The Rose of Sebastopol (33 page)

T
he riding habit I created
was nothing short of inspired. My scissors went slicing recklessly through Nora’s black skirt until I had cut the waist down by a dozen or more inches. I took out gathers from the front, removed several yards of stuff, and used the spare fabric to add a deep frill, complete with train.

My needle flew along the seams, and with every tightening of the thread, every stab of the fabric, I thought of Henry:
“ ‘Bright Star’...”
Or Rosa:
“You can have no respect for me...”

Then, as the scissors went snip-snap through the waistband of Nora’s petticoat, round I went again. Henry. Rosa.
“Her hair is bound up in a blue scarf...”

Rosa. Henry.

I planned how I would use my own jacket as a template and transform one of Nora’s blouses into a riding coat, complete with wide lapels and brass buttons, but still their faces came back to me.
“I saw your cousin Rosa. Very strange affair...”

It was past midnight by the time I’d finished the skirt and still Nora hadn’t come. In the morning, I thought, I will show her what I’ve achieved. And though she will want to go with us up to the camps I won’t let her. She has burnt her boats with me.

By the time Lady Mendlesham arrived the following afternoon I had a blistering headache brought on by a sleepless night and a morning seated under the awning while I worked on my bonnet and jacket, but I said nothing about it in case my escort changed her mind about riding with me up to the camps. She sported a tailored riding habit, straining at the bust and trimmed with military-style braid and buttons, and she was leading a little pony ominously called Flight. He had bony haunches, a fly-blown coat shaved in places to reveal a couple of vicious scars, and a sensitive disposition. He took one look at me, felt my nervous hand on his bridle, threw up his head, and stamped his back legs.

“He was the best I could find,” said Lady Mendlesham, who was mounted on a tall piebald mare. “I borrowed him from one of my husband’s aides, who assured me that he will behave like an angel, as long as he is well treated. Do look after him, because horses are gold dust out here. Never let him out of your sight or he’ll be snatched from you and whisked away to market at Kamiesh as soon as you can say
knife
.”

We wove through piles of crates lining the harbor amidst heavy traffic of carts, horses, mules, Turks, soldiers, Greeks, laborers, and beggars. I concentrated on holding Flight steady and hoped that Barnabus, if he happened to glance through his dirty window, would not recognize me. “Now that, over there, is the ordnance wharf,” said Lady Mendlesham. “Did you ever see so many munitions in one place?”

I had never seen munitions at all, beyond pictures of the famed minié rifle and the guns stored in the medieval-style armory at Stukeley, but now I saw cannon balls stacked up like heaps of oranges, thousand upon thousand. “How can there be so many?”

“What on earth do you mean? There’s a war, remember. Although in the past couple of months there’s been so little action one wonders if it’s worth being here, if one’s energies, not to mention one’s husband’s, might not be better used elsewhere. I’ve left three small children at home in Gloucestershire, not seen them since January.”

“I heard the guns firing all night. Wouldn’t you call that action?”

“Oh, they’re always firing but nothing is achieved. A breach is made, a breach is mended. A head appears above the enemy barricades so we fire at it and vice versa. But now that we’ve taken Kerch I’m sure it will be much easier to starve them out. My husband says it’s all a matter of morale.”

“What is this Kerch? I’ve heard it mentioned...”

“But surely you’ve heard of our great victory in Kerch? We have cut off a major supply route to Sebastopol and now command the Sea of Azov. The enemy crumbled almost as soon as they spotted our ships. Hardly put up a fight. A notable British victory managed despite French prevarication, as usual. We would have taken it months ago had it not been for the French but I can’t give you details, obviously. In my position one has to be discreet.”

We began a slow climb up the metaled road out of the village with the newly built railway to our left. “Horse-drawn trucks,” said Lady Mendlesham. “As I say, we rely on horses for everything, which is why it was such a disaster to lose so many in the winter.”

