The Rose Stone

by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)

  “Sit down, Joss. How may I help you?”

  He sat in a large, overstuffed wing armchair, leaned forward, frowning a little. Irritation moved in Grace. Why did the boy always have to be so intense?

  “I should like to talk to you about Anna,” he said.

  “Oh?” The last thing she had expected. She waited.

  Unusually, he seemed for the moment uncertain of how to proceed. He touched long fingers to his mouth in a gesture that in another she might have thought of as nervousness.

  “Well?” she prompted, her impatience barely concealed by her good manners. Rain trickled in dismal furrows down the windowpane.

  “I think I may have discovered the reason for Anna’s illness.”

  “She caught measles – really Joss, we all know—”

  “No.” Joss stood up. In God’s name what was he doing here? The child’s predicament was really nothing to do with him. Then the vision of a thin, flushed face and frightened eyes rose in his mind. Poor little devil. Someone had to do something—

  “Anna believes that she is responsible for the death of the baby. She is desperate with guilt. She thinks you all hate her for it. She thinks she deserves to die.”

  Grace was on her feet. “What?”

  “It’s true. She told me. I thought it would help if you knew. I think you should talk to her. She needs to be reassured. To be convinced that it wasn’t her fault that the baby died.”

  There was anger in her, and confusion. How should this – this stranger know such things about her daughter when she did not? He sensed her antagonism, half turned from her, then stopped. Joss Anatov was not one to shirk a self-appointed task. He had come so far, it made no sense to stop now. “Mrs Rose – I think there is something else you should know – something that might help you to understand.”

  “Oh?”

  “On the day that Anna fell ill she had run away.”

  That was too much. “Nonsense,” she said sharply. “Run away? We all know what happened on the day that Anna fell ill, Joss. You took her to the park. You forgot the time. You allowed her to become wet, and cold, and overtired—”

  “No. I found Anna outside in the street. She was very distressed. She told me she had run away because she believed that no one loved her since the baby came.”

  Grace opened her mouth, shut it again.

  “We lied, both of us. Now I’ve broken my word to her in telling you. But I thought you should know.” He walked towards the door, turned with his hand on the knob. “I’m sorry if you think I’m interfering. I simply thought that someone should at least be aware of the child’s state of mind. And since I have so obviously upset you, for which I apologize—”

  Why, she thought, in furious exasperation, did he have to be so wretchedly polite?

  “—then there seems little point in holding back the other thing I came to say.”

  “Which is?” Grace asked, faintly.

  “If Anna were a child of mine, I’d not have her tended by a woman who obviously dislikes her. In my opinion, a lot of what ails the child comes directly from her treatment by that detestable Nanny you employ.” He could hardly believe the words he spoke himself. He knew the influence Grace had with Josef, was absolutely unsure how she would take such undeniable impudence.

  She regarded him for a long, cool moment. “Thank you, Joss,” she said, “I’ll look into it.”

  * * *

  He knelt beside the child’s narrow bed, the young man – slight, dark, graceful, his face serious, as always. “You must understand, Anna – I had to tell them. We must finish this nonsense once and for all. You’re punishing yourself for nothing. It wasn’t your fault.”

  She turned her head from him. “It was. It was!”

  “No.”

  Very very slowly she turned back to him. “You don’t know what I did.”

  “You caught measles. The baby caught measles—”

  “No. Not that. Something else. Something – horrible.”

  He waited. Tears dribbled down the thin cheeks and dripped on to the pillow. Joss had a meeting to go to. Diamond prices were fluctuating crazily – if he could just persuade Josef to let him go to South Africa.

  “What? What did you do that was so horrible?”

  She lay quiet a long time. “I—” she began at last and stopped, swallowing painfully. “I – I prayed that—”

  His straying attention was caught. “What?” he asked gently. “I prayed to God that the baby should die. I wanted her to die! I told Him I did.” The words were tumbling out now. “I wanted things to be the way they used to be. I wanted Mama to love me again – so you see it is my fault! It is! I asked God to let the baby die – I’m wicked. I’ll go to hell like Nanny says – and, oh, supposing Mama finds out how wicked I am?”

  “Oh, Anna. Anna.” Very gently he drew the sobbing child to him, rocking her as he might have rocked a baby. “Listen to me. And think. Do you truly believe that God has time to listen to all the naughty little prayers of all the naughty children in the world? Don’t you think He knows what’s really in your heart? Was He not a child Himself? Did He not speak of and to the little children? Do you have such little faith that you believe He would do something wicked because you asked it of Him?” She had grown very still against him, listening. “You caught measles accidentally. The baby caught measles accidentally. And she wasn’t strong enough. We all knew that. I believe that your mother knew it. It had nothing to do with your prayers.”

  “Perhaps the devil heard them.” The words were whispered. Be sure the devil will take you, Miss, Nanny had said numberless times in the past for the slightest misdemeanour. Hell’s flames haunted the imaginative child.

