Measles. The disease swept through the house like fire; first Anna, then her brothers and finally – fatally – the baby. Grace watched helplessly as the small flame of life that she had fought so hard to preserve flickered and died. Her calm acceptance of the tragedy amazed those who watched and worried over her. Only she knew that in her heart she had suspected all along that her weakling child would be unlikely to survive the first onslaught of infant illness. After the difficult birth she had been told that she would never be able to bear Josef another child – knowledge that had made the small scrap doubly precious. But no matter how hard she had tried, not even her fierce motherly instincts had been able entirely to overcome the clear-sighted common sense that was so much a part of her make up, and she had been unable truly to deceive herself. So, when, despite her own constant care and attention, the disease took its inevitable toll of the frail constitution she, with painful stoicism, bowed her head and accepted at last that for His own good reasons God had not willed the child to live. Acceptance, however, did not preclude grief, and she never forgot the ordeal of her child’s funeral. They followed the pitifully small white coffin through the October streets to the churchyard, the glory of autumnal red and gold a sharp contrast to the mourning black of the small cortege. The funeral plumes of the horses tossed in a chill wind that also stirred the white wreaths and flowers. Josef sat sombre beside her in the carriage, his hand clamped around hers in a hurtful grip. He had taken the loss of his little daughter very badly indeed – whilst beneath her black mourning veil Grace’s eyes, if reddened, were dry, he wept openly, in a man’s painfully silent way, for the new life extinguished before it had truly begun. She laid her free hand gently upon his arm. No love in her life, she knew, could ever equal that she felt for this man – old enough almost to be her father, uncommunicative in the extreme about his life before he met her, hardworking, emotional, indulgent – there was nothing about him that she would change. Grace Rose believed with utter and unquestioning faith in her God and in His designs – however obscure – and His benevolent omnipotence. She had no doubt at all that it had been His will that had sent Josef to her so strangely and so fortuitously, as it was His will that Margaret Jane had been taken from them. It worried her that she suspected that Josef had no such prop. As was right and proper he accompanied her, the household and the children, to church each Sunday morning and took his appointed place at the end of the pew; but she, who knew him so well, detected within him none of the joy and the certainty that her own communion with God brought her. On the contrary, though she would not dream of questioning him about it, she sometimes feared that she sensed a scepticism that concerned her always, but most of all now, when the sight of his contained but violent grief hurt her almost as much as her own loss.
Late that afternoon, back in the darkened house, he sat in the cluttered, shaded drawing room staring bleakly at the black mourning ring upon his hand within which was curled a small whisp of the baby’s hair. Grace laid a hand upon his shoulder. “Our little one is with God, Mr Rose. We must remember that and try not to grieve too much.” Her voice, despite the words, was not quite steady. “We are still blessed with the other children.”
Her husband lifted reddened eyes and seeing the intent and worried look upon her still-thin face did his best to smile. “You’re right, of course, my dear. It’s just that it seems so hard—” The words fell into a silence made deeper by the whispers of a house in mourning.
She nodded. “Yes. It’s hard.” With her customary neat movements she stood up and walked to where the tasselled bell pull hung by the draped mantelpiece. The low late October sun slanted through the crack of the drawn curtains, glinting upon a small table with a long, fringed tablecloth upon which stood a collection of glass and china knickknacks that gleamed, spotless in the light. “Now – a cup of tea, I think? And then we’ll visit Anna.”
The mention of their surviving daughter’s name had exactly the effect that she had hoped. Grief for the dead child was, for the moment at least, overcome by concern for the living. “She’s no better?”
“It would seem not. The last lot of medicine that Doctor Thompson gave her has done no more good that the first.”
He stood up suddenly, strode to the fireplace. “I don’t understand it. She was very ill, I know – but that was weeks ago. The boys have recovered long since. Yet there she lies – doing nothing, hardly speaking, eating nothing at all.”
“Doctor Thompson says she is quite cured of the measles. It is, he says, the after-effects—”
“After-effects? What’s that supposed to mean? After-effects?” The day’s emotions exploded into the relief of anger. “The man’s a charlatan. The child is ill. Fading to nothing. And he talks of – ‘after-effects’?”
He stopped as the door opened and a small, uniformed maid tripped into the room. “Yes, Ma’am?”
