A Dark and Distant Shore (94 page)

‘Well, you look positively mournful to me! Don’t tell me there isn’t something wrong.’

‘It’s only – well, I don’t understand things.’

Juliana sighed. ‘You’ve never been awfully quick, you know! What kind of things?’

‘We can’t be married until I have been received into the church, and I can’t be received until the priest thinks I’m fit. And I won’t be fit until I understand all the things he explains to me – and I
can’t
!
’
It was a wail.

‘Surely you can pretend to?’

‘Oh, no. That wouldn’t be right.’

‘Have you told him you don’t understand?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Well, why not try? He might be able to explain everything differently, so that you could.’

Doubtfully, Lizzie said, ‘Do you think so? The dreadful thing is that I don’t understand Guy either, most of the time.’ She rose and drifted over to a settle with painted cupboards over it, occupying one of the bewildering number of nooks and alcoves in the walls. Opening one of the cupboards, she brought out a box of sweetmeats, but when she turned her eyes were full of tears.

‘About art, you mean?’

‘And its – its verity, and purpose and significance. I can draw, Juliana, you know I can, but I don’t seem able to put my
soul
into it. At least, Guy says I don’t, and I’m sure he’s right, because I don’t understand
how
one puts one’s soul into it. If only I weren’t so stupid!’

‘You aren’t stupid,’ Juliana replied automatically. ‘Besides, none of it matters if Guy loves you.’

‘But what if he stopped loving me?’

‘My dear Lizzie, if you always look as beautiful as you do now, it’s highly unlikely. I shouldn’t think there’s a man on earth who wouldn’t fall head over heels in love with you if you so much as smiled. Though I do think,’ she added judiciously, ‘that it would be better if you could make your smile a little less wan and sorrowing.’ She looked like some early Christian martyr.

‘But that’s what Guy and all his friends admire so much. They all want to paint me because I look so remote and unattainable. It’s very tiring sitting for them, you know. Guy says I personify the abstraction of Love, rather than the reality of the beloved. I don’t know what that means.’

Neither did Juliana, but she didn’t like the sound of it at all. ‘Stuff!’ she exclaimed. ‘Spiritual passion is all very well, but it seems to me that the sooner you settle things with the priest the better. You’ll feel so much more comfortable when you are married.’ Not being wholly ignorant, she went on a little hesitantly, ‘I’m sure it must be very hard for Guy living with you like a monk. Perhaps he talks about – what was it? – abstractions of Love to take his mind off – er – other things.’

‘That’s what
terrifies
me!’ Lizzie whispered tragically. She was leaning on the back of the monumental chair, her white hands gripping its Gothic peak. ‘If anything should happen – you know? – without us being married, it would be the most dreadful thing. I could never hold up my head again. I would kill myself.’

‘I can’t see why,’ Juliana said prosaically. ‘No one would know, would they? And if they did, they could hardly blame
you
!’

Even Lizzie was capable of spotting the flaws in that ill-considered speech.

‘Couldn’t they? Everyone would say I had brought it on myself.
No one
would truly feel for me. And, oh, Juliana, I wrote to Papa to tell him what has happened, and he hasn’t answered! Do you think he has washed his hands of me too? I’m so frightened!
Everyone
has deserted me, and I can’t bear it alone!’

‘Don’t be silly!’

She could have bitten her tongue out. Two great tears welled up in Lizzie’s eyes and began to roll down her cheeks, impairing her beauty not at all. Tragically, she moaned, ‘Guy has begun to say that, too!’

An exasperated Juliana didn’t altogether blame him. ‘Well, if you will go on about how inadequate you are, when you’re not inadequate at all, it’s not to be wondered at. For heaven’s sake, Lizzie, pull yourself together. I’ll come and see you again as often as you like, and you’ll feel much more cheerful for being able to talk to someone. It seems to me that you have worked yourself up into a terrible state! If Guy is out a lot in the evenings – which, I must say, seems to me
most
thoughtless of him – you are obviously left too much alone, and you have never been used to that. You have allowed your fears to get the better of you. Shall I come again one evening next week?’