  “Fiddlesticks to the devil. There’s no such thing,” he said.

  She lifted her head, her eyes enormous. “Nanny says—”

  “And fiddlesticks to Nanny too,” he said shortly, and with finality.

  Even in her distress a small spark of scandalized delight glinted in her eyes at that.

  He laid her back upon the pillows. “Enough of this nonsense, little Anna. Your mother is coming to see you. Listen to what she tells you. Believe her and me. And as for the devil—” he leaned forward, spoke quietly “—spit in his eye and forget him! He’ll have to wait a long time for you.” Smiling one of his rare smiles, he tucked her in and made her comfortable. Already it seemed to him that her eyes were clearer and more peaceful, her cheeks a more healthy colour. The cleansing of confession, he thought a touch wryly, perhaps the men of science and of medicine should not too quickly dismiss the ministrations of Mother Church.

  “Joss?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ll come and see me again? Soon?”

  “Only – absolutely only – if you promise to get better.”

  “I will. I promise I will.”

  He left the room with a lift of relief that now, surely, his involvement in the child’s problems was over. Before he had reached the bottom of the stairs he was rehearsing arguments in his mind to convince Uncle Josef that Rose and Company needed to invest some of its profits – he was so old-fashioned in this desire to have money lying in the bank, accumulating, doing nothing.

  He had absolutely no idea that in the past moments childish devotion had in Anna given way to a depth of emotion far beyond her years: the first stirrings of a passionate and possessive love that would haunt them both, in one way or another, for the rest of their lives.

  * * *

  Grace’s visit to the sick room following her talk with Joss was a better tonic than anything a doctor could have prescribed. To her credit, despite her initial outrage at what he had told her, she was ready after only a few minutes’ talk with her daughter to admit her mistake. And to rectify it. Her efforts were rewarded with satisfying speed. With the wound that had festered so long in her mind lanced and cleansed, Anna’s physical health began to improve steadily, though it was some weeks before the doctor believed the evidence of his own eyes an
d pronounced her out of danger. Nor was Grace small-minded enough to ignore Joss’s other piece of advice. After she had spoken to each of the children, had a quiet interview with Trudy and an extremely stormy one with Nanny Brown, the latter, with bad grace and mutterings of spoiled brats and over-indulgent parents, packed her bags and left. The children were delighted – and Anna, when she was strong enough to rejoin her brothers in the nursery where Trudy now held much less repressive sway than had her predecessor, found herself something of a heroine, she having been given credit for the dismissal of the ogre. Life, at last, resumed its even tenor – for if grief for the lost baby still shadowed the hearts and minds of the adults of the family, younger memories were shorter and yesterday’s trials and sorrows soon forgotten. Anna soon found herself slipping into the now pleasant nursery routine, happy to be well again, happy in her reinstatement in her parents’ lives, happy above all to nurse secretly in her heart her devoted love for Joss, her handsome prince who once more had saved her. That she saw little of him as he became more and more involved with the business bothered her not at all. Her love had not as yet acquired the adult vice of possessiveness.

  Christmas came and went and the new year of 1887 – Queen Victoria’s fiftieth year on the throne – was ushered in with the usual celebrations and expectations. With Khartoum conveniently forgotten, the British people knew their Empire secure and their right to ‘rule the waves’ inviolable. Confidence, prosperity and expansion were the watchwords. To be sure, in the new year, there were some ugly disturbances in the streets of London and soldiers had to be called in to quell the riots and to disperse those malcontents who dared publicly to protest at poverty and unemployment; but on the whole, as the year moved on, most people’s minds were much more exercised by the coming Golden Jubilee on the 22nd of June, than by those subversive elements who muttered disruptively of social reform and radical change. Most people in fact, if asked, would argue that things had changed quite enough already. After all, was it not true that even working-class children were now being educated? Most of them, anyway. And had not working men’s conditions improved? If they behaved themselves and spent their time working instead of foolishly and contentiously trying to form unions to challenge their betters, the majority of them could earn a decent living – and if there were those to ask what happened to working men and women when their useful lives were over or were blighted by sickness or by injury and they were thrown on to the charity of an uncharitable world, self-righteous words like thrift and prudence came easily to most middle-class tongues.

  In the Rose household there were few committed political attitudes. Josef was concerned only with his family and his business – in that past life of which he never spoke and tried not to think, politics had already cost him too dear. Grace, in this as in all things, dutifully took her cue from her husband. In her view, which was the prevailing one of the time, politics were, anyway, man’s business; the running of the home and the dispensing of charity woman’s, and so with her dear friend, Hermione Smithson, despite her own still far from perfect health, she spent a considerable amount of time and energy collecting money, food and clothes for distribution to her ‘deserving poor’ and helping at an East End refuge which catered for those whose only crime was destitution but whose sentence, too often, amounted to a slow death. She took it as God’s will that these inequalities existed – the idea of an egalitarian society where such injustice might be eradicated simply never occurred to her. Even her own close brush with disaster, before she had met Josef, had taught her nothing. In common with most of her age her concept of social justice was simple, and based upon the paternalistic principles of charity.