“Tea, please, Sally.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Josef waited until the door closed behind her. “I want a second opinion,” he said then, more quietly. “We’ve lost one child. We aren’t going to lose another.”
Grace nodded, seated herself, straight-backed upon a chair, her eyes upon her tightly-clasped hands, still sheathed in the black lace of mourning; and the tears that she had resisted all day, welled from her eyes and slid soundlessly down her cheeks.
The new doctor, however, did no better for Anna than the old. He examined her, tapped her chest, looked in her eyes, ears and down her throat and professed himself – in suitably professional language – mystified. As far as he could see there was no reason in the world why the child should decline so. Privately – for he had seen such apparently inexplicable cases before – he believed it likely that the girl would soon follow her small sister to the grave. Who knew why such things happened? God moved in a mysterious way. He took his fee, tipped his hat and left.
And Anna lay, bedevilled, slipping further into her nightmare world of guilt, contrition, terror and self-punishment.
In caring for her sick daughter Grace found at least some ease from grief. For while she believed absolutely in the will of God, she also believed – as she had demonstrated at and after Margaret Jane’s birth – that He was occasionally found to be open to persuasion. Here was a daughter she would not easily let go. That her own loving ministrations actually added to the child’s guilt-ridden distress never occurred to her, no more than did the fact that Anna, though ill, had been progressing perfectly satisfactorily until the baby had been taken ill and that her desperate decline had begun from the moment of her small sister’s death.
Oddly, it was Joss who discovered the truth.
Trudy it was who begged Joss to visit the sick child. “Honest, Mr Joss – I wish you would. She thinks the world of you, you know. I’m sure it’d ’elp.” Trudy was truly fond of Anna. She was also not averse to the thought of a daily visit to the sick room by this quiet, rather intriguing young man whom she found a lot more attractive than his more flamboyant brother.
Joss felt himself to be an unlikely comfort in the sick room. Also he was busy: Josef, recognizing his remarkable business acumen, had begun to allow him more scope in his activities within the company, encouraging him more and more to take into his own hands the financial side of the business, which had never been Josef’s own forte. The thought of spending precious time with a sick child did not greatly appeal. “I think you exaggerate, Trudy.”
“No. As God’s my witness, Mr Joss, it’s true. Your visit the other day did ’er a lot more good than that there doctor does, I can tell you that.” Trudy crossed her fingers behind her back – it was, after all, in the best of causes – and added, “She’s always askin’ for you.” In fact Anna never asked for anyone.
In conscience, there was little Joss could do but accede, and so it was that he took to dropping in on Anna each evening. As much to Trudy’s surprise as her pleasure these visits did have a beneficial effect. The child came to look for the young man each evening. She even, at last, began to talk. It was a couple of weeks after the baby’s funeral that Joss asked, very politely, to talk to Grace alone.
Grace agreed to this unusual request with some surprise and not a little reluctance. She and Joss were not close – indeed, if pressed, she might have admitted to an actual antipathy for the young man. She was ill at ease with him, and had been from the first moment he had stepped into the house. His brother Boris – handsome, lighthearted, feckless as a child and good for nothing but laughter – had found an immediate corner in her heart: but Joss disturbed her strangely. She never could fathom the thoughts behind those coal-dark eyes, nor find any warmth in the harsh line of his mouth. She supposed that to some he might appear as attractive in his slight, tense way as was Boris in his, but for herself his habitually sombre expression and long, disconcerting silences made him a difficult companion. Although the older by nine or ten years, she felt awkward and uncomfortable in his presence, an experience she was not used to in her own house and which, not unnaturally, she found herself resenting intensely. Always, to her, he gave the impression of an intolerable superiority, of sitting in judgement on those about them and mostly finding them wanting. Her husband’s preference for him over his more extrovert brother puzzled her. She smiled now, a little coolly.
“Sit down, Joss. How may I help you?”
He sat in a large, overstuffed wing armchair, leaned forward, frowning a little. Irritation moved in Grace. Why did the boy always have to be so intense?
“I should like to talk to you about Anna,” he said.
“Oh?” The last thing she had expected. She waited.
Unusually, he seemed for the moment uncertain of how to proceed. He touched long fingers to his mouth in a gesture that in another she might have thought of as nervousness.
