The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  Rachel

  They had no idea where they were heading, or what plan or strategy there was – if, indeed, any such thing existed. They assumed that an assault would be made on Sevastopol – their original objective since leaving England – from the north, since that was the direction in which they were travelling. But each night brought no further news, and each morning delay and frustration before they moved off. They had no idea where the enemy might be, and as the elation of victory wore off so uncertainty took hold. On the third night the cavalry were led into a narrow defile with steep, wooded sides, and spent the night there in a state of uneasy alert, aware that if the enemy had knowledge and opportunity they would attack with almost certain success. But nothing of the kind transpired and they emerged next morning to rejoin the main column, none the wiser as to why such a demonstrably dangerous bivouac had been chosen.

  That they had barely clapped eyes on any Russians since freeing the prisoners of the Alma did nothing to reassure them. After all, the enemy had at his disposal a well-fortified city to which he had now had ample time to withdraw no matter what the condition of his troops and morale. The sighting of occasional small groups of Cossacks on the skyline was unsettling.The allies and the handful of distant horsemen would survey each other suspiciously but take no action, for it was impossible to tell whether the Cossacks were a scouting party, or merely the vanguard of a horde of hostile cavalry. The shallow hills and declivities of the area were deceptive and might conceal large numbers of troops.

  So the army continued on its way, steadily but blindly, with no sense of an objective. They reached another river and another ransacked, empty village, equally fruitful, but this time there was no excited pillaging and gorging among the troops.

  This was where Leonard Palliser died of cholera. It was very far from the first time Harry had witnessed such a death, but it was only the second that he had witnessed from first to last, of a man in whose company he had been constantly and whom, in spite of a certain bombast and pepperiness in this case, he had come to like.

  Its onset was sudden. Not even then did Leonard complain of feeling unwell. As they dismounted near farm buildings he put his hand to his belly and commented that he, too, must have overindulged in the fruit. Such was his character that the rest of them laughed with him. But within half an hour the cramps and pain were so intense that he was obliged to lie down. An hour after that he could no longer stand, and his face already had the characteristic fish-belly pallor and dampness, the eyes sinking back into their sockets and the lips grey. Harry and Hector made him as clean and comfortable as they could, scarcely able to prevent themselves from retching as they did so, and laid him on the verandah of the farmhouse, rigging up a rough screen of blankets to protect him from the flies. They knew there was nothing to be done. Only rarely did a man recover from cholera, but it did happen, and that was a matter for the Almighty. To begin with, when he shouted in agony, one of them would go to him and sit for a while, but after another two hours had passed he was delirious and then barely conscious, the contents of his stomach long since voided, his flesh melting off him in a sour, noisome sweat.

  Six hours after the first pain he was, thankfully, dead. It was one a.m. The ground was dry and hard but they dug a grave under a tree behind the pond and buried him, Hector saying a few appropriate words and agreeing to write to Leonard’s parents who lived not far from his own in Leicestershire.

  They none of them slept that night and the next morning after a stand-to of four hours they began the day’s march with energies depleted by tiredness, depression and the fact that they still had no idea of the ultimate aim of their advance.

  In the middle of that day they came to a small, isolated farmhouse which to their astonishment was still occupied. A woman, neat in a grey-and-white-striped dress and white apron, came out of the door and stood there waiting for them, with three wide-eyed little girls aged between perhaps three and eight (Harry was no judge of these things) clustered round her skirts.

  Hector, who had some Russian, dismounted, handed his reins to Harry and walked over to her. The little girls shrank back, two of them into the house, and the little one bursting into walls of fright so that her mother picked her up and held her face into her shoulder. Harry saw that Hector – not noted for his fine feelings, and first among the tormentors over the cat episode – removed his glove and reached out to touch the child’s hair as if to reassure her. It was a deliberate rather than a spontaneous gesture, and had the opposite effect from that which was intended, but the mother acknowledged it with a washed-out smile.

  Hector returned, his usual caustic self. ‘No language problem. She’s married to an Englishman, but the Cossacks took him four days ago and she fears the worst. She’s terrified naturally but has nowhere to go. She had a cart, but with their customary generosity they’ve taken that as well. The children are hungry and she’s effectively cut off from both sides and safe with none.’

  They found the woman a cart and horse and helped her load on to it as many of her possessions as it would carry. She spoke reasonable, heavily accented English, and her children none at all, though she instructed them to repeat ‘thank you’ after her, which they did charmingly.

  Harry asked her where she intended to go, and she pointed north, adding with a glint of gallows humour: ‘It would not be good to go to Sevastopol, I suppose.’

  Harry conceded this. ‘And your husband?’

  She shrugged. ‘We shall hope to find each other, God willing.’

  ‘We wish you the very best of luck. You and your daughters.’

  She relayed this to the children, already seated on the cart, and with a sharp nod cued another round of thank yous. All of them, like their mother, were the very image of respectability – their hair brushed, their clothes, hands and faces clean. The house itself, as they’d helped remove its contents, had been spotless. Harry could well imagine that this woman, left alone with her family, had been waging her own private war in the only way open to her, with a refusal to let domestic standards slide. His admiration for her was boundless.