  The enthusiasm in the Rose household for the coming Jubilee was intense and shared by everyone from the smallest housemaid to Josef himself – who, in the way of most converts, had become in the twelve years he had lived in England more English, as Grace was fond of saying, than the English themselves. Grace and Josef – the Piccadilly shop shut for the day – planned to take the children to see the procession which promised to be a spectacle the like of which had only rarely been seen before in the streets of the city. New clothes were ordered, patriotic flags and favours purchased. The day itself dawned with all the excitement of Christmas, a birthday or a wedding. Very early in the bright June morning, decked in their finery, the happy party set off for their chosen spot not far from St Paul’s, where the Queen was to give thanks for her long and prosperous reign. With Grace, Josef and the children went Tanya, Boris, Joss, Trudy, the little maid Sally – the latter twittering with excitement and totally unable to stop talking – a dozen flags and enough refreshments, as Trudy exclaimed, to feed the Queen’s Guard.

  “Oh, just look, Ma’am – Trudy – do see! How handsome the soldiers look! And the Jack Tars! Oh, my – I do love the sailor boys—” Sally was fairly jumping up and down with excitement, her usual discreet good behaviour entirely abandoned for the occasion.

  Josef shepherded his flock to a good vantage point. The boys, like Sally but for different reasons, were greatly impressed by the gallant uniforms of the men who lined the processional route. Anna was enthralled by the crowds in their gay Sunday best, the wide skirts of the women like great upturned bellflowers in the sunshine, their hats perched like pretty butterflies on their heads. They waited with growing anticipation, watching the slightest occurrence with the minutest of interest – a stray dog parading down the centre of the road got the biggest applause of the morning – and commenting upon their neighbours. Grace, even her usual calm disrupted by the atmosphere, and resolutely ignoring the tiredness that seemed recently to be with her always, held tightly to her husband’s arm, a buffer against the surge of the crowd, and kept a sharp and slightly anxious eye on the rest of the party. Even so they nearly lost a member – James, lured by a barrel organ man and his mischievous monkey, wandered into the crowd and might well have been mislaid had not Boris scooped him up and with an easy movement swung the child up on his broad shoulders, where he sat happily and proudly, hanging on to a handful of bright, curly hair and looking out over the sea of bonnets, bowlers and waving flags.

  “See the soldiers, Boris! Just see them! Aren’t they splendid? Aren’t they fine? I’m going to be a soldier when I grow up. A soldier in a fine red uniform!” He waved, wobbling precariously, at a nearby, impassive guardsman.

  Boris reached a hand to steady the boy upon his shoulders, laughing, a glint in his hilariously brilliant eyes too bright to be explained simply by the excitement of the day. Joss, standing nearby, glanced at him suspiciously. He had seen that look before—

  “They’re coming! They’re coming! Hear them!” Above the roar of the crowd came the compulsive sound of martial music. James wriggled excitedly, almost unbalancing the laughing Boris. “I see them! Oh, look – the horses – and the splendid carriage!”

  The progress of the monarch could be charted by the rising tumult of sound that accompanied her coming. Dumpy, plain, bolt upright beneath her lace parasol, her determined mourning black lightened by silver, her black bonnet trimmed with white flowers, the old lady rode through the streets of her capital upon a frenzied wave of cheering. She had been criticized bitterly in the past for her withdrawal from public life following the death of her beloved Albert more than twenty-five years before, had believed herself – at times with good reason – to be unpopular with her subjects. Yet here, on this occasion, the affection of a nation for a queen who had presided over fifty unprecedentedly eventful years was fervent and undisguised. Her people roared for her. The old Widow of Windsor might be a bit dull with her mourning black and her prim and proper ways – but by God she was theirs, and the old country wouldn’t be the same without her.

  The Roses cheered with the rest – Alex so hard that he nearly choked and had to have his back banged by Trudy. Anna watched the wonderful procession in utter, breath-held silence. She had never seen such colour, such splendour. She wanted to draw it. The curve of a horse’s neck, the
lift of a hand – it was like one of Joss’s stories of the magical splendours of the past. As the procession passed at last, leaving in its wake a residue of wild, emotional excitement that demanded release, someone in the crowd struck up the National Anthem, “God save our gracious Queen.” In no time the whole throng was roaring the patriotic words, tears streaming down flushed faces. Small Michael, safe in Trudy’s arms, put his fingers in his ears, knocking awry his sailor’s cap which was decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon. Ralph, enthusiastically conducting with his Union Jack, caught Alex on the nose with it and received a buffet for his trouble.

  It was a day of pride and pageantry, of friendliness and good-tempered excitement. A day never to be forgotten – for more reasons than one.

  It was Joss who noticed, after the procession had returned in another boiling swell of excitement and people were rolling up flags, brushing down skirts and straightening headgear in preparation for leaving, that his brother Boris was missing.