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The Rose Stone

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by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)




  The Rose Stone

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Interlude

  PART TWO

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Interlude

  PART THREE

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Interlude

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Copyright

  For Rita

  PART ONE

  Russia, Poland, Amsterdam, 1874-1875

  Chapter One

  The rutted and waterlogged road that had started in death and terror and that led – so far as the exhausted child could tell – to the promise of little better, stretched bleakly to a cloud-smudged horizon that seemed never to change, never to come any closer no matter how the travellers laboured. The girl bowed her head, and fixed her eyes despairingly upon the rough ground just a yard in front of her, trying not to see the endless, awful miles ahead. For how many days now – how many weeks – had they been following this hateful ribbon of potholed mud and stone westward? She could not recall. She only knew that sometimes now it seemed that she could barely remember a time when this had not been her life: the freezing rain and foul, squelching mire, painful feet and cruelly aching legs, and always the necessity, the compulsion, to tramp on. To what? Day after day in raw cold that chilled her to the bone despite the overlarge and moth-eaten fur jacket that Uncle Josef had managed somehow to acquire for her she trudged blindly on, the origins of this fearful journey often blessedly forgotten, the possibility of an end unimaginable. They slept at night in any haven they could find – a noisy tavern, a hayloft or byre, or at best, when some peasant woman took pity upon a child’s pinched and weary face, upon the beaten mud floor of a crowded hovel before the fire. The girl drew a long, trembling breath, watched muddy water slurp around her ruined boots as she plodded through an ice-filmed puddle that she was simply too tired to avoid, and wondered how much further they must struggle today before the relief of roof and rest. Despite the cold, despite the movement, her eyelids drooped as she walked. She would not even mind if, as so often before, there were nothing to eat – she was simply tired to death, the ankle she had twisted yesterday paining her badly. Her eyes closed again, the comforting dark at least some refuge from the misery around her, and against her own volition she found herself drifting into that waking dream world that was both her sanctuary and, if she were unwary, her terror.

  A small white bed. Fragrant sheets. The last rosy blush of an evening sun lighting the familiar ceiling of the night nursery. The comforting sound of a lullaby as one of the Georgian maids crooned to baby Olga in the room next door. The calling of her brothers as they tumbled on the lawns below—

  Don’t think of it.

  She was conscious of a faint lift of sound in her head, a sound that had its source somewhere in the base of her own skull; a keening, an echo of misery that if she allowed it – and in the worst of circumstances she had discovered that it could be almost a relief to allow it – would overwhelm her, drown her, beating from her brain all thought, all terrible memory. Once – it now seemed long ago, for the sun had been shining and the roads had been dry, and dusty – when they had been travelling with the gypsies, the terrifying boy with the rat’s face whose greatest pleasure had been to torment the frail, pale little stranger who had fallen in with them on the road, had discovered her horror of fire and had chased her with a burning brand. That had been the worst time. The sound had risen to a crescendo to burst her head. Stumbling from him, the brutal smell of burning flesh in her nostrils, she had begun to scream, had screamed herself to blessed, mindless oblivion until the feel of Uncle Josef’s hands upon her shoulders, the urgent sound of his voice had brought her from terror to silence. She opened her eyes now, blinking against the windblown sleet’s razor edge, and glanced up at him. He walked as always, grim-faced, eyes fixed upon the muddy track ahead, her hand tight in his, his heavy sack bouncing rhythmically upon his shoulder. She knew that the burden chafed with every step through leather and cotton to the skin beneath, had seen once the raw redness of his back beneath the torn and dirty shirt where the tender skin had been flayed to blood. Yet she knew that, next to her own hand, his grip upon that dirty sack would be the last thing he would relinquish. And she knew why. The dop, the tang, the heavy wheel known as the scaithe, the small precious leather bag – if they had a future, here it lay. Night after night she would doze off to the sound of his voice talking of a far-off and unimaginable place called Amsterdam, of a new life, of a home and warmth and rest and comfort. She flinched from the thought. A home? Without the gentleness of her mother? Her glorious, graceful, bright-faced father? Her brothers and sisters and baby Olga? Grandfather, with his stern voice and twinkling eyes? Sometimes she told herself – yes, they will be waiting, and we will be together again, and happy. But sometimes the truth would not be denied, and she knew they would not. The eldritch ringing began again in her head, distant, insistent.

