The Rose Stone

by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)

  A wave broke, ran up the sand almost to their feet. Joss stood up. “Time to go, little one.”

  “Just a minute. There’s a pretty piece of seaweed over there.” She ran and picked it up, and folded its smelly length carefully into her pocket. “Joss?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Do you think – one day – that you might get married?”

  He looked at her in astonishment. “What a question! What brought that on?”

  “I – just wondered. Will you?”

  Another wave swept almost to their feet. They sprinted for the path. Joss lifted her over a chalky outcrop, smiled into her face.

  “Will you?” she persisted. “Get married?”

  “Oh – I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  He laughed. “What an exasperating young lady you can be once you set your mind on something! I won’t get married because—” he thought for a moment, then, uncharacteristically impulsive, he leaned to her and touched her nose with his finger “—because I’ll never find anyone as pretty as you.”

  He was taken aback by the effect of his words. Colour flared in the thin cheeks, anger sparked in her eyes. “I think you’re horrible,” she said flatly, and turning, marched straight-backed away from him.

  Puzzled – as he often was – by the perversity of female nature, Joss followed.

  Chapter Eight

  Anna’s visit to her father’s workshop was both as exciting and as pleasurable as she had hoped it would be. Eagerly she begged to be allowed to go again and her father, with growing pride and enthusiasm at his daughter’s interest, readily agreed. So it was that the one visit turned into two, three, four – until by that winter of 1888 Anna was a familiar figure in the Hatton Garden rooms as, absorbed, she watched the – to her – magical and fascinating processes that produced the lovely objects that glimmered upon velvet in the Piccadilly showrooms. The goldsmith and the silversmith, the enamellers and the workers in precious stones, she got to know them all; and most of them, at first amused or ready to be irritated by the child’s precocious interest in their work, came genuinely to enjoy her company, her unfeigned admiration for their skills and her avid eagerness to learn. For her part Anna – hardly until then known for her brilliance or application in the schoolroom, where she had often been the absolute despair of Miss Spencer as she stumbled through times tables and mental arithmetic – showed a quite remarkable grasp and understanding when it came to this, the subject that had fascinated her for as long as she could remember. Very soon she knew at a glance the cut of a stone, could discuss intelligently and informedly the pros and cons of a particular cut for an individual jewel. Time and again she would beg her father to tell her of his work on the Shuvenski Diamond, the stone upon which Rose and Company was founded; of all things she longed to see the fabulous thing, and her pride in her father’s skill and courage in attempting such a task in such conditions both touched and pleased him. The process of enamelling particularly fascinated her – the glowing colours laid, layer upon layer, fired and lovingly polished to brilliance. She spoke knowingly of cloisonné, of champlevé and of guilloché – to her mother’s quiet disapproval, for Grace, whilst gratified at her daughter’s unexpected talent, nevertheless did not consider such knowledge either desirable or ladylike, since she could see no possible application for it in the future and was concerned that in pursuing this eccentric interest the girl was neglecting those accomplishments so dear to Grace’s own heart that might recommend her in the future to a young man looking for a wife. Heaven knew, the child had little enough to offer in the way of looks – a few ladylike and practical accomplishments would take her a lot further in Grace’s opinion than a superfluous knowledge of brilliant cuts and the method of achieving oyster enamel In this, however, happily for her daughter, as in everything else, she recognized her husband’s authority and accepted his rulings, though not without private reservations; and so Anna continued to spend hours at the workshops, mostly watching her father’s chief enameller, Tom Logan, experiment with the subtle shades and colours that were so popular with Rose’s clients, occasionally helping to polish some of the minor pieces with the wooden wheel and wash-leather used for that purpose. The alloys, too, of the silversmith and goldsmith pleased her colour-conscious eye – rose-gold, green-gold, white-gold.

  “Father, the snowdrop pin for Lady Masham – don’t you think green-gold would be better? The white is harsh, I think, with pearl.”

