The Tea Rose

by Jennifer Donnelly

  It was quiet in the parlor. The only sound was the rhythmic ticking of the mantel clock. Fiona, reeling from the reception she’d received, didn’t hear it. All she heard was the sound of a million problems shrieking at her. Her aunt was dead. Her uncle was a raving drunk. Her cousin was somewhere in this godforsaken city, but where? The shop was closed; the job she’d counted on did not exist. The building was going to be auctioned. Where would they go when it was? What would they do? How would she find a place to live? A job?

  She moved through the flat; everywhere she went, there was another mess. The bathroom was vile. Michael’s bedroom, like the parlor, was littered with empty bottles. Tangled sheets hung off the bed onto the floor. On one of the pillows rested a framed photograph. Fiona picked it up. A pretty woman with merry eyes smiled back at her.

  “Feeeee!” Seamie wailed. “Come on! I’m scared!”

  “Coming, Seamie!” she shouted, running to him.

  “I don’t like it here. I want to go home,” he fretted.

  Fiona could see the worry in his face and the exhaustion. She couldn’t let him see how upset she was; she had to be strong. “Ssshhh, pet. It’ll be all right, you’ll see. We’ll get something to eat and I’ll tidy up a bit and things will look a lot better.”

  “Is that Auntie Molly?” he asked, pointing at the photograph she was still holding.

  “Yes, luv.”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she, Fee? That’s what Uncle Michael said.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid she is,” Fiona said. She wanted to change the subject. “Come on, Seamie, let’s find a shop and get some bread and bacon for sandwiches. You’d like a bacon sandwich, wouldn’t you?” She reached for his hand, but he whipped it away.

  “Dead! Dead! Dead!” he shouted angrily. “Just like Mam and Da and Charlie and Eileen! Everyone’s dead! I hate dead! Father’s dead, too, isn’t he? Isn’t he, Fee?”

  “No, Seamie,” Fiona said gently, kneeling down in front of him. “Nick’s not dead. He’s in a hotel. You know that. We’re going to see him in a week.”

  “No, we aren’t. He’s dead,” Seamie insisted, delivering a savage kick to one of their bags.

  “No, he isn’t! Now you stop this!”

  “He is! And you’ll die, too! And then I’ll be all alone!”

  Seamie’s eyes filled with tears. His face crumpled. The sight split Fiona’s heart in two. He’s just a tyke, she thought. He’s lost all his family except me. Lost his home, his friends, everything. She pulled him to her. “Nick isn’t dead, luv. And I’m not going to die, either. Not for a long, long time. I’m going to stick around and look after you and keep you safe, all right?”

  He snuffled into her shoulder. “Promise, Fee?”

  “I promise,” she said. She released him and made an X on her chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die –”

  “No!” he howled.

  “Sorry! Just… just cross my heart. How’s that?”

  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, then said, “Granddad O’Rourke’s dead and Nana O’Rourke, too. And Moggs the cat. And Bridget Byrne’s puppy that wouldn’t eat and Mrs. Flynn’s baby and …”

  Fiona groaned. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped his nose. She wanted her mother. Her mam would know what to say to Seamie to soothe his fears. She’d always known what to say to her when she was frightened. Fiona didn’t know how to be a mother. She didn’t even know where to buy their dinner or where they would sleep in all this mess. She didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, where to look for a room, or what they would do for an income. Most of all, she didn’t know what had possessed her to come to this bloody city. She wished now that she’d taken her chances and stayed in England. They could’ve gone to Leeds, Liverpool, or way up north to Scotland. West to Devon or Cornwall. They would have been better off in some grotty mill town, a mining town, some dung heap of a one-horse country town. As long as they were somewhere in England and anywhere but here.

  Chapter 23

  Nicholas Soames flinched as the doctor placed a stethoscope against his bare chest. “I say! Where do you keep that thing? The icebox?”