  Don’t think of it.

  Bright-eyed faces, laughing. The flower-filled fields of spring. Picnics, and games across the fields. The musical running of the silvered river as the winter snows melted. Her brother Josef – named in friendship after this same man who now strode silently beside her – his brown, serious face gentle as he lifted her to see a perfectly woven nest securely enclosing the dear, funny little fledglings with their blinking eyes and gaping beaks—

  Don’t think of it!

  Too late. Blood now and screams. A soft baby head crushed like rotten fruit. A brutal hand in her sister’s long, flying hair, that stopped her flight and dragged her back to death. The unspeakable things that the devils had done to her mother – her father’s pleading, anguished and desperate as, laughing, they had held him to watch. And then, after that nightmare of blood, the fire. The smell, that had crept to her nostrils as she had crouched, half dead with terror, in the water barrel behind the workshop, her secret hiding place in their children’s games.

  Don’t think of it.

  Too late now. Much, much too late.

  She stopped walking. From some far distance she heard someone screaming; a thin, shrill sound like the cry of an injured animal.

  “Tanya!” Josef was on his knees in front of her, his grip on her shoulders painful, the precious sack fallen disregarded in the mud beside him. “Tanya!”

  The sound subsided. She stood quite still, trembling, tears pouring soundlessly down her face. He gathered her fiercely to him, crushing her, hurting her. The leather of his jacket was hard and cold. Something sharp dug into her cheek. Passively she stood, still shaking, unresisting in his arms, an unhappy, docile little doll.

  Josef Rosenberg drew back, looked into the huge, haunted eyes of the child and cursed savagely the land of his birth.

  * * *

  Later he watched her in sleep, the thin little face a pale, beautiful mask within its haloed cloud of hair, the enormous eyes closed, violet-shadowed within an arch of bone. Occasionally she moved or muttered, restless even in her exhaustion. Jo
sef sat by her, setting himself between the child and the crowded room, fervent guardian to her safety. No further harm would come to this, the only surviving child of his murdered friend, if the body and strength of Josef Rosenberg could prevent it; he owed that at least to a lifetime of comradeship and near brotherhood. And more, much more. To the Anatovs he owed his life, his loved ones, his very existence – the least he could do in exchange for so great a debt was to try to preserve this small, damaged flower, the last of their line. Thirty-five years before, Tanya’s grandfather, Count Boris Anatov, had rescued a dying baby from its dead mother’s side on the bitter winter road to Kiev and had brought it to the house of Solomon Rosenberg, his best friend. The elderly childless couple had believed the child a gift from God and the nameless, abandoned scrap had become Josef Rosenberg, a much-loved son, secure within the framework of the two families, a companion to the Anatovs’ own son Alexei, an unlooked-for treasure to bring light and happiness to the Rosenbergs’ old age.

  Tiredly Josef rubbed the heels of his hands into his reddened eyes. The atmosphere was thick with smoke, the stench of unwashed bodies and with the unappetizing reek of the cabbage soup which was the only sustenance, with black bread, that the tavern had to offer. The noise was deafening. In one corner a small knot of men gambled, faces avid in the lamplight, the group dominated by a giant of a man in the homespun blouse and dirty, baggy trousers of the Polish peasant, with hands that dwarfed the dice to pea size and a voice like a bull. Josef detested having to bring Tanya into places like this and made a point of avoiding them whenever possible; but tonight the child had been on the brink of pure exhaustion. He had had to carry her for the last difficult mile, together with his other burden. At the thought his hand moved instinctively to the sack, unaware that from across the room a pair of bright, hot eyes had lifted from the dice and were watching him in crafty speculation. Through the rough cloth he felt the reassuringly familiar outline of the wheel. Here was yet another gift from the Anatovs – for in taking him to the Rosenbergs old Boris had not only presented him with loving and devoted parents but with a skill and a livelihood that had, as the years progressed, become a true passion. Diamonds. He allowed himself, fleetingly, to remember a small boy standing by his foster father’s knee watching in wonder the spinning wheel, hearing the sweet note of the singing stone, seeing and envying even then the skill and deftness, the sureness of touch that turned what looked like a small shapeless lump of clouded glass into a piece of living, sparking fire. With delicate accuracy the planes were cut, measured by eye to a fraction of a degree, then polished on the spinning wheel until within the gem the light would glance and gleam, rainbow spears of colour to delight the eye. Often Boris Anatov would be there, watching his old friend at work, for this love of the diamond was one of the things that drew the two men, so disparate in most things, together in unlikely friendship. One of the things. Josef sighed. If it had been only that, if they had not also shared a passionate hatred for injustice and oppression, had not become enmeshed in that dangerous movement that advocated reform and revolution in a country where, Josef was convinced, neither would ever come about, then Tanya Georgievna Anatov would at this moment be safely asleep in her nursery in the lovely old house that had been her home on the estate just outside Kiev and he, Josef, would be sitting downstairs in the house in Charnov Street, quietly with his wife Anna, the children, those little innocent ones martyred for their name and their religion, asleep upstairs—

