Anna

Chapter Eleven

It snowed again that morning, the flakes falling with cat’s-paw softness on to the glittering, frozen city. Anne stood at her window and watched the endless, silent whirling from a sky the colour of a gull’s back, blotting out the view and making instead for her a magical, miniature landscape of drifts and hollows along the glazing bars of the window. It was March, still a month away from the thaw.

Ottepel – the thaw: an event so dramatic, so overwhelming, that Russian poets without number had used it as a simile for every kind of violent change from the emotional to the political. Anne had seen three of them since she came to Russia, as each year the revolving world turned back towards the sun, and the lengthening daylight hours began at last to warm the frozen northlands.

The first intimation would be the pink-tinged mist at dawn, and the long-absent sound of water dripping from the eaves and gutters. Then the ice on the Neva would suddenly split with a violent report like a cannon shot, and begin to break up. For a week, huge ice floes would move slowly downstream towards the Gulf, more and more of them, fed in from the ice-bound Lake Lagoda. They passed in endless procession like a migration of primordial beasts, magnificent in their heedlessness, grinding their shoulders against each other like rocks, jostling against the quays with a booming thud. The river, which all winter had been a road, and all summer would be a waterway, for a time was unusable. The banks were cut off from each other, except when some daring soul ventured out on to the ice and risked the crossing by jumping from one floe to the next.

As the ice melted, so would the snow in the streets. Underfoot it turned to treacherous slush, and galoshed boots replaced the felt valenki for those determined to walk. Sledges were put away, and the first wheeled vehicles churned the streets into grey-brown mires, flinging icy water over unlucky pedestrians. The dripping sound hastened into gurgling as the world threw off its winter-long accumulation of water: butts filled, gutters overflowed, and masses of softened snow slid suddenly and perilously from roofs. Everything was wet, cold and wet, and the air became a damp, grey blanket of fog through which the sun shone dimly, tracking across the sky a little higher each day.

And yet in the space of only two or three weeks, the whole thing was accomplished, and the blue-white, smooth and glittering world of winter would be gone, dislimning as completely as a dream. Suddenly there was colour again, the greens and browns of nature, the blue of cupola and the gold of spire; the sun shone, pallid but daily strengthening, from a vivid, spring-blue sky.

Then would come the day when the Peter and Paul Fortress at the mouth of the river fired its cannon as a signal that the river was open for navigation. As if conjured from nothing by the sound, hundreds of little boats, like gaily coloured insects, would instantly appear, filling the miracle of reflection between the banks. That first day, the tall, lovely buildings would echo with voices and laughter and music, as if the pent-up mirth of the city had been set loose to flow again, as the clear water bubbled up out of the unlocked earth like joy. Then the Governor of the Fortress would be rowed in a ceremonial barge, ornate and canopied as a Venetian gondola, to the quay in front of the Winter Palace, where he would present to the Tsar a glass of cold water as a symbol that the winter was truly over.

But that was all a month away at least, and, looking out on the smooth, unbroken integrity of the frozen world outside her window, Anne had her usual spasm of disbelief that this could be anything but the permanent order of things. While she had been standing there, deep in her reverie, the snow had stopped, and now the thermometer on the window-frame outside told her that it was freezing hard again. The sky was like stone, heavy with the threat of more snow to come, and her heart was numb, too, with apprehensions of disaster and the weariness of waiting for news. A month ago there had been a battle in snow-bound Lithuania between the French and the Russians. The Russians had claimed it as a victory; but the Count was missing.

It was odd to think, Anne reflected, that it had all started with the Duc d’Enghien, that handsome, auburn-haired Bourbon prince whom she had met briefly at the court at Karlsruhe. She remembered his gaiety, his lightness, the way the Princess had tapped his cheek affectionately with her fan, and could hardly believe that he had ever had anything more weighty on his mind than hunting, dancing and flirtations. But in February 1804, the French police had uncovered a plot to assassinate Bonaparte, one of many such since the Corsican had taken supreme power. It was secretly financed by the British government, and a leading figure in the conspiracy was said to be this same Duc d’Enghien.

It seemed that his role was to liaise between the emigrants in England and the Breton royalists who were fomenting the plot, and in particular to ride post-haste to Paris as soon as the Consul was dead, and proclaim the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Bonaparte evidently decided to make an example of the young Prince. In March 1804 he dispatched a force of three hundred dragoons secretly to Strasbourg. They crossed the Rhine in the dead of night, surrounded the castle of Ettenheim, dragged the Duc from his bed, and bundled him, protesting, into a coach, in which he was galloped under strict guard to Paris. There he was brought before a military tribunal, and summarily condemned for fomenting civil war. At two-thirty in the morning of the 21st of March, he was executed by firing-squad in the waterless moat of the fortress of Vincennes.

The news of this abduction and judicial murder caused a violent wave of reaction in all the courts of Europe, and nowhere more than in St Petersburg. By his act, Bonaparte had violated the territorial integrity of Baden, which was the principality of the Empress’s mother; and to this political indignation was added personal grief for the handsome, high-spirited young Prince, whom the imperial family had known and loved. The Empress Elisabeth broke down and wept at the news of his execution, and a full week of formal mourning was ordered for the Court.

The Emperor was incensed, regarding the incident as a personal affront; and his antipathy towards Bonaparte was further strengthened when, only two months later, the Corsican had himself declared Emperor of the French. When that piece of news had arrived, Anne had reminded the Count of their discussion at the ball in Paris about ambition.

‘Emperor of France today; ruler of the world tomorrow. Can anyone now doubt that that is his desire?’

‘It was inevitable he should take this step,’ the Count replied with a shrug. ‘Ambition of his sort has only one, well-marked path it can tread. As First Consul, he had the power, but not the mystery: he was too vulnerable. You remember that line from Hamlet – “There is a divinity which hedgeth round a king”?’

‘But can he think it will protect him?’ Anne said. ‘Kings are made of flesh and blood: they can be murdered.’

‘It isn’t a matter of that. He has a large country to rule, and hopes to make it larger. An elected consul is only one government official ruling over others, and in every province there would be ambitious men eager to take his place. But a king – or an emperor – occupies a realm far removed from government office. He can be adulated by the people – almost worshipped – and he cannot be demoted.’

‘Yes, I see that,’ Anne said. ‘And I suppose in time people would forget how he came by his royal state.’

‘Don’t forget, either, that kings can also leave sons to carry on after them,’ the Count said. He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. ‘It is all inevitable, you know – everything that has happened, and that will happen, in France. Men do not change. Once the Revolution began, it was inevitable that one man would emerge to take power, and that having power, he would seek to establish his own dynasty. Now every man’s hand will be against him. Europe will be convulsed with war, and men will die. Eventually Bonaparte will be defeated, at great cost to everyone; and all of that is inevitable too. We learn nothing from history; it is in our nature that we never will.’

‘And will Russia go to war?’ Anne asked.

‘I think so,’ the Count said. ‘I told you once that whether or not we joined the war would be the personal decision of the Tsar; and this business with d’Enghien has afforded just the personal reason he needs.’

The Count had proved right. By April 1805, Russia had signed treaties of alliance with Austria, Sweden and England, and in August, Kirov, resplendent in the white and gold uniform of a colonel of cavalry, rode off to take up his command in Poland.

That had been an anxious year for Anne, waiting day by day for news of the planned invasion of England by Bonaparte – now calling himself the Emperor Napoleon – with the army he had assembled along the Channel coast. Deprived of the support of the Count’s presence and worried for his safety, she yet had to try to comfort the Countess for the same pains she was suffering herself. The news of the great sea battle off Cape Trafalgar in October 1805, in which the English fleet under Admiral Nelson had destroyed the combined French and Spanish force, relieved Anne’s mind of one anxiety. It was impossible that the French, blockaded as they were, would be able to build another fleet. As long as the English navy ruled the seas, England herself was safe.

But bad news followed good: in December a terrible and bloody battle was fought at Austerlitz, seventy miles from Vienna, and the combined Russian and Austrian army was utterly routed by the French. In an incredibly short time, Napoleon had marched the army he had assembled at Boulogne for the invasion of England over 700 miles across France and Bavaria into Austria, there to defeat a force twice as large. Of the allied army, twenty-seven thousand men were killed or captured; after the battle, the Emperor Alexander, who had insisted on directing the campaign in person, sat down among the Russian dead and wept.

With Vienna occupied by French troops, the Austrian Emperor was forced to submit to Napoleon. The Holy Roman Empire was no more: Austria was stripped of half its territories in the Treaty of Pressburg, and Napoleon was recognised in his newly assumed title of King of Italy. With Tsar Alexander back in Petersburg and his army licking its wounds in winter camp, the war might have ended there; for with the death of Pitt there was a change of government in England, and the new government under Fox was anxious for peace.

Through spring and summer of 1806, tentative talks went on between the emissaries of England and France, with Hanover – principality of the King of England, but at present occupied by French troops – as the bait and the prize. But even as they talked, Napoleon formed sixteen small German states into a single entity, called the Confederation of the Rhine, making it a state within the French Empire with himself as Protector, and it seemed increasingly unlikely that he meant to let Hanover go. When he prepared to invade the previously neutral Portugal, the English sent a fleet to Lisbon to protect it, and the prospect of peace receded.

The Count spent a month at home in August 1806, and Vera Borisovna brought Sergei to visit his father. The talk was inevitably of war, with Sergei fretting that he was not old enough to serve alongside his father.

‘Don’t worry, Seryosha,’ the Count said with a grim smile. ‘There will be plenty more fighting to come. You will have your share.’

‘But isn’t it all over?’ Sergei asked. ‘I thought, after Austerlitz–’

‘No, no, my dear. Napoleon has Austria; now he will have Prussia. The Confederation of the Rhine is the first step towards extending his empire northwards, right to the banks of the Nieman. He has a great belief in what he calls ‘natural territory’ – a sort of geographical logic, you know.’

‘You don’t think – he won’t try to take Russia too?’ the Countess asked faintly.

The Count frowned. ‘I think not–’

‘He could not do it,’ Sergei broke in boisterously. ‘No one could conquer Russia – it’s too big! He would not be so mad as to try!’

‘Apart from that,’ the Count went on calmly, ‘I don’t believe Napoleon would attempt it for another reason. He has a strange admiration for our Emperor – looks upon him as a sort of spiritual brother. It is not widely known that before Austerlitz he sent twice to our camp asking for a personal meeting with the Tsar to talk peace; and that after the battle, he sent another message along the same lines. It’s my belief that he thinks it would be a fulfilment of the natural order of things, if Europe were divided into two great empires, France and Russia, ruled by himself and Alexander, bound together in brotherly love.’

‘He is mad, then?’ Anne said quietly.

The Count looked at her for a moment. ‘Yes, I think so,’ he said at last. ‘And yet – there is something appealing about such magnitude of vision. It is the faint scent on the breeze, the hint that man could be greater than he is.’

‘At the price of so many thousands dead,’ Anne reminded him.

‘Yes,’ the Count said. ‘An unacceptable price, of course. We do not yet seem to have found another way to greatness.’

‘But what about music, painting, architecture?’ Anne protested. ‘Look at Petersburg, for instance. Is that not greater than the sum of the men who built it?’

The Count smiled at her in perfect sympathy. ‘You chose your example badly – thousands of serfs died to raise Petersburg from the swamps. But I grant you the point. Perhaps a great cathedral is almost as grand a vision as a mighty empire.’

Sergei looked bored with the turn the conversation had taken. ‘But Father, will Napoleon really fight Prussia? We heard that he had offered them Hanover in exchange for their neutrality.’

‘He won’t give Hanover to Prussia any more than he will give it to England. Why should he? He has little to fear from Frederick William.’

‘Who are you talking of, Koko?’ said Vera Borisovna, walking into the room at that moment. ‘The King of Prussia? Oh, he’s a poor creature, nothing like his great-uncle, Frederick the Great. Now there was a ruler! He was on the best of terms with our dear Empress Catherine, you know. In those days, Europe was ruled by great monarchs, a giant breed who seem, alas, to be extinct in these poor modern times! Now there is nothing but an unprincipled Corsican bandit, and spineless creatures like the Austrian Emperor, signing away his patrimony, and that half-witted, vacillating oaf in Berlin. His wife is more of a man than he is. Why doesn’t he drive Bonaparte out?’

‘He will probably try, Mama,’ the Count said mildly, ‘but I doubt whether he will succeed. Napoleon’s star is still rising. The time has not yet come when he can be defeated.’

The Countess was looking at him with wide, surprised eyes, but Vera Borisovna had merely snorted contemptuously. ‘Mystical rubbish! He is a common little man who rose through the ranks, and he can be sent back the same way. He has armies? Send armies against him! He lives by the sword? Let him die by the sword!’

There was never any point in arguing with Vera Borisovna, so the Count changed the subject at that point; but after dinner, while strolling on the terrace, he told Anne that Frederick William was even then in negotiation with the Tsar, for his support if he declared war on France.

‘I don’t think the Tsar will refuse to help,’ the Count said. ‘As soon as they reach an agreement, war will be declared, and I will have to leave you all again.’ He lapsed into silence, leaning on the parapet and staring sightlessly at the blue wreaths of smoke rising from his neglected cigar.

‘Will it be for long?’ Anne asked quietly.

‘Yes, I think so. It will not take long for Napoleon to defeat Prussia; but my fear is that he will interfere in Poland, and that will mean that we will enter the war on our own behalf, not just to help Frederick William.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Anne said.

He smiled. ‘No, how should you? I will explain, if you are ready for a little history lesson.’

‘You know that I am always eager to learn,’ Anne said.

‘Yes, I know. That was one of the things I always liked about you, Anna Petrovna: your mind is not closed and shuttered like most women’s – like most people’s indeed! Well, then, we must go back to the last century, when, as my mother told us so eloquently, the world was ruled by those giant figures, Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia. Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great.’

‘Were they so great?’ Anne asked.

‘You doubt it? Little cynic! They were, at least, ruthless, which often does just as well in a ruler. At any rate, with the help of the Emperor of Austria, they carved up the Kingdom of Poland into three portions, and swallowed them. Austria took the southern Polish province of Galicia; Russia took the provinces bordering the Ukraine, along with Lithuania and the northern seaboard territories; and that left Prussia with the ancient Polish Crown lands, the capital of Warsaw, and the seaport of Danzig – which up until then had been a sort of free state with its own autonomous government.’

‘Rather hard on the Polish people,’ Anne suggested.

‘Straight to the heart of it, as usual,’ the Count nodded approvingly. ‘Yes, it was; and the Poles are a fiercely patriotic people. Well, we Russians haven’t had much trouble with our share of the partition, because our way of life isn’t much different from theirs, and we leave them alone a good deal. But the Crown Lands were the heart of Poland, and they hate Prussian rule. That’s where the trouble is likely to begin. Last year Czartoryski, our Foreign Minister, who happens to be a Pole himself, begged the Tsar to help the Polish cause; but he wouldn’t interfere, and that, of course, leaves the way clear for Napoleon to become their national hero instead.’

‘But how?’

‘By helping to recreate the Kingdom of Poland – with himself as overlord, of course. I imagine he will offer to help them free themselves from Prussia, in return for their becoming a satellite kingdom within the French Empire. The Poles are proud, and Napoleon is not without tact, so he will probably not ask to be called King, or Emperor, or Protector, or whatever is this year’s title, but that’s what it will amount to. And then, naturally, the Poles will want their lands back, which now belong to Russia.’

‘And the Tsar, of course, will not agree,’ Anne said thoughtfully.

‘Of course not. It will mean real war between us and France, not this half-hearted business of helping Austria and helping Prussia.’

Anne sought for something comforting to say. ‘Perhaps if it is real war, it will be over the sooner,’ she said.

He looked at her for a moment, and then laughed. ‘Well tried! But it would be more to the purpose if you offered to play to me on the pianoforte. Music has charms, you know, to soothe a savage breast.’

‘Likewise, “music oft hath such a charm to make bad good, and good provoke to harm”,’ Anne returned.

The count considered. ‘Shakespeare,’ he said at last.

‘That’, she said severely, ‘was pure guesswork.’

‘It’s a long time since we played that game,’ he smiled, and offered her his arm. ‘Come and play to me, and we’ll see who was right.’

Prussia declared war on France in September 1806, and the Count rode away again to join his regiment, this time in Lithuania. Napoleon defeated the Prussians in a devastatingly short campaign, crushing their armies at Jena and Auerstadt on October the 14th in a single day. Thereafter, the Prussian Empire collapsed in a series of retreats and surrenders; and by December, French troops were trotting into Warsaw to be greeted as deliverers by the delirious inhabitants. From every side, Polish nobles and their followers streamed into Warsaw, eager to offer their services. Napoleon had made the offer the Count had foreseen, and as the bitter Polish winter closed in on the armies of France and Russia, a new Polish state was being created under the leadership of Prince Joseph Poniatowski, the nephew of the country’s last king.

The Count had written what he knew of these events from a camp near Konigsberg, where he was with his regiment under the overall command of the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, as short, pug-nosed and hot-tempered as Alexander was tall, handsome and serene. News came infrequently, much delayed and frequently garbled or contradictory. There had been a short, fierce but inconclusive battle in December between the Russians and the French at Pultusk, after which the French had retired into winter quarters, and nothing more was expected to be heard until the thaw.

But three weeks ago news had filtered through of a further engagement. The Russians, it seemed, had attacked the French in winter quarters at Preuss-Eylau. A running battle had been fought through the town, with heavy losses on both sides, but the French, it was claimed, had had the worst of it. It was the nearest thing the Russians had had yet to a victory, and there was rejoicing in Petersburg. In the Kirov Palace they did not celebrate. The Count’s regiment had been one of those engaged, and as yet there had been no news of him.

A scratching on the door of her chamber roused Anne from her reverie, and a maid came in to say that Fräulein Hoffnung had finished giving the girls their German lesson and wondered, as it had stopped snowing, whether they ought to take their walk now, in case it should begin again.

‘I’ll come,’ Anne said, having little difficulty in translating this as a cry for help. Bad weather lately had confined Lolya and Nasha to the house a great deal, making them even more boisterous and high-spirited than usual; and Fräulein Hoffnung had a head cold.

‘Run along to Nyanka, girls, and put on your outdoor things,’ Anne said as she lifted the siege. The Fräulein rolled grateful eyes in her direction, and drew out her third handkerchief of the day. ‘And you had much better go to bed,’ Anne added to the sufferer as the children ran away. ‘You don’t look at all the thing.’

As soon as they were outside, Lolya and Nasha rushed off like dogs frisking, and were soon snowballing each other and shrieking with all the force of their pent-up energy. Lolya, now almost thirteen, had reached the age when her normal propensity was to behave like a hoyden. She bubbled over all day long with energy, and her high spirits were sometimes violent, especially when bad weather confined her indoors for any length of time; but she was gradually learning the accomplishments of a woman and beginning to take an interest in her future marriage prospects; and had fits of worrying that she was little taller at thirteen than she had been at nine.

‘When will I grow, Anna Petrovna?’ she would ask anxiously. ‘How tall were you when you were my age? What if I never grow any more, ever?’

Anne’s attempts to reassure her were defeated by the fact that her cousin Kira was six inches taller than her, and even more so by the fact that Nasha had suddenly shot up and, at six and a half, could easily keep up with her. Anne had been glad to see the friendship growing between the sisters. Natasha was mature in advance of her years, and Lolya now found in her an acceptable companion for her games and a sympathetic listener to her troubles.

Nasha was a good listener. After the incident at the ice-fair, she had not spoken again for some time, but it was clear that it was from disinclination, not inability, and her reading and writing skills grew rapidly from that point. Anne took great pleasure in teaching her, because she was so eager to learn. Lolya only learned to please Anne, or because she thought it would be useful to her in later life; but Nasha had a real hunger for knowledge for its own sake. She still spoke little, rarely volunteering a remark, and answering more often than not with gestures and nods of the head; but she wrote reams, stories and poems and strange internal monologues, and made pencil sketches and tiny coloured paintings which she showed to Anne with the confidence of love.

Anne received them with pleasure and a certain tingling of unease. Both the writing and the drawing presented a view of the world which was strangely familiar, and yet which gave the impression of being slightly distorted in a way Anne could not quite pin down. It was as if she were looking through one of the crystals of the lustre in the great hall: everything appeared tiny and radiantly clear, rainbow edged, and infinitesimally out of shape.

As well as her silence, Nasha had retained her self-absorption. Left alone, she would amuse herself quite happily all day long, writing or drawing, or simply staring into the fire or out of the window for hours at a time, her golden eyes blank and shining, her face serene as she travelled through some landscape of thought which was entirely satisfying to her. While Lolya had the normal child’s love of novelty, playing with a thing briefly and discarding it when her attention was diverted, Nasha had an intensity of focus which could shut out interruptions, land she would carry one thing around with her all day, to feel it and look at it until she knew it absolutely.

But with all that, there were enough times when, as now, she rushed about, shrieking and romping with Lolya, for Anne to feel there was no need to worry about her. Nasha had unusual talents, but she was a normal, healthy child as well. Anne was not entirely sure that it was always Lolya who initiated their naughty pranks, though it was usually she who took the blame. Yesterday, for instance, when they had tried to make an indoor skating rink in one of the unused rooms of the palace, by opening the top windows and pouring water on the floor. There had been something about Nasha’s face that had made Anne suspect it was she who first thought of it; but Lolya was the one who had argued, justified, defended, and finally sighed and accepted punishment.

They needed a firm hand, Anne thought with a sigh, and though they minded her pretty well, there were times when she wished there was a higher authority to whom to appeal. But the Count was away, and the Countess, though physically present, was growing more absent, it seemed, every day.

Walking along the quay behind the children, Anne thought about her with a mixture of anxiety, pain, and exasperation. Irina had never been the same since Sashka was born. In fact, she had begun to change even during that pregnancy. Anne remembered how for the first few happy days, she had basked in the joy of accomplished love. The Count had treated her like something fragile and precious, and Anne had been driven nearly mad with fiercely suppressed jealousy. But then Vera Borisovna had returned to the palace from her visit and had been told the news that the hated interloper was pregnant again. Anne had watched the Dowager’s lips whiten with fury, and for a moment had thought that she would actually forget herself and let out all her rage and spite.

But the moment passed. Vera Borisovna controlled herself, and uttered a few words of congratulation, though in such a cold and loathing voice that even the Count could not have believed she meant them. Irina seemed to shrink together under the icy glare like something blighted by frost, and the joy went out of the pregnancy. From then on it brought her only misery. Physically she was unwell, troubled with continuous nausea, cramps, headaches, insomnia, and later backache and painfully swollen legs. Yet those were the least of her problems: it was the Dowager’s persecution which really made the pregnancy a torment. Vera Borisovna was furious that another half-caste was to be brought into the world to steal her precious grandchildren’s inheritance from them, and in every way she could, she vented her spite on Irina.

It was a subtle and unrelenting campaign. The Dowager could not attack openly, or do anything that might provoke her son to remonstrate; but she was a master in the art of the veiled insult, the criticism disguised as kindly advice, the reminiscence designed to undermine confidence. The Count, seeing his wife grow pale and thin, expressed his concern about her, giving his mother a new opening; for now, under the guise of concern for Irina’s health, the Dowager could describe in lingering detail all the miscarriages, birth agonies and childbed deaths she had ever witnessed or heard about .

There came a day when Irina, while talking to Nyanka about the state of the linen cupboard, collapsed in tears on that broad, familiar breast and sobbed out her fears that the Dowager was ill-wishing her, that she would give birth to a deformed child or die in childbed. Nyanka, fierce in her motherliness like a mountain bear, offered to go at once and turn the Dowager bodily out of the house. But Irina, her sobs subsiding, begged her to say and do nothing, afraid that any intervention would only make things worse. Nyanka insisted on giving her the phial of St Nino’s blood to wear around her neck as protection against the Evil Eye and stamped about the house muttering imprecations, crossing herself whenever she passed the Dowager. At the end of the day, when the Count returned home, Nyanka cornered him and told him bluntly that if the Dowager did not leave, she could not answer for the consequences.

‘My mistress’s nerves are all to pieces,’ Nyanka said, fixing him with a steely eye, ‘and if you want your son to be born alive, you must do something about it.’

Anne was not privy to the interview which took place between the Count and the Dowager. The Dowager did not leave for Moscow for another month, but during that time, she kept herself distant from the Countess, and persecuted her only by treating her to a cold politeness whenever they met. After she had departed, the Countess revived a little, but like a flower left too long out of water, she did not regain her spring. The Dowager seemed a continuing presence, and even from the remoteness of Moscow managed to continue the campaign by writing weekly letters describing the excellent qualities of Yelena Vassilovna’s son and doubting that anyone else’s child could begin to match him, wondering if Irina Pavlovna’s delicate health had improved at all, and uttering vague threats about the future disposition of her personal fortune. Anne, urged on by Nyanka, would have kept these letters from the Countess, even going so far as to beg her not to open them, but they seemed to exercise a black fascination over her. The Countess read them because not knowing what they said was worse than the reality.

The baby was finally born at Schwartzenturm in August, a perfectly formed, if rather small, baby boy; but the labour went hard with Irina, and she was unwell for a long time afterwards. Even when she did rise from her bed, she did not regain her former strength and spirits, but remained listless, depressed, and more silent than ever. She seemed unable to take any interest in the child, whom they named Alexander; and as soon as he was done with his wet-nurse, he seemed to turn quite naturally to Anne for mothering.

From his small beginnings, Sashka had thrived and grown, filling Anne with a different kind of love from anything she had ever known before. It was the first time she had ever known a human creature from birth, and as Irina turned away from the boy, Anne began to feel almost as if Sashka were her own son. Everything to do with him gave her great joy: to feed and bathe him, rock him and play with him, even to stand by his crib and watch him sleep. She was fascinated by his growing intelligence, and at times she felt she could almost see the unmarked, malleable clay of his infant mind taking shape as each new experience was impressed upon it. From the first moment he reached out a hand and encountered the bars of his crib, he was discovering where his own self ended and the rest of the universe began. It was a process Anne loved to watch, and with only a light hand she guided his exploration of the world, and his learning, day by day, the nature of things and how to respond to them.

It was for Anne that Sashka first smiled; it was she who placed objects in his fat little hands to examine and, inevitably, suck; towards her he made his first crawling movements, and with her aid first stood upright and took a bow-legged, wavering step. When he spoke his first word, it was Annan, uttered with a beaming smile and outflung arms towards his adoptive mother.

Now, as she walked along the quay watching Lolya and Nasha race ahead and snowball each other, Sashka was stumping along manfully beside her, and his hand locked fast in hers seemed as natural a concomitant to walking as her own legs. He was the more absolutely hers because his father had been absent from home, with only two brief visits, since he was a year old. The Count barely knew his son; Irina had no interest in him; Vera Borisovna refused to acknowledge he existed. Sashka was hers; and while with her conscious mind she might tell herself that as governess to the Kirov household it was her business to raise Alexander, there was a dark, atavistic place inside her that loved the child with a fierce, maternal passion. Sashka was the child of the Count that she should have borne.

Tanya, who was walking beside her pushing the baby-sledge, a sort of baby-carriage on runners, for when Sashka’s legs grew tired, said, ‘There’s a gentleman over there waving, mademoiselle. I think it might be Count Tchaikovsky.’

Anne turned her head. ‘Yes, you are right. We’ll wait for him. Call the children back, Tanya.’

The figure in fur hat and long sable coat would not have been recognisable at that distance as Basil Tchaikovsky, except for the white boots he affected, which he claimed were made from polar bear fur, and his gold-headed ebony walking-stick. Anne waited for him to close on her with a degree of pleasure she would not have imagined possible three years ago; but he had changed in the time she had known him, becoming a great deal more sensible and a little less conceited. The Count had been struck by it the last time he had been home and had teased Anne on the effect she had had on her lover.

‘He is trying to win your approval, Anna, that’s what it is. You will make a man of him yet.’

Anne had denied it hotly, protesting that she was not so vain and foolish as to suppose that she could have wrought any change in him; yet it was hard not to conclude that his idle plan of making her popular had resulted in his coming genuinely to admire her. She could not say he precisely courted her; but he sought her company, and was at pains to please her; and this winter, for the first time in his life, he had come to Petersburg without his sister.

It was he who had brought the first news of the battle at Preuss-Eylau to the Kirov household, and since then had oscillated between the Court and the Angliskaya Naberezhna, using his influence at the former to beg intelligence for the latter. His attentions had been kind, and though he was still very much a man of fashion, he seemed to Anne much less of a coxcomb, and she liked him the better for it.

He reached her now, his breath smoking with his haste, the tip of his thin nose crimson with the cold, and held out hands encased in huge sable gauntlets, like a bear’s paws.

‘Anna Petrovna! I’m glad I spotted you walking along. I was just on my way to call on you at the Palace.’ His bulging eyes were alight with some excitement, and he closed both paws over the hand she offered.

‘Is it news?’ she asked, suddenly breathless.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking down at her with some unfathomable emotion. ‘It is news of Kirov. He is found. He is alive.’

Anne’s apprehensions seized on the words. ‘Alive! What do you mean? Is he hurt?’

Before Tchaikovsky could answer, the children came running up.

‘Basil Andreyevitch!’ Lolya called. ‘Why are you walking? Where’s your troika? Are your greys lame? Are you going to walk with us? If you come with us, we could go as far as the winter garden, and see the aviary.’

‘Basil Andreyevitch does not want to see the aviary, you foolish child,’ Anne said with a nervous smile. ‘We are going to turn back now, so that he can pay his respects to your mama.’ Lolya pouted. ‘Oh, pooh! I don’t want to turn back – we’ve only been out a minute. Anna, do let’s go on! There’s a new scarlet parrot at the aviary and you can see Basil Andreyevitch any time.’

But Nasha, watching Anne’s face carefully, tugged briefly at her sleeve and mouthed the word ‘Papa?’ Anne nodded, tears jumping to her eyes. Lolya had not noticed this exchange, and Basil, trying to be helpful, solemnly offered her his arm, and said, ‘I think it is going to snow again very soon. Your walk had better be postponed until a finer day. Won’t you do me the honour of allowing me to escort you, Yelena Nikolayevna?’

Lolya hesitated, torn between the pleasure of such grown-up attentions and her disapproval of this particular gentleman. ‘Well,’ she said, placing her hand doubtfully on his arm, ‘I suppose I might. But I still think it’s very poor-spirited of you not to go and fight the French. If I were a man, I’d have gone.’

‘I’m sure you would – and heaven help the French if you had! But someone had to stay, you know, to look after you ladies,’ Basil said gravely.

‘We’d have looked after ourselves,’ Lolya said stoutly. ‘I don’t see that that was very important.’

Anne could not listen to any more of this. ‘Children, why don’t you run on ahead of us? You needn’t go indoors yet. Ask Stefan to take you tobogganing in the garden. Tanya, go with them – and take Sashka in the sledge. I think he’s walked far enough.’ Lolya was happy enough to comply, but Nasha flung Anne a burning look of appeal. ‘Yes, I’ll come and see you later,’ Anne replied to it.

The children ran off, with Tanya following them pushing the sledge, and Anne was at liberty at last to turn to Basil and say, ‘For God’s sake, tell me! What do you know? Where is he? Is he hurt?’

‘He is safe. I’ll tell you everything I know, but take my arm, at least. You’re trembling. That’s better. Well, you know that there was a battle in Preuss-Eylau?’

‘Yes, yes, go on!’

‘It seems it was a pretty fierce affair, right in the town itself, a sort of running fight from house to house. Barclay de Tolly was commanding our men, but Soult’s soldiers gave them plenty of trouble at first, driving them back to the gardens at the edge of the town. It came on to snow, and our men were tired and half-starved, but Barclay rallied them and they fought their way back into the town square in the centre. Hundreds of French fell and even more were taken prisoner.’

‘But what of the Count?’ Anne asked desperately.

‘Hush, I’m coming to it,’ he said. ‘Well, the snow was blowing, making it hard to see anything, and dusk was falling, too, and the last of Soult’s men were holed up in the church and the graveyard, and making a stand there behind the snow mounds which had formed over the gravestones. Barclay sent in the cavalry to clear them out. Kirov was leading his own men in the charge when it seems he was hit by a round of grapeshot–’

‘Oh, dear God!’ Anne cried, her hands going up to her mouth.

‘Wait! Let me finish. He came off his horse and was probably knocked unconscious by the fall, or the shot, or something. His sergeant saw him go, but couldn’t stop, carried forward by the charge. All was confusion. You can imagine how it was darkness, driving snow, galloping horses. Kirov disappeared under the horses’ hooves – God knows why he wasn’t killed! He must have been rolled around like a stone in a whirlpool. Anyway, the charge was successful, and the French were completely knocked out, but when Kirov’s sergeant, who’d seen him fall, went back to help him, he couldn’t find him. He searched everywhere, and then reported him missing.’

‘And where was he?’

‘It seems some soldier from another troop, who didn’t know who he was, had found him and took him to a dressing station. The Count was unconscious at the time, of course, and when he came to himself, they discovered he’d lost his memory couldn’t remember his own name, or anything. So that’s why no report came through to us that he’d been found.’

‘What are his injuries?’ Anne managed to ask.

‘Well, he’d taken a lot of bruising from being under the horses, and one of them must have given him a kick in the head, for he had a head wound which was obviously what caused him to lose his memory. And his left arm was pretty badly knocked about.’

‘Have they – did they–’

‘Cut it off?’ He anticipated her with devastating ease. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. The message says it’s pretty bad, that’s all.’

‘And does he still remember nothing?’

‘Oh, as to that, he’s quite himself now. What happened was that they moved him from the dressing station almost at once to a hospital camp at Konigsberg, which is why no one from his own troop could find him. And from there, they took him by sledge to military headquarters at Olita. That’s where he was when his mind cleared, and he remembered who he was and what had happened. So they sent off a message, and it came through in the despatch bag to Czartoryski’s office today. And that’s all 1 know.’

There was a brief silence while Anne digested the story, and then she said, ‘Thank you for telling me. I could not have endured to wait until we reached the Palace. But you will have to tell it all over again to the Countess.’

‘Of course,’ Basil said simply. ‘I wonder how she will receive it. It will be as well for you to be on hand, in case she faints away, or something. All women have not your spirit, Anna Petrovna.’

Anne hardly heard him. ‘It is intolerable to know so little! There must be a way to find out more.’

‘Well, of course, now we know where he is, we can send for news. But whether it will arrive before the thaw, there’s no knowing.’

‘But you will do everything you can to hasten any news to us – to the Countess?’ she amended hastily.

‘I will come to you daily,’ he promised, ‘even if it is only to tell you that there is no news. But try not to worry. If there were apprehensions about his life, they would surely have said so.’

‘You think so?’ Anne mused. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right. And perhaps, now he has been wounded, they will send him home after the thaw.’ She imagined the summer at Schwartzenturm with him, with a wound only just bad enough to stop him going off on business all the time. She imagined driving him about the estate in the caliche, helping him to get to know Sashka, walking with him on the terrace after dinner. She sighed. ‘We must go and tell Irina Pavlovna,’ she said, and they resumed walking towards the Palace.

Chapter Twelve

It was a beautiful, clear May day. Lolya had gone riding with her mother, and Anne was walking back from a visit to Marya Petrovna with the two younger children. Sashka had fed the chickens from his hand, and smiled in delight as the old red hen’s single chick came running with a shrill tseep-tseep and thrust its little clown bill between his fingers for the grains of meal. Nasha was trying to teach tricks to the latest pig, whom she had named ‘Pushka’ – cannon – because he was black and barrel-bodied. She said he had learned his name already, and certainly he came to her when she called, but Anne thought secretly that it was rather because all animals loved Nasha and came to her whether she called or not.

After a while, when the children had run off to the red stables to feed the white oxen with sugar, Marya Petrovna, her fingers flashing back and forth in her lap amongst the lace-bobbins as if they had a separate life from hers, had told Anne the village news: of marriages arranged and deaths anticipated; of new friendships and old jealousies; of a lame horse and a twin calving; how Zina Andreyevna had prayed to St Anthony, and the very next day had found the ring she had lost; how wicked old Nikita, who had barely drawn a sober breath since last harvest, had sworn to the Pop – the parish priest – that the reason he had not come to Mass last Sunday was that he had seen Our Lady in a vision and had been too overcome to stir out of his bed.

Anne listened with interest and a sense of peace, which always came to her in the presence of this old lady. The little village concerns – small, unimportant, universal – stroked her mind into the same kind of blissful calm that Nasha induced in Pushka by scratching his back with the rounded end of a bodkin. Beyond the borders of Russia, armies marched and counter-marched, battles were fought, men cried out and suffered and died; but here, in the heart of this great country, the fields bore no treading foot but the farmer’s and the oxen’s, and the hills echoed only to the whistle of a man to his dog, and the clamour of rooks going home at dusk.

She had tried to explain this to Marya Petrovna, but her Russian was not yet good enough to express so nebulous and complex a thought. But old Marya had nodded as though she understood, and her snake-dark eyes had looked long into Anne’s.

‘Ah, Barishnya, you have an old head on your young shoulders! Some people can look at a field and see only earth and stones, and maybe next winter’s hay. But you can look at a field and see Russia. Yes, it is there, and whatever comes, it will always be there for those who can see. Men bring evil into the world and breed it up for their sport the way they breed their hunting dogs. They change and spoil and destroy what is within their reach; but women go on, unchanging as the wind. Women go on, and Holy Russia goes on. God made it so.’

Her fingers stopped and were still. She was silent a moment, and then continued, holding Anne’s gaze intently. ‘The little one, Barishnya, she is another who sees more than is there.’

‘Natasha?’

Marya nodded. ‘Since she was born, I’ve watched her and wondered. She is not of us, Barishnya. She moves to a music we can’t hear. Sometimes I think–’ She paused to pursue a thought. ‘I lived in a house in Moscow once, where the beams and floorboards were made from an old ship’s timbers. When there was a storm at sea, the timbers used to creak and groan, even though the air around the house was quite still. The house was very old, and those timbers hadn’t been near the sea for a hundred years or more, but still they remembered. In their dreams they heard it sing, and they wanted to get back to it.’ The black old eyes were unfathomable. ‘The little one may walk away, one day. You should keep an eye on her, Barishnya. Don’t let her stray too far.’

The sun was westering as Anne walked back along the dusty track towards the house, with Nasha skipping ahead, and Sashka walking beside her, holding her hand and chattering in his happy way about the chickens and the oxen. Both children looked so normal and healthy and happy, it was hard to take old Marya’s warning seriously, or to believe that anything other than good could come to them. How rich I’ve become, she thought, with a home and a family, a future to look forward to, and this feeling of belonging. England seemed as far away as a dream; but her father was always near, his memory drawing substance from the unchanging earth, and all the things which, added together, meant home.

The house came into sight, and her steps quickened automatically. The family would have gathered on the terrace, she thought, for once the sun had gone round, it was shady and cool for most of its length; and the Count would be there, reclining on the day bed Vasky brought out for him from the small parlour. She walked round the side of the house with the children so as to approach by the terrace steps from the garden. Her eyes flew to him first in hope, and then her heart sank at the realisation that he was looking no better: in fact, his face was more drawn and pinched today than ever, and he lay back on the day bed in the flattened manner of one exhausted. He smiled as she appeared, but he did not speak or move, and his immobility was too complete to be natural.

Irina and Lolya were there too, still in their habits and talking about their ride. Lolya was sitting on the top step, and with her long hair in a plait hanging over one shoulder, was twiddling the end of it for the white stable cat, who was watching it with a lofty indifference belied by a certain tension in his posture.

‘And then when we came to the stream, I had to go round by the ford,’ Lolya was saying. ‘I do think I ought to have a proper lady’s horse of my own now, Papa. Poor Tigu simply can’t keep up with Iskra. Oh, here they are! Anna Petrovna, don’t you agree I ought to have a horse of my own? I mean, thirteen is nearly grown-up, isn’t it?’

As she looked away, the white cat struck at last with a massive paw and needle-claws half extended, and having speared the thick tuft of hair, curled his paw over sideways, revealing pads as pink as marmelad, and tried to draw it to his mouth.

‘I thought you loved Tigu,’ Anne temporised, her eyes on Nasha, who had run to her father and knelt beside the day bed to look passionately up into his face. With what seemed a disproportionate effort, he reached out his hand and stroked her hair briefly, and said, ‘Hello, my Mouse. What have you been doing?’ Nasha didn’t speak, but for answer pushed her head against his hand as a cat does, and settled herself with her elbows resting on the edge of the sofa so that she could continue to look at him.

‘Well, I do,’ Lolya said, ‘but now I’m thirteen I oughtn’t still to be riding a pony. Kira’s having a proper horse for her birthday. When I go to stay with Aunt Shoora next time, it will be hateful to have to ride a pony, when Kira has a horse.’

Vasky, alerted in some mysterious way to Anne’s arrival, appeared at the door of the parlour with the tea-tray, and Stefan came behind him carrying the samovar. Behind him, looking suspiciously from side to side as he emerged into the open air, as if he expected to be ambushed, came Adonis, the latest addition to the household. He was a soldier of fortune who had befriended the Count at the dressing station after the battle and had insisted on going with him whenever he was moved. When the Count had come home from Olita, Adonis had come with him, like a fierce and ill-favoured but unshakably loyal watch-dog.

‘But what is he to do, sir? What is his position to be?’ the despairing Vasky had asked his master on their arrival, while Adonis glowered from the corner of the hall, just out of earshot.

‘He will decide that for himself, I daresay,’ the Count had said with weary humour. ‘He seems to believe that I need him, and he will find some way to serve me. Make sure the other servants are polite to him, Vasky, and try to make him welcome. I owe him a great deal.’

Adonis’ appearance was not reassuring to a highly trained house servant. He was short and stocky, massively muscled about the shoulders and thighs, and with strong but surprisingly delicate hands with which he could do fine needlework as well as control a team of horses. His face was disfigured by a scar which ran slantwise across the left cheek and crossed the eye, which was white and blind. The eyebrow, too, had been cut almost in the middle, and the outer half grew wild and shaggy, while the inner part matched the smooth arch of the right brow. As Anne came to know him, she felt that his appearance in some strange way mirrored his nature. It was as if his inner self had been bisected by the wound, leaving him half-savage, half-civilised.

His name, she had assumed, was a joke.

‘It was like this,’ he told her later. ‘I come from Hungary, from a town called Puspokladonysz. When I first went a-soldiering, no one could pronounce my real name, so they called me by the name of my home town – just the end part, of course. In those days, I wasn’t so bad looking. Before I got this.’ And he touched his seamed cheek.

He had left home at a very early age to fight for anyone who would hire him. ‘There was nothing to do at home but work in the fields. I wanted to see the world and make my fortune. I’ve fought for the Turks and the Austrians and the French and the Prussians and the English. The Austrians paid best, and the Turks ate best, and the French had the most women, but the English were the best soldiers. I nearly went to England once, because they have such fine horses, but I didn’t want to be a servant. The English treat their horses like people, and their servants like animals.’

For one so alien-looking, Adonis had settled into the household very quickly, serving his master like a military body-servant, with a curious, touchy pride, which made him seem almost more like the Count’s friend than a domestic. He took an immediate liking to Anne and, with the slightest encouragement, would settle down beside her in the evenings with his piece of work and tell her his adventures. He was a natural storyteller, and many an evening she had sat spellbound, watching his hard, pointed fingers stitching delicate embroidery on a nightshirt for the Count, while he described desperate sorties, bloody battles, boar hunts and wild affairs with half-savage gypsy women. The latter stories, of course, were quite improper, but Anne took it as a compliment to her intelligence that Adonis did not feel inhibited from telling her them.

Vasky and Stefan had set the tea-things down in front of Anne. It was always she, now, who presided over the samovar, and she had grown skilled in the ritual, learning just when to add more boiling water to the pot of very strong liquor which stood keeping warm on the top, so that the tea was always at the right strength. Lately Vasky no longer even troubled to ask the Countess whether she wished to preside, acknowledging her by a bow of the head as he placed the tray on the table by Anne. The Countess nodded in reply. She was sitting on one of the stone benches, flicking the tip of her boot idly with her crop and watching Lolya play with the cat; but Anne, at least, knew that her attention was really fixed on her husband.

Lolya, receiving no satisfaction on the subject of horses, allowed her train of thought to follow another connection.

‘When are we going to Moscow, Papa? It must be soon, surely? Shall we visit Aunt Shoora’s, too?’

Irina, her voice as mild and languid as the little breeze which stirred the air beyond the terrace, expressed her surprise to her husband.

‘Is there a plan to go to Moscow, Nikolasha? I didn’t know. What for?’

The Count looked a little self-conscious. ‘For Sergei’s passing-out ceremony, to be sure,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I mention it to you?’

Adonis appeared at Anne’s elbow to take the Count’s cup. Since he had arrived, no one but him was allowed to hand the Count anything to eat or drink. She wondered if he had once served a master who had feared to be poisoned – a Turk, perhaps? What little she knew of Turks suggested they lived darkly volatile lives.

‘But Mamochka, you knew Seryosha was to graduate in June,’ Lolya interrupted with wide-eyed surprise. She straightened abruptly, snatching the plait end from the white cat’s grasp. The cat stood up, offended, and walked away down the terrace steps with a flounce of his furry Scythian trousers. ‘Of course we must be there to see it. There will be a parade, and manoeuvres, and a musical ride, and a ball in the evening – though I don’t suppose,’ she added in a voice which did not quite exclude hope, ‘that I shall be allowed to go to that.’

‘I do not recollect being told about it,’ Irina said in that same unemphatic tone. ‘Perhaps I did not attend.’

‘But they always have them, every year,’ Lolya insisted. ‘You must have known that.’

The Count moved to take his cup from Adonis and winced, and Anne met his eyes with a look half-afraid, half-accusing. He evaded it and said to his wife, ‘Perhaps I should have raised the subject with you sooner. Mother wants to give a party for Sergei’s graduation. The passing-out ceremony is on the 21st of June and there will be celebrations of all sorts during the week following. After that we might all go and stay with Shoora and Vsevka, if you like. Anyway, there is no need to decide all at once. There’s plenty of time.’

He exchanged a look of mingled apology and entreaty with Irina, for they both knew it was Vera Borisovna’s plans which mattered, and which were the reason that, man-like, he had put off discussing the business with his wife.

Irina sighed a little, emptied her cup, and stood up. ‘Just as you wish,’ she said. ‘I must go and change – and Lolya, so must you.’

‘Now? Must I?’

‘Of course. Besides, you must be so hot in that heavy skirt. Ah, here is Nyanka for the little ones.’ Nasha jumped up and ran to Nyanka, while Anne rose automatically and bent to pick up Sashka; but Irina forestalled her, holding out her hand. ‘No, do not disturb yourself, Anna. Nyanka and I will manage. Come, Sashka, will you come with me?’

Sashka flung a brief look of enquiry towards Anne which she reflected could not but be hurtful to the Countess. She gave him a little helpful push, and he went, placing his hand in his mother’s, not precisely hesitantly, but without enthusiasm, and allowed her to lead him away.

When the children had gone, Anne turned to the Count and saw that Irina’s manoeuvres had not been lost on him. He waited for her question with as much humour in his eyes as he was capable of in his present state.

‘The wound is still troubling you, isn’t it?’ she said, obedient to his silent prompting.

‘She thought I would tell you sooner than her,’ he observed with some irony.

Anne frowned a little, wondering whether, or how much, he minded. ‘She knows you try to protect her from things,’ she said. ‘Besides, she has had no training or experience in nursing the sick. When the children are ill, Nyanka won’t let her near them.’

‘You, of course, have a lifetime’s experience of caring for wounded soldiers,’ he said. ‘I should have remembered.’

Anne ignored this. ‘Will you let me look at it, at least?’ she said. Refusal was instantly in his face. Then Adonis, whose presence they had both forgotten, made a small, admonitory sound. The Count looked towards him enquiringly, and then gave Anne a resigned nod.

‘Very well.’

She drew a chair up beside the couch, and Adonis came to help her ease off the sling and unwind the bandages from the wounded limb. Even through the gauze, she could feel the heat of it, and when her cool fingers touched his skin, she felt it flinch. The scars which seamed the upper arm had healed together, but they were red and sore-looking.