  As the cart rattled away with its toppling load, the oldest girl, peering round at them, lifted a hand and waved to Harry, who saluted in return.

  The landscape was changing as they went south, becoming steeper, the areas of steppe smaller and less frequent. Information at last filtered through. They would not be launching any sort of attack on Sevastopol from the north, but circumventing it to the east, and laying siege to it both from there and from the south, by sea.

  A troop of cavalry, accompanied by one of infantry, was sent forward through a wooded area to reconnoitre the main Sevastopol road beyond. The path, which began as a broad and promising one, soon dwindled to something scarcely more than a deer-track along which in places it was only possible for the cavalry to ride in single file. This being the most dangerous deployment possible they could only pray that the enemy had not placed any snipers in the undergrowth, for which they would have provided a virtually unmissable target. They had been assured that Lord Lucan was supplied with a knowledgeable guide for this exercise and that the route that seemed so unpropitious would lead them to the road, and had no alternative but to place their trust in this assurance.

  If they had often cursed the baking treeless wastes of the open plain, they now thought of them almost fondly. Here there might be some shade but the air amongst the dense and thorny scrub was suffocating and the atmosphere forbidding. Had it not been for the piercing attack of legions of insects they might have been the only living creatures there. There was no birdsong, not the scurry of a rabbit or the slither of a grass snake. The horses fretted and laboured, their flanks covered in scratches, but theirs was nothing to the discomfort of the infantrymen, who were obliged to carry their rifles above their heads, whose faces and hands were cut to ribbons by the thorns and whose voluble fulminations and swearing punctuated their progress. Eventually any semblance of a path petered out altogether and they were
forced to hack and plunge through unbroken coverts of needle-sharp branches that seemed to knit tight at their approach and to close after them.

  When a halt was called the relief was shortlived – at least while they moved there was some possibility of emerging from what increasingly felt like a nightmare maze. Standing stock still in the airless heat, with every cut, abrasion and insect-bite smarting with sweat, was still more disorientating, and Harry felt an unfamiliar panic rise in his chest and constrict his lungs.

  The delay lasted some twenty minutes. When at last they moved off they discovered that they had been not a quarter of a mile from the road, but that due to some miscalculation of Lucan’s guide they had succeeded in arriving there after Lord Raglan himself who more by luck than judgement had taken the correct route – thereby exposing him to a considerable force of Russians heading north with the intention of an outflanking movement. Only Raglan’s composure, it was said, and the consequent uncertainty of the Russians as to what might be behind him, prevented a catastrophe. The two sides had outstared each other, the Russians had blinked first and backed off. Lucan had been publicly reprimanded by the Commander-in-Chief for an error which by any calculation was not his fault, and the result was a still greater blow to the cavalry’s pride and morale.

  ‘I am beginning to think,’ observed Hector to Harry as they descended the road toward the coast, ‘that your treatment of that mangy cat may turn out to be the most heroic act of the cavalry war.’

  The port of Balaklava was greeted with acclaim. Steep slopes embraced a harbour of perfect safety, its narrow entrance shielded from the open sea by overlapping bluffs. The still water was so deep that great ships were anchored only yards from the cobbled quay. Pleasant houses, small shops, gardens, churches and secluded lanes spread upward from the harbour on the eastern side, and seabirds wheeled over the cliffs and masts.

  The British Army swarmed over it as though this had been the sole objective of the past three months. To be near the great unoccupied expanse of the ocean, to know that once again they were united with the maritime might of England, and to have once more at their disposal the amenities of a populated town, no matter how small and ill-prepared, went to their heads like strong drink. Something like a festive atmosphere prevailed.

  But it was a mood which Harry could not share. That night he rode Clemmie out of the town and up to the ruined Genoese fort that stood on the cliff overlooking the harbour entrance. Notwithstanding the lights and fires, the sound of tin whistles and singing, the soaring beauty of the early autumn sky, he could feel no satisfaction.

  Behind them was the Crimea. Ahead, the sea. To the west, their enemy, reassembled and well fortified. There could be no turning back now. To Harry, it felt like the end of the road.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘Blue, me?’

  —Stella Carlyle, ‘Joking Apart’

  Stella 1997

  This made the third time in as many weeks that, like a naughty child, Stella had run away.

  She knew that it was running away and not simply going out, because she did not tell anyone. Not where, or why, or when she would be back, nor even that she was going at all. If she happened to pass anyone on her way out she might smile but she did not say goodbye. She simply walked out of the villa, silent as a Sioux in her thick sandals, and made her escape.

  Once or twice she had walked, but the heat and the steepness of the incline in both directions deterred her. Mostly, she got into the hired Uno and sped away down the pale road towards the village, or up to where it snaked over the lion-coloured Tuscan hills to Siena, thirty miles away. But she seldom had any specific design or plan – her destination was escape itself.

  It was the only problem, she decided, in being the hostess. Or if that wasn’t too grand a word, the resident, the householder – the chatelaine. She liked that. If the house where people were staying was temporarily yours, then you were the fixed point. It was others who came and went. They brought presents, they mucked in, they shopped and cooked and organised outings, they were assiduous about shared costs and responsibilities (almost too assiduous when Stella wished to retain the whip hand), they ‘got out of your hair’.

