by V. A. Stuart
“I know, Phillip,” she responded, “I know . . . .” And suddenly the dream was there again, in all its nostalgic beauty, filling her heart and her mind. But now, she thought, it could become more than just a dream, treasured through childhood—now it could be translated into reality. She was no longer a child, with her head full of strange notions; no longer, as Charlotte had so acidly pointed out, a postulant to the Order of the Sisters of Mercy. She had grown up, she was on the verge of womanhood and its fulfillment, and Alex Sheridan had asked for her hand in marriage . . . shyly she looked up into Phillip’s face.
“Well, child?” he encouraged.
Emmy sighed. “Tell Alex that I will give him his answer tomorrow,” she whispered. “And . . . it is yes, Phillip. I want to marry him, whenever he wishes. He is the one man, above all others, whom I should be proud to have as my husband.”
“I am glad,” Phillip told her. “Sincerely glad, Emmy dear, for I am certain that you have reached the right decision and will not regret it.” He held her to him, smiling down at her with warm affection. “Although I must warn you . . . Alex will not hear of your attempting to follow him to war. He has said so and he has very strong views on the subject.”
“He made them plain to me also,” Emmy assured him.
“Then you and Charlotte would be well advised to prepare to go to Therapia,” Phillip said. “I shall write to Lady Stratford and to the ambassador and see if I can arrange transport for you before we leave for the Crimea.” He kissed her again and Emmy went with him to his horse and stood in the open doorway, waving, until he had disappeared into the darkness. She felt happy and secure, now that her decision had been made, and was filled with a sense of eager anticipation.
It fell to Charlotte to shatter her short-lived complacency and prick the bright bubble of her happy dream. When she returned to the living-room, her stepsister glanced at her sharply, taking in her flushed cheeks and air of excitement, and said coldly,“So you have made up your mind to accept Alex’s offer of marriage then?”
“Yes, I . . .” Emmy faced her defiantly. “Yes, I have.”
“You told Phillip, I suppose?”
“Yes, I told him. He was very pleased.”
“Naturally he was—because he does not understand.” There was a wealth of scorn in Charlotte’s voice. “Phillip does not know why Alex has asked you to marry him. And nor, I fancy, do you. You are very naïve, Emmy.”
“Am I?” Emmy’s smile flickered and dissolved but she held her ground, returning Charlotte’s gaze steadily. “Why should you say that, Charlotte?”
Charlotte laughed. “Oh, you little fool . . . you surely do not imagine that he is in love with you, do you? Alex is in love with me. I should have thought that it was obvious, even to you.”
Perhaps it was, Emmy thought bitterly. She felt her lower lip quiver and bit into it fiercely, determined not to betray her uncertainty to Charlotte. “Then why,” she asked, “should he ask me to be his wife? Do you know why?”
“Of course I do. Because Alex is a man who has scruples. He is still in love with me but, because I am the wife of a friend of his, he seeks to put barriers between us to strengthen his own resolve. What more effective barrier than marriage to you, Emmy dear? Certainly I can think of none. But”—there was an edge on Charlotte’s voice—“even so, I have only to crook my finger and Alex will come running, for all his scruples and in spite of his desire to behave honorably towards me.”
“That isn’t true!” Emmy protested. “It cannot possibly be true. You are making it up, you are attributing motives to him which he would not entertain. Alex is a man of honor, you have just said so yourself. You are simply trying to hurt me.”
“Do you want proof?” Charlotte asked, her smile malicious. “If you do, it will be very easy for me to supply it, I assure you.”
Emmy stared at her in numb misery and then, unable to overcome the terrible conviction that what her stepsister had said was true, bade her a subdued good night and went wretchedly up to bed.
In the days which followed, the conviction grew until it became virtually a certainty. Alex—although when he was alone with her, he was all that she could wish for in a betrothed husband—seemed, in Charlotte’s presence to take on a different personality. When Charlotte was there, he was only half aware of anyone else. Like a man bewitched, he responded to her overtures, sought her company and obeyed her smallest, most unreasonable wish with every appearance of pleasure and devotion.
