. It amazes me that there are no ghosts even in somewhere as untouched as this. I can imagine them surging out of their boats, the noise, the jostling into place of the slaves and lower orders, the screeching of tired children, but they’re not here, are they, in any sense?”

“There’d be no room for us all if we were surrounded by ghosts.”

“Yet, sometimes I think we must be moving through an invisible soup of the dead.”

“Is that what it felt like on the battlefield? ”

But again he didn’t answer.

The theater where the bloodiest battles had been fought was the best preserved of all, with arches through which the gladiators had rushed from the dark interior. Henry said: “I expect a horde of doctors used to come here to attend the frailties of spoilt Romans on holiday.”

“I presume that’s a dig at your colleagues back home.”

“Of course. But after all, I have profited from rich patients myself. Look at the house I’m able to build because of the fortune I’ve amassed through medicine.”

“I thought you were pleased with your house,
our
house, as it was to be. And you always said, if you didn’t treat the rich you wouldn’t be able to cure the poor.”

“Did I use that word,
cure
? I think now I never effected a cure on anyone.”

“You have saved hundreds of lives, I’m sure.”

“I hacked off body parts and called it surgery. Dear God, I could have saved so much pain, in my time, had I been issued with a pistol so that I could have shot all my patients in the head and had done with it.”

I glanced into his face thinking that I might be expected to smile incredulously but he was deadly earnest. We were under a formidable bit of Roman engineering, arch upon arch leading to the labyrinthine cells and passageways backing the theater. There was an ominous trickle of falling stone and a smell of dank earth and goats’ dung. Ferns grew high up in the walls, their lurid green foliage proof of moisture and shade but no exposure to sunlight.

“Shall we walk on? ” I said. “I’m very cold.”

“I’m amazed. I find it too warm.” He took my arm and we walked out into the yellowish light where his jacket was immediately misted by a fine drizzle. After a few more paces he sank onto the remains of a wall and buried his face in his hands. “Ella. I can’t keep up this pretense. I have never been able to hide from you.”

Yes, yes, I thought. It will be much better if everything is in the open. I need to know the truth.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground so that his too-long hair flopped across his eyes. “I shall never be able to practice as a doctor again. They thought I stopped working at the hospital because I was ill. In fact I found that I couldn’t bring myself to inflict any more pain. The sight of blood appalled me. I couldn’t make an incision of any kind because of breaking yet more flesh. That’s what made me incapable.”

I sat beside him in the rain with my hands folded on my lap. My pink silk was bound to mark, it would not stand up well to a drenching. “You are ill,” I said wearily, “too weak to make any such decision. When you are well again, when we have returned to England . . .”

He gripped my wrist. “Mariella, I won’t have you tied to me. I am useless, worse than useless. Culpable.”

“Of what? ”

We stared at each other. His eyes were red-rimmed, his nostrils bluish; he put up his cold hand and pressed it to the side of my face. “Mariella. Don’t love me. I’m worthless. And I won’t be coming home. Look at the state of me. Dear God, the state of me.” He seized my hand, kissed it, and kept his head bent low. “Mariella. I can’t keep my promises. Forgive me.”

“Forgive you?”

“Oh, God. God.”

“Forgive you for what? Tell me. Henry, you wrote that you’d met Rosa. What happened?”

“Mariella.”

“I think you are in love with her. Do you love her?”

“Mariella.”

“Please, Henry, tell me. Are you in love with Rosa? ”

But there was no answer, because he had fallen against me.

LONDON, 1854

 

 

 

F
osse House. Minus Rosa.
Minus visits from Henry.

Fosse, meaning ditch or trench. My father’s joke. That’s what I do, he said, dig ditches, lay pipes, make foundations. Every building must begin with a ditch. What better name to give a builder’s own home, then?

He had designed the house himself, with large windows, crenulations above the porch, and broad white steps to the front door, which was where he deposited me at nine thirty on the morning of Friday, December 1, after we’d waved good-bye to Rosa and taken a long detour to leave Mother at the Governesses’ Home. Father was on his way to a site in Putney, so when the carriage pulled away there was no-one left at home except the servants, Aunt Isabella, and me.