‘This isn’t right,’ she said, frowning.

Adonis growled. ‘Army surgeons! Know nothing and care less, drunk by noon every day, most of ’em! You see how it is. I’ll give you odds there are bone splinters left in there. That wound ought to be searched again.’

Anne looked up at the Count’s face and was shocked to see the apprehension which he was struggling to control. He tried to smile, but his mouth-corners wouldn’t obey him. ‘Something must be done,’ she said. ‘Will you let me send for another surgeon?’

Adonis snorted. ‘Don’t ask him – tell him! He’d suffer and say nothing; but every man takes orders from someone. She knew that–’ he jerked his thumb in the direction of the door through which Irina had left. ‘That’s why she went away. You tell him he’s got to see a surgeon – a smart one from the city. I don’t know who is the best in Petersburg, but I can soon find out. You tell him and I’ll fetch one here snick-snack.’

‘You are insolent,’ the Count said, with a feeble attempt to regain the initiative. ‘You had better mind your tongue, or–’

‘Or what? I’m not a serf, thank God! I’m a free man, Colonel, and I talk as free man to free man. If you don’t like it, you may do otherwise!’

Despite her anxiety, Anne could not help being amused at the baffled expression on the Count’s face, and the defiance in Adonis’ one fierce eye. ‘This is not the moment to quarrel,’ she said hastily. ‘Sir, will you let me send for a surgeon?’

The Count met her eyes and nodded once briefly, and then looked away. His face seemed grey and exhausted.

She stood up and gestured to Adonis to accompany her into the small parlour. There she rang the bell and sat down at the desk to write a note for the surgeon, while he stood behind her and looked over her shoulder.

Vasky came in, and Anne said, ‘Adonis is going into Petersburg to fetch a surgeon to the master. Will you give orders for a good horse to be saddled for him? And he will need a little money for his expenses.’

Vasky gave them both a comprehensive inspection, and then said, ‘Very good, mademoiselle. I will see to it.’

When he had left the room, Adonis said, ‘Read me what the note says.’ Anne glanced at him in surprise, and he said, ‘No, I can’t read. What use would that be to me?’

‘It’s useful to everyone,’ Anne reproved automatically. ‘It opens up a whole world of experience, such as you can hardly imagine.’

‘Maybe you shall teach me one day,’ he said generously. ‘But now read.’ Anne complied, and at the end, he nodded. ‘That will do. Give it to me. I’ll go at once, Little Mistress, and I’ll find which is the best man in Petersburg, and bring him back as soon as possible.’

‘What if he won’t come?’ Anne asked.

‘I’ll offer him gold,’ Adonis said with a quick nod. ‘And if that doesn’t move him,’ he added with a grin, drawing out the knife he always carried, a long, slender blade with a well-worn ivory handle carved at the end into the shape of a snarling tiger’s head, ‘I’ll think of some other way to persuade him.’

When Adonis had gone, Anne went out on to the terrace again. The Count’s eyes were closed, but when she drew near him he opened them and looked up at her unsmilingly. He looked worn with pain.

‘He is leaving at once,’ Anne said. ‘Does it hurt you?’

‘It aches all the time; and when I move, the pain is like a knife,’ he said shortly.

‘You should have said something before now,’ she said.

His mouth was wry. ‘I hoped it would heal on its own. You know what this means? If the surgeon decides there are bone splinters, he will want to probe the wound again to extract them. There,’ he added, meeting her flinching eyes, ‘I am a coward. You know about me now.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. It is not cowardice to be afraid of pain. God knows–’ Her mouth was dry, and she could not go on. His sound hand reached blindly for hers, and she did not think it improper, in the circumstances, to give it. They sat in silence for a while. ‘Adonis was right,’ he said at last, obscurely.

‘He’s a good man,’ Anne said. ‘I’m glad you have him.’

He gave a rueful smile. ‘I rather think he has me. Anna–’

‘Yes?’

‘If – if it has to be done, will you – could you–’

She met the fear in his eyes and strove to thrust her own down out of sight, out of knowing. The thought of being obliged to witness such an operation – to witness his suffering – filled her with horror. But she answered almost without pause, ‘Of course I will stay with you. I wish to God,’ she added in a low voice, ‘that it could be me instead.’

He shook his head at that, but he looked comforted.

The operation was performed two days later, in the early hours of the morning, as soon as it was fully light. The surgeon Adonis had chosen was a firm-faced, soldierly man of middle years, with a quiet bearing and expensive, but not elaborate, clothes. He was evidently quick-witted and had gathered enough on the journey from Petersburg in Adonis’ company to understand that nothing short of death would have prevented the ex-soldier from assisting at the operation; but he looked askance at Anne’s presence and only agreed to allow her to help if someone else were there as well.

‘If you faint away, mademoiselle,’ he said abruptly, I shall not be at leisure to attend to you.’

‘I shan’t faint,’ Anne said, with more defiance than conviction. But Nyanka offered her services and privately to Anne gave her opinion that it was Adonis who was more likely to faint away. In her home village in Georgia, she said, most of the doctoring was done by the women, because the men were too squeamish and could not bear the sight of blood.

Anne was glad of her presence, boulder-like, holding basins and handing towels as if she were presiding over the bathing of a baby, rather than the bloody and disgusting spectacle it really was. Anne did not faint, but again and again she had to think hard about something else to prevent herself from retching.

When it was all over, and the surgeon was sitting quietly beside his unconscious patient with a hand over his heart, and Nyanka and Adonis were clearing up the mess, Anne slipped away and climbed to the top of the black tower. Out on the leads, the air was clear and cool. It had not taken so very long, all in all: the day was still new and unused, and below, where the shadow of the tower had only just withdrawn, the dew was still thick on the grass like gossamer. Anne rested her hands on the cold stone of the parapet, and tried to clear her mind of the images which were as sharp and jagged as the bone fragments the surgeon had drawn out from the wound.

The liquid thrilling of wren’s song rose from the wild pear tree which grew at the foot of the tower. ‘It will heal soundly now,’ the surgeon had said. ‘The arm may always be a little weak, but he will have the use of it, at least.’

I wish it could be me, Anne had said. But that was before. Could one really, really wish to suffer another person’s pain? Easy to say; not so easy to mean. She felt troubled, ill at ease with herself. It is not cowardice to be afraid of pain, she had said. Surely that was true? Then the image of what she had just witnessed jumped again into her mind. Perhaps it would almost have been easier to suffer than to witness: the Count had lost consciousness quite soon after it began.

There was a sound behind her, and she turned to see Adonis standing near. ‘He said you would be up here. He is awake and wants you.’

‘Have you told the mistress that it is all over?’ Anne asked quickly.

‘The old nurse told her. She has been to him. Now he wants you.’

‘Very well, I’ll come,’ Anne said, starting for the hatchway.

Adonis took her arm as she reached him. ‘It is good that he has you,’ he said, unconsciously echoing her words. ‘The outsider sees most of the battle. I know who is really mistress of the house.’

‘You mustn’t say that,’ she said uncomfortably, pulling her arm free.

Adonis nodded. ‘Aye, I know. It is bad for you, Little Mistress. He doesn’t yet understand himself. It’s her he loves, with his head, at least – but it’s you he turns to.’

‘You’re wrong,’ she said, gripping her hands together. ‘He loves her truly. Please don’t talk like that. It’s improper and – and untrue.’

Adonis gave a sardonic smile and stepped out of her way. ‘Have it your own way. But it was not her he called for in Konigsberg, when he was delirious.’

Anne shook her head, frowning, and hurried away.

The difference was astonishing. For a day or two, the Count was groggy and in pain from the new wounds; but within a week he had begun to mend, and his spirits were returning to normal. Though he felt so much better, the surgeon insisted on his resting as much as possible and spending his days upon a couch. Like a child, he grew restless with boredom and needed to be distracted. Irina and Anne read to him, played chess or picquet with him, conversed with him, begged the neighbours to come and visit him, and even had the children play spillikins with him, but still he sighed and fidgeted.

Then, to amuse himself, he resurrected a scheme of which nothing had been heard since Anne first arrived at Schwartzenturm, and had Grigorovitch in to paint Anne’s portrait. The sittings took place in the small drawing-room so that the Count could watch. He decided everything, from the gown Anne was to wear, to exactly how she should place her hands, and what was to be painted in the background. He observed and criticised every brush stroke, and thus distracted, Grigorovitch took a week to finish the job; and when it was done, the Count was far from satisfied.

‘It doesn’t do, somehow. It doesn’t capture you,’ he said critically, moving his head restlessly to get the best light on it. ‘We will have to have it done again – outside perhaps. Yes, that is a better idea. Grigorovitch is excellent at horses. We shall have you taken on horseback, in front of the house – in a blue habit, I think. Oh, if only I were allowed off this wretched sofa!’

By the end of May, he was up and about again. The arm no longer pained him, and he was beginning cautiously to use it, taking it out of the sling for a few minutes each day to exercise the muscles. This was more like the convalescence of which Anne had dreamed: when her duties allowed, she sat with him on the terrace, or strolled with him about the garden; but she was never alone with him. On the rare occasions when Adonis was absent from his side, the Countess was there, bathing in the glow of his restored health; and it was she who took him out for drives about the estate in the caliche, guiding Limonchik carefully over the smoothest parts of the tracks.

The Count began to spend a good deal of time in the stables talking to his head groom, and the Countess suspected that he was longing to begin riding again and feared they would have difficulty in restraining him. But it soon became plain that he had had other plans.

One day when they had no visitors, they were sitting on the terrace in the drowsy part of the afternoon which Anne, because of her father, still thought of as the dog-watches. Sashka was sleeping on a rug in the deepest shade; Anne was instructing the girls in a desultory way in geography; and the Countess and Fräulein Hoffnung were engaged in needlework and chatting in low voices – a sound as small and soothing as distant running water. Even the white cat was stretched out on its side, immobile except for the very tip of its tail.

Then Silka, the borzoi bitch, was amongst them, dabbing them each in turn with her wet nose, and the white cat was gone in an instant. The Count appeared, coming up the terrace steps, and said, ‘Lolya, I have been thinking about what you said – about wanting a horse instead of a pony.’ Lolya’s head came up: Anne could almost see her prick her ears. ‘I think you are right, and I have decided to give you Grafina for your own. She’s a good mare and will carry you safely; and when you are fifteen, you shall choose your own horse – a youngster if you like, to break in for yourself.’

‘But Papa,’ Lolya found the only thing to object to in the proposal, ‘Anna Petrovna always rides Grafina. What is she to ride? You don’t mean we must share her?’

‘No, that would not do at all. I have something else in mind for your Mademoiselle de Pierre.’ He smiled at Anne and then beckoned her over to the edge of the terrace. ‘Come and look, Anna Petrovna.’

Puzzled, Anne got up and went to stand beside him at the parapet. Below, she saw a groom come into sight around the corner of the house, leading a horse. It was a beautiful mare, glossy and black, breeding in every fine line from her delicate head to her small, hard hooves.

Anne’s astonished eyes met the Count’s, and he smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, she’s for you,’ he said.

Lolya had joined them and was frankly gaping. ‘Papa!’ she cried. ‘Where did she come from? Have you just bought her?’

‘She’s a Karabakh,’ the Count said imperturbably. ‘I bought her from Volkonsky – he’d bought her for his wife, but she isn’t a great horsewoman, and the mare was wasted, standing in the stables eating her head off most of the time. I hope you like her, Anna. She’s called Quassy.’

Anne could find no words. She knew enough to know that Karabakhs were extremely expensive, the best horses money could buy, and such extravagance, such generosity towards her, seemed out of proportion to anything she had ever done – almost unseemly, given her situation. Everyone was now standing at the parapet looking down at the glorious black mare below, calmly swishing her tail against the flies and mouthing her bit as the groom held her for their inspection. Anne was acutely conscious of the Countess’s silent presence. Irina’s small hands were resting on the parapet wall within her vision, and it seemed to Anne that they were gripping the stone rail rather harder than was necessary.

It was Lolya who spoke, her voice innocent of anything but frank admiration. ‘She’s beautiful, Papa! She must have cost the earth!’

The Count looked at his daughter with a self-conscious grin. ‘Oh, not more than she was worth. I can see you are aching to try her, at any rate, but remember she’s Anna Petrovna’s horse, and if you dare to touch her without permission, you’ll have me to reckon with. Come and look at her, Anna! She has a mouth like silk.’

‘Papa, you’ve been on her!’ Lolya said accusingly. ‘And the surgeon said!’

‘Round the paddock, that’s all, just to try her paces,’ he said, and he looked absurdly guilty, like Sashka caught eating jam in bed.

They were half-way down the terrace steps when Anne realised the Countess had not moved to follow them. She looked back and met Irina’s eyes, and saw the puzzled, questioning look in them change to despondency. Natasha, standing beside her mother, looked from one to the other, and when a moment later the Countess turned and walked away towards the house, Nasha hesitated only a moment before following her.

There were several reasons why Anne would have preferred to remain at Schwartzenturm instead of going to Moscow for Sergei’s graduation. Quassy was one of them: riding the mare was an experience so delightful that she was reluctant to give it up even for a day, and the Count must have paid so much for her that it seemed absurd to be going away so soon after receiving her.

Then there was the slight coolness she had detected in the Countess since the mare’s arrival. It was so little that it was barely quantifiable, but Anne could not help feeling that the Countess was hurt by the Count’s gift. It was not that she objected to his generosity, for he was generous to everyone, and the Countess was not so small-minded as to wish him to buy no one presents but her; but it was a more tangible evidence of the many small ways in which he showed his preference for Anne. Almost any other expensive gift would have aroused no emotion in the Countess; but a horse was such a personal thing, and he had obviously expended time and trouble on choosing the perfect one for Anne – just as, years ago before Nasha was born, he had chosen Iskra for Irina.

Anne had done her best, since that day, to avoid the Count’s presence, to leave him alone with the Countess whenever she could do so without drawing attention; and she felt that if the Count and Countess went to Moscow without her, the matter would assume its proper proportion in Irina’s mind. When the plans were discussed, Anne begged to be allowed to stay home to look after the baby and ride Quassy, while Fräulein Hoffnung accompanied Lolya and Nasha. But Fräulein Hoffnung pleaded off, saying that the journey would be too much for her, and indeed, she looked so frail, that no one could suspect her of exaggerating.

‘It will not do,’ the Count said at last, cutting across the argument. ‘You must come to Moscow, Anna. You need not worry about Sashka – Nyanka can stay and help Fräulein Hoffnung with him, and Tanya shall come to take care of the girls. I’m sorry you will have to leave off riding your horse for a while,’ he added ironically, ‘but fife is full of these little disappointments.’

Anne saw there was no help for it. ‘Of course I’ll come, sir,’ she said hastily. ‘I have no wish to seem disobliging. Whatever Irina Pavlovna decides, I shall abide by.’

‘Besides,’ the Count went on, ‘you must not disappoint Basil Tchaikovsky. He will be at the Graduation Ball and will expect to dance with you. Fräulein Hoffnung could not take your place there!’

‘Oh Papa, mayn’t I go to the Ball?’ Lolya broke in passionately. ‘I’m sure thirteen is old enough, and if Anna is to be there anyway…’

His denial led to the usual argument, and the moment passed without further awkwardness.

The day of the passing-out ceremony was humid and overcast, but the weather was kind enough to stay dry, and all the fine ladies who went to watch in open carriages were saved from having their elegant hats spoiled by a soaking. It was one of the main social events of the year in Moscow, for every noble family had at least one sprig in the Academy.

‘In my grandfather’s day,’ Vera Borisovna explained more than once during the day, ‘boys were taken from home when they were ten, for five years’ compulsory education, and then enrolled in the Guards at fifteen. Of course, state service was for life in those days. Even my father was obliged to perform twenty-five years’ compulsory state service, though to be sure, they had raised the age of enrolment to twenty by then. You don’t know how lucky you are, Koko,’ she concluded severely.

‘Yes I do, Mama,’ the Count said patiently.’

‘Things are very different in modern Russia,’ she went on unregarding, ‘and I don’t know that we are better off for it. Young people are sadly heedless. You had your freedom from the very beginning, Koko, to do what you chose, and go where you pleased. No state service for you! Not that you haven’t served our dear Emperor very well, travelling all over Europe, living in foreign countries, and I’m sure he is very grateful. And it will be just the same for my dearest Serge: he will be able to travel wherever he likes. In my grandfather’s day no one was allowed to leave Russia without a special permit from the Tsar, and precious few of those were ever issued, you may believe me! What a wonderful thing it is, this progress!’

‘Very true, Mama!’

She sighed. ‘But I don’t suppose he is grateful for it. People are never grateful for liberty or indulgence. It is a great mistake, to allow young people to do as they please. Discipline, firm discipline, that’s what people need – and a good whipping, if they disobey. I never spared my children, though your father, Koko, was foolishly soft-hearted! Many a time I had to beg him to beat you when you had done wrong, for he would have let you off, if left to himself.’

‘Yes, Mother, I remember,’ the Count replied with admirable self-possession. ‘My gratitude to you is beyond expression.’

They attended the open-air ceremonies in two carriages: a new, smart barouche, in which Vera Borisovna rode with her son, and a larger, four-seat vis-à-vis, which was provided for Irina, Anne and the children. As the barouche only held two, the division seemed a natural one, and Anne thought nothing of it at first. The carriages were drawn up side by side at the edge of the parade ground where they were joined by another containing Shoora, Vsevka and their children, who had come up from Tula for the occasion.

There was soon a throng of carriages drawn up close enough to each other for conversation, each one filled with the first in rank and fashion of Moscow Society. Older ladies remained seated, nodding to each other from a distance, but gentlemen and younger ladies visited between carriages rather as they visited between boxes at the theatre or the ballet. Many were the polite calls of congratulation paid on Sergei’s account, for he was not only popular amongst his fellow cadets, but well liked in Moscow Society generally, and particularly by those families who had unmarried daughters upon the market.

The visits, Anne noticed with the beginnings of unease, were all to the barouche, and the congratulations were directed towards Vera Borisovna, with the Count receiving the overspill. Even when the ceremonies began, there was still a constant coming and going of gentlemen to pay their respects to the Dowager and chat about the war to the Count. Vera Borisovna was clearly revelling in the attention, and made as much use of her fan and parasol as a debutante.

The Count made one or two attempts to include his wife in the congratulations, but geography and his

mother made it impossible; so after a while, he gave her a bow and stepped down to go around to Irina’s side of the vis-i-vis and ask if she was sufficiently amused.

‘I’m sure it will be a spectacle worth watching,’ he said apologetically.

‘Yes, I’m sure it will,’ she replied calmly.

‘But there is a disappointment for you, Anna,’ he went on, giving her a mock-sympathetic smile. ‘Your admirer is not here! I cannot think what he is about, but perhaps he is saving himself for the ball. I believe it takes him fully three hours to dress for a formal occasion.’

‘If you mean Basil Tchaikovsky, he and Olga are in the Crimea. Their uncle is sick.’

The Count raised his eyebrows. ‘Is it so? Then, Anna, your disappointment will know no bounds. But I shall try to make it up to you. I shall dance with you, at all events.’

Anne felt uncomfortable. ‘I shall not be going to the ball, sir. My place is with the children.’

‘Nonsense!’ he retorted at once. ‘Your place, like that of any handsome young woman, is to enjoy yourself! The servants can watch the children sleeping.’

‘Really, sir,’ Anne said in a low voice, ‘I am quite decided. I do not wish to go.’

‘Nonsense,’ the Count began again, but Irina interrupted.

‘Let her be, Nikolasha. Anna knows her own mind. If she does not wish to go, do not press her.’

‘Oh, I do not press her,’ he said with a wicked grin. ‘I can see I am no substitute for Tchaikovsky. The young men carry all before them – especially those with two sound arms!’

He gave them a laughing bow and went back to his mother’s carriage, leaving Anne to think that never before had his sense of humour been so displeasing to her.

The cadets paraded and were given their scrolls. From a distance Anne could not pick out one from another, but Lolya was perfectly sure she knew which was her brother, and pointed him out in a shriek at every opportunity; and when the review began, and the cadets’ manoeuvres brought them closer from time to time, she proved to have been right.

While the cannonades were going on, and before the musical ride, in which he was to take part, Sergei rode over to the carriages, a little red in the face from his exertions, to speak to his family. He seemed very pleased with himself and greeted everyone exuberantly, promising them good entertainment from the displays to come.

‘And the ball tonight is going to be first-rate!’ he exclaimed. ‘There are to be fireworks at the end, and the set-piece – well, I won’t spoil it for you, but if you ever saw anything half so fine, I shall be astonished! I must go now, however. I see I am wanted.’

And he rode away to the sound of Lolya’s renewed demands to be allowed to go to the ball. ‘Fireworks too! Oh Mamochka, Papa can’t be so cruel!’

After the open-air spectacles, they returned to Vera Borisovna’s house to change for dinner.

‘Just a small dinner,’ the Dowager had promised. ‘Just family and a few intimate friends.’ She was giving her grand party for Sergei on the following day; this, she had taken pains to point out, was just an intimate affair. When Anne learned, however, that Sergei was to ride over to eat with them before accompanying them to the ball, she was not entirely surprised to discover that the long table was set for forty, and that the Dowager intended to receive at the head of the stairs in the formal manner, rather than in the drawing-room.

Lolya was still grumbling about not being allowed to go to the ball when Anne accompanied her and Nasha down to the drawing-room, well before the first carriage was announced.

‘Do stop, Lolya,’ Anne said as they reached the drawing-room door. ‘You’ll have plenty of balls when your turn comes, all just as exciting as this one, I promise you.’

‘But everyone’s going!’ she cried tragically. ‘And there will be fireworks’.’

‘I’m not going,’ Anne pointed out. ‘And as to the fireworks, we’ll be able to see most of them from the upstairs windows. If you’re a good girl and don’t make any more fuss, I’ll come and wake you up when they begin, and watch them with you.’

Lolya accepted the compromise reluctantly, and they entered the drawing-room to find that Sergei had already arrived, and was standing in the centre of the room with his father beside him, the centre of attention. He had grown handsome since Anne last saw him, though his face still had that unfinished look of a very young man. His pale blue uniform suited his golden looks to perfection, but most of all, she thought with an inner pang, he looked absurdly like his father. He was a little the taller, slightly larger-boned, and his hair was a shade lighter; but as they stood side by side with that same long, curving face, shining gold-green eyes, and mobile, quirky mouth, it was as if some kind of magic had brought the Count as a young man from the past to stand beside his adult self for comparison.

Both pairs of eyes came round to her as she entered. The Count smiled warmly, Sergei shyly, and then Lolya ran forward to claim their attention and her brother’s hugs, and to display her new best dress, put on for the dinner and perfectly fit, she assured them eagerly, for dancing. Anne took Nasha to sit on a sofa to one side. Shoora engaged her in conversation across the Countess, who was sitting between them, silent but faintly smiling as she gazed at her husband and her stepson with what appeared to be both pleasure and pride.

Then the door opened and Vera Borisovna sailed in, magnificent in puce satin decorated all over with glinting crystal spars and beaded fringe, and with her famous pink diamonds glittering on her bosom and in her hair.

‘The first carriage is approaching. Come Serge, Koko, we must take up our positions at the head of the stairs to greet our guests.’ The Count looked towards his wife, who made a move as if to rise, but the Dowager crushed her back with a kindly smile. ‘No, no, my dear Irina Pavlovna, we need not trouble you. There is no need for you to receive – not the least in the world! My son and grandson and I will do all that is necessary. Pray do not disturb yourself.’

The Countess sat very still, her face very pale, her eyes carefully blank. The Count and his son exchanged a quick glance, and Anne thought how, in the Dowager’s presence, they were like two guilty, children. Her influence over both of them was absurdly strong; but the Count could not refrain from at least beginning an objection.

‘Surely, Mother, Irina, as my wife, ought to be with us.’

The Dowager’s smile was wider and whiter than ever. ‘No, no, my dear, there is not the least occasion to trouble the dear Countess. People will not expect it. Serge is merely a relation by marriage to her, and it is I, after all, who have been a second mother to the dear boy – have I not, mon cher?’

‘Yes, Gran’mSre,’ Sergei said automatically, but he was watching his father enquiringly.

‘Mother, I must insist–’ the Count began.

‘No, my dear, this is a Kirov affair, you know. There is no need for this debate – and no time! I hear people below. Come now, we must take our places at once!’

She swept them out without allowing any further argument. It was done so cleverly that there was nothing on which anyone could have hung offence; and yet Anne knew it was meant to offend, and that it had offended. Lolya was chatting to her aunt and uncle, who had not observed the piece of business at all, and Irina remained motionless, displaying no distress, but Anne could feel her pain like a separate person standing between them. She went across and sat beside the Countess and began talking about the first thing that came into her head.

‘I wonder if we shall hear more, ma’am, of this shocking new dance they have invented in Germany? I cannot believe we shall ever see men and women holding each other in public in that way; but perhaps the reports have been exaggerated. What do you think? Would you countenance the Waltz in your drawing-room?’

The Countess could not answer at once; but after a moment made some kind of reply, and Anne continued to talk, hardly aware of what she was saying, only using her voice as she would to soothe a frightened animal. In a little while, Irina looked up and met Anne’s gaze with eyes that were too bright and gave her a small, tight smile of gratitude.

The dinner was magnificent, but Anne, whose appetite was usually healthy, ate little of the procession of delicacies which passed her way. As the Countess was seated on the same side of the table, Anne could not see her, or judge how she was feeling; and Lolya, beside her, demanded a great deal of attention. But it was still unhappily plain to Anne that Vera Borisovna, at the end of the table with Sergei on her left hand, was taking all the congratulations of the occasion to herself, not only as hostess, but as patroness and surrogate-mother of the newly graduated cadet.

The Count was at the other end of the table, and Irina, seated insignificantly half-way down one side, was being pointedly ignored. Anne began to wonder apprehensively what would happen at the party tomorrow. If Vera Borisovna stage-managed another slight to Irina, would the Count protest? Anne hoped so fervently, though her imagination shrank from the prospect of a quarrel between mother and son. The situation would be unpleasant, whether he intervened or not; and she wondered whether she might somehow speak to him, persuade him to confront his mother privately during the course of the next day, before the party, and somehow force her to be properly civil to her daughter-in-law. Yet that would be an unwarrantable intrusion on her part. It was not her business to intervene, however much she longed to.

She was so preoccupied with her thoughts that she hardly noticed the Dowager’s butler approach his mistress with an unusually agitated expression to murmur something into her ear. The Dowager’s expression altered. She spoke a few rapid words, and the butler hastened towards the door; but before he reached it, a new figure appeared in the doorway. It was a young Guards cadet in uniform, booted and caped and a little tousled, as if he had ridden fast. His face was pale, his eyes, as they swept the room, almost unseeing from some kind of emotion, and as he strode up the room towards the Dowager, all eyes turned to him, and the clamour of conversation died rapidly away.

He stood before Vera Borisovna, but seemed unable to speak in his agitation. His mouth opened and closed a few times without words, and he looked around him again, as if seeking help.

The Count stood up. ‘What is it?’ he said into the chill silence. ‘You have a message for someone? Pull yourself together and spit it out, man! Remember you’re an officer.’

The young man straightened up, gratefully, and turned towards the Count, almost visibly separating himself from his emotions.

‘News, sir,’ he said at last. ‘A despatch has just arrived from Olita. I have been sent from military headquarters to request you to come at once – and you, sir,’ he added, his eyes flickering round towards Sergei. Sergei made a movement as if to rise; his hand, with his napkin crumpled in it, going down on to the table to push himself up, knocked a knife lying on the nap, so that it swivelled and struck the stem of his wine glass, which rang with a tiny, clear sound. Anne always remembered it afterwards: it was as if someone had rung a bell, as they do during the Mass, to draw attention to the moment of transubstantiation. What came next would change everything.

The Count recalled and held the messenger’s gaze. ‘A despatch from the front?’ It must be serious, if they were summoned immediately. ‘Is it news? For God’s sake, what is it?’

The boy’s precarious self-possession crumpled, and he looked at once very young and very scared.

‘There’s been a battle, sir, against the French, at Friedland. A terrible defeat! Our men are in retreat to Danzig. They are evacuating Konigsberg, and taking the wounded to – the wounded–’ His voice trembled and failed, and nothing followed it in the palpitating silence. His eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh sir, they say our dead number more than twenty thousand!’

Chapter Thirteen

In May 1808, the Countess Irina set out with her two children and their governess on the long journey south to her family home, the Kiriakov estate on the warm, dry, sunny northern slopes of the Caucasian mountains. It had been a sickly winter. Everyone had had colds and aches and pains, and Irina had suffered a particularly bad attack of influenza, which had left her thin and pale and with a troublesome cough; and when a letter came from her sister Ekaterina, recently widowed and returned to the family home, Nyanka suggested that it would do her mistress good to do the same. The climate would benefit her health, and the companionship of her brothers and sisters would raise her spirits, which had been very low since the news of the defeat at Friedland had taken the Count away from home again.

The day of the Graduation Ball was burned on their memories. The ball had been cancelled, of course: no one could have danced with the cadet’s words still ringing in their ears. The Count and Sergei had gone straight to headquarters and had remained there all night, returning the following morning only to pack for their immediate departure to Olita to join the Tsar’s retinue – the Count as diplomatic advisor, Sergei as a subaltern in the prestigious Preobrazhensky Guard. The latter appointment was made as a favour to the Count, and it was a sign of his high standing with the senior military officials that they could think of it at a time like that.

Shoora and Vsevka had invited Irina and the children to return with them to Tula, but she had wanted only to go back to Schwartzenturm, in which Anne had whole-heartedly agreed with her. To be away from home at such a time was unbearable. If he were to be gone, the only comfort could come from familiar surroundings. Lolya had begged to be allowed to go with Aunt Shoora, however, and Irina had admitted her plea. There she had remained ever since, while Anne and the Countess had taken Natasha back to Schwartzenturm. Since then, Anne had been able to distract herself for much of the time with her duties to the children; but Irina had nothing to do to stop her thinking about her husband and missing him, and her spirits had never been lower or more in need of a visit to her loved and distant home.

The thousand-mile journey was not undertaken lightly, and it was almost a caravan which eventually started out from Schwartzenturm. The Countess took along her maid Marie; Nyanka and Tanya to take care of the children; Kerim the cook, and one of his assistants; two footmen; Morkin the coachman; six grooms; and eight other servants. There was also one of the estate carpenters, who was also a skilled wheelwright, and Marlinski, the farrier-blacksmith, who, besides being able to shoe horses and repair broken carriage-frames, could doctor almost any living creature who did not object to it.

There was a mountain of luggage, too, which included bed linen, cooking pots, spare harness, tools, medical supplies, soap, a large number of firearms, and emergency rations in the form of dried meat, dried peas, and a kind of hard bread like ship’s biscuits, which though as unappetising as wood had the virtue of remaining edible for long periods.

Anne, used to travelling in England, and even with the experience of her journey from Paris behind her, rather stared at all these preparations; and wondered, too, that the Countess should choose to travel in a peasant kibitka rather than her own comfortable berlin. She also wondered at the small chest of gold, which was stowed under the driving-seat of the first cart, to be guarded by a groom with a horse pistol. Anne, the Countess, and the two children travelled in the first cart, and behind it came four others. At the rear of the procession rode Stefan, leading Iskra and Quassy.

The journey was a slow one. As soon as they were away from the immediate environs of Petersburg, the roads worsened rapidly, for in the winter ice and snow, driven by the wind across the tracks, formed deep waves, like the sea, which, after the spring thaw, turned the roads into broad morasses of mud, over whose vast ruts and troughs the horses dragged the carts with great difficulty. This kind of going was hard on both horses and vehicles, and wheelwright and blacksmith between them had repairs to do at the end of most days. The sturdy peasant kibitkas and telegas were best suited to the job: a smart European berlin or barouche would have been jolted to pieces within days.

The lurching of the vehicles was sometimes hardly to be bom by the passengers. The children retched with travel-sickness while the adults were flung violently against the sides of the kibitka and cracked their heads on the roof. At the end of the day, Anne would undress cautiously to find herself black and blue, despite the bulky clothing Irina had advised her to wear. They dressed each other’s bruises with arnica each evening in the most friendly way: the shadow of coolness that had come between them over Quassy had been driven away by subsequent events.

The necessity for the box of gold was explained by what Nyanka described as ‘galloping consumption’ in the pockets of postmasters, innkeepers, and local constables, all of whom had to be sweetened by large sums of money in order for the travellers to proceed, to obtain passes or beds for the night and fodder for the horses. Iskra and Quassy had to be guarded at night by a groom, who sat up with them in whatever shelter had been obtained for them, watching over them with a lamp and a shotgun. Imperial couriers and other officials of the Empire took precedence on the roads in all matters, and sometimes, despite the bribes, the party was turned out of a posting-inn to make room for them, and had to make do with some rough peasant hut, or even sleep in the carts. But the servants showed the proverbial adaptability of the Russian peasant, and managed to make everyone reasonably comfortable.

Things were better when they reached the Steppes, for here the tracks were wide and level, and the horses were able to make better speed. The children’s spirits improved: they began to take notice of things, and enjoyed riding sometimes in one cart and sometimes in another, while Anne and Irina took the opportunity to refresh themselves by riding for a spell, galloping over broad grasslands as smooth as bowling-greens, sewn with an incredible carpet of wild flowers. The vast grasslands rolled away, level and featureless to the horizon in every direction. In the distance they saw herds of horses and cattle, being driven by mounted herdsmen on small, swift ponies, which they rode bareback, and turned with a dig of the knees, leaving their hands free for their whips and weapons. It was all as new to Anne as to the children, but Irina answered their endless questions patiently.

Beyond the Steppes the country changed again. It was as if the flat grasslands had been crumpled up like bedclothes into a series of gentle rolling foothills. The tracks were dusty, the blue sky windless, and the heat at noon was oppressive, and made the horses sweat, so that at the end of the day their coats were matted and pale with dust. There began to be trees again, oaks and maples, and the strange feathery grasses of the drylands, giant thistles and poppies, bellflowers and yellow mullein, and sometimes patches of marsh sewn with reeds. The cicadas sang all day long; there were vultures with hideous bare necks perched unnervingly near the track; and sometimes a pelican flew over from the Sea of Azov. Anne never quite got used to the sight of these extraordinary birds, but Nyanka said even the sight of them was lucky, and crossed herself fervently every time one flapped slowly by.

One day, when they were a short way from Stavropol, and Irina was telling Anne and the children an anecdote about her childhood at Chastnaya – the name of the family estate – Morkin suddenly reached for his shotgun, and said tersely, ‘Horsemen, Barina.’

The effect on Irina surprised Anne: she broke off in midsentence, her whole body grew rigid, and her hands gripped together in her lap. ‘Tcherkess?’ she asked abruptly.

Morkin did not immediately answer, straining his eyes towards the group on the track, far ahead where it met the horizon. He transferred the reins of the horses to one hand and held the shotgun ready in the other, and his and the groom’s bodies were tense in every line. Then at last he seemed to relax. ‘Cossacks,’ he pronounced.

At the single word, Irina’s breath sighed out of her, and she looked towards Anne. ‘We are almost at the Line,’ she said. ‘This is the dangerous part of our journey.’

‘The Line?’ Anne asked.

‘It’s a line of fortresses, guarded by Cossacks. Travellers like us pass along it, and the Cossacks protect us from the Tcherkess – the Circassians,’ Irina said. ‘They are mountain people, and they live by war and plunder. They like to attack and rob travellers, but the Cossacks prevent them.’

Her eyes flickered towards the children to indicate to Anne that she did not want to make more of the subject in their presence; but Morkin, the shotgun across his knees now, said, ‘Sometimes they prevent them, Barishnya. When there’s enough of them, and they haven’t gone to the bad themselves. I’ve heard stories that would curdle your blood, about Cossack troops deserting to the hills and–’

‘Enough, Morkin,’ Irina said sharply, cutting his voice off instantly. But the damage had been done, and everyone was silent with apprehension for the next few minutes, until the horsemen waiting ahead were close enough to be identified as friendly. There were eight of them, in sheepskin coats, bearing red lances, and with muskets slung over their shoulders, mounted on small, swift horses. They were the first true Cossacks Anne had seen, though she had heard a great deal about them, mostly from Nyanka and Adonis, who held them in some respect. They saluted the travellers cheerfully, and whirled their horses around the carriage, inspecting the women frankly and joking with the children. They had high Tartar cheekbones and hawk noses, and fierce smiles under their long moustaches. Their Russian sounded very strange to Anne: she could only understand half of what was said.

Though a mood of apprehension kept the party rather subdued, under the escort of successive bands of Cossacks, they continued their journey without incident. They passed down the line of look-out posts, where a single guard watched the horizon, ready to light a signal beacon if a raiding band were sighted, and the fortresses themselves, which were little more than an enclosure of earthworks and ditches, but which provided necessary shelter, a barracks, a church, and the protection of a two-pounder gun.

A little before Georgievsk, Irina suddenly sat up straight, straining her eyes ahead, and cried out in a joyful voice, ‘Oh look, there’s Mount Kazbek! Isn’t it lovely? Look, children, the Caucasus at last!’

Mile by mile it grew more distinct on their horizon, the triangular white peak of Mount Kazbek cutting into the blue sky, and beyond it, the three-hundred-mile sweep of snow-capped mountains refracting a thousand colours from the sunlight, the spires and pillars and minarets of the countless peaks like some magical city of the clouds: awesome, beautiful, longed-for, and unattainable. It was a magnificent spectacle, and Anne and the children exclaimed over it again and again. But the Countess only gazed in silence, with her eyes shining with a joy that Anne had never witnessed before.

At Georgievsk they had to wait two days for the formation of the weekly imperial convoy. From here onwards, the risk of attack by the Tcherkess was too great for the protection of a single troop of Cossacks to be adequate. The convoy was guarded by seventy or eighty Cossacks armed with guns and some small artillery, and its purpose was to escort the Tsar’s mail and treasury through the mountain passes along the Georgian military highway to the Governor General of Georgia at Tiflis, on the other side of the Caucasus. So dangerous were the lands beyond Georgievsk that anyone who wanted to travel that way waited for the convoy and took advantage of the heavy guard, and the procession that the Countess and her party eventually joined was formed of more than a hundred vehicles, a very mixed party of travellers ranging from peasants to high-ranking government officials, and herds of cattle and roped teams of horses to add to the confusion.

Marshalling this unwieldy convoy into two columns for marching took a very long time, with officers shouting orders and Cossacks shouting abuses, cracking their whips, and riding up and down the lines on their sweating horses to prod stragglers into place. When they eventually got on the move, progress was as slow as it had been at the beginning of their long journey. They were reduced to the walking pace of the slowest ox: twenty miles took sometimes as long as twelve hours.

There was always something interesting to be observed, and the children were full of chatter, and thoroughly enjoyed the altercations between the Cossack guards and the travellers who strayed out of line or held up progress or allowed their cattle to graze. Anne noted one or two incidents to include in the long letter she was writing to her friend Emma Hatton in Petersburg: the description of the convoy and the colourful characters in it alone was likely to take up two pages.

One particularly noticeable figure was a man to whom Irina had first drawn Anne’s attention in Georgievsk, when he had arrived to join the convoy accompanied by an impressive number of servants and a quantity of luggage. She said he was a Tartar prince. He was tall, blackly handsome and moustachioed, and he wore pearls in his ears. His clothes were magnificent: a dark green and purple striped surcoat over silver-gilt chain mail that flashed in the sun; pantaloons of sky blue embroidered with silver, bound at the knee with scarlet leather garters; a leather cap shaped like a cupola, trimmed with a band of black sheepskin; and long boots of red and yellow leather with long pointed toes, fastened close all the way up to his knees by laces.

He carried a whip of crimson leather with which he made a great deal of noise, slapping the stem of it against his saddle flaps to make a path for himself through the crowds. He wore a sabre of Damascus steel with an ivory handle, and a short Circassian bow slung over his shoulder, together with a quiver full of arrows, ready for use. He rode a magnificent, curvetting bay horse, whose harness was decorated with crimson tassels and gold discs, and he was accompanied everywhere by his mullah, also on horseback, in a white turban, flowing scarlet robe, and yellow boots.

Anne had enjoyed looking at him, and memorising his appearance for her letter to Emma. Once or twice she had caught his eye and hastily removed her gaze, not to appear rude, but had thought no more about it; until one day while they were on the road, and Anne was wishing longingly that she could rest her bones by riding Quassy, the Prince appeared beside her, forcing his way up to the kibitka and pacing his horse to the cart’s speed.

He bowed towards the Countess, who had made an instinctive shrinking movement at his appearance, ignored the children, who were frankly goggling at him; and fixed his glittering eyes on Anne. In a strange and barbaric Russian, he said, ‘The mare – the black Karabakh – is she yours?’

Anne was too surprised at the question to feel much afraid. The bay horse close beside her fretted against the curb bit, making its harness discs ring, and spattering a little foam on the side of the kibitka, and the Prince checked it minutely with hand and foot. It was so close to her that she could feel its heat, and the barely restrained power of it; its bright eye and foam-whitened lips were on a level with her face.

‘Yes,’ she said. The black mare is mine.’

‘So he said,’ the Prince replied with a jerk of his head, evidently meant to identify Stefan. He examined her fiercely and without apparent approval. With his hard eyes and hooked nose, he reminded Anne of an eagle. ‘You are not Russian,’ he said finally.

‘I am English,’ Anne replied. Despite his abruptness, she saw no particular threat in his presence – indeed, she was rather enjoying the exchange with so exotic a character. This, surely, was why one travelled in foreign parts!

‘Ah, English!’ said the Prince, baring his teeth in what Anne took to be a smile. ‘English love horses, this I hear! How you like your Russian horse?’

‘She is very beautiful and very swift,’ Anne said. ‘I like her very well.’

He nodded in approval. ‘Russian horse,’ he affirmed.

Anne felt her native honour at stake. ‘Our English horses are also very fine,’ she said.

The Prince ignored this puny attack. ‘The black mare, I buy her from you,’ he said, throwing back his head and looking down at her fiercely, in a way, she thought, that was calculated to suppress any desire to refuse. ‘I give you much gold – one hundred gold pieces for this horse.’

‘But I do not wish to sell her,’ Anne said calmly, and felt Irina touch her hand warningly.

The Prince glared at her a moment, and then turned away to stare thoughtfully at the sky. ‘Two hundred,’ he said at last, looking down at her again. ‘This is enough, even for a mare.’

Anne met his eyes steadily. ‘I will not sell her,’ she said. ‘Not for two hundred, or four hundred – not even for a thousand.’

‘You sell!’ he growled threateningly.

‘I will not,’ she said firmly.

The Prince’s brows drew down in a ferocious frown, and he leaned down from the saddle to put his face on a level with Anne’s, so that she could get the full benefit of it. At close quarters he was quite frightening, but there was that in her which could not endure to be bullied, and she forced herself to meet his gaze without flinching; and in a moment he straightened up, and without another word whirled his horse away, and galloped off down the line. Anne let out her breath in a long sigh.

‘He meant no harm,’ she said, hoping it was true.. ‘I expect that’s just his way of striking bargains.’

‘You should not have provoked him,’ Irina said, her voice shaky. ‘You don’t know what he’s capable of.’

‘Would you have let him have Iskra?’ she countered reasonably.

Irina didn’t answer that. ‘These people can be dangerous. You should not take them lightly.’

‘I assure you,’ Anne said, lifting her hand from her lap and showing the Countess how it trembled, ‘I did not take him lightly.’

The second act in the drama took place that evening when they reached the fortress at Prokhladnoye. The Kirovs were just settling down around the fire in one of the huts when the Prince appeared in the doorway, hand on the hilt of his sabre, and strode towards them, followed by several servants carrying baskets.

‘I have come,’ he announced, bowed, and gestured forward the baskets. ‘You will take dinner with me, English lady – and your people,’ he added, waving a hand towards Irina and the children, as if they were very much a secondary consideration. ‘Never before was I beaten in bargaining – and by an English lady. So, dinner – eat!’

The baskets proved to contain caviar, cold pheasant, meat patties, fruit, including a magnificent bunch of muscat grapes, and several bottles of real French champagne from the Widow Clicquot’s estate. This was better fare than they had expected to enjoy that evening. The Prince was in great good humour, filled their glasses, and raised his towards Anne with a flamboyant gesture that baptised everyone. ‘To your horse!’ he cried.

They drank the toast and then fell with a will on the delicious food. The Prince drained his glass, refilled it, and examined Anne closely and at length. Then at last he reached across and tapped her arm with his whip to gain her attention, and said with decision, ‘I will marry you.’

‘What!’ Anne could not help exclaiming, while the children giggled, and Irina looked nervously from one to the other.

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding firmly. ‘English lady with horse, you make a very good wife. And,’ he added, looking at her sidelong, ‘if I marry you, I get the horse too.’

There was a moment’s silence, and then Anne burst out laughing, realising that he was teasing her. He laughed too, very loudly, showing all his teeth and turning his face from one to another to make sure they were appreciating the joke. After that, the evening went very fast. Despite the language difficulties and the radical differences in their culture, Anne and the Prince managed to get along very well. His harsh laughter and abrupt manner no longer worried her, and he asked her many interested questions about her country and told her stories of some of his more dangerous exploits against the Tcherkess.

When at last he rose to leave, he said with sincerity, ‘English lady, I like you very well. Send to me, Akim Shan Kalmuck, if you change your mind. I think you make a very good wife!’

It would make a good story, Anne thought, to tell the grandchildren one day – if only she were ever likely to have any! It would certainly amuse Emma Hatton. She only wished the Count could have been there to enjoy it, for it was the kind of absurdity that he would like.

At Vladikavkaz, they left the convoy, for here they were met by a smiling, exuberant party of Cossacks from the Kiriakov estate, come to escort them over the last stage of the journey to the safe haven of Chastnaya. It was a large plantation of more than five hundred serfs, containing vineyards, groves of fruit trees, and acres of mulberry trees, on which lived the silkworms whose industry supported the Kiriakov fortune. It was set in the pleasant country where the Caucasian foothills ran out into the plain of the Caspian, a green and smiling landscape of gentle rises and hollows, a sprinkling of deciduous woodland, and numerous little streams making their way downhill to join the great River Terek.

The house itself was different from any that Anne had yet seen, being long and low and rambling, made almost entirely of wood, and surrounded by a deep verandah where a great deal of the family’s life took place. It was sheltered by clumps of dusty false acacia and tall elms loud with rooks. White jasmine clambered exuberantly over the verandah roof, filling the evening air with its rich scent, and to one side an attempt had been made at planting a pleasure-garden: roses, lavender and rosemary bushes, separated by gravel paths.

The Kirov party was greeted rapturously, and Irina was clasped to bosom after bosom, embraced, petted, and called any number of pet-names by her numerous and affectionate family. Anne, watching her smile and bloom under this treatment, began to understand the Countess’s intense reserve when away from them. To have been brought up amongst such an exuberant and demonstrative family, and then to be taken away from them to the formality and reserve of Petersburg life, must have its effect.

The children were next seized, hugged, exclaimed over, and borne away to be regaled with honey cakes and kissell; and Nyanka was openly blubbering in her joy at being home again, and was sprinkling one of her former charges after another with her happy tears. The whole of Irina’s large retinue was absorbed into the Chastnaya household with the ease of a minnow embraced by an octopus; in their warm hearts, and in the rambling honeycomb of rooms which was the house, there was space for everyone.

There seemed so many of the Kiriakovs that Anne had difficulty for a few days in sorting them out in her mind. They all had Irina’s fair, Tartar looks, and a friendly, forthright way of speaking. Irina’s parents were dead, so the head of the family was now her eldest brother, Feodor, who had a wife and four grown-up children. Next came Zina, who was unmarried, and more or less ran the household, though Feodor’s wife was official mistress of the house.