At the very top of the road leading to the harbor was a collection of broken stone cottages and an encampment of new huts. “Kadikoi.” Lady Mendlesham stabbed her riding whip. “One of our hospitals is here.” She lowered her voice. “The British Hotel is that large building on the hill. Run by a Negro woman, name of Mrs. Seacole.” The hotel was a two-storied hut with gables and glazed windows, goats and sheep tethered in the yard, chickens pecking round the door, and a group of diners seated at a table under an awning. “You are perhaps far too young to be told what goes on in that place. So many people have come out here to exploit our men,” she added loudly. “I’m afraid some people can’t resist the chance to make a quick fortune. Armenians. Jews. They’re all at it.”

The further we rode from the harbor, the more we were amidst a bustling community of tents and huts and the air was filled with the muted clank of pots and the murmur of voices of the kind that accompanies a village fete. From the lurid accounts I’d read in
The Times
I had expected chaos and squalor. Instead there was a smell of new bread; we passed piles of vegetables outside the cook huts, and on all sides was evidence of purposeful activity, men polishing boots, on parade, or trimming their weapons. It was very hot and my riding habit, being black, soaked up the sun. From time to time Lady Mendlesham took a gulp from a flask of water. She didn’t seem to notice that I had none and I was too shy to ask if I could share hers. The headache dug deeper into the side of my face.

With every forward movement of our horses the sporadic gunfire grew louder but as my companion didn’t bat an eyelid I tried not to show that I was nervous. Instead I had a sense of disbelief that here I was, actually in the Crimea, and yet the sky was blue, the grass was covered with flowers, and men were whistling. The only real discomfort was the lack of shade, although the men were able to shelter behind huts and tents. In places the ground was scarred where roots had been torn up or trunks roughly hacked down at ground level. “In the winter,” said Lady Mendlesham, “men ripped up all the trees because they saw them as convenient fuel. They didn’t think ahead. But how much further do you want to go? The English camp extends as far as the eye can see; we could ride all afternoon and not reach the end of it.” She took such a careless drink from her bottle that liquid trickled into her collar.

“As far as you’ll take me, at least to the Derbyshires,” I cried recklessly, though the crack of gunfire had grown uncomfortably loud, pain was coiling into my ear, and my limbs were beginning to protest at the discomfort of being on horseback. The sidesaddle had a high pommel which demanded a particularly awkward stretch of my right thigh and meant that when the horse stumbled, a sharp pain ran through my muscle.

The Ninety-seventh Derbyshires’ camp was on the far side of the plain, and like everywhere else had a disturbing air of permanence about it, huts as well as tents, washing lines, even vegetable patches. From within one tent came the sound of raucous singing.
“Oh, then Polly Oliver, she burst into tears / And told the good captain her hopes and her
...”

“I expect the men are rehearsing one of their interminable shows,” said Lady Mendlesham. “You would not believe the tedium but the poor boys have to be occupied somehow. We are occasionally expected to go up and laugh.”

We came across Newman on a low bench outside a bell tent, hunched over his rifle, shirt undone almost to the waist. He stared, scrambled to his feet, saluted, and turned his back for a moment while he made himself decent. When he faced us again he was blushing deeply. “I wish you’d given me warning, Miss Lingwood. I would have had tea sent over.”

“You mentioned that Rosa Barr had left a box here.”

He looked horrified. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. You’ve come all this way. Captain Stukeley would have it but he’s still away. Oh, Miss Lingwood...”

“Well, there we go,” said Lady Mendlesham. “At least we tried...”

“But I could show you her hut if you like, where she slept.”

“Why, yes.”

Lady Mendlesham said she wouldn’t dismount but one of the boys might bring her a lemonade, provided he could guarantee it had been made with boiled water. We left her giving instructions about the preferred method of cooking beetroot to a group of men gathered round a cookhouse.

Newman was rather too eager to help me over a succession of guy ropes as we walked between tents to where Rosa’s hut was set a little apart from the rest in a row of five. Nearby a couple of women sat on shady ground with a heap of mending between them. They were coarse-skinned and their hair was hidden under creasy scarves in the Turkish style. When Newman introduced me as Miss Barr’s cousin, conversation died completely.

