The Rose of Sebastopol (28 page)

“I’ve been enquiring at the desk and of Dr. Lyall. We will be able to take a carriage to the coast, to Pescara, and from there a steamship to Turkey. Or to Civitavecchia and sail round the bottom of Italy. It can be done.”

I rolled over on the bed, buried my head in the pillow, and felt a familiar snake of pain in my temple: headache, brought on, no doubt, by distress. I understood that I had three choices, each more unthinkable than the last. First I contemplated the long journey home beginning with an interrogation by Mrs. Hardcastle in Rome, the arrival at Fosse House, the climbing the stairs to my bedroom, and the removal of my cloak and bonnet. Then what?

Or I could stay in Narni and endure Henry’s anguish that I wasn’t Rosa.

Or I could pick up my skirts, dash across Europe, find Rosa, and beg her to tell me the truth.

N
ext morning Lyall came with money
sent by Henry. Pain thrummed under my bonnet and his features were a blur. Then I was handed into a carriage and driven rapidly downhill across Narni’s unforgiving cobbles. As we journeyed through Terni and into the hills, it grew insufferably hot, my head rolled on my neck, and the pain behind my eye was so bad it made my mouth drop open. I was too nauseous to eat but Nora held me against her bosom and dribbled water between my lips. At night we shared a room in some dark little inn where I writhed on the narrow bed and she slept on the floor. Towards dawn I fell asleep and when I woke she had pushed the shutter open a chink and was sitting up with her eyes closed, fingering a string of green beads.

In a port called Pescara we found a steamship bound for Constantinople from whence we would be able to sail to Balaklava. That night, while we were still in the dock, Nora opened the porthole of our stifling cabin and I smelt the sea. In the morning my headache faded and I had a flicker of happiness when she brought me a cup of tea, because though it was tepid and milk-less, I could drink it without feeling sick.

All that day, as the engines juddered to life and the racket of paddle, piston, and rushing water began, I lay in a bunk with my eyes shut, holding tight to the sheet, and wondered how it could possibly have happened that I was being carried towards Turkey and a war. Nora appeared from time to time but we didn’t speak. In any case, I didn’t care where I went. Now that my headache was gone and the excitement of departure was over, there was no hiding from the fact that Henry had fallen in love with Rosa and the great dream of my life was therefore over.

The community of the ship impinged itself slowly. Through the queasy first days of the voyage I listened as other bodies moved above, beside, and beneath me, lurching against my cabin wall when the ship tipped, the soles of their feet walking the boards a foot from my face until I couldn’t stand the confinement any longer, I had to get away from that anonymous, busy flesh. So I rose from the bunk, wrapped myself in a shawl, covered my lank hair with a bonnet, and crept up on deck.

The world turned out to be blue, rushing, and sparkling, water and sky, swaying, rippling, flashing blue. I was too ill to go to the saloon for dinner so instead Nora brought a meal of bread and soup to my chair. When I took a mouthful I discovered I was ravenous.

I liked the fact that the ship was so economical and neat in its fittings and furnishings; the bathroom had brass taps, an ample supply of towels, and an adequate water closet. After the third day I discarded a few petticoats, because I was too hot and the gangways and cabin were so cramped. The ship juddered and stank its way into the Aegean Sea among a hundred little islands. With Greece on one side, Turkey the other, I was actually inside the map I had stuck into my Russian War album.

Small rituals gave me a degree of comfort, such as the removal of clothes before sleep, the brushing of my hair, though this last reminded me of Rosa’s obsession with watching me: “I listen for the crackle,” she used to say. “I think there is more of Mariella in her hair than in anything else about her.” At all other times, when I wasn’t quivering with shock and despair, I was consumed with panic. When I lay down at night my heart went into palpitations and thudded against my side.

By day I sat on the deck with Henry’s letters in my hand, the ones he’d written me and the last, delirious notes which must have been meant for Rosa. After all, I thought, who, faced with a choice between that thrilling girl and her doll of a cousin, wouldn’t choose Rosa? Now I saw everything differently. Now, as we sailed down the coast of Greece, as I watched a relentless blue sky slide overhead, as there strolled past me men with extravagant moustaches and military dress, and women in floating muslins with the shadows of their parasols bobbing on the deck behind them, I thought only about Henry and Rosa and how despite his having once, as a child, pressed his head into my lap and sobbed, despite the hours I had spent trimming my gowns, arranging my hair, and moistening my lips in preparation for his visits, despite the fact he and I had stood in the turret of his new house and gazed into the future together, he had still fallen for Rosa’s dazzling smiles, just as I had fallen for them the minute she turned the blaze of her attention on me from the top of the gatepost at Stukeley.

A
s we arrived at Constantinople,
a purple dusk rolled over the water and obscured all but the skyline of the city. The sudden end of vibration and engine noise made us stagger and rush to the deck. There was an uncanny silence which filled immediately with a thousand other sounds: voices, feet, cart wheels, dogs, and the insistent Muslim call to prayer. It seemed to me that the timing was deliberate. You are in a foreign place, wailed those off-key voices, Mar-i-ell-aaaaaaaaaaa, you have nothing to do with us. Needle-like columns with odd little bulges on top, domes, towers, and chimneys pierced the fading sky. The city smelt of smoke and sewage and ahead of us, as we glided into our berth, was a tumbling crowd of humanity wearing the wrong clothes, speaking the wrong language. In a moment of panic-stricken forgetfulness I looked for Rosa. If only I could spot her elbowing through the crowd, springing up to get a better look, her eyes lit with joy.

