They did not have to. On the 14th of September the dockworkers’ demands – incredibly to some – were almost all met, a paralysed London began to move again and, to Grace’s relief, disaster was averted.
Matthew it was who brought the news of the return to work to Bayswater – a Matthew mildly amused by the heartfelt relief with which Grace received it. In his opinion, it mattered not a jot that there might have been nothing to offer the guests at the wedding breakfast. If the strike had gone on for ever – if the sun had fallen from the sky and the world stopped turning – what did it matter? Tanya would be his. Nothing and no one could spoil that. He watched her, that afternoon, across the tea table. Everything she did, her every expression and movement held him spellbound. It seemed to him that he would never tire of the sight of her. He turned to find Grace’s eyes upon him, amused and affectionate. God, he’d been gawping like a lovestruck schoolboy! He blushed fiercely.
Grace moved her chair back from the table and reached for the small silver handbell to summon the maid. “Well now, why don’t you two young people take a walk in the garden before the sun goes? I know you’ve a lot to talk about.”
Anna jumped to her feet. “May I come?”
Tanya opened her mouth to answer, smiling. Grace, taking pity on Matthew’s disappointed face – he had not had a moment alone with Tanya since his return from America – said sharply, “No, you may not. With all this gallivanting off to the workshop you’ve sadly neglected your piano practice. If you’re to play that piece at the Smithsons’ on Sunday evening, then an hour’s practice now wouldn’t come amiss. Or you’ll disgrace us all.”
‘Oh, but—”
“Anna!”
Anna subsided, her face rebellious.
Matthew escorted Tanya on to the verandah and down into the garden. She was dressed in rustling sapphire silk trimmed with heavy Brussels lace. He was certain that no one in the world could possibly look lovelier. In companionable silence they strolled through the small shrubbery to the little pool. Sun glinted golden on the dark surface of the water. From beyond the high wall came the familiar street sounds – vendors called their wares, wheels creaked and rattled, horses’ hooves clattered upon cobblestones. Yet here, within this enclosed green refuge, even the house hidden by the trees, they might have been alone in the world. Matthew took Tanya’s hand in his.
“Two weeks. Just two weeks and you’ll be Mrs Matthew Smithson. I still don’t dare to believe it.”
She smiled. Her hair was spun gold in the sun.
“Have you been to see the house lately? It’s looking very smart. It’s small of course – but it will do for a start, won’t it?” His voice was a little anxious.
“It’s lovely. I like it very much.”
“And you don’t mind that my wretched mother’s insisted on interviewing all the servants?” Matthew’s mother was a forceful lady of great authority and little tact.
She laughed a little. “Of course not. I should not have known where to start.”
He tugged at her hand, drew her to the small grassy bank that was Anna’s favourite place in the garden. “Let’s sit for a moment. It’s quite dry. Here—” He took off his jacket and laid it upon the ground for her to sit on. She settled herself beside him, straight-backed, her hands loose in her lap, her head turned from him as she watched the insects skimming the surface of the water. Matthew leaned on one elbow, studying her sun-gilded profile, aware of a rising need to touch her, to feel her warmth, her nearness. He had been away for a very long time; each day of his absence he had thought of this girl, dreamed of her, imagined what it would be to take her to wife—
“Tanya,” he said suddenly, and she turned at the strangeness of his voice, straight into his arms and his seeking mouth.
She froze.
“Tanya,” he said again. “Dearest love.” His hard-held self-control was no match for the desire that flooded his body, burning him, blinding him to the panic in her eyes. His mouth was at her neck, his breath hot. His hand brushed her breast, constricted beneath its layers of clothing. Eyes closed he sought her mouth with his own, his weight, awkwardly unbalanced as he was, bearing her over beneath him. She lay rigid as a lifeless doll. He opened his eyes. She looked at him in horror and in fear. He drew back. “Tanya—”
She slid away from him, levering herself with her arms, her terrified eyes not leaving his face. She looked at him as she might have looked at a fearful, threatening stranger. “No,” she whispered. “No. No. No!”
