They stopped beneath the bare, spreading branches of a magnificent oak. The great trunk afforded at least some shelter from the wind. Rupert lit a cigarette, cupping his hands to the match. Sophie picked at the bark of the tree with her fingernail.
Rupert tilted his head to look up into the tree. “We used to have a treehouse up there. See? Where the big branch forks.”
“I see it. It looks very high.”
“Richard would have it right up there.” He half-laughed. “To be truthful I used to suffer agonies over it. I’ve always been a bit afraid of heights. I used to find the climb up there pretty fearful at first.”
“But – you got used to it?” She was not looking at him. “More or less.”
“Did Richard ever know? That you were afraid?”
He shook his head. “No.”
She leaned against the tree. “And now?”
“Now?”
“Are you still—” she paused “—afraid of heights?” Her voice was light, her eyes intense and questioning.
He took a long breath. Above them the clouds had broken a little and the faintest gleam of pale sunshine touched the waterlogged countryside, lining it in silver and in pearl. “Yes,” he said, very quietly, “I am afraid. Of everything.” He turned from her, leaned against the tree, drew deeply on the cigarette, his eyes on the wetly-gleaming countryside. “I’m afraid of death. Of the grief that my death will inflict on others. I’m afraid of pain. Of mutilation. Of fear. I’m afraid of going back.”
She said nothing.
“Over there – I wake with fear each morning. I eat with it, drink with it, sleep with it. It’s a familiar face in the mirror. Here,” he shook his head, helplessly, “it’s as I feared – it’s worse. Much worse. I had grown used to it. Now, I have to start again.”
“But – I thought,” her voice was soft, and she stumbled upon the words, “I mean – you’ve been so brave. The Military Cross. Mentioned in dispatches, twice.”
He made a small, impatient movement with his head. “I didn’t say I was a coward,” he said. “I said I was afraid.”
She sucked her lip, watching him. And for the first time since Richard’s death the ice in which misery had sheathed her heart melted a little and she found herself sharing, almost physically, another’s pain. She had after all loved Rupert as a friend before she had found a lover in Richard.
“Have you told anyone else?” she asked, not knowing why she asked, not knowing why it was important.
He shook his head.
She pushed herself away from the tree, held out her hand, the hand of love and compassion.
With no hesitation he took it, and together they walked back to the house.
Chapter Twenty Three
On the sixth of April 1917, a couple of weeks after Rupert had rejoined his regiment at the front, the long-awaited news that America had at last entered the war on the side of the Allies cheered war-weary Britain in a way that little else could have done. Surely, now, the end could not be far off? Yet still the fight continued; bitter, deadly, indecisive. Winter refused even now to relax her ruthless grip upon Europe and men still fought and dropped in sleet and snow, their fingers too numbed to reload their rifles. The French in particular had fought almost to exhaustion: sporadic and worrying outbreaks of indiscipline and near mutiny in the ranks were dealt with severely, and the news of them suppressed. Russia’s internal problems, too, were bleeding those of her soldiers still at the front of confidence and the will to fight. As summer came at last, however, Londoners found themselves rather more concerned with a domestic threat than with the problems of their allies, as a spate of air attacks was launched upon their city by a Germany desperate to end the war in victory before the might of the United States could fully be brought into play against her. No airship attack these – for the tracer bullets that had brought down the first airship the year before had spelt a fiery end for those giants – but raids by flights of a dozen or more aeroplanes, often by day, sometimes by night, that caused casualties and damage enough to make certain that a civilian population already tired and on edge did not sleep easily in their beds. As the year moved on, however, the news from the front at last began to look more cheerful. Anna was one of many Londoners to be woken in the early hours of the morning of the seventh of June by the vibrations of the huge explosion that blew the Messines Ridge and its German emplacements quite literally to pieces and paved the way for a victory that raised spirits and hopes. Within weeks it was the name of Passchendaele that was on every tongue – strange, evocative name that was for many to be the one that personified the endeavour and the suffering of this war to end wars. And through that terrible battle – that lasted, incredibly, until November – inexorable rain, chilling cold and ground that had been blasted long ago into filthy bog created conditions that no man that suffered them was ever likely to forget.
