The Rose of Sebastopol (45 page)

One, very tiny and bright-eyed, edged closer to me. “You’re something to do with Rosa Barr.”

There it was, the surge in the blood. “Yes. I’m her cousin.”

“I thought so. We all say you look like her.”

“Do you know her well, then?”

“Oh, yes. She was a good lady. Shared everything.”

“Was. You say, was?”

“Well, she’s gone, obviously. She went off with her mad doctor and never came back. Surely you knew. We all thought that’s why you’re here.”

“Did you see them together?”

“Of course. He was forever up at the camp. Clamoring for her. So in the end she followed him.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“I don’t know.” She stood on tiptoe to whisper in my ear. “But why would he have come back all wild and speechless, and her not seen again?”

I laughed; I nearly told her that Henry was my fiancé and I knew him to be incapable of harming a fly but the words died on my lips.

As there had still been no armistice hundreds of men had been left all night on the open ground in front of the Russian bastions and now once again the sun was climbing high and hot in the sky. The women said that yesterday some of the men had tried to drag their wounded fellows off the field but had been driven back under a hail of bullets. The mood was ugly, the soldiers foul-mouthed as they cursed the Russians for not allowing the armistice. The trouble was that the Russian wounded had fallen within their own bastions so only the French and English lay out in the sun. Therefore the Russians could afford to take their time.

We came to the brow of the hill where I had stood with Lady Mendlesham-Connors to peer out over Sebastopol. A crowd had collected, because from here it was possible to view the city but be relatively safe from stray cannon balls. It was said that Lord Raglan was among the group of high-ranking military who were looking out at the Russian bastions, their highly polished buttons and buckles winking in the sun, Raglan himself identifiable because he had only one hand pressed to the small of his back and was surrounded by a cluster of aides with papers and field glasses. Their horses were tethered in the shade of a stone parapet further down the hill. On her own, a little apart and still on horseback, was Lady Mendlesham-Connors herself.

I tried to hide under the brim of my sunbonnet but it was too late, I’d been spotted. Lady Mendlesham pulled her horse’s head away from the rest and came trotting over, bellowing my name, so that others looked round and the soldiers’ wives backed away. Somewhat to my surprise she was touchingly pleased to see me. “Dear Miss Lingwood. How dreadful. This has been a disaster. My husband is beside himself. He won’t speak to me. Raglan has as good as collapsed—they can’t get a sensible order out of him. I can’t bear to think of our men out there. Look, look.” She swung round so that she could train her field glasses on the bastions, sighed deeply, and passed them to me.

Without the glasses all I had seen was the maze of trenches zigzagging across the plain before Sebastopol and the great Russian fortresses smoking under the hot blue sky. Sprinkled in front of them, like confetti, were patches of red, blue, and the odd dot of white. Once I’d adjusted the lenses I realized that these colors were soldiers lying heaped together or scattered far apart: blue French uniforms under the Malakov, red British coats under the Redan. Beside the fallen men were weapons, flags, ladders, wool bags, all the detritus of the war. Overhead, vultures wheeled and plunged.

Lady Mendlesham’s voice shook. “They will die of thirst. I’ve seen it happen before. Their wounds will fester. We could still save some of them, if they’d only let us.”

“There are so many,” I said.

“What did you expect? The men go out in their hundreds. On this occasion it was a massacre. No hand-to-hand fighting, just bullets. I’ve told my husband it was all wrong but as I said he won’t speak to me. They’re all at their wits’ end with Raglan because he won’t make up his mind what to do next.”

“What could he do?”

“Get on his horse. Ride out there. Speak to the Russians. Pride and protocol prevent him. Not to mention fear, probably. Pride is what led to his lunatic orders. I do wonder. Well, that’s it, I’m going home. I feel I can do no more good out here. Why don’t you come with me? We could share a cabin, if need be. What do you think?”

“My maid is ill. My cousin...” I turned the glasses again to the scattered colors on the battlefield. Where was Newman?

“Well, the offer’s there. You’ll do no good here, getting underfoot.” She reached for the glasses and smacked her whip on the horse’s rump. “The pony I lent you, by the way. Took himself home. You might have said you’d got back safely. I was worried.” She pointed towards the cluster of horses and there was the unmistakable, battle-scarred Flight, flicking his tail and nudging up under his much taller neighbor’s flank apparently with no other purpose than to annoy him.

The sun baked down and a breeze stirred in hot gusts. The sky was a burning pale yellow and the sea a shimmering rim of gold behind the Russian bastions. Nobody moved. Time dragged. The wounded men must be dying in front of our eyes. Occasionally a soldier threatened to rush out onto the field and grab his friend but was held back by others. From time to time there was a spatter of fire from either side and shells fell among the dead and wounded. Sometimes I wondered what I was waiting for: I needed to go back and see if Max was alive; I should return to Nora. But I stayed put, watching the shadows shorten at midday and then lengthen again, the birds perform hateful dives to feast on broken flesh.

Then at last in the mid-afternoon a murmur went up among the troops, and those with field glasses pointed towards the harbor, where it was said that British and Russian boats had met to discuss the terms of an armistice. A few minutes later there was a groan of relief as white flags appeared above the Redan and the Malakov and then were marched slowly forward across the open land. In a great wave hundreds of men rose from the trenches, French on one side, British on the other, and hurried forward, bearing stretchers and spades.

