The Rose Stone

by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)

  “But Jesus was a Jew,” Josef had pointed out, just once, in argument at the university in Moscow. “And He, surely, hated no one. If you believe, as you say you do, how can you think that He would countenance such cruelty perpetrated in His Name?”

  “Watch what you say, bastard Jew,” had come the reply. “If you want your tongue slit, just take His Name into your filthy mouth once more—”

  Josef’s decision to flee after the attack on Charnov Street and after he had found the terrified, speechless child in the water butt had been instinctive – but still, now, he believed it to have been right. He had known, had been warned, that Alexei’s – and through Alexei his own – involvement in subversive activities had come to the notice of the authorities. He had no doubt at all as to the motive of the attack. But the violence had not stopped there: others, innocent, had died and Josef Rosenberg, always despite his efforts the outsider, would rightly be held responsible when the community recovered from this latest outbreak. He could expect little help or support from anyone. And Tanya – what of her? She had lost every living relative in the massacre, apart from a distant cousin in Amsterdam. Her father’s estate would undoubtedly be forfeit now that Alexei’s strong arm was no longer there to defend it. The child had been shocked almost beyond reason. Harsh treatment now, Josef was certain, might have deranged her mind for ever. And so, with the small leather bag of rough stones that he had been carrying with him that day and the old tools of his trade that, discarded in favour of new, had been stored almost forgotten in the garden shed, he had taken the child and fled, following that arduous refugee road to the west that had been trodden by so many before them. Had he guessed the enormity of the task of shepherding a young, delicately nurtured mind-sick child across a continent, would he still have attempted it? He looked now at the pale little face and knew beyond doubt that he would, despite the danger and hardship that had brought him more than once to the brink of despair. With little or no money they had had no choice but to face more than a thousand miles of rough country on foot, travelling sometimes alone, or sometimes – as with the gypsies – falling in with a group of travellers for safety’s sake. Josef earned their bread where and when he could along the way. The stones he carried were worth nothing in terms of food, shelter or transport. A Russian or Polish peasant offered these baubles in place of hard cash would scorn the fool who tried it; and, unsure of pursuit and terrified of rousing suspicion, or getting himself arrested and so being forced to abandon Tanya to a lone existence which she would certainly not survive, Josef had avoided the towns where he might have sold one of the small gems. Apart from anything else, as the weeks had passed, the stones had become to him a kind of talisman, a charm of promise for the future. Here lay their fortune – he would not endanger it by forfeiting a single gem. Let them just survive the gruelling present and, in Amsterdam or maybe London, their future was assured. A small business, prosperity, safety – perhaps even complete recovery for poor Tanya. For the moment, with winter advancing fast and the weather worsening by the day, they must endure, keep moving and avoid the dangers of the road.

  The thought brought his mind back unpleasantly to the present. He turned his head. The big man who had accosted him earlier was staring across the room through the smoke, eyes narrowed, probing into the dark corner where Josef huddled over Tanya. As Josef watched, one of the man’s companions, a boy pretty enough to be taken for a girl, spoke and laughed uproariously, slapping the table, rattling the bottles and glasses. The giant nodded, smiled briefly. But his eyes across the hazy room were calculating and absolutely mirthless.

  * * *

  They were waiting for him the next day just a few miles along the road. They made not the slightest attempt to hide themselves or their intent. The giant sat upon a stone, elbows on knees, rain-damp towhead lifted, watching the man and child as, they approached, his cronies disposed around him on the muddy grass verge of the track. There was no one else in sight. Josef’s heart took up the steady, heavy beat of fear at the first sight of them, but he walked on unfaltering, Tanya’s hand firmly in his, the sack bouncing on his shoulder. As he drew closer he saw that in one huge hand the man held a rough cudgel which he slapped rhythmically into the vast palm of the other as he sat and waited.

  Tanya, frightened, hung back when she saw the men. Josef squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Come along, my pigeon. It’s all right.”

  She shook her head, her feet dragging.

  He dropped to one knee beside her, still holding her hand. “Don’t be afraid, little one. They won’t hurt us.”

  Brave words.

  She bit her lip and nodded uncertainly. He straightened, braced his shoulders and started forward.

  With no words the giant stood and barred the path, the cudgel swinging gently beside him.

  Josef stopped. “Good day to you.” The words were calm, civil, spoken in Russian.

  The man smiled his predator’s smile and held out his hand, palm up. “Give.”

  Josef, swallowing, stood his ground, gripping his sack and the child’s hand, knowing himself lost. “I have nothing.”

  The smile faded. The three other men were on their feet now, two behind Josef and the third, the slim, slovenly beautiful young man that Josef had noticed the night before, at his leader’s elbow. “Give,” said the man again and took a threatening step forward.

  Tanya cringed, whimpering and clinging to Josef’s coat, her huge eyes terror-filled.