“The mud is unspeakable,” Rupert wrote to Sophie. “Worse than the bombardment. Worse than the weather. Worse than the food. Yet still the men find humour in it. No one – fortunately for him – has yet discovered the identity of the man who substituted a plate of it for the Sergeant Major’s mulligatawny soup the other day. The laughter over that piece of insubordination did us all more good than three days’ rest!”
And then it was over at last, when at the beginning of November Canadian troops captured the small, utterly wrecked group of ruins that had once been the village of Passchendaele. But while the bells of victory rang in London news just as momentous was filtering from the East: for in Russia bloody revolution was under way, and the Russian bear was out of the war.
* * *
Joss spent a good deal of time that year in the north where two of his factories were now heavily involved in the designing and production of tanks, those armoured monsters that many thought might prove to be the final weight in the balance of victory. Anna was surprised therefore to be informed one cold December morning on arriving home that the master was there before her, and awaited her in the drawing room. She divested herself of hat and coat, patted her hair, ordered tea, and went to join him.
When she entered the room Joss was standing at the window, his back to her.
“Joss? What are you doing home? I thought—”
He turned. And at the sight of the object that depended from his fingers in a shimmering blaze of light and gleamed in the room’s darkness like fire, she stopped, her eyes wide with shock. “God in Heaven,” she whispered, after a moment. “Where did you get that?”
He held it up. It swung gently, each facet independently brilliant as if lit from within, the entwined doves gleaming dully above the stone. Very, very slowly Anna advanced into the room, lifted a hand, then let it drop without touching the pendant. “Where did you get it?” she asked again. Her heart was thumping painfully against her ribs, as if she were engaged in some great physical effort, and she found it impossible to control her breathing. She had not dreamt that the thought of Nicolai still had the power to hurt so; not after all these years.
“It was brought into the shop. They contacted me. It’s for sale.” He lifted unreadable eyes. “Congratulations, Anna. It’s a truly lovely piece.”
“For sale? But how? Who brought it?”
“A cousin of the Shuvenskis’. The family have suffered badly, both in the war and in the revolution. Most are dead. The rest are in prison or in hiding. Their property has been destroyed or confiscated—”
Anna flinched.
“This man escaped with his family, bringing with him what he could. What more natural than that he should bring it to us? Within the family, apparently, it was often called the Rose Stone.”
“And – shall you buy it?” Anna could not keep the tremor from her voice. Joss’s bald words were taking painful moments to sink in to her shocked consciousness. In her mind’s eye young and happy ghosts called, and sang; careless, innocent victims of their inheritance. All gone? Oh, surely not? Surely, surely not!
His eyes did not
waver, yet they were not as guarded as usual. It seemed to her that she detected a gleam of sympathy in their depths; and then it was gone, and she knew she must have imagined it. “Oh, yes, I think so,” he said, softly.
Despite herself, her eyes were drawn back to the stone. Brilliant, lustrous, ablaze with a fire that was as cold as ice it swung gently. “Papa,” she found herself saying, her voice strange in her own ears, “Papa has always thought – that the stone was unlucky—”
Her husband’s expression did not change. “I know,” he said.
* * *
Two days later she was to remember that conversation when in a telephone call from Bissetts Alex informed Anna that their father had disappeared. “God only knows where he’s gone,” Alex said, his voice angry with worry. “He’s in no fit state to be wandering around by himself – especially in this weather. We simply can’t imagine what can have got into him. We’ve been everywhere. He’s simply nowhere to be found. The nurse says he went for a walk—”
“You’ve contacted the police?”
“Of course. They’re out looking now.”
“I’ll come immediately.”