Then came Dmitri and Danil, separated by a year, but looking and behaving like twins, the more so because they had married twin sisters, which added enormously to Anne’s confusion. They had seven children between them. Ekaterina came next in age, widowed and returned for a long visit with her two children. She was the closest to Irina in age, being just eighteen months older.

After Irina came the unmarried brothers, Mishka and Grishka, and the unmarried daughters, Nadezhda and Zinaidia. Nadezhda had recently been betrothed by their eldest brother to a steady young man who would be allowed to marry her in nine or ten years’ time, when he had proved himself worthy. Anne saw that Irma’s whirlwind courtship and marriage to Count Kirov was not the way things were usually done, and that they had worried a great deal about her and were upset but not too surprised to find poor ‘‘Rushka’ looking so pale and thin.

‘Now you’re here,’ Zina said, putting an arm round her little sister, ‘we’ll soon make you rosy and plump. You must stay a good, long time. No need to hurry away, since that husband of yours is not at home. In fact, since you’ve brought the children with you, there’s no need to go back at all,’ she said, and at Irina’s startled look added hastily, ‘until Kirov comes home again, I mean.’ But it was plain that it was not what she meant, and that she could see no good and sufficient reason why any Kiriakov should ever live anywhere but at Chastnaya.

Life at Chastnaya was very much less formal than at Schwartzenturm. Anne was surprised but pleased to see her mistress put off her fashionable French clothes and adopt a plain and serviceable mode of dress; and was amused at Marie’s outrage when Irina stopped having her hair curled, and wore it instead in a single plait down her back, like a child. One day she even put on Scythian trousers, and went out on Iskra riding astride, the way she had when she was a little girl. The change in her was astonishing: she blossomed under the kindly warmth of her family’s love, and became smiling, talkative, even mischievous, enjoying romps and old family jokes as much as any of the children.

It was a happy, haphazard house. Everyone had their tasks to perform, and their own interests to pursue, and though the greeting they gave Anne was warm and sincere, she was a little startled, but not displeased, to find that they expected her to look after herself. Whatever she wanted she could have for the asking, or better still, help herself to. She might please herself how she dressed and what she did; and until everyone gathered on the verandah at the end of the day for the long, social evening of eating and drinking and talking and laughing, no one felt it was their business to entertain her, or advise her what to do.

Riding took up a great deal of everyone’s day. Chastnaya was a large estate, and just to get around it all the brothers spent many hours each day on horseback. The children were taught to ride almost before they could walk, and scrambled about on ponies, bareback like the hill children, as easily as on their own legs. Because of the threat from the Tcherkess, it was not possible to go outside the estate, and even within its bounds there was some danger, though all the Kiriakovs affected at least to ignore it. Their father had been killed by a Circassian raider, who picked him off while he was riding about his business in one of the outlying parts, and his sons felt that to show any fear of the same fate would be to dishonour his memory; but the women never went near the boundaries unescorted, and the children kept strictly to the fields nearer the house. The estate was so large, however, that this was not a hardship.

Anne rode for a good part of every day, and could hardly have desired a more agreeable occupation. Quassy had quite recovered from the journey, and Anne was discovering all over again the particular joy of riding her perfect horse. Her paces were smooth, her mouth like silk; but best of all, as Anne had found the first time she mounted her at Schwartzenturm, Quassy had a great natural exuberance which made riding her a particular delight. The mare loved to go out; and as they explored Chastnaya together, Quassy’s ears were pricked, her nostrils quivering, and she looked about her, bright-eyed with the intensity of her interest in everything around her.

The good-natured Grishka had built a series of small obstacles in one of the paddocks and was teaching Anne to jump.

‘I’ll teach you to ride astride, too, if you like,’ he offered one day. Anne was reluctant at first to try it. It looked immodest, she said. Grishka laughed, and pointed out that he had taught his two younger sisters to ride astride, and he would hardly have done that if there were anything improper about it; so she consented. The lessons were so successful that Danil offered next to teach her to shoot, and promised she would be a very fair shot by the time he had finished with her.

As to her pupils, she hardly saw them. There were so many people at Chastnaya eager to take care of them that she was never called upon to accompany the. Lessons were not thought of. They ran and played and rode with their cousins from dawn to dusk, growing brown and strong in the delightful Caucasian sunshine; and Anne comforted herself with the thought that the things they were learning then might be just as useful to them as the ability to put the map of Europe together, or recite the Tsars in order, with their dates.

One day in June, Anne was coming in with a basket of roses she had picked for the house, and to her astonishment found Sergei standing on the verandah talking to Zina, who had been called away from overseeing an important culinary event by his unexpected arrival. He turned as Anne approached, and his face lit up with a very flattering smile.

‘Anna Petrovna!’ he said. ‘There you are! I was told you were all here, so I thought I’d call and see you. I’ve been seconded to the Independents – the Independent Caucasian Corps, you know – and we’re stationed at Grozny, which is only twenty versts away. How are you? You are looking so well! And how is my mother?’

The second question sounded rather more perfunctory than the first, but Anne answered it as if it were not merely polite. ‘She is so much better, you would hardly know her. She grows quite plump – doesn’t she, Zina?’

‘She does; but none of us will have anything to eat today unless I get back to the kitchen and stop my cook and Kerim from killing each other. So I bid you welcome and farewell for the present, Sergei Nikolayevitch. Anna will take care of you, I know, and the men will be back soon. Forgive me – I shall see you at dinner.’ She hurried away, and though she had spoken in a friendly way, Anne wondered if she rather disapproved of Kirov’s son, and whether some other visitor might not have been deemed worth the risk of a domestic disaster.

Sergei seemed to notice nothing, however. He was looking at Anne, and as she put down the basket of roses he reached out and took both her hands, and said, ‘You look so well, Anna Petrovna! And different, somehow, I wonder what it is?’

‘Nothing, except that I dare say I am rather brown, from riding all day,’ Anne said with a smile.

‘No, no, it is something. You look happy and -1 don’t know.’ He was staring at her with such intensity, that she began to feel a little uncomfortable. She drew her hands back and gestured to him to sit down on one of the large sofas in the deep shade of the verandah.

‘Now, tell me all your news,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen you since you left Moscow with your father last year. You must have so much to tell! You were with him for some time, weren’t you?’

She managed to keep the wistful note out of her voice, though she longed for news of the Count. Sergei leaned back in the sofa’s embrace, and stretched out his elegant legs, crossing them at the ankle, and she studied his face unobserved for a moment. He had changed, too, she thought: his face had gained authority, his neck was thicker, his shoulders heavier. He no longer had that unfinished look: he was almost twenty, and had come into his young manhood, which suited him very well. She noticed that he had grown very handsome; and also, with a pang, that he looked more than ever like his father.

‘Yes, until December,’ he was saying. ‘Then he went to Paris, and I went to Lvov. Provincials! How I hated that! And then to Kiev, which I liked very well; and now here. Have you heard from Papa? He is lucky, to be sent to Paris again. How I long to see Paris!’

‘I think he would sooner be here,’ Anne said, ‘and let you go to Paris in his stead.’

‘Do you think so, indeed?’ Sergei said seriously. ‘I wonder. He loves his work, you know. He told me when we were together at Tilsit that diplomacy is in his blood. I think he soon grows bored with sitting at home and riding about his estate, with nothing to do in the evening but talk to his–’ He broke off, and blushed a little, and Anne affected not to notice what she imagined was to be a disparaging remark about Irina.

‘Was he in good health when you saw him last? His letters never mention such things. Does his arm trouble him?’

‘He says it aches a little in cold weather, but otherwise it seems to hold up very well. He told me,’ he added in a burst of confidentiality, ‘about your standing by him, when the surgeon searched the wound. I must say, Anna Petrovna, you are very brave, and a good friend to Papa. I know he thinks very highly of you – and I do too. And,’ he added, looking closely at her, ‘if you won’t think me impertinent, I’ll say you are looking very handsome today.’

Anne laughed. ‘I shall think you not only impertinent, but very foolish! Handsome, indeed, in this gown, and with my hair undressed!’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but it seems so to me,’ he said, seeming more puzzled than rebuked. ‘Perhaps–’

‘Ah, here is Yurka with some tea for us,’ Anne said with relief. ‘Or would you rather have something else?’

‘Tea will do very well. Papa told me how you preside over the samovar at home, in my mother’s place. I shall like to see how you do it.’

‘You are determined to put me out of countenance, but I shall not give you the satisfaction,’ Anne said, laughing. ‘Now do tell me what has been happening to you. What did you do in Kiev? I know very little about it, except that there is a fine cathedral there. Did you see it? Tell me all about it.’

By skilful questioning, she persuaded Sergei to drop the subject of her looks and character, and to talk instead of his own experiences. If he had been anyone other than her employer’s son, she would have thought him trying to flirt with her, or at least finding her attractive; but she was eight years his senior, and her position within the family alone should have made her invisible to him as a woman. Yet she was a little put out to find how attractive he had grown, and even more so to find herself noticing it when she was with him.

Zina’s slight coolness towards Sergei was not echoed in the greeting of any of the rest of the family, and soon wore off in the face of his personal charm and the family’s tradition of hospitality. Even Irina seemed less reserved with him than on former occasions, and she questioned him eagerly about his father, without seeming shy of him. Anne thought he still was not at ease with her, but he greeted his half-brother and half-sister affectionately. Nasha, in particular, seemed pleased to see him, and wound herself briefly but fervently round his waist.

He came evidently prepared to stay, and after dinner revealed that he had been given a month’s leave, which he thought not long enough to go even as far as the Black Sea. Feodor said at once, ‘Then you must stay here; of course you must stay with us!’ and so it was settled. As the family accepted him so easily into their number, so also they treated him as one of them, without troubling themselves to entertain him. Before long, Anne found he was attaching himself to her as being the one person who would interest herself in his feelings and enterprises. If she sat down on the verandah with a book or a piece of work, he would drift up and sit beside her; if she changed into her riding-skirt to take Quassy out, he was sure to appear at her elbow and offer her his escort; and after a day or two, she stopped struggling against the inevitable, and accepted that whatever she did, he would be her shadow.

She found herself enjoying his company more than she had expected. She tended always to think of him as the child he had been when she first came to Russia, but he had grown up so much in the last year or so that the difference in their ages was less obtrusive than before, and his experiences since he had graduated from the academy and left the stifling folds of his grandmother’s care had made him enormously better worth conversing with.

On the first day that they took a long ride together, he told her the extraordinary story of what had happened at Tilsit. After the defeat of Friedland, the Tsar’s brother Constantine, along with other senior generals, argued that to continue the war was like holding a loaded pistol to the head of each Russian soldier. The war was in any case being fought for no vital Russian interest, and to drag the weakened and demoralised army into another confrontation with the highly trained French would simply be to court another defeat, which might bring Napoleon to the very gates of Russia itself.

Besides that, the war was unpopular at home; and the peasants, on whom it fell to provide the manpower, detested the compulsory military service, and there had been outbreaks of violence and arson in protest against it. Galling though it was to deal with an upstart general whom the Synod of the Russian church had stigmatised as ‘the raving foe of mankind’, common sense dictated that it was necessary to make peace.

‘Papa said that Napoleon had never wanted to fight us; that he had always looked on France and Russia as natural allies,’ Sergei said as he rode his horse casually one-handed alongside Quassy. ‘He said that Napoleon had made overtures to our Emperor before, but that the Tsar would have nothing to do with it; and it was very hard, even though the Tsar agreed we must make peace, to get him to meet Napoleon at all. Especially, it was hard to find a place to hold the meeting. Napoleon has his pride, too, so it had to be on neutral ground.’

‘And hence the raft on the river?’ Anne prompted.

Sergei laughed. ‘Oh, you heard about that? Well, of course you would have! It was so fantastic, we all thought from time to time that we must be dreaming! Only it wasn’t a raft, you know, but a barge.’

‘But how did it come about?’ Anne asked.

‘It was Papa’s idea,’ Sergei said with evident pride. ‘Every place we suggested, the French objected to, and vice versa, and in the end Papa said, why not meet in the middle of the river? Because the Nieman is the boundary, Russia on one side and Prussia on the other. He swore afterwards that he said it as a joke, but you know Papa – he always means more than you think when he says things.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ Anne said.

Sergei nodded. ‘Well, whether he meant it or not, the idea seemed to take, so we had a barge built, and towed it out into the middle of the river and moored it with ropes to the central piles of what had been the bridge, before it was destroyed. Then we had a tent made, with N for Napoleon on one side and A for Alexander on the other – oh, you’d have laughed, Anna! – and the two Emperors were rowed out there, and sat in the tent on either side of a table and talked.’

A quail got up from the grass beside the path, and his horse startled, and he took a moment to quiet it. ‘But after the first two days,’ he went on, ‘everyone said it was too cramped on the barge, so it was decided that Tilsit itself should be declared neutral territory, and the rest of the talks took place there. But the barge was a good idea. I don’t see how we’d ever have got the Emperor to sit down in the same room with Napoleon if it hadn’t been for that.’

‘Did you see Napoleon? What did you think of him?’ Anne asked, checking Quassy from snatching at some tender leaves on a low branch over the path.

‘Well, I was lucky, because naturally everyone wanted to be appointed to the duty, but Papa being who he was, he was able to get me on the roster to attend the Emperor himself. So I was actually in the room some of the time. I must say, our Emperor beat the Frenchman to flinders!’ Sergei exclaimed with evident satisfaction. ‘He’s taller and handsomer and much more like a ruler in every way. But there’s something impressive about Napoleon all the same,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know what it is.’

‘You sound surprised,’ Anne said.

‘Well, he’s so short, to begin with – our Emperor towers over him – and he’s got a short neck, and a pasty face, and thin, dark hair. But his eyes are extraordinary – blue, though not such a bright blue as our Emperor’s, more a sort of grey-blue – but so bright and piercing, you have to look away from them. They make you feel very strange when they fix on you. He looked at me once, when he was asking for some more paper to be brought, and it made my head swim. I didn’t like him,’ he confessed, ‘but there’s something about him you can’t ignore.’

‘What was his manner like, to the Emperor?’

‘Oh, he was very polite – conciliatory, even. He called him “brother” – I don’t think the Tsar liked that at first, but after a while, he seemed to take to Napoleon more and more, as though he were casting a spell on him. They sat down after dinner and talked into the early hours, night after night, and from what I could hear, they seemed to be carving up the world between them – as if no one else had any say in it! Papa said they both got carried away. He says that Napoleon is quite mad, and that he fascinated our Emperor, but that their plans were grandiose, like children with no idea of how things really are. He says that it will destroy Napoleon in the end – but not until thousands have paid the price of his madness.’

Anne could hear the Count saying the words, and for a moment, Sergei was him, riding beside her and explaining the world to her, as he had done so often before.

‘I’ve heard some of the terms of the treaty, of course,’ Anne said thoughtfully. ‘France to help Russia against the Turks, for instance, in return for recognising the French in the Adriatic. But it doesn’t seem as though we came out of it very well. There’s Poland, for instance.’

‘Yes, the new Grand Duchy of Warsaw ratified,’ Sergei said, without apparently noticing that Anne had referred to Russia as her country, ‘and Moldavia and Wallachia handed back. And though Napoleon encouraged the Emperor to take Finland from the Swedes, he didn’t offer any help, and he’s claimed the right to keep garrisons in the Baltic ports. I can’t help feeling’, he concluded uneasily, ‘that all the treaty has done is to make Napoleon stronger. Perhaps we ought to have gone on fighting after all. And yet, there seems no chance we would have beaten him.’

‘The time hasn’t yet come when he can be beaten,’ Anne said, remembering the Count’s words.

Sergei looked at her strangely. ‘Sometimes you sound so like Papa,’ he said. ‘I must say, it’s wonderful talking to you, Anna Petrovna. You have such a quick grasp of things. The girls I am used to talking to can think of nothing but French gowns and dancing! In Kiev we had two balls a week during the season, and how bored I got with the giggling, feather-headed creatures I had to dance with! But of course, they are just girls – you are a woman, and an educated woman at that. No wonder Papa–’ He broke off abruptly.

‘No wonder what?’ Anne asked, intrigued.

‘Nothing,’ Sergei said, blushing a little. ‘Only Papa thinks a great deal of you, I know. He often talks about you – and I begin to see why.’

This was growing too close for comfort. Anne changed the subject. ‘So how did you occupy your time at Tilsit, when you weren’t on duty with the Emperor? Was there lots to do?’

He was successfully distracted. ‘Lord, no!’ he said with a disdainful curl of the lip. ‘Tilsit is the most beastly little town, shabby and downtrodden, and nothing decent to be had, not so much as a pair of gloves! There were a couple of banquets, but the food was dismal – everything tasted of river water, you know how it is in these provincial holes! And of course, the place was crawling with French.’

‘You didn’t like them?’ Anne hazarded.

‘Sneaking, air-blowing braggarts,’ Sergei said with unexpected passion. ‘Strutting about the town as if they owned the world, and not one of them from what we would call a decent family. But in the French army, anyone can become an officer, so what can you expect? We of the Guard refused to mix with them; and we didn’t like it above half when Grand Duke Constantine got friendly with their General Murat, and gave him a pair of Cossack breeches. Seeing that frog-eating blowhard swaggering about in them was enough to make one sick! He looked ridiculous, but he didn’t seem to know it.’

‘Perhaps the Grand Duke knew he would. Perhaps he did it as a joke,’ Anne said.

The notion seemed to appeal to Sergei, and he smiled. ‘Perhaps. Well, the French at least had the decency to send us their one remaining gentleman as Ambassador to the Court of St Petersburg. Have you seen anything of him?’

‘Armand de Caulaincourt? Yes, in Petersburg last winter. The Emperor has given him the Volkonsky Palace, practically next door to us, and we were invited to several balls and receptions there. Your father knew him in Paris, of course, and I saw him there once, at an embassy ball. He seems a very agreeable, intelligent man, and gets on well with everyone at Court, from what one hears.’

‘And lives like a prince, with fifty indoor servants,’ Sergei said with a grin. ‘They say his cook, Tardif, is the best in the world. Have you experienced his skills yet?’

‘Oh yes, at the banquet before his first ball. The food was certainly delicious, though Kerim tells me that there is nothing that comes out of the Volkonsky kitchen that he could not do just as well, or better! But de Caulaincourt certainly likes to entertain, and he will be a great asset to Petersburg society. I wish the French may do as well in Paris, with our Ambassador.’

‘What, Rumiantsev? Oh, he’s a gentleman of the old school, but no great gourmet,’ Sergei said carelessly. ‘You know that the Emperor wanted Papa to go?’

‘What, as Ambassador?’ Anne said in astonishment. ‘I did not realise – I had not thought he stood so very high, though to be sure–’

‘Oh yes, the Emperor thinks the world of him, and he said that as Papa had spent so much time in Paris, and knew everyone, he was perfectly suited for the position. But Papa refused it. He suggested Rumiantsev instead, and offered his services in an advisory capacity.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘I should not, myself, like to refuse the Emperor anything, but Papa is as brave as a lion.’

‘Why did he refuse? Did he happen to mention to you?’ Sergei frowned. ‘I’m not absolutely sure. Papa jokes, you know, and sometimes one cannot precisely pin down what he does mean. But he told me that Rumiantsev was the best man for the job, because he really believes in the alliance with the French. He thinks that the French are sure to help us secure the Turkish lands we need to complete the old Byzantine Empire; and that what happens in the rest of Europe doesn’t matter, as long as Napoleon leaves our western border alone.’

‘By which we must infer that your father does not think so.’

‘Papa thinks Napoleon is the enemy of civilisation, and that he must be defeated sooner or later. He thinks what happens in Europe does matter, and that we should resist it; and that the treaty solves nothing, only pushes the problem under the carpet.’

They reached the top of a rise, and he halted his horse and turned it a little so that he could look at Anne. She reached forward to stroke Quassy’s neck and turn over a lock of her mane, and then straightened up to meet Sergei’s searching gaze.

‘The worst thing about the treaty,’ he said, ‘is that our Emperor was obliged to side with the French against England. It makes me feel very bad to think that Russia is now England’s enemy; though I’m sure’, he added hastily, ‘that the Emperor doesn’t mean to do anything about it, beyond the boycott of British shipping. This talk about a secret treaty to declare war on England is all nonsense, I’m sure.’

Anne was touched by his concern; and a little puzzled to know what her own feelings were. ‘My dear,’ she said, trying to make light of it, ‘there’s no need to apologise for the actions of the Emperor of All the Russias. I’m sure if he had consulted you, things would have been different.’

Sergei bit his lip. ‘You are all generosity to joke about it, but I hate to think that we are now on opposite sides.’

‘You mean that officially I am now your enemy?’ she teased gently. ‘No, it’s all right -1 am joking you. And, indeed, I hardly know what I feel. I have been four years in Russia, but it seems like half a lifetime. I think I am becoming more Russian every day, and England seems so far away – far away, and lost to me.’

He observed her intently. ‘You miss your home?’ he asked gently. ‘I’m sorry if I have spoken clumsily, and made you remember it.’

She gathered herself together. ‘Don’t look so tragic, Seryosha! England is still there, and still safe, whatever Alexander and Bonaparte may decide between them. While the British navy rules the waves, no harm can come to my country. And the war won’t last for ever. One day I shall be able to go back.’

‘Go back to visit – or to live?’ he asked hesitantly.

She stared unseeingly at Quassy’s ears. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘At this moment, I really don’t know.’

There was a silence; and then Quassy tugged impatiently at the bit, and Anne shook herself and smiled at her young companion’s grave expression. ‘Come on, let’s gallop,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I haven’t felt the wind in my face all day. I’ll race you down to the brook and see if that bay of yours is as great a sluggard as it looks.’

Sergei rose to the challenge. ‘He’d beat your mare over any ground! Name your stakes!’

‘The winner shall name them! Are you ready? Go!’

Chapter Fourteen

Anne was sitting on the verandah enjoying a late breakfast of yoghurt, honey, figs, grapes, and the strong, cloudy coffee which had taken so much getting used to, but which she now relished almost more than the usual kind. Sashka was lolling against her knees, picking idly at the grapes on her plate as he took a short respite from the energetic games he had been playing with his cousins since dawn. He had grown visibly that summer, since arriving at Chastnaya, and Zina said proudly that it was the Caucasian air and food, which, she firmly believed, could have made a dead man get up and dance.

His father, Anne thought, half-fondly and half-sadly, would hardly recognise the boy when he saw him again. When that would be there was no knowing. The Corsican general who had made himself Emperor now ruled half the world: with Portugal overrun and Spain become a subject kingdom, the French empire now stretched from Gibraltar to the Russian frontier; from the chilly Baltic to the blue Ionian Sea; and with Russia complaisant and Sweden helplessly neutral, England alone resisted, maintaining the war against the most successful soldier the world had ever known, not in hope of success, but because there was no choice. Already the European embargo on British goods, or goods carried in British ships, had bitten hard: Napoleon hoped to starve his enemy into submission, since he could not invade England’s shores without control of the sea – and that, Anne still firmly believed, he would never have.

Meanwhile, life for her at Chastnaya was very pleasant, and she missed the stiff formality of Petersburg not at all. Like her mistress, she had taken to wearing her hair in a plait, and dressing with simplicity in a cotton skirt, peasant blouse and sandals, or soft boots for riding. Occasionally a feeling of guilt would drive her to gather the children together for a lesson, or to take them out on an escorted ride to teach them the names of the trees and flowers; but otherwise she spent her days in idleness and pleasure, and enjoyed every moment.

Sergei came out of the house, smiled a greeting at her, and flung himself down in a hammock, one leg trailing idly over the edge, one arm hooked under his head so that he could look at her.

‘What are you going to do today, Anna Petrovna?’ he asked. Sashka left Anne’s knee to climb on to the hammock and sit astride his half-brother, who held him off gently with one strong hand. ‘Don’t kneel there, Sashka! I’ve breakfasted on quails and champagne and I should hate to lose them!’

‘Quails and champagne?’ Anne said with a quizzical smile. ‘Is that the way you Guards officers live? What luxury! I suppose that’s what you learned in Kiev?’

‘That, and how to dance and make love to the Ukranian girls,’ he smiled from under his eyelids. ‘I am an excellent dancer, you know, Anna. They all said I was a pleasure to dance with.’

‘I’m sure you are,’ Anne said, sipping her coffee.

‘So, will you entrust yourself to me tomorrow, at the dance after the muster? I think we should make a very pretty couple.’

Anne raised an eyebrow. ‘You want to dance with me?’

‘Why not?’

‘I should have thought you would want to dance with Zinaidia and her friends. They are closer to your age, and Zinaidia is very pretty. That’s what I’d call a pretty couple.’

A pink spot of vexation showed on his cheek, but he kept his eyes on Sashka, who was pretending he was a horse, and slapping his thigh to drive him on faster. ‘What nonsense you talk! Anyone would think you were a matron in a cap, to hear you. The difference in our ages is nothing. I regard you as my contemporary; Zinochka and her friends are giggling schoolgirls as far as I’m concerned, and I have no interest in them.’

She saw his dignity had been touched, and did not want to upset him further. ‘I am rebuked,’ she said calmly. ‘I shall dance with you, with pleasure, if that’s what you want.’

He sat up abruptly, swinging Sashka down in one movement, and regarded her with bright eyes. ‘Do you mean it? Any dance?’

‘Any dance,’ she smiled. ‘You choose. Now I think I’ll go and put on my riding boots, and take Quassy out to look at the view from Picnic Point.’

‘Good idea! May I come with you?’ Sergei said at once. ‘Here’s a thought: why don’t we take a picnic with us, and go the long way round, by Valley of the Horses? After tomorrow you won’t see the great herds grazing there, so you ought to go and look at them once more. Then we can take a nuncheon under the trees, and ride back through the woods, which will be nice and cool in the hot part of the day.’

The plan was very appealing, but there was something in the eagerness in Sergei’s eyes that made Anne hesitate. He did not look at her as she would expect a boy to look at the governess, his father’s employee; but then, she reminded herself, he was not a boy any longer, and it would be as well not to forget that again. She met his eyes, and felt a strange flutter inside herself, which she immediately and sternly crushed down.

‘What a good idea,’ she made herself say lightly. ‘We could take Nasha and Sashka, too. Would you like that, Sashka? How kind your brother is, to think of it! Run and find your sister, and we’ll send for the horses, and get Kerim to make us up something to eat. We could carry it in saddle-bags, so as not to have to take a groom with us.’

Sergei took it very well, but seeing, out of the corner of her eyes, the disappointment in his, Anne felt she had been right to include the children in his plan.

Three hours later, they were riding in single file along the path which ran along the side of the hill for the whole length of the Valley of the Horses. As they wound in and out of bushes and rocky outcrops, they could see down below them the silver thread of the little river which tacked back and forth across the valley floor. In some places it ran brown and deep between green banks, and there were fish to be caught, flickering suddenly out of the overhang, or rising to snatch a fly with a faint popping sound; in other places it became shallow, and tumbled noisily over natural dams of grey rock, refracting the light into dazzle; clattered hollowly over smooth bare stones; and spread silver ripples over wide gravel beaches.

And scattered over the whole valley floor, everywhere they looked, there were horses, grazing on the good, rich grass, peacefully unaware of the muster to come on the morrow. They were mostly bays and greys and a few blacks, Karabakhs and Kabardas, highly prized throughout Russia and the Levant: intelligent, fast, and hardy. As they rode along, Quassy turned her head continually from the business of picking her path, to gaze intently at the grazing herds below, as if she recognised her kin; and now and then she would stretch her nostrils wide for the smell of them and make a little whickering sound of excitement. She had been born in just such a herd in such a valley, and her eyes were bright with the memory. Sergei’s horse, and the children’s ponies, being geldings, paced along unemotionally, their ears at the usual half-mast of indifference.

At the head of the valley, the flanking hills closed together, and met in a flattish headland, with a broad grey patch where the underlying granite broke through the thin turf. Behind it rose a rough cliff, topped with wind-bent thorn trees; but around the natural rock table was a pretty clump of birch which afforded shade from the noon sun, and relief to the eye. This place was called Picnic Point, for it was a natural place to stop and enjoy an alfresco meal, and admire the view.

Kerim had exercised his imagination in the matter of the nuncheon; perhaps enjoying the challenge, for much of his time hung heavy on his hands. He was under-occupied at Chastnaya, for the Kiriakov cook was even more fiercely autocratic than Kerim, and only grudgingly allowed him to help in the kitchen, except for the one day a month when he took a holiday on vodka and for twenty-four hours became incapable of anything but snoring. Then Kerim came into his own, not only cooking, but passing through the kitchens like a whirlwind, cleaning and reorganising everything along the lines he approved and had learnt from his Moscow master; only to see the new order overturned the following day when Bablash returned to duty with his temper soured by a thick mouth and pounding head.

A nuncheon to be packed in saddle-bags was beneath Bablash’s notice, however, and he had made no objection to Kerim’s being asked to prepare it personally. Had he been given sufficient notice – say, a day or two – Kerim would have put up a feast fit at least for a count; as it was he had done his noble best by assembling all the good things he could find that didn’t need cooking.

While Sergei unsaddled the horses and tied them up, Anne spread a cloth and the children trotted back and forth bringing the quail’s eggs, pickled mushrooms, cold roast duck, smoked eel, salads, strawberries, raisins and honey cakes with which Kerim had solaced his thwarted creativity.

‘Quassy’s very restless,’ Sergei reported as he came to join them, bringing the bottles which had been packed in his saddlebags. ‘We shall have to keep an eye on her, in case she breaks her rope.’

‘I expect it’s the herds down below upsetting her,’ Anne said, making room for him.

‘The other horses aren’t excited,’ Sashka pointed out.

‘Perhaps she can smell the stallion,’ Nasha said unexpectedly, and Anne and Sergei met each other’s eyes, and suppressed a smile.

‘Maybe so,’ Anne said hastily. ‘Sit down, Nasha, and have something to eat. What has Kerim given us to drink, I wonder?’

‘Buttermilk,’ Sergei said, making a face. ‘That must be for the children. And Rhenish for us, Anna.’ He smiled into her eyes. ‘It should have been champagne.’

‘Not in the heat of the day,’ Anne said.

Sergei seemed suitably chastened, and laid himself out instead to be pleasant and amuse the children. He told them tales of his adventures; described their father ‘being the arch diplomat, all lowered eyelids and inscrutable smiles’; even played guessing games with them while they ate Kerim’s delicious food. Now and then, to Anne’s amusement, he glanced at her for approval, but she kept her eyes on her plate and feigned not to see. When they had finished, the children, energy restored, jumped up to wander off to explore while Anne and Sergei made themselves more comfortable, gazed at the view and chatted.

‘I must say,’ Anne said, ‘I’m really looking forward to the muster tomorrow. It promises to be quite a day! And Grishka says there will be riding displays, and mock battles, and gypsy dancing, as well as the feast and the dance afterwards.’

‘Yes, they always make a festival of it, at Chastnaya,’ Sergei said. ‘People come from miles around to buy horses and sell other goods in exchange. It’s like a regular country fair. Not that I’ve ever been here before, but Papa has told me of it often. It was at the muster that he first met Irina Pavlovna.’

‘I didn’t know that. How did it come about?’

‘Well, he was serving with the Caucasus Highland Guard at Pyatigorsk, and they had an anonymous warning that the Tcherkess were going to attack Chastnaya in force during the muster, and steal the horses to sell to the Turks. So he was ordered to bring a troop down to guard the plantation; but the Tcherkess never came, and instead he fell in love with Irina Pavlovna, and married her and took her away within the month.’

‘So quickly!’ Anne said. ‘Was it love at first sight?’

Sergei shrugged. ‘I only know what Papa’s told me. The story is that he saw her coming in from riding with her hair in a plait and a scarf round her head, and took her for a peasant girl, and asked her to bring him some lemonade. Later when he was introduced to her as the daughter of the house, he didn’t realise it was the same girl, until she asked him if he wanted anything more to drink. It made a sort of joke between them, I suppose.’

Anne didn’t think this sounded like a sufficient reason for marrying anyone, but could hardly say so. Instead she said lightly, ‘So the Kiriakovs kept their horses, but lost a daughter.’

Sergei gave a quirky smile. ‘I wonder if that’s why Zina doesn’t take to me – maybe she’s afraid history is about to repeat itself, and that I’ll run off with Zinochka! Perhaps I should set her mind at rest.’ And he sang in his small but tuneful voice a verse of a popular local song:

The mountain girls are honey-sweet,

With midnight in their eyes,

But wind and sky and freedom

Are still the better prize.

So I’ll not wed, and die in bed:

I’ll save my cash

And buy a horse instead!

Anne laughed and said, ‘That’s a thoroughly reprehensible song, but I don’t know that I can find fault with the philosophy, feeling as I do about Quassy! Did I tell you about the offer of marriage I had from a Tartar Prince? If I had been willing to part with my horse, I could have been a princess by now!’

‘In Papa’s case, he’d have done better to take the horse,’ Sergei said unguardedly.

‘Sergei, you mustn’t say things like that,’ Anne said quickly.

‘I can’t help it, Anna -1 don’t like her. Oh, I do my bit and behave pretty, and call her Mother, but I’ve never liked her.’

‘I’ve seen you try, and applauded it, but I wish you need not find it such an effort. What is it you dislike?’

He shrugged. ‘There’s something about her and all her people that’s -1 don’t know – different. Not civilised. They aren’t really Russians at all. They’re like half-tamed dogs – they might turn at any moment and bite you.’

‘But you must believe that Irina Pavlovna loves your father very dearly, and he her.’

‘Why must I? I don’t believe it,’ Sergei said, frowning. ‘I don’t know what they may have once felt for each other, but I don’t believe he loves her now, and as for her – well, look where she is! If you loved my father, wouldn’t you go with him to Paris? Would you stay behind?’

‘Seryosha, it’s most improper for us to talk like this. Please, don’t say any more. You forget my position.’

He flung himself back on the grass on one elbow. ‘Your position! How could I forget? You’re always reminding me of it!’

Anne looked at him in distress, wondering how to cope with the jumble of emotions being presented her. But before she could draw breath to tackle the situation, there was a sound behind them, a little rushing rattle of small loose stones, and she turned her head to see that Nasha had climbed half-way up the cliff face and was sitting on a ledge, watching them.

Anne called out an automatic warning. ‘Nasha, be careful! It’s dangerous.’

Nasha looked down at her unperturbed. ‘I’m all right,’ she said calmly. ‘I shan’t fall.’ She regarded them steadily, her eyes impassive and bright, and Anne wondered uncomfortably if it were possible that she had heard what they were saying. But surely she was too far away?

‘Nasha, come down now,’ Anne called, but Natasha did not move to obey. Instead she looked away, and fixing her eyes dreamily on the middle distance, she said unexpectedly, ‘Anna, are all the people who hear voices mad?’

‘What do you mean? What voices?’ Anne asked, some undefined apprehension sharpening her voice.

Nasha’s gaze slid from the infinite to focus on Anne’s face. ‘Marie was telling me about Jeanne d’Arc hearing a voice that told her to dress as a man and go to war. But when I asked Kerim, he said that it was a sign of madness to hear voices.’ Anne regarded her cautiously, wondering what new mischief this heralded. Was Nasha hoping to be allowed to dress in trousers and ride at the muster tomorrow? And did she hope to enlist Divine aid for the purpose?

‘In the case of Jeanne d’Arc, we believe that the voice she heard was a command from God,’ she said, aware that Sergei was watching her with amusement at her predicament.

‘And what if someone else heard voices?’

‘I suppose it might be a Divine command,’ Anne began cautiously.

‘In the case of Bablash,’ Sergei interrupted, ‘it’s the voice of the genie in the bottle. Commands of a very different sort.’

Nasha considered. ‘How would anyone know which it was?’

Sergei was grinning at her discomfiture, and Anne firmly avoided his eyes. ‘I think if the voice were from God, the command would probably be to do something difficult that you didn’t particularly want to do.’

‘Because if it was something you liked doing, God wouldn’t have to tell you – you’d do it anyway?’ Nasha hazarded.

‘Something like that,’ Anne said, wondering how she could change the subject.

Nasha appeared to be pondering the matter, staring away into the distance. Suddenly she straightened and said in a very different voice, ‘Oh look, there’s the stallion!’

At the same moment Quassy let out a piercing whinny, and they turned to see the herd stallion standing on a rocky outcrop only a little way off, separated from them by a shallow gully. Anne drew a breath. She had never seen anything so magnificent: he was no mere horse, but a creature of raw power and commanding presence. He stood watching them, his head turned, his bright eye showing a little white, his whole body gathered and tense like a coiled spring. He was pure white, not tall for a horse, almost too stocky for beauty; his chest was deep, his ribs widely sprung, his quarters broad, muscle packed over shoulder and loin, and arching his massive neck into a crest; but his head was fine-cut and intelligent. Power and delicacy were perfectly combined in him as he stood there outlined against the sky, his ears pricked, his nostrils flaring as they sought to trap and identify the scents coming to him on the light air.

‘He’s magnificent,’ Anne breathed. The stallion arched his neck and raised his tail into a banner, and stamped his hoof threateningly as he looked warily at the group before him. Then he fixed his eyes on the horses, and made a deep knuckering sound. Instantly Quassy answered, fidgeting in excitement, and even the geldings began shifting nervously at their tethers as the tension in the air reached them.

Sergei was half-way to his feet. ‘We’d better get to them,’ he said. ‘There’s no knowing what–’

But the stallion had caught Quassy’s scent, and he made another sound, quite different this time, a deep and powerful whinny, to which Quassy replied with an excited squeal. She flung herself abruptly back on her haunches and jerked at her head-rope, and as the stallion called again, she reared up and struck out at her tether, and came down with a leg over the rope.

Now all was confusion. The horses were milling, the stallion stamping and calling, and Quassy was trapped, unable to free her leg from the rope which she was pulling taut in her efforts to escape. She was whinnying and struggling in a mixture of excitement and panic, and Anne and Sergei were both up and running.

‘Oh God, she’ll break her leg!’ Anne cried.

‘Get to her! Hold her!’ Sergei called. ‘I’ll try to drive him off!’ He ran past the horses, waving his arms and shouting to try to frighten the stallion away. Anne reached Quassy, grabbed her rope close to the head, and tried to pull her head down so as to slacken the rope enough to free her leg. But Quassy was too frightened now, strong in her panic, and strained back with all her strength, pulling the rope ever tighter under her knee.

In terror that the leg might break, Anne saw there was nothing to do but untie the rope. Sergei had hitched all the horses with safety knots, and she had only to reach for the loose end and tug. Her fingers closed on the rough hemp, just as Sergei, turning his head, saw what she was about to do, and shouted, ‘No! For God’s sake, don’t untie her!’

He was too late. The rope came free, and for a blessed moment all seemed well, as Anne dropped the slack of it and Quassy was able to put her foreleg down; but in the same instant the stallion called again, and the mare, her whole body quivering, flung up her head, her ears pricked towards him, and obeyed the imperative summons. The rope was jerked free, running through Anne’s hand, and burning her palm as she tried to hold on. She cried out; Quassy gave a violent breenge, and leapt away, almost knocking Sergei over as he tried to grab her. She was over the dry gully in one bound; the stallion whirled and snorted excitedly, circled her, and then closed his teeth on her crest, driving her towards the herd. Quassy squealed and obeyed, and the two of them disappeared over the edge and down the hillside.

Anne ran forward automatically, but Sergei caught her, almost pulling her over.

‘Anna, for God’s sake!’

‘We must catch her! He’ll hurt her! Let me go!’ Anne cried out, struggling.

Sergei tightened his hold, turning her to face him, shaking her a little to get her attention. ‘Don’t be a fool, you can’t go after her on foot! He wouldn’t let you get near her anyway. Be still, Anna! There’s nothing we can do now. Oh Lord, we’ll lose the other horses if we don’t calm them!’

And he let go of her to run to the head of his gelding, who was snorting and tugging at his rope. Nasha was there, too, soothing the ponies, and Sashka looking frightened. Anne suddenly became aware of the pain in her hand, looked down at the red rope-burn across her palm, and burst unexpectedly into tears.

In a moment, Sergei, abandoning the horses to Nasha, had crossed to her again, and taken her in his arms, holding her close against him and murmuring, ‘Anna! Annushka! It’s all right. Don’t cry.’ Anne wanted to obey him, but the excitement and shock of it all had for once overset her usual self-control. ‘Oh don’t cry, doushkal. She’ll be all right. He won’t hurt her – he just wants her for his herd. It’s a compliment really.’

Anne tried to respond, but only cried harder. His arms were unexpectedly strong and comforting, and she leaned against him gratefully, and tried to say something, which came out as a gulp and a sob.

‘What is it, Annushka? Oh, there, don’t cry! We’ll get Quassy back, don’t worry.’

Over Sergei’s shoulder, Anne caught sight of the children watching her gravely, and it was enough to make her recover her senses. She must not take comfort from Sergei like this. She pulled away from him, and he allowed her to go, transferring his hold to her wrist, and uncurling her wounded hand.

‘Poor darling, does it hurt very much? Wait, I have a clean handkerchief here. Let me bind it up for you.’

‘No, no, I’ll do it,’ Anne said hastily.

‘Nonsense,’ Sergei said. ‘How would you tie it, one-handed?’

She submitted, allowing him to fold the clean linen and bind it around her palm. ‘We’d better get back to the house, so that we can dress it properly,’ Sergei said. ‘And then perhaps you ought to go to bed and rest. It’s been quite a shock for you.’

Anne almost smiled at this picture of her fragile sensibility. ‘Thank you. I’m quite all right now,’ she said, fumbling for her own handkerchief. She dried her face, and thought as Sergei watched her solicitously how absurdly young he looked when he was being protective. ‘As for going to bed, there’s no question of it. We’ll have to ask Mishka to get a party together at once, to go after Quassy. She still has that rope on her headstall. I’m so afraid she’ll catch it in something and hurt herself.’

Sergei shook his head. ‘Don’t be silly. The stallion would never let us get near her, even with a dozen men. The only way to separate her now is to drive the whole herd in and corral them, which is what will happen at the muster tomorrow. We’ll get her back then. Don’t worry, she’ll be all right.’

‘But supposing–’

‘Don’t suppose! There’s nothing else to be done. Come, we had better pack the things and get back. We’ve got Quassy’s saddle to carry, too. Look, do you think you could ride Nabat astride? He’s not broken to side-saddle. Then if you could take Nasha up behind you, I can ride her pony and carry the saddle. That will be the best way. Can you manage the reins, with your hand, or should I lead you?’

‘No, I’m sure I can manage,’ Anne said, and meekly allowed Sergei to go on organising everything since he seemed to be enjoying it. He helped her mount his gelding, and Anne was very glad now that she had had those lessons from Grishka. Nabat felt uncomfortably broad after Quassy. Her thigh muscles ached from the unaccustomed position, and her hand hurt, but there was nothing to be gained by complaining. Sergei threw Nasha up behind her, helped Sashka to mount his pony, and almost stepped astride Nasha’s pony with the spare saddle over his arm.

It seemed a very long ride back, and by the time they reached the house, Anne felt exhausted. Zina tutted over her hand, and dressed it with sweet oil, and noting the heaviness of Anne’s eyes, insisted that she have a warm herbal bath and retire to her room for a rest. ‘You will need to be fresh for tomorrow,’ she said reasonably. ‘It will be a very long day.’

Naturally, neither Anne nor the children were allowed to take part in the muster itself, but mounted on quiet ponies, they were able to watch the beginning of it from the hillside above the valley. Irina was there too, but not on Iskra. She had been very much upset by the narration of what happened to Quassy, and had taken the precaution of shutting her own mare in the stable for the day, and coming out on a safe pony.

Down below the herd grazed. Anne strained her eyes, but could not pick out Quassy from that distance, even allowing for the rope and headcollar. The stallion was on a little rise to one side, scenting the wind, seeming already uneasy, though he could not yet have caught the smell of the men who were approaching from downwind, thirty of them on horseback, and another twenty on foot, with whips and sticks with which to make a noise to head off the horses if necessary. The watchers on the hillside could see the cordon of riders approaching, stretched out across the open end of the valley. The plan was to drive the horses up the headland and through the gulley, and down the woodland track to the bottlenecked corral which had been built about half a mile from the house.

A horse whinnied, and the mares stopped grazing and looked about them uneasily, and called their foals to their side. The stallion’s head was up high, turning this way and that, and then he saw the movement out beyond his herd, and stamped his foot warningly. He left his eminence and trotted down the side of the herd, and his gait was long and smooth and floating; despite his solidity he moved with effortless grace, barely seeming to brush the grass.

The mares were beginning to draw together and move away from the approaching cordon, but the stallion was suspicious. He reached the far side of the herd and halted, head up, staring at the riders, trotting a few steps one way, then whirling on his haunches and trotting the other way, keeping between his mares and the threat, yet not knowing quite what the threat might be. He could smell the men, but the ridden horses confused him; and all the while his herd was drifting away from him up the valley, bunching in closer as the valley narrowed.

Finally he whirled away and raced the length of the herd, turning at the front to halt the mares, who looked uneasily over their shoulders, and then at him, uncertain which imperative to obey. One or two tried to break back, their foals running and turning with them as if attached by invisible cords, and the stallion whinnied to them anxiously. Then Anne saw a glint as one of the leading riders – probably Mishka or Grishka – raised his shotgun in the air, and a moment later there came the flat slamming sound of an explosion, which echoed back and forth across the narrow valley.

It was all that was needed. The mares who had tried to break turned away from the sound in panic, and the whole herd began to move up the valley at a trot. The stallion went with them, circling at that same, effortless, flying gait, bunching the mares closer together, unwittingly doing exactly what his pursuers wanted.

‘We’d better go now, if we’re to get to the corral before they arrive,’ Irina said. ‘You mustn’t miss that part, Anna – it’s so exciting! One year they managed to break out, and it took two days to drive them back again once they had scattered. That was in the days of the old stallion, of course. He was very clever, and very fierce, and he knew all about the muster. This is the new, young one – there’s no knowing what he may do.’

‘I don’t understand what’s to keep them on the path through the wood,’ Anne said as they turned their ponies away from the valley. Across country, they should easily reach the corral first. ‘They could scatter amongst the trees, and you’d never catch them.’

‘Instinct,’ Irina said. ‘They always try to keep together, and run for open country. It isn’t in their nature to go in amongst the trees, and the stallion wouldn’t let them, either. Horses don’t hide for safety – they run. They obey their nature – and it will be their undoing,’ she added.

On the other side of the headland, at the end of the wood, there was another gully, and beyond it the corral had been built, a wide-open funnel at the end from which the horses would approach, narrowing into a bottleneck with a double gate. Up on the top of the gully another group of men waited with brushwood hurdles to jump down behind the herd and close the gap to stop them breaking back; and here, too, Anne and Irina and the children joined the other women and children to watch from the safe eminence.

It was hot, even so early in the day, and airless, and clouds of tiny black flies rose from the bracken to torment the ponies; but the ring of their bits as they shook their heads, and the occasional stamp of a hoof, were the only sounds. Everyone was silent, waiting in almost unbearable tension for the arrival of the herd.

They heard them before they saw them, a soft drumming sound that was so low and heavy it was almost felt rather than heard, like the beating of one’s own heart. Its vibration increased as it drew nearer, and became audible as a thunder of hooves on the hard-baked track; and then the distant sound of pursuit reached their ears, the men yipping and cracking their whips to drive them on.

Then suddenly out of the wood the stallion appeared, leading his mares now that the track was too narrow for him to circle them. He cantered, head up, bright eyes everywhere, his mane and tail streaming out with the wind of his passage. Then, as he reached the point where the gully sides rose short but sheer like cliffs, he stopped dead. Behind him the mares crowded up but did not pass, while he stood staring suspiciously about him.

Anne thought how beautiful he looked: wild and proud; the master of his mares, but their protector, too, going first into danger on their behalf, offering his life for them, and for the right to mate them; and somehow the beauty and the pride made her feel sad. She wanted to cry, because they, the human beings, were deceiving him, trapping him; and though she knew it was foolish, because no harm would come to him, she felt they were small, mean creatures, beside his greatness, his noble strength.