Sadly, this bracing little homily had no effect at all. Juliana didn’t realize how like Vilia she had sounded. Dealing with Lizzie, it was hard not to.

Lizzie’s heavy-lidded eyes became vacant, and her voice, when she spoke, was apathetic. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. You see, when Guy is at home he likes to work at his easel, and I don’t think he should be interrupted. He is a very great artist, you know. But I don’t always know when he is going to be out. Mr Ruskin has arranged for him to teach at the new Working Men’s College, you see. It’s very exciting. Guy says that Christian Socialism is humanity’s one great hope for the future. He goes there quite often in the evenings, sometimes even when he has no classes to take.’

Juliana, drawing on her gloves, said with a trace of asperity, ‘You mean it would be more convenient if I only come when I am invited? Very well, Lizzie. But I warn you, if you don’t invite me, I shall come anyway. I don’t think it’s good for you being on your own.’

Lizzie didn’t invite her, and Juliana heard nothing for several weeks. More than once, knowing her cousin’s lethargy too well, she hesitated about descending on her, but then did nothing. Already, she was caught up in the round of parties and receptions, luncheons and suppers, that preceded the real start of the Season, and Vilia insisted that she must attend them so that she could extend her acquaintance. Then she would not be quite among strangers later on. To Juliana it made little difference; it was just as much of a trial making new acquaintances in a private house as it would have been at a grand ball.

At last, in the middle of March, she received a note from Lizzie. But she told no one about it, because by the time it arrived, Lizzie was dead.

The news reached Gideon less than two weeks after he himself had turned the corner between life and death.

Late in January, when there were eleven thousand men besieging Sebastopol, and twelve thousand lying in hospital at Scutari, sick with acute scurvy as well as all the other diseases that ravaged the army, Gideon had decided he must visit the hospital again. It had a morbid fascination for him. For more than a month he had scarcely thought of anything but the extraordinary gentleness of the men who lay so patiently in their loathsome surroundings, suffering horribly, screaming sometimes, and yet never allowing a single coarse word to pass their lips in case it might distress the gentlewomen who nursed them; the ill, the dying, the nurses, all rising with heartbreaking dignity above conditions that no human being could be expected to endure. And they were all being betrayed, time and time again, and in everything, by the stupidity, the incompetence, the indifference of politicians, administrators, and petty officials. Gideon knew that in December twenty thousand pounds of lime juice, the surest specific against scurvy, had arrived at Balaclava but that none of it had been issued, because army orders made no provision for its inclusion in the ration. In January, a shipload of cabbages had been thrown into the harbour because it was not consigned to any particular department. And huge quantities of warm clothing and preserved foods had been sent out from England only to disappear in the bottomless pit of the Turkish Customs House. Fretting, miserable, feeling himself useless at Sebastopol where nothing was happening to justify the presence of a newspaperman, Gideon was drawn as if by a magnet to Scutari where he might, perhaps, be able to help just a little.

The wards were cleaner now, the lavatories unstopped, and the food almost eatable, even if men with scurvy were unable to masticate it. Miss Nightingale had worked wonders. But outside there was a sea of decaying filth, so that the very walls of the hospital were soaked in it, and every breath of air blew gases from the choked, overloaded sewers back through the privies and into the wards and corridors. One of the nurses told Gideon that patients in the beds nearest the privies never survived.

An epidemic of what some of the nurses called Asiatic cholera and others ‘famine fever’ had broken out earlier in the month, and four surgeons and three nurses had already died of it. At any other period of his life Gideon would have walked sensibly away from a place of danger where he had no need to be. But now, obsessed, he stayed.

He stayed, fetching and carrying, taking down messages from men who were sick, in agony, almost too weak to talk. He stayed as the death toll steadily mounted, and the Turks tipped the bodies into large shallow pits because the British couldn’t muster a fatigue party of men strong enough to dig. He stayed, and helped, and at the end of February himself went down with cholera.

Just before that, he had received a letter from Lizzie, a sad and at the same time hysterical letter reproaching him for having deserted her. He had written to her from Sebastopol, but it seemed she had not received his note; the messenger with whom he had sent it to Balaclava must have been killed on the way.