In the event, however, Anna did not go to Bissetts. For before she could pack, change and make the necessary arrangements, the uniformed maid was tapping upon her door, a worried look upon her face. “Excuse me, Ma’am—”
“What is it, Madge?” Anna was impatient.
“There’s an old – gentleman – down in the ’all.” The girl’s face was doubtful. “’e says ’e’s—”
Anna was out of the door and down the stairs before she could finish. Josef stood in the hall. He was hatless, drenched, and shivering with cold.
Sophie appeared at the top of the stairs. “Good Lord! Uncle Josef! What the—”
“Sophie, dear, get a bedroom ready, will you?” Anxiously Anna put a supportive arm about her father, shocked at his appearance and at the frailness of his frame beneath the wet jacket he wore. “Light a fire. And get some extra blankets.”
“Of course.” Sophie flew from the landing.
Anna turned to Josef. “Papa! What on earth are you doing here? We’ve all been so worried!”
“I have to see Joss.” The old face was earnest, and his voice surprisingly strong. Yet Anna got the impression that he had not heard the words. “Anna – I have to see him—”
“But – to come all this way – and in this weather – what on earth were you thinking of? You could have telephoned Joss—” So anxious was she that for a moment the oddity of her father’s need to see a man who had barely spoken to him for fifteen years passed Anna by.
He shook his head. “No, no! I have to see him. Speak to him. Now. He’s here?”
She shook her head. “No, Papa, he’s—”
He turned to the door. “I must find him.”
She caught his arm, held it fast. “Papa – no! You can’t possibly go out again. You’re shivering with cold! Come upstairs to the drawing room. The fire’s lit.”
Hectic spots of colour burned in his face. The hand that gripped hers, she suddenly realized with a shock, beneath the surface chill was beginning to burn like fire. “I have to see Joss. Have to see him.”
“I’ll send for him. I promise. But – please, Papa! – come with me now.”
Suddenly it was as if his resolution deserted him. He shivered, looked around him, strangely vague, as if only just registering his surroundings. “Yes,” he said. “I am – a little tired.”
“Then come.” She began to lead him up the stairs when suddenly he stopped, clutched at her arm.
“I must see Joss!”
“What about, Papa?” she asked, gently. “What must you see Joss about?”
“The stone. Alexis said the stone had come. From Russia—”
She bit her lip. Of course. The stone again. Damn the thing. “Yes,” she said quietly. “It has.”
“—and that Joss is going to buy it.”
She hesitated. “That’s right.” What use in lying?
He swayed a little, dangerously, upon the stairs. “Don’t let him do it, Anna. To himself. To you. Stop him. Don’t let him.” He swayed again. In desperation she caught and held his slumped body.
“Sophie! Madge! Here – help me – quickly!”
The pneumonia that came in the wake of the fever which struck the frail constitution that night took the old man quickly. He died before Joss could be summoned from the north, his son-in-law’s name the last on his lips. Dry-eyed, Anna had kept a watch by him through the day and the night as he drifted in the half-world of delirium, a half-world peopled by ghosts whose names meant little to her as she listened to the all-but unintelligible babblings of fever. But Joss’s name she heard, and Tanya’s. Again and again. But in this final hour the adopted language of his adopted country failed the old man, and his explanations and his terrors found voice in his native tongue; with the one who might have understood not there. He was lucid just before the end. Alex and Alice were there, with Sophie and Anna. The old eyes wavered from one face to another. Then sadly, sadly, the old head shook upon the pillow. “Joss,” he said softly, and died.
* * *
On a bitterly cold day three days before a Christmas that everyone prayed, with a little more hope than before, would be the last of the war, Josef Rosenberg was laid to rest. And as the coffin was lowered into the dark, frozen ground, a single flower, tossed there by Sophie, resting upon its lid, Anna lifted her eyes to her sombre, silent husband’s and saw, with a shock of utter astonishment the tears of loss upon his face. She stared at him across her father’s open grave. He met her eyes steadily, made no attempt to hide the tears.