“Tanya – please – darling, I’m sorry.” Concerned, he reached a hand to her. She shrank from him. She was shaking her head now, jerkily, from side to side, rubbing her open palms against the fine material of her skirt in a strange, compulsive movement, as if to clean them. “No,” she said again, and this time her voice was lifted and threaded with unmistakable hysteria. It seemed to him that she looked through him to some horror that lay beyond. “Oh God!” she said then and, trembling violently, buried her face in her hands.
He was frantic now. “Tanya, please, I didn’t mean to hurt you – to frighten you – you know I wouldn’t—” He tried to put an arm about her.
With the most violent movement he had ever known her make she turned from him. Between her fingers he saw the glint of tears.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t!” She began to rock, to and fro, like a desolate child. “Oh, God!” she said again, and the terrible tone of her voice struck him to stillness and to silence. He drew back, watching her, helpless. She sat for a long time so, rocking, face covered, shoulders hunched as if she were protecting herself from blows. When at last she lifted her head the sun had gone and dark shadow had invaded the garden like an enemy. Her face was a still, cold blur of white in the twilight.
From the house Grace’s voice called. “Tanya? Matthew? Are you there?”
“Please go,” Tanya said.
“Go? I can’t go and leave you like this. You know I can’t. Darling, I’m sorry, truly sorry, but I don’t understand. If you are to be my wife—”
She shook her head. “No.”
“What?”
“No. Matthew, I can’t be your wife. Not yours, not anyone’s. Please don’t ask me why. If you love me, please don’t ask. Just go. Now.” Her low, trembling voice still sounded to be on the very verge of hysteria.
“Can’t marry me? Tanya, for heaven’s sake – what is all this? I’m sorry if I frightened you – if I was clumsy – I shouldn’t have kissed you like that – but—”
She scrambled to her feet, eluding his hand, and began to walk fast through the trees, back towards the house.
“Tanya – wait!” He ran after her, caught her arm.
She wrenched away with surprising strength. “Don’t touch me. You mustn’t touch me. I’m—” She stopped. “I love you. You mustn’t touch me. I’m – dirty. Filthy! You don’t understand.” She picked up her skirts and flew through the gathering dusk, tears streaming down her face.
“Why, Tanya? What on earth—” Grace stood on the terrace, waiting. The girl fled past her and into the house.
From the garden Matthew called, tears in his voice. “Tanya? Tanya!”
Within the house a door slammed and there was silence.
* * *
She would not leave her room. Food left outside the door remained there, untouched. One after another they tried to speak to her through the door; to no avail. For twenty-four hours she spoke to no one, nor was there any sign or sound of movement. Indeed the only evidence that she was there at all was in the door being firmly locked on the inside.
“But – what can be wrong? What’s got into her?” Grace was terribly distressed. A distraught Matthew had stumblingly attempted to explain what had happened before, his presence an obvious embarrassment, he had left. “Matthew swears he didn’t hurt her – he wouldn’t, we all know that. Do you have any idea? She seems finally to have taken leave of her senses.”
Standing by the window, his back to her, her husband shook h
is head. He could not bear to turn and meet her eyes, could not indeed meet the eyes of any of them. His fault. All his fault. Be sure your sins will find you out. Josef Rosenberg knew as surely as if he had entered her skin what ailed Tanya Anatov. If she would just let him in – just let him speak to her – explain – reassure—
Upstairs, Tanya sat as one struck deaf and dumb, tearless now, and comfortless; remembering, hating herself and the world that had done this to her. But most of all herself; defiled, unclean.
It was Joss who finally, that second night, gained admittance, not by shouting, nor by begging and pleading as Josef had done, but by the simple expedient of sitting down in the corridor, his back against her closed door and informing the silence that he, as stubborn an Anatov as any, could remain so for as long as it took her to open the door. For hours he sat, unmoving, speaking occasionally to the closed door, inconsequential things, sometimes in his still heavily-accented English, more often as the night wore on in his own strange, quiet tongue; the tongue of Tanya’s forgotten childhood. At last, in a house exhausted and sleeping, long past midnight he heard the key click softly in the lock above his head. Wordless he stood, and entered the room.