Newman knocked on the door of the last hut, then, when there was no answer, pushed it open. The interior was hot and cramped though it contained just two camp beds and a pile of packing cases. The smell of rough-cut wood gave me a sharp memory of a potting shed at Stukeley, one of Rosa’s secret places where she and I went sometimes on wet days to listen to the rain on the thin roof and peer through the half-open door at dripping greenery outside.

Newman’s gaze shifted disconcertingly from my bosom to my hands and back again.

“Would it be possible to have some water?” I asked. “I’m very thirsty after my ride.”

He looked mortified. “Oh by all means. So sorry. I should have thought. Back in a sec.” At last he ducked his head and backed out of the little doorway so that I was alone in Rosa’s hut. The air settled softly about me and sunlight shone through knot-holes on shelves running at shoulder level round the walls, piled with shabby possessions: shoes, hats, boxes, and labeled tins. I sat on a bed, half closed my eyes, and tried to imagine Rosa there. Yes. She’d have liked it, a place where she could be among the soldiers but set apart. Between the clamor of guns I heard birdsong, the women’s voices, and a sudden burst of male laughter.

Then it dawned on me that the labels on the tins—Sewing, BISCUITS, tea, medical—had been printed by Rosa. Soldiers’ wives probably couldn’t write and anyway there was no mistaking that confident print.

I took down the tin labeled Sewing and opened the lid. A couple of ants scurried over the neat contents: reels of black and white thread, a pair of scissors, a collection of buttons, a paper of pins, a thimble, and Rosa’s needle book, the very one she and I had made at Stukeley. It had been her first attempt at sewing, a fold of canvas lined (by me) in silk, with uneven red running stitches along the fold to attach a little square of flannel in which the needles were kept—there were three left, very rusty. On the cover were the cross-stitched initials RB, with a decorative cross at each corner in green. The whole enterprise would have taken me ten minutes but had occupied Rosa for two afternoons, because she had scarcely touched a needle before in her life. I remembered sitting in the box hedge, a caterpillar traversing my shoe, the dappled shadow on Rosa’s hair, the knitting of her brow as she sucked the end of the thread and tried to push it through the eye of the needle (“No, Rosa, do as I taught you, fold the thread over the needle, pinch it between finger and thumb, and push the loop through the eye”), her frustration when I told her the embroidery would have to be undone because she’d not made all the criss-crosses go the same way. “But who cares which way the crosses go? I don’t. What does it
matter
?”

“It matters because in needlework the appearance exactly reflects the quality and durability of the finished product,” I said, repeating poor Aunt Eppie verbatim.

“But I think my cross-stitch looks fine the way it is.”

“Turn it over. You see what a mess it looks on the back.”

“But nobody will see the inside after we’ve lined it.”

“Yes, but you and I will always know that the inside isn’t right.”

She picked up the scissors. “I like that,” she said. “I like the way you say,
You and I will always know...
Because we will, won’t we. We’ll always know and we’ll always be together.”

“You mustn’t undo the stitches by cutting through them, Rosa. Unpick them with the blunt end of the needle so you can use the same thread again. Embroidery silk is expensive.”

She sighed dramatically. “Such a fuss,” then darted her head forward to kiss me. “Never change. Never let me persuade you these little things aren’t important, because they are.”

I wondered whether I should take the needle book with me but couldn’t bear to remove it, so I replaced the tin on the shelf and peeped into a few others, but found only a muddle of impersonal things. Then I sat on the bed and pictured Rosa lying with her arms behind her head, hair tumbled over the pillow, smiling because she was so happy to see me. But with a shock I recalled that Rosa’s smile had perhaps been false and that even when she slept in this little hut she may have been plotting her seduction of Henry.

Had
he
been here? Had they lain together on one of these narrow beds? Is this where he had learnt to caress the contours of her breast?

I pushed open the door and walked into a blaze of sunlight. Newman was approaching with a tray containing a carafe and a glass but I stumbled off in the opposite direction, unfastened Flight, climbed inelegantly onto his back, and asked which way we should go next.

Lady Mendlesham set off at such a brisk pace that I was hard-pushed to keep her in sight as we trotted northwards up a gentle incline until the camp stretched away like a child’s model.