“You cried for him,” she said later, in bitter disbelief, when the other mourners had left the house and Sophie had gone to tend to Felicity. “After all that’s happened. After all the – the hate. You – cried – for him. Why? Joss – why?” Her own tears, very close to the surface, sounded in her voice. Her father had been an old man. She had thought herself prepared for his death. Had discovered that she was not.
Joss did not reply. He was sitting in a large winged armchair, feet stretched to the meagre wartime fire, in one hand a large glass of brandy, which rested upon the arm of the chair. His face was in shadow.
“Joss!” Anna had to restrain herself from screaming. From shaking him. “For God’s sake! Talk to me! I have to know!”
“Why?” Joss’s voice was tired. “Why do you have to know?”
“Because my father is dead. And I didn’t know him. Because you are here. And I don’t know you. Because something – something – is being kept from me. Has always been kept from me. Hasn’t it? Joss – hasn’t it?”
He said nothing. Drank deeply of the brandy. Leaned to the bottle at his elbow and poured more.
She came to the chair, crouched beside it, looking up into his dark face. “You cried,” she said again, painfully patient. “Why?”
“Because once I loved him.” The words came out with difficulty, their tone harsh.
“And then – you hated him. Why?” She watched him tilt the glass, swallow. “Why?” She knew with absolute certainty that if she were ever to find the answers to the questions that had haunted these last fifteen years of her life it must be now, or never. His tears had unlocked a door between them that had been closed these many years. She could not – must not – let it shut again without trying to discover what lay behind it. “Joss – why?”
For a long moment he did not move, then with a movement so abrupt as to startle her he got up, went to the bureau desk that stood in the corner and unlocked a drawer. When he returned to the chair the glittering ice-fire that was the Rose Stone dangled from his fingers. She watched him, and it. He held it, swinging, his eyes fixed upon it as if hypnotized by the movement. Once again his face was in shadow.
“You,” he said very quietly, “and the rest of the family – believe that Josef brought this stone with him from Kiev.”
“Yes.”
The dark eyes moved from the shimmering diamond to her face. She kept her own eyes steady, though her heart, strangely, had taken up a sickening hammer-blow of dread.
“The night before my sister died,” her husband continued softly, “I discovered differently. Once a long time ago, Josef implied to me that there was some connection between Tanya, her—” he paused “—her strangeness, and the diamond. He thought that she did not remember. He thought that the innocent child did not know what he did. But it was there. Locked in her memory. Until Matthew turned the key, and the memory destroyed her.”
Only once did she make a sound. “Oh, God!” she said, when he told of Josef’s frenzy and van Heuten’s death. The deeply accented, unemotional voice did not falter. The tale was told, apparently dispassionately, to the grievous bitter end. But the hand that held the stone was knotted like wire, bone and knuckle showing whitely through the dark skin.
When he had done there was a long, heavy, silence. Anna dashed the tears from her face. Cleared her throat. “And all these years,” she said shakily, “this is what has lain between us – between us—” she emphasized the last word “—and you haven’t told me.”
“It was not my story to tell,” he said, stone-faced.
“Oh, but it was!” Suddenly, fiercely passionate, she was on her knees beside him, her bunched fists hitting at his arm, “It was! Josef was my father, Tanya your sister. That—” she indicated the stone with a sharp gesture which held a kind of loathing “—has been the basis of my life and comfort ever since I was born. And, worst of all, our marriage – my marriage – has been wrecked – wrecked, I say – by these things you have refused to speak of. How dare you say to me that it was not your story to tell? You certainly thought it was yours to brood upon – yours to allow to warp and to twist your own life and mine.” Tears were again pouring down her face, and she made no attempt to wipe them away. “God, Joss, don’t you see it is for that that I could hate you? For the wasted years, the emptiness, the hopeless trying—” The shock of what he had told her had set her shaking. She could not stop. She trembled so that her teeth chattered and she stuttered, as if with cold. “I c-could k-kill you.”
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