The Rose of Sebastopol (53 page)

“So you want me to punish you instead of Rosa.”

“Yes...I don’t mind...”

“Come here then.” He took hold of my arm and studied me as if deciding which part of my body to hit. With the end of the whip he mapped me out—my shoulder, upper arm, and hip. He even raised the hem of my skirt to look at my quivering knees. For a moment I sobbed helplessly, supported only by his grip, then he threw the whip aside and spoke softly again. “Mariella, I have no intention of punishing you. You’ve done nothing wrong, except to do as Rosa told you, though I’m sad that Rosa’s opinion seems to matter more to you than mine. There, stop this crying.”

“Promise you won’t tell Rosa what I said. Promise you won’t punish her.”

He led me over to the armchair, stroked my head, kissed my hand, then very gently pulled me into his lap. “Now, hush. I can’t have you spoiling your pretty face with tears.” I raised my face and he wiped my eyes with his scented handkerchief, crossed his leg, which brought me even tighter against him, and gave me another hug. Then he took my chin in his hand and studied my face, first my eyes, then my mouth, gave a little laugh deep in his throat, and kissed me on the lips.

It was just a little kiss, the merest pressure of his mouth on mine and something very odd, a flick of his tongue between my lips, but it made me so nervous that I pushed myself away from him and stood up. Then I didn’t know what to do and I certainly didn’t want his anger to come back, so I curtseyed and for good measure seized and pressed his hand. After that I hurried over to the door, thinking: Thank goodness, it’s over and he’s forgiven me. He won’t tell Rosa.

I looked back one more time and he was sprawled in the chair with his legs apart and his hands clasped together under his chin, watching me with his usual, moist-eyed affection. Then I let myself out, slipped into the hall, and ran hard into Max.

The new shock made my teeth knock together and my knees vibrate against my petticoat. But Max was relentless and before I knew it had dragged me into the cubbyhole under the stairs.

The CRIMEA , 1855

 

 

 

I
stumbled to the mouth of the cave,
cupped my hands round my mouth, and funneled my cry across the valley. “Rosa.” At first my voice was so weak that it was huffed away in the hot breeze but I shouted again: “Rosa.”

I went on and on calling her name until my voice broke and the cannonade above Sebastopol had become a mocking echo. “Rosa. Come back. Rosa.” By now her name was a grinding sob scraped across my throat.

My shoulder was roughly shaken and a hand covered my mouth. “For God’s sake, Mariella.” Though I dragged my head from side to side and tore at Max’s wrist he held me firmly and ordered me to be quiet.

At last I went limp but as soon as his grip slackened I turned on him. “No wonder you hate me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“After your father sent us away from Stukeley that time, what happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“I don’t believe you. He told me he was going to punish Rosa.”

He put his finger on my lips, as if I were a child. “Mariella, have you forgotten the war? Ssssh. Quiet.”

“I told your father about Rosa’s visits to the Fairbrothers. He would have made her suffer because of me.”

“Mariella, does everything always have to begin and end with you?”

“This does. Nora said he even made Rosa nurse him as a kind of punishment. What else did he do to her? Tell me.”

“At least come inside, out of sight. Good God, I’ve scarcely heard you raise your voice above a murmur and you choose to have a fit of hysterics here.” He took me firmly by the hand and led me into the gloom. “If you must know, you were just another irritation, a further nail in the coffin of their relationship, nothing more. Father couldn’t abide Rosa, so he found ways of tormenting her. Our swing was cut down on the grounds that it was dangerous, the box hedge torn up to create a different vista, she was forbidden to go more than half a mile from the house on her own.”

“And did she keep to his rules?”

“Of course not. She was an expert at defying him. Even when he used his own sick body to confine her she turned the tables on him by regarding him as part of her training to become a nurse. The more degraded he became, the stronger she grew.”

“But she must have found out about my lessons with him. Why didn’t she ever reproach me in her letters or when she came to London?”

“Because she loved you too much.”

“No. No. How can I bear it? And now she’s gone. Oh God, I wish she would come back.” I tore at my skirt and scarf as if I might somehow purge my body, hating the child who had sat so pertly on Sir Matthew’s armchair with a starched napkin arranged on her lap, too full of her own sense of power to see the danger. And this last year, those coy moments with Henry; to have been so self-obsessed regardless of what was happening before my very eyes. Fool, fool.

I fumbled ineffectually with Solomon’s harness, my one idea to get away from the deadly emptiness of the cave. Max stood with folded arms, watching. “Mariella, you were only a child. You weren’t to blame. Compared to Rosa you were easy prey. We all should have kept a closer eye on you.”

“What do you mean, compared to Rosa?”

“Why do you think my rich father married your penniless aunt? Rosa was the lure, as I later realized. He probably thought once he’d got her to Stukeley she would become his little play-mate—she told me he’d cornered her in the Italian Garden but that she repulsed him with a few well-chosen words. So it’s no surprise he tried to embroil you in a secret relationship.”

“She trusted me. I went behind her back. And now she’s sacrificed herself for me.”

Max rested his elbow on Solomon’s patient neck and studied me. With his other hand he wiped a bit of grime from my chin. “You delighted her. You were quite literally the light of her life. She never stopped talking about you, her London cousin. Whenever I let her, if I slipped my guard for a moment, she wanted to discuss you, your hair, your eyes, your clothes, your voice, your talent with the needle.”

“I wasn’t worth it.” But I no longer struggled with Solomon’s reins. Everything was changing. The cave was empty of Rosa and Henry but Max was there, leaning against the horse, quite different from the stony-eyed man who had left me an hour before. The noise of the guns was muffled by stone and in the unaccustomed quiet I was absorbed by the same dark gaze that had burnt into mine when he crept at dead of night into the Stukeley bedroom.

