“Everyone should visit it once in their lives. Preferably when they are about thirty. Then they would be old enough to realize how marvelous it is, to feel something of all it has been and sense the past around them, to give depth to the present. And yet they would still be young enough for the flavor to enrich the larger portion of their lives.” The train jolted hard, and then continued forward at greater speed. “I think it is a shame to have your miracles in life when you are too young, and in too much of a hurry to realize what they are. It is a terrible thing to know your blessings only in hindsight.”
Hester was considering the impact of that thought so seriously she did not reply.
“But you have also traveled,” Mary said, her eyes bright on Hester’s face. “And far more interestingly than I-at least for the most part. Oonagh told me you were in the Crimea. If you are not pained by recalling it, I should most dearly like to hear something of your experiences. I admit, my mind is filled with questions in a manner most unbecoming. I am sure it must be ill-bred to inquire so much, but I am old enough not to care what is considered proper.”
Hester had found many peoples’ questions poorly framed and based on assumptions made from the peace and ignorance of England, where the vast majority knew only what newspapers told them. Although that knowledge was now increasing their ability to criticize and raise doubts, it still carried very little of the passion or the horror of reality.
“It brings back distressing memories?” Mary said quickly, apology vivid in her voice.
“No, not at all,” Hester denied, more in courtesy than strict taith. Her memories were sharp and complex, but she had seldom found herself desiring to escape them. “I fear that they may become tedious for people because I felt so strongly about so much, I tend to repeat myself about the wrongs and omit the details which may make the tale more interesting.”
“I should not be in the least interested in a well-considered and emotionless account that I might read in my daily newspaper.” Mary shook her head vigorously. ‘Tell me what you felt. What surprised you most? What was best, and what was worst?” She waved a long hand dismissively. “I don’t mean the suffering of the men, I shall take that for granted. I mean for yourself.”
The train had settled with a steady rhythm that was almost soothing in its regularity.
“Rats,” Hester answered without hesitation. “The sound of rats falling off the walls onto the floor; that, and waking up cold.” The memory was sharp as she said it, blurring the present and the sense of the warm rug around her. “It wasn’t so bad once you were up and moving around-and thinking of what you were doing-but when you woke up in the night and were too cold to go back to sleep again, no matter how tired you were, that’s what stays with me most.” She smiled. “Waking up warm, pulling the blankets close around me, hearing the sound of the rain outside, and knowing that there is nothing alive in the room except me, that’s marvelous.”
Mary laughed, a rich sound of pure enjoyment.
“What an unpredictable faculty memory is. The oddest things will bring back times and places we had long thought lost in the past.” She leaned back in the seat, her face relaxed, her eyes on some distance of the imagination. “You know, I was born the year after the fall of the Bastille-”
“The fall of the Bastille?” Hester was confused.
Mary did not look at her, but kept her gaze on the sudden memory that was apparently woken so sharply. “The revolution in France, Louis the Sixteenth, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre…”
“Oh! Oh, of course.”
But Mary was still lost in her own thoughts. “Those were such times. The Emperor had all Europe under his heel.” Her voice sank in awe so it was barely audible above the rattle of the wheels over the ties. “He was twenty miles away across the channel, and only the navy stood between his armies and England-and then of course Scotland too.” The smile on her lips broadened, and in spite of the lines in her face and her silver hair, there was in her a radiance and an innocence as though the years between had fallen away and she was a young woman momentarily caught in an old woman’s body. “I remember the spirit we had then. We expected invasion every day. Everyone’s eyes were turned eastward. We had lookouts on the cliff tops and beacon fires ready to light the moment the first Frenchman set foot on the shore. Right up and down the coast every man, woman and child was watching and waiting, homemade weapons ready to hand. We would have fought till the very last of us was dead before we would have let them conquer us.”
Hester said nothing. England had been secure all her lifetime. She could imagine what it might have been like to fear foreign soldiers trampling through the streets, burning the houses, laying waste the fields and farms, but it was only imagination, it could never touch the reality. Even in the very worst days in the Crimea when the allied armies were losing, she had always known England itself was peaceful, impregnable, and except in small, private bereavements, untouched.
“The newspapers used to print terrible cartoons of him.” Mary’s smile broadened for a moment, then vanished suddenly, and she shivered, looking directly at Hester. “Mothers used to terrify their naughty children by threatening that ‘Bony’ would get them. They used to say that he ate little children, and there were pictures of him with a great gaping mouth, and a knife and fork in his hands, and Europe on his plate.”
The train slowed almost to walking speed as it climbed a steep gradient. A man’s voice shouted something indistinguishable. A whistle blew.
“And then when I had my own children in Edinburgh,” Mary went on, “people used to frighten the disobedient with stories of Burke and Hare. Odd, isn’t it, how much more sinister that seems now? Two Irishmen who started selling corpses to a doctor so he could teach his students anatomy, then progressing to robbing graves, and finally to murder.”
The train began to pick up speed again. She looked at Hester curiously.
“Why does murder to dissect the corpses chill the blood in a way murder to rob never can? After it all came out in 1829, and Burke was hanged-Hare never was, you know! For all I can say, he’s still alive now!” She shivered. “But afterwards, I remember we had a maid who left without giving notice. We never knew where she went-off with some man, in all probability-but of course all the other servants said Burke and Hare had got her, and she was cut up in pieces somewhere!”
She wrapped her shawl tighter around her, although the carriage was no colder than it had been before, and their feet were on the footwarmer and snugly wrapped in a blanket.
“Alastair was about twelve then.” She bit her lip. “And Oonagh was seven, old enough to have heard the stories and understood the terror they woke. One night, it was late in the winter and there was a fearful storm, I heard the thunder and got up to see if everything was all right. I found the two of them together in Oonagh’s room, sitting up in bed, huddled under the blanket with the candle lit. I knew what had happened. Alastair had had a nightmare. He had them sometimes. And he had gone into her room, ostensibly to see if she was all right, but really because he wanted the comfort of being with her himself. She was frightened too; I can still see her face in my mind, white-skinned, wide-eyed, but busy telling Alastair about Burke having been hanged and that he was quite dead.” She gave a dry little laugh. “She described it in detail, she was so certain of it.”
Hester could picture it. Two children sitting together, each pretending to assure the other, and whispering in hushed voices of the horrors of body snatchers, resurrectionists, secret murder in dark alleys, and the dissector’s bloody table. Such memory runs deep, perhaps below the surface of consciousness, but those things shared forge a trust which excludes other, later, comers. She had no such moments with her elder brother, Charles. He had always been a little on his dignity, even from the earliest times she could recall. It had been James with whom she had had adventures and secrets. But James had been killed in the Crimea.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said quietly, her voice cutting across Hester’s thoughts. “I have said something that distressed you.” It was not a question but an observation.
Hester was startled. She had not thought Mary was more than peripherally aware of her, certainly not enough to notice her feelings.
“Perhaps resurrectionists were not the most sensitive of subjects to raise,” Mary said ruefully.
“Not at all,” Hester assured her. “I was thinking of the two children together, and remembering my younger brother. My elder brother was always a little pompous, but James was fun.”
“You speak of him in the past. Is he-gone?” Mary’s voice was suddenly gentle, as if she knew bereavement only too well.
“Yes, in the Crimea,” Hester replied.
“I’m so sorry. To say I know how you feel would be ridiculous, but I have some idea. I had a brother killed at Waterloo.” She said the word carefully, rolling it off her tongue as if it held some mystic quality. To many of Hester’s