Hours later he emerged. Behind him a kind of peace had descended after the storm. A wraith moved on the dark landing; Grace came to him, candle in hand, hair streaming down her back, her voluminous nightgown billowing as she moved. Unconsciously he noted how frail she looked so, in contrast to her carefully groomed daytime self, how much older than she had just a year or so before. She voiced no question, but stood looking at him, anxiety in every drawn line of her face. Joss’s own face, by the light of her candle, was perilous, bone-white and cruel with pain. “She’ll sleep now, I think,” was all he said, and with that Grace had to be satisfied.
But Joss was terribly wrong. His haunted sister did not sleep. Just before dawn saw the end of an endless night she rose, dressed, and left the house. As the pearl-glow of sunrise touched the eastern sky she stood above the dark waters of the Thames and remembered the sea, beside which she had first met Matthew; the cool, rushing, cleansing sea of which she had never been afraid.
They recovered her body the following afternoon, at the turn of the tide. The boatman shook his head as he disentangled his hook from the unfeeling, dead flesh. Another of them. What made them do it? And this one – Lord she’d been a looker all right. Amazing how many of them were. What a waste.
Interlude
1889-1898
Joss Anatov was nothing if not a man of patience; he had learned to be so in the hardest of schools – learned too that to leave vengeance to God was to leave it to chance and that was something Joss would never accept with regard to the man he implacably blamed for the death of the sister he now found himself mourning for a second time. In the moment that he stood, dry-eyed, beside Tanya’s bloated, waterlogged corpse, the Josef Anatov who had seen his parents murdered, who had survived the slums of Kiev, Budapest and Vienna resurfaced; embittered, inimical, coldly determined to exact retribution, no matter how long it might take. Hard as diamond itself he vowed that, sooner or later, he would see tears on the face of the man he had been deceived into loving as a father, and upon whose shoulders in Joss’s eyes clearly rested the blame for Tanya’s death. Not for an instant did he betray his knowledge or his feelings – not from the moment that he stood by his sister’s new-filled grave to the time, nine years later, in September 1898 when he stood before the altar with Josef’s daughter – the man’s pride and joy, his only true comfort since Grace’s death two years before, and his hope for the future of Rose and Company—beside him. By then the business was relying heavily upon Anna’s fast-burgeoning reputation as a designer of distinctive jewellery in what was coming to be known as the style of ‘Art Nouveau’. Working with Tom Logan and her father’s other craftsmen, she had succeeded in creating a style that was both fashionable and unique to Rose and Company; and the books that Joss still handled so adroitly told their own story of a growing prosperity based more and more upon her talent.
Not that Joss had seen Anna immediately as the instrument of his revenge upon Josef – indeed, it was her single-minded pursuit of him that ended in sowing the seeds that were to bear such bitter fruit for both of them. She had adored him steadfastly since childhood – in her eyes he had never ceased to be her handsome prince, the subject of all her dreams. Resolutely she resisted family plans to marry her off to Christopher Smithson – “Can you imagine being married to that?’ – and through her growing years her devotion to Joss, despite the change they had all sensed in him after his sister’s tragic death, far from faltering became stronger. Indeed, as she grew older and came to recognize the disturbing, strangely sombre attraction of the man, her infatuation grew. Both her father and her mother – before Grace’s death from fever in the winter of 1895 when a constitution more fragile than it would admit finally gave out – tried gently and for their own separate reasons to guide the girl’s affections elsewhere, both only too aware that Joss was unlikely to make her happy, but to no avail. She followed him, when she could, like a small, patient puppy, looked for his homecoming when he went away, gloomed through his absences like a lovesick child. While the world went about its business – linking London to Paris by telephone, tunnelling underground railways beneath city streets upon which people rode with eager pleasure in dirt and discomfort, exchanging its oil lamps first for gas mantles and later, if it were lucky, for electricity, granting Mr Marconi the first patent for a system of wireless telegraphy that would eventually revolutionize communications – Anna and her brothers grew up. Alex – spurning ‘trade’, however high-class, opted to go into law; Ralph, to everyone’s astonishment, expressed a quiet but utterly determined wish to enter God’s ministry; James – to his father’s initial indignation – kept faith with the resolution he had made the day that Boris had visited them before leaving for India and stood out for a commission in the Guards. As Anna irreverently pointed out, with a soldier, a lawyer and a priest in the family they had most of their options covered. Michael, the baby, trailed lightheartedly – and lightmindedly – behind the others, an easy-going and happy go lucky scamp whose main aim in life was comfort, if possible at someone else’s expense.