  “Anna,” Grace looked up from her plate and fixed her daughter with a severe eye, “I hardly think that your father needs to be told his own business at his own dinner table.”

  Anna subsided, but not before she had caught the conspiratorial half-wink that her father sent her way.

  In her room she would sit for absorbed hours, pencil in hand, drawing those flowing, stylized designs that she so loved; delicate flowers, curving leaves, fairy-winged butterflies and – most frequently and in all shapes, sizes and colours – her beloved dragonflies. For her mother at Christmas she had designed a graceful spray of moonstone bluebells with a narrow knotted ribbon of gold flowing through the slender, green-gold leaves. The conception was entirely her own, the execution of it was left in the hands of her father’s craftsmen. She thought it quite the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. She took the finished brooch to her father, watched him anxiously as he held it for a long time before commenting.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I like it very much indeed.” He studied the spray. “It might well have come from Paris, or from Liberty’s – the style is modern, yet somehow distinctive.” She stood before him, her breath held – he was talking to her as he might to Tom, or to one of the others. He lifted his head. “It occurs to me – would you mind if we made another – perhaps a little bigger – using sapphires, maybe? The Countess was looking for—” He stopped, seeing the expression on her face “No?”

  “Well, I—” She wanted more than anything in the world to please him – but this was her mother’s and she wanted no one else to have it. “Might I try to do something else for you? A little different? I’ve tons of ideas—”

  “Of course. Of course. Do another by all means.”

  “Tomorrow. I could do it tomorrow—” She stopped as something he had said registered in her mind. “Sapphires? You’d have it set with sapphires?”

  “That’s what she wants. And Anna—”

  She looked at him enquiringly.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you stopped working for nothing? A workman, I believe they say, is worthy of his hire. You make me a design that I like – I’ll pay you for it.”

  She laughed delightedly. “Oh, Papa – you are the loveliest father in the world – and I’m the luckiest, luckiest girl!” The agonies of rejection she had suffered a couple of years earlier seemed now a bad dream. She had never been happier, and it showed in her face, radiated from her like sunshine.

  “I declare, child,” her mother said one day in some astonishment, “I do believe that your fairy godmother has waved her magic wand at last! You’re growing. And you’ve actually got some colour in your cheeks.” She, Tanya and Anna were gathered in the stone-flagged lobby of the Bayswater house, a miscellaneous and unlikely collection of blankets and bundles of clothes about their feet. Grace handed the covered basket she was holding to her daughter. “Carry this for me, will you? And do be careful – Cook’s junket never seems to set really well. Tanya and I can bring the blankets. The cabbie will help us with the clothes—”

  “Oh, Mama – must I come today? Tom says he might find time to look at my drawings for the little decorated box today – he’ll be waiting.”

  Her mother marched briskly to the door. “Then I’m very much afraid that he’ll have to wait. The Refuge needs these things and extra hands far more than Mr Logan needs you to keep him from his workbench. Come along.”

  Anna knew when not to argue. Reluctantly, she went. These trips to the East End
with her mother and Aunt Hermione were the one thing she truly detested. She knew it was wrong, knew it her Christian duty, as her mother so often informed her, to help those less fortunate than herself, but try as she might she could not bring herself to do anything but hate that part of the city with its filthy, over-crowded streets, its soot-darkened brickwork and reeking gutters. Even more was she repelled by the ragged, sallow, undernourished and spiritless people who came to the Refuge for shelter and hand-outs. She hated having to know that such people, such an environment, even existed. The squalor and the ugliness repulsed her, and no amount of self-castigation could stop that. She huddled now in the corner seat of the cab, her head turned from the distinctive, unpleasantly musty smell of the heap of clothes beside her, staring out of the window – seeing not the passing dingy streets but emerald dewdrops upon a leaf-comb, diamond raindrops upon an enamelled flower – why not? Tomorrow she’d go to the workshop with Papa – she’d talk to Tom about it.