  The doctor, a stern, well-fed German, was not amused. “Breathe, please,” he commanded. “In and out, in and out…”

  “Yes. Right. I do know how it’s done. Been at it for twenty-two years,” Nick grumbled. He took a deep breath and let it out. He didn’t want to be here, in Dr. Werner Eckhardt’s examination room, with its nasty smell of carbolic and its sinister metal devices for prying and poking, but he had no choice. The fatigue had taken a turn for the worse aboard the boat. Fiona had wanted to send for the ship’s surgeon on more than one occasion, but he wouldn’t let her. Couldn’t let her, or he might have found himself turned back to London.

  He’d written to Eckhardt, whom he knew to be one of the best in his field, just after he’d arrived at his hotel yesterday to request an appointment. The doctor had written back telling him he’d had a cancellation and could fit him in today.

  As Nick continued to take deep breaths, Dr. Eckhardt moved the stethoscope from his chest to his back, listening intently. Then he straightened, removed the instrument from his ears, and said, “It’s in your heart. There are lesions. I can hear them. There’s a hissing in the blood.”

  Well, isn’t that just like a German? Nick thought. No platitudes to soften the blow. No hand on the shoulder. Just a nice hard conk on the head. And then his glibness, which he used as a shield against the world and its ugliness, failed him and he thought, Oh, God. It’s in my heart. My heart.

  “Your illness is progressing, Mr. Soames,” the doctor continued. “The disease is an opportunist. If you want to slow its progress, you must take better care of yourself. You need rest. A good diet. And no exertions of any kind.”

  Nick nodded, dazed. First his heart. What next? His lungs? His brain? He could picture it, invading his skull like some barbarian army, eating away at his faculties bit by bit until he was reduced to picking dandelions and singing nursery rhymes. He wouldn’t allow it. He’d hang himself first.

  As the doctor droned on, he found himself wishing that Fiona were here. She was so loving, so loyal, so good. She would take his hand and tell him it would be all right, just as she had on the ship. Or would she? he wondered anxiously. Even a heart as kind as hers had its limits. If she found out what was really wrong with him, he would surely lose her, his dearest Fee, his only friend. Just as he’d lost everyone else.

  “Are you listening to me, Mr. Soames?” Eckhardt asked, giving him a close look. “This is no joke. It is critical that you take plenty of sleep. Ten hours at night. And naps during the day.”

  “Look, Dr. Eck, I’ll take more rest,” he said, “but I can’t become an invalid. I’ve a gallery to open, you see, and I can’t do it from a reclining position. What about a course of mercury?”

  Eckhardt waved a hand dismissively. “Useless. It blackens the teeth. Makes you drool.”

  “Charming! What else have you got?”

  “A tonic of my own devising. Makes the system more robust, more resistant.”

  “Let’s try that, then,” Nick said. As he started to dress, Eckhardt decanted a dark, viscous solution into a glass vial, stoppered it, and instructed him on the dosage. The doctor told him to return in a month’s time, then excused himself to attend another patient. Nick looped his silk tie into a soft Windsor knot, inspecting his face in a wall mirror as he did. At least I still look healthy, he thought. Maybe a little pale, but that’s all. Eckhardt’s exaggerating. All doctors do. It’s how they keep their patients. He put his jacket on and slipped the bottle into his pocket. On his way out he asked the receptionist to send the bill to his hotel.

  Outside, the sunny March morning was bracing. Nick cut a fashionable figure in his gray three-piece suit and rather forward choice of a brown tie, brogues, and greatcoat, instead of black. He walked down Park Avenue – hoping for a hackney – with his hands jammed into his pockets. His gait was lop
ing and oddly graceful. The brisk air brought color to his pale face, with its high cheekbones and stunning turquoise eyes. He attracted many admiring glances, though he was aware of none of them, lost as he was in his own thoughts.

  He finally secured a cab and instructed the driver to take him to Gramercy Park. On its way, the carriage passed an art gallery on Fortieth Street. With its white gilt-edged awning, its polished brass doors and its bronze urns flanking them, it looked extremely prosperous. As he stared at it, his expression became determined. He would have his gallery, and it, too, would be prosperous. He would not allow his illness to defeat him. He was made of tougher stuff and he would prove it. To Eckhardt. To himself. Most of all, to his father, who had called him an abomination and advised him to die quickly and spare the family any further disgrace. An image of the man came unbidden. Portly, brisk, unsmiling. Wealthy beyond belief. Powerful. Monstrous.