But no-one came to rescue me. However, the Italian crew had taken a liking to Nora, presumably because of her Catholic leanings, and the first mate found us a steamer, the
Royal Albert
, which was to sail the following evening for Balaklava, carrying soldiers who had been sent across the Black Sea to the English hospital at Skutari and were now fit enough to return to battle.

Our transfer from one ship to another went so smoothly that we scarcely had to touch Turkish soil except for a brief scurry along the dock-side behind a servant who contrived to carry our entire luggage consisting of two trunks and five or six bags on his back, head, and under his arms. The new ship seemed quite clean, though noisy, because it had just taken on a cargo of chickens and geese as well as crates sent from England, some of which might contain, for all I knew, the mittens Aunt Isabella had knitted at such cost to her nerves and mine.

My idea was to send notes to Lady Stratford at the embassy and to Miss Nightingale at the Skutari hospital, enquiring whether they had heard of Rosa, but Nora, without consulting me, had already arranged for a boat to take us across to the hospital at Skutari first thing in the morning. She said that notes, in her experience, could easily fall into the wrong hands or get ignored. We must go in person and knock on doors.

From what I had heard of Miss Nightingale I thought she would be very irritated by the sight of my pink traveling dress, so I unearthed my plainest blouse (eight vertical tucks each side of the button-holes and a three-layered ruffled collar), in which I would be far too hot, a summer shawl, and my large-brimmed bonnet. There was a scrap of mirror in my new cabin and I saw that I looked entirely unconvincing as a sophisticated lady, being merely a pale version of Mariella Lingwood, the broken-hearted daughter of a builder.

I barely slept. The night was very warm, I had scarcely eaten any supper—the meat had been tough and the bread sour—and as darkness settled it became apparent that I was sharing my bed with insects.
Fleas
. I lay in the dark with tears falling into my pillow, pinpricks of pain piercing my hands and neck. What troubled me almost more than the physical discomfort was this slide towards the abyss. Fleas, inedible food, and a close association with a Roman Catholic were all part of my disappearance from the known world.

Next morning one of Nora’s Italian sailor acquaintances escorted us to the pier where we would take a boat to Skutari. I gripped Nora’s arm as we entered a Turkish crowd and kept my eyes fixed firmly on the pavement, or rather the collection of large boulders that passed for a pavement and across which humanity, animals, and cart wheels lurched and staggered. There was a racket of other tongues and a blur of strangely draped clothes and bare feet, a sudden flash of embroidery worked in gold thread, and then we came to a rackety jetty where a Turkish boatman was waiting to take us across the Bosphorus in his gaudily painted boat.

To my horror the Italian, who by now seemed like our last friend, was not to accompany us on our voyage, so off we set in that flimsy vessel rowed by a heavy-shouldered Turk with a permanent smile and very white teeth. I huddled in the stern while Nora struck up a conversation; mostly nods and smiles from both parties, because he was too ignorant to know English although he nodded repeatedly and uttered the word
buono
, as if it covered every eventuality.

After a few minutes I realized that he was a proficient boatman, that he was trying to please us, and that far from his abducting us we were in fact heading towards what was unmistakably the Barrack Hospital, a colossal building a thousand times the size of the dwellings clustered under its walls. I had never seen so many windows in one structure and wondered what Father would have made of it. There must surely be practical difficulties in managing the maintenance of the pipe-work in such a place.

The boatman gave me his warm, rough hand and I climbed ashore, aware that this wide jetty of new wood and the well-laid path up the slope to the hospital were not at all like the nightmarish picture that had been painted in our newspapers at home. The sun shone, the ground was firm, a smell of seaweed came from the Bosphorus, and the water seemed clean enough despite a slick of rubbish. Along the path we passed natives and soldiers who stepped back and removed their caps with great deference. The Turkish women were shrill-voiced and dressed from head to toe in bright colors but their faces were heavily veiled. I envied their obscurity. My own face, by contrast, seemed prominent as a white moon in the dark frame of my bonnet.

Once through the gateway to the hospital we suddenly entered deep shade. Here the noise was more concentrated and purposeful: running water, brisk footfalls, the clop of a mule, the rasp of a saw. Inside was a vast courtyard, wide enough for ten parade-grounds, with huts scattered about, groups of loitering men wearing fragments of uniform, and dogs slumped in the shade. A couple of men dressed in shirts and trousers and with two bare feet between them lolled on a bench against a sunny wall. They took off their hats when Nora asked the way to Miss Nightingale’s office and the smallest sat up eagerly. “We can take you up to her quarters but she’s not here. She went to the Crimea. And she’s got terrible sick. Surely you’ve heard.”

My spirits fell still further. Aside from the inconvenience of her being away, it crossed my mind that if the indomitable Miss Nightingale could get ill here, what hope was there for me? Meanwhile the men had covered their tousled heads, heaved themselves onto crutches, and prepared to be our guides.

The hospital consumed us with a dankness unique to stone buildings in hot countries as we climbed a staircase and entered a long corridor lined with beds. I remembered that Rosa had compared the hospital at Koulali to a railway station and here indeed were high-arched ceilings, many-paned windows deep-set in the walls, row upon row of doors, and down the courtyard side of the corridor, lines of beds, and in each bed a sick man. I thanked God that at least I’d had a glimpse of a hospital in London so that I wasn’t too horrified by the sights and sounds of collective sickness. We saw only men: patients shuffling from bed to bed, orderlies carrying pails or trays, some officials in army uniforms, a man in a frock coat. Anyone who was conscious stared at us, and one or two of the patients winked.