  But Stella had discovered in herself an urgent requirement, a need, an imperative, to get out of theirs. And the trouble was that if she told her guests she was going out they wanted to know where, in case they could just hop in and scrounge a lift to wherever it might be. Or they imagined that she must want company, and though she was quite prepared to say that she wished to be alone, that in itself set up a situation in which they were waiting, with cheery grins and barbecue lit, for her return, sure that she needed cheering up and taking out of herself.

  Which was the last thing Stella wanted. She was used to herself. She and her self – her various selves – had reached an accommodation over many years of shared living. No matter how diverting and comforting the company of others she needed to get into, not out of herself, to dig deep and reflect, to touch base with what was going on in her head and her heart, to discover what it was she thought and felt, and gain a perspective on those thoughts and feelings.

  That, after all, was where the songs came from. Not that she intended to write while she was in Italy, but part of the mind-game that she was playing was to allow the subconscious process to begin. She understood that process well enough by now to know that no matter how bad things got they were in the end, as the old journalistic adage went, all good copy. She no longer castigated herself as cold-blooded for this, it was simply how it was with her. It was not too much to say that it was her living in both the emotional and the material sense. And a process that saved her from both despair and insolvency couldn’t be bad.

  She was fleeing Robert, too. No matter what the professed changes in his life, in the wake of the miscarriage she trusted neither him nor herself. The brief picture that she had entertained of telling him about the baby, of his likely reaction, of how it might be – that was all academic now, just so much old fantasy. She had been in shock. But curiously her mother’s suggestion of ‘going away with friends’, a suggestion dismissed at the time, now commended itself to her. She might not want to go away with people, but perhaps she could go away alone and allow people to come to her ...

  Once she had decided to take a villa she had made her choice and the necessary arrangements quickly and without thought for the cost. After all, she reasoned, her lifestyle was modest by many people’s standards, not because she was deliberately economical but because her requirements were few and inexpensive. But if ever there was a moment for not spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar, this was it. She wanted a beautiful house in a beautiful place, for six weeks. She wanted a pool and a terrace and a garden big enough to get lost in. She wanted plenty of bedrooms, and she wanted old stones and tiles, with modern plumbing and cooking facilities. She wanted a view. She wanted a motherly soul to help around the place. And she wanted a rural location with amenities that were far enough away to be invisible from the terrace, but close enough to reach in five minutes when supplies ran out. There must be shops, a weekly farmer’s market, cafés and a winery. Perhaps something vaguely artistic – a pottery, a local painter, country opera – which she didn’t promise to visit but which it would be nice to know was there.

  She got all of it, at a price. The Villa Paresi lounged like a jewel on the breast of a sun-kissed courtesan on a southfacing hill overlooking the village of Paresi itself. It was garlanded with vines and bougainvillaea and its skirts of golden-green grass, barred by the long shadows of cypresses, were sparked with wild flowers and flittering with bees and butterflies. Paths meandered through the grass and olive trees sculpted by time reached their knotty hands to the sun. The pool had been created in such a way that it might have been there for two hundred years, with a vine-covered arbour on one side and a curving terrazza on the other on which rough urns spouted torrents of crimson trailing geraniums like small volcanoes. There were two bathrooms each the size of a
library, and several lavatories ranging from the mediaeval to the turn of the century, all in perfect working order. The kitchen was huge and dim and smelt of herbs, with a table big enough for human sacrifice and a range of pots, pans and cooking equipment second to none. There was help in the unmotherly form of Claudia, a woman minute and sinewy as a lizard and who functioned like one – she could remain inert for hours with a magazine or the works of Danielle Steele, only to explode into a whirlwind of activity when required, cleaning and cooking like some maddened dervish. She almost never smiled, and she rode back and forth from Paresi on a Miss Marple-ish bicycle without breaking sweat. But what she lacked in charm she made up for in efficiency, which was all Stella required.

  Best of all was the view: a rolling sea of slumbrous, tawny hills from which a sense of rich ease and wellbeing seemed to rise like a vapour into the shimmering heat. Stella had not, until now, known Italy, but it was love at first sight. Here was a place where beauty and plenty, art and nature, were so constant and abundant that they engendered in people a natural moderation. They lived in perfect harmony with the good things of life because the good things were on tap. Theirs was a sybaritic life, calmed by custom.

  Stella herself was by nature not a sybarite. Indulgence for its own sake did not come naturally to her. She saw pleasure as something to be earned, and which she derived mainly from her work. Even the planning of this trip had been deliberate, a means to an end, not something she had undertaken with a long sigh of relief but a project with a purpose. She recognised something feverish and driven in her nature which did not allow for the slow savouring of good things. She was nervy and impatient, anxious always to move on, never living in the moment unless that moment were on stage, its intensity a removal from real life. There was a quieter satisfaction in song-writing, but even that involved the inevitable contradictions of creativity. She was a poor taker of holidays – the notion of going away for a period of enforced leisure was foreign and incomprehensible to her, a quite unnecessary interruption to the hand-to-hand struggle with life.