The Rose Stone

by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)

  “Someone tell Nanny to keep those boys quiet,” Alex’s voice was brusque.

  Wordlessly obedient, Alice stood up, brushed down her skirt and left the room.

  “I think,” Anna said, very quietly, “that I’d better go home.”

  * * *

  He was waiting for her, as she had expected. With unfeigned delight she greeted her daughter with hugs and kisses and watched her open the presents she had brought her, then sent the child into the garden with Mary and followed Joss into the small parlour. They faced each other across the room, unsmiling. “Well?” Anna said.

  “You’ve been to Bayswater?”

  “I have. Boris was at the station.”

  “I thought he would be.”

  “And you were not.”

  “No.”

  “Joss – I want to know what’s been happening.”

  He almost shrugged. “I suspect you’ve been told.”

  “I’ve been told something, yes. Something that I can’t – won’t believe. I’ve been told that you’re trying to ruin my father. Trying to take away from him everything he has, everything he cares for—”

  Joss remained silent.

  “Well? Aren’t you going to say anything? Explain anything?”

  “No.” The word was brutally blunt.

  The sudden rise of temper almost choked her. “You can’t mean that! You can’t mean that you aren’t even going to try to explain what you’ve done and why you’ve done it.”

  He took a short, impatient-seeming breath. “What I’ve done is more or less what you’ve been told I’ve done. Why I’m doing it is between me and Josef. Ask him.”

  Anna was looking at him as if at a stranger. “I did. He won’t talk about it.”

  “That’s his choice then, isn’t it? It’s a pity a few others don’t follow his lead.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, suspicions crystallizing in her mind with a terrible clarity. “Tell me something,” she said quietly. “How long have you been planning this? And how much responsibility do you bear for Papa’s difficulties in the first place? You’ve been advising him for years – he trusts you implicitly – yet you’ve made money and he has apparently lost it. How is that? You’ve been saving every penny you’ve made. What for? To do what you’ve now done? To take over the business? To take, God preserve us, the very roof from over his head?” Her voice was rising. “He told Boris he overheard a conversation about some shares. Was that all a part of it? Did you know he was listening? Did you trick him into believing what you were saying? Did you?”

  Her husband said nothing. His dark eyes were implacable and totally without warmth. She hated him. Hated him. The memory of her father’s face, grey upon the white pillow, skeletal, defeated, rose in her mind.

  She stared at Joss. “They’re right, aren’t they? Alice and Alex – they’re right! You manipulated the whole thing. You did want to ruin Papa. To take from him everything he had. Joss – in heaven’s name – why? And why has he let you do it – with no protest, no attempt to defend himself?”

  He turned from her, took a cigar from a box on the table, applied himself to the task of cutting it. “I told you. You must ask him that. If he wants you to know then I suppose he’ll tell you.” His voice was perfectly contained; they might have been discussing the weather.

  She shook her head dazedly. “I think I must be going mad. I just don’t believe any of this. I can’t.”

  “Believe it. It’s happening.” He did not look at her.

  She took a breath, trying to calm herself. “And what of me?” she asked quietly. “Have you thought at all of me? Do you know that half the family suspects that I’ve had a hand in all this?”

  He lifted his eyes to hers. “I’m sorry for that,” he said.

  “But nothing else?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why, Joss? Why?” she asked again.

  “Ask your father.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. “You want him to tell me,” she said at last, slowly. “You won’t tell me because you want to force him to do it. Because whatever it is – it will hurt him to tell me. And you haven’t had enough yet, have you? You want to hurt him, don’t you? You must really hate him. But how can that be? He gave you everything – you, your brother, your sister – he treated you all as his own sons and daughter. You above all. What can he possibly have done that is bad enough to deserve your hatred?”

  The dark eyes did not falter. Joss lit the cigar. Fragrant smoke drifted in a cloud between them.

  “Don’t expect me,” Anna said then, when it became clear that he was not going to answer her, “to live with you in the house that you’ve taken from my father.”

  “I suppose you must please yourself in that.”

  She stared at him, sick at heart. “You don’t care. You don’t care if I stay or go. Live or die. Or anyone else either for that matter. Do you?”

  He looked directly at her through the drifting cigar smoke. “Would you believe me if I denied it?”

  She had to hurt him somehow, make some kind of point no matter how small. “No,” she said, flatly.

  He gestured with his free hand. “Then there’s little point in a denial, is there?” His voice was soft.

  She watched him for a long time. “You’re detestable,” she said, slowly. “Absolutely detestable. And I hate you for what you’re doing. For what you are.”

  That barb went home and he flinched at it, but she did not see it. She turned from him to the door.

  “Anna.” His voice was sharp.

  She stopped, her back to him.

  “If you went. Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know. With Papa, perhaps – wherever that might be.”

  “Think carefully,” he said. “A mother’s bond with her child is hard to break. You’d miss Victoria.”

  She turned slowly. “You’d do that?” She knew as she said it that she had lost.

  “I would,” he said, the words tranquil.

  She stared at him in silence, pale eyes silvered with impotent rage before she turned and left the room, shutting the door very quietly behind her.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks later Josef himself, his health much improved, still absolutely refusing to discuss what had passed between him and Joss, urged her against rash action.