I stumbled, heat-struck, behind the stretcher-bearers, aware that just to my right a swarm of flies buzzed over a corpse. The smell of rotting meat was faint at first, then grew overpowering, rancid, sickening. The men were clinical, rushing from one body to another, and on the rare occasions when they found a flicker of life a shout went up and doctors and stretcher-bearers raced to the spot. On and on I went, past the little group of Russians holding the white flag, through a shallow trench littered with bodies, and right up to the abatis which formed a shield in front of the Redan. Ranked along it were Russian officers in full uniform, very tall and well groomed, smoking cigars and gossiping. One of them caught my eye and gave me a lazy wink. Then his expression changed as he nudged his companion and pointed to me. I blushed while two pairs of laconic Russian eyes ran across my mouth, neck, breast, waist, and feet. For those few seconds, as I froze under their impertinent gaze, I could have reached out and touched the enemy’s greatcoat. The second officer nodded and made a little grimace, so that his lips turned down, then threw a remark over his shoulder to yet another man.

I rushed past them to reach the English bodies piled up along the barricade where a storm of bullets must have fallen among them—I’d recognized Newman by his bandaged hand. He was caught on the abatis, arms outstretched, back arched as if he’d been attempting an over-ambitious gymnastic trick. His back was to me and his uniform was oddly tight, as if he’d gained several inches of girth since we last met. When I tiptoed round the side of his body I saw that his face had been blown away and his brains were spattered in a dark, fly-blown sludge on the tangled branches. Only his jaw and ear were left. His second-best jacket was bursting at the seams because his body had swollen in the heat, and his unbandaged hand was black. Yet this was definitely Newman: I knew his blond quiff of hair, the shape of his boyishly large ear, the injured hand.

I sat down on a clean patch of grass nearby and waited for orderlies to come with a stretcher. The muslin on my bonnet blew back and forth in the hot wind and I covered my nose and mouth in an attempt to stifle the smell. But I forced myself to gaze at Newman’s hanging body.

It was relatively quiet close to the Russian bastions: only the low voices of the enemy officers, the squabble and screech of vultures, unemotional orders from English doctors, an occasional muttered oath or prayer.

On the way back to the allied trenches I passed a party of a hundred or so men digging a pit into which would be tipped the corpses of the common soldiers. Ahead of me four stretcher-bearers carried Newman’s body towards the burial ground beside the camp. But I didn’t wait to see him laid in the earth; there was no time. When I reached Max’s hut I packed the contents of Rosa’s box into my carpetbag and set off back towards the General Hospital to find out if Max, at least, was still alive.

PART FIVE

W
hen I arrived back at the General Hospital
in the late evening I found that the air of crisis had been replaced by a weary calm, though there was still a line of stretcher cases awaiting surgery. I hardly dared mention Max’s name for fear of being told that he was dead but in the end I spoke to an orderly who directed me to a hut where he lay unconscious. For a long time I stared down at his face, because I couldn’t bear to see what they had done to the rest of his body. Despite his ashen complexion it was a good face, with none of his father’s narrowness of feature or softness of chin, though he had inherited the high Stukeley bridge to the nose and hollows under the cheekbones. The thick, wavy hair and dark brows were his mother’s.

Then I plucked up the courage to look further along the bed. Two feet. Yes, there was no doubt, two feet at the end of two legs, one heavily bandaged.

Shaking with relief, I whispered into his ear in case he could hear me. First I told him I’d been up to the camp and rescued Rosa’s things. Then, for want of any other cheerful news, I added that his stepmother was to marry a moth-collector half her size. When I waved away the flies prancing in his nostrils and eyelids he didn’t react and they immediately flitted back. I put my hand in his but his fingers didn’t move.

This was my first incursion into a ward since my visit to the Barrack Hospital in Skutari. I made a mental note of what I’d write in my next letter to Henry:
amply staffed by orderlies and doctors; smell of carbolic; patients covered in fresh linen and wearing hospital nightshirts; evidence of lavish supplies of medicines and bandages...
I did not intend to mention the gray rat crouched under one of the beds, the flies sucking at a bloody clod of lint covering a man’s forehead, the filthy apron worn by a passing surgeon. Nor would I write about the wagon into which I had seen four corpses being loaded, or the sobs of an officer who had lost an arm and an eye in a spray of grapeshot.

A portly doctor came in, squinted along the ward, and approached. When he bowed over my hand I noted that his whiskers must have taken half an hour to groom and I wondered why so august an individual should bother with me. He told me that against his better judgment they had spared Captain Stukeley’s leg because he’d been so insistent, though even if he survived he wouldn’t walk for months, if at all. In the meantime he would probably die of infection, as they’d warned him. It was all very well to try and knit a broken bone but a man’s chances of recovery were much higher if there was a good clean amputation and the stump kept moist with champagne until it healed. It turned out that the reason for his deference was that he somehow knew of my connection with Dr. Henry Thewell, of whom he spoke perhaps too effusively—brilliant surgeon... highest survival rate of patients...utterly dedicated...shame he got so sick.

“By the way, Miss Lingwood, it might interest you to know that I have a pile of books left here by Dr. Thewell. I’ll look them out for you.” Then he cast an expert eye over Max’s bandaged leg and darted away to be important elsewhere, before I could ask any awkward questions.