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 his 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.
“Joss?” Her young voice shook forlornly.
He did not answer.
“Joss, I love you. I truly do. I always have. I’ll never love anyone but you.”
He shook his head, trapped by hatred and by love.
She caught his hand. “I do! I do! And – oh, Joss – you love me too – don’t you? You wouldn’t have – kissed me like that – if you didn’t. Would you?” The words were desperately uncertain. He tried to move away from her. She caught his hand, clutched it to her meagre breast. “Don’t go. Please – don’t go. I’ll do anything, Joss. Anything you want.” She was whispering, desperate, tears in her voice. She had rehearsed this moment, or one like it, a thousand times in her dreams. She knew, instinctively, it would not come again.
He looked at her, expressionless in the glimmering dark. Light streamed from the windows behind them. Voices were lifted in song.
She watched him, wide-eyed, frightened but stubborn. “Anything you want,” she said again.
Revenge waited, smiling. A favourite only daughter, ruined, disgraced – then another thought, more subtle, obscurely more satisfying and of a lifetime’s duration. Deliberately he reached for her, kissed her again, felt once more the unexpected wildness of her. “Anything?”
“Yes.”
“Would you marry me?”
She froze, looked up at him, mouth open.
“Well?” Already he was half-regretting it.
“You aren’t joking? Oh, Joss – you aren’t teasing me?”
“No.”
Her face lit like a lamp. “Then yes! And yes, and yes, and yes! Oh, Joss!” She clung to him, laughing and crying.
He looked over her head, into darkness.
So it was that, in the same week that his brother Boris stormed into Omdurman with his comrades behind Lord Kitchener to seal yet another victory for Empire, Josef Anatov took to wife Anna Amelia Rose, till death should them part. As they came from church on that bright September day a group of children playing nearby stopped to watch the spectacle, and then, as the last of the brightly decorated carriages bowled off down the street, took up their game again:
In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
Who will be my master?