  All gone.

  Bitter words, bitter thought, almost impossible to accept even now as the truth. God of my father, where are you now? If you exist, and I pray that you do not, how could you possibly encompass such viciousness, such barbaric cruelty, such mindless horror – not once, but a thousand times? For the carnage of Charnov Street was, Josef knew even in the agony of his own loss, just a small drop in the ocean of the suffering of his parents’ people, the Russian Jews.

  His parents’ people.

  Why, after all these years, did he still think that? Why, after a lifetime in a Jewish family, after marrying the good, Jewish wife that his foster mother had so desired for him, did he still feel, in the depths of his being, an outsider? Why could he not believe? Why, for all these years, had it been necessary, in gratitude and love, to pretend? Of one thing he was certain – the feeling of alienation had not been simply due to the circumstances of his birth and adoption, nor yet to the fact that he in no way physically resembled the people amongst whom he had lived; it had been rooted deeper than that, somewhere in the darkness of an unbelieving soul that still now denied him the comfort of faith, never revealed to those who loved and cared for him for fear of hurt. Alexei had known – but then, in the intimacy of near brotherhood, Alexei had known everything about Josef Rosenberg. They had shared everything from their thoughts and dreams as boys to their first whore as students in Moscow. Alexei had been Josef’s other, more flamboyant self. He could see him now in the pure lines of the face of the child who was his daughter, in the living halo of her hair, saw his shadow each time he looked into the dark-fringed violet eyes. Alexei, laughing, careless, daredevil who had inherited his father’s passion for revolutionary politics without the old man’s good sense and restraint, and who had been the undoing of them all. Josef knew beyond doubt that the attack on the house in Charnov Street had been instigated and stage-managed by agents of the police and the Imperial government. The Anatovs had had too much influence, were too well regarded and protected upon their own ground – how much more vulnerable were they there in the Jewish quarter of the city, unarmed, unprepared, at a family party celebrating a child’s birthday? How regrettable, people would say, that a family such as the Anatovs should have been caught up in one of those sporadic spasms of Jewish blood-letting that were, if unpleasant, so necessary to the health and well-being of the city of Kiev. But then – a man was known by his friends, was he not? And if he chose to befriend dogs above his own kind, should he be surprised to find himself hunted with them?

  Josef thanked the God in whom he could not believe that Solomon and Sarah Rosenberg had been safely at rest for more than a year before the Cossacks had come, laughing, to that neat and prosperous house in Charnov Street, to ravage, to kill and to burn—

  A shadow loomed, blocking the light. Josef looked up, eyes still clouded with recollections of that terrible day. The giant who had been dicing with the others in the corner grinned down at him, exposing wolfish teeth. He held out a massive hand in which nestled two ancient bone dice, yellowed with age and worn almost spherical by use.

  “You like this?” His Russian was horribly accented, almost unintelligible.

  Josef shook his head.

  The other man frowned, jerked the hand that held the dice. “You like,” he said again, and moved his head towards the corner in which his friends were sitting, grinning, watching the entertaining sideplay. “You play.” He mimed the rolling of the dice, grinning his canine grin in crafty encouragement.