“Well?” she prompted, her impatience barely concealed by her good manners. Rain trickled in dismal furrows down the windowpane.
“I think I may have discovered the reason for Anna’s illness.”
“She caught measles – really Joss, we all know—”
“No.” Joss stood up. In God’s name what was he doing here? The child’s predicament was really nothing to do with him. Then the vision of a thin, flushed face and frightened eyes rose in his mind. Poor little devil. Someone had to do something—
“Anna believes that she is responsible for the death of the baby. She is desperate with guilt. She thinks you all hate her for it. She thinks she deserves to die.”
Grace was on her feet. “What?”
“It’s true. She told me. I thought it would help if you knew. I think you should talk to her. She needs to be reassured. To be convinced that it wasn’t her fault that the baby died.”
There was anger in her, and confusion. How should this – this stranger know such things about her daughter when she did not? He sensed her antagonism, half turned from her, then stopped. Joss Anatov was not one to shirk a self-appointed task. He had come so far, it made no sense to stop now. “Mrs Rose – I think there is something else you should know – something that might help you to understand.”
“Oh?”
“On the day that Anna fell ill she had run away.”
That was too much. “Nonsense,” she said sharply. “Run away? We all know what happened on the day that Anna fell ill, Joss. You took her to the park. You forgot the time. You allowed her to become wet, and cold, and overtired—”
“No. I found Anna outside in the street. She was very distressed. She told me she had run away because she believed that no one loved her since the baby came.”
Grace opened her mouth, shut it again.
“We lied, both of us. Now I’ve broken my word to her in telling you. But I thought you should know.” He walked towards the door, turned with his hand on the knob. “I’m sorry if you think I’m interfering. I simply thought that someone should at least be aware of the child’s state of mind. And since I have so obviously upset you, for which I apologize—”
Why, she thought, in furious exasperation, did he have to be so wretchedly polite?
“—then there seems little point in holding back the other thing I came to say.”
“Which is?” Grace asked, faintly.
“If Anna were a child of mine, I’d not have her tended by a woman who obviously dislikes her. In my opinion, a lot of what ails the child comes directly from her treatment by that detestable Nanny you employ.” He could hardly believe the words he spoke himself. He knew the influence Grace had with Josef, was absolutely unsure how she would take such undeniable impudence.
She regarded him for a long, cool moment. “Thank you, Joss,” she said, “I’ll look into it.”
He knelt beside the child’s narrow bed, the young man – slight, dark, graceful, his face serious, as always. “You must understand, Anna – I had to tell them. We must finish this nonsense once and for all. You’re punishing yourself for nothing. It wasn’t your fault.”
She turned her head from him. “It was. It was!”
“No.”
Very very slowly she turned back to him. “You don’t know what I did.”
“You caught measles. The baby caught measles—”
“No. Not that. Something else. Something – horrible.”
He waited. Tears dribbled down the thin cheeks and dripped on to the pillow. Joss had a meeting to go to. Diamond prices were fluctuating crazily – if he could just persuade Josef to let him go to South Africa.
“What? What did you do that was so horrible?”
She lay quiet a long time. “I—” she began at last and stopped, swallowing painfully. “I – I prayed that—”
His straying attention was caught. “What?” he asked gently. “I prayed to God that the baby should die. I wanted her to die! I told Him I did.” The words were tumbling out now. “I wanted things to be the way they used to be. I wanted Mama to love me again – so you see it is my fault! It is! I asked God to let the baby die – I’m wicked. I’ll go to hell like Nanny says – and, oh, supposing Mama finds out how wicked I am?”
“Oh, Anna. Anna.” Very gently he drew the sobbing child to him, rocking her as he might have rocked a baby. “Listen to me. And think. Do you truly believe that God has time to listen to all the naughty little prayers of all the naughty children in the world? Don’t you think He knows what’s really in your heart? Was He not a child Himself? Did He not speak of and to the little children? Do you have such little faith that you believe He would do something wicked because you asked it of Him?” She had grown very still against him, listening. “You caught measles accidentally. The baby caught measles accidentally. And she wasn’t strong enough. We all knew that. I believe that your mother knew it. It had nothing to do with your prayers.”