  He shuddered, willing the image away, but it persisted and he saw his father as he’d looked the night he’d learned of Nick’s illness, fury twisting his face as he’d slammed him into a wall. He lay on the floor afterward, gasping for breath, watching the black toe caps of his father’s oxfords as he paced the room. The shoes, from Lobb’s, were polished to a harsh gleam. The trousers, from Poole’s, were sharply creased. Appearance was everything to the man. Speak and dress like a gentleman and you were one, regardless of whether you beat your horses, your servants, or your son.

  Shaking the memory off, Nick reached for his watch. He was supposed to meet with an estate agent at eleven to view sites for his gallery. By mistake, he opened the back of the case. A small photograph, neatly trimmed, fluttered into his lap. He picked it up. His heart clenched as he regarded the young man smiling back at him. On the wall beside him were the words “Chat Noir.” Nick remembered the place so well. He could almost taste the absinthe and smell the night air – a rich mix of cigarette smoke, perfume, garlic, and oil paint. He could see his friends – their faces, their shabby clothes and stained hands. He pressed his hand to his heart and felt it beating. Lesions? If the shattering loss he’d endured last autumn hadn’t stopped it dead, what could a few spots do? He continued to stare at the photograph and suddenly he was no longer in New York, he was in Paris again. Henri was sitting across from him at the café wearing his favorite wine-red jacket. It wasn’t March, it was May, the very night they met. He was there again, in Montmartre …

  “… two hundred fifty francs for that… that poster?” Paul Gauguin shouted in thick, wine-slurred French. “Why, it looks like something from a lamppost, a billboard!”

  “Better a poster than a child’s cartoon … like your Bretons!” Henri Toulouse-Lautrec shot back, eliciting shrieks of laughter from the rest of the company.

  Earlier that day, Nick had sold one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, a colorful portrait of Louise Weber, a music hall performer known as La Goulue. His employer, the renowned art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, had been uncertain about representing Toulouse-Lautrec, but Nick pressed him and he’d agreed to let him show a few canvases. Nick had garnered only a small commission from the sale, but he’d earned something else – a victory for the new art.

  It was no mean feat, selling the new generation. Moving a Manet, Renoir, or Morisot – the ones who’d started it all – was hard enough. But Nick had faith. In 1874, when the vanguard first exhibited, they couldn’t sell anything either. A critic, taking his cue from the name of Monet’s canvas Impression, Sunrise, had dismissed them all as impressionists, mere dabblers. Rebelling against what society deemed acceptable – historical and genre paintings – they sought to present the real, not the ideal. The seamstress bent over her work was as valid a subject to them as an emperor or a god. Their techniques were loose and unstudied, the better to evoke emotion. The public had reviled them, but Nick adored them. The realism with which they portrayed life spoke to his hunger for some small degree of honesty in his own existence.

  At Cambridge, he’d read economics because his father made him – he wanted him well-prepared to take over Albion, the family bank – but he’d spent his spare time studying art. The first time he’d seen work by the Impressionists, at the National Gallery, he’d been nineteen years old, working at Albion over the summer and hating every second of it. Afterward, he’d walked out of the museum, flagged down a cab, and instructed the man to drive around the city for an hour – anywhere he liked – so that he could weep in privacy. By the time he’d arrived home that evening, he knew he couldn’t stay at Albion or return to Cambridge. He would defy his father and leave for Paris. He hated his life – the suffocating days; the family dinners at which his father drilled him with questions on finance, then berated him for not knowing the answers; the unbearable parties where his mother’s friends pushed their daughters on him like whoremongers, for he, as his titled father’s only son, was considered a catch. His whole life was a pretense. Who he was – what he was – was unacceptable. But in the canvases of Monet, Pissarro, Degas, he’d glimpsed the world as it was, not as some would have it appear, and he’d embraced that vision.

