‘Rose? She broke under the strain. Shell shock, I suppose you’d call it. You hear a lot about the poor boys, the breakdowns, the self-inflicted wounds, but you never hear much about the women, do you? Where are we in the history books? We might not have been shooting at the Germans and only in minimal danger of getting shot at ourselves – though there were times – but we were there. We saw the slaughter first hand. We were up to our elbows in blood and guts. Some people just couldn’t take it, the way some of the boys couldn’t take combat. I’ll say this, though, I think it was Nicholas’s death that finally sent Rose over the edge. It was the following year, 1918, the end of March, near a little village on the Somme called St Quentin. She found him, you know, on the field. It was pure chance. Half his head had been blown away. She was never the same. She used to mutter to herself in French and go into long silences. Eventually, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of morphine, but a doctor found her in time. She was invalided out in the end.’
‘Do you know what happened next?’
‘I visited her as soon as the war was over. She’d just come out of the hospital and was living with her parents. They were wealthy landowners – very posh, you might say – and they hadn’t a clue what to do with her. She was an embarrassment to them. In the end they set up a small fund for her, so she would never have to go without, and left her to her own devices.’
After a moment or two’s silence, I showed Midge the book of poetry. Again, she fingered it like a blind person looking for meaning. ‘Oh, yes. Ivor Gurney. She was always reading this.’ She turned the pages. ‘This was her favourite.’ She read us a short poem called ‘Bach and the Sentry’, in which the poet on sentry duty hears his favourite Bach prelude in his imagination and wonders how he will feel later, when he actually plays the piece again in peacetime. Then she shook her head. ‘Poor mad Rose. Nobody knew what to do with her. Do tell me what became of her.’
I told her what I knew, which wasn’t much, though for some reason I held back the part about Tommy and his mistake. I didn’t want Midge to know that my godson had mistaken her friend for a traitor. It seemed enough to lay the blame at the feet of a gypsy thief and hope that Midge wasn’t one of those women who followed criminal trials closely in the newspapers.
Nor did I tell her that Rose’s house had been destroyed by a bomb almost a week after the murder and that she would almost certainly have been killed anyway. Midge didn’t need that kind of cruel irony. She had suffered enough; she had enough bad memories to fuel her nightmares, and enough to worry about in the shape of her two boys.
I simply told her that Rose was a very private person, certainly eccentric in her dress and her mannerisms, and that none of us really knew her very well. She was a part of the community, though, and we all mourned her loss.
So Mad Maggie was another of war’s victims, I thought, as I breathed in the scent of the apple tree before getting into bed that night. One of the uncelebrated ones. She came to our community to live out her days in anonymous grief and whatever inner peace she could scrounge for herself, her sole valuable possessions a book of poetry, an old photograph and a nursing medal.
And so she would have remained, a figure to be mocked by the children and ignored by the adults, had it not been for another damn war, another damaged soul and the same poppy field in Flanders.
Requiescat in pace, Rose, though I am not a religious man. Requiescat in pace.
It should never have happened, but they hanged Tommy Markham for the murder of Rose Faversham at Wands-worth Prison on 25 May 1941, at eight o’clock in the morning.
Everyone said Tommy should have got off for psychiatric reasons, but his barrister had a permanent hangover, and the judge had an irritable bowel. In addition, the expert psychiatrist hired to evaluate him didn’t know shell shock from an Oedipus complex.
The only thing we could console ourselves with was that Tommy went to the gallows proud and at peace with himself for having avenged his father’s death.
I hadn’t the heart to tell him that he was wrong about Mad Maggie, that she wasn’t the woman he thought she was.
THE DUKE’S WIFE
I was absolutely speechless. After everything that had happened, there he stood, bold as brass, telling all the world we were going to be married. Married! You would have been speechless, too.
Let me give you a little background. My name is Isabella, and until that moment I had been all set to enter a convent. I fear I have a wayward and impulsive nature that needs to be kept in check, and the convent I had in mind, the votarists of St Clare, was one of strict restraint. Imagine my feelings when, head swimming from the twists and turns of recent events, I heard I was to be married to the duke!
But there’s more, much more.
A short while ago the duke realized that he had become lax in his duties, being of too mild and gentle a nature to enforce the laws of the land to their fullest. Of special concern to him, because it ate away at the very institution of marriage itself, was the law that forbade, on pain of death, a man to live with a woman to whom he was not married.
Fearing that the people would revolt if he were suddenly to change course and start enforcing the law rigorously himself, the duke thought it better to slip away for a while and leave his deputy, Angelo, in charge. Thus, Angelo was invested with all the duke’s powers and charged with cleaning up Vienna.
Mistake. Big mistake.
Where do I come into all this? you might be wondering. Well, it so happens that my brother Claudio had plighted his troth to his fiancée Juliet, and they were sleeping together. The problem was that they had kept their marriage contract a secret in the hope that Juliet’s family would in time come to favour their union and provide a dowry, and this brought them within the scope of the law against fornication.
Now, Angelo could have exercised mercy, realizing that this was a very minor infringement indeed, and that the two were, in all but the outward ceremony itself, legally married, but Angelo is a cold fish and a sadistic, ruthless dictator. He likes to hurt people and make them squirm; it gives him pleasure. Believe me, I know.
Finding himself so suddenly and inexplicably condemned to death, Claudio asked me to intercede with Angelo on his behalf and see if I could secure a pardon. This I did, with disastrous results: Angelo told me he was in love with me, and he would only let Claudio go if I slept with him.
Now, while I do realize that in many people’s eyes to give up one’s virginity for one’s brother’s life might not seem too much to ask, you must bear in mind that I was to join the votarists of St Clare. I was to be married to God. This was my life, my destiny, and all of that – my very soul itself – would be sacrificed if I gave in to Angelo’s base demands.
And don’t think I didn’t care about Claudio. Don’t think for a moment that the thought of complying didn’t cross my mind, but I wasn’t going to give in to that kind of blackmail. I didn’t trust Angelo anyway. For all I knew, he might take my virginity and have Claudio executed as well – which, as it turned out, was exactly what he had in mind.
The whole process was degrading, me pleading passionately for my brother’s life, going down on my knees on the cold stone to beg, Angelo making it clear that only by yielding up my body to his will could I save Claudio. Humiliating.
When I told him my decision, Claudio wasn’t at all understanding. Of everyone, he should have been the one to see how important my virginity was, but no. He even had the effrontery to suggest that I should reconsider and commit this vile sin to save his life. Claudio was afraid of death, and all he could talk about was his fear of dying when I was facing a much greater enemy than death.