“Perhaps the devil heard them.” The words were whispered. Be sure the devil will take you, Miss, Nanny had said numberless times in the past for the slightest misdemeanour. Hell’s flames haunted the imaginative child.
“Fiddlesticks to the devil. There’s no such thing,” he said.
She lifted her head, her eyes enormous. “Nanny says—”
“And fiddlesticks to Nanny too,” he said shortly, and with finality.
Even in her distress a small spark of scandalized delight glinted in her eyes at that.
He laid her back upon the pillows. “Enough of this nonsense, little Anna. Your mother is coming to see you. Listen to what she tells you. Believe her and me. And as for the devil—” he leaned forward, spoke quietly “—spit in his eye and forget him! He’ll have to wait a long time for you.” Smiling one of his rare smiles, he tucked her in and made her comfortable. Already it seemed to him that her eyes were clearer and more peaceful, her cheeks a more healthy colour. The cleansing of confession, he thought a touch wryly, perhaps the men of science and of medicine should not too quickly dismiss the ministrations of Mother Church.
“Joss?”
“Yes?”
“You’ll come and see me again? Soon?”
“Only – absolutely only – if you promise to get better.”
“I will. I promise I will.”
He left the room with a lift of relief that now, surely, his involvement in the child’s problems was over. Before he had reached the bottom of the stairs he was rehearsing arguments in his mind to convince Uncle Josef that Rose and Company needed to invest some of its profits – he was so old-fashioned in this desire to have money lying in the bank, accumulating, doing nothing.
He had absolutely no idea that in the past moments childish devotion had in Anna given way to a depth of emotion far beyond her years: the first stirrings of a passionate and possessive love that would haunt them both, in one way or another, for the rest of their lives.
Grace’s visit to the sick room following her talk with Joss was a better tonic than anything a doctor could have prescribed. To her credit, despite her initial outrage at what he had told her, she was ready after only a few minutes’ talk with her daughter to admit her mistake. And to rectify it. Her efforts were rewarded with satisfying speed. With the wound that had festered so long in her mind lanced and cleansed, Anna’s physical health began to improve steadily, though it was some weeks before the doctor believed the evidence of his own eyes and pronounced her out of danger. Nor was Grace small-minded enough to ignore Joss’s other piece of advice. After she had spoken to each of the children, had a quiet interview with Trudy and an extremely stormy one with Nanny Brown, the latter, with bad grace and mutterings of spoiled brats and over-indulgent parents, packed her bags and left. The children were delighted – and Anna, when she was strong enough to rejoin her brothers in the nursery where Trudy now held much less repressive sway than had her predecessor, found herself something of a heroine, she having been given credit for the dismissal of the ogre. Life, at last, resumed its even tenor – for if grief for the lost baby still shadowed the hearts and minds of the adults of the family, younger memories were shorter and yesterday’s trials and sorrows soon forgotten. Anna soon found herself slipping into the now pleasant nursery routine, happy to be well again, happy in her reinstatement in her parents’ lives, happy above all to nurse secretly in her heart her devoted love for Joss, her handsome prince who once more had saved her. That she saw little of him as he became more and more involved with the business bothered her not at all. Her love had not as yet acquired the adult vice of possessiveness.
Christmas came and went and the new year of 1887 – Queen Victoria’s fiftieth year on the throne – was ushered in with the usual celebrations and expectations. With Khartoum conveniently forgotten, the British people knew their Empire secure and their right to ‘rule the waves’ inviolable. Confidence, prosperity and expansion were the watchwords. To be sure, in the new year, there were some ugly disturbances in the streets of London and soldiers had to be called in to quell the riots and to disperse those malcontents who dared publicly to protest at poverty and unemployment; but on the whole, as the year moved on, most people’s minds were much more exercised by the coming Golden Jubilee on the 22nd of June, than by those subversive elements who muttered disruptively of social reform and radical change. Most people in fact, if asked, would argue that things had changed quite enough already. After all, was it not true that even working-class children were now being educated? Most of them, anyway. And had not working men’s conditions improved? If they behaved themselves and spent their time working instead of foolishly and contentiously trying to form unions to challenge their betters, the majority of them could earn a decent living – and if there were those to ask what happened to working men and women when their useful lives were over or were blighted by sickness or by injury and they were thrown on to the charity of an uncharitable world, self-righteous words like thrift and prudence came easily to most middle-class tongues.