  Nick downed another mouthful of wine as Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec continued to taunt each other. He was enjoying himself immensely. Spirits were high, the mood triumphant. La Goulue herself arrived amid hoots and applause. Nick looked around and saw Paul Signac and Georges Seurat arguing heatedly. Émile Bernard was teasing a handsome young man with long, dark brown hair, a painter Nick didn’t know, because the waitress was in love with him. Some of his colleagues from the gallery had come. The Van Gogh brothers, too. Vincent, rumpled and cross, and solemn Theo, director of the Montmartre Goupil’s – a rival gallery. It was a wonderful party, a wonderful night – and then disaster struck.

  Nick had been stuffing himself with steamed mussels, sopping up their garlicky broth with hunks of crusty bread. He’d just reached across Gauguin for the remains of a loaf when, out of nowhere, a large, putrid cabbage came sailing through the air and hit him in the head. He sat there in shock, speechless, blinking slime out of his eyes. A cry went up and members of the party were dispatched to apprehend the sniper. The man was collared and marched back to the scene of the crime. He turned out to be a postal clerk infuriated by Gauguin’s paintings. And not only did the rotter refuse to apologize, he berated Nick for sticking his fat head in the way, causing him to miss his target.

  The stink was unbearable. Nick stood up, announcing he had to go home and change, when one of the party – the young man the waitress fancied – offered to take him to his flat where he could wash and borrow a clean shirt.

  “My name is Henri… Henri Besson,” he said. “My place is nearby, only a street away.”

  “Let’s go,” Nick said.

  They ran all the way up the five flights of stairs to Henri’s tiny room, with Nick pulling off his shirt on the way. Once inside, he bent over a small paint-stained sink and poured a pitcher of water over his head. Henri gave him soap and a towel, and when he’d dressed, a glass of red wine. Nick had been in such a hurry to wash that he hadn’t taken in Henri’s room, but once he was clean, he did. And to his astonishment, everywhere he looked – hung on the walls, propped against the empty fireplace, leaning on the few bits of furniture – were some of the most vibrant, light-infused paintings he’d ever seen. A young girl at a dance, the spreading blush on her ivory cheeks subtle and perfect. A laundress, her skirts kilted up above her meaty knees. Bloodstained porters at Les Halles. And then he saw one that floored him – a portrait of two men at breakfast. One sat at a table with toast and a newspaper, the other sipped coffee at a window. They were dressed, not even looking at one another, but an attitude of familiarity marked them as lovers. It was at once innocent and incendiary. Nick swallowed. “Bloody hell, Henri… have you shown this?”

  Henri came over to see what he was looking at, then shook his head. “Our friends paint the truth, Nicholas, and they are hit by cabbages.” He laughed. “Or rather, their representatives are.” His smile faded as he tou
ched his fingers to the canvas. “They reveal us to ourselves and people cannot bear it. Who would accept the truth of my life?”

  They hadn’t rejoined the others. They’d finished one bottle of wine, then opened another, talking late into the night about their painter friends, the writers Zola, Rimbaud, and Wilde, the composers Mahler and Debussy, and themselves. And the next morning, as the first rays of the sun caressed Henri’s sleeping form, Nick lay awake just watching him breathe, barely able to breathe himself because of the strange new fullness in his heart…

  A police officer rapped harshly on the cab, startling him out of his thoughts. “There’s an overturned cart ahead,” he yelled to the driver. “No one’s moving. Turn off on Fifth.”

  Nick looked down at the photo still in his palm. The jacket Henri wore made him smile; he remembered buying it for him. He slid the photo back inside the watch case. Henri had thought he was too good to him, too generous. It wasn’t so. The gifts Henri gave – love, laughter, courage – had mattered so much more. He was the one who’d convinced him to stand up to his father, to live his life as he chose. It had taken some doing, a few fights, including a rather loud scene in the Louvre. It was in English, at least – Henri insisted on speaking it so he could improve – so most of the museum’s patrons hadn’t understood them, but still, it had been quite embarrassing.

  “Henri, please! Lower your voice –”

  “Say to me I am right! Admit it!”

  “I wish I could, but –”

  “But? But what? You don’t need his money. You make excellent money at the gallery –”

  “Hardly excellent.”

  “No, very excellent! It pays the rent, buys us food and wine, gives us a good life –”

  “Bloody hell, Henri, you’re making a scene! People are staring –”