  * * *

  It was spring when Matthew Smithson asked, at last, for Tanya’s hand in marriage – a spring when industrial unrest was stirring in London’s docklands, when the troublesome and recurring Irish Question split the country’s politicians and when, in far-off South Africa, Cecil Rhodes, with the resources of de Beers Consolidated Mines behind him signed the largest cheque that had ever been written – for more than five million pounds – and with the stroke of a pen achieved his dream of gaining control of the greater part of the world’s output of diamonds. The marriage proposal – long looked-for by most of the Rose household – was finally prompted by the fact that Matthew was required to go abroad for several months on business for his father’s bank. Rather than leave his still, as he saw it, far from certain prospects to cool for five or six months’ absence, the young man took his courage in both hands and, one cool April evening, gambled upon Tanya’s growing trust in and undisguised fondness for him and asked at last the question upon which he had no doubt all of his future happiness rested.

  Tanya stood quite still, eyes downcast, her hands in his.

  He waited, heart thumping like a frightened schoolboy’s. “My love?” he prompted at last, unable to bear a moment longer such suspense.

  She lifted her eyes. Within them was a light of desperate uncertainty. His heart sank. Fool! After all his patience, all his restraint, he had misread her heart and her fears – he would lose her.

  “I – yes, Matthew. I’ll marry you.”

  The words were so low that he could barely hear them – barely credit what he heard.

  She half-smiled, fearfully.

  He clutched her hands. “I’ll make you happy. I swear it. There’s a little house just around the corner from here. Father says he’ll buy it for us as a wedding gift. So – you shan’t be far from Mr and Mrs Rose and your brother—”

  “I should like that.”

  They stood, absurdly awkward, their tight-clasped hands between them, breast-high. He had never kissed her – had never even attempted to do so, daunted as much by Tanya’s reserve as by the conventions. He kissed her now, however, lightly and tenderly upon her closed, cool mouth and wondered at the tremor that shook her as he did so. She drew back quickly, ducked her head so that her fair hair brushed his cheek and its fragrance mingled with the soft perfumes of the spring garden. He exercised every ounce of restraint he possessed and let her go.

  “September,” he said, softly. “We’ll be married at the end of September. Does that suit you, my love? The house should be ready by then.”

  She nodded, not looking at him. He reached a finger to her chin and turned her face towards him. Serious, trusting as a child, yet apprehensive she watched him. He kissed her again, then, long and gently, feeling her tremble again, unable in his inexperience to tell desire from fear, knowing only that within himself was a fire lit and raging that only her nearness could quench. He stepped back, formally offered her his crooked arm. “Shall we go and tell the others?”

  No one in the household was unaffected by the announcement. Josef, resolutely dismissing fears with which he had lived for so long that they had almost ceased to threaten, was openly delighted. Joss, won over at last by Matthew’s obvious and tender devotion to his sister, offered gruff congratulations. Anna almost at once begged her father to be allowed to design the wedding present and Grace – as delighted as if Tanya had truly been her own daughter – found herself reflecting upon the duties of a surrogate mother to an inexperienced girl about to marry.

  Not for a couple of months, as it happened, did a suitable opportunity arise to broach the delicate subject that demanded discussion. By that time the wedding preparations were well under way. It was after a fitting of the all-important wedding gown – a marvellous creation of ivory silk with a fall of lace at throat and wrist and a train that swept the floor a full three feet behind its wearer, an extravagance that was a personal present from Joss to his sister – that Grace decided that, embarrassing or no, the effort must be made. She took a deep breath. “My dear—”

  Tanya looked up, smiling, paused in the rebuttoning of her day dress. It was June. The weather, sultry all day, looked ready to break at any moment. Heavy clouds threatened and a distant murmur of thunder silenced the birds in the garden.

  Grace cleared her throat. “I feel – that perhaps we should – that is that I should – speak to you. Regarding—”

  Tanya buttoned the last of her buttons and waited obediently, her face puzzled.