He looked at the people lining the gully top, and at the inviting open space before him at the gully mouth, and he seemed to sense that something was wrong. His mares pressed against him, and one tried to pass, but he snapped at her to hold her back. His ears went forward and back, and he snorted, misliking the situation, and held the great press of bodies behind him by the sheer force of his presence.

Then Natasha tugged urgently at Anne’s arm, and whispered, ‘Oh look, there’s Quassy!’

Anne had seen her at the same instant, as she flung up her head and the headcollar and rope became visible. She was near the front, and apart from the headcollar she looked no different from any of those other black and brown and grey bodies; with her dusty coat, tangled mane and wary eyes, she was just another wild mare trying to escape from the hated smell of men. Anne’s heart ached for her, too.

Behind them the men redoubled their shouts and whipcracking, and the mares surged forward more urgently. The stallion looked again suspiciously at that inviting gap; and then, there being nothing else for it, trotted forward. Anne was conscious of everyone’s letting out their breath in relief. The herd surged by, a sea of long bodies, wild manes, upflung heads; the foals pressed to their mothers’ sides, only their tiny faces visible in the mass of warm bodies, as they did what was born in them for survival. In a brown and black and white stream, the horses poured through the narrow gap and spread out into the space beyond. Anne turned her pony and rode to the other edge of the gully to see the finale.

The paddock rails were visible to the stallion now; and all around the circumference were people, lining the rails, making escape impossible. Now the lie was exposed to him. The open space was not what it seemed: the paddock rails curved in again, narrowing ahead into a trap. He snorted and began to run back and forth across the width of the paddock, whirling, ears back, just out of reach of the hated men who hemmed him in. The mares pressed in behind him, driving him towards the bottleneck; he ran back and forth, more and more urgently, kicking out as he spun around at the end of each shortening run, angry, afraid.

‘What will they do with him?’ Anne asked breathlessly, of no one in particular. Surely no one could hold that white storm? Then there was a confusion of shouting and a flurry of movement, as at the last moment when it would be possible, the stallion charged the rails, and with a power born of desperation sprang into the air, clearing both the rails and the instinctively ducking heads of the men beyond them. It was a soaring, stunning jump, at least five and a half feet upwards, perhaps fifteen feet outwards, hard to believe even though they witnessed it with their own eyes. He landed in a spurt of dust, and swerving violently, galloped at an astonishing speed for the open country.

Everyone was shouting and exclaiming with excitement. ‘Did you see?’ Irina cried needlessly, her eyes shining. ‘What a jump! He must have cleared six feet!’

‘I’m glad he got away. They’ll never catch him now,’ Anne said, her eyes unaccountably moist.

‘They don’t want to. Once he was through the bottleneck he’d have been let go anyway,’ Irina said. ‘His job is to look after the mares out in the wild – he is never brought in or tamed.’

‘Where will he go now?’

‘Not far,’ Irina said. ‘He’ll hang around just out of reach, waiting to see what becomes of his wives, and when they are released, he’ll come and gather them up, and take them back to the valley. But I’m glad I saw that jump! I don’t suppose anyone’s ever seen a horse jump higher.’

The corral was filling up now, and Sergei came riding up to the gully-top to say to Anne, ‘Quassy’s up there, and she looks all right, as far as one can see.’

‘Yes, I saw her go past. What happens now?’

‘Since the stallion’s gone, Feodor’s going to go in and try to get hold of her. She may be a little wild. Do you want to come down and watch?’

‘Of course,’ Anne said. ‘But wouldn’t it be better if I went in to her? She knows me.’

Sergei grinned. ‘Foolish! You don’t really think anyone will let you climb into a corral full of wild horses, do you?’

With no one driving them, and no stallion to lead them, the mares were growing quieter, no longer milling about, but standing still, watchful, yet not panicking; one or two even suckled their young foals. When Anne and Sergei reached the paddock rails, Feodor with a rope in his hand was preparing to climb in.

‘Going to see if I can get up to that mare of yours, Anna,’ he said as they came up. ‘See if she’ll let me near her.’

‘She ought to,’ Anne said. ‘She’s as gentle as a kitten to handle.’

‘That was before she had a whole day of freedom on the range, and with the stallion for company,’ Feodor said with a grin. ‘It changes priorities, you know. But we’ll see.’

Anne watched with amazement and distress as her previous docile, gentle mare proved impossible to catch. In a while, Feodor was back.

‘She’s not having it,’ he said, climbing back over to safety. ‘Unfortunately, there’s just enough room in there for them to move about. If they were packed tighter, I’d be able to take her, but I don’t want to upset them any more. We’ll get her when she goes through the bottleneck. One thing, though – she’s not lame. Seems to be perfectly sound, from the way she was dodging me and kicking out.’ He turned to his head man, hovering at his side. ‘All right, let’s get on with it.’

Half an hour later Quassy was driven by the press of bodies into the bottleneck, and trapped between the two sets of gates. Leaning over, Feodor caught the rope hanging from her headcollar, while Mishka reached over from the other side and attached a second rope; then the further gate was opened, and she exploded out of the trap, towing the two men with her. Anne watched in amazement as for the next few minutes, Quassy bucked and struggled like a mad thing to get away; then she seemed quite suddenly to resign herself to her fate, and stood quietly, though trembling all over from her head to her feet.

The two men examined her, ran their hands down her limbs, and pronounced her sound.

‘She’s very upset, though,’ Mishka said. ‘We’d best shut her in the stable for the rest of the day, let her get over it.’

Anne came towards her to try to stroke her, but she flinched away, staring over their heads with wild eyes, and when they led her forward, she went with them reluctantly, turning her head back and whinnying shrilly, as though calling to her recently acquired sisters for help. The men took her into a loosebox and released her, and she ran at once to the half-door and put her head out, staring into the distance and ignoring Anne’s attempts to stroke or pet her or give her sugar.

‘She’ll settle better if we shut the top door, too,’ Feodor said. When he had bolted the door at the top, he looked sympathetically at Anne and said, ‘Don’t worry, she’s not hurt.’

‘But she sounds so unhappy,’ Anne said. From within the loose-box came the rustling sound as she moved restlessly around in the straw, and the occasional angry thud as she tried kicking the door. Then, even harder to bear, a series of piercing neighs, as, shut up in the semi-darkness, deprived of her freedom and the excitement and the companionship she had tasted, Quassy called and called to the herd she could no longer see or smell.

Sergei hovered near, looking at Anne sympathetically. ‘She’ll forget all about it in a day or two,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Anne said, ‘but I wish she didn’t mind so much.’

‘You’ll have to be careful with her while the stallion’s nearby, or he’ll come and steal her back,’ Feodor said. ‘Best keep her shut in, until the herd’s back in the valley.’ With Sergei’s help, he urged Anne away from the box and out of earshot of Quassy’s piercing cries, back towards the corral.

‘By the way,’ he said suddenly, cocking his head at her quizzically, ‘have you thought what the result of this little adventure might be?’

Anne looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

Feodor grinned. ‘Well, she was out with the herd for a whole day, and that’s a very eager young stallion. Ten to one he covered her in that time. Your Quassy may present you with a foal next spring!’

Chapter Fifteen

It was a day of hard work, filled with the sound and smell of horses, with dust, sweat, shouts, whinnies, and the soft drumming of unshod hooves. Anne’s mind was filled with a tessellation of images: a horse’s head flung up against the sky, nostrils wide; a foal determinedly suckling in the midst of turmoil; a man laughing, wiping a bloodied nose on the elbow of his coat; Zinochka in a red kerchief bringing out a jug of ale on her shoulder, the gold rings in her ears flashing in the sun; Mishka whirling a rope into blurring patterns around his head; Sergei astride the dozing Nabat, leaning back with a hand on the sun-warmed bay rump.

One by one the horses were driven through the bottleneck, and the ones that were to be sold at the fair were herded into a second paddock, while the others were released. None of those set free had any doubt as to where to go: they galloped as fast as they could lay foot to ground back towards the valley, where the stallion waited anxiously for them, keeping sentry on a prominent rock above the path that led to the pass.

The house-serfs meanwhile were making preparations for the evening’s amusements, digging a cookpit for the whole ox which was to be roasted, setting up lanterns and benches around the area marked out for dancing, labouring under Bablash’s caustic direction to prepare the feast which would accompany the ball. Other preparations were a grim reminder that here at Chastnaya they were on the very edge of the civilised world. Bars were fitted over all the windows of the house; the two elderly two-pounder guns mounted in front of the house, which Anne had thought merely for decoration, were loaded and primed and kept manned; and a guard of armed serfs was told off to patrol the house and the paddock, in case of raids in the night.

But the Kiriakovs did not allow the threat of danger to damp their enthusiasm for the pleasures of the evening which were to follow the labours of the day. As the sun began to go down, the men came back to the house, and there came sounds of tremendous scrubbings as they plunged their sun-reddened faces and dust-whitened hair into tubs of water, or submitted themselves to the chilly gush of the back-yard pump, with a grinning serf at the handle.

The sun sank, swollen and dark orange, and the spectacular display of gold and pink and purple that flushed the western sky went unobserved as the Kiriakovs sought out their finery, the billowing fragrance of clean linen, the tender whisper of silk, the gratifying weight of gold-thread embroidery. Perfume expanded upon warm skin; ears and wrists and necks were hung with gold and jewellery; heartbreaking little kid slippers, or soft boots of mellowed leather, were drawn on to eager feet; hair was brushed and curled and pomaded with as much care as if each head were a thoroughbred horse being groomed for exhibition.

The last rim of molten gold sank below the hills, and the mysterious twilight drifted silently in from the eastern sky. The servants lit the lamps on the verandah, and the vibrant blue air beyond the rails was alive with the flicker of bats and the soft madness of downy-winged moths; and the Kiriakovs began to assemble, drifting out one by one to sit or lounge, to gaze out into the dusk, to light the first cigar, to converse softly, in tentative phrases, as though their thoughts were assembling as imperceptibly as the twilight was stealing into darkness.

Mishka lay upon a hammock, one leg spilled carelessly over the side, and picked out a tune on the balalaika, in tenuous, almost disconnected notes; while Zinochka, her hair turned up and piled on top of her head for the first time, so that her slender neck was like a stem bearing some great top-heavy flower, sat on the verandah rail beside him and sang the words in a sweet, husky undertone. Feodor came out, lighting a cigar from a taper, his head bent over the glowing cave of his cupped hands, his profile and his fine Tartar nose illuminated suddenly like a religious painting. As he passed Zinochka he reached out a hand to touch her cheek fondly, and she turned her head and smiled – a wistful, almost a sad smile. She was in love for the first time, and could hardly bear herself, or the beauty of it.

Anne came out and walked to the end of the verandah, and stared out into the twilight. The air was as warm as milk on her skin, and filled with the intense fragrance of white jasmine and night-scented stock. Behind her were the sounds of softly clad feet moving on bare wooden boards, and the lilt of voices conversing quietly in Tartar Russian. A night-flying beetle, as big as a mouse, flew buzzing in like a clockwork toy to land on the verandah rail, folding its iridescent wing-cases with an audible click; and suddenly she became aware of how different it all was, how foreign to her. She thought of England, and for an instant it was close and dear, lying cool and green across her memory: her home, now lost to her. Her eyes filled with tears; foolishly she had not brought her handkerchief out with her; she turned blindly to go into the house, and found Sergei beside her.

‘Here, have mine,’ he said, thrusting the clean linen into her fingers, and positioning himself so as to shield her from the others while she dried her eyes. ‘What was it?’ he asked, when he judged she had recovered herself.

‘I thought of home – I was homesick,’ she said. She managed to smile, touched by his sympathy. ‘It’s all right – it’s passed now.’

‘Poor Anna,’ Sergei said tenderly. ‘I’m so used to your being here, that I forget Russia isn’t your home too.’

‘I forget it, most of the time,’ she said. ‘It’s just occasionally… Things are so very different here. And there’s so much of everything, that sometimes I feel overwhelmed.’

She saw that he didn’t understand her – and indeed, how could he? He had never been to England; and if he had, he would have felt, like the Count, confined by the smallness. Only someone born there could understand that a place might be larger on the inside than on the outside; that to be encircled by a closed horizon could give one more freedom than to stand in the middle of a vast and featureless plain.

It was a little, she thought, like the freedom of religion, the power and scope that was granted to one by virtue of belonging to God: the atheist might think he was free, but the very emptiness of his life was a prison. She thought of the Second Collect for Peace: ‘… whose service is perfect freedom’.

She could have explained those things to the Count, perhaps, but not, she felt, to Sergei. He was watching her now with his head a little cocked, alert but puzzled.

‘You were a long way away, then, thinking deep thoughts,’ he said. ‘What were they?’

‘Paradoxes,’ she said in English, not knowing the Russian word for it. He waited. ‘A thing which has two opposite qualities both at the same time.’

She hadn’t expected him to understand, but he said, ‘Yes, I know – like the White Nights, or like snow being so cold it bums, or being so comfortable in bed you ache with it!’

‘Yes!’ she laughed. ‘Just like that.’

Natasha came out from the house and headed straight for Sergei, pushing her small but solid body determinedly between him and Anne, looking up at him with gold eyes that seemed to shine in the twilight. Her soft, pale brown hair was drawn into one long plait behind, as Irina wore it. She looked very like her mother just then. Sergei caressed her head with an absent hand, and she sighed and nudged against his arm with pleasure.

He was still pursuing a thought. ‘Or like being in a church, and staring so hard at the candles on the high altar that after a while they seem to turn black. Have you ever done that? I sometimes think God must be like that,’ he added. ‘Darkness which is light.’

Anne was startled that his thoughts should have taken a similar turn to hers. ‘Henry Vaughan,’ she murmured. He made an interrogative sound. ‘An English poet,’ she explained. ‘He lived about a hundred years ago. He wrote: “There is in God – some say – a deep, but dazzling darkness.” I never fully understood it – our churches are not like yours. But now I can see how it would be…’ she mused. ‘Like staring at the sun.’

‘And then would you see God?’ Natasha asked, surprising them both, for they had almost forgotten she was there.

‘No Nashka, of course not. If you stared at the sun you would go blind. No one can see God,’ her brother explained kindly.

‘Some people do,’ she insisted; and sighed. ‘I suppose they must know where to look.’

‘We’ll all see God after we’re dead, Nashenka-maya,’ Sergei said cheerfully, ‘and that’s soon enough for me, I think. Look, here’s Zina coming out at last – that must mean the feast is ready. Let’s go and find out – I’m starved! Coming, Anna?’

‘Go on – I’ll follow,’ Anne said, amused at his abrupt descent from the supernatural to the physical plane, and watched him grab Nasha’s hand and dash off exuberantly.

Outside the ring of torchlight and firelight, it was quite dark now. A band of serfs was assembled at one end of the marked-out floor, with a fine collection of musical instruments – fiddles, balalaikas, bagpipes, fifes, a tambour, a set of bells and a kind of primitive hurdy-gurdy, which creaked and wheezed in the background, to the evident satisfaction of the sublimely deaf old greybeard who wound it.

Beef-scented smoke drifted over from time to time from the cookpit as the gentle night air changed direction. A second circle of torchlight illuminated the trestles on which the feast was assembled, where Bablash, growing ever more red-faced from a mixture of heat and alcohol, presided over the mountains of cold meats, pies, pasties, salads, cheeses, breads, cakes, creams, syllabubs, fruit and sweetmeats he had created for the delight of the Kiriakovs and their guests. Besides the whole roast ox, and one or two sucking-pigs charring in the embers, there was a huge cauldron of a local delicacy called pilaff, a mixture of rice, prawns and chicken, flavoured with a peppery sauce which could never be too spicy for the true aficionado. Urged on by Bablash, Anne tasted some cautiously, and tasted nothing else for over an hour.

To drink there was wine, of course, and home-brewed ale and cider, lemonade and raspberry juice to quench the thirst of the dancers, and a potable equivalent of the pilaff in the form of jonka, a rum punch in which it was the custom to float burning sugar lumps. Grishka could do a trick with it: tilting his cup gently and allowing the sugar to float into his mouth while still burning, he then exhaled gently, igniting the vapours and blowing out flames like a dragon in a fairy-story, to the hysterical delight of the children, who hung on his sleeve shrieking, ‘Do it again, Uncle Grishka! Again!’

Eating, drinking, dancing, conversing. The torches burned red and smoky, the cookpit spat golden sparks, the lamps on their poles were fat yellow buds on bare trees. The music sawed and thumped, the dancers whirled and sweated, and the watchers clapped their hands and cheered them on, and sang the words of favourite tunes. The children ran back and forth like maddened dogs, their shadows jumping up blackly as they crossed the light, their hands always full, their mouths stretched to accommodate cakes and laughter. And the gibbous moon rose at last, clear and lemon-pale, sailing free of the shadowy trees and casting a new and different light, silver-blue, on the dark places outside the lamp light.

Half-way through the evening, Sergei stood before Anne, looking eighteen again with his hair ruffled from his exertions.

‘We must have our dance!’ he shouted over the noise of the band. ‘I claim my dance, Anna Petrovna!’

She looked past him at the violent Cossack contortions being practised on the dancing-lawn. ‘What!’ she cried.

He laughed aloud. ‘No, no, not this! The next dance will be a country dance. When this one is ended, you will stand up with me?’

She shook her head deprecatingly. ‘You don’t want to dance with me.’

He looked surprised. ‘But it was a promise. Don’t you remember?’

‘Yes, I remember. But. I don’t hold you to it.’

‘But I want to dance with you!’ he cried, looking hurt. ‘You promised! You cannot go back on a debt of honour, you know.’

She looked past him again, and saw Zinaidia standing watching the dancers, her faint, sad smile still intact, though her lovely hair was tumbled. The neighbour’s son with whom she was in love was one of the dancers: aware of her eyes on him, he made spectacular leaps, slapping his feet behind him in midair. Her love for him just then needed no reciprocation; it was sufficient unto itself. She stood, patient under the burden of her beauty, absorbed in love, and the exquisiteness merely of breathing the same air as the beloved.

Sergei followed the direction of Anne’s eyes, and then stepped sideways, placing himself in line of her eyes and blocking out any other view. ‘Anna Petrovna, I want to dance with you,’ he said seriously, ‘and no one else will do. Don’t you want to dance with me?’

She could not hurt his feelings. ‘Of course, my dear,’ she said.

His eyes seemed to glow. He took hold of her hand and raised it to his lips. ‘Am I your dear?’ She looked up at him, startled, but at that moment the music ended, and he whirled round, keeping hold of her hand, but only, it seemed, to draw her towards the dance floor. ‘Now it is time! Our dance – come, Anna. Don’t worry, I’ll teach you the steps if you don’t know them.’

The set formed beyond them. There was Irina, laughing, her face wearing the Chastnaya animation that made it so much more beautiful than it appeared in Petersburg, taking her place with Dmitri. His beard – so shocking at first to Anne, who was used to clean-shaven men – fanned out over his chest, and there was a long, dark wine stain on his white Cossack tunic which looked like a continuation of it. As the music began, his youngest child, little Olga, her cheeks rosy as Crimean apples, came running to him with arms upheld, and he lifted her up on to his shoulder and danced with her clinging madly to his hair.

Sergei called the steps as he danced, and Anne suddenly cast restraint, reflection, sadness to the winds, and danced with Russian exuberance, clapping her hands above her head, whirling in the turns so energetically that her hair began to loosen. Sergei laughed, calling encouragement to her. ‘That’s the way! Again! And turn – and leap!’

He caught her crossed hands to spin her, and she leaned back to give them more momentum, feeling herself laughing, as, long ago now, she had felt herself screaming coming down the toboggan run in Petersburg. I must be a little drunk, she thought happily. Sergei looked so like his father, that for a confusing moment she forgot where she was, and imagined it was with him she was dancing.

‘Set across – and turn – clap!’

Zinochka, her melancholy love forgotten for a moment, dancing with Dmitri’s twelve-year-old son Pavel, her hair now entirely loose and flying like an animated cloud about her head. Natasha amongst the musicians, being allowed to turn the hurdy-gurdy’s handle, while the greybeard gazed at her admiringly and wagged his fingers in encouragement. Zina amongst the onlookers, sleepy Sashka in her arms, watching Sergei with a thoughtful frown.

The dance came to an end, leaving Anne feeling breathless and happy and little more than fifteen years old. Sergei, smiling broadly, led her off the dance floor towards the trestles where the feast was spread.

‘Something to drink,’ he suggested. ‘Are you hot? Some lemonade, perhaps. That was well done, Anna Petrovna! You danced like a Russian!’

‘I felt like a Russian,’ she laughed, glancing back at the next set gathering. ‘It would not have been possible in England,’ she said. ‘I should have been shamed for ever, if I had danced like that.’

There was no one at the tables at that moment. Bablash had long since abandoned his place, and with a flask of vodka had sought the comfort of a secluded tree trunk; the remains of the feast were there for anyone to help himself, and Sergei searched and found a jug of lemonade, but could not find any clean drinking vessels.

‘If I hold it for you, could you drink from the jug?’

‘Tonight, anything is possible,’ Anne said solemnly.

The attempt caused a certain amount of hilarity, and one part of Anne, standing back, was amazed at her continued freedom from restraint. When she had succeeded in drinking enough, Sergei dried her face and hair with his handkerchief.

‘There! You’re just like an obedient kitten, being licked by your mother cat,’ he said. ‘I should–’ He broke off, looking at her abstracted expression. ‘What is it?’

‘Listen!’

‘What? The music?’

‘No, listen – from the stables! That’s Quassy.’ She looked distressed. ‘I wish she would settle down. I can’t bear her to be so upset.’

‘Would you like to go and see her? Maybe she’s just lonely.’

‘Oh, yes! Wait – I’ll take her an apple. It’s all right, you needn’t come. I don’t want to drag you away from the dancing.’

‘Nonsense. You can’t go alone – you never know who might be wandering about in the dark. Come, take my arm – you might stumble.’

They almost stumbled on one of the guards, who had fallen into a profound slumber, his cheek cradled peacefully on his musket stock. Sergei stepped instantly into his military persona, and was every inch the Guards officer as he berated the unfortunate serf, who claimed feebly that he had just crouched down for an instant to examine a suspicious footmark, and must have accidentally fallen into the recumbent posture in which they had found him.

Quassy whinnied again, and Anne tugged at Sergei’s sleeve anxiously. He delivered a final threat, and led the way to the tack room to collect a lantern, and then opened the door of Quassy’s box and ushered Anne in.

The black mare came forward instantly, her dark eyes glowing in the lamplight, and she knuckered welcomingly and nudged at Anne’s hands.

‘There, you see, she was lonely,’ Sergei said. ‘She’ll be all right now.’

‘Poor Quassy,’ Anne crooned, rubbing the mare’s crest and fondling her ears. ‘It must be so hard for you, to taste a little freedom, and then to have it snatched away.’ Quassy nudged her briefly in the chest, and then pushed past her to thrust her head out over the half-door and stare into the darkness, her nostrils stretched to catch the scent of her lost sisters. She gave a piercing whinny, and one of the corralled herd answered her. Anne looked despairingly at Sergei, and tried offering the mare the apple. Quassy took it and crunched it up, but her attention plainly was not on the treat. ‘You see, she’s still upset. I wish I could make her forget.’

Anne stood close to her and stroked her neck soothingly, and after a while Sergei said, ‘It’s hard for women, isn’t it – made to go here and there, as men decide for them.’ Anne glanced at him enquiringly. ‘I was thinking of cousin Nadya – when she marries Yurka, she’ll have to go and live with him at Slovolovsk, which is a horrible place compared with Chastnaya, and I don’t believe she really wants to leave home at all. And then it’s the other way round for Zinochka – she’s in love with Mishenka Uvarov, but she won’t be allowed to marry him, because he isn’t suitable. Like poor Quassy being dragged away from the stallion,’ he added with a small smile.

Anne thought, painfully, of Irina. ‘It isn’t always like that,’ she said.

He looked at her cannily. ‘You know, it would have made me very unpopular if I had asked Zinochka to dance. They’ve never forgiven my father for taking their sister away, and if I were to show any signs of wanting to steal Zinochka, they’d send me about my business so fast my head would spin. In fact, I think you are the only person they’d feel happy seeing me dance with – which happens to be the way I feel, too.’

Anne, following her own thoughts, didn’t notice the last remark. ‘She went of her own free will. It was her own choice,’ she said.

‘Was it?’ he said coolly. ‘She’s never been happy away from here. If she could have had the choice, she’d have made Papa live with her here.’

‘Oh, of course – but one never has everything one wants. There must always be compromise.’

‘Unless–’ he hesitated. ‘Unless you choose someone who has nothing to begin with.’

She looked at him, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Anna Petrovna, will you really go back to England?’ She leaned her cheek against Quassy’s neck. ‘No, I don’t suppose so,’ she said. ‘What would I go back to? Everything I have, now, is here.’

He was silent a moment, contemplating her profile. Then he drew breath to speak; but at that instant a flicker of movement outside the box simultaneously drew his attention, and made Quassy prick her ears and snort.

‘Who’s that?’ he said sharply, drawing back the bolt of the door. Anne looked round, startled. ‘Whoever it is, show yourself!’

Quassy knuckered softly, and the moving shadow paused and returned slowly, coming into the edge of the light.

‘Nasha! What are you doing here?’ Anne said.

The child stood quite still, looking from one to the other calculatingly, like a cat judging a distance before a spring.

‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous to wander about tonight?’ Sergei said angrily. ‘There’s an armed guard, and if you startled one of them, they might shoot you by accident.’

‘They won’t shoot me,’ she said unemphatically.

‘Never mind – Sergei’s right, you shouldn’t be here,’ Anne said. ‘What were you doing?’

‘I heard Quassy calling. I came to see if she was all right,’ Natasha said. She stood facing them, hands down by her side, like a soldier on parade, her face expressionless, waiting to see what they would say or do. Such self-possession, it seemed to Anne, was unnatural in a child so young, and she shivered, suddenly convinced that Nasha was lying, or at least, not telling the whole of the truth. But to what purpose? She couldn’t imagine.

‘Well, you’d better come back with us now,’ Sergei said. ‘I expect it’s time you were in bed, anyway.’

Nasha waited patiently while they shut Quassy in again, and then walked obediently beside them back towards the lamp light.

‘What were you doing, Nasha?’ Anne asked after a moment.

‘I came to see Quassy,’ she said again. She flickered a glance upwards under her eyelids.

‘And what else?’ Anne persisted.

‘And the other horses,’ she said with the air of one admitting the truth, ‘They’re restless, because of the herd.’

‘How do you know? They aren’t making any noise,’ Sergei said suspiciously.

Natasha looked up, and now her gaze was limpid. ‘I hear them,’ she said.

At first light, while the revellers were still sleeping, the groups of tribesmen began to arrive at Chastnaya for the horse fair. By the time the family was up, considerable numbers had already assembled, had tethered or hobbled their horses, and were sitting on the ground eating, or setting out the wares they had brought with them to sell. This makeshift bazaar was always a secondary feature of the horse fair.

After breakfast, Sergei constituted himself Anne’s bodyguard in order to allow her to take a closer look. She viewed with amazement the diversity of different physical types amongst the tribesmen, which was to her far more extraordinary than their strange dress or customs. It was as if she had suddenly discovered herself to be living at the edge of a place where the Creation was still going on, where God was experimenting with the very stuff of mankind.

‘Those are the Eastern tribesmen – the Lesghians and the Avars,’ Sergei murmured to Anne, pointing them out. ‘They’re from Daghestan, and they’re the least civilised of the tribes – except for the Chechen, but I don’t suppose they would come to a fair like this. I don’t suppose they’d be welcome, either. Even the other Tcherkess don’t trust them.’

Anne thought they seemed closer to animals than men. They were short, stockily built, swarthy-skinned and black-haired, as if they had been hewn out of the black rock of the region they inhabited. Their dark, bright eyes were quick and cunning, and they kept close together and eyed the strangers amongst whom they found themselves with suspicion, snuffing the air for danger with their broad nostrils. The horses they rode in on were slender and fleet and beautiful, strange contrast to their atavistic ugliness.

‘When I first joined the Independents, we were warned never to underestimate them,’ Sergei said. ‘And never to be captured alive. They torture prisoners, especially Christians, in the most hideous way – or bury them alive.’ Anne shuddered, and he glanced at her, gratified at the response. ‘But they love their horses,’ he added. ‘Odd, isn’t it, that they have so little regard for human life, but so much reverence for a dumb beast?’

‘Why does Feodor allow them to come at all,’ Anne asked, ‘if they are so savage?’

‘For trade, of course. Who else would he sell his horses to? Of course, he sells some to Russians, but the bulk of his trade must be with the tribesmen. The Eastern clans in particular are great horsemen, and prize karabakhs beyond anything. And they pay good gold for them, which is more than the Russians always do. Of course, they’d sooner steal them than buy them, and sell them to the Persians and the Kurds,’ he added with a chuckle, ‘so it’s best to keep a sharp eye on them.’

‘Are all of them so dangerous?’ she asked, glancing round warily at the nearest groups.

Sergei shrugged. ‘On the whole, the Western tribes aren’t so bad, from living shoulder to shoulder with civilised Russians for so long. Some of them – the Kabardins and the Nogays of the plains, for instance, we talk of as “tamed tribes”, because we’ve held them in subjection for generations, and we trade with them as with civilised people. But even they are not entirely to be trusted. They may come openly by day to buy salt and gunpowder from you, and then slip back at night and steal your horses, and like as not put a knife between your ribs. The best plan with any of the Tcherkess is to keep your eyes open and your hand on your gun.’

He pointed out the Ossetins, red-haired, blue-eyed mountain people from the region of Mount Kabak. They wore a great many gold chains and discs which caught the light dazzlingly, and their surcoats of dressed leather were patterned in red and blue. They looked very handsome, but Anne soon discovered it was advisable to keep upwind of them, for they had a custom of rubbing their bodies with rancid mare’s milk to protect themselves from the cold and the bitter wind, and the warmth of Chastnaya’s summer sunshine, even so early in the day, had ripened it to a kind of cheese inside their leather garments.

The Nogays, she discovered, were small men, made shorter by the fact that they were mostly bow-legged, from having been upon horseback since infancy; and their yellow skin and high, protruding cheekbones betrayed their origins. ‘Their ancestors came to Russia with the Golden Horde,’ Sergei told her. The mountain Nogays were distinguished from the plainsmen by their shaven heads, and their heavy felted cloaks, which protected them equally from the burning sun, the bitter cold, and the torrential rain of the Caucasian heights.

‘And at night, they fling it over a heap of straw or brushwood, and it makes a very respectable mattress.’

One or two of them had spread their cloaks on the ground to display the goods they had brought to sell – objects carved from wood and animal horn, dressed and painted leather, harness, necklaces of polished stones. The plainsmen had brought flasks of oil, bags of sunflower seeds, salt, dried meat, lengths of cloth and – to Anne’s surprise – a great many sweetmeats: gingerbread and curd cakes and candied fruits. The wilder the tribesman, she discovered, the sweeter the tooth: the black-browed, grim-looking Lesghians from the bleakest mountain heights on the borders of Kakhetia crowded around the heaps of glistening sugar plums like eager children.

The Kabardins were the largest group, and Anne admired their proud bearing, and their slender, graceful bodies, which looked so well astride a horse. They were an aquiline-nosed, dark-eyed people, proud and cruel, living by war and plunder, reverencing above all the attributes of the warrior – steadfastness, physical courage, skill in arms. Their clothes were colourful and splendid, and their horses were as elaborately caparisoned as the riders.

They reminded her, in their physiognomy and their dress, of the Prince who had tried to buy Quassy from her. She was not entirely surprised, therefore, when during the course of the morning, he rode into Chastnaya with a small retinue of followers, and claimed her exuberantly as an old acquaintance.

‘English Lady, I have come! I greet you, in the name of the Most High,’ he said, with a graceful bow from the saddle of his handsome horse. Anne had forgotten how overpowering he was, and was glad of the presence of Sergei close behind her shoulder. The Prince turned his eagle’s beak of a nose in Sergei’s direction and surveyed him with bright, feral eyes, taking in his youthful good looks, and military bearing. ‘It is your husband, the light-eyed one?’ he asked, not without a hint of approval.

‘It is not,’ Anne said firmly. ‘But, sir, you spoke as if you knew I would be here.’

The Prince raised his eyebrows. ‘Assuredly I knew it.’

‘But how? How could you?’

The Prince looked loftily amused. ‘Akim Shan Kalmuck knows everything. It is his business to know everything. I wish to see the English lady again, but also,’ he added sternly, ‘I come to buy horses. At Chastnaya are the best horses in the Caucasus – yes, better even than the horses of the Five Hills of Pyatigorsk. So I have said – and it is true.’

He pronounced the words as one speaking Holy Writ, and then glowered around him, as though anyone were likely to argue the point. Sergei, at Anne’s shoulder, whistled the tune of the song he had sung her on the day of the picnic, and she suppressed a smile. Evidently the Prince knew it too, for he bared his white teeth in his savage smile, and said, ‘I come to buy horses – women I never buy. Always, since I am young man – younger than you – I have any woman I want. Except English Lady. Still my offer is good – I will marry you,’ he offered generously, ‘with no dowry but the black mare.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Anne said gravely, ‘but I do not wish to marry.’

The Prince looked from her to Sergei speculatively, and then shrugged. ‘And how is she, my horse, my black karabakh mare with the north wind in her blood?’ he went on.

‘She is perfectly well, but her spirits are oppressed,’ Anne told him, and explained the circumstances. The Prince listened attentively, frowned a moment in thought, and then to Anne’s surprise and slight alarm, prepared to dismount.

‘I will see her,’ he announced.

‘Really, sir, she is not for sale,’ Anne began, and he frowned at her.

‘I will see her. Akim Shan Kalmuck knows everything about horses. I will cure her of her melancholy – yes, for you I will do this, though I am begged in vain by men from Batoum to Kizlyar to give of my great wisdom. Bring me to the karabakh!’ He raised a hand in an imperious and theatrical gesture, which so delighted Anne, reminding her of the Demon Prince in a farce she had once seen at Drury Lane, that she had no more thought of resisting him.

The Prince handed his horse to his nearest attendant, waved them back and spoke a few words to them in the language Anne didn’t understand, and then drew his robe about him in a lordly way and looked to her to lead the way.

Sergei didn’t like it at all, but since the Prince, most courteously, was leaving all his bodyguard behind, it would have been churlish to object. Besides, he comforted himself, whatever else he was, the Prince was a horse lover, and would not harm Quassy; and as long as he, Sergei, was present, he could do nothing to harm Anne.

As the strange trio crossed in front of the house on the way to the stables, Nasha and Sashka came running down from the verandah. Nasha thrust her hand into Sergei’s, while Sashka too flung himself passionately around Anne’s knees, so that she was obliged to pick him up to release herself.

‘Where are you going?’ Nasha cried.

‘Take me!’ Sashka pleaded.

The Prince looked at the scene with interest.

‘Your children! Ah, so you are married! That is why you refuse me! Of course, I am a Christian too – I may have only one wife. A pity – that is a healthy boy! I said you would make a good wife. Akim Shan Kalmuck is never wrong. About horses and women, never wrong.’

Though she was blushing, Anne had no great wish to disabuse the Prince, especially as the truth would have been too complex to explain, so she merely averted her eyes, hitched Sashka up against her shoulder, and continued towards the stable.

The grooms were made very nervous by the sight of the Prince, even in the company of Anne and Sergei, and they backed away and glanced this way and that, like horses who have smelt a mountain lion. Anne set down Sashka and unbolted the stable door, and stepped aside for the Prince to enter, wondering how Quassy would react to him.

She needn’t have worried. He stood in the doorway and slowly held out his hands, speaking in a continuous low murmur words which she didn’t understand, and which she guessed from Sergei’s expression he didn’t either. But Quassy understood them. Her ears shot forward, and she looked at the Prince intently. Still talking, he began to smile, his eyes taking on a soft shine, his voice caressive. Quassy’s eyes began to glow too, her body relaxed, and her head lowered, and after only a few moments she stepped forward confidently and dropped her muzzle into the Prince’s outstretched hands.

‘God! How did he do that?’ Sergei muttered. Anne watched, enthralled, as the Prince examined the mare, running his hands over every part of her, resting his ear to her neck and breast and flank to listen, smelling her breath and her skin, looking into her eyes. Finally he stepped up close to her, put his arms round her neck, and resting his cheek against hers, closed his eyes and remained quite still for several minutes. During the examination, Quassy stood as still and docile as though she had been mesmerised – which, Anne thought, she probably had.

The Prince sighed, released the mare, and stepped back, turning to Anne to say firmly, ‘She has a broken heart, but I can cure her.’

‘You can make her forget?’ Anne said.

He looked approving. ‘Ah, you understand! Yes, I can make her forget. I need herbs – common herbs, easily found. Your serfs will fetch them for me. While they are gone, you will serve me with refreshments –’ he looked around ‘ – there, under that tree.’

It was a strange, dreamlike interlude. Two astonished, and very nervous, serfs were told off to collect the herbs, and sped on their way by the addition of what was evidently a blood-chilling threat from the Prince, though fortunately for Anne she did not fully understand it; she herself ordered another serf to bring suitable refreshments at once. Then they all sat down on the ground under the tree, the Prince with his back to the trunk, and Anne, Sergei and the children in a semicircle in front of him, and he began to talk.

The children were enraptured, and even Anne was soon drawn out of herself, away from the sensible, practical world she had always tried to inhabit, into a realm where the most exotic fantasy seemed to be able to come true. He told them of battles and feats of daring, of single combat with the champions of oriental kings, of chests of treasure discovered and princesses’ hands won, of elephants and dragons and monsters and talking beasts. When the refreshments came, he consumed them without once pausing in his narrative flow, and no one would have dreamed of hoping to share the contents of the tray with him.

When the serfs came back with the plants, Anne saw that they were indeed unremarkable – yellow mullein, common cinquefoil, leaves from the horse chestnut tree, catnip, camomile, and feathery blue-green sprays of rue.

‘Fetch me a bowl, boiling water and thread,’ he commanded. A serf went for the water, while the children scurried off after the bowl and the thread; and then they watched in breathless silence, Nasha’s golden eyes utterly unwavering, as the Prince went to work. The chestnut leaves and the rue he bound with thread and quickly and skilfully fashioned into a garland, and tied the ends together. The other plants he tore up and threw into the bowl, and then poured on the hot water and waited for the mess to draw, much in the way one would make camomile tea.

‘Now, a bottle. And you, English Lady, will come and help me, for she will not like to take the medicine.’

‘I had better help you, sir,’ Sergei said firmly. ‘If the mare struggles–’

The Prince held up his hand. ‘We will not force her – we will persuade her. Come, all of you – you may watch.’

A number of grooms gathered at a safe distance beyond the stable door, too, so that it was quite a throng which eventually witnessed the Prince gently lift the garland over Quassy’s head and hang it round her neck.

‘For forgetfulness,’ he murmured to Anne. “The smell of these plants drives memories out of the head. And the medicine for calming, for easing of the heart’s pain, and for forgetting. Hold her head up – so – and I will do the rest.’

Quassy rolled her eyes as the Prince pushed her head up so that her muzzle was pointing at the roof, but she did not struggle, and Anne had no difficulty in holding her in that position. The brownish liquid had been poured off the mashed leaves into the bottle that was kept in the tack room for administering drenches, and now the Prince, crooning to Quassy, slipped the neck of the bottle into the corner of her mouth, upended it, and stroked her throat firmly so that she was obliged to gulp it down. When the bottle was empty he nodded to Anne to let her go, and the mare lowered her head, sneezed a few times, smacked her lips, and then shook herself violently from head to foot and looked about her like one just waking up from a deep sleep.

Nasha clapped her hands and cried out. ‘Oh, she’s better already! You can see! Anna, see, she’s better!’

Anne smiled at her. ‘Yes, I see.’ She turned to the Prince. ‘Thank you sir,’ she said. ‘I am most grateful to you. And what must I do now?’

‘Do? Nothing! Let her wear the garland until tomorrow. After that, you are quite safe. You may ride her as usual – yes, even to the Valley of the Horses itself. She will ignore the herd as if they were not there. Even the stallion she will treat with indifference.’

Anne thanked him again, and he turned to the children. ‘You have seen a wonder here today, and heard many more. You will not forget the name of Akim Shan Kalmuck.’

They nodded acquiescence to the proposition, and Anne was inwardly amused at his desire to impress the children, which seemed to her akin to the Lesghians’ craving for sweetmeats.

‘And one day,’ he went on magnificently, ‘you may come to my village, and I will show you the tiger, which was given to me in tribute by the Pasha of Kavzan, and which lives in a cage and eats from my hand, and wears a collar of magnificent emeralds from Marakata.’

The children’s eyes were as round as saucers, and Anne privately thought it was an exit line better than anything Drury Lane had ever offered. Sergei was evidently less impressed. They escorted the Prince back to his people, and returned the children to the care of Nyanka, and when they were alone again he said, ‘It’s as well there was nothing more than common herbs in that potion, or I should have been forced to prevent him administering it.’

Anne looked at him with amusement, wondering how he would have hoped to achieve that. ‘Just as well,’ she agreed, ‘for I don’t think he’d have relished being prevented.’

Sergei looked a little angry. ‘You think I’m afraid of that – that posturing barbarian?’

‘Not at all, Seryosha. I’m sure you aren’t, which is what worries me. But he hasn’t hurt Quassy, and perhaps he may have helped. She certainly responded to him.’ He only grunted, and Anne went on, ‘If she seems calm tomorrow, I shall be very glad to be able to ride her again.’

He brightened. ‘There are other horses you can take. Why don’t we go out for a long ride tomorrow? There are lots of places you haven’t seen yet. I’d like to show you the beechwoods and the deer and the place where the eagles nest. Just you and I,’ he added hastily, perhaps reading her mind. ‘I don’t want to take the children, because they’ll slow us down, and there is such a lot to see. Do say yes, Anna!’

‘I shall have to see if I’m wanted for anything,’ Anne said. ‘You forget, Seryosha, I am supposed to be Natasha’s governess.’

‘Pho!’ he protested. ‘As if any of that matters here!’

By the evening, the horse sale was over, and the tribesmen were dispersing, packing up their wares, and the goods they had acquired from each other, hitching the new horses they had bought together for the long ride back to their territories. The corrals were dismantled, the hurdles stacked away in the barn, the manure raked aside and carted to the dung heap, the bars dismounted from the house windows. Soon there would be nothing left to show there had been a horse fair, except for the beaten patch of earth, the fire-scarred cookpit, and the smell of horses lingering in the air.

The Kiriakovs began to think of returning to their normal routines, though it was hard that evening to shake the images of the last two days out of their minds. A simple meal was served, and the gathering on the verandah afterwards was more than usually thoughtful.

Urged by Sergei, Anne asked Irina rather diffidently whether she might go out for a ride the next day.

‘Is Quassy safe?’ Irina asked. ‘I heard about your friend the Prince and his magic cure.’

‘I’ll go and check on her in a little while. But if she’s still restless tomorrow, perhaps I could take one of the stock horses. Sergei wants to show me some of the places I haven’t seen yet.’

‘Of course you can,’ Feodor said promptly, ‘but I advise you most strongly not to go too far afield. Seryosha, you know where the safe places are. Don’t forget that the local tribes are often attracted further down from their usual hunting runs by all the coming and going of the horse fair. You may come across them in unexpected places. Stay to the well-marked paths, and keep your gun ready to hand.’

Sergei nodded gravely. ‘Of course.’

‘The children mustn’t go,’ Irina said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘We weren’t thinking of taking the children, Mama,’ Sergei said, repressing his gratification, even as Nasha’s mouth turned down in disappointment.

‘If it’s really dangerous…’ Anne began doubtfully, thinking of the savage aspect of some of the tribesmen she had seen; but Sergei interrupted.

‘Of course it’s not, as long as you’re careful, and I promise you I will be. Don’t you think you ought to go and look at Quassy now, and see if she’s any quieter?’

‘If the Prince’s potion is anything like his stories,’ Anne said mildly, getting to her feet, ‘she’ll probably have grown wings.’

But the first glance told her that Quassy was better. Still wearing her garland of aromatic leaves, she was pulling quietly at her hay rack, completely relaxed and evidently at peace. She turned and knuckered a friendly greeting as Anne appeared, but showed no disposition for trying to jump out of her box, or call for the herd. She even had one hind foot cocked, inelegant, but comfortable.

‘Well,’ Anne said, leaning over the box door, ‘what a difference! The Prince’s potion worked!’

‘You don’t really believe all that nonsense, do you?’

‘But just look at her. The evidence is there before your eyes.’

‘Those herbs couldn’t have made any difference. Don’t you think everyone would have known about them long ago, if they were good horse medicine?’

Anne turned to him with a smile. ‘I don’t know why you are so determined to be unkind to the Prince. He went to a lot of trouble to cure Quassy, out of the kindness of his heart.’

Sergei looked a little warm. ‘It wasn’t kindness, Anna Petrovna. Don’t you see that? He wanted to marry you – he said so himself. Or something worse.’

‘Nothing could be worse than being married to him,’ Anne laughed. ‘But all the same, he’s cured my poor Quassy, and I’m grateful.’

They turned away to go back to the house. ‘You realise, don’t you, that the difference is probably that the herd is out of range now? Since she can’t hear them or smell them, she’s not upset any more.’

‘Ungenerous! The Prince said she wouldn’t even be interested in the stallion.’

‘Yes, but she was evidently on heat before. Now she’s been mated, of course she wouldn’t be interested,’ Sergei said unguardedly.

It was the kind of thing that no one would have dreamed of saying to a young woman in England, least of all an unmarried woman; fortunately, the four years she had already spent in Russia enabled her to take such things in her stride.

Chapter Sixteen

They made an early start, while the air was cool and the dew still on the grass. Sergei had a packet of bread and meat and a bottle of wine packed into one saddlebag, a box of ammunition in the other, a blanket to sit on rolled behind the saddle, and his gun slung over his shoulder.

‘That should cover all eventualities,’ Anne remarked wryly.

Quassy was fresh, and curvetted about as Stefan flung her up into the saddle; but it was only her normal high spirits. She showed no sign of distress, or of wanting to be off after the herd.

‘All the same,’ Sergei said, ‘we’ll go the other way to begin with, up through the beech woods, to give her time to settle down.’

It was a beautiful day, clear with the promise of heat. The air was already spicy with thuja and juniper, and the smell of damp, crushed grass rose from under the horses’ quiet feet. In the distance the hills were lavender with shadow, and above them arched the dark-blue sky, decorated here and there with the little clouds of Russian summer – blinding white above and blue underneath.

They passed through the arable fields, where already the women were at work, bending between the rows of pale-green bean plants, their rumps broad with a multitude of petticoats. They straightened up as the two horses came by, resting their hands on their hips to ease their backs. A young woman with a red kerchief round her head was carrying a baby in a sling on her hip, and she waved its faf brown starfish of a hand at the dvoriane as they passed.

Anne was at peace with the world. How lucky I am, she thought, to have this perfect day before me, a beautiful horse to ride, a pleasant companion beside me, and all this glorious country to explore. Even the wistfulness, which is a quality of all happiness, was pleasant just then. She felt young, free, full of natural high spirits. She was twenty-seven years old, and in England she would have been considered already upon the shelf. She had never had the youthful pleasures that her birth ought to have entitled her to, the opportunities to enjoy her girlhood and secure herself a comfortable establishment; yet at a moment like this she could forget such things. She could forget that she was an orphan, a dependant, without security, without a home of her own, without love. For this one day she might have been ten years younger, in the first springing of youth, and riding beside a companion of her own rank, with a future of endless possibilities all before her. That was how life would have been for her, if her father had not died: today, she felt, had been given to her in compensation for what she had missed.

The beech woods were before them, lilac-shadowed in the early sun. The smooth, mysterious boles rose up like pillars in a cathedral to the canopy far above, where the leaves seemed almost transparent, quivering in the golden light. The feeling of tranquillity was so strong that the riders fell silent, and rode side by side almost without breathing. When they came out at the top of the woods, and the riant sunshine fell on them suddenly, they glanced at each other and smiled almost with relief.