  “Please – don’t frighten the child. There’s no need to frighten the child—” Despite his efforts fear threaded Josef’s voice. He heard it himself, and hated himself for it. He gritted his teeth and met the giant’s hot eyes with his own as steadily as he could manage.

  The Pole snapped something in his own language. The boy stepped swiftly forward and caught Tanya’s shoulders, trying to drag her away from Josef. She screamed shrilly and fought like a small animal, kicking, spitting, biting, holding like grim death to Josef’s hand.

  Josef let drop the sack to reach for her.

  Deftly the giant caught it before it hit the ground, upended it, spilled its contents into the mud and pushed them around with an enormous, booted foot. The young man who had grabbed Tanya swore luridly as her sharp teeth sank into his skin. He lifted a hand to strike the child. She screamed again, her breath sobbing in her throat. Before the blow could fall the bandit leader’s huge hand shot out and, with enormous strength simply plucked the sobbing, struggling child from Josef’s grip and tucked her beneath his arm like an oversized doll. His fears for himself forgotten, Josef froze.

  “Please. Don’t hurt her.”

  A great, dirty palm was extended, open, waiting. The calculating eyes were unblinking.

  “We don’t have anything,” Josef gestured, his empty hands graphic. “I swear we don’t have anything.”

  Josef’s tools lay at the giant’s feet in the mud. There was no sign of the leather bag. The man pushed the scaithe again, uninterestedly, with a booted toe. Grunted. Thrust forward his hand once more.

  “I tell you we don’t have anything!” Frantically Josef began to turn out his pockets, showing them empty of valuables, his eyes on Tanya’s hanging head. The child’s body had gone ominously limp; even the sobs had stopped.

  The giant watched Josef’s pantomime of emptying his pockets with unimpressed eyes, snapped an order at the girlish-looking young man. The lad grinned salaciously, stretched filthy, slender hands with long, effeminate fingers and advanced towards Josef. One of his companions laughed, harshly. Josef stood like stone as he was searched slowly, meticulously, painfully obscenely. The long fingers probed, caressed, investigated every likely and unlikely place where valuables might have been concealed, whilst the boy’s companions looked on, laughing and calling encouragement. Like the whore he obviously was, the lad explored Josef’s body, his bright, pretty eyes fixed upon his victim’s face. Josef stood like rock. At last, regretfully, the boy stood back, shaking his head. Tanya moaned a littl
e, tried to move. The big man who held her looked down at her almost in surprise as if the small comedy he had just witnessed had driven the thought of her from his mind. Josef, his face burning with humiliation, raked his numb brain for the Polish words.

  Unexpectedly gently the giant set the child on her feet. She staggered from him, then finding herself free she flew to Josef, flinging her arms about him, burying her face in his patched coat. Josef’s arms closed about her, his eyes on the robber leader. The man was gazing thoughtfully at the implements that had fallen from the sack. Curiously he bent to pick up the dop with its rounded heap of solder, the tiny indentation at the top. He regarded it for a moment with puzzled eyes, then tossed it back into the mud. He shifted the big metal wheel once more with his foot, and pounced upon something that was revealed by the movement. Josef’s heart sank. The big man straightened. In his hand he held not the leather bag but Josef’s loupe, his jeweller’s eyeglass, a tiny magnifying glass set in a brass surround and frame. The man held it cradled in the palm of his hand, crafty eyes thoughtful. Then he said something in Polish and reached again for the sack, shaking it, turning it inside out.

  The little soft leather bag landed at his feet.

  The small sound that Josef made was hardly audible, a simple, swiftly indrawn breath. But the man heard it. He bared his yellowed teeth, danced the bag in the air in front of Josef’s eyes, tutting softly, his eyes dangerous.

  “Tch, tch. Bad boy,” he said in his mangled Russian.

  Josef said nothing.

  Huge fingers fumbled with the fine leather thong, tore it at last in impatience. The small, dull stones tumbled into a dirt-ingrained palm. The man frowned. This was not what he had expected. Pieces of dirty glass? Of what possible use were they?

  And yet—

  He glanced at his victim. In the man’s eyes as he looked at the glass-like pebbles was a despair he could not disguise. That was enough. Jan Kopelski was no man’s fool. He tucked the leather pouch into his pocket and then eyed the man and the child, his mind moving with slow deliberation to the next problem.

  What to do with them?

  The man was whey-faced, the child clinging to him in terror. In truth they made a sorry pair. Behind them Lech the whore, who had just so much enjoyed searching the man, was waiting with bright expectancy on his face, long fingers flexing. For some reason Kopelski felt a spasm of irritation at the naked bloodlust in the boy’s face. Stupid child.

  The little girl was weeping softly, helplessly, the great, oddly empty violet eyes drowned in tears.