In the Rose household there were few committed political attitudes. Josef was concerned only with his family and his business – in that past life of which he never spoke and tried not to think, politics had already cost him too dear. Grace, in this as in all things, dutifully took her cue from her husband. In her view, which was the prevailing one of the time, politics were, anyway, man’s business; the running of the home and the dispensing of charity woman’s, and so with her dear friend, Hermione Smithson, despite her own still far from perfect health, she spent a considerable amount of time and energy collecting money, food and clothes for distribution to her ‘deserving poor’ and helping at an East End refuge which catered for those whose only crime was destitution but whose sentence, too often, amounted to a slow death. She took it as God’s will that these inequalities existed – the idea of an egalitarian society where such injustice might be eradicated simply never occurred to her. Even her own close brush with disaster, before she had met Josef, had taught her nothing. In common with most of her age her concept of social justice was simple, and based upon the paternalistic principles of charity.
The enthusiasm in the Rose household for the coming Jubilee was intense and shared by everyone from the smallest housemaid to Josef himself – who, in the way of most converts, had become in the twelve years he had lived in England more English, as Grace was fond of saying, than the English themselves. Grace and Josef – the Piccadilly shop shut for the day – planned to take the children to see the procession which promised to be a spectacle the like of which had only rarely been seen before in the streets of the city. New clothes were ordered, patriotic flags and favours purchased. The day itself dawned with all the excitement of Christmas, a birthday or a wedding. Very early in the bright June morning, decked in their finery, the happy party set off for their chosen spot not far from St Paul’s, where the Queen was to give thanks for her long and prosperous reign. With Grace, Josef and the children went Tanya, Boris, Joss, Trudy, the little maid Sally – the latter twittering with excitement and totally unable to stop talking – a dozen flags and enough refreshments, as Trudy exclaimed, to feed the Queen’s Guard.
“Oh, just look, Ma’am – Trudy – do see! How handsome the soldiers look! And the Jack Tars! Oh, my – I do love the sailor boys—” Sally was fairly jumping up and down with excitement, her usual discreet good behaviour entirely abandoned for the occasion.
Josef shepherded his flock to a good vantage point. The boys, like Sally but for different reasons, were greatly impressed by the gallant uniforms of the men who lined the processional route. Anna was enthralled by the crowds in their gay Sunday best, the wide skirts of the women like great upturned bellflowers in the sunshine, their hats perched like pretty butterflies on their heads. They waited with growing anticipation, watching the slightest occurrence with the minutest of interest – a stray dog parading down the centre of the road got the biggest applause of the morning – and commenting upon their neighbours. Grace, even her usual calm disrupted by the atmosphere, and resolutely ignoring the tiredness that seemed recently to be with her always, held tightly to her husband’s arm, a buffer against the surge of the crowd, and kept a sharp and slightly anxious eye on the rest of the party. Even so they nearly lost a member – James, lured by a barrel organ man and his mischievous monkey, wandered into the crowd and might well have been mislaid had not Boris scooped him up and with an easy movement swung the child up on his broad shoulders, where he sat happily and proudly, hanging on to a handful of bright, curly hair and looking out over the sea of bonnets, bowlers and waving flags.
“See the soldiers, Boris! Just see them! Aren’t they splendid? Aren’t they fine? I’m going to be a soldier when I grow up. A soldier in a fine red uniform!” He waved, wobbling precariously, at a nearby, impassive guardsman.
Boris reached a hand to steady the boy upon his shoulders, laughing, a glint in his hilariously brilliant eyes too bright to be explained simply by the excitement of the day. Joss, standing nearby, glanced at him suspiciously. He had seen that look before—
“They’re coming! They’re coming! Hear them!” Above the roar of the crowd came the compulsive sound of martial music. James wriggled excitedly, almost unbalancing the laughing Boris. “I see them! Oh, look – the horses – and the splendid carriage!”