Above the beech trees, the view opened out, a vista of green foothills rising to rocky heights, and in the distance the striding mountain chain, misty in the heat. There were skylarks high above them in the crystal air, and the sunshine fell so straight and clean and pure it seemed almost heatless.

‘Where is the house from here?’ Anne said some time later, when the windings of the path brought it to the edge of the hillside. They halted the horses to gaze out over the country; their shadows were short, now, and sharply black on the turf beneath them.

‘You can’t see it from here,’ Sergei said at last. ‘It’s over there, beyond that slope. You see where those trees are? Below that, under the flank of the hill.’

‘So far away?’ Anne was impressed. ‘I hadn’t thought we had come such a distance.’

‘It’s easy to lose track of where you are up in the hills. We’ve probably come thirty versts. It’s getting on for noon, you know.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Anne said. At once she began to feel hungry and thirsty. ‘I wish we’d brought some water with us, as well as wine,’ she said.

‘Bring water to a place like this? That’s like taking salt to the sea,’ Sergei laughed. ‘There’s water everywhere in the mountains – cleaner, sweeter water than anywhere down below. We’ll ride on a bit, and stop at the first stream we see.’

Round the next curve in the path, they came upon a crop of sunflowers growing in a sheltered pocket of land, between rocky outcrops like short, knobbed grey cliffs tufted with gorse bushes and stunted thorn trees. The sunflowers, which Anne had grown used to as a cottage-garden crop, looked fantastic in such profusion, and in this unexpected place: so tall, and with their round black faces and golden halos, like strange Nubian saints.

Suddenly Quassy stopped dead, quivering, her ears almost crossed with excitement. Sergei halted his horse too, his hand moving round automatically for his gun, and he searched for whatever it was that had alerted the mare. Then he put out a hand to Anne, and whispered urgently, ‘Anna! Look!’

She followed the direction of his pointing finger, and saw the brown plush coat and spreading antlers of a stag, basking amongst the sunflowers. They were downwind of him, and he hadn’t yet become aware of them. He leaned back, resting on his shoulder, his eyes half-closed with pleasure, his white throat a little stretched, like a contented cat, while above him the giant plants waved in the gentle breeze, passing their faint shadows back and forth across his red-brown coat.

‘Oh, lovely!’ Anne breathed; and then Quassy whickered her excitement, and in an instant the stag had sprung to his feet and leapt away over the side of the hill towards the beech woods, taking the steep slope in great heedless bounds.

‘What antlers! A pity I couldn’t get a shot at him,’ Sergei said.

‘You wouldn’t shoot such a lovely creature!’ Anne said reproachfully. ‘How could you?’

He looked at her sympathetically. ‘You’re too tender-hearted. We call the stag the Tsar of the Forest; but they do a great deal of damage to the crops, and they’re impossible to keep out even with fences. They eat and trample everything, and kill the fruit trees by chewing off the bark.’ Anne looked unconvinced, and he added, ‘Besides, you enjoy venison, don’t you?’

She sighed. ‘Yes. It’s just hard that having good things to eat should involve destroying something so lovely. When I was a child, I remember crying dreadfully the first time I realised that the lamb I ate was the same as those dear little knock-kneed creatures on the hillside.’

‘Where was home? Tell me about it,’ he said eagerly as they rode on.

‘I was born in Hampshire–’

‘Is that a city?’

‘No, a county – a region. I was born in a house by a stream in a small village.’

‘And what is Hampshire like?’

‘Green, and fertile – soft hills, a little like these, but smaller and closer together. You would think it very small and cramped, I expect. And rivers full of fish, and woods full of birds. Narrow lanes deep with mud in the winter and dust in the summer. Flowers in the hedgerows and sheep on the hills.’

‘I should love to see it some day,’ Sergei said. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to England. When this war is over, I shall go.’ He glanced at her sideways, shyly, from under his thick lashes. ‘It would be wonderful to go there with you, and then you could show me everything.’

‘To see England again,’ she said softly, and then she sighed. ‘But it doesn’t seem as though this war will ever end. Your father has been away so long already, I don’t suppose Sashka would even recognise him.’

Sergei had nothing to say to that. They rode in silence for a while, and the path climbed higher, towards the blue sky and nearer the sun. They came to a place where a tiny stream of clear water fell down the face of a rocky outcrop, making a miniature waterfall, and Sergei jumped down and helped Anne to dismount, and held Quassy while she knelt on the springy turf to drink. The water was icy cold in her cupped hands, and tasted delicious. At the foot of the rock the stream ran away between deep, narrow lips of peat. They offered the horses a drink, but they only blew at it.

‘Shall we stop here and eat?’ Sergei said, looking around him. ‘It seems as good a place as any.’

They tied the horses to a thorn tree, and spread the blanket beside a rock, to give them something to lean against. Anne pulled off her hat, and felt the smooth heat of the sun against the top of her head; and after a moment, she took off her jacket too. Sergei did likewise, and rolled up his shirtsleeves, and flung himself down gracefully full length, to lean on one elbow and gaze at her while she unpacked the food.

Anne found herself not quite at ease with that bright stare, so disconcertingly like the Count’s, and yet so unlike; and to distract him she engaged him in conversation. Once begun, it continued quite naturally; they were of a similar turn of mind, and the difference in their ages was not as great as before. They chatted comfortably while they ate, about horses and hunting and food, and the war and foreign travel and paintings, like old, tried friends.

When they had finished eating and drinking, a pleasant, mid-day somnolence came over them. Now Anne, too, reclined on one elbow, listening to Sergei’s inconsequential account of a long-ago picnic with his cousins, gazing out into the distance towards the mountains, lilac in the heat-haze, peaked and spired and fantastic.

He was lying on his back now, his arms folded under his head, staring into the blue zenith. ‘Anna, look there,’ he said suddenly, breaking into his own narrative, releasing one hand to point upwards. She craned her head back.

‘Where? What is it?’

‘An eagle – look, he’s wondering what we are, and whether we’re good to eat.’

‘Where? I can’t see.’

Sergei laughed, and caught the arm that was supporting her and pulled it away, so that she fell on to her back, and then wriggling close to her held her hand up with his, pointing her forefinger directly above her head.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see now? See his wings, like spread fingers? He flies so effortlessly.’ He allowed her hand to drop down, but somehow, absently, kept hold of it. His body was resting against hers for its whole length, his head so close to hers that she could feel the warmth of his cheek.

Staring up at the black speck of the circling eagle in the deep blue, Anne felt a little light-headed. Suddenly she had the strange feeling that the sky was below her rather than above her, that she was somehow suspended face downwards, looking down into the crystal depths of space. What kept her there? She might tumble off at any moment! She pressed her back up against the earth, and tried to cling on to stop herself falling. The fingers of her left hand hooked into the short turf beside her, while her right hand clenched round Sergei’s, and her head seemed to spin.

‘Wouldn’t you like to be able to do that?’ Sergei murmured. His face came closer, was resting against hers now: she felt the softness of his skin, and the light prickle of golden hairs. ‘To ride the air like that – he never beats his wings, look, just drifts–’

She tore her eyes away from the dizzying depths, and found herself looking instead into the hypnotic shine of Sergei’s gold-green gaze.

‘Anna,’ he said softly. He turned over on to his side, facing her, moving very carefully, as though not to frighten her, never releasing her gaze. His free arm passed across her body, and at the touch of it, though it was so light, she shuddered. ‘Annushka,’ he whispered. His face was close to hers, she smelt his sweet breath, lightly fragranced with wine, his sun-warmed skin, the young-man smell of his body. His hand came up to touch her face, stroke the hair from her brow, trace the line of her jaw, her lips.

Stop: you must stop him, her mind protested; but from so far away, the warning was almost inaudible. She was held, mesmerised, by the warmth, the wine, the familiarity, the friendship, the natural longing of her body for love. His strong, gentle fingers brushed her lips and then took hold of her chin, holding her face still. His face came closer, blurring, and she closed her eyes as something inside her gave a desperate lurch, and his mouth was on hers, kissing her.

Tenderly, then avidly: young, passionate, impatient. She lay as though stunned; and then all the feelings that had been so long held in check – terrible, potent mixture of different affections, longings and desires – rose up in her, and she yielded to him, her lips parting in response, her hand fluttering up to touch the back of his head. Sergei said something against her lips, and then he was pressing against her, out of control. She felt the young hard strength of him – a boy’s strength allied with a man’s desire. And then she was struggling, her dizziness gone as if she had been plunged into icy water.

What was she doing? This was Sergei, the Count’s son! The son of the house, her mistress’s step-son, her charges’ brother, and therefore, surely, almost himself her charge? This was wrong, wicked, almost incestuous! She struggled madly against him, and after one moment of resistance, he allowed her to push him back, and looked down at her with a flushed and puzzled face, his hand still resting on her shoulder.

‘What is it? Annushka!’

‘No, no, you mustn’t! Let me go!’ She pushed at him, struggled to sit up, feeling her cheeks burning with distress. He stared, evidently not understanding, seeing nothing wrong yet in anything they had done.

‘Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to, Doushka,’ he said.

She felt her heart contract. ‘You mustn’t call me that.’

‘What? Doushka?’ He laughed, and tilted his head quizzically. ‘But why not? You are my darling! You must know that by now! What’s the matter, did I startle you? It’s all right, you know – it isn’t wrong if we love each other. And I would never do anything to harm you.’

‘Seryosha, stop! Don’t say any more! This is all wrong – you must see that it is!’

‘Wrong?’

‘Impossible!’

‘But why? I love you.’ His face cleared as he had a sudden thought. ‘You didn’t think I meant to – to dishonour you? You couldn’t have! I want to marry you, Anna Petrovna..When I said I wished you could go to England with me, I meant as my wife, my countess! The Countess Anna Petrovna Kirova – how good it sounds!’ he said exultantly.

Anne felt close to tears. The name he had given her – the name she had secretly, wickedly, longed to bear – but in other circumstances! She could not meet his eyes, and yet saw all too plainly his young, handsome, flushed face, the generous love in his eyes, the first outpouring of a warm and untouched heart, offered trustingly to her – to her. What could she say? How could she bear to hurt him? But she must – she must.

‘Sergei, it’s impossible. You cannot marry me. Please – you must put it from your mind. You must forget – we must forget that this ever happened.’

Now there was hurt as well as bewilderment in his expression. ‘But why? Anna, why?’ She might have known that he would not simply accept it – what man would? ‘I don’t understand.’

‘My dear,’ she began desperately – mistakenly: he seized on the word, and her hand, lifting her fingers to his lips.

‘Your dear – I am your dear, aren’t I? You do love me, Anna – you do, don’t you? I know you do.’

‘Of course I do,’ she said, ‘but not – not as a wife.’

‘What then?’

‘I am a great deal older than you,’ she said, fumbling for words. ‘I knew you as a child, don’t you see? To me you are still–’

‘A child?’ More puzzled than hurt. ‘Not true! When I kissed you just then, you kissed me too – and not like a child. You can’t deny it! You love me as a man.’

Impossible to explain. She could only shake her head dumbly-

He kept hold of her hand, looking earnestly into her face. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there? Not your age, surely? The difference between us is nothing!’

‘Others wouldn’t say so.’

‘You can’t be so foolish as to care what other people think? If we don’t mind it, why should they?’

‘I am your sisters’ governess,’ she said desperately. ‘Your father’s employee – a trusted servant in his house. How can I – how could I – so abuse–’

‘Abuse?’ he cried dangerously.

‘Abuse his trust–’

‘But you didn’t – you haven’t! How can you say that? You have done nothing wrong! It was I who – made things happen. And Papa would not think so, either. He holds you in the greatest respect. You are not a servant,’ he said hotly. ‘You are more like a – a guest in our house. Papa would be proud and happy to have you as a daughter-in-law, I know he would. He has so often spoken to me about you, about how intelligent and cultured you are, how you are a gentlewoman by birth. He really likes you, Anna – you must believe me.’

She looked at him sadly, knowing she could not make him see. Since he thought of her as being of the same generation with him, he assumed she regarded the Count as he did – as one of an older generation. He could no more have imagined Anne being in love with the Count, than himself being in love with someone of his grandmother’s generation.

And besides, her feelings for the Count were something she could not admit to anyone. She tried not to admit them even to herself. What reason could she give Sergei for rejecting him, that he would accept? How explain that moment in his arms when her whole being had longed for love, for a lover, for caresses and warmth and belonging, for a mate? There was one part of her still that wanted, crazily, to accept him: it would be an escape from the impasse of her life, a way out of the weary, repetitive sin of loving another woman’s husband. It would give her security and love; and she did love him, in a confused and complex way. But she could not do such a thing to Sergei, who deserved nothing but the best; and she could not do it to the Count.

She met his eyes as steadily as she could, and gently withdrew her captive fingers. ‘Sergei, I cannot marry you,’ she said. ‘I am deeply honoured, and grateful–’

‘Grateful! I don’t want you to be grateful!’ he said, his face flushed with mortification, his eyes too bright.

‘Please try not to mind,’ she said desperately. ‘In a little while, in a few months, you’ll see I was right. You’ll meet someone else nearer your own age, someone of your own station in life–’

‘Someone like Zinochka, I suppose,’ he said angrily. ‘A young, empty-headed girl – and she will drive you out of my heart – you, who are everything a man could want –’

Anne turned her face away. ‘Don’t. Please don’t.’

He came close to her, put his mouth to her ear. ‘Anna, listen to me! I think I understand – you think this is just a passing fancy of mine, that I will fall out of love with you in a little while, and go off after someone else. Well, I won’t! You’ll see. I love you, and I know you love me, and I will prove to you that it’s a real, lasting thing! No, don’t argue with me!’ he said quickly as she drew breath to protest. ‘There is no reason in the world why I may not try to win you, is there?’

Only reasons I cannot explain to you, she thought.

‘I don’t love you in that way,’ she said again.

He smiled, and rested his forehead against her hair. ‘So you say. Very well; but you will some day. I will make you love me.’

I shall have to go away, she thought desperately; and as if he heard her thought, he kissed the tip of her ear and straightened up, saying, ‘Don’t worry, milienkaya, I shan’t do anything to embarrass you. In front of the others, I shall be just as I have been before; but privately, I shall try to win you. You will not deny me the right to court you, surely? Everyone has that right.’

She had no answer for him. He smiled – a lovely, warm, confident smile, which made her feel just for an instant younger than him, and under his protection. ‘You’ll enjoy it, Anna Petrovna. I promise you!’

She wouldn’t have thought, after such a scene, and such spilling of emotions, that it would be possible for them to continue with the ride, to spend the rest of the day together, without awkwardness. But Sergei took charge, not only directing their activities and choosing their route, but setting the tone of their conversation and introducing topics when Anne’s sad, confused mind refused to co-operate. His life-long social training as a cadet both of the Guards and a noble house had given him the skills. Gradually his mood affected Anne, and she began to respond more naturally, until at last they were chatting almost as easily on the ride home, as they had on the way out.

Anne was grateful to him, as well as a little surprised by his self-possession. Perhaps it would be all right, she thought. If he behaved like this, she could cope with the situation; and in any case, he would have to return to his regiment soon, in another week or ten days. By the time she saw him again, everything would be changed. At his age, surely, such a mistaken love could not last very long? Some pretty girl would take his fancy, and she would be forgotten.

From the picnic place they rounded the hill and began to descend, climbed again, and passed through a small wood to come out at the other side of the Valley of the Horses, having covered three quarters of the circular route Sergei had planned for them. The herd was down below, but Quassy paid them no attention beyond a sharp pricking of the ears and an intent look when she first spotted them. The stallion was out of sight, and the mares and foals were grazing peacefully, drifting westerly to the sheltered end of the valley where they would spend the night.

‘I wonder if Quassy will prove to be in foal,’ Anne wondered aloud; but Sergei’s attention was not on her. He was staring away across the valley and to the east, away from home, a frown between his brows. ‘What is it?’ Anne asked. ‘Have you seen something?’

He didn’t answer at once; and then he said, ‘I’m not sure. Look, across there, there’s something moving. Can you see it? I thought at first it was a deer, but now I think it looks like someone on horseback.’

Anne stared. ‘I don’t see what you mean.’

‘You see the whitish patch of rock, with the thorn trees above it? Well, just to the left, and below. No, it’s gone behind some bushes. There, now – it is a rider, isn’t it?’

‘It looks like it,’ Anne said. ‘But who could it be? Someone from Chastnaya?’

‘Too far away. And no one from there would ride alone.’ He paused, watching. ‘It must be one of the tribespeople – see how small he is? And he’s riding bareback, I think. But why is he on his own? The Tcherkess don’t ride alone on raids, and there’s no other reason for one of them to be here.’

‘He’s not alone,’ Anne said suddenly. ‘Look, higher up, against the skyline.’

Sergei breathed out. ‘Yes! Quite a party of them. What would you say – six? Ten?’ His hand drifted automatically towards his gun, and then he said, ‘I think we’d better get back home as quickly as possible, and alert the men. If they mean trouble, we had best be prepared.’

They turned their horses towards home. Nabat pricked his ears eagerly, and Quassy put in a dancing step or two, and both were only too willing to increase pace. Anne glanced back just before they passed out of sight. The party on the skyline were gone, but the small figure was still moving on the path below, picking a dogged way along what must have been a narrow and precipitous track. There was something naggingly familiar about the figure, she thought; and then smiled at herself for her absurdity. At that distance, it was impossible to recognise anything more than that it was a human on a horse.

They met Mishka on horseback about half a mile from the house. He waved and changed direction when he saw them, and galloped towards them, shouting something they couldn’t understand. Nabat and Quassy shied excitedly as he came up, circling his horse around them as he overshot.

‘Have you seen her?’ he shouted, hauling the reins of his sweating horse.

‘Seen who?’ Sergei asked. ‘We saw some Tcherkess on the ridge above the valley – looked like a raiding party.’

‘Natasha,’ Mishka replied automatically; and then, ‘What’s that? Tcherkess?’ He dragged his horse to a halt at last in a cloud of dust. Anne felt its grittiness in her mouth as she spoke.

‘Mishka, what are you saying? What about Natasha? Where is she?’

‘That’s what we don’t know. She’s gone. She took a horse and slipped away some time this morning. No one missed her until she didn’t come in for dinner – well, you know what she’s like, always doing things on her own. But then one of the serfs found a horse was missing from the stable, and one of the women came in from the fields to say she’d seen Nasha riding alone, and didn’t think it was right. We’ve got everyone out looking for her.’

Sergei and Anne exchanged a glance; Anne’s mouth flooded with the coppery taste of fear.

‘We’ve just seen her,’ Sergei said grimly. ‘On the valley side, going east. She was so far away, I didn’t recognise her – I thought she was one of the Tcherkess.’

Mishka’s face was pale, not only with dust. ‘But you just said you’d seen a raiding party.’

‘Yes, on the skyline above the path where Nasha was. About six or eight of them, I suppose.’

Mishka’s eyes were wide as he tried to assimilate the facts. ‘What were they doing? Had they seen her? Did they know she was there?’

‘They were just sitting there – watching her, I think,’ Sergei said, and his voice sounded like a sentence of death.

‘We must go after her,’ Mishka cried, turning his horse so sharply that it snorted and gave a half-rear.

‘Yes,’ Sergei said. His voice sharpened into an officer’s as he gave his orders. ‘Anna, go back to the house, tell them what you know, get Feodor to turn out an armed party, as many as he can, and send them after us. Mishka will come with me. We’ll go back to the valley and see if she’s still in sight. If she is, I’ll go after her and leave him somewhere to pass on the message. Do you understand? Then go!’

Anne made no argument, turning Quassy and kicking her into a canter even as Sergei finished speaking. A glance over her shoulder a moment later saw the two men already at some distance, galloping hard back towards the valley.

The women had the hardest part to bear. For the men there was at least activity to ease the ache of anxiety; but the women had nothing to do but wait. Nyanka alternated between wailing and prayers, beat her breast with a gnarled fist clenched about her wooden crucifix, offered God her life in exchange for Natasha’s. But behind this noisy and theatrical outcry, it was not hard to see the genuine, black fear in her eyes: not for the retribution she might expect if anything should happen to the child, but simply for Natasha herself. The child had been left in her charge: she should not have allowed her out of her sight; and if Nasha were not returned to them unharmed, Nyanka would never forgive herself.

It was not hard to discover how it had come about. At Chastnaya, the children enjoyed a greater degree of licence than in Petersburg, greater even that at Schwartzenturm. They were all well aware of the dangers of wandering too far from the house, and as long as they were somewhere nearby, everyone was happy enough to let them romp and play, and merely glance out at them from time to time to see that all was well.

Nyanka had had other things on her mind that day. Irina’s maid, Marie, had come storming into the kitchen quarters that morning complaining bitterly that a pair of her ladyship’s silk stockings was missing, and that someone must have stolen them. The Chastnaya servants had naturally resented the implication that there was a thief in their number, and counter-accused Marie of not knowing her own business. The Kirov servants rallied to Marie, and warfare had broken out, as all the frictions of the past weeks and the mixing of two households came to the surface.

Nyanka had tried to mediate, feeling herself to have loyalties on both sides – a Kirov servant, but Chastnaya bred. When Zina had come to find out what all the noise was about, Nyanka had tried to represent both sides of the argument fairly, and had her nose bitten off by Zina for her pains. She retired in high dudgeon to her sewing, and bid Tanya go and see if the children were all right.

Tanya, who had been given some mending to do which she did not believe was rightly her job, since the articles in question were the property of Danil’s children, and should therefore have been mended by a Chastnaya servant, flounced off to poke her head out on to the verandah. Sashka was there, playing with some wooden soldiers, and seeing some of the other children run past engaged in a game of hide-and-go-seek, she found it convenient to assume Nasha was of their number.

Thus it was that no one had noticed Nasha had gone until the children were called in for their dinner, by which time she had been gone several hours.

But gone where? And why? And why so far? To take a horse suggested some serious purpose. If she had wanted to go for a ride, there was no reason why she should not have asked for a pony to be saddled up for her. A groom would have gone with her then, of course; that she had taken a horse suggested she wanted to go somewhere she thought would be denied her.

But where? Sitting in silence on the verandah through that long, airless afternoon, the women racked their brains, trying desperately not to think of what might have happened to the little girl. It was not likely that any of the Tcherkess would lose the opportunity of capturing the fair-skinned, light-haired daughter of a Russian Dvorian. The best of them might simply return her in the hope of a reward – which they would undoubtedly receive. Others might kidnap her and hold her to ransom; and there were yet other possibilities too horrible to contemplate.

Nyanka might wail and croon her hysterical fear, while looking inwardly at her unforgiveable sin; Irina might sit in stunned silence, contemplating the loss of her dearest child, knowing that she was ultimately responsible for Nyanka, and for bringing the children here in the first place; but Anne knew that the final responsibility was hers. Nyanka was only a servant, and a serf at that; Irina had a mother’s cares, but a high-born mother’s detachment too. Anne was the person employed by the Count to take care of the children, to bring them up in loco parentis, and she should not have gone off on a pleasure-jaunt and left them unguarded.

She, above all, knew what Natasha was like – how unpredictable she could be – how little regard she had for physical danger. The child was strange, there was no escaping the fact. Anne remembered old Marya’s warning – the little one may walk away one day… don’t let her stray too far… There was no doubt that Nasha had deliberately taken a horse and ridden away, of her own will, for some purpose of her own. But where? And why? Her thoughts trod the weary circle again.

The men came back after dark, exhausted, silent with failure.

‘But you can’t leave her out there in the dark!’ Ekaterina cried, clutching her own daughter against her bosom. ‘Think how frightened she will be! You must keep looking for her!’

‘We can’t search in the dark, Katya,’ Feodor said, defeat heavy in his voice. ‘We’ll begin again at first light tomorrow, but there’s nothing more we can do now.’

‘We’ve left lookouts to bivouac at various vantage points,’ Mishka added. ‘It was Seryosha’s idea. She may be trying to make her way back home by now, and she’ll see their camp fires. If she comes across any of them, they’ll bring her straight back here. It’s the best we can do.’

‘What about the tribesmen we saw?’ Anne asked quietly. She saw the same reluctance in the eyes of the men to answer, as she felt in asking.

‘We found the place where we saw them,’ Sergei said. ‘They must have been there quite a while, judging by the dung. But what they were doing…’ He shrugged.

‘They came from the east and made off that way,’ Mishka added, ‘to judge from the few tracks we could find. But there was no possibility of following them. As to Nasha – well, the path she was following is bare rock. The only trace is a scratch here and there, and there’s no knowing if that was made by her horse, or any other.’

There was a silence.

‘But what did she go for?’ Ekaterina asked, as if exasperated by the illogicality of the situation.

Feodor looked at his sister helplessly. ‘God, if we knew that… ! Perhaps she went to look at the horses in the valley, and then wandered too far to get back before dark. She’ll probably make her own way back,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘She’s probably hiding up somewhere, waiting for it to get light. She’ll turn up safe and sound tomorrow morning.’

No one agreed or disagreed.

‘I’d better see about supper,’ Zina said dully. ‘Come with me, Katya. There’s water hot for you men. Go on to your rooms, I’ll send it in.’

The next day, as soon as it got light, the men went out again in four parties, armed, and equipped with ropes, blankets, food, aquavit and anything else they thought might conceivably be useful; and the women settled down to another day of waiting. Anne took Sashka away and taught him his letters, in an attempt to keep her mind from the fruitless anxiety that was wearing them all down. Nyanka washed, starched and ironed every item of children’s clothing she could lay hands on. Irina sat on the verandah, rocking a little, staring at nothing, her long, golden eyes blank. Her hands were folded, motionless in her lap; under them, though no one knew it but Anne, she held one of Nasha’s shoes, a pink sandal she had worn on the night of the feast, to dance in.

The day’s search revealed nothing. ‘There are so many places she might be – woods, ravines, caves,’ Danil said defeatedly. ‘It will take for ever to search them all. It’s hopeless.’

‘We need more help,’ Feodor said, giving his brother a warning look. ‘Tomorrow I shall call out every serf, and comb the whole valley inch by inch. We’ll find her, don’t worry,’ he added to Irina, trying to sound confident; but she only looked at him blankly. Anne, with Sashka in her arms for comfort, visualised the size of the area they were searching, thought of Nasha lying hurt and helpless in some hidden gully.

‘If she had fallen from her horse, wouldn’t it have made its own way home?’ she asked.

‘Not necessarily. If it were very far away, it might just wander,’ Mishka said briefly. ‘Or it might have got caught up somewhere – trailing reins.’

‘If there were a fall, the horse might be hurt,’ Grishka suggested.

‘You’d better hope that the horse is still with her,’ Danil said. ‘A lone child will be even harder to find.’

Irina took Sashka from Anne to put him to bed, and the others drifted away, leaving Sergei, Feodor and Anne alone on the verandah. The darkness was the black velvet of before moonrise, and they instinctively turned their faces to it. It was easier to talk and hope, when you could not see the despair in other people’s eyes.

‘Tomorrow I will send out a message to the tribes,’ Feodor said. ‘They can search the hills beyond the estate better than we can. They know every inch.’

A silence. ‘I don’t know whether I ought to write to my father,’ Sergei said, sounding for once very young, in need of reassurance. ‘It will take so long for the message to reach him, and if she were found meanwhile, he would be worried for nothing.’

‘Perhaps you might wait another day or two,’ Anne said, knowing it was the answer he wanted. ‘It’s a large area to search.’

‘If only we hadn’t gone out for the day!’ Sergei cried out, his guilt rising to the surface at last.

‘My dear, it isn’t your fault,’ Anne said. ‘It was never your business to take care of her. It is I who–’ She stopped abruptly. To voice her guilt was to court denials from the two men. She turned to look at Feodor’s dark shadow beside her, leaning on the verandah rail. ‘You don’t think she’s on the estate, do you? You think the Tcherkess took her.’

He was long answering; then he said quietly, ‘It seems likely. But there’s always hope. Let’s not talk about it.’ He pushed himself upright, the heavy movement of a tired man. ‘We’ll do everything we can – search, ask questions – and pray besides. But talking and thinking won’t help.’

‘How can any of us help thinking,’ Anne said helplessly.

Feodor touched her shoulder as he walked away. ‘We can try.’

Chapter Seventeen

Anne woke from a restless and tangled dream to find Sashka beside her bed, tugging urgently at her arm.

‘Anna! Anna! Come quick!’

She struggled up on to one elbow. Moonlight filled the room: her bed here at Chastnaya was uncurtained, and the window drapes had not been pulled quite together. Sashka was brightly illuminated in his white nightgown, his fair hair ruffled into a crest.

‘Sashka? What is it?’

‘Mama’s not well! Come and make her better, oh please, Anna!’

She was out of bed on the instant, reaching for her wrapper. ‘Did you wake Nyanka?’

Sashka shook his head. ‘She was snoring,’ he said succinctly. Anne took his hand and hurried out of her room and along the passage towards Irina’s. She had been watching the Countess carefully over the last few days, worried about her increasing withdrawal. Irina sat all day staring at nothing, or walked back and forth along the verandah, always holding Nasha’s shoe tight against her like a talisman. She did not cry or speak, barely seemed to understand when she was spoken to, ate little and without interest when food was placed before her. The only change in her came when the men returned at night, and her focus would suddenly sharpen as she looked at them for their report.

Negative: they were always negative. It was as if Natasha had disappeared from the face of the earth; and though the words had never been spoken, everyone had gradually relinquished any hope of finding her alive. The Kiriakov men left at first light every day on an increasingly hopeless search, and the unvoiced thought that they were now only seeking the final proof of her death made the days longer and more weary for everyone.

Irina’s door was ajar, and Anne saw that the room was even brighter than her own had been. Once inside, she could see why: the curtains had been drawn right back, and Irina was standing at the window, looking up at the moon. The sky outside was clear, and the moon was high and hard, a white-hot disc whose light was so bright it might almost have burnt.

In her nightdress and with her long plait hanging straight down her back, Irina looked like a child. She held the pink slipper in both hands against her breast; her eyes were wide and blank, her lips were moving soundlessly. She did not seem to notice when Anne came towards her.

‘Is she ill, Anna?’ Sashka whispered anxiously. ‘I called her but she didn’t answer, and she looks so strange.’

Anne squeezed his hand reassuringly, and then relinquished it and approached the Countess, saying quietly, ‘Irina Pavlovna, are you all right?’ There was no response. ‘Can’t you sleep? The moon is very bright.’

Close beside her mistress, Anne could hear now that she was whispering rapidly, and thought at first that she was praying. She touched Irina’s hand cautiously, and was shocked to feel that, in spite of the warmth of the midsummer night, it was icy cold. ‘Madame, come back to bed,’ she said gently. ‘You’re cold.’ The rapid whisper went on unheedingly; Anne saw that her pupils were dilated, too. Anne turned to Sashka and murmured, ‘Go quietly and wake Nyanka, my love, and bring her here. Try not to wake anyone else.’

He gave one wide-eyed look, and scurried away. Anne placed her hand over Irina’s icy one, and tried to turn her from the window, but her whole body was rigid, and her resistance was so powerful that Anne could not make any impression on her, nor unclasp so much as one finger from around the shoe. She was either in a trance, or sleepwalking.

‘Irina Pavlovna!’ she said more urgently. ‘Can you hear me? Wake up!’

The whisper became distinguishable. ‘So cold… so cold. Dark, here… No light anywhere. Cold.’

‘Wake up, madame. You’re dreaming.’

‘Cold,’ Irina said. ‘No more voices… you promised… so alone.’ Out of the corner of her eye, Anne saw Nyanka appear in the doorway, clasping a crucifix a little before her as if to ward off evil. Irina’s voice rose. ‘Don’t leave me alone… Lonely… So lonely…’ Suddenly she cried out. ‘Mama! Mama! Help me!’

Nyanka had been advancing across the room, but at the last words she stopped as though shot through the heart, and her eyes met Anne’s, wide with horror. The voice which had issued from Irina’s lips was not her own. It was higher, younger, a child’s voice – Natasha’s voice.

‘Dear God alive!’ Nyanka cried, crossing herself.

‘Quick, Nyanka,’ Anne said sharply, ‘what must we do?’

But Nyanka was too frightened to be of any help. Irina was rigid and shaking, and Anne feared she might actually injure herself, and yet feared to wake her by violent means, in case it should be harmful. Sashka was hiding behind Nyanka, clutching her skirt and peeping out in fear; and into the midst of this came Zina in a sensible wrapper, with Zinochka in curl-papers behind her, and strode across the room, grim-faced. She brushed Anne out of the way, took hold of Irina by one shoulder, and slapped her calculatedly, first on one cheek and then the other.

Irina’s eyes widened even further in shock as she stared at Zina for an instant; and then she collapsed bonelessly against her sister.

‘Help me put her to bed,’ Zina snapped at Anne. ‘Zinochka, turn back the covers. You, Nyanka, don’t stand there like a stock! Fetch her smelling-bottle, and go and wake up her maid. Go, for God’s sake – and stop crossing yourself like that! She’s not possessed by evil spirits. She’s just been sleepwalking again.’

While she was speaking, Anne had come round to the other side of her mistress, and between them they half-carried, half-dragged the inert form back to the bed, where Zinochka had pulled back the covers and was hovering anxiously. Nyanka had left the room. Out of the corner of her eye, Anne knew that Sashka was still somewhere near, and ought to be taken back to bed, but she hadn’t any attention to spare for him at the moment.

They got Irina into bed, pulled the covers over her. She lay limp against the pillows, her eyes closed, her face white except for the reddening imprint of Zina’s fingers. Zina lifted one fragile wrist to test the pulse. Anne saw that the Countess had dropped the shoe by the window, the first time it had been out of her hands since Nasha went missing.

‘I was afraid of this,’ Zina said grimly. ‘I’ve seen it building up. She used to have these fits when she was a girl, especially when the moon was bright like tonight.’

‘Fits?’ Anne queried.

‘Sleepwalking – or whatever you want to call it. A sort of trance, I suppose,’ Zina said. ‘Our mother was the same way, so I’m told – I don’t really remember. She was thought to have second sight. The serfs believed it, anyway. She was a seventh child – and Irina was her seventh, if you count the stillbirth between Feodor and me.’

Marie came in, voluble with anxiety and questions, bearing the smelling-bottle. Nyanka hovered in the doorway, torn between her desire to attend her nurseling, and her fear of things supernatural. Almost irrelevantly, in the back of her mind, Anne heard the Count’s voice: We all see visions. There’s a magic in Russia that we breathe in all the time… Well, but this was something a little different, a little out of Anne’s experience. Yet five years in Russia had changed her. The sensible English governess would have dismissed what she had heard as imagination; but this Anna Petrovna was not so sure.

‘Zina, did you hear?’ she asked now, as Zina plied the bottle under Irina’s nose. ‘When she spoke – it sounded like Natasha’s voice.’

Irina coughed, struggled a little, lifted a hand to ward off the bottle. Zina pushed it down firmly and said, ‘One more sniff, there’s a good girl.’ Irina gasped, and her eyes fluttered open. She looked around her at the ring of faces hovering over her, and then closed her eyes and moaned.

‘What happened?’

Zina’s fingers were firm on the wrist again. ‘You took one of your turns,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘No,’ Irina moaned. ‘My head hurts… What happened?’

‘She’s like this,’ Zina explained to Anne. ‘She’ll be better in a minute or two.’ She stroked Irina’s forehead, her work-hardened hand unexpectedly gentle. ‘There, little’Rushka, there. It’s all right now. Zina’s here.’ She looked over her shoulder and saw Sashka at the end of the bed watching, and frowned. ‘Nyanka, take that child and put him to bed! What are you thinking of? Your mistress is all right now. Marie and I will stay with her. You go back to bed too, Zinochka. You need your sleep. And send those servants away,’ she added, aware of some hovering outside the door.

When the room was cleared, Anne walked over to the window and picked up the shoe, noting as she did that it felt unexpectedly cold, though the soft leather soon warmed in her hand. Imagination, perhaps? She went back to the bed, and stood quietly. After a while Irina opened her eyes again, and Zina said, ‘Take a sip of wine. You’ll feel better soon.’

Marie helped her prop up Irina’s head while Zina held a wineglass to her lips. When she was resting against the pillows again, Irina said, ‘I saw her. I saw Nasha.’ Her voice was weak, but clear.

‘Of course you did,’ Zina said soothingly. ‘What else would you expect, the way you’ve been carrying on? I’ve seen this coming these two days. You must eat properly, Irushka, or you’ll make yourself ill.’

Irina caught her sister’s wrist, and her knuckles showed white. ‘Don’t baby me! You know what I’m saying! You know my visions are true ones! I saw her – I saw my child. She’s alive!’

Zina did not deny it, but she could not help a tiny shake of her head in disbelief. Irina’s eyes came round pleadingly to Anne’s.

‘She’s alive. I saw the place.’ She frowned with concentration. ‘A high place. Very high. And very cold.’

‘Do you know where it is?’ Anne asked tentatively.

Irina stared through her. ‘A long way away. Further away than we’ve been searching. A high place…’

‘In the mountains?’ Anne asked.

‘Yes! High in the mountains!’ She closed her eyes, plainly exhausted.

‘Leave her alone, now,’ Zina interposed quietly. ‘Don’t excite her again – she needs to sleep. You’d better go back to bed – Marie and I can cope. Goodnight, Anna Petrovna.’

Anne was dismissed too firmly to resist, and with a final, doubtful glance at the Countess, she went away. She looked in to see that Sashka had settled, and found him half asleep, with Nyanka sitting beside his bed. The old woman nodded to her, and Sashka turned his face drowsily for Anne’s kiss.

‘Is Mama all right now?’

‘Yes, she’s all right. She’s sleeping now – and so must you. Goodnight, Sashka.’

‘Goodnight, Anna,’ he murmured. He was almost asleep. ‘I’m glad Nasha’s all right.’

Anne went quietly away, leaving him to Nyanka. In her own room, she went to the window to pull the curtains closed, and found Nasha’s shoe still in her hand. It was so small, and so soft. She remembered the strange voice that had come from Irina’s mouth, remembered the bleak, pitiful words, and suddenly she was crying – for the first time since Nasha had been lost. Whatever had been the truth of Irina’s ‘vision’, it brought home to her the stark reality: wherever Natasha was, she was alone, facing either life or death without anyone to help or comfort her, and she was only seven years old.

Anne lay on her bed and cradled her head in her arms and wept; and weeping, she finally fell asleep.

It was a very different Irina who faced her brothers the next morning. Her face was pale, beginning to be a little gaunt, smudged here and there with violet shadow, and yet alert and alive, taut with eagerness, her eyes like gold flame as she told of her vision.

‘You must search further afield. She’s not nearby – not on Chastnaya at all. But she’s alive.’

‘Can’t you tell us where, Rushka?’ Feodor asked. He looked grey with fatigue; if he believed that his sister’s vision was true, he hadn’t enough energy to spare to show it.

‘A high place,’ she said. ‘Cold and high.’

‘But where? Which direction?’ Dmitri asked. ‘North, south, east or west?’

‘If it’s a high place, it can’t be north or east,’ Danil pointed out. ‘The mountains are south and west.’

‘Depends how high. It needn’t be as high as a mountain.’

‘Cold means high, doesn’t it? Was there snow, Rushka? Did you see snow?’

‘Maybe it’s Mount Kazbek. Could you see that?’

Sergei had been listening to this with scant patience. Now he said, ‘For God’s sake, how could a little child get up Mount Kazbek? Or get as far as that, for that matter? It must be more than a hundred versts.’

Irina turned on him. ‘You don’t believe me? You don’t believe I saw her?’

‘It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not, Mama,’ Sergei said impatiently, ‘unless you can describe the place in more detail. High and cold doesn’t help us much, does it? It could be anywhere.’

‘One thing we know,’ Danil said, frowning at Sergei, ‘is that it is somewhere. You don’t understand – they run in the family, these visions, and they never lie.’

Sergei made a dismissing movement with his hand. ‘All 1 said was a child of that age couldn’t have got that far on her own.’

They looked at each other with hostility; and Anne, feeling sympathy on both sides, said, ‘How far is it to the nearest mountains? High ones, I mean?’

‘Fifty versts, perhaps, going south-west,’ Feodor said.

Sergei looked at him sharply. ‘That’s Chechen country,’ he said.

‘Those tribesmen you saw – could they have been Chechen?’ Feodor asked cautiously.

Sergei shrugged. ‘They were against the light, and a long way off. They could have been anything.’ He looked uncomfortable, not wanting to say what he had to say next. ‘But – look, if the Chechen took her, it’s highly unlikely – well, that she’d still be in the mountains, and alive. Either they’d have killed her, or sold her south.’ He flickered a glance at Irina. ‘I’m sorry, Mama, but it’s true.’

She rounded on him like a tigress. ‘I saw what I saw! You Moscow-bred, you city-bred nothing – what do you know about it? You only believe what you can see and touch. But my brothers believe me! They know! I saw her – she’s alive!’

‘Please, Mama–’ Sergei began to protest; and Irina actually lifted both hands, clenched into fists, and brought them down violently against his breast.

‘Find her!’ she cried fiercely. ‘Find your sister! Find my child!’

They pored over maps, they pondered, they discussed. None of the enquiries they had pursued outside the estate had produced any result, though they had hardly expected them to, even though they had offered a reward for information: the loyalty of the Tcherkess to each other was usually stronger than their sympathy for their Russian overlords, even when the latter were bolstered with money.

Anne looked from face to face, trying to guess what they were thinking. Dmitri and Danil believed wholeheartedly in Irina’s vision; Sergei was openly sceptical, though he said no more about it. Between the extremes, Mishka and Grishka probably believed it with their stomachs, but rejected it with their minds, knowing that the chances of finding Nasha alive had diminished with every passing day, of which there had already been too many.

As to Feodor, it was impossible to judge what he believed: he knew what his duty was and did it, without comment or explanation; he was the patriarch, and responsible for the estate and everyone on it; but he loved his younger brothers and sisters with a warm-blooded Russian fervour, and not for anything would he have hurt Irina, or tried to destroy a faith which she evidently found sustaining.

It was while she was looking at his long, grey face that Anne had her idea. Her mind had been drifting a little; and suddenly, far away in the back of her thoughts, she heard the Tartar Prince saying Akim Shan Kalmuck knows everything; it is his business to know everything. She thought of him, of his dark, bright, feral eyes, his calculating looks, his seemingly genuine admiration for her. If anyone could obtain information from the tribes, surely it must be him? She wondered she hadn’t thought of it before.

In dealing with the tribesmen they had had no weapon but money to use against the natural hostility of the wild mountain men for the dvoriane from the north. Why should they betray their own to the interlopers, the conquerors? But Akim Shan Kalmuck, besides being the Prince of one of the ‘tame’ tribes – for what that was worth – called himself her friend. He had placed himself at her service, and that, surely, must count for something?

She put it to Feodor. ‘Do you know where he lives – where he is to be found? I imagine he is quite an important man, and therefore well known?’

Feodor considered, and his face lightened a little at the prospect of a new avenue to explore, which perhaps offered more of a chance than the search for an unidentified high, cold place. ‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said, ‘but it will be easy enough to find out. He comes from somewhere near Vladikavkaz, between there and the Pass of Dariel – on this side of the mountains, anyway.’

Sergei frowned. ‘I didn’t like the look of him,’ he said. ‘Why should he help us, any more than any of the other tribes?’

‘Because he likes me,’ Anne said shortly.

Feodor glanced at Sergei. ‘It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing. Besides, he has bought our horses more than once, and that makes a bond between us. And I believe he does a great deal of business with the regional agent in Vladikavkaz, which makes him almost civilised.’ Sergei looked sceptical, and Feodor added with a shrug, ‘It’s worth trying, anyway.’

‘Oh, yes, by all means,’ Sergei said neutrally. ‘I’m willing to go, if you like to trust me with the business.’

Anne fixed him with a hard look. ‘Whoever else goes, I must.’

‘Nonsense!’ Sergei said quickly. ‘It’s out of the question – much too dangerous.’

‘Sergei, consider – no one but me can put a personal request to him on my behalf. Put yourself in his place – would you lift a finger to help, unless approached in person?’

Danil said slowly, ‘She’s right, Seryosha. Why, I’ll bet he wouldn’t even listen to us.’

‘But it isn’t seemly. Anna’s a gentlewoman. Quite apart from the danger, there’s no knowing what sights she might be called upon to witness.’

Anne shrugged. ‘None of that matters. I must go. You know I must.’

‘Then I will go with you. I owe it to my father,’ Sergei said. ‘While he’s away, I am responsible for his household.’

Feodor had passed beyond that stage of the argument, and was already planning details. ‘We’ll have to take him gifts, to sweeten him; and armed men, to let him see we’re not in his power. It’s a delicate business.’

‘A show of strength that isn’t a threat – a present that isn’t a bribe?’ Anne said with a faint smile. ‘Yes, delicate – and from what I know of him, he will be more adept at the game than any of us could ever hope to be.’

‘That’s a certainty,’ Feodor said.

There was no time to be lost, and they set out just before noon for Vladikavkaz. The party consisted of Feodor, Dmitri, Grishka, Sergei, Anne and ten armed men. Ekaterina was both worried and disapproving that Anne should have no woman to attend her: it was indecent, and dangerous, she thought. But Anne would not oblige anyone to come on such a mission against their will, and there were no volunteers. Besides, speed was of the essence, and none of the female servants could ride well enough to travel fast, and stay in the saddle all day long. When Katya went on protesting, Irina interrupted on Anne’s behalf.

‘Nonsense, Katya, hold your tongue. What do such things matter at a time like this? They are going to rescue my child, not to have a picnic at Pyatigorsk.’

Anne had been afraid that Irina would want to go herself, but she seemed to understand that she would only be a hindrance. However hard it would be to remain at home waiting for news, she accepted it without protest, only showing her emotions at the moment of departure by putting her arms round Anne and hugging her briefly.

‘God bless you, Anna Petrovna,’ she whispered into her ear; and stepping back a little, added, ‘Find her!’

They took with them a mule laden with gifts: sunflower seeds, oil, fine cloth, skins, and a jar of perfume – not overwhelmingly expensive things, which might look too much like the bribe of desperate men, but the sort of pleasant gifts that might be exchanged between friends. Anne dressed in her best habit, for she would need to impress – though probably Quassy would do that for her well enough. Anne had already decided that if all else failed, she would offer the Prince the mare in return for his help. As he believed Quassy to be in foal, she would now be twice as valuable to the man who had long coveted her.

It was fifty versts – about forty miles – from Chastnaya to Vladikavkaz; but the days were long, and the roads dry and hard, and they were able to reach the city long enough before dark for enquiries to be made by Feodor and Sergei, while the others looked for lodgings, saw to the horses, and bespoke a dinner. It was after dark when Feodor and Sergei joined them, but from their expression it was plain that they had achieved their object.

‘We know where he is,’ Sergei said the instant he came through the door. ‘It’s a village up in the hills about eight versts along the road towards Kazbek. It’s called Karzerum, and he’s the chief man of the whole area. A very important person, your admirer, Anna Petrovna.’

‘We’ll set off at sun-up,’ Feodor said. ‘We can’t approach a man like that in the dark – open to misinterpretation.’

‘If we left before dawn, we could be there at first light,’ Sergei suggested. ‘It might be better for us if we arrive unexpectedly.’

‘Unexpectedly?’ Feodor said.

‘Throw him off balance – it would give us the upper hand.’

Feodor gave a tired smile. ‘My dear Seryosha, you don’t know the kind of people you’re dealing with. It’s two hours since we began asking questions about Akim Shan Kalmuck, and he lives only eight versts away. If he does not know by now that we are come looking for him, I promise you I’ll eat my hat – new ribbon and all.’

Anne slept heavily, tired from the long ride and the emotions and worries of the day, but woke feeling refreshed, with the consciousness that at last she was doing something positive to try to find Natasha. Despite the arguments of her reason, she could not help feeling absurdly hopeful. Irina believed her daughter was alive. Anne saw now what she had been doing all those days when she walked up and down holding Nasha’s shoe: not brooding, but searching – letting loose her mind to cover those distances impossible for her body. Akim Shan Kalmuck would help them; he must help them.