  Never let it be said that Jan Kopelski was not a generous-hearted man; let them live. Why not? The child looked like an unhappy angel – perhaps if he left her unharmed one small candle might be lit somewhere, sometime, for his besmirched soul. Kopelski, nothing if not superstitious, took the thought as an omen. A good deed warmed the heart. Leave them be. They were harmless enough. In all probability they’d die on the road anyway. Let some other son-of-a-whore take the responsibility for that. With a sweep of his arm he gathered his comrades to him. They came, eager for sport.

  “Leave them,” he said, and took malicious pleasure in the disappointment in young Lech’s girlish eyes.

  “But—”

  “Leave them, I say. They can do us no harm. Come.” He turned and strode down the road, knowing his command of them. Reluctantly they followed. At the brow of the hill he turned back. The man had sunk to his knees in the mire, the child clasped in his arms. Even from this distance there was defeat in the bowed shoulders.

  “Pah!” he hawked, spat, considered for a moment going back and finishing the job after all, then shrugged. Why bother? Let the wolves have them.

  Chapter Two

  AMSTERDAM 1875

  The city, on this February evening, was a place of glimmering reflections: the dark, wind-rippled waters of the canals shimmered beneath bridge and wall, never still, mirroring the gleam of lamplight from the tall, gabled houses, glittering in the bitterly cold darkness and creating a deceptive beauty from the narrow, squalid streets behind the city’s waterfront.

  Josef Rosenberg, head down against a biting wind that cut through his threadbare coat like a butcher’s new-honed knife, noticed neither the beauty nor, for once, the squalor. He walked fast, blindly, his fury carrying him forward. Turning a corner too fast he slipped on rain-slick cobblestones and cursed in a manner of which he would have been incapable twelve months before. At least, he reflected bitterly, past experience was teaching him something.

  Ahead lay the familiar little bridge which crossed a narrow canal to a street where stood a row of dirty tenement houses much frequented by the sea-vagrants of the port. In one of these, to his shame, in an unhealthily damp semi-basement he and Tanya had lived since arriving in Amsterdam a few months before. He slowed his steps a little, fighting for control of a temper which, if slow to kindle, had always been equally slow to die.

  Thrown out by a servant! After all he had been through – to be literally thrown from the door of the house of the man upon whom he had pinned his hopes, with no chance to explain himself. He almost choked with mortification to think of it. He could still feel the rough hands on him, still see the sneer on the servant’s face. “Out, beggar!”

  Josef stopped on the bridge, leaned over the crumbling parapet and, sightless and sullen, contemplated the night-dark waters of the canal. Was nothing ever going to go right again? Was this nightmare never to stop? They had survived a massacre, a gruelling journey, attack, theft and – he was certain – near murder. Left bereft and helpless by the vagabond thieves of Poland, they had stubbornly struggled on, step by step, yard by yard, always westward, always somehow keeping hope alive, until at last, against all odds, he had dragged himself and the helpless child to Amsterdam – the goal that in those last terrible weeks on the road had shone before them like a golden beacon in darkness. He uttered aloud a sharp bark of self-mocking laughter, and turned to contemplate with a disenchanted eye the dingy tenements and narrow, unpromising streets that surrounded him. Not for them the wide waterways and pretty, tree-lined avenues of fashionable, prosperous Amsterdam. From the day they arrived their ill-luck had continued to dog them. Even without their precious small store of diamonds Josef had felt reasonably certain that he would be able to find employment in the diamond cutting and polishing centre of Europe. But those last grim weeks on the road had taken a much worse toll than he had realized. To feed Tanya he had himself eaten nothing, to clothe her he had gone all but naked, and his body, unused to privation, had finally rebelled. By the time they had reached the city, in company with a band of players from whom Josef had earned a few coppers helping to set up and dismantle the stage, he had been a very sick man indeed. Their first night had been spent in the open, their second here in the comfortless room in which they still lived, the only accommodation that Josef could afford. By that second night Josef had had a fever, and those first few days in the city were still a confusion in his mind, a nightmare of pain and restless half-sleep punctuated by terrible hallucinations. Amazingly, it had been Tanya who had cared for him then. His few lucid moments had been lit by her sweet smile, tended by her small, careful hands. She had in her gentle way made friends for them amongst the other tenants of the crowded building – the woman on the first floor had donated worn and none-too-clean blankets, the man who worked on the fish quay supplied fishheads for soup, another a few lumps of coal. And Pieter van Heuten – Josef’s brow furrowed a little as the name came to him – had shared his bread and sometimes his ale. For a time the world had seemed a more friendly place. As soon as he was enough recovered, Josef had set out hopefully to look for two things – the house of Tanya’s distant cousins, whom he felt sure would be ready to give the child a decent home again, and work. In the first task he had expected some difficulty, whereas in fact the discovering of the Anatovs’ whereabouts had proved relatively simple; in the second he had expected none and been savagely disappointed.