The loss of Grace in December 1895 was a terrible blow to them all, and to Josef in particular. So great, in fact, was their introspective grief at this time that the significance of a well-publicized event in the Transvaal at the turn of the year – the Jameson Raid, ominous portent of trouble to come – all but escaped them. Even Joss tended to dismiss the affair as the hotheadedness of a crazy Scot. But while at home preparations were soon under way for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee the following year, tempers and patience were running short in South Africa as the Boer settlers’ resentment of British insensitivity and high-handedness became a groundswell of rebellion.
Nothing, however, could have been farther from most minds on that day in 1897 when the city, the country and what seemed like half the world acclaimed Victoria’s sixty years as queen in a jingoistic extravagance of patriotic fervour. In common with many other of the city’s merchants, Rose and Company made its own small contribution in the form of a gold pin surmounted by a small, diamond-studded crown, which offering Her Majesty was pleased to accept along with thousands upon thousands of other gifts presented by her wildly enthusiastic subjects.
That year of 1897 gave the Rose family cause for double celebration – the public one of the Jubilee and the private one of Alex’s advantageous marriage to Alice Peabody, a young woman blessed not only with looks and breeding, but with – as Anna noted with a cynicism beyond her years – an exceedingly rich father who possessed no other offspring. Anna, unfortunately, disliked her prospective sister-in-law on sight – but since she did not care greatly for Alex either, lost little sleep over the fact. Within a week of Alex’s elaborate nuptials, news of another wedding was received – news which was undeniably more startling. Boris, it seemed, now stationed with h
is regiment in troubled Egypt, also had acquired a wife – daughter to a Sergeant Major with a strong right arm and a high regard for the proprieties. The idea of feckless, attractive Boris as a husband was a novel one; the situation, however was a little clarified six months later by the laconic announcement of the birth of a child, a daughter, Sophie Anne. Alex and Alice, as was to be expected, were rather more conventional, and, “typical of Alex”, as Anna was heard disgustedly to remark, even more successful. In the summer of 1898 Alice was brought to bed of not one son but two, Rupert and Richard, twins as like as two peas in a pod.
Through all this Anna pursued zealously the butterfly of artistic success and watched Joss, waiting – whilst Joss, unknown to her or to anyone, brooded, the gall of his hatred for Josef corrosive within him. He had put his own harsh interpretation upon the story that Tanya had told him the night she had died, and everything that Josef was or did Joss now saw through the distortion of his own bitterness. The means of his revenge, however, came to hand in a form that, blind to the last, he least expected. At the celebrations that followed the baptism of the twins Anna, ever impulsive, ever unconventional, followed Joss on to the darkened verandah and stood beside him looking over the starlit garden. At twenty she was taller than might earlier have been expected, was indeed almost as tall as he, but she was still willow-slender, in an age that preferred its women well rounded, almost breastless, waif-like. Joss had had far too much champagne. His thoughts had turned to the little whore in Whitechapel who – for a price – served his needs with avid pleasure. He turned and leaned against the wrought iron balustrade, studying the young woman beside him, saw her blush at his openly appraising regard. Yet she stood her ground. Half-amused, he kept his eyes steadily upon her; astonishingly then it was she who stepped to him and lifted her mouth to his. Without thought or tenderness he kissed her, hard and hurtfully, forgetting the child for which he had felt such affection, knowing only the grown daughter of a man he secretly and bitterly hated. Her reaction astounded him. After the first, shocked recoil from him she kissed him back with a wildness that more than matched his own, her thin body tensed against his, her teeth sharp and fierce. If he had not been utterly certain of her virtue he might have thought he held a practised young harlot in his arms. Half-drunk he made no gentlemanly effort to control his own easily aroused passions. He turned her into the shadows of the verandah, trapped her body with his own against the railings and handled her as he might have handled his whore in Whitechapel, his hard hands at her buttocks and in her bodice, seeking the bare, rigid nipples. But she did not try to break away. At last, more than half-disgusted with himself he drew back, turned away from her.
The Rose Stone Page 17