It was a fine day, but humid, and there were clouds covering the high jagged peaks of Mount Kazbek and the Mountain of the Cross, so that they looked mysterious and withdrawn, like inaccessible judges withholding their counsel, waiting to pass sentence. The road out of the town was steep, and the horses were soon sweating, early though it was, and clouds of little black flies descended to torment them. Sergei and Grishka got off and walked, leading their horses, and Anne would have liked to do the same, to save Quassy, but dared not: she could not remount quickly, as they could, in case of sudden need.

The village of Karzerum was built above the road, on a hilltop which was a natural fortress, a flat, green plateau above bare cliffs, impossible to scale. Above it the mountains rose sheer, uncolonised except for the gorse and thorn clinging to ledges. The village was dominated by a stone-built fortified house, presumably the Prince’s, behind which was a cluster of wooden and daub cottages, sheltered from the north by a stand of trees. A little apart, on rising ground, stood the inevitable little white church, its Byzantine dome just catching the rising sun.

The path to the village left the main road and climbed in a winding way between natural cliffs. Anyone using it would be kept in view, and at a disadvantage, by lookouts on the top; and Anne, riding well to the front to emphasise the peaceful nature of their approach, thought that Akim Shan Kalmuck would be a hard man to take by surprise. She felt that they were being watched, but her occasional glances upwards could not discover anyone; only once there was a flash from amongst the bushes high overhead, as though something metallic had caught the sun’s rays.

When they emerged from the gully and out on to the hilltop, there was a party of horsemen waiting for them, dark, hook-nosed tribesmen in striped coats, with guns held upright before them, not threatening, but at the ready. The Prince was in the centre of them, on a white Kabardin stallion whose restless sidlings he sat effortlessly. The champing of its bit and the ringing of the gold discs on its browband were the only sounds on that silent hilltop.

The Chastnaya party halted, and Feodor raised his hand in the universal, palm-outwards gesture of greeting.

‘Peace be with you, Akim Shan Kalmuck,’ he said. ‘Peace and prosperity to your tribe.’

The Prince gave a courteous bow, and raised his own hand, his eyes flicking over the group speculatively. ‘Peace be with you, Feodor Pavlovitch,’ he said in the Russian form. ‘You are a long way from Chastnaya of the Horses.’

‘We have come to visit you,’ Feodor said. ‘We bring gifts –’ he made a superbly throwaway gesture, as though the gifts were hardly worth mentioning between gentlemen of standing – ‘so that we shall not leave your house poorer than we found it.’

The Prince inclined his head slightly. ‘The guest who comes in friendship can never leave the house poorer,’ he replied in kind. He surveyed them again. ‘You will come and drink wine with me! Your men will be taken care of.’

It was not quite an invitation. The men surrounding the Prince performed a neat manoeuvre which put them between the Kiriakovs and their men, cutting off master from servant, ushering the former forward, and retaining the latter behind. But the Prince smiled as though he were in the Tsar’s drawing-room, and turned his fretting stallion to walk him alongside Anne, holding him in with the curved spring of a wrist so that he kept perfect pace with Quassy. He was, Anne acknowledged to herself, a superb rider.

‘I had not thought’, the Prince said, ‘to have the honour of receiving you into my house, Anna Petrovna.’

‘You know my name,’ she said in surprise. Always before he had called her ‘English Lady’.

He bowed. ‘I think it must be some very important thing that brings you such a long way on horseback, in this wild country. I wonder what it may be?’

His bright eyes were watchful, and Anne felt she was being tested, though she had no idea what was the nature of the test. She tried to smile. ‘I have come to see the tiger, of course,’ she said. ‘When you told me you had a tame tiger with an emerald collar, I felt my days would be weary until I had seen it for myself, with my own eyes.’

She seemed to have said the right thing. He relaxed a little, and laughed, showing all his teeth.

‘You shall see it!’ he cried.

‘It exists, then?’ she said demurely.

‘It exists. Did you doubt it?’

‘Entirely. And it has an emerald collar?’

‘A collar of the most fabulous emeralds in the world, the bright green emeralds that are found nowhere but in the waters of the Ganges River. That also you shall see.’ He looked pleased with himself, and allowed the stallion to dance a little. ‘I have never entertained an English lady in my house before. This is indeed a special day.’

They were approaching the stone house, whose single door was a black cave in the shadowed side away from the sun. Servants in white robes came running out to take the horses’ heads, and the Prince leapt down to come to Quassy’s side and hold out his hands to Anne. Sergei was there at the same instant, ready to be angry and push the Prince aside; and though she looked at those hands with fear, and was loath to let them touch her, she knew he must not be offended. She stilled Sergei with a ferocious glance, and allowed the Prince to jump her down.

Close to he smelled of oil and strong perfume and meat and garlic, a smell like sheep yolk from the raw wool of his sleeveless coat, and a musky animal smell which she supposed was his body. He terrified her, but she forced herself not to struggle away from him as soon as her feet touched the ground; forced herself to meet his eyes steadily as he towered over her.

She saw his lower lip, pink and naked-looking amongst the curled and oiled hairs of his beard; the brown edges of his lower teeth; the dark pitted skin of his cheeks above his beard; the black hairs in his nostrils; the little white scar across the bridge of his beaked nose; and then the bright, black, unfathomable eyes with their yellowish whites under the jutting black cliffs of his eyebrows. She saw his tongue move like an animal in its cave behind his teeth, and felt his breath warm and moist on her face, as he said, ‘The mare is tired. I shall order my men to give her a cooling feed while you drink wine with me. She must be taken care of, the beautiful one.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Anne managed to say. She felt faint, and longed to break the gaze and put her head down, but she would not before he did. Minutes later, it seemed, though it must really have been almost instantly, he released her and stepped away, snapping an order to the servant who held Quassy’s head. At the door he turned and spread his hands to all of them.

‘Enter, and be welcome. My house is yours.’

He turned and led the way, and they followed him, as the servants led away their horses. Now by stages they had been divested of men, arms, and means of escape. Inside his house he might have them all murdered if he chose, and no one would ever be any the wiser. They knew it, and they knew he knew it, and the air around them seemed almost briny with tension. But Anne trusted him. He terrified her, but she did not believe he would strike without a reason.

Sergei jostled up beside her. ‘Are you all right, Anna?’ he murmured. ‘When I saw him put his hands on you, by God, I wanted to–’

‘Hush,’ she whispered urgently. ‘It’s all right, Seryosha. For God’s sake try to act like a guest – be friendly, don’t provoke him. We’re in his power now.’

‘Don’t I know it!’ he muttered. ‘I should have come here with a company of the Independents…’

‘Then we should never have found out anything. Now be quiet – and smile!’

Inside the house was very dark, from the lack of windows – partly the result of fortification, she guessed, and partly to keep out the burning sun in summer, and the bitter wind in winter. Burning incense sticks smouldered in brass holders at every corner, wreathing faint blue smoke up into the shadows of the roof. Their choking sweetness did not disguise an unpleasant smell underneath. Anne did not know what it was, could catch it only in brief snatches, and unwillingly.

The floor was stone, and its unevenness suggested that they were walking on the living rock, which had been roughly levelled when the house was built. The walls were plastered white, and again looked rough, as if the plaster had been laid on bare rock. They were decorated with painted designs in bright, clear colours, though the true beauty of them was only evident where a shaft of sunlight from a slit window suddenly illuminated them. There was a frieze of twined flowers and fruit; there were hunting scenes, and feasting scenes, dancers and dogs and horses and hawks; a parade of serfs carrying baskets of produce on their shoulders; a young warrior leading his war horse; a slender girl feeding a bird from the palm of her hand.

The passage in which they were walking opened out into a large room. It was furnished with several handsome chests and tables, elaborately carved, wooden chairs with slung leather seats, and bare wooden stools. A number of icons, elaborately framed in jewel-studded gold, spoke of the household’s being at least nominally Christian. As well as the plaster paintings, there were handsome Persian and Chinese carpets hung on the walls for decoration, and woven, patterned rugs on the floor. At one end of the room, on a slightly raised dais, there was a heap of sheepskins, some of them dyed, and brightly coloured cushions decorated with knotted fringes, beads and discs, and it was towards this that Akim Shan walked. He turned, spread his hands again in a welcoming gesture, and folded himself gracefully to recline in the soft depths of the heap.

‘My humble house,’ he said. He gestured to the chairs. ‘Please, be comfortable. English Lady, you will sit beside me, as my guest of honour.’

There were many things Anne would have preferred, but again she saw that it was inevitable, and took her place beside him, doing her best to sink gracefully as he had, though her clothes were not designed for it as his were. The prickly, caged-animal smell rose from the cushions as she sat, and was all around her, emanating, she felt, from the Prince himself. She didn’t like to be so near him, especially as she could not now look at him without turning her head, which was too deliberate an act, calling attention to itself; and she very much wanted to keep him in sight.

The others took seats, and servants came in with jugs and cups and bowls of fruit and sweetmeats, and disposed them about the guests on little tables. The Prince himself poured a cup of wine for Anne, and held it out to her, with a courtly bow. She accepted, looked briefly at the others, and drank. There was absolutely no point in wondering whether it were poisoned or not. If he wanted to kill them, he would do it, and there was nothing they could do to stop him. On the other hand, there was everything to be gained by being bold. She drank deep, lowered the cup, and smiled at the Prince.

‘Thank you, sir. An excellent wine.’

He looked as if he had known everything that had just gone through her head. ‘From the Black Sea,’ he said. ‘The wines from there grow sweet and heavy with age, like a lovely woman; but when they are young, they are vigorous and not always to be trusted. Also like a lovely woman.’

Anne laughed dutifully, and the men smiled uneasily and sipped. Akim Shan looked from one to another, evidently enjoying the situation and his power over it. He plied them with sweetmeats and trivial talk, and seemed particularly to enjoy Sergei’s discomfiture, though Anne did her best to draw attention away from him. Then at last the Prince seemed to tire of the game. He straightened up perceptibly, and fixed Feodor with an eye as hard and bright as polished jet.

‘So, you have come to ask for my help,’ he said abruptly. ‘There is something you seek – some knowledge, perhaps?’

Feodor met his gaze. ‘If you know that much, Akim Shan, then you must know what it is we seek.’

‘I know what it is you seek,’ he said, matching Feodor’s inflection so exactly that it was neither question nor statement. ‘You came last night to Vladikavkaz asking where you might find me. Yes, I knew that – I was told you had arrived. I knew also, long before, that you had left Chastnaya of the Horses. Between Eborus and Petrovsk, nothing moves that I do not know about.’

‘If that is true, sir,’ Anne said quickly, ‘then you must know something of the whereabouts of the child.’

He looked at her, and his eyes were unfathomable; and then he turned away and said, ‘The gifts you brought with you – shall I have them carried in? It would amuse me to see them.’

‘Sir–’ Sergei began angrily, but Dmitri kicked him sharply to silence.

‘They are small things, sir,’ Feodor said. ‘Mere trifles, to signify the common trust and friendship between gentlemen.’

Akim Shan looked amused. ‘Gentlemen,’ he mused, and then he chuckled. ‘And yet, I might have you all cut into little pieces, there where you sit, just to amuse myself. I need only give the order. Are you not afraid?’

Anne answered. ‘You have tasted our hospitality at Chastnaya,’ she said, trying to sound offhand, as Feodor had. ‘You have bought horses of the Kiriakov herd. Therefore no Kiriakov – and no friend of Kiriakov – can be afraid in your house.’ He looked at her, and she made herself continue. ‘In particular, you treated my mare, and made her well again, and I am in your debt. It would be impossible, would it not, to kill one who owes you so much – and means to owe you more?’

The Prince stared a moment longer, and then burst into wild laughter. ‘English Lady, you are very clever! You have the wisdom of more than your years! For your sake I will listen to your request, and consider whether I may be able to help you.’ He turned his attention then to Feodor, who gave the history of the loss of Natasha as concisely as possible. Akim Shan asked one or two questions, and then sank into a thoughtful silence, which went on so long they all began to feel restless and nervous again. At last he roused himself and said, ‘I tell you at once, I do not know where the child is.’ Sergei drew a breath of mingled disappointment and anger, but the Prince went on almost without a pause, ‘Yet I have ways of finding out what I wish to know. If the knowledge exists, I shall obtain it. By this hour tomorrow, I shall have information for you.’

‘We are most grateful,’ Feodor began, and the Prince cut him short.

‘It may not be the information you desire.’

‘Nevertheless, we are grateful,’ Feodor insisted. ‘To know is better than not to know.

The Prince bared his teeth. ‘You may have cause to change that opinion. But I do not perform this task for your gratitude, but for the sake of the English Lady who is in my debt, and wishes to be more so.’ He turned the grin on Anne, and she felt a sinking sensation as she wondered what was going to be asked of her. She had been prepared to give up Quassy – but what if she herself were the price? He had wanted to marry her – what if he insisted on that in exchange for the information about Nasha? Could she bear it? She knew she could not – yet what if that were the only way?

She forced herself to meet his eyes, though her flesh felt as though it were shrinking on her bones in the effort to be further from him. Something was about to be asked of her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the stirring amongst the men as they, too, wondered what the Prince was going to say; and in the Prince’s eyes, she read his perfect knowledge of everything that was happening, and his enjoyment of it.

‘The price, English Lady – do you not wish to know the price?’ Through the pounding of her own blood in her ears, Anne heard Sergei growl; she heard herself ask faintly, ‘The price, sir?’

‘The price for my services,’ the Prince said, with patient enjoyment. ‘Everything has its price. So life must have taught you, English Lady. Yes, I see it in your eyes – your eyes which do not flinch to look into mine.’

They did, but she controlled them as best she could. ‘Well, then, sir – the price. What is it?’

His smile became infinitesimally more gentle, and yet it was not reassuring. It was the tenderness with which a great cat licks the piece of meat it is about to devour.

‘The price,’ he said slowly, ‘is that you remain here until tomorrow as my guests – all of you.’ Anne stared, feeling as though she had braced herself against something which had suddenly given way. ‘I shall entertain you, and give you a dinner such as you have never eaten before and will never eat again, and you shall be ever deeper in my debt. And tomorrow morning, I will have the information for you. Is it agreed?’

Anne had no idea what she was going to say until she heard her own voice. ‘Unfortunately, sir, because of the urgency of our quest, I did not bring a waiting woman with me. It would not be proper for me to remain under your roof, unattended by any female.’

She saw Dmitri staring at her as though she had run mad. She rather thought she had run mad; but the Prince seemed delighted with the inconsequence of her answer, enchanted by its incongruity.

‘It is no matter,’ he said, and the gentleness was real now. ‘I shall appoint a woman of my own people to wait on you. You are my honoured guest. No harm shall come to you.’

Anne could only bow her consent, momentarily exhausted by the tension of the last few minutes.

The Prince gave a rapid string of orders to the waiting servants, who scattered to obey them with a speed which spoke of either great devotion or great fear.

‘And now, you shall come and see the tiger,’ he said, rising gracefully to his feet, and holding out a hand to raise Anne. When she was on her feet, he bent over her conspiratorially, and she smelt the feral sweetness of his breath. ‘The interesting thing about the tiger is that if you fear it, it will tear out your throat; but if you do not fear, it will not harm you.’ He smiled beguilingly. ‘But of course you must be genuinely without fear. The tiger will always know the difference.’

‘Always, sir?’ Anne said faintly.

‘Always. But you may comfort yourself with the thought that if it does kill you, it is a swift and noble death.’ Anne walked with him, beyond fear, beyond even surprise now. ‘The tiger’s death, and not the jackal’s,’ the Prince said reflectively, leading her to the door. ‘Perhaps, at last, that is the best any of us can wish for.’

Chapter Eighteen

Anne drifted upwards towards wakefulness, her thoughts hazy and confused. Where was she? Something had happened. Had she been ill? Half asleep, she thought she was in the sick-room at Miss Oliver’s school. She had been there once, when she had influenza: a small room under the roof, with a hard and narrow bed, and a skylight through which you could see the clouds passing, and the shadows of birds. It had a dusty, unused smell, the smell of dry attics everywhere.

She drifted away again. The influenza had left her tired, weak and confused. She was too hot. The blanket was rough, and prickled her skin wherever it touched. Later the doctor would come and give her a draught, dark and foul-tasting, like thin tar. She didn’t want to take it. He hung over her, menacing, his aquiline nose coming closer to her face… and closer… his teeth were white and sharp, his eyes yellow, a beast’s eyes with slit pupils…

She woke with a start, opening her eyes to stare at the beams of the vaulted wooden ceiling in utter confusion, not knowing where she was, who she was, what had happened. For a moment she panicked, straining her head up from the pillow, staring at the wooden walls around her, her mind empty of the usual comfortable certainties of time and space, trying to make sense of what she saw.

Then knowledge seeped slowly back. She remembered. She was in the Prince’s house, in the mountains, in the Caucasus, in Russia. Last night there had been a feast and dancing, and she had gone late to bed – to this unexpectedly hard bed with the coarse, striped blanket which had rubbed a sore place on her neck.

She lay looking at the roof and reflecting. It was utterly fantastic, of course. Five years ago – only five – she had been a governess in a house in Margaret Street; she had never been outside England; she had never even seen the sea. Her life had been ordered and monotonous, safe, filled with the familiar and trivial, with small vexations and small pleasures. A new book from the circulating library in Wigmore Street had been something to look forward to; mending stockings had been a chore to be put off.

She thought of last night, of the banquet in the smoky, dark hall: the air had been hard to breathe, with a mixture of incense and torch smoke, and the reek of charred meat and the Prince’s civet-sweet perfume, and another pungent, almost herbal smell from the aromatic leaf which the Prince and his male guests smoked, which was not tobacco, and which, even breathed in second-hand, made Anne feel dizzy.

She thought of the strange things she had eaten and drunk. Most of the time she had no idea what she was putting into her mouth, and perhaps it was just as well. A seemingly endless procession of dishes had come from the kitchens, each borne by a servant to the Prince, who sniffed, tasted, and then with his own hands served a small amount into a bowl which he gave to Anne.

Many were spicy, all strange, some unpleasant. Sometimes she asked what it was, and sometimes she was told. A charred, strong meat was wild boar, the spiky flavouring of it rosemary; thin, flexible strips with little taste at all was octopus; small joints full of bones were some kind of rabbit. At one point there was a chunk of lamb, moist and delicious, flavoured with coriander leaves. A soup with a grainy texture was presumably made with lentils; a dark stew might have been anything, and Anne did not recognise the name of the spice the Prince mentioned. There were some things that might have been oysters but weren’t, and which she tried to swallow without thinking, because she was told they were a great speciality, and always given to the honoured guest. There were sweet things, too – cakes running with thin honey, sweet curds with nuts, sticky white gritty balls a little like marzipan – too many sweet things. Then more meats, and fish, and fowl. And more sweets. The feast went on until Anne had exhausted all capacity for surprise, and any desire ever to eat again.

While they ate there was entertainment, music and dancing. Some of the music was pleasant and familiar, the sort of thing she had grown used to since coming to Russia: country music, sweet and plaintive, or fast and jolly. But some seemed monotonous and hard to listen to, played on strange instruments with a penetrating, jangling sound which got into her head and hurt. The dancing was easy to watch, but made her feel dizzy, though that might have been something to do with the smoke in the air, and the quantities of wine she had been obliged to drink. Though she was tormented with thirst, it was beyond her even to contemplate lemonade or water in such fantastic surroundings. At the end of the feast, great bowls of fruit were brought in, and Anne fell on them with the first eagerness she had felt for hours, and quenched her thirst on figs and kumquats.

And even then they were not done. The servants brought in a small brazier, a brass pot with a long neck, and some other equipment, and proceeded to make coffee, which was served to the guests in cups so small and so fragile they were like the blown shells of robin’s eggs. With the coffee they were served spirits – kumiss, made from fermented mare’s milk, and kummel, flavoured with carraway seeds, and a variety of thick, sticky liquors made from fruit – and more sweetmeats. And there was more entertainment – music of the eastern sort, and singing, tuneless to western ears and wearisome.

Anne picked through her confused, whirling, multicoloured memories. Running through them all, the constant thread, was the Prince, the smell and sound of him, his presence, impossible to ignore, his character, impossible to understand. They talked all evening, and Anne felt exhausted at the very memory of it. It was like conversing with a lunatic: no ease, no surety, no knowing from moment to moment what he would say or how he could react, which words would spell life and which death. His Russian was difficult and idiosyncratic, and sometimes he used dialect words she didn’t know, and there was no one nearby to translate for her, or advise her.

The Prince; and the tiger. If the Prince was the thread running through the cloth, then the tiger was the jewel in the centre. Sifting back through the day, before the feast, she came to the moment when he had led her away after that first interview to see the tiger. She hadn’t really believed in it, and her scepticism lasted right up until the moment she first saw it. The Prince took her to a small room at one end of the house, bare of decoration, with one small window high up, through which the only light came. It was empty except for the cage containing the tiger.

She had never seen one before, except for a drawing in a book, and that was no preparation for the reality. To begin with, a picture gave no idea of the sheer size of it. She had been supposing a large creature, the size of a big dog, perhaps; but the tiger was huge. If it had stood upright like a man, it would have been as tall as a man, but much, much more massive.

Then there was its beauty: the strong, fantastic markings, the wide, delicate, wild face, the luminous green-gold eyes. Round its neck it wore a collar of strong gold, studded with the fabulous emeralds, and their colour might have been just that instant created by God to complement the fawns and golds and browns of its coat: they glimmered amongst the deep fur as the beast padded back and forth in its cage, twitching the black tip of its striped tail at every turn.

The air was thick with the prickly, caged-animal smell Anne had caught before, which hung about the Prince, and which she had thought was – which might still be – his own smell. The musky smell of the tiger’s body, the rank carnivorous reek of its breath, the power and danger of it: there was death in those paws and those teeth, the knowledge of power in the unwinking eyes. The Prince stood and stared at the tiger reflectively, and the tiger stared back balefully, hating its captivity, hating its captor. Anne could not believe that it would feed from his hand, and said so.

‘But all things have their price,’ the Prince said, and he sounded sad that it should be so. ‘She is my captive, and I feed her. So she must eat at my pleasure and according to my whim. Yet every time I go into the cage, I know that she has never surrendered, and that this time she may rise up and strike me down. I am unarmed, and she has her nails and her teeth. My flesh would rend easily. She knows it, and I know it.’

‘Then why do you do it?’ Anne asked, surprised, and a little disgusted.

He didn’t answer for a long time, continuing to gaze into the tiger’s eyes, almost as if in a dream. ‘I am a prince from a long line of princes. I have ridden to war since I was eight years old. I have killed thousands of men: hundreds with my own hands. I kill them, and then I have their women, and burn their villages, and take their children to be my serfs. Men go in fear of me. Servants bow to my every caprice. I can have whatever I want. I have only to speak the word, and whatever I wish done will be done, whatever I wish to possess will be brought to me.’

He said these things not precisely with pride, but with satisfaction, which made Anne think what a barbarian he was. And then he put out his hand and moved it through the air, as though he were caressing the tiger’s head; a small movement, repeated over and over.

‘But her I can never possess. Yes, I know what you will say – that I do possess her, that I have her in a cage from which she can never escape; from which she will never escape until her dying day. And yet she is not mine. That part inside her, which animals have instead of a soul, is hers, and does not yield to me. And every day I go into her cage and feed her from my hand with the knowledge that this time she may kill me. She is free inside herself, and proud, and unconquerable. That is why I love her and respect her as I have never done any human being.’

Anne stared at him, appalled. ‘If you love and respect her, why don’t you let her go? For pity’s sake–’

‘Pity? There is no pity in her – she does not wish pity from me. No, she will never be allowed to go free. If she kills me, I have left orders that she is to be destroyed instantly. If I die naturally, or in battle, the same will be the case. She will die in that cage. But that is the price, and all things have a price. If she were not caged, where would be the merit in her pride? Anything that walks free can be proud; and anything that is caged can submit.’

Anne clenched her fists in frustration at his twisted reasoning. ‘But it’s monstrous! How can you talk of merit? Such a test can mean nothing to her. She didn’t ask to be captured.’

He merely shrugged. ‘Did we ask to be born?’ He made the caressing movement again, and the tiger lifted her lips a little over her teeth. ‘We are all captives. She is mine, but I am hers – I cannot let her go, and it breaks my heart.’

Then abruptly his mood seemed to change. His expression hardened, and he took Anne’s arm and turned her towards the door. ‘You must go. I wish to be alone with her. Go through the door, and the servant will conduct you to your friends.’

Anne left, deeply distressed, and yet not knowing precisely why, or for whom. Even as the servant conducted her back to the others, she wondered whether this might be the day when the tiger finally struck back. Perhaps the Prince would never emerge from that room again. It was monstrous that he should have left orders for the tiger to be killed on his death – poor, pitiful caged thing. It would serve him right if he were killed. But of course she must hope he wouldn’t be, or where were their chances of finding Natasha? When she rejoined the others, they looked at her pallor and evident distress, and clustered round her, demanding to know what that devil had done to her.

But ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said. She could not explain to them; she could hardly have explained to herself. ‘I didn’t like to see the poor creature in a cage, that’s all.’

She returned from her memories of the tiger to the present. It was necessary to get up, and find where she was, and where the others were. At the feast, the rest of the Kiriakov party had been like distant figures in a fever dream, moving on the edge of vision, eating, drinking, watching the dancing just as she was, and yet as separate from her as if they were in another universe – parallel perhaps, but not touching. She had no memory of how the evening had ended, or indeed of how she had finally got to bed. At what point had she parted from the Prince, from the rest of the company? And where, indeed, were they?

There had been a woman at some stage, helping her to undress – an old woman in a black robe, who smelt; presumably a servant told to take care of her. Perhaps if she shouted, someone would come. Anne sat up, and a pain which had been lying loose in her head jolted into place and made her close her eyes in momentary agony. Too much wine, and too little air, she thought. She ran her tongue across her teeth, and it was hard to tell which was the more furry.

She groaned; and almost immediately the old woman appeared beside her bed, said something incomprehensible, bared her gums and cackled. The shrill sound hurt her head, and Anne groaned again, and the old woman nodded and touched her own forehead and said something in which the word ‘kumiss’ was distinguishable.

‘I’m sure you find it very amusing,’ Anne said distantly, ‘but I must get up.’

The old woman bustled away, disappearing behind a coarse, striped blanket hung on the wall, which Anne realised now must conceal the doorway. She pushed back the bedclothes and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her pulse seemed to be beating in different rhythms all over her body, a most unpleasant sensation. Now the old woman reappeared carrying a jug in one hand, and a cup in the other. She put down the jug and preferred the cup, and Anne took it suspiciously, but it proved to contain only strong, hot coffee, which she sipped gratefully.

The old woman nodded, and took the jug over to a chest in the corner, where she set it down beside a large earthenware bowl. Then she began moving about the room, tidying things, talking all the while, though her dialect was so strange and her accent so strong, Anne could understand only the occasional word of what she said. The coffee finished, Anne got up and washed herself, drying herself on the cloth the old woman held out. The sanitary arrangements, as she had anticipated, were of the most primitive sort, and to her distress, she found that the old woman expected to remain present while she used them. Through sheer vehemence, Anne managed to make herself understood, but had to resort to stamping her foot and making threatening gestures before her attendant would even go to the other end of the room and turn her back. She evidently found Anne’s modesty highly diverting, and stood with hands on hips, cackling and shaking her head in amused disbelief, looking back over her shoulder from time to time for the sole purpose, it seemed, of refuelling her mirth.

When it came to dressing, Anne refused assistance with a firm gesture which produced only a resigned shrug, though the old woman insisted on handing her each garment, running her fingers appreciatively over the fabric and making what were evidently admiring comments. The clothes smelled of smoke and food, and it was disagreeable putting them on for the third day running. The realisation that it was the third day dispelled the last of the night’s confusion and restored a sobered sense of reality: so much time had been wasted already in the search for Natasha. Anne brushed her hair quickly and twisted it up behind as neatly as possible, and then turned to the old woman.

‘I must go to my friends at once. Will you take me to them?’ she said clearly. The old woman grinned again and nodded, evidently not understanding. Anne pointed to the door, to the old woman, and to herself, and this seemed to work. The old woman beckoned with a bony finger, and led the way out of the room, chattering all the time, but in an undertone, as if to herself. Anne followed her through a labyrinth of stone corridors, until she stopped at a doorway and stepped aside, gesturing Anne to go through. Anne did so, and found herself in the banqueting hall of the previous night. It was quite empty; and when she turned to ask the old woman where her friends were, she found she had gone.

There followed a long and anxious wait. She expected someone to come from moment to moment, and moment by moment her anxieties grew. Did anyone know she was here? She imagined the others assembled in some other place, waiting for her as she was waiting for them, the precious hours ticking away uselessly. She possessed no watch, and in this shadowy place with the small, high windows, there was no way to judge the time of day. The thickness of the walls prevented any sound from penetrating: it was so quiet, she might have been alone in the world.

She had time to worry about everything: her safety, that of the others – was she a prisoner? would they be allowed to leave? The horses – would Quassy be returned to her? About Natasha, in self-defence, she would not think. Hope would be too painful until there were cause; despair too easy, too debilitating. The headache she had woken with had not gone away, and she was very thirsty too: the cup of coffee the old woman had given her had gone nowhere towards slaking the throbbing desert inside her.

And then at last, after she had despaired several times of ever being rescued, there was a sound of footsteps, and voices which quickly resolved themselves into familiarity. The men, led by Sergei, came into the room by the far door, and she turned to greet them with enormous relief.

Sergei ran to her and took her hands.

‘Anna! Are you all right? I was so afraid we wouldn’t see you again! We’ve been waiting for ages in a sort of ante-room, and no one came, and we didn’t know where they’d taken you.’

The others crowded round, and there was a moment of confused explanation and useless questioning. In the midst of it, Anne felt a chill sensation which made the hair rise on the back of her neck, and turning abruptly, she saw that the Prince had come in by the door at the back of the dais, and was standing watching them with a smile of dark amusement. Following the direction of her eyes, the others fell silent. The Prince advanced a few steps, and his eyes gathered their attention.

‘Good morning, my guests. I trust you slept well,’ he said neutrally.

Feodor spoke for them. ‘Sir, we are grateful for your hospitality, but the day is already far advanced, and we have been waiting since sunrise for the news you promised us.’

The Prince’s brows drew together a little. ‘You are impatient,’ he said.

Sergei growled, but Feodor restrained him with a glance, and managed to say calmly, ‘Understandably so, I hope, sir. It is a matter of the gravest importance to us. Have you news for us? We should be grateful to hear it without delay.’

The Prince was silent a moment, almost as if he were debating whether to answer or not. Anne watched him with doubt and apprehension. In the gathering strangeness of last evening, she had become used enough to him to accept him almost as normal; now in the light of a new day, he seemed more darkly alien than ever – incalculable and unapproachable.

‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I have news for you.’

Feodor looked at him with mingled hope and apprehension. ‘You know where she is?’

‘I know where she is,’ the Prince said indifferently. ‘At least,’ he corrected himself, ‘I know where she was two days ago. It is a place called Kourayashour, about forty versts from here to the south-east, high in the mountains.’

Anne thought briefly of Irma’s ‘vision’ – a high place, she had said, and cold. The Prince went on.

‘My people made enquiries, as I promised, and one of them found a tribesman who had heard of the child being in that place. He knows it well – he trades with the people of that region. He agrees to take you there. He waits outside.’

The inflection of his voice plainly indicated that he had finished, that this was all the information he wished, or was able, to give them; but the Kiriakovs looked at each other a little helplessly, unable to absorb the implications so rapidly.

‘But has he seen her? Is she safe? What sort of a place is it?’ Feodor asked.

‘It is a village of the Chechen people,’ the Prince answered a little impatiently, as if that question alone were worth answering.

‘But how did she get there? Have they captured her? Is she their prisoner?’ Feodor persisted.

The Prince made a small, brushing-away gesture with his hand. ‘I have kept my part of the bargain, and more,’ he said. ‘I promised you information – I provide you also with a guide. I can tell you nothing more.’

‘But–’

‘Consider this – that nothing moves in my village or in the mountains around it without my permission. If she is in Kourayashour, it must be by the will of the chief man of those people. Now go – you waste time.’ He began to turn away, clearly indicating that he had finished with them.

Feodor bowed. ‘We are truly grateful for what you have done, Akim Shan Kalmuck. The Kiriakovs of Chastnaya are in your debt. We will go now with all speed. I hope to God the child is still alive.’

The Prince paused at those words, his teeth bared in what was not quite a smile. ‘I think you do not perfectly understand. The people of Kourayashour are Chechen. I myself am a Christian, and a most civilised man, as you have seen. But the Chechen belong to the Prophet, whose name be honoured! Such people have no respect for women. The women of their own faith they regard merely as – useful. But other women, women not of the Faith–’ He shrugged, and it was an unlovely thing to see. His eye was quite expressionless, and Anne felt a cold chill settle in her stomach. ‘You hope that she is alive,’ he concluded, ‘but if the Chechen have her, you had far better hope that she died quickly.’

A servant led them through the passages and out into the hot sunshine of the courtyard before the house, where their men and the horses and the guide all awaited them. The guide said that his name was Kizka. He was a short, broad-faced, yellow-skinned man with straight black hair and a drooping black moustache, and he sat astride a strong, thick-coated, mouse-grey mountain pony with the patience of a rock. Feodor and Sergei engaged him in a brief conversation, and then gathered round the others to discuss their plans.

‘Anne must go home,’ Dmitri said at once. ‘That is plain. And you too, Feodor. The estate needs you.’

‘You also,’ Grishka pointed out. ‘You are a married man with children – the risk is too great. This is a mission for unmarried men. Seryosha and I will take the men and go to this place, while you and Feodor escort Anna Petrovna back to Chastnaya.’

Sergei interrupted impatiently. ‘None of you has listened to a word that has been spoken! Don’t you understand how dangerous this is likely to be? If the Chechen have kidnapped Nasha, they will not tamely let her go because her uncles come and ask politely for her! They are fighting men, bandits; they live by war and pillage.’

His bright eye swept over them; his cheeks were flushed with the prospect of action. ‘You, all of you – and the men – are to go back to Chastnaya. I shall go with this Kizka to the village – but not alone, I promise you! First we will go back to Vladikavkaz, and I will use my authority to call out a platoon of the Guards. Armed and trained soldiers will be a match for these tribesmen. I wish to God I could call out the Independents, but there isn’t the time to spare to ride to Grozny and back. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.’

Grishka began to argue, but Sergei cut him short. ‘I have the best right to decide. She is my sister, and I am my father’s representative while he is away. For God’s sake, don’t waste any more time. See that Anna is safe. I will send word as soon as I can.’

Seeing some of them still not convinced, Anne intervened. ‘He’s right – it’s the best way. Go, Seryosha. Don’t worry about us. Do what ever you have to.’

He gave her one burning, grateful look, nodded briefly to the others, and then swung himself into the saddle, and with the tribesman beside him, clattered away towards the path down the hillside.

The others watched him go, aware that however much danger he might be called upon to face, he still had the easier part. For them, there remained only the ride home to Chastnaya, and the wait for news. They watched until the two figures were out of sight and then prepared to take their leave. A serf brought Quassy out for Anne, and the mare whickered eagerly, looking bright-eyed and well rested. Someone had groomed her very thoroughly, even to the extent of crimping her mane into handsome parallel waves.

Anne felt a sudden surge of gratitude and warmth towards the Prince, who had been kind to them, entertained them, helped them, without any need to do so. He might so easily have behaved otherwise – at best, merely refused to listen to them, at worst had them put to death, without anyone being the wiser. As she settled herself in the saddle for the long ride back to Chastnaya, she looked towards the house, wondering whether he were watching, wishing there were some way for her to show him her gratitude. Her feelings about him were very confused: in her mind he was ineradicably tangled with the image of the tiger – a barely contained savagery, with only the appearance of being civilised.

Now that he had something to do at last, some proper action to perform, Sergei was full of restless energy. Every delay frustrated him, and no one and nothing could possibly have moved quickly enough to satisfy his desire to get on.

On the way down to Vladikavkaz he questioned Kizka closely, and came up against the maddening propensity, of which he had heard, of tribesmen lying to Russians, even when the truth would serve them better. ‘To lie like a tribesman’ was a common adage amongst the Independents; and it was not an indication of general untruthfulness – to each other, he believed, they were as true as any people – but rather an unwillingness to give anything away to the hated invaders. When the Russian masters asked a question, they were requesting a commodity which they did not propose to pay for; it was the natural, the obvious thing to do, to deny them what they wanted.

Kizka, he discovered, was a half-bred Nogay, and something of an outsider, belonging to no clan, making his living by trading amongst the tribesmen of the hills, who tolerated him because of his usefulness. He spoke in a strange patois which was a mingling of many different dialects; and though he said a great deal in answer to Sergei’s many questions, what exactly he knew about Natasha remained maddeningly vague.

Through a mass of evasions and contradictions, Sergei elicited the information that Kizka had been at Kourayashour some days ago – Sergei could not determine exactly when, and gained the impression that Kizka’s notions of time were no more definite than they needed to be. A mountain peddler, wandering his own way and answerable to no one, would probably count time in generous measure, by the month and the season, rather than the hour and the day.

However, at Kourayashour he had been, and there had heard talk of the golden-haired child who had come to the village with an armed party returning from a raiding expedition on the Valley of the Horses. Sergei puzzled a little over this, for though he questioned Kizka closely, he could not get him to define ‘with’ any more precisely. Was it in the company of, or as a prisoner of the raiding party? Kizka only nodded. With the raiding party, he reaffirmed unhelpfully.

Had Kizka seen the golden-haired child himself?

‘No – only heard speak of her. She had already gone to the Holy Place, high up in the sky.’

Those words chilled Sergei’s blood, for he took them to mean that Natasha was dead; but as he pressed Kizka further, there seemed some doubt about it. The Holy Place – was it of this earth? Both of this earth, Kizka said wisely, and not of it – as all Holy Places were. He had never been there himself, but he understood it to be a place of great power, where the sky was very thin.

A dangerous place, then?

Assuredly a dangerous place. Kizka suggested all Holy Places were dangerous; and then affirmed that there could be nowhere safer for one of the Faithful, than in the shadow of the Prophet’s beard.

Sergei struggled with the notion. Was the child still there, then?

Kizka shrugged and would not commit himself further.

The Governor of Vladikavkaz made no difficulties about Sergei’s request. Though he outranked Sergei himself, he knew that the Count Kirov was a senior member of the Diplomatic Service, and a prominent courtier, a favourite of the Emperor, and at present fulfilling a mission for which he had been personally chosen by the Little Father himself. That the Count’s daughter should have been kidnapped and was at present in Chechen hands was a horrible thing to contemplate, but not nearly so horrible as the thought of what would happen to the Governor’s career, if it ever emerged that he had done less than his utmost to help the Count’s son to recover her.

Within two hours of Sergei’s arrival in Vladikavkaz, he was on his way again, this time accompanied by a troop of regular Cossacks under their own lieutenant, with instructions to accept Sergei’s orders without question. The two hours had been twice too long for Sergei, but he was aware that he was lucky not to have been delayed longer, for the Governor thought it would be much more sensible for him to dine and stay the night at his house, and set off on the morrow for what was – his eye plainly said, though he didn’t speak the words – after all, a hopeless mission.

Feeling much happier with a disciplined force of armed men at his back, Sergei rode beside his guide up the road into the mountains. Kizka eyed the Cossacks a little nervously, aware that most of them hated the tribesmen of the Caucasus as a traveller hates bedbugs, and would relish the opportunity to reduce their number even by one.

‘They are under my command,’ Sergei told him sharply. ‘Do your job, and no harm will come to you. My word on it.’

Kizka only looked unhappy, evidently doubting the word of a Russian as sincerely as he would have expected a Russian to doubt his.

Their route led at first along the Georgian Military Highway, and the travelling was fast on the well-maintained surface. The road climbed rapidly, and soon they were far above the green of the valleys, in a land of strange and awesome peaks, spires and minarets reaching up into the clouds, like the skyline of a roughly hewn, gigantic city. The unmistakable triangle of Mount Kazbek was on their right, and the Mountain of the Cross on their left, as the road climbed dizzily between the great peaks. Despite the bright sunshine, the air struck cool and thin so high up; and still the road climbed, up towards the Kayshaour Pass, after which it fell away again down the other side of the Caucasus backbone, into the green land of Georgia far below, and the plains which ran down to the shores of the Black Sea.

Before they reached the pass, however, Kizka halted, and pointed away up the mountain slope to his left.

‘Our way lies there,’ he said.

Sergei looked. ‘I see no road,’ he said sternly, wondering if his guide were about to lead them astray, the more easily to abandon them in a wild and rocky place. ‘Do you expect us to scramble over the rocks like mountain goats?’

Kizka looked pityingly. ‘There is the path – don’t you see? I will show you – follow me, but keep close. It is rough in places.’

Kizka’s little tough pony made nothing of the scramble up the almost sheer mountain side, and the Cossacks drove their mounts upwards with a will, but poor Nabat was a cavalry horse, and resented the supposition that he had somehow of late grown wings. His iron-shod hooves slipped, and he scrabbled for footholds, sweating with anxiety, his ears laid back in protest. Had it not been for the round, mousey rump ahead of him, and Sergei’s spurs digging suggestively into his flanks, he would have refused altogether; but after the first precipitous climb, something resembling a path appeared, a narrow way winding with the shape of the mountain, but evidently well worn.

When at last the path stopped climbing and widened out, Kizka stopped and slipped down from the saddle.

‘We rest the horses here for a while,’ he said.

Anxious though he was to get on, Sergei saw the sense of it, jumped down, and loosened Nabat’s girth. The gelding sighed and stretched his neck gratefully, and dragged in the thin mountain air through stretched nostrils. Sergei looked around. They were almost at the top of the world. There were still peaks higher, but they were wreathed in cloud and invisible. The lower edges of the cloud blurred into mist, drifting with the light breeze, and occasional wisps of it brushed his skin with a damp chill. The Caucasus ran in a long ridge north-west to south-east, dividing Daghestan from Georgia, the Caspian plain from the Black Sea plain. From this vantage point, Sergei thought, on a clear day it ought almost to be possible to see both shores. Above them there was nothing but the blue sky, through which the sunshine fell clear and clean; stepping to a rock over the drop, Sergei looked down and saw a colony of jackdaws far below him, and the spread-fingered shape of an eagle, drifting out over the valleys on the warm air.

The horses had gained their breath, and were now nosing about in search of something to nibble, so Sergei nodded to Kizka, and ordered the remount. They rode on, climbing at first, and then beginning to descend. Time had worn the sharpness from this part of the mountain ridge, breaking it into small, subsidiary peaks. The track was clearly marked now, and here and there Sergei saw traces of previous travellers, horse dung at least several days old, and other tracks branching off downhill. Automatically he reached round to make sure his sword was loose in the sheath. A frequented path suggested lookouts, guards, danger.

Suddenly Kizka stopped. ‘I go no further,’ he announced firmly.

Sergei frowned at him. ‘What are you talking about? You are to take us to Kourayashour.’

Kizka nodded ahead. ‘This path goes nowhere else. Follow it, and you will come to the place, without fail.’

‘You will come with us,’ Sergei said, laying a threatening hand on his sword-hilt. Kizka’s eyes followed the movement, and then flickered nervously about the horizon.

‘I dare not,’ he said. He dropped his reins and spread both hands in an unexpected gesture of appeal. ‘Understand, master, I do business with these people. If they know I bring you here, next time they will kill me. For Akim Shan Kalmuck I bring you this far, because I am obliged to, but I must not be seen. It must not be known I am your guide.’ He looked around again, his eyes showing white. ‘Already perhaps I have come too far. I must go now, quickly.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the kind,’ Sergei said, reaching out. ‘You’ll take us to the village as agreed.’

But Kizka was too quick for him. He turned his pony with a jab of the heel, picking up the reins as he did so, and drove it straight down the mountainside in a scurry of dislodged stones. ‘Follow the path,’ he called over his shoulder.

Sergei gave a curse, and looking down, saw the tribesman reach a path lower down, turn on to it, and kick his pony into a trot.

‘Shall I go after him, sir?’ the Cossack officer asked.

‘No – you’d never catch him. And what’s the use? He’d only slip away again.’

‘Do you think it’s a trap, sir? Maybe he was leading us into an ambush.’

Sergei had already considered the likelihood. ‘Anything is possible. Tell your men to be on the alert. But unless they take us by surprise, we ought to be a match for any undisciplined tribesmen, even in their own country.’

He felt they were drawing near. The signs of frequentation were everywhere, dung both old and fresh, the scars of horseshoes on exposed rock, the print of bare hooves on the turf where the path crossed a stream. They had been going gradually downhill, and there was more greenery around them, moss and bushes and even the occasional stunted tree. More cover, too, and all the men were nervous and alert now, riding in absolute silence, hands ready on their rifles, eyes flicking back and forth for any sign of an ambush.

The path rounded a big, smooth outcrop of rock, and suddenly they were there. The path widened, crossed a stream, and opened out into a flat area on which had been built a corral for horses. Beyond that was the village itself, a jumble of izby of various sizes, built of wood, interspersed with huts made of daub and roofed with turf. Behind the village rose a cliff, on top of which they could see the silhouettes of armed lookouts. Between them and the corral was a party of mounted tribesmen, a few with rifles, others with arrows ready nocked on their short, lethal bows.

Sergei called the halt. He was not surprised to see the armed party, only surprised that they had not been challenged before, and his eye rapidly summed up their number and strength. The arrows and the guns were not pointing directly at them; that, and the fact that they had been allowed to come thus far without attack, suggested an unexpected willingness to parley.

He turned to the lieutenant. ‘Don’t let anyone make a hostile movement until I give the command. It looks as though they don’t want a fight – God knows why – and I should like to get out of this without bloodshed if we can.’

‘Yes, sir. You’re going to parley with them, sir?’

‘Yes. Cover me. If they kill me, wipe them out.’

‘Be careful, sir. They’re Chechen,’ the lieutenant said anxiously.

Sergei looked at his men, barely held back, like fighting dogs on a leash, and gave a grim little smile.

‘And those are Cossacks,’ he said.

His eye swept the waiting group of tribesmen, and picked out the man near the centre whose eye sought his. He wore a striped robe, which was edged with scarlet – usually among the Tcherkess a colour reserved for princes. There was a short hatchet as well as a long knife and a powder-horn hanging from his broad leather belt, and he carried a spear instead of a gun. His pointed cap was of leather dyed deep blue, and edged with a ring of fine, black fur – some kind of fox, Sergei thought – which seemed to ripple as the breeze stirred the long hairs. He looked young, not much older than Sergei himself, though it was hard to tell with the Tcherkess; he was dark haired and dark-skinned, with high cheekbones, and he sat very still on his pony, and very straight, head up. A young man, in the pride of his strength: evidently the war leader rather than the village elder, perhaps the chief of the clan, or the chief’s son. It might make him easier to deal with, Sergei thought.

Slowly moving his hands so that they were in full view, he pressed his heels gently to Nabat’s flanks, and walked forward, clear of his men. The Chechen leader let him advance five steps before he lifted his hand and held it up, palm forward, in a halting gesture. At the same moment the point of the arrow of the man next to him lifted almost lazily to the horizontal, so that it was pointing directly at Sergei’s breast.

‘Stop,’ said the leader.

Sergei stopped.

Chapter Nineteen

There was a long, tense moment of silence. Sergei, stranded out in the open between the two armies, was aware of how perilous the situation was. The men on both sides were poised on a knife edge, and if any one allowed his excitement to overcome him, indiscriminate firing would break out, and he would be caught in it.

He sat very still, never allowing his eye to waver from that of the man with the spear. The sun was behind him; the tribesman frowned a little against it. The light breeze ruffled the fur of his cap, and lifted the fine ends of Nabat’s mane. There was a sound somewhere of a crow yarking, and more distantly the chack of jackdaws, and below that the singing upland silence; the mountain air was cool and utterly without smell. Sergei waited. The tribesmen had already showed that they did not want to fight, which put him in the stronger position. Let their leader make the first move.