Poor Lizzie. This was a cry from the heart. ‘I am so alone; I have no one to turn to if I do not have you.’

He had known already that he had caught
something
in the hospital, so he had scrubbed his hands with extreme care before he sat down to reply, and touched nothing but pen and paper while he wrote. But he could still smell the sickness around him, feel it as tangibly as if it had soaked into his shirt, as if it were tangled in the hairs on his forearms, as if it lay like a sheen of perspiration over all his skin.

Somehow he had finished the letter, somehow explained to her the situation he was in, somehow collected together as many short, reassuring words as he could think of. And then, reporting to the medical staff as a patient, he had begged one of the nurses to see his letter dispatched, explaining a little of it to her before he was gripped by the first brutal, cramping pains. He had watched men beyond counting die of cholera. He knew it was uncomfortable at first, but no more; like a touch of dysentery. Then, within hours, it became the ‘bloody flux’ that had devastated armies in the past, ravaged cities, killed more people in famine zones than famine itself. After that, the cramps really took hold, and the sick man wasted away before one’s eyes, his face shrinking, eyes receding, nose losing all its flesh until it became pointed and pinched and skeletal. His skin became wrinkled and dead, so that even a finger’s pressure remained like a potter’s thumbprint in clay. The stomach cramps had spread throughout his body by now, reaching the throat so that breathing was constricted and to swallow impossible; it was then that panic began to show in a man’s eyes.

Most of the men at Scutari had gone quickly on from there, because they were undernourished and exhausted even before the disease struck. The fortunate ones – those who had been born in slums, starved in youth, harshly tested in maturity – went in less than two days sometimes, from start to finish. The well-fed took longer. Gideon knew what lay ahead of him.

But, somehow, he survived, although it was three long weeks before he was capable even of standing on his feet again.

When the letter from Vilia arrived, he was sitting at the little deal table in Miss Nightingale’s storeroom making fair copies of correspondence for her. She was inundated with paperwork, for she had no one to act as her secretary. She nursed, and she managed the wards, and the supplies; she dealt with an endless stream of questions and demands from anyone who had anything to do with the hospital – nurses, merchants, doctors, chaplains, the captains of the sick transports. And she wrote home for the men, with their dying messages; for the nurses, to their children; occasionally to her own family; and almost daily there was a stream of official letters, and reports, and requisitions. The light in her room was never put out. Her stamina was perhaps the most remarkable thing about her. For a little time at least, Gideon hoped he might take some of the burden from her shoulders.

Vilia’s letter was brief.

It seems that Lizzie had been suffering from neuralgia, and the pain, as well as a natural unease of mind, were making it difficult for her to sleep. Guy went out at about nine o’clock to the Working Men’s College, where he teaches in the evening, and when he returned some time after eleven she was unconscious. An empty phial of laudanum was on the table beside her bed. She died a few hours later. It seems possible that she took a normal dose of the drug and fell asleep and then, waking again soon after, dazed and confused, took more without realizing quite how much it was. I believe this to be probable as well as possible, for even when she was in full possession of her faculties poor Lizzie was too often inclined not to concentrate on what she was doing. Guy is distraught with grief and remorse, and blames himself entirely.

I need hardly say how deeply distressed we all are over this tragedy. I don’t know what you will wish to do – whether you will come home, or whether it would be better for you not to – but Theo has arranged for Lizzie to be taken back to Marchfield and buried in the little cemetery of the village kirk. We hope that is what you would have wished. All my love and sympathy, my dear. What else is there I can say?

Gideon did go home when he was fit to travel, although there seemed little purpose in it. He had failed Lizzie just as he had failed Elinor, and couldn’t judge how that weighed in the balance against the hundreds, thousands of lives he had been trying to save by staying in the Crimea and observing, and exposing, and writing the articles for the
Times-Graphic
that had helped to force the newly elected government at home to send out a Sanitary Commission to investigate the state of the military hospitals. It was a question to which there wasn’t any answer, but he thought it was a question he would never be able to forget.