  “—regarding the – delicate subject of marriage. Of the duties of a woman with regard to her husband’s – needs.” Uncharacteristically nervous, she avoided the girl’s eyes and looked into the garden. Brief storm-wind tossed the branches of the trees and turned the leaves. The room fell to silence for a moment. Tanya waited, her pale face expressionless now.

  Grace struggled on, heartily wishing she had never started. She could just as easily have let well alone, as her own mother sensibly had. “You understand, of course, that there are – certain differences between man and woman. Physical differences. And differences of—” She stopped again. She knew she was making a wretched job of this. Her one desire now was to finish. “That is to say – within married life – within the marriage bed – there are certain demands that a man is entitled to make of his wife and to which she must submit obediently and with grace.” Beyond the window a flash of lightning split the summer darkness. Moments later the thunder cracked above their heads. Inside the room the silence lengthened. Grace, on sudden impulse, leaned to the girl and touched her arm. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this. Don’t be afraid, Tanya dear. Your Matthew is a truly gentle man. He’ll teach you the way of these things. It isn’t something that I find easy to talk of.”

  Tanya nodded and attempted a smile. Her long fingers fiddled restlessly with a narrow velvet ribbon at her throat.

  “Well, now,” relief was tangible in Grace’s voice, now that the awkward and undeniably unsatisfactory interview was over, “I’ll have to leave you, I’m afraid – cook’s waiting for next week’s menus.”

  As the other woman hurried from the darkening room Tanya turned to the window. Outside great spots of rain had started to fall, rustling restlessly in the leaves, splashing upon roof and paving stone. Lightning and thunder crashed together. The girl did not even blink. The rain fell faster, quickening to a torrent, drowning the beaten earth, beating down grass and flower.

  Somewhere in memory a child screamed.

  Tanya Anatov, still as an alabaster statue, stared into the streaming curtain of rain and tried to remember.

  * * *

  That summer was one when the increasing restlessness of a working population, whose conditions and wages had in no way kept pace with the wealth that their sweated toil had produced for others, became focused upon London’s docks. Dock work was hard and dangerous, the pay meagre, the conditions often atrocious. The indignity of the infamous ‘calling on’ system – the men caged, queueing, begging for work at dawn and n
oon, fighting, often literally, for a chance for survival for themselves and their dependents – was a matter of bitter resentment. For years a discontent had been bred that culminated, at the end of those summer months, in an angry demand for improved conditions and a decent living wage; sixpence an hour – the ‘Dockers’ Tanner’ as it came universally to be called. In August 1889, just a few days after Matthew Smithson’s return from America, the dockers – united, determined, pushed to outraged and, some considered, outrageous action – went on strike. Not a crane moved, not a ship docked. Stevedores, carpenters, lightermen, dockers; the action was solid. With bands and banners, men, women and children marched the streets of London. Cargoes rotted at the waterside, nothing moved on the wharves or in the great warehouses, and the capital almost at once began to feel the pinch. Yet, oddly, support for the strike was widespread and by no means confined to the working-classes. When the action started the union had in its coffers the far from princely sum of seven shillings and sixpence – no work meant no money and families, already undernourished, might easily have starved. Yet, astonishingly, the money rolled in and the strike held. For a month Londoners sweltered, the shortages grew, yet still the pennies, the shillings and the pounds were donated – by other unions, some from as far away as Australia, by individual workers, by people of comfortable means who were beginning to be sickened at the exploitation that had been condoned and encouraged by generations of profit-takers in the docks.

  By early September, Grace declared herself truly worried – not, as might have been expected, by the threat to the established order posed by a rabble of working men, nor yet by the issues that had sparked the action – but by the fact that the wedding was fast approaching and the caterers were complaining that nowhere at any price could they obtain the supplies they needed. The happy occasion was but three weeks off; surely, surely, the wretched dockers could not hold out so long?