Emmy watched them together, her heart close to breaking, her mind beset with doubts. Plans for the wedding were afoot but she left these to Phillip as if, by so doing, she could absolve herself from the necessity to make a final and irrevocable decision to marry Alex. She did not revoke her promise to him, partly because she cared too much for him to want to and partly because, on the few occasions when Charlotte permitted them to be alone, he was obviously so anxious that she should not. She knew that he was torturing himself, sensed the bitter inner conflict he was enduring but, although it was matched and sometimes exceeded by her own, she would not bring herself to leave him to wage his battle alone.
Her relationship with Charlotte became almost unbearably strained beneath the surface, yet above it, they both went to considerable pains to conceal their differences. Neither was happy, neither felt secure and Charlotte, whilst ready enough to demonstrate her power over her stepsister’s betrothed by flirting with him, never overstepped the bounds of propriety. She held him by the slenderest of threads but she held him inexorably, refusing to let him go and the tension between them increased to a point when, Emmy was unhappily aware, one or other of them would be compelled to take drastic and perhaps fatal action.
In the end, it was she who was driven to take it . . . but not before all three of them had suffered a great deal of mental anguish. She broke her engagement to Alex and, within a few hours of having done so, returned to the small house in the Street of Silversmiths to find Charlotte in his arms.
Neither of them heard her come in. As on the first occasion when Alex had called on them, she left them together, and went wearily up to her own room alone. This time she did not weep; the grief which racked her went too deep for the relief of tears. But, as it had before, the sound of their voices came to her, distorted and indistinct, and she lay sleepless and fully clothed on her bed, listening to the voices, waiting until they should cease.
A loud, impatient knocking on the street door finally silenced them. Emmy ran to the window and, looking out, recognized Phillip, with a companion, who was muffled in a cloak, so that at first she did not realize who he was. Then he looked up and she saw, with a gasp of dismay, that it was Arthur Cassell.
Charlotte was in the hall. When she reached it, Alex standing in the shadows at her back.
“Who in the world can be calling at such an hour?” Charlotte asked sulkily but every vestige of colour drained from her cheeks when Emmy told her who it was.
“Arthur is here? You mean that he has returned?”
“Yes,” Emmy answered, from between stiff lips. “You had best let him in, had you not?” She turned to Alex, holding out her hand to him. “And you and I,” she said, endeavoring to speak without bitterness, “had best go into the drawing-room, I think, and endeavor to look as if we have been there together all evening.”
He followed her without a word as Charlotte went reluctantly to admit her husband and Phillip.
To Arthur Cassell, as Emmy had known she would, she introduced Alex as her stepsister’s fiancé, and Arthur, greeting him as an old friend, was loud and enthusiastic in his congratulations.
The awkward moment passed, the crisis was averted, but for Emmy the real torment had only just begun . . . .
CHAPTER SIX
THE LAST WEEK of July and the beginning of August was a period fraught with terrible anxiety for everyone in Varna. The lurking cholera germs, always present in unhealthy, over-crowded camps, were suddenly released in their full, hideous virulence.
At first the French suffered more acutely than the British. Marshal St Arnaud’s expedition to the Dobruja came to a disastrous conclusion, with the loss of over three thousand of his Zouaves from the disease—and without the sight of a single Russian. By the time he returned with his stricken force to Varna, cholera had begun to take heavy toll of his British allies as well.
In a single day—Sunday, 23 July—nineteen men died in the Light Division encampment, all men of the Rifle Brigade. The only precautionary measure the medical officers could suggest was the changing of the camp sites and this, although put swiftly into effect, did not prevent or even slow down the rapid spread of infection.
The Cavalry Division—initially the least affected—was moved to Jeni-Bazaar and then to Issytype, where it was cut off from the rest of the army, 28 miles beyond Devna. But the unhappy infantry, shift about as they might, could find no escape from the dreaded sickness. The Guards Brigade were hardest hit, with over three hundred cases of cholera, dysentery and typhoid in their new camp. When ordered to move yet again to a fresh site at Galata, on the south side of Varna Bay, their packs had to be transported for them by bullock wagon, since the men who managed to march there had not the strength to carry them.