  “Leave? Leave your husband, your daughter – oh no, child. Don’t think it. Where would you go? What would you do? Rose and Company is your life—”

  “As it was yours.”

  He sighed, shifting in his chair.

  “I thought I might come with you,” she said, stubborn to the end. “Help you. Try to make up for what Joss has done.” She knew how absurdly childish it sounded.

  He shook his head. “I shall be perfectly all right. I promise you. In the end it would have come to something like this anyway – with my health so frail I should have had to give up the business.”

  “And your home?” Her voice was bitter as his was not.

  “Anna, Anna—”

  “Why did he do it Papa? Why?”

  Josef looked down to the hands that were clasped in his lap. Upon his thumb still could be seen the brand of his trade. Half-unconsciously he folded the thumb into his hand, hiding it.

  She dropped to her knees beside him. “You know, don’t you, you know why he did it.” Her voice was urgent.

  He took her hands. “Anna. Child. Please listen to me. Believe me when I say that the best thing you can do for me is to stop questioning me so. Joss did what he did and it is done. I have told the others and I tell you – I don’t want trouble in the family because of it. To have seen you turned one against the other would have broken your dear mother’s heart. Joss has what he wanted – the business. And that means that Rose and Company is in good hands and your work can go on. If I can find satisfaction in that, can’t you? As for this house – it’s far too big for an old man alone. Boris and Louisa are leaving, Michael is hardly ever
here. I should so have hated to see it go to strangers.”

  “Michael’s staying with us,” Anna said, her voice subdued. She had hardly spoken to her husband since that first evening except upon this one matter of her young brother. His ready capitulation had been the last thing she had expected, giving as it did the impression that Joss, for all his implacability regarding her father, had already decided in his own mind to offer Michael a home. “I spoke to Alex yesterday,” she continued. “He said you’re going to Bissetts—”

  “That’s right. To a cottage on the estate. You see how well it’s all worked out? I shall have a little home in the country, and you will all come to visit me—”

  “But – how will you live?”

  “I have enough. Enough to live comfortably, if quietly. He left me that.” His face was suddenly, sombrely intense. “Remember that, Anna. He could have taken everything. But he did not.”

  She stared at him in bafflement.

  He reached a hand to her. “I say it again, Anna. I have told the others – and I tell you – there is no place for bitterness. I want no rift in the family. I want no one digging and prying. If my family is destroyed – and Joss, and his brother are still part of that family in my eyes, no matter what has happened – then I truly have nothing left. And whatever I deserve, I don’t believe that I deserve that.”

  “Deserve? Papa – what are you saying? After all you’ve done for us all – all you’ve given us – you deserve nothing but love and respect!”

  “Anna—”

  She rushed on. “And most especially from Joss. You took him and Boris in when they had nothing. You cared for Tanya as if she had been your own—”

  “Anna!”

  The tone of his voice stopped her. She got to her feet, a little shakily, put a hand to her head. “I don’t understand.”

  He looked at her in quick concern. “Anna – are you all right?”

  She shook her head. “I – no – I’ve been a little unwell lately. If you would please excuse me, Papa? I think a little air—” She left the room on unsteady legs and fled to the bathroom where she was extremely sick. For the fourth time in three days.

  * * *

  Her pregnancy seemed, to Anna, to crown a misery that just a few short weeks before would have seemed inconceivable. There was, she knew, no possibility that the child could be Joss’s. She plodded through the days, wretchedly sick, haunted by anxiety. At last and in near despair she confided in Arabella Dawson one late September afternoon when a wind that skittered coldly through the London streets, presaging autumn made it chill enough to light the first fire of the season. Arabella looked at her with sympathy. “I suspected that something was wrong.”

  Anna took a long breath. “I’m at my wits’ end. I don’t know what to do. I have to tell Joss. I can’t keep it secret for much longer. And I’ve no idea – absolutely no idea – what he’ll do. He seems not to care – but this—” She lifted helpless hands and let them drop to her side. She looked pale and thin and her eyes were shadowed. “He might – he could – turn me out.”

  “It couldn’t be his?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “And you couldn’t—” Arabella paused, delicately “—arrange it? Make it look as if—”

  “No.” The word was flat.

  “I see.” Arabella tapped her teeth thoughtfully with a long polished fingernail. “If you’d like,” she said after a moment, “I might be able to put you in touch with – someone who might be willing to help.”

  It took a moment for the meaning of the words to sink in. Anna looked up in shock. “No! Oh, no, Arabella – I couldn’t! Don’t you see? This is a child – Nicolai’s child! Whatever happens – whatever Joss does – I couldn’t kill it! I couldn’t!”

  “Then you’re just going to have to face it out,” the other girl said simply. “And soon. It isn’t going to get any easier—”

  * * *

  The confrontation with Joss, though he neither ranted nor raved nor threw her from the house was, if anything, worse than Anna had anticipated and she had expected it to be bad. The news itself he greeted with no trace of surprise. She stared at him. “You knew?”

  “My dear Anna—” his voice was cold, slightly impatient “—your pregnancies being what they are I should imagine that the whole world knows. You look like death.”