The progress of the monarch could be charted by the rising tumult of sound that accompanied her coming. Dumpy, plain, bolt upright beneath her lace parasol, her determined mourning black lightened by silver, her black bonnet trimmed with white flowers, the old lady rode through the streets of her capital upon a frenzied wave of cheering. She had been criticized bitterly in the past for her withdrawal from public life following the death of her beloved Albert more than twenty-five years before, had believed herself – at times with good reason – to be unpopular with her subjects. Yet here, on this occasion, the affection of a nation for a queen who had presided over fifty unprecedentedly eventful years was fervent and undisguised. Her people roared for her. The old Widow of Windsor might be a bit dull with her mourning black and her prim and proper ways – but by God she was theirs, and the old country wouldn’t be the same without her.
The Roses cheered with the rest – Alex so hard that he nearly choked and had to have his back banged by Trudy. Anna watched the wonderful procession in utter, breath-held silence. She had never seen such colour, such splendour. She wanted to draw it. The curve of a horse’s neck, the lift of a hand – it was like one of Joss’s stories of the magical splendours of the past. As the procession passed at last, leaving in its wake a residue of wild, emotional excitement that demanded release, someone in the crowd struck up the National Anthem, “God save our gracious Queen.” In no time the whole throng was roaring the patriotic words, tears streaming down flushed faces. Small Michael, safe in Trudy’s arms, put his fingers in his ears, knocking awry his sailor’s cap which was decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon. Ralph, enthusiastically conducting with his Union Jack, caught Alex on the nose with it and received a buffet for his trouble.
It was a day of pride and pageantry, of friendliness and good-tempered excitement. A day never to be forgotten – for more reasons than one.
It was Joss who noticed, after the procession had returned in another boiling swell of excitement and people were rolling up flags, brushing down skirts and straightening headgear in preparation for leaving, that his brother Boris was missing.
“Where is he? Did anyone see him go?”
“I did.” James, together with his wilting flag, clutched a scrap of paper. He was almost bursting with excitement and self-importance. “He told me to count to two hundred and then give this to you. I’d only reached a hundred and eighty-three—”
Joss, who still managed, despite the heat and the crowds, to look dapper in his check trousers and well-cut grey jacket, took the note and read it, his dark brows drawing together, the austere line of his mouth hardening.
“What’s the matter? Joss – what is it?” Josef reached a hand to Joss’s shoulder, “Is something wrong?”
“Boris is gone.”
“Gone? How can he be gone? He was here a minute ago.” Vaguely Josef looked around, as if expecting to see the bright head and laughing eyes bob out of the thinning crowd.
Joss shook his head. “He’s gone.” As so often in moments of emotion, his voice was absolutely expressionless, his accent strong. The rest of the party, puzzled, looked at him and waited. Joss stood for a long time staring at the note he held in his hand.
“Well?” prompted Josef uneasily, at last.
Joss lifted his head. His face was sharp with anger. “I have to apologize for my ungrateful brother. He has chosen to leave us.”
“Leave us?” Grace echoed blankly. “Whatever can you mean?”
In reply Joss lifted the note. “‘I thank you all for your kindness and care,’” he read evenly, “‘and I apologize if I distress you in this. Uncle Josef, I know a desk and a pen are not for me. Give them to Josef. I go to be a soldier. I ask you not to be angry. Pray God for me. Yours in affection and thanks. Boris.’”
There was a moment’s unbelieving silence.
“The whippersnapper!” Josef said, more in amazement than anger.
“Deary me!” said Sally, a scandalized hand to her mouth. “Well, deary me! There’s a thing!” Trudy nudged her, hard, to silence.
“The little devil!” Josef said, and then, suddenly and surprisingly, laughed. He turned to Joss, slapped him on the shoulder. “Well, Joss my boy – it’s just you and me, eh? Since your brother it seems is willing – anxious indeed – to exchange a place in Rose and Company for a dashing red coat—”
“If he wished to do this he should not have done it so. It shows ingratitude and thoughtlessness. Again I apologize for him.” Josef’s voice was still grim, but his anger was more for the manner of the action than for the action itself.
“Well I’ll say one thing for Mr Boris,” Sally’s stage whisper, intended for Trudy’s ear alone, reached them all in an unexpected lull in the noise around them, “he’s goin’ to look a treat in one o’ them uniforms. A real treat!” And as tension broke into laughter the martial drums and trumpets that had lured the restless Boris sounded again in the distance, a faint, challenging call to arms.