Every day came news of more outbreaks, more cases of cholera, more deaths . . . including one in the Horse Artillery at Issytype, and every day the fear grew.
Emmy heard the rumors and the frightened whispers, despite the fact that such social life as there had been in Varna was abruptly curtailed and, for a time, she and Charlotte had no contact with either Lady Errol or Mrs Duberly—or indeed with anyone else, save for an occasional hurried visit from Phillip. But they witnessed the dreadful spectacle of the ambulance wagons, passing in slow procession through the streets, bringing the sick to the inadequate and soon overcrowded barracks on the far side of the town, which had been brought into use as a general hospital. Few survived incarceration in its filthy wards and rat-run corridors, and the poor old pensioners, whose duty it was to drive the wagons, died like flies, having little stamina to resist the ravages of cholera and dysentery.
At sea and in harbour, the British and French fleets also suffered. Many ships put to sea, in the hope of leaving the infection behind . . . only to learn that they had brought the disease with them. In the space of sixty hours, the French Admiral Bruat lost 153 of his crew and Admiral Dundas, in H.M.S. Britannia, had 100 deaths, with three times this number of unfortunate seamen lying helplessly below decks, all victims of cholera or typhoid. The Britannia was forced to return, worked by a skeleton crew.
The fresh drafts of healthy young soldiers from England, sent out to bring the army up to strength, caught the infection almost as soon as they set foot ashore and officers, as well as the rank and file, died in a few short, agonized hours. Men were buried in shallow, hastily dug mass graves, with weary chaplains mumbling the funeral service many times each day.
Lord de Ros, the quartermaster-general and Arthur Cassell’s immediate superior, was taken ill—so too, was General Buller of the Rifle Brigade. Both, Emmy heard later, had recovered, although Lord de Ros was much weakened by the ordeal he had undergone. Several other senior officers succumbed to illness but few of them fatally. It was the common soldiers who died, they who were stricken in their thousands by the disease, due to lack of medical attention, the appalling disregard for proper sanitation in the camps, heat and overcrowding. And the unhygienic manner in which their food was stored and cooked did little to aid the recovery of the invalids.
Emmy, deeply distressed by what she had heard of conditions prevailing in the hospital, made numerous abortive attempts to offer her services in almost any capacity but each time her offer was rejected, with pitying condescension, by those to whom she appealed. Once she tried to take gruel to the men in the wards but was sternly ordered to keep away by a horrified army surgeon, who intercepted her at the hospital gates.
“It is bad enough that men must die,” he told her reproachfully, “I want no woman’s death on my conscience, Miss O’Shaughnessy—least of all that of a lady of quality, like yourself. You would be well advised to leave this town . . . and leave at once, whilst you still can!”
Phillip, on the infrequent occasions when she saw him, also urged Charlotte and herself to leave Varna. But there had been no reply as yet from Lady Stratford, and travelling—with cholera rife in all the available ships—seemed likely to present as great a risk of infection as if they remained where they were. So Phillip did not insist and Arthur Cas sell, reunited with his wife and, by special permission, allowed to live with her in the house in the Street of the Silversmiths, seemed relieved when Charlotte stated that, all things considered, she preferred for the time being to stay there.
She made no secret of the fact that she was terrified of catching the infection but, as this was mainly prevalent in the camps and on board the ships, her decision to remain in Varna was probably a wise one, Emmy thought. Apart from those in the hospital, there had been no cases of cholera among the townsfolk—or none had been officially reported—from which Charlotte evidently took comfort.