  “And – you haven’t said anything?”

  He lifted scathing eyes. “Should I have? Is it any of my business?”

  She flushed, painfully, to the roots of her hair. “I’m sorry.” she whispered, stammering with mortification. “I – it was—”

  “No!” He held up a sudden, imperative hand, “Spare me that. I don’t want to know who, or where. Or why.”

  She stood dumb with mortified humiliation. “What – what will you do?” she asked at last, quietly; and none of her efforts could keep the miserable trepidation from her voice.

  He kept her waiting for the space of a dozen hammered heartbeats. “Do?” he asked at last. “What would you expect me to do? Throw you from my house?”

  “I – thought you might – yes – I – suppose you could not be blamed—”

  He stood and walked to her, his step light, his face hard. With enormous effort she stood her ground and did not shrink from him. In the clear second before he struck her it came to her that since he had guessed at her pregnancy he had had time to plan this scene, and her humiliation and punishment, in advance. Beneath her guilt pride and fury stirred and she lifted her head. His hand caught her sharply high on her cheekbone – not with the full force of his strength, as in anger, but crisply and stinging; a chastisement and a gesture of contempt.

  “Have your bastard, Anna,” he said, softly, “I wish you joy of it.” And in the moment that she registered the savage pain deep in his eyes he turned and left her alone.

  Interlude

  1901-1909

  On January 22nd 1901 an era ended with the death of the old lady who had ruled an empire from Windsor for an incredible sixty-four years. Her subjects genuinely mourned her passing – for most of the population she was the only monarch they had known and her reign had been crowned by national prosperity, prestige and success in arms. Dressed in deepest mourning, they lined the black-draped streets to bid her farewell. And yet, despite the sadness, there was too a new stirring of excitement. Bluff Edward was King at last, a new day was dawning, and the hope abroad was that it might perhaps be a day a little less sober, a little more amusing.

  Anna named the child that was born just four months after the Queen’s death, Nicholas; and she doted upon him from the first moment that he opened his brilliant, unfocused eyes. Joss’s unexpected willingness to protect her and to accept the child as his own, at least publicly, still mystified her. On just one occasion, a few weeks after the birth of the child, she swallowed her pride and attempted to thank him – but he dismissed her and her thanks with an acidity that stopped the words in her throat. She saw little of him in the weeks that followed. When forced into one another’s company they were civil but distant and their conversation was confined to impersonal matters. Surprisingly, though, Anna could not have said that she was entirely unhappy. She suffered none of the depression after the birth of Nicholas that had so plagued her when she had borne Victoria. Under Joss’s astute management Rose and Company flourished, and with it flourished Anna’s reputation as a designer. Encouraged by Arabella, whose ideas and free spirit inspired her, she designed some exotic and adventurous pieces especially to complement Arabella’s flamboyant clothes, whose clients, most of whom were part of the esoteric world of dance and the theatre, a world of art in which Anna found herself more and more at home, greeted them with rapture, but which served to widen the gulf between herself and Joss – who considered her new friends affected and sybaritic – even further. Of Alex and Alice and their twin sons they saw little at this time. Despite Josef’s pleas, the attitude of Anna’s brother to her husband was understandably one of frigid ho
stility, though in deference to his father’s wishes Alex did to his credit make the effort to avoid an open break. However, Boris, Louisa and their daughters were frequent visitors to Bayswater. They had taken a small, inexpensive house in Plaistow, a respectable working-class area to the east of London. To supplement his meagre pension Boris, despite his handicap, obtained a job with the proprietor of a public house in Green Street, his tasks ranging from handling the accounts to serving on a busy evening in the public bar, where his good humour and quick wit made him very popular. In vain Joss railed at him – Boris would accept from his brother neither employment nor charity. He had made his decision and left the company: while there was breath in his body he would stand by his choice and support his own family. And still he found time for laughter.

  In her son more than in anything Anna found delight. She had always in the past been more than happy to hand Victoria to whatsoever waiting arms would take her; Nicholas she guarded jealously. No one was to be allowed to take her place with him. She cossetted and cuddled him, would give up anything – her work, her friends – to be with him. All this was not lost upon two-year-old Victoria, young as she was. Yet Anna’s daughter was a docile child and her vague unhappiness at the obvious favouritism that her adored mother displayed for the new baby did not evince itself in tantrums or bad behaviour, as it had in Anna herself those many years before. On the contrary, it had the effect of making the little girl almost painfully well behaved: in her eagerness to placate the mother she was afraid of losing altogether her sweetly docile nature, so much like Tanya’s, led her to meek biddability which, if not exactly having the desired effect, at least would sometimes draw from Anna a word of absent-minded praise, a word that the child would hug to her for days, basking in her mother’s casual and insubstantial approval. Like her Aunt Tanya, too, she had a pretty cloud of fair hair and the wide violet eyes. Not unnaturally, it never occurred to Anna to connect this circumstance with Joss’s absolute insistence that she take her daughter with her every time she made the trip into the country to see her father: neither did she ever perceive the pain that the sight of the child afforded her father, despite the fact that he dearly loved her.