He did so at last by kicking his pony forward, advancing a few paces clear of the group and halting again. He held his spear like a badge of office rather than a weapon. Sergei sensed uncertainty in him, and his heart rose a little. If they had killed Natasha, or sold her south, they would surely expect retribution, and anticipate it by attacking. A desire to parley suggested a desire to trade, which in turn suggested that she was still alive.

The leader spoke at last. ‘Turn around and go back,’ he said in the strong, harsh accents of Chechniya. The dialect was similar to that which Sergei heard most often around Grozny, and he thanked God for it. If there were to be negotiation, it was important that they understood each other.

‘I come seeking the village of Kourayashour,’ Sergei said, ‘and the chief man of that village.’

‘I speak for Kourayashour,’ said the tribesman. ‘You have come to our village with armed men, but we will let you go in peace, provided you turn round and go now. Otherwise…’ He shrugged, and let the threat suggest itself.

Sergei ignored it. ‘I am Sergei Nikolayevitch Kirov, and I seek the chief man of Kourayashour. If you are he, name yourself. Otherwise, let him come forward.’

The tribesman lifted his head a little, stung by the tone. ‘I am Tatvar Khoi Zaktal, and I speak for my people. Why do you come here with armed men? We are men of peace. Go now, that there may be no bloodshed.’

Sergei smiled a little. ‘I have never heard that the Chechen people dislike the shedding of blood. Yet we do not come here for blood, but to take back what has been stolen. Restore it to us, and we will go in peace.’

Zaktal did not flinch. ‘We have nothing that is yours,’ he said. ‘What is it that you seek?’

‘You know what I seek,’ Sergei said, his voice rising angrily. ‘Bring forward the golden-haired child, restore her to me unharmed, and I will spare you and your village. Bring her to me now!’

There was a slight stir amongst the tribesmen, hardly more than the ripple of a light breeze through a barley field, but it filled Sergei with triumph. It was the right place, then! Kizka had not lied. He had brought them to the right place.

‘I know nothing of any golden-haired child,’ Zaktal declared, looking past Sergei aloofly. ‘The children of my people belong to the Prophet, whose name be honoured, and they are dark-haired, as all of the Faith should be.’

‘The child was here,’ Sergei said, ignoring the jibe at his own fair colouring. ‘Many have spoken of her. It is known all over the Caucasus that she was here.’

‘Nevertheless, I do not know it,’ Zaktal said.

Sergei was a little puzzled: it was not the best way to begin negotiations, by denying that you had the goods. His eyes flickered over the other tribesmen, trying to determine the purpose of the lie; and then he caught sight of something in the corral beyond them which made him stiffen. His blood coursed angrily through his veins, but he spoke with icy calm.

‘It surprises me that you do not know. I would have thought one who spoke for his people would know everything that happens in his village. Perhaps there is someone else who knows more than Zaktal? If so, let me speak to him about the child.’

Zaktal was young enough, at all events, to be proud. His eyes narrowed and brightened, and there was another stirring amongst the field of arrows, mirrored by a stirring amongst the Cossacks behind Sergei. But before he could speak, Sergei went on.

‘You say you know nothing about the child: yet the horse she rode is there in your corral, amongst your mountain ponies. How do you explain that?’

The Cossacks broke into a muted cheer, and Nabat waltzed restlessly sideways. Sergei checked him, and anxious that nothing should precipitate firing, raised his hand to quiet his men. The silence fell again, and Zaktal subjected Sergei to a long, thoughtful examination. Finally he said.

‘By what right do you demand to know about the child?’

‘I am her brother,’ Sergei said simply.

The arrow that was pointing at him was lowered a little.

After a moment, Zaktal spoke. ‘You and I will go apart from the rest,’ he said, ‘and I will speak with you.’

Zaktal wanted Sergei to leave his arms and his men behind and go into the village with him, but Sergei would not trust him quite as far as that. Eventually both men dismounted and walked to a little distance where they could not be overheard, but could be seen clearly by both sides. Zaktal seemed ill at ease, almost embarrassed, and Sergei wavered between hope and dread. This was not the behaviour of a man with a hostage to sell. He could not make sense of it.

When Zaktal finally began to speak, the story was long and rambling, and Sergei picked his way through it with difficulty. It seemed that the news of the Chastnaya horse fair had, as expected, fired some of the outlying tribes with the idea of using the occasion, with all its comings and goings, as a cover for a little horse stealing. Zaktal did not admit this in so many words, but it was obvious that the ‘war party’ he spoke of, which had happened to be passing along the ridge of the Valley of the Horses that day, was not there by accident, or for any innocent purpose.

‘Yes, I saw you,’ Sergei said, trying to cut through the evasions. ‘I was riding along the other side of the valley, and I saw your men against the skyline. You were a long way out of your usual runs, surely?’

Zaktal shrugged. ‘We are horsemen, travelling people. We go where necessity takes us.’

Sergei brushed that aside. ‘No matter what you were doing there. Speak of the child.’

Zaktal looked embarrassed. ‘We saw her – alone, unguarded. The children of the dvoriane do not customarily ride alone.’

‘So you decided to kidnap her – seize here – hold her to ransom,’ Sergei said, hoping to quicken the tale. ‘I beg you will tell me the truth. If she is unharmed, I will not exact revenge. I wish only for her return.’

Zaktal eyed him consideringly, and then said, ‘So, I will tell you plainly. My brother saw her first, and thought to seize her, as you say. But I saw you on the other side of the valley, and so I counselled caution. Let us follow, I said, and see what comes.’

And seize her when it was safe to do so, Sergei thought angrily, but he held his tongue.

‘We followed at a distance. The golden-haired one went on as though she were following a line drawn along the earth – she never hesitated, nor looked to left or right. Assuredly, she knew where she was going. When we had gone some way from the Valley of the Horses, we drew closer, and my brother said, Now is the time.’ He looked sideways at Sergei, noting the tension in every line of his body. ‘I tell you frankly, hiding nothing,’ he said defensively. ‘Soon you will see why.’

‘Very well,’ Sergei said grimly, ‘but be quick, for my men are restless.’

The eyes slid away, and rested on the middle distance. A little frown puckered Zaktal’s brows as he remembered. ‘We rode up close, and the golden one heard us coming and stopped, and turned to face us. She had no fear, truly, though she was so young, and we were many, and armed. She waited for us to approach; and when we were a few horse’s lengths away, I held up my hand and stopped my men. For I saw–’ He hesitated. ‘I saw she was not for us.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sergei said impatiently.

Zaktal’s frown deepened. ‘I saw at once that she was in the hand of some god, and that it would be ill-luck to touch her,’ he said. ‘There was a shining about her. We all saw it. She did not speak to us, and when she saw that we would not come near, she turned her horse and went on. We followed, and she rode before us all the way to Kourayashour.’

Barbarian lies, Sergei thought angrily: they had seized her and brought her here, and now he was spinning this web to deceive, and to excuse himself. Yet something deep in him was uneasy. It was not the usual sort of lie; and Zaktal did not look like a tribesman lying. He looked disturbed, anxious, even afraid -but not of Sergei.

‘So she is here, then? She is in this village?’ Sergei demanded, going to the heart of it.

But Zaktal shook his head. ‘No, she went on. She would not stay here.’

Sergei took a step nearer, in spite of the watching, hostile eyes. ‘What are you talking about? My sister came to this village you have admitted it. Where is she now? What have you done with her?’

Zaktal did not step back, or flinch. Instead he met Sergei’s eyes directly, and looked back at him steadily, something so unusual amongst the Tcherkess when talking to Russians that Sergei felt a flicker of panic.

‘Listen,’ Zaktal said quietly, ‘and I will tell you all. When the golden-haired one reached this place, she would have ridden on at once. But I called out to her, for her horse was lame, and she had not noticed it. So she stopped. The men of the village came out to meet us, but when they saw her, they drew back – they also, for they could see what she was. I asked her to come into our village and take refreshment, for in spite of all, her body was only that of a child. My brothers and the other men of the council were against it, wanting nothing to do with her, but still I asked. But she would not go with me. She asked that the horse be looked after, and went on, on foot, alone.’

‘Went on?’ Sergei asked desperately. ‘Went on where?’

‘Up the mountain,’ Zaktal said simply.

Sergei remembered that Kizka had said the same thing. ‘You mean she left her horse here and walked on alone? And did no one follow her?’

The tribesman looked pitying. ‘She was going to the Holy Place. None of us would go there, unless we were called. It is a place of great power.’

‘And where is she now?’

He shrugged. ‘She did not come back. She is still there or – or she has gone beyond.’

Sergei struggled to make sense of it. They had captured Nasha and brought her to the village, he thought, but for some reason she was no longer there. They had sold her, perhaps, or killed her and disposed of the body. Or they were holding her captive in some safer, more remote place. But why, in any of those cases, had they allowed Sergei to bring his men up here? Why hadn’t they ambushed them, or picked them off on the way up the mountain, or even attacked at first sight? Was it just the superiority of numbers on Sergei’s side? But to do them justice, the Chechen had never been cowards.

And this story that Zaktal was spinning: he didn’t understand it. He told it with simplicity, with conviction – so much so that the dark, atavistic part of Sergei’s mind wanted to believe it. But this was Natasha he was talking about, his little sister, a warm-blooded, mischievous seven-year-old, an ordinary little girl.

Still, it seemed that there was only one thing to do, only one way to find out more: he must go along with it.

‘Take me there,’ he said.

Zaktal’s eyes widened a little. ‘Take you to the Holy Place?’

‘Yes, so that I may see for myself, and bring back my sister, if she is still there.’

‘I cannot. I cannot go to that place.’

‘Why not? Is it so far away? Where is it?’

Zaktal pointed upwards. ‘Up the mountain. A cave, near the peak. I have never been there, but there is a path. Sometimes people go there, when they are called, but they do not come back. The child – your sister – went. It is the truth I tell you,’ he added a little angrily, seeing the scepticism.

Sergei’s eyes narrowed. ‘You will come with me and show me. Either that, or I will tell my men to open fire. We will kill every man in the village, and burn it to the ground. Take me to my sister, or I will give the order.’

There was a long silence. Zaktal stared at him, his mind evidently weighing the alternatives. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘I will take you. But it must be you alone, and you must go unarmed. I will show you where it is, but I will not go in with you, for that would be a blasphemy. And when you have seen for yourself, you will go away, with your men, and not return.’ Now Sergei considered. If there were another fortress higher up, a more secure one, where they were holding Natasha, all that would happen was that he would either be killed by the guards, or taken prisoner too. But what could he do? It was either that, or attack, and if he attacked, they would fight to the death, and he might never find out where she was. He felt he would have to go with the current, and trust that a course of action would become apparent.

‘I agree,’ he said at last, watching Zaktal closely for the tell-tale gleam of triumph in the eyes.

But Zaktal only nodded, seeming almost indifferent, as if he had made up his mind to perform some distasteful task, and wanted simply to have done with it. Sergei had the oddest feeling that he had not submitted to a threat, but decided to co-operate for entirely different, personal reasons.

‘You had better tell your people, then,’ he said. They walked back, and parted, each to his own side. Sergei explained to the lieutenant what he had agreed, and the lieutenant looked at him as though he were mad.

‘Sir, they’ll surprise you as soon as you are beyond our help, and kill you, for sure! Don’t go, sir. It’s madness!’

Sergei looked at him steadily. ‘I don’t believe this crack-brained tale any more than you do, but I don’t see what else I can do. You will wait here with the men. If I don’t return, you must use your own judgement about what to do next. The thing is, the guide, Kizka, spoke about a holy place too,’ Sergei added musingly. ‘There may be some grain of truth in it.’

The lieutenant raised a brow. ‘Oh, but there is a holy place up there, sir. It’s famous amongst the tribesmen. The Lesghians call it the Cave in the Sky: it’s sacred to them, though it’s actually just in Chechen country. They say the sky is so thin there, you can step through into Heaven.’ He laughed, uneasily, seeing Sergei’s look. ‘A lot of nonsense, of course, sir, but the Tcherkess believe it all right.’

Sergei heard him with a sense of shock. He looked around, and everything seemed suddenly sharply etched, the colours bright and clean, as though he were seeing this place for the first time – or was it the last? Even the distances were clear, every detail outlined, small but distinct, as if seen through a perspective-glass.

‘Wait for me here,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t provoke anything unless you’re sure I’m lost.’

Zaktal was waiting for him at a little distance, patient, resigned.

‘I’m ready,’ Sergei said.

It was a stiff climb, and Sergei’s riding boots were not made for the exercise. Zaktal went on upwards lightly, only pausing from time to time to take his bearings. It was true there was a path, of sorts, but it petered out here and there, where there had been an earthslip, or there was a rock too big and hard to move. It did not seem to have been much used, and that reassured Sergei. No armed party could inhabit the higher place, and be supplied with their needs, without leaving a well-worn track behind them; if there were to be an ambush, it would be by one or two men only, and against a few he might give a good account of himself.

It was getting harder to breathe. Though the air was no more than pleasantly cool in the sunshine, there was a scattering of snow here and there, and he imagined it would be very cold at night. They were climbing towards the cloud, but Sergei, his eyes on his footholds, didn’t notice until he suddenly stepped into it, and it closed down around him, chill and grey, shutting out the sun, and cutting off the warmth of the day.

Zaktal climbed on steadily, without slowing. Now there was only one way to go, and the path ran deep like a furrow between knee-high rocks, as though it had been worn away by thousands of years of devout footsteps. An old water course, perhaps, Sergei thought. The rock was smooth under his feet, and glistening damp from the mist. His foot slipped a little; he put out a hand to save himself, and a big, irridescent green-gold beetle scurried away almost from under his fingers.

They came out at last on to level ground, and now Zaktal stopped.

‘I go no further,’ he said. ‘The cave is straight ahead – you will not miss it. I wait here for you.’

The milky mist was all around them, opaque, shutting out everything further than a few feet away.

‘You come with me,’ Sergei said firmly.

‘No, I cannot.’

Sergei drew out from inside his jacket the knife he had not given up with the rest of his arms. ‘We live together or die together,’ he said. He seized and twisted Zaktal’s arm round behind him, and put the point of the knife to his neck, pricking the skin over the great vein lightly. ‘Go on, now, if you wish to live. Take me to the place.’

Zaktal wriggled lightly, to test the strength of the grip, and then relaxed. He bowed his head a moment, and then sighed.

‘Very well. But go quietly, and be careful what you say. It does not do to anger the spirits of such a place.’

They walked forward, and the mouth of the cave appeared suddenly out of the mist like the yawn of a monster. It was huge, as tall as a cathedral. Sergei had imagined some little, man-sized cave, and saw easily how the ignorant mountain people might be afraid of it, and weave some magical story about it. But it was only, he told himself, a natural phenomenon, nothing to be afraid of.

Zaktal was hanging more and more heavily on his arm, though it must have hurt him, and Sergei got the odd impression that the man’s body was shrinking back in spite of his mind; that he had resigned himself to going in, but that his body was refusing all on its own.

They stepped into the entrance. Beyond the grey slick of light from the cave-mouth, it was dark, and it smelled cold and utterly unused. No higher garrison this – no armed guard would jump out on him. Why, then, had the man brought him here? To abandon him? Or had Natasha really come here? He shivered.

‘We should have brought a torch,’ he said, and his voice sounded shockingly loud.

Zaktal made a little whimpering sound of protest, and pulled a little, desisting at once with a gasp of pain.

‘Walk,’ Sergei said – but he whispered this time. ‘I don’t wish to hurt you.’

‘Let me go,’ Zaktal muttered. ‘Let me wait outside. This is a bad place.’

‘It’s a cave, like any other,’ Sergei said determinedly. ‘Take me to my sister.’

‘I don’t know where she is.’

But they walked forward into the blackness. Sergei strained his eyes forward, waiting to become accustomed to the dark; sliding his feet cautiously in case of potholes; feeling his way, almost as unwillingly as his companion. He began to feel that it was pointless to go on without a torch. Why hadn’t he thought of it? He thought of going back down to the village for one, and the notion wearied him. What was he doing here? Nasha could not be here. Zaktal was wasting his time, leading him away from the scent.

But now the darkness before him was not so utterly black: there was a greyness of light somewhere ahead. He stopped, thinking he must have wandered round in a circle in the darkness. He looked over his shoulder, and saw the dim light of the cave entrance behind them. He walked forward again, and now, oddly, the sense of position the two sources of light had given him made him more reluctant to move on, made his stepping into the blackness seem even more dangerous than before.

The hair rose on his scalp at the sensation of space all around him, the cold deadness of the air, the fear that there might be something in the dark that could see better than him. No, that was not it. There was no sense of any living creature near them: if there had been – bear or bat or snake or lizard – it would have been in a strange way comforting. What was so terrible was the feeling that there was no life anywhere in the darkness, that no living thing could survive here.

The source of light grew nearer, illuminated a rock wall, massive, impossibly high, reaching up into the fluted vaults of the mountain top. The light came from behind it: the cave turned a corner, that was it. Sergei shuffled towards it, laid his hand on the vertical plane, stepped round it; and there suddenly was the light. He drew in a breath of astonished awe. It was a perfect column of sunlight falling from a gap in the roof of the cave, far, far above: extraordinary, eerie in the blackness, its sides too regular to seem natural. It was like a finger of light pointing down from Heaven.

At some point, without knowing, he had let go of Zaktal’s arm, but Zaktal was beyond running away. He crept at Sergei’s heels, more afraid of being left alone now than Sergei was. Closer to, they could see that it was a natural fissure in the rock which went all the way up to the top of the mountain. The peak must have been clear of the cloud they had climbed up through: high above there was a strip of heavenly blue sky, and the sunlight fell into the cave like liquid gold.

‘Where the sky is so thin,’ Sergei murmured, remembering, ‘that you can step through into Heaven.’ After all, it was nothing but a natural phenomenon, a trick of light and rock and space; but to a receptive mind, it would seem much more, in some way significant. Sergei stared, fascinated; even he felt a reluctance to go closer, as though that strange golden beam might burn him up like paper, or transport him upwards lto another place. It looked unnatural, eerie – dangerous.

The Holy Place! He tried to mock with his mind; but he didn’t want to go on. He wanted to go back, and be safe.

And then Zaktal gave a little gasp and gripped his arm; and he saw Natasha. She was sitting at the edge of the band of light, looking so small in that vastness, less than a child. Her back was to the rock wall, her knees drawn up, and she was staring upwards through the fissure into the blue sky above.

Sergei’s heart leapt. ‘Nasha! Nashka!’ he cried out.

The echo jumped and boomed and reverberated, flicking from rock to rock high up like mocking goblin voices. Zaktal whimpered, and pulled at his arm, trying to hold him back.

‘Come away,’ he begged. ‘Come back. It’s not safe.’

Sergei shook him free. ‘‘It’s my sister.’

‘Don’t touch her! It’s unlucky!’

But Sergei ran forward, heedless of everything but having found Natasha against all hope. He flung himself down, hurting his knees on the rock. ‘Doushenka, it’s me! Thank God I’ve found you!’ He took her by the shoulders; and his words were cut off.

She was cold, as cold as the stones on which she sat. Her knees were drawn up and her arms locked around her knees, locked with a rigidity that defied his fingers. Her head was tilted back, her eyes open and fixed on that patch of blue sky far, far above, and her lips were curved in a smile. But she saw nothing. The first touch told Sergei that his sister was not here. She heard nothing, smiled at nothing, felt nothing.

‘God,’ he said. He drew back from her in horror. He looked around, looking for escape, escape from those blank, staring eyes and that terrible smile. His fists clenched. ‘God. God.’

Zaktal was whispering, retreating. ‘Come away. Leave her. It’s not lucky. Come away.’

‘God!’ cried Sergei. His mind felt close to bursting. There was too much space, inside and outside, pouring through him as though he were hardly there, transparent as air; and that terrible, burning light, and the madness of that small smile, burning his brain. Get out, get out, get out.

Not without Natasha. He forced himself to stoop and pick her up, and she came up all-of-a-piece, light as a starveling bird, stiff and cold with the loathsome cold of death. The madness expanded like an indrawn breath in his mind as he made himself hold on to her, and turned and stumbled away from the light, with the horrified, retreating Zaktal before him; into the darkness, blacker than before, too black, going on for ever, into the eternity of death, going on into the nothing of Hell itself. They would never get out. He held death in his arms, and it was inside him and outside him, filling him with its emptiness.

Then, thank God, there was a little grey light. With a sob of relief he went towards it, dragging his breath as though he had been running. Grey, drab light from the misty cave mouth, dank, chill light, but oh! the light of sanity! He stumbled towards it; and then they were out of the cave mouth, and he felt earth under his feet, and tendrils of cloud on his face. He stopped and turned his face up into it, and gulped at it like a man saved from drowning.

When at last he looked unwillingly down at what he held in his arms, he saw it was only pitiful, a frail little husk of humanity. There was no horror there, only a great overmastering sorrow. Natasha, his sister, was dead. He set her down carefully on the grass, as though she could still feel, and knelt beside her. Her empty eyes were frozen open, and her lips had drawn back a little with the stiffening of death, but there was no glare, no horrible smile. She had died of cold and hunger in that remote cave to which somehow she had been brought, or wandered; small and alone and lost, she had died.

Zaktal stood near. Sergei looked up and met his eyes. ‘I am sorry for your grief,’ the tribesman said with dignity, ‘but it was between her and God. She was called, and she went. We did not harm her. I knew when I saw her that she had been called, and I suffered no one to touch her. This I swear, by all that is holy.’ Sergei tried to speak, but nothing emerged but a shapeless sob.

He brought Natasha’s body home from Vladikavkaz three days later. When the stiffness of death had passed away, the women of the Governor’s house had straightened her limbs and washed her, and made a decent robe for her from one of the Governor’s wife’s nightgowns. A coffin had been hastily fashioned for her, and they laid her in it. Sergei hired a cart, and drove it himself, and the Governor authorised an armed guard to ride with him, to see him safe home to Chastnaya. He offered also to start a message on its way to the Count by official courier, and Sergei accepted the offer bleakly.

Torn with anxiety, the family had waited, hardly daring to think that Natasha would be found alive after all that time. The first sign of that melancholy procession told all, spelled the death of hope. That common little telega, drawn by a gaunt, bewhiskered dray horse, with the weary Nabat nodding behind; the plain wooden coffin in the back; Sergei on the box, the reins slack in his hands, his shoulders bowed as though with great age; these were sights no mother ought to witness. Irina and Anne came out on the verandah as the cart drew near. Irina’s eyes widened; only one small sound escaped her, but it was a sound Anne could never forget, a cry of unbearable pain. The horse halted of its own accord; Sergei managed to remember to put on the brake; and then he simply sat, his head bowed, his hands in his lap, unable to do more.

Others took over. Death had its dues and its rituals, which must be observed, and Anne perceived dimly through her grief how they were a comfort. Perhaps the worst thing about death, she thought, was its passivity. There was nothing to do about it, nothing to distract the mind from it: the rituals gave the bereaved some action to perform, to fill the vast empty spaces of time.

A new coffin was made, lovingly, with their own hands, by Mishka and Grishka. Nyanka and Tanya made a new robe of white silk, rocking and weeping over it: Tanya with the easy, healing tears of youth; Nyanka, grey-faced and red-eyed, with sobs that tore her painfully. With her own shaking hands, the old woman dressed her nursling and lifted her into the coffin. ‘There’s so little of her!’ she cried out in pity. ‘She weighs no more than a dead leaf.’

The coffin was placed on a trestle, draped with a white pall, turned back to show the face, and the hands crossed high on the breast over an icon of St Catharine, her birth saint. Candles burned at the four corners, and more were set all round the room, so that their blaze almost challenged the daylight. Juniper sprays were spread about the floor; the chanter sat in the corner, reading psalms, while members of the family prayed, and neighbours came in to pay their respects. The village priest came in every hour to say the panihida, the prayers for the dead, and prudently made great play with his censer: despite the juniper and the candles, it was noticeable that the body had been dead four or five days.

As soon as darkness fell, the bells began to toll monotonously, and the funeral took place. Anne did not consider for a moment absenting herself, knowing Irina needed her. Anne helped Marie to dress her, and then drew her arm through her own and led her like a blind woman to take her place in the procession.

The flaming torches turned the dusk to darkness, stretching like a bright snake all the way from the house to the church, as the servants lined the route, ready to fall in behind as the coffin passed. Dmitri, Danil, Mishka and Grishka carried the coffin; Feodor walked before, bearing Irina on his arm; Sergei supported Anne, who led the bewildered Sashka by the hand; the rest of the family walked behind. It seemed a long way, between the darkness and the wavering torchlight; Anne stumbled a little on the uneven ground, and Sergei bore her up. She kept thinking of Natasha’s pink kid slipper. She could not associate her with the coffin; it could not be Natasha in there, not possibly.

The church was a cave full of jewels, a treasure-trove, filled with winking diamond points of light, and the glimmer of gold, and the jewel-bright colours of the icons and the priest’s robes. It was filled with singing, too, and the sweet harmony of the massed voices was too beautiful to be melancholy: it bore the coffin forward as though to some joyful celebration. The altar was so weighted with candles it looked like a fire-ship; before it stood the priest in white and purple, and the attendants swinging the censers, filling the air with lilac clouds of incense which drifted across the golden candlelight, and wreathed the sad, dark brow of the Byzantine Christ painted on the tall panel behind.

More and more people came in, packing the crowd ever tighter. Anne thought briefly of the churches of England: the cool, elegant spaces, the careful distance maintained between the clergy and the people, and between the people themselves; the restraint, the civilised lack of emotion. Crushed between so many bodies, Anne thought of England longingly, deplored this barbarous proximity, the heat, the smells, the lights, the childish colours.

But it was a brief rebellion. The singing worked its way past her defences, unlocked her heart, set free the tears she longed to cry. The long, dark faces of the saints, transfixed in mortal agony, looked back at her from their golden frames, telling her that they understood, that they had surmounted human sorrow, that ease was possible, that wounds could be healed. The colours were not crude, but pure and beautiful and comforting; the cloudy incense blurred the edges of pain; the bright dancing flames spoke of life and hope.

The service was long, the rites complicated, the responses unknown; but as weariness increasingly blunted her sense of reality, Anne found herself yielding more and more to the dark earth-magic of the old religion. The sounds and the rhythms sank deep into her soul like water penetrating the earth, bringing things to life that had laid dormant year after dry year, making them spring up green and living. She began to murmur responses, learning them as she went, finding they fell into place as though she had known them already, long ago. Her hand of its own accord made the sign of the cross, and she felt a joy of release. She looked up at the narrow, Byzantine face of Christ, and He, too, seemed familiar. He seemed to say I know you: welcome home.

Idolatry, said a warning voice in her mind; but it was a small voice, and very far away. All that was here was love: there was nothing bad or wrong. The candle flames wavered and blurred into each other until they became one single light, a burning golden light, at the heart of which was the dark face, itself more full of light than a hundred thousand candles, than the sun itself: a darkness that was light. There is in God a deep but dazzling darkness. I understand, she thought humbly. It was a thing to be understood not with the mind, but with what was older by millennia than the mind: the first part God made – primitive, blind, dumb, but turning always, instinctively, towards the light; knowing nothing, and so knowing better.

The service was over, the rites completed. The lid was screwed down on the coffin, and the congregation streamed out into the darkness. The torches massed to make a new path, round the side of the church to the little burying plot behind, fenced for decency, shaded by tall trees invisible in the darkness. The coffin was born aloft again, floated down a stream of fire on its last journey. Now they were by the graveside, an oblong hole in the solid earth, the cast-out soil heaped beside it, horribly real. Anne saw the colours of the strata, heaped in the reverse order from Nature’s: the black topsoil, the greyish clay, and on top the yellow sandy subsoil. She saw in the fluctuating light the crumbled sides of the hole, with severed rootlets protruding. The incense clouds were dispersing from her mind. Oh don’t let the magic stop now, she prayed. I don’t want to see this.

But the grass was dew-cold under her feet, the night air drifted the smell of bodies and tar and smoke and the soured, turned earth across her senses. Sergei beside her was grey with fatigue, taking no nourishment from the rites of passage; beyond him was Irina, and as their eyes met, Anne saw her despair and pain as the numbness of shock wore off, and the reality of the graveside brought her, too, wide awake.

The clamour of the bells filled the air, almost drowning the priest’s words. The four serfs at the ropes’ ends swung the coffin over the open grave and began to lower it. It swung a little, dislodging a shower of stones and earth as it struck the side. It was all too real: a child’s body in the coffin, being buried deep in the cold earth. Natasha was dead. To outlive a child seemed monstrous, an affront to nature.

The ropes went slack. The coffin was at the bottom of the hole. The priest stooped and took a handful of soil, and pressed it into Irina’s hand. She looked at him, bewildered, and then at her hand, and then threw the soil into the grave with a jerky movement. It struck the coffin lid with a a sound so like a hand knocking at a closed door that Anne’s heart jumped; and at the same instant Irina cried out, and flung herself down as though she would jump into the grave. Dmitri and Sergei, to either side of her, grabbed her arms, pulled her back, and to her feet. ‘Give me my child!’ she cried out. ‘Give me back my child!’ Dmitri said something; Zena and Katya came close, murmuring; but she went on crying out her useless appeal, over and over with the monotony of madness, until the last words had been said, the gravediggers reached for their shovels, and her sisters drew her away.

The serfs worked quickly, as though in a race against time, and within minutes the coffin had disappeared, and the grave was only a hole in the ground. After the first few spadefuls, most people moved quietly away; but Anne stayed to the very end, not so much from a need to pay her respects, but from not really knowing what to do next.

The following day was worse, by far the worst day since Natasha had disappeared, for now all doubts were resolved, and there was nothing left to do. The Kiriakov men went, a little apologetically, back to their work. Irina did not emerge from her room, and Nyanka had taken charge of Sashka with such an evident need to fill her empty arms that it would have been cruel to deprive her of him, which left Anne with nothing to do but think.

It was a dry, hot day, unfeelingly bright, too hot to ride, even had she been able to bring herself to make the effort. She wandered out on to the verandah and sat in Irina’s rocking chair, and rocked herself, and thought.

All her memories of Natasha were there to hand: she remembered the moment she had first seen her, when she had run in to Anne’s room in her white nightshirt, her toffee-coloured curls disordered from sleep, her eyes bright with unspoken thoughts. Little Nemetzka, the strange one, seeing so much and saying so little! She remembered her at her lessons, so quick in some ways, so blankly withdrawn in others. She remembered the day at the fair when she had first spoken – a precious memory, mixed up with her feelings for the Count. Oh, God, what would he suffer when he heard the news? To have missed so much of his child’s life, and to have lost her at such a distance!

But why had she been lost? That had not been at all clear from Sergei’s confused narrative of the night before. He had been too exhausted, and everyone else too shocked, for a detailed exposition; and after the funeral, he had sat apart in grey silence, locked into a world of his own bitter thoughts. Anne had watched him from the corner of her eye, longing to be able to comfort him, but knowing that she could not have reached him then. He would come to her in his own time, she thought, and she would give him what comfort she could – though, God knew, that would be little enough.

The sun slid over the zenith; other members of the family came and sat a while, and went away again, and Anne stayed, too lethargic to do anything about her discomfort. The afternoon heat softened and broadened, the shadows moved round, dogs and chickens sought shade and slept. Anne was alone again on the verandah when Sergei came out at last, and stared about him like a sleepwalker suddenly woken. She looked towards him encouragingly. He avoided her eye, as though he were embarrassed, but he came all the same, and drew out a chair to place it beside hers.

For a long time they sat side by side, staring out past the hanging flowers of the jacmanna towards the dusty shade-trees. Then at last Sergei said, ‘I want to tell you what happened. I must tell someone, just once. Then I shall have done.’

‘Yes,’ Anne said neutrally.

‘It’s fantastic,’ he said. His voice was weary, as though he were past all surprise. ‘I hardly know what to believe. I couldn’t tell it to the others, not everything.’

‘You can tell me.’

‘Yes, I know.’

Slowly, with many pauses, he told her everything that had happened since they parted at Akim Shan’s house. He spoke without inflexion, as though he were reading someone else’s narrative, as if he neither believed nor disbelieved. Anne listened, seeing through the eyes of his unemphatic words as if through a magic window on to past events.

She remembered the distant figure of Nasha riding purposefully along the side of the Valley of the Horses; she remembered Marya Petrovna’s words: She dances to a music we cannot hear. It was not difficult, at least today, and in this state of shock and emotional exhaustion, to believe that Natasha had ridden away to a Holy Place she could only know of, if she knew of it at all, by the most distant heresay.

‘Do you remember, the day of the picnic?’ she said at one point. ‘She talked about hearing voices.’ The evidence had been there, if she had only taken notice. She ought to have stopped her: she alone had all the clues. ‘She asked me if a person who heard voices was mad.’

Sergei looked at her for the first time. His eyes were red-rimmed, his skin grey with weariness. ‘She was talking about Kerim.’

‘Yes, so she said. So I thought.’

He looked away again. ‘God,’ he said. ‘God.’ If it was an appeal, it was for oblivion. After a while, he took up the narrative again, describing the climb up the mountain, the cave, the finding of Natasha. There were tears on his cheeks when he reached that point, but he did not seem to notice them. He spoke of carrying the body out of the cave to the hillside, and of Zaktal’s words to him, how he swore that no one had harmed Natasha. Then he stopped.

Anne looked at him. His head was hanging, as if he were exhausted almost to death; his face bore the lines of a man who had seen what no man should ever see. After a moment he went on. ‘I believed him, God help me; somehow, at the time, I believed him. But we burned the village anyway. I carried her down the hill to where my men were waiting, and then I gave the order. We killed everyone – every man, every woman, every child – we even killed the dogs. I killed Zaktal with my own hand. And then we burned the village.’

He looked at Anne, but not as if he saw her. ‘What else could I do? If the other tribes had heard that she was dead and we had done nothing…’ He stopped again.

Anne was shocked beyond speech. She tried to think of something to say, but her mind balked at the images he had conjured for her, shied away like a frightened horse.

When he spoke again, it was in a faint voice, as if to himself. ‘There’s nothing left there now. I suppose eventually others will come and build over it again – a place such as that. But until then, it will be her monument.’

His voice faded and stopped, and did not begin again. Anne gathered herself together and looked at him. He was sitting forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands dangling loosely between them. His face looked old: he looked older, just then, than his father.

Anne, who knew the truth of it – about Natasha, as about him – saw that what he had done, up there in the mountains, had violated his soul. He was a boy no longer. He himself had killed the boy he had been, and there was not yet a man to take his place: there was only this killing exhaustion. He might die, she saw, if he did not find himself again, because he had done what he could not regret, and could not live with. But she couldn’t help him. It was the boy she had loved: there was nothing she could love in this old man.

Chapter Twenty

In August, the Kiriakovs, like other wealthy families of the region, usually travelled to Pyatigorsk, a town whose natural sulphur springs had made it into a spa rivalling England’s Bath or Tunbridge Wells. It attracted invalids and valetudinarians from all over Russia, and as the facilities and entertainments of the town expanded to accommodate them, it became also a fashionable place for summer houses for the aristocracy. The young and the wealthy went there to dance and to flirt; and mamas took their marriageable daughters for the Pyatigorsk Season, for it was a favourite resort for officers on leave and convalescing from wounds.

The proposition was raised at Chastnaya and listlessly rejected; but Ekaterina, who had a tendency to fancy herself sickly when she was bored, wanted diversion and decided the baths would do her good. She began canvassing for support with Zinaidia.

‘I know we have had all this sadness, but it doesn’t seem fair to make you miss the balls at Pyatigorsk. It’s different for Nadya, after all – she’s already betrothed – but you ought to have your chance too. My own health is very indifferent, Zinochka dear, but I would undertake to chaperone you if dear Zina didn’t care to go.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Aunt Katya,’ Zinochka said with a frightened look, ‘but I couldn’t think of dancing at a time like this. I’m sure Uncle Feodor wouldn’t allow me to go.’

So Ekaterina went to Feodor’s wife, Galina. ‘You know, Galishka, I do think in spite of everything that it would be a good idea for your poor Masha to be allowed to go to Pyatigorsk this year. After all, a girl is only young once, and if she doesn’t have her Season, you’ll never be able to get a good husband for her – and why should she be made to suffer for something which isn’t her fault? She’s such a pretty girl, she ought to have her chance.’

‘I don’t think Feodor will want to go at a time like this,’ Galina said.

‘No, perhaps not. But then, I was thinking of going myself, for the baths – I’m such a wretched invalid, you know – and if I do, I could chaperone Masha for you. She’s such a good girl, it wouldn’t be any trouble, I’m sure.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Galina said doubtfully. ‘I’ll have to speak to Feodor about it.’

To Zina, Ekaterina said, ‘I’m so worried about poor’Rushka. I think her health will break down entirely if she isn’t taken out of herself. Don’t you think, Zina dear, it would be a good idea if we were to persuade her to go to Pyatigorsk for a month or six weeks, to take the baths? I’m sure if you suggested it, she would go – you always had great influence over her.’

Zina, who had been really worried about her sister in the weeks since Natasha’s death, frowned and said, ‘I don’t suppose for an instant she would listen. But she could be made to go.’

‘You could make her, Zina dear. And perhaps I ought to go too,’ she added with a wistful sigh. ‘My own health has suffered so these past weeks, and it would not do for me to become a burden on you. But at least’, she brightened, ‘if I went, I could save you the trouble of escorting poor’Rushka, for I’m sure you will not feel like going there at a time like this.’

As a result of these campaigns, Feodor, Galina and Zina got together, and decided that the summer house at Pyatigorsk should be opened after all. None of the younger brothers wanted to leave Chastnaya, but Dmitri insisted they could manage very well without Feodor, and that he ought to have a break from his cares, which seemed of late to be bowing his shoulders and greying his hair. So it was decided that he and Galina should go, and chaperone their own Masha, a plump merry sixteen-year-old, and Zinochka; and that Katya and Irushka should go along for the baths.

‘What about Anna?’ Zina said. ‘She is looking pale, too. Perhaps a change of scene would do her good.’

Anne, when asked, thanked them, but declined. She had no desire for the bright lights and music of a fashionable resort. She would prefer to stay quietly at Chastnaya teaching Sashka, from whom, now she had got him back from Nyanka, she was rarely parted. And she had begun in the evenings to have regular talks with Father Gregory, the priest from the estate church, who was helping her to come to terms with her guilt over Natasha’s death. He was also, she knew, trying to convert her to the Old Faith, but she didn’t mind that. She was beginning to feel that the English prejudice against idolatry was not so age-old and deep-seated, nor even necessarily so absolutely reasonable as it had once seemed to her; that God could not be entirely averse from a little magic, since He had put so much of it into His world in the making. Little by little, she was coming closer to her adopted country; but where the realisation would once have alarmed, now it pleased her.

However, when it came to it, Irina refused to go to Pyatigorsk without her. She was indeed looking very ill, and the cough which had troubled her last winter had returned. She was listless, unable to be interested in anything, sleeping a great deal, and when she was awake, lying on her bed or on a sofa staring at nothing. Anne tried to involve her with Sashka, feeling that if the boy could draw his mother back from the darkness, it would be worth losing him to her; but Irina didn’t seem able to care about him. She tried, politely, but she looked at him like a stranger, and Sashka’s lip began to tremble ominously. She had nothing to give her son. Nasha had been everything to her; she could care for nothing else, not now.

So when Zina and Feodor insisted she went to Pyatigorsk, she made little resistance, and sat and watched Marie packing for her with dull but resigned eyes. When she understood that Anne meant to stay, she suddenly roused herself and issued an ultimatum. She would go if Anna went, or stay if Anna stayed. They might take their choice.

So when the party set off from Chastnaya to travel back along the Cossack line, westwards along the River Terek, and then north-west to Pyatigorsk of the Five Hills, Anne went with them, leaving Sashka behind in Nyanka’s charge. He waved goodbye to her bravely from the verandah as the carriage pulled away, and Anne leaned out of the window and waved back as long as his small figure was in sight.

The Kiriakovs’ summer house was a pretty, modern building of white-painted wood and pink shingles, sitting in an extensive and rather overgrown pleasure ground just outside the town, on the road which led from Pyatigorsk to Karras and Mount Besh Tau. It had a large verandah – an essential feature of any house in those parts – over which clambered a riot of white and palest pink roses and white summer jasmine, whose scent filled the air all day and through the long pale twilight.

The area around Pyatigorsk had always been famous for horses, and there were well-marked bridle paths to all the best viewpoints, interesting ruins and ‘safe’ villages. Expeditions on horseback to tribal villages to see displays of horsemanship and charming Tartar customs, to buy native souvenirs, and to witness the strange ceremonies of the Moslem feasts, were an integral part of the Pyatigorsk ‘Season’. Anne felt she had seen as much of these things as she wanted. Fortunately, after Feodor’s curt refusal of the first such invitation, the story was quickly passed around as to the circumstances of Natasha’s death, and the Russian community tactfully refrained from asking again.

But there were still picnic rides, and expeditions to other places of interest, such as the famous stud farm in the foothills of Mount Mashuk, and to the great St Eusignius’ Day Fair at Karras. And then, of course, there was the life of the town itself. It was evidently in a state of rapid expansion, new houses and public buildings going up along the main street, and the dachas of the rich being built at the edges of the town in their own pleasure gardens. The houses were mostly of wood, but painted bright, cheerful colours – blue and raspberry and rust-red and woodland green – and they had breath-taking views of the blue-green foothills rising up to darker mountain peaks, and in the far distance the misty silver chain of the Caucasus.

As well as the sulphur baths, on which, of course, a great deal of the town’s activities centred, and the chalybeate springs, there were newly laid out public gardens for walking in, and an open-air theatre; and the main street was in a state of improvement, with new shops opening every month, and a raised footpath along which had been planted an avenue of spindly saplings which would one day be scented limes. There were numerous public and private balls, for the Season was now at its height; and routs, picnics, masks, dinner parties, card evenings and every other sort of occasion that the fashionable people could invent for dressing-up and getting together to gossip and flirt.

Besides the invalids and the pleasure-seekers, Pyatigorsk always had a large and fluctuating population of military personnel, for it was strategically placed on the route between Stavropol, and Tiflis in Georgia and Petrovsk on the Caspian shore. It was a cheerful town, and Anne could not help her spirits being raised, though she had anticipated little pleasure from the visit. Masha and Zinochka, after a brief struggle with sadness, flung themselves whole-heartedly into the gaiety which inevitably surrounds a large number of handsome young officers on leave, and only occasionally looked guilty when they discovered they were enjoying themselves. Feodor encouraged them. They had loved little Nashka as much as anyone could in the short time they had known her; but they were young, and life must go on.

Katya soon found a circle of matrons who were just to her taste, and when she was not subjecting herself to the malodorous baths, she was usually to be found sipping coffee or soda water with two or three women of her own age and status, and chatting luxuriously about ailments, confinements, the delightfulness of one’s own children, the wickedness of servants and the expense of everything in particular.

Irina, however, did not revive. She went dutifully to the baths every day, accompanied by one or other of the women, drank her glass of the stinking water, and immersed herself in the communal pool. Thereafter she sat on the verandah, just as she did at Chastnaya, her eyes fixed on some invisible distance, rocking and rocking herself, as if the movement were putting distance between herself and her pain. She seemed to Anne somehow to be fading, becoming transparent, as though the stuff of her were wearing thin, and time were beginning to show through here and there. She rocked and rocked, travelling every day further from them, her blue-shadowed eyes focused elsewhere, on what alone now could brighten them.

Anne tried to talk to her, to make her discuss what she felt and thought, but it was a hopeless task. Sometimes she would talk about things that had happened in her childhood – some incident which had intrigued or pleased or frightened her – but nothing more recent seemed to interest her; and even then she would sometimes stop in the middle of what she was saying, as though she simply could not care enough to go on.

Anne wished fervently that Zina, with her strong mind and determined views, were here; in lieu of her, she tried talking to Feodor, who she knew was as worried about his sister as she was.

‘We must just wait until she gets over it,’ he said helplessly. ‘Irushka was always the strange one. She feels things differently from the rest of us. She’ll work it out in her own way, I suppose.’

‘I’m afraid’, Anne said hesitantly, ‘that if she loses interest in life she may…’ She stopped. ‘She’s too thin. She doesn’t eat enough.’

Feodor met her eyes. ‘I know. I don’t know what to do about it. I’ll try talking to her tonight.’

He spent a long time with her on the verandah that evening, talking about their childhood together at Chastnaya. Irina seemed to be listening; sometimes she responded; and once, miraculously, she smiled when Feodor reminded her of some childhood prank of Dmitri’s. But as soon as he left her, her face went blank again, and she resumed her rocking, rocking journey away from reality.

In the second week of the visit, Anne was walking one day with Zinochka in the Tsarskoye Gardens, where there was shortly to be a concert on the bandstand by the band of the Caucasian Highland Guards. The handsome young captain who conducted them had danced with Zinochka at two balls, and a promising inclination on his part deserved the encouragement of her attendance at his performance.

Galina had taken Masha to visit a mantuamaker, and Katya had gone to the baths with a friend, but Anne had been quite happy to take a turn at chaperoning Zinochka. She liked music, and felt that it was one of the few pleasures she was able to enjoy at the moment. Zinochka had been so anxious not to miss the start that they had arrived much too early, and they had been occupying the time by strolling along the formal walks, between the dazzling displays of roses, while Zinochka told Anne what a superb musician Captain Orlov was, and how gracefully he danced.

Anne was listening amusedly but with only half her attention. There was something unexpectedly familiar about a figure approaching on a path at right angles to the one they were walking along. Thin, dark, with a dark moustache which suggested the military; but his was not a military gait. Smart, city clothes; a silver-headed cane – but of course! He turned the corner, started as he saw her, and hastened towards her with outstretched hands, and a smile of welcome.

‘Anna Petrovna! Oh, how good it is to see you!’

Her hands were engulfed, and she looked up into Count Tchaikovsky’s face with unexpected pleasure. The spontaneous warmth of his greeting had touched a loneliness she had not been fully aware of; the thin nose and protuberant eyes did not, for once, seem either ugly or ridiculous, only comfortingly familiar.

‘Basil Andreyevitch, what a surprise to see you here!’

‘I heard you were in Pyatigorsk, and I was intending to call on you tomorrow. I arrived only this morning, from Georgievsk. But what a pleasant coincidence that you should choose to walk here this morning! I think Fate must be wanting to bring us together.’

She was surprised at the directness of his speech, but smiled and introduced him to Zinochka. ‘We have come for the concert – which I believe is about to begin,’ she added, intercepting an urgent fidget from Zinochka.

‘Will you then allow me to escort you?’ he asked at once. ‘I have so much to tell you, so much to ask.’ He offered an arm to each of them. ‘What a pleasant town this! Though the smell of the sulphur baths is something one has to get used to.’

‘The officers say that the sulphur in the air turns their silver epaulettes quite yellow if they are here more than a day or two,’ Anne said.

They walked as briskly as Zinochka could make them along the gravel path to the centre of the park, where the pagoda shaped bandstand was ringed with wooden chairs, and already a considerable audience was assembling. Once Basil Andreyevitch had secured them seats from which Zinochka could admire Captain Orlov’s undeniably distinctive profile, he was able to claim Anne’s attention and converse with her in reasonable privacy under cover of the music.

‘I heard about your dreadful loss,’ he said. ‘The shock must have been terrible for you. To lose a child is always a tragedy – but in such a way! I wish I could offer you comfort.’

‘Thank you,’ Anne said bleakly; but his sympathy was so genuine, it did comfort a little.

‘Has Kirov been informed?’

‘Sergei wrote to him. We haven’t yet had a reply.’

‘He will come home, I imagine. The situation in Paris is surely not so grave that they will deny him compassionate leave. And Sergei Nikolayevitch – he is back with his regiment?’