“You didn’t find Rosa then,” I said at last.

“She’s not here. I searched the hillside for some sign, recently turned earth perhaps. But the whole of Inkerman is a graveyard. I felt absurd.”

Even the horses were still, and the guns’ percussive accompaniment had ceased to matter. Max ran the back of his finger up my cheek and my headache swam against my temple. “I have often thought how much I should like to see you smile again, like you did when you found me in the hospital—that’s it, such a slow, tentative smile.” His thumb ran across my lips and I buckled against the horse. My wits were tagging behind my senses and when I put my hand on his chest to keep him at a distance my fingertips pulsed.

“I thought you loved Rosa,” I said.

“Of course I love Rosa. She’s my mad girl, my sister. But you have a wholly different effect on me, you and your frothy petticoats and sideways peek from under your bonnet.”

“Well, I had no...” His moustache brushed my lips and my bones were liquid. Just for a beat the old Mariella hesitated but there was no stepping back, I wanted him too much, so I put my hands behind his head, closed my eyes, and gave him my half-open mouth. Max kissed with the vehemence he applied to every other aspect of his life, my body was pulled up hard against his long, lean frame, and the tepid kisses I’d once exchanged with Henry turned to dust.

When we looked at each other again we were shaken and shy. The strangeness of having kissed Max Stukeley, the vulnerability of his eyelids and the softness of his mouth hurt me. My body was new and needy, clothed in its borrowed blouse and narrow skirt. I held his face between my hands, caressed his jaw and cheekbone, and drank in the taste of him.

As he kissed my ear he whispered, “We should go. Already it’s almost too late. We’ll never reach the camp before dark.”

“No. No. Max.”

“Miss Lingwood, your reputation will be in tatters.”

“What does that matter compared to this?”

His lips pressed my palm and the underside of my wrist so tenderly that I folded myself against him and slid my fingers under his sleeve so I could touch his naked arm. I loved the textures of him, the shock of flesh on flesh, the softness of his neck and roughness of his cheek. In the end he held me under his arm and with the other hand fumbled to unpack a striped blanket and throw it on the floor of the cave. In the half-light I lay with my head pillowed on his shoulder and knotted my legs over his uninjured knee. That little dent in the hillside was both my home and a place where I was utterly different, exorcising the memory of the Narni bedroom as I breathed the scent of Max’s flesh, threaded my fingers through his black hair, and leant over to kiss his mouth until he clasped my head and pulled me into a blacker, wilder space, where my only sensations were of the smoothness of his warm skin and the need to be touched and held.

“Why did you change?” I whispered. “You’ve done nothing but try to send me away. I thought you hated me.”

“So I do, every inch, especially here, this soft, secret place behind your ear. But when I heard your cry just now I thought you’d been captured by the Russians and I said to myself what a fool you are, Max Stukeley, to be scrambling about looking for the lost Rosa, and putting at risk Mariella.”

He kissed my eyelids and I disappeared further and further from my usual self, my lips closed on his tongue, my body adjusted itself to accommodate his weight, and my hand learnt the curves of his shoulder and throat. Mrs. Whitehead’s blouse separated itself from the waistband of my skirt and he stroked my back, his kisses feathers against my ear. “Actually you didn’t stand a chance. I had it all planned in that bloody hospital at Renkioi. Fourth piece of unfinished business, make love to the obstinate little minx Mariella Lingwood.” His fingers performed a slow dance on my flesh and when they closed on my breast my back arched. He kissed my collarbone and my breast through the thin material of the blouse, and I lay against his fragile bones, listening to his heart.

As the sun set the sky cleared, a segment of moon rose above the hill opposite, and a couple of bats flitted out of a crevice in the rock and scooped into the darkness. We clung together while the sky flickered with rocket fire and the ground shook. As night advanced and the heat of the day sank into the rock, I tightened my hold. To love Max was to walk a tightrope above an abyss. All around us, under their thin covering of earth, the hundreds of dead men sighed and stirred.

“I still can hardly believe you survived,” I said. “It terrifies me to think I might never have seen you again, or been able to lie with you like this. Why are we alive and not the others? What gives us the right?”

He stroked my hair and gave me a slow, sad kiss. “Mariella, we have no right. In a war, it is a matter of half an inch either way that makes the difference between life and death.”

“How can you bear to fight, knowing that?”

“Death is part of the process, one outcome among many. Some days I shake with fear, others I am euphoric at the thought of another battle. It makes no difference either way. The war goes on, we fight, we live or we die. We have no choice.”

“But if it’s a bad war. If there’s no point.”

“You sound just like Rosa. But I told her, it’s a matter of trust. I expect my men to obey me without question and I do the same. That’s the rule, right down the line.”

“And what did Rosa say to that?”

“Rosa said she could never have been a soldier. After all, she didn’t last in the hospitals for more than a few weeks, because she couldn’t keep to the rules.”

“Mrs. Shaw Stewart’s view was that by working among the men in the trenches Rosa had gone out on a limb.”

“That’s exactly it. That is Rosa.”

“So then she came here, to Henry.”

“And after that, where next? How much further could she go?”

It grew colder, and the night filled with kisses rolled so fast towards morning that I felt the floor of the cave wheel under a smudge of stars. In the small hours, shivering and stiff, we got up, harnessed the horses, led them outside, and paused for a moment to look back. We had left nothing behind us but a stony space. And below us was the valley, the hills on either side still bathed in mist and the river emerging like a strip of mercury as it flowed first to the right, then round the edge of the hillside out of sight.