  “No,” Josef said again, firmly, his eyes steady though his hands were slick with the sweat of anxiety. He had no doubt at all that this Goliath could break him in half with one hand, even less that the other occupants of the room would watch him do it with no concern and little more than a passing interest. “No.” He looked away, deliberately dismissive. The big man did not move. His huge hand hung level with Josef’s eyes. Josef tried not to look at it, at the callouses, the ingrained dirt, the filthy, bitten nails. His own hand seemed coldly welded to the rough sack beside him. Still the man made no move; his shadow, enormous and somehow threatening, lay across the sleeping child. Josef stiffened, the sickness of fear stirring the pit of his stomach as the huge hand reached towards Tanya, touched the fair, tangled, sleep-damp curls.

  “Nice,” said the Pole in his heavily accented Russian. “Pretty.”

  Josef, very still, lifted his head and watched the other man as he stood contemplating the small, angelic face. The stirrings of terror lifted the hairs of his body.
He knew himself not to be a brave man – in their years together at university in Moscow he had never managed to acquire Alexei’s gay appreciation of a good fight, his disregard for physical hurt – but nevertheless he bunched his legs beneath him, ready to launch himself at the giant at the first threat to his sleeping charge. Tanya murmured and turned her head, her fingers curled loosely close to her smooth cheek. She was small for her eight years; asleep she looked younger. Another fearsome grin spread across the man’s face, exaggeratedly sentimental. He said something in his native tongue which Josef did not understand. The man smelled like a pigsty and his breath was foul. At a table not far away an argument had started and a knife flashed. The big hand closed upon the dice, rattled them gently, close to Josef’s ear.

  “You play.” The words were soft, confident. “Yes? You have a good time. A man is not a – what? – a nursemaid, no? You play.”

  “I’ve no money.”

  “You win some.” The words were coaxing, the bright eyes disturbingly derisive, disbelieving. The Colossus dug his hand into the pocket of his trousers and produced a handful of small coins, rattling them enticingly in his fist as he had the dice. The altercation at the next table rose again. A man stumbled across the floor and cannoned into Josef’s tormentor. He had blood on his face. Without taking his eyes from Josef the big man planted a hand in the man’s chest and shoved him back with the force of a steam hammer the way he had come.

  Josef waited, sweating.

  The giant watched him with bland eyes and an unfeeling smile.

  “I’ve no money to gamble,” Josef said at last, in desperation.

  The man sniffed noisily, cuffed his running nose. One of his friends in the far corner of the room, bored with the lack of action, called impatiently. The hot, speculative eyes watched Josef for a silent moment longer before, with no other word, the man turned and pushed his unceremonious way back across the crowded room to his table. Before he sat down he looked back, once. Josef turned hastily away. When next he hazarded a glance the man was once more intent upon his game. Almost paralysed with relief Josef moved closer to Tanya. Protectively he leaned to the child, tucking the fur jacket closer about her, trying to still the painful racing of his heart. No Alexei to take his part now – nor ever again. Had he been here, Josef found himself wondering, what would he have done? Taken the dice, more than likely, and happily beaten the brute at his own game. Or, depending upon his mood, cheerfully accepted the implicit challenge to violence and proceeded to destroy the tavern stick by stick. Many a man had been misled by that deceptively pretty face and slight build. Roused, Alexei Anatov had not been noted for his restraint. Indirectly it had, in fact, been Alexei’s volcanic disposition that had earned Josef a place at university with him, sponsored and paid for by a Boris Anatov who had hoped – vainly – that the steadier Josef might temper the extremes of his son’s volatile temperament. As if anything or anyone could have done that, Josef thought now, ruefully. Even after Alexei’s marriage to a girl he truly loved, even after the birth of children, the passing of years and the responsibilities of taking over his ailing father’s estate, the blithe recklessness of his youth had never truly left him, neither in action nor speech. And so the intellectual polemic of the father had in the son given way to rash action – and the inevitable end that came upon the blades of the Cossacks in Charnov Street. Blind chance had decreed that Josef should not share the bloody fate of his friends and family, and even now he could not for his life decide if fortune had favoured or duped him. Might it not after all have been better to have died with the others? With Anna and the children, with Alexei and his family. Even old Boris Anatov’s years and standing had not been spared. When, hurrying late from an appointment in the city, Josef had come to the house in Charnov Street after the brutal storm had passed, the old man’s savaged body had been the first he had found. Of the others, those that remained after the flames, he still could not think without sickness. By then the violence, unleashed and uncontainable, had spread through the Jewish quarter and slaughter was everywhere. Ancient fires of hatred had blazed again, endless retribution exacted from a despised race.

 

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