Her attitude towards her husband had undergone a noticeable change, which Emmy found difficult to understand, in view of what it had been in the past. Arthur had returned with a severe chill and for days, Charlotte had been the model of a devoted wife, cosseting him and fussing about him and seldom leaving his side. She made no mention of Alex, unless it were in Arthur’s hearing, when she talked of him to Emmy and went to extraordinary pains to create the impression that their marriage was still about to take place. Emmy, who had at first thought of denying this indignantly, decided in the end that it was useless. Alex did not call; he was with General Scarlett, at the Heavy Brigade’s new camp nearly thirty miles away and this—so far as both Charlotte and her husband were concerned—appeared to offer sufficient excuse for his absence.
Arthur, at any rate, did not question it . . . and did not welcome visitors. He was tired and ill, far from his normal hearty, good-natured self and for long hours on end wanted no more than to be allowed to doze fitfully, with his wife seated at his bedside, her hand clasped in his. When he recovered sufficiently to dress and come downstairs, it was to sit in a chair in the tiny living-room, a rug wrapped about him, and allow himself to be waited on by Charlotte and Constantin.
Matters continued like this until well into August, with Charlotte seemingly well content to go on playing the role she had chosen. Then Arthur returned to part-time duty and brought them news of the return of Sir George Brown who, with General Canrobert, had gone by ship to make a survey of the Crimean coast in order to select a suitable landing place for the British and French armies.
“And he has brought back a favourable report, it would seem,” Arthur said excitedly. “Of course, we have not yet heard any details but judging by Lord Raglan’s increased cheerfulness since receiving it, I begin to hope that we may soon be on the move. There is to be a conference between the British and French High Commands in a day or so, for the purpose of deciding the date for our embarkation and in order to settle upon a plan of campaign for the two armies. It’s generally understood, however, that our objective will be Sebastopol.” He rubbed his pale, invalid’s hands in eager anticipation and then, looking down at them, expressed the plaintive hope that he would completely have shaken off his malaise when the time came to embark on the invasion of Crim-Tartary.
Listening to him, Emmy found herself hoping that the rest of the invasion force might also recover in time. But deaths from cholera continued unabated and more and more soldiers fell victims to other mysterious, undiagnosed fevers, supposedly caused by the climate. Rumors concerning the number of French dead were officially denied, yet these persisted, suggesting that French losses ran into many thousands, chiefly among the unfortunate Algerian troops.
Then at last the weather changed and became cooler, giving rise to optimistic forecasts from the medical authorities that this would aid the sufferers
and halt the ghastly spread of infection . . . but it did not. A furious fire broke out in the port of Varna on the night of 13 August—said to have been started by the Greeks for the purpose of delaying the invasion of the Crimea. Thousands of pounds’ worth of much needed stores were destroyed before it could be brought under control . . . . Emmy watched the glow in the sky and saw the leaping flames from her window and waited, fearful that it would spread and destroy the whole town. News that it had been put out was followed by the gloomy tidings that the Coldstream Guards had lost eighty of their number from cholera and that the cavalry had also become infected. There had been eleven deaths in the 5th Dragoon Guards—the famous “Green Horse,” General Scarlett’s old regiment, which formed part of the Heavy Brigade. Then came a note from Fanny Duberly, addressed to Charlotte, to say that officers and men of the 8th Hussars had also fallen sick, including the commanding officer, Colonel Shelwell, to whom she was much attached.
“It is not supposed to be the cholera,” Mrs Duberly wrote, “yet, in spite of this, we have had to have a marquee erected to receive the sick and they seem to be very ill . . . .”
Emmy, for all her resolve to put the thought and memory of Alex out of her mind, started to worry about him and to wait impatiently for more news. At last, unable to bear the suspense any longer, she told Charlotte, who seemed indifferent to her concern, that she was going out for a breath of air. Constantin brought her horse for her and she set forth in the hope that she might encounter someone who could tell her how the Cavalry Division was faring. But she met no one, save a few staff officers, whose pale, preoccupied faces and general air of lethargy discouraged conversation. She was on her way back to the house, feeling more depressed than when she had started out, when she heard a deep voice calling her name and turned, with a cry of mingled pleasure and relief, to see Colonel Beatson trotting towards her.