‘Yes, at Grozny.’ Anne frowned. ‘He of all people ought to have had leave. He was very shocked. Nasha was a great favourite with him, and of course, he was the one who witnessed it all at first hand. In some ways, it was worst of all for him.’

‘Yes – poor young man! But at least he was able to take revenge.’

‘Oh, but you don’t understand – that was part of what was so shocking! Poor Seryosha – to witness, to take part in such killing…’

Basil Andreyevitch eyed her curiously. ‘But he is a soldier; it is his trade! He would not feel about it as you do.. And besides, surely the barbarians deserved it? You would not have had them go unpunished?’

Anne avoided the question. Sergei had told the whole truth to no one but her, and it was not her secret to impart to anyone else. She said, ‘But now there is trouble along the Chechen line – some of the tribes have risen up in protest against the burning of the village, and so the Independents are called out to contain them, and all leave is cancelled.’

‘Action of that sort may be the best thing for him,’ Basil said. ‘It will leave him no time to brood. But you, Anna Petrovna – you are looking pale, and tired. I think you have been bearing the burden for too long.’

Anne was embarrassed. ‘How can you say so? It is not my bereavement alone; indeed, the family is more involved than I.’

For answer he took her hand and pressed it. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You have more feeling than the rest put together.’

She drew back her hand. She could not believe that he would flirt with her at a time like this. She sought to change the subject.

‘Your sister is well, I hope? Is she with you? Shall I have the pleasure of meeting her again?’

‘No, Olga is at Odessa. In fact, I have just come from there. We have been there all summer, staying with my aunt. My uncle died in March.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry – I didn’t know.’

‘No, how should you? We were in time to see him before he died, which was the important thing.’

‘And what brings you to Pyatigorsk? I should have thought, from what I’ve heard, that Odessa would be the most pleasant place to be at this time of year. Have you come here on business?’

‘You might call it that,’ he said, watching her with a curious expression in his softly bulging eyes. ‘In fact, I came partly to put a distance between me and Olga. She and I have been quarrelling for the last six weeks.’

Anne was surprised – the closeness of the brother and sister was legendary – but she did not feel she had any right to ask questions. Basil Andreyevitch, however, seemed to want to tell her.

‘My uncle, you see, had always given us to understand that when he died, he would leave us his fortune between us. However, when the will was proved, it came out that he had left the bulk of his fortune to me, with no more than a pension to Olga and my aunt. Quite a generous pension to each of them, but it’s not quite the same.’

Anne looked concerned. ‘It is a pity that something like that should come between you,’ she murmured.

‘Oh, Olga is being perfectly unreasonable! She and my aunt have been stirring each other up, and attacking me in the most absurd way. My uncle, being childless, was entitled to leave his estate where he liked. And if he wanted to leave it to me, why shouldn’t I accept it?’ Anne could not answer that, of course; but Tchaikovsky evidently didn’t mean her to. He was smiling at some pleasing inner landscape, and went on with a chuckle. ‘The best part about it is that it makes me independent of my father! Now I may do as I please, instead of being forced to toe the line so as not to jeopardise my allowance!’

‘But I hope you will be able to make it up with your sister,’ Anne said.

‘I don’t care if I do or not – and neither should you. She’s no friend of yours, Anna Petrovna – but I suppose you know that?’

Anne was upset. ‘I’m sure I have never done anything willingly to offend your sister–’ she began.

‘You didn’t need to,’ Tchaikovsky interrupted, smiling at her in a way that made her begin to blush. ‘You put poor Olga’s nose out of joint the first time you were ever in company with her. Mine too, I must confess. I shall never forget the way you looked at me – so coolly! – when I exercised my wit on you! I was used to Kirov laughing at me, and I thought he had corrupted you to his cynical view of the world, but of course, it was just you and your superior intelligence.’

‘Please,’ Anne said, hardly knowing where to look, ‘you shouldn’t be talking to me like this.’

‘Why not? It’s the truth– you are superior, though it took me a while to acknowledge it. I had been used to being regarded as the leader of intellectual society, and I didn’t care to be unseated! But I’m wise enough, at least, to acknowledge myself bested.’ He eyed her averted profile. ‘I must say, that colour becomes you, Anna Petrovna.’

‘Please,’ she said in confusion, ‘don’t say any more. I can’t bear – at a time like this–’

He was instantly contrite. ‘No, of course not! How thoughtless of me! I beg your pardon. I have allowed my tongue to run away with me. I’ll say no more – only I beg you to remember that you have no more sincere admirer in the world, and to regard me as your friend to command. Now, don’t turn your face away any longer – I shan’t embarrass you again! What a jolly band this is! Did you know Orlov, the conductor, is a very fine violinist? I heard him at Princess Arsineva’s in Moscow. He doesn’t give public performances, so it’s considered a great coup for any hostess who can persuade him to play for her guests.’

He chatted in a light and pleasant way about music and Society in general, allowing Anne to recover her countenance, and neither said nor did anything else to embarrass her. This evidence of tact and genuine consideration made her like him more than she had thought possible; and when, after the concert, he asked permission to escort them home, and to be allowed to take Anne out riding the following day, she accepted on both counts. She had been lonely in her grief, and it was good to have someone whose sympathy was particularly her own.

But it was more than that: she had been lonely for a long time, simply as a woman. The unfortunate incident with Sergei had been precipitated by that loneliness. The dreadful tragedy which had followed had driven any thought of courting her from his mind, of course; and Anne was confident that when they next met, he would have forgotten all about it, and would regard her again as his father’s employee, his siblings’ governess.

Over the next few days, Count Tchaikovsky proved himself both kind and sensitive, placing himself at Anne’s disposal, escorting her, arranging diversions for her, talking amusingly to distract her from her sadness. He did not flirt: he behaved like a friend; and though she did not understand why he should go to so much trouble on her behalf, or even, indeed, why he was here at all, she found herself eased and comforted, and was grateful to him. He was, she thought, a better person than she had ever given him credit for.

Anne had walked into the town on an errand for Galina, and as she was returning along the dusty road, she heard a carriage coming up fast behind her, and stepped up on to the grass to be out of the way. It went past her very fast, and then to her surprise slowed and came to a jerky halt up ahead of her. She started towards it doubtfully, thinking it must be some lost traveller needing directions; but before she had gone more than a step, the door opened, a hand appeared and then a boot, and Count Kirov jumped down into the road and strode towards her through the swirling dust, his hands outstretched.

She must have run to him, though she didn’t remember covering the distance between them. She had one vivid, confused glimpse of his face, white under his tan, his eyes burning with emotion, and then she was in his arms, being strained against his lean, hard body. Her own arms were round him, and such joy and relief and love fountained up in her that she could not have spoken just then, even had the force of his embrace allowed her breath enough.

It lasted only seconds. She was released, swayed a little, found her balance. She looked up at him, and saw the intense, troubled look in his eyes, the marks of grief and anxiety in his face, and realised that she was probably revealing all too much in her own expression – and in a public place! Shocked at herself, she looked down and conducted a brief, desperate struggle to control her feelings.

‘Anna Petrovna,’ he said hoarsely, as though the dust had got into his throat. ‘It’s so good to see you! I hadn’t expected… Dear God, what you must have been suffering, all of you! I came as soon as I got the letter. I couldn’t believe it. My poor little Natasha!’

Anne felt her eyes hot with tears, and tried to blink them back. She was ashamed of what she had felt, when he must be riven with grief for his child; ashamed that she had not thought first of that.

‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ she said, and tried to mean it only as she was allowed to mean it; but her treacherous heart kept on singing with his presence, and yearning towards him with almost a physical tug.

‘Thank God they had you!’ he said, and at the warmth in his voice, the tears spilled over helplessly, and one awkward, sobbing gasp escaped her control. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, taking her hand – oh, the touch of him! – and leading her towards the carriage, ‘I know how much you will have supported them all! I did better than I knew when I rescued you in Paris! How is she? How is Irushka?’

They were at the carriage door, and she was able to let him help her to climb up, and to settle herself on the seat before being obliged to answer. By then she was calm, the rushing, flooding love for him quelled; duty, propriety rolled like a boulder over the mouth of the spring to keep it down.

‘Far from well,’ she answered him as he closed the door and the carriage rolled forward again. ‘She grieves terribly, but she’s so withdrawn it’s impossible to comfort her. I’m glad you’re here. I hoped you would come. Nothing else can help her – but you will bring her back.’

She kept her eyes forward, not allowing herself to look at him again. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him put his hands over his face, and rub it wearily.

‘It’s so hard to believe,’ he said. ‘Little Nasha! How could it happen? I can’t make myself understand that she’s dead, that she won’t come running to me when the carriage stops, and look up at me in that way–’

He stopped abruptly, and said nothing more until they reached the house. The carriage stopped, but he sat still for a moment, thinking. Then in a low voice he said, ‘What in God’s name can I say to her? I can’t even comfort myself.’

Anne absented herself all day, took herself off to the remotest corner of the tangled gardens with a book she was quite unequal to reading. It was inexpressibly painful to think of them together, painful and shocking to discover how much she still felt for him, how little control she had over her mind and her feelings. She had not even been able to bring herself to witness the first reunion between them. As soon as he had handed her down from the carriage, she had hurried away round the side of the house before anyone had time to emerge from it.

When the hour for dinner approached, however, she had to go back. Galina told her that Count Tchaikovsky had been there asking for her, and she remembered belatedly that he had promised to bring a book they had been discussing. He had left the book, and a kindly message to say that he would call the next day, as he didn’t suppose she would be at leisure to receive him that evening, in view of the Count’s arrival.

Dinner proved not to be the ordeal she had expected, for neither the Count nor Irina emerged from their rooms for it. The mood of the assembled company was subdued, and there was little conversation, for which Anne was grateful: she didn’t want to know how the Count had greeted Irina, nor she him. After dinner, Galina was obliged to chaperone Masha and Zinochka to a ball, and Katya was engaged to drink tea with a friend. Feodor sat with Anne on the verandah for a while, smoking a cigar in silence, and then said apologetically, ‘I don’t seem to be much company tonight, do I?’

‘I don’t really feel like talking myself.’ She glanced at him. ‘Don’t feel you have to bear me company. I had just as soon be alone. I think I’ll go to bed early.’

‘Well, if you don’t mind… Feodor said, pushing himself up out of his chair. ‘I’ve some letters I ought to be writing.’ Left alone, Anne sat by the verandah rail and watched the light fade from the pale-green evening sky, and the soft, moth-winged dusk creep in. She was too tired even to think, and she listened to the sounds of evening and smelled the emerging twilight fragrance of the jasmine with her mind blessedly blank.

Some time later – she didn’t know how long – the Count came out from the house. She felt his presence before she saw or heard him, felt it like a weight on the back of her neck, and turned to see him standing in the doorway, one hand against the upright as though he needed its support. He didn’t look at her, but he crossed the verandah and took the chair next to hers, and leaned back in it, sighing like a weary man come home after a day in the fields.

Anne sat very still, feeling his ease with her – the treacherous way he had come to her as to a place of comfort. After a while she heard herself ask him calmly if he had eaten, and the sound of her own voice amazed her. It was like a question passing between husband and wife of long standing: unemphatic, almost needing no words.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They sent in dinner on a tray, but I couldn’t eat it. Too tired,’ he added. She was putting off the moment of looking at him – half in fear, but half as a child postpones a treat.

‘I expect they sent you the wrong things,’ she said. ‘Let me get you some fruit, and some wine.’

‘Fruit – yes. I could eat fruit.’

‘And wine.’ She rose to her feet to ring the bell.

‘Only if you will drink with me. It’s poor sport to drink alone.’ She nodded consent, and he added suddenly, ‘Champagne – let it be champagne! Did you know the best champagne in the world comes from just across the mountains, in Kakhetia?’ She looked at him, startled, but the servant had come out in answer to the bell, and he gave him the order. When they were alone again, he turned to her and said gently, ‘He thinks I’m mad too. But champagne is not only good for celebrations, you know. It’s a medicine too. They gave it to Yelena Vassilovna when she was dying. I should like to be sure I will die with something so good on my tongue.’

It was the first time he had ever spoken of his first wife to Anne. He was looking away from her now, out into the evening, and she was free to study his face. It was tired, drawn, grey with fatigue and, probably, hunger; but there was a burning, luminous look in his eyes, which she didn’t understand.

The servant came back with the wine, and a bowl of fruit, which he placed on a small table before them. The Count poured two glasses.

‘This is Tsinandali, the best of the Kakhetian champagnes. Drink, Anna – the first toast I taught you, do you remember? Za vasha zdarovia! How long ago it seems! I feel as though I have known you all my life.’

She was unable to speak, and drank the toast in silence; but he went on without seeming to need more encouragement.

‘I came across Kakhetian champagne for the first time when I was about Sergei’s age. Like him, I served in the Caucasus against the Tcherkess, but I was stationed with the Dragoons in Tiflis, protecting the vineyards of the foothills against the wild mountain beys. They used to come down like sudden hailstorms from the mountains, and we had to drive them back, and kill enough of them to discourage them for a while. It was hard, dangerous living – and how hard we celebrated in the mess every night, those of us who had survived the day!’

He drank again, and then took a glowing, Crimean apple from the bowl and lifted it to his nose to sniff it delicately; but then he seemed to forget it, put it down absently, and said, ‘So beautiful, the Caucasus – ice blue and brown and white and blood red – have you seen the “bloody snows” of the Caucasian mountains? Something to do with iron in the rock, I believe. Beautiful and sinister.’ He was silent a moment. ‘When I came again, years later, I was seconded to the Independents, as Sergei is now. That’s when I met Irina.’

‘Yes,’ Anne said. ‘I’ve heard the story.’

He put his glass down abruptly. ‘I can’t reach her,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do. Tell me, Anna, tell me what happened.’

‘You know what happened,’ she said warily. ‘Sergei must have told you in his letter.’

‘His letter made no sense; and she won’t tell me the real story.’

‘She doesn’t know it,’ Anne said quickly. ‘For God’s sake, don’t say anything to her!’

Triumph bloomed in his eyes. ‘So there is another story. I knew it! And I knew you would know the truth of it. You must tell me, Anna, I must know.’

She was distressed. ‘I can’t. It’s for Sergei to tell you. The story is his.’

‘No, the story is mine. Tell me the truth – what really happened?’ She looked at him, wide-eyed, miserable, and he added gently, ‘It could not have been as Sergei said. There could not have been so much dereliction of duty in the whole household that the Tcherkess could come down to the very threshold and snatch her away. There is a story, isn’t there?’

She saw the impossibility – and worse, the impropriety – of holding back the truth from him, the child’s father. But would he believe? Would he understand? Sergei’s letter must have been incomprehensible because he did neither – and how could she explain that to him?

Stumblingly, she began the story; but as it progressed, she began to tell it not to his face, but past his eyes, into his mind, and saw the words sink into place without effort or translation. She wondered how she could ever have been so stupid as to think he would not understand. She had been apart from him too long, had forgotten that all she knew, he knew; that they were not different from each other except unimportantly, on the outside.

When she came to the last part, she trembled; and without breaking her rhythm, he reached across and took her hand, and it made a warm bridge across which the communication could flow, half thought, half feeling. She told Sergei’s part of the story too, remembering that Sergei was his child, and that he had a right to know what he could know; and she saw that he did not understand that part directly, but only through the medium of her sympathy. She thought that had it been he who had found Natasha, and heard Zaktal’s words, he would have found some way not to do what Sergei had done. He would have been stronger, strong enough to have spared the village; or weaker, perhaps, in his grief, enough to have killed without the remorse. He did not understand why Sergei was suffering, could only accept it because she said it was so.

When she stopped at last, there was a silence, filled only with night noises – the chirp of cicada, the rustle of the breeze in the leaves, the thin high squeak of a hunting bat. A servant came out to close the screens on the windows, so that the lamps could be lit inside, and their butter-yellow light made the dusk suddenly blue as steel. When the servant had gone, leaving them alone, the Count lit a cigar. Anne watched the movements of his hands until the task was completed, and then said, ‘She doesn’t know the true story. Sergei didn’t tell her, and it was not for me to do so, if he did not.’

‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘She does know. Perhaps not in detail, but she knows something. Natasha was her child, more than anyone’s. She knows, at least, that Nasha went away of her own accord.’

Anne watched him draw on the cigar, making the tip glow with sudden jewels, sending the smoke wreathing out into the twilight through the tangled, nodding roses. And suddenly she thought how the accoutrements of the scene were utterly fantastic, like details in the dream of a lunatic: cigar, champagne, roses, glowing fruit in a deep lapis-blue bowl – so completely incongruous with what was being said. If this were a dream, it could only be her dream, and there was nowhere to hide in it. She felt utterly exposed to him, as though all her nerve endings were uncovered, as though he would be able to hear her thoughts as she thought them.

At last the Count put down the cigar on the edge of the table, and looked down at his hands, and said wearily, ‘I wish to God I had never allowed you all to come here! This place! I rescued her from it – why did I let her come back? It’s like an evil monster in a fairy-story, weaving bad spells, stealing life away.’

‘I thought you would blame me,’ Anne said. ‘I blame myself. I shouldn’t have left her unguarded.’

‘Blame is useless,’ he said. ‘Nothing can bring her back. What we have to do now is to find some way of going on. But just now, I can’t think what it could be. Perhaps it’s too soon.’ His hand went up to his face as if it didn’t know what to do with itself; he rubbed his eyes, and then dropped both hands to his knees. ‘Help me, Anna,’ he said quietly.

‘I’ll try. Only tell me what to do.’

He gave a small, quirky smile. ‘I was hoping you would tell me.’ He looked down at his hands, and then at her, and the smile warmed into something without pain in it. ‘Well, you can help me finish the bottle, to begin with. Fill the glasses, would you? I think I’m too tired to reach for it.’ She hesitated, and he met her eyes with faint, humorous reproachfulness. ‘What, you won’t even do that for me? Do I ask so much of you, Anna Petrovna?’

She felt the tears close behind her eyes, and wanted to look away, so that he shouldn’t see them; but his gaze was too bright and close, and that faint smile told her that he knew everything she was thinking, understood all and forgave all.

‘No, sir,’ she said at last. ‘Nothing you ask of me could be too much.’

‘Then drink with me.’

He released her gaze, and watched her fill the glasses, and took his from her hand with an odd grimace, his mood changing again. ‘It will at least make us both sleep,’ he said.

Chapter Twenty-One

The next few days were hard for Anne. She couldn’t bear to see the Count and Irina together; she hated his care for her, the absolute concentration he bestowed on her. At dinner he sat beside her, served her with his own hands, poured her wine, coaxed her to eat and obliged her to drink. After dinner he sat beside her on the verandah, talking and talking to her in a low voice while she rocked. Anne sat apart with a book, trying not to overhear, but her ear seemed especially tuned to his voice. She wished, desperately, that there were a piano here, so that she could keep out his voice with music; she talked to Galina about household matters, even surprised Katya by asking after her various matronly friends.

By day, the Count walked with Irina in the gardens, accompanied her to the baths, was with her every moment. By night, he retired to her room with her, and Anne shut her mind resolutely to that. Unable to sleep, she would stand by her window for air, and see the light burning in their room at all hours. It didn’t seem to matter how much she told herself that she was both foolish and wicked: she had felt, that evening on the verandah, how close they were to each other, and how alike, in a way she could not believe was true of him and Irina. She could not bear that he loved his wife, cared for her, gave her all the product of his remarkable mind – that woman who could not begin to appreciate it. And yet she cared for Irina too, grieved for her grief, wanted to comfort and restore her, and was bitterly ashamed of her jealousy. The dichotomy in her own feelings was doubly hard to bear.

She turned to Count Tchaikovsky for respite from the impossible situation, and was grateful that he seemed ready at all hours to escort and distract her. He took her riding, strolled with her in the gardens or along the main boulevard to look at the shops, and talked to her endlessly: social small talk, gossip, long discussions about the political situation – it didn’t matter what he said, she responded with all the eagerness of one trying to escape from her own thoughts.

She met him in the evenings, too, for though she would not attend entertainments on her own behalf, she offered with a firmness that would not be denied to chaperone Masha and Zinochka, to save Galina the trouble. At balls and routs and social evenings, she sat in a corner, protected by her cap and her black gloves from being asked to take part in the amusements, and Basil Andreyevitch would come and sit by her and talk. From time to time she intercepted odd looks from some of the matrons, and knew that they were being talked about. The particularity of his attentions to her was bound to cause comment, but she was beyond caring about that. She began almost to wish that the Count would be recalled to Paris: at least there he would be as much hers as Irina’s.

One day, when they were out riding on the lower slopes of Mount Mashuk, she asked Tchaikovsky, diffidently, what chance there was of it. They had reined in their horses at a natural vantage point. Below them the town was spread out, humming with morning life in the clean sunshine; to the west, Mount Besh-Tau rose up to jab the sky with its five peaks; and to the south, just visible against the skyline, were the twin peaks of Mount Elborus, between which Noah’s Ark was supposed to have lodged when the Flood subsided. It was a lovely day, the sky clear blue, the air fresh, the sunshine bright. Anne was aware of these things outside her unhappiness, close but not touching her, like something seen beyond a window.

‘Recalled to Paris?’ mused Basil Andreyevitch. ‘It’s hard to say. The situation is tense, but not critical, from what I hear. Of course, Napoleon’s had to go to Spain to take charge of the campaign his brother’s bungled, and the life of Paris always drops from a canter to a trot when he’s away.’

‘Do you know Paris so well?’ Anne asked, surprised.

He looked embarrassed. ‘I’m reporting what I hear at mess dinners: there are plenty of officers who have been there since Napoleon took it over. Anyway, he won’t beat the Spanish in five minutes, so Paris will be quiet at least until after the harvest.’

Anne frowned. ‘I can’t think why Boney should want to conquer Spain. From my geography lessons, I learnt that it was just a trackless wilderness.’

Basil Andreyevitch shrugged. ‘So it is – but it’s the last piece of Europe he doesn’t control, and naturally any conqueror worth his salt will not be satisfied with less than everything. He can’t move north, because Russia stops him, and so he must move south.’

‘Well, at least he is leaving England alone,’ Anne said.

Tchaikovsky smiled. ‘But will England leave him alone? Your country has already sent an army to Portugal, and rescued the Spanish royal family from under Murat’s nose. Napoleon won’t like that piece of interference.’

‘Portugal is our oldest ally,’ Anne said.

‘And Lisbon is the only port in Europe open to English ships, now that we have been obliged to fall in with Napoleon’s embargo,’ Tchaikovsky said. ‘He means to starve England into submission.’

‘He won’t do that.’

‘No, I don’t think he will,’ Tchaikovsky said thoughtfully. ‘From what I hear, the embargo is causing as much hardship in France as it’s meant to cause in England. It cuts both ways, you know. There’s all sorts of things that can’t be got except in English ships – coffee, sugar, spices. I shouldn’t be surprised if the embargo doesn’t bring down the alliance between us and France in the end. I don’t think the Tsar was ever too keen on it, and if the Imperial Court can’t get its little luxuries, life in Petersburg will be hardly worth living.’

‘You think Russia will change sides again – ally with England?’

‘It seems more natural somehow. And I don’t see how anyone can trust a man like Napoleon. He won’t be satisfied until he rules the whole world.’

‘Including Russia?’ Anne said innocently.

‘No one can conquer Russia,’ Tchaikovsky said airily. ‘No one would be fool enough to try.’ He looked sideways at her. ‘Come, that’s better – you actually smiled then!’

‘I see now why you think England and Russia are natural allies – both countries have that same belief that they cannot possibly be conquered.’

‘You speak as though you belonged to neither.’

‘In a way, I don’t. I belonged entirely to England for most of my life; now I am half-way between England and Russia, I seem to be without a country.’

He looked at her with keen sympathy. ‘Move closer to Russia, then. Become wholly Russian.’

‘I don’t know if that’s possible,’ she said.

‘There is a way.’

He reached across the space between them and touched her hand, and she looked at him, startled at the tone of his voice.

‘What – what do you mean?’

‘Is it so hard to guess? Have I not made my feelings clear to you these last weeks?’ he said gently. ‘Please, don’t speak yet – let me finish! I know that you are deeply grieved by the poor little girl’s death, and I would not have spoken, except that I can’t help feeling you need comforting – a special sort of comforting, that can only be given by someone closer than a mere friend.’

‘You have been everything that is kind -1 am truly grateful for all your attentions to me–’

‘It wasn’t kindness, Anna Petrovna!’

‘Yes, it was,’ she said hastily.

‘Well, if you insist – only in that case, let me be kinder still. Will you marry me?’

Despite her recent observations, she was still taken by surprise, so much so that she could not find any words to answer him.

‘You look surprised – but surely you must have known what was in my mind?’

‘I – I didn’t think about it. I thought–’

‘You thought I was only flirting with you?’ he said with a hint of reproach. ‘Am I such a scoundrel in your eyes?’

‘No – indeed not. I didn’t think that.’

‘Well, then? We have been friends for many years, have we not? I have grown to admire you more than anyone I have ever met. But lately, it has become more than that. I will confess to you -1 came to Pyatigorsk on purpose to ask you to marry me.’

‘Oh, surely not!’ she protested at such an extravagant idea. ‘You could not have known I was here.’

‘To be sure I did! News travels faster here than in the north, where there’s little else to talk about. I have told you that my uncle’s death leaves me independent. I’ve remained unmarried all these years, despite my parents’ pleadings, because I didn’t want the sort of wife they wanted for me. But now I’m independent, I can choose for myself. That’s why I came here.’

Still she looked unbelieving. ‘But why me? How can you possibly want to marry me?’

‘I want an intelligent wife.’ He spread his hands in a disarming gesture of honesty. ‘I’ve long had the reputation of leading intellectual society – yes, and I know you’ve laughed at me secretly. Well, I want to do in fact what I’ve already done in reputation. With you as my wife, I can do it. We shall have a salon: all the great thinkers, the writers, the reformists – artists and musicians, too – they will all come. We’ll be famous. We’ll go down in history – more than that, we’ll make history!’

Anne tried to stem the torrent of his enthusiasm. ‘You do me too much honour! I’m no intellectual – I’m an English governess. I am far beneath your touch.’

‘Don’t say that!’ His pale eyes glowed with fervour. ‘I won’t allow anyone to say you are beneath me. You are gently bom, and better educated even than most men. Besides that, you have something else that makes you worth ten of every other woman in Russia. I don’t know what to call it, except intelligence, but it isn’t only that.’

He held out his hand to her. ‘Anna Petrovna, listen to me! I came to Pyatigorsk in all arrogance to ask you to marry me, thinking you would jump at the offer – for I can offer you security, position, rank, fortune, all those things. But meeting you again after so long, I remembered what you were really like. Now I ask not as one conferring a favour, but as one asking it. You are by far my superior in everything that matters – I know that! But I do sincerely love you, and I will try with all my heart to make you happy, if you will honour me with your hand.’

She looked at him with sad astonishment; flattered by his preference, touched by his offer, unhappy that she must be the cause of wounding him.

‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your good opinion,’ she began, but he interrupted her.

‘I don’t want your gratitude! I can see from your face that you mean to refuse me – but please, won’t you take a little time to consider? I don’t need your answer this minute! You are not yourself, you are still in mourning. Wait, please wait, until you are calmer, and think about it. There is a great deal I can offer you.’

‘I know that. I am honoured to be your choice, Basil Andreyevitch. Any woman would be.’

‘You didn’t used to think so,’ he said wryly. ‘You used to laugh at me.’

‘No one could laugh at such generous feelings as you have expressed,’ she said seriously.

‘Well, then, what is the impediment?’ he asked anxiously.

She hesitated, and then said as gently as possible, ‘I don’t love you.’

His face cleared. ‘Oh, is that all? Don’t refuse me on that account. We have been good friends these last two weeks, have we not? You don’t dislike me?’

‘No, of course not – but–’

‘Then it’s all right. People can be very happily married with no more than liking. Half the married people in Russia no more than tolerate each other.’

‘I should not wish you to have so little in return for all you offer,’ she said.

‘Well, I would settle for it. And love will probably follow in time. Please, Anna Petrovna, say you will think about it.’

She felt her lip trembling, and was aware of an absurd desire to laugh and cry, both together. He was ludicrous, he was kind, he was touching and sad, he was a friend, he was more generous than she deserved.

‘Say you’ll think about it,’ he pressed her again.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, feeling ungracious and unkind. ‘I do thank you,’ she added, and he smiled.

‘No need for thanks. Come, let’s ride on. Have I taken you to the Elizavyetinski spring yet? No? We’ll go round that way, then. It’s a pleasant ride, and everyone goes to the spring at this time of the morning. There’s sure to be someone agreeable to chat to. We’ll gather up all the latest gossip, and then go back by the gallery, and stop for a glass of coffee, for it will be noon by then.’

A new Governor of Georgia was on his way to take up his duties, and as he was to break his journey in Pyatigorsk, there was to be a grand reception and ball to which everyone would be going.

The occasion also brought Sergei to Pyatigorsk, as part of a detachment representing the Grozny garrison. He arrived the day before the Governor was expected, and as soon as he had made his report, he rode out to the Kiriakov dacha to meet his father.

He arrived just after noon, when the family was gathered on the verandah eating a nuncheon of fruit, sweet buns and coffee. Galina had ordered a coddled egg with spinach for Irina, who was looking more wasted every day, and the Count was trying to persuade her to eat it, when Sergei came striding down the path between the oleanders, his spurs clinking, his boots white with dust.

Anne thought at once that he looked ten years older, no longer the handsome, light-hearted boy who had boasted to her only two months ago about breakfasting on quails and champagne. The boyish fullness had gone from his cheeks, and their high colour: his face was stern, his lips thinner, his eyes harder. His fair brows were drawn down in a sun frown, which she could see would soon become a permanent mark. As he halted before the step, he pulled off his hat, and she saw that he had cut his hair shorter, so that even its barley-fair softness could not lighten the impression of grimness about him. His temples and brow, newly exposed, were paler than the rest of his face.

His eyes went straight to Irina, who sat looking at nothing, her hands hanging like dead leaves from her thin wrists, as though she had no strength to use them; and then jumped to his father. He coloured under his tan and his mouth grew uncertain, and just for a moment he looked a boy again. The Count had risen to his feet, was staring at his son with painful love and longing.

‘Papa–’ Sergei said, his voice light with hesitancy.

‘Seryosha! Oh my dear boy!’ The Count crossed the space between them in three strides, and took his son in his arms. It was customary in Russia for men to embrace, and Anne, brought up amongst undemonstrative Englishmen, had at last grown used to it; but the Count held Sergei not as men embrace, but as he might have held a woman, one arm round his shoulders, the other hand on the back of Sergei’s head, holding him close against him.

Anne heard Sergei’s muffled voice say, ‘Papa, I’m sorry!’ – the apology pitiful in its inadequacy; and she looked away, biting her lip.

The Count released him, took hold of his shoulders instead, looking into his eyes. There was little physical difference between them now; in the year since he had graduated, Sergei had filled out, and grown the half-inch he had lacked of his father. They looked more than ever alike; yet the difference between them was greater than it had ever been. The lightness, the inner glow had gone out of Sergei: it was no longer in this young man to grow into one such as his father was.

‘Papa, I loved her,’ he said now. There were tears on his eyelashes, but he would not look away, or hide them: he was a soldier on report. His pride was the only young thing about him. ‘I would never have let anything harm her.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ the Count said helplessly.

Sergei met his eyes with a look of desperate pain. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘It wasn’t your fault. You can’t think I blame you?’

‘It was my responsibility,’ he said, his voice flattening with inevitability.

‘You couldn’t have prevented it!’

Still Sergei looked into his eyes. ‘If you had been there, it would still have happened. And you would have taken the responsibility, wouldn’t you, sir?’

There was a long moment of silence. Father and son stared at each other; then the Count dropped his hands to his sides. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘But now I am here, it is mine again. You must not punish yourself over this, Seryosha. You did all you could. Your little sister is dead, and nothing can bring her back. You have your own life to lead, and it’s as precious as hers was.’

‘Yes, sir, I know,’ Sergei said. ‘I shan’t waste it, I promise you.’

The Count stared at him helplessly, and Anne saw that he was looking for some sign of the lightsome, merry boy he had left behind. He and Sergei meant different things by the same words. Sergei would live his life, but not as the Count would have wanted him to live it. Things were changed; they could not be changed back.

‘Come,’ the Count said at last, ‘come and have something to eat and drink. You must have had a long journey this morning.’ It was the only thing to do – to fall back on social form, when everything else became impossible to bear – but Anne could see that Sergei didn’t understand that, and thought his father unfeeling, frivolous. Suddenly she couldn’t bear any more. With a muttered excuse, she got up and almost ran into the house, before she could be obliged to join in the painful ritual.

There was no opportunity for Sergei to talk to her for the rest of that day, and Anne was glad of it. As she felt the Count’s pain, so she felt Sergei’s; and when he and his father were together, and their wounded minds rubbed against each other, it became intolerable. She exchanged only a distant, polite greeting with the young man, and for the rest, avoided them both as much as possible.

She managed to be out of the way when Sergei left that evening, being obliged by the call of duty to return to the military headquarters. She hoped that the arrival of the Governor would keep him out of the way the following day. All the family was going to the reception and ball, and no doubt she would meet him there, but at a social occasion of that sort, they would be cushioned from each other by etiquette. Basil Andreyevitch would be there, of course, and would no doubt constitute himself as her escort, and she looked forward to that with a kind of relief. More and more she appreciated his good manners, his gentlemanly restraint. Since proposing to her, he had not mentioned the matter again, nor behaved with any greater particularity towards her, except that his manner was a little softer – to which she could hardly object. Indeed, fraught as that situation was, it was still easier to be with her hopeful suitor than with either of the Kirovs.

The following day was cooler and hazy, a thin, high cloud covering the sky like gauze, through which the sun shone distantly, muted. Anne walked about the gardens all morning. Whenever she sat down anywhere for a moment, her restlessness drove her to her feet again within minutes. Sitting down, she felt vulnerable, as though someone might come upon her and demand something of her. She walked and walked under that hazy sun, and by the time everyone gathered for a nuncheon at noon, she was weary with the exercise. She drank a little coffee, crumbled a cake on her plate to look as if she had eaten, heard from a distance Galina ask her if she had a headache, and herself answer no, she was quite well. She was aware of the Count looking at her, and would not meet his eyes.

The meal over, everyone retired to their rooms to dress for the Governor’s reception, while the servants went to their quarters for their dinner. Gradually the house grew quiet, and Anne, sitting on the edge of her bed, felt her restlessness and anxiety dissipating into simple tiredness. She supposed, wearily, that she ought to dress. Marie would probably come later, when she had finished with her mistress, and offer to dress Anne’s hair, as she usually did for parties or balls. She had better be ready. She got up from the bed, took off her sandals, and then remembered she had left her reticule on the verandah. She would just slip out and get it before she changed.

She opened the door to her room and stepped out into the passage, and at the same instant the Count appeared round the corner of the passage and came face to face with her. He stopped in front of her, blocking her path, and she looked up at him nervously. His mouth was curved into an enigmatic smile, and his bright eyes, more gold than green today, looked directly into hers, dazzling and confusing her.

T was just – just going–’ She waved a foolish hand towards the verandah, the direction from which he had come. With his arms folded across his chest, he seemed to fill the narrow passage completely.

‘You’ve been avoiding me,’ he said.

‘No, sir, of course not,’ she said, lowering her eyes. ‘Would you please let me past? I want to fetch my reticule.’

‘Not until I have an explanation,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing to explain.’

‘Yes, there is.’ He unfolded his arms, and rested one elbow against the jamb of her open door. ‘What’s the matter, Anna? 1 thought you were my friend – my dear friend. Yet you avoid me, you won’t talk to me – you won’t even look at me.’

She looked up, and it was a mistake. Their eyes met, and she felt her scalp shrink and her stomach clench at what she saw in his face, what she knew was mirrored in hers. ‘No,’ she whispered. She stepped back from him defensively into her own room, and he followed her step for step, closed the door behind them. The small click of the latch sounded too loud in the quiet – accusing, dangerous. He stood against the closed door. She could hear his breathing, too loud, as though he had been running. His lips were parted, his eyes narrowed with some fierce emotion.

No, she had said; but in the end it was she who led them. He made a small movement towards her, and half in terror at her own insane daring she stepped close to him, and her arms went up about his neck. There was no thought but to have what she wanted so much. She put her body against his hungrily, quivering at the forbidden touch of it, alien, and yet already, somehow, known to her.

His response was instant; his hand rose to stroke her cheek; he cupped her face with his hands. ‘Annushka!’ he whispered. His eyes closed, and he kissed her brow, touched her lips with his; her mouth opened hungrily, and then they were kissing like lovers, with the utter abandon of long desire let loose at last. His arms were round her, his hands behind her shoulders pressing her against him.

For once in her life she abandoned herself completely, her inner voices silenced. She leaned against him avidly, revelling in the exotic hardness of his male body, the warm smell of his skin, the touch of his strong hands. Her whole body, every nerve ending, sang with the joy of him. Love welled up in her, and a huge desire that, innocent as she was, she hardly knew what to do with; the knowledge that he wanted her, loved her equally, made a hard knot of passion in her stomach that would not be ignored.

He pulled his mouth away, panting. ‘Annushka! My own, my love.’ He kissed her throat and the upper curves of her breasts. She slid her hands up into his hair, loving the hard curve of his skull that her eyes had so often caressed. His hands were hard about her waist, slipped upwards and spanned her breasts, and she trembled and felt sick with the force of wanting him. ‘I love you.’

‘I love you, too,’ she whispered. His lips came back to hers, and they kissed again, feeding on each other.

‘Je te veux,’ he said against her mouth, and she quivered with response. He was strong; he lifted her with one arm round her waist, stepped with her away from the door, reached out one-handed for a chair and swung it round and under the door handle, to jam the door closed. It was enough to break the spell.

‘No,’ she said, more urgently this time. ‘We can’t.’

He set her feet to the ground but did not release her; he looked down at her, his face flushed, his eyes bright, his hair ruffled.

‘It’s wrong,’ she said desperately, growing more sober with every breath.

‘I love you,’ he said, but she heard the change in his voice, too.

‘You have a wife.’ She said the deadly words.

‘Yes,’ he said helplessly. Anne, in his arms, knew she should withdraw from him, but could not, not yet. He felt the thought in her mind, and snatched her tighter to him. ‘I can’t reach her. Anna, I have nothing for her, nor she for me. We should never have married. It was a dreadful mistake.’

‘These past few days – I’ve watched you together–’

‘Yes, I’ve tried, God knows I’ve tried! But I can’t love her. I don’t know why. Poor woman, she has never done me any harm, but – Anna – she fills me with horror!’

‘No,’ Anne pleaded.

‘It’s true. But you – Oh God, I love you! I’ve loved you since the first moment I met you. You are like me – you are my image, my match, my soul!’ He kissed her again, her brow and her eyes and her lips, and she whimpered, but could not struggle. ‘If you knew how often I’ve wanted to do this! How I’ve stopped myself! Anna, Anna!’

‘Don’t – please–’

‘You feel it too. We’re alike, you and I, we belong together. When I arrived here, and I saw you standing there in the road, it was like – like coming home! I swear to you I felt more as though you were my wife than I have ever felt with Irina.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said. The fever was mounting again. She saw his eyes narrow.

‘I can’t let you go. I must have you. I want to possess you utterly – to fill you up with myself–’

She gave up her mouth to him again, and felt the sweetness flowing between them, and knew how easy it would be to give way to the madness, to have what she wanted, what they wanted, so much. But it would be at too great a cost. If she lost herself, she would lose him too, and the more completely. She sighed as she kissed him, and he felt it, and their lips parted.

‘It’s not possible,’ she said.

He resisted the words, but she pushed him back firmly – not completely away, but enough to stop him kissing her. She looked into his eyes, saw the knowledge of their plight reflected there. He knew as well as she did that this was a moment outside of time, that real life was waiting for them only a shadow away, ready to part them, ready to break their hearts.

‘I love you,’ he said again.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I love you too–’

‘Say my name,’ he begged. ‘Just once, let me hear it on your lips.’

‘Nikolai,’ she said, and the sound of it made her feel shy. ‘Nikolai, Nikolasha.’

He drew her against him as she said it, and cradled her close, the fierce passion gone now, only the tenderness, the dearness between them, binding them together with frail, indestructible ropes. She rested against him, knowing in this one moment of perfect wholeness, that she had found the place where she belonged, the other half of herself for which each person searches all their life. How could this be wrong? How could anything part them? The vitality of life itself flowed between them, unhindered by their separate flesh.

There was a light scratching at the door, and they both grew very still. Marie’s voice came quietly from the passage. ‘Mademoiselle? Puis-je vous coiffer maintenant?’

The world had caught up with them. He looked down blankly into her eyes, and she heard her own voice call out with amazing calmness, ‘Go away Marie. I will do my hair myself.’

There was no further sound from the passageway; but the mood was broken. They released themselves by common consent, and stood a little apart. His arms were down uselessly by his sides. He was all too aware, now, of the other view, the one any person other than themselves would have of the matter.

It was Anne who spoke first. ‘You had better go and dress.’

He nodded, turned to go, and then turned back, unable to leave something so important so lightly.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Everything will be all right.’

No, she thought; nothing will ever be all right again. He must have seen something of that thought in her eyes, for he gave a small, crooked smile, and said, ‘Trust me, Anna.’

She could not see any way forward, anything to come but pain; but she said, ‘Yes,’ as if it were an answer to his question-no, his demand – and he seemed satisfied, for the moment, with that. He nodded again, and after a brief hesitation, left her.

By the time she arrived at the reception, Anne felt exhausted, as if she had not slept for two nights. She travelled in the second carriage with Katya and the two girls; the Count and Irina had gone on ahead in the first carriage with Feodor and Galina, and when Anne stepped into the commandant’s house, the Count was already established and out of reach in conversation with a group of senior military and diplomatic personnel.

Feodor had waited, so that they should have someone to present them, but he was not obliged to trouble himself on Anne’s behalf, for her hand was at once claimed by Basil Andreyevitch, who begged to be allowed to present her to the Governor, who was an old friend of his mother’s. Feodor met Anne’s eyes and raised an interrogative eyebrow, and she shrugged minutely. If she were not to be allowed to lie down and die of her misery, she didn’t much care what happened to her.

Tchaikovsky presented her as the daughter of the English Admiral Peters, and in that flattering light the Governor bowed over her hand most graciously. They moved on, and other members of his staff came forward to be introduced to her. Tchaikovsky was expert, if in nothing else, in manipulating conversation, and before long there was a lively discussion going on around Anne, which she could not help but join in.

The thing which had happened to her was shut away in a separate part of her mind: for the moment she could not think about it, and her physical tiredness helped her to stand outside herself, and regard the present in a detached way. Servants drifted up at regular intervals with glasses of champagne and trays of zakuska, and in the background an orchestra played quietly. It really was a very good reception, and she had the grace to repeat the thought to Basil.

He looked pleased. ‘Mess hospitality!’ he said. ‘In Russia, it’s the best in the world! Have some of this caviar – the red is best – and some more champagne.’

‘Tsinandali?’ she said, remembering. They had sat on the verandah together in another world, long ago, drinking champagne. On top of the tiredness, the wine was filling her with a pleasant sense of unreality. The edges of things were just a little softened. The wounded place inside her seemed far away; the pain quiescent for the moment, like a fierce animal sleeping. ‘I like you, Basil Andreyevitch,’ she said. ‘You’re so restful.’

He smiled uncertainly. ‘I suppose you mean that as a compliment.’

During the progress of the reception, Anne saw Sergei only at a distance, talking to various officials and dignitaries. She knew that he had seen her: he bowed the first time she caught his eye, and several times she saw him look her way, but he was in uniform and on duty, and could not excuse himself to come to talk to her.

Basil Andreyevitch had brought her a Colonel of Hussars who had recently come from Spain, where he had been liaising with Murat’s army in Madrid. He was able to give fascinating details of the situation there. Napoleon had made his brother Joseph king in place of the deposed Bourbon, and Joseph had embarked on a programme of reform and public building. But the Bonapartes had underestimated the strength of the Spanish church, which regarded the Revolution with horror, and Napoleon as the Antichrist. Urged on by the priesthood, the Spanish people themselves, though betrayed by their queen and abandoned by their king, had risen up against the French occupation, and had driven the army out of Madrid.

‘When I left, the news was that your General Wellesley was marching through Portugal to head off Junot’s army,’ the Colonel added. ‘Do you know him? He has done great things in India, so it’s said.’

Anne contemplated the idea of her ‘knowing’ Sir Arthur Wellesley, the proud son of an Anglo-Irish peer and brother of a minister of the realm. ‘I’ve heard of him, of course,’ she said.

The Colonel nodded. ‘An able man. I think France may have more trouble than she looks for in the Peninsular. Napoleon invaded Spain in a frivolous mood – but he may find it a sobering experience.’

Tchaikovsky said, ‘You seem not to mind the idea of our ally being bested by the Spanish, Boris Feodorovitch. Can it be that you have no great love for the French?’

The Colonel shrugged. ‘France or Spain, it is not our quarrel. And Napoleon – who is he? A commoner, when all’s said and done. It is not for our Emperor to ally himself with a brigand. We ought to be opposing him, and helping England. The English are our natural allies,’ he said with a bow to Anne.

Tchaikovsky gave Anne a conspiratorial glance, and said innocently, ‘What you mean, Borya, is that England has no Continental ambitions to clash with ours. Provided she rules the sea, she will let us rule Europe as we please.’

The Colonel looked dignified. ‘You may laugh if you will, but a clash is bound to come sooner or later, between us and a mushroom like Napoleon. What about Poland? What about Sweden? What about the Levant? Do you think he will stand back and let us have them? And do you think we will let him take them from us? Let France have her natural frontiers, and we ours, that’s what I say. The ancient empire of Byzantium–’

‘No no!’ Tchaikovsky protested, holding up his hands. ‘I cannot permit you to start on Byzantium. Once he mounts that horse, Anna Petrovna, nothing can throw him.’

The Colonel grinned good-naturedly. ‘Very well. But I don’t scruple to say this before you, Vasya – or before Mademoiselle, your friend: the idea of a marriage alliance between Russia and France is going a great deal too far, and so it will appear.’

‘A marriage alliance?’ Anne said in surprise.

Tchaikovsky lowered his eyelids. ‘It seems Napoleon is thinking of divorcing Madame Josephine–’

‘That sweet woman!’ the Colonel added indignantly.

‘But I thought it was a love match,’ Anne said. ‘Everyone talked of it so. When I was in Paris–’

‘Napoleon wants a son, and she cannot give him one,’ Tchaikovsky said. ‘Now he has a throne, he must have a son to inherit it.’

The Colonel nodded. ‘That’s right. And at the conference in Erfurt next month, he plans to suggest a marriage between himself and one of the Grand Duchesses,’ he said indignantly. ‘He does not know his man. The Tsar may sign a pact with the Devil, if he is driven to it, in order to gain time; but he will not sell one of his sisters to him.’

A general disturbance at that point, as everyone began moving towards the ballroom for the opening of the ball, interrupted the conversation. The Colonel bowed to Anne, and excused himself to go and find the lady he was engaged to escort; and Basil Andreyevich offered Anne his arm with a certain satisfaction.

‘You see, Anna Petrovna, how it would be? I can offer you not only wealth and position – any rich nobleman could do the same. But I have the entrée at Court. I know the Imperial Family, and I know the ministers and the generals. You could hold a central position in the wheel of power.’

‘Why should you think I want to?’ she asked.

‘Because knowledge is power. Because for the intelligent mind, to know is everything.’ He read her expression. ‘Visualise yourself at the heart of matters, mistress of the salon where the fate of nations is decided: the intriguante sans pareil! Yes, it attracts you, doesn’t it?’

‘You talk such nonsense, Basil Andreyevitch,’ she said.

Sergei came up to her at last, where she was sitting on a sofa a little out of the way, in a sort of alcove in a corner of the ballroom. She could not dance, of course, but apart from Tchaikovsky, several people had come up to sit beside her and talk for a while, and she had got through the evening more pleasantly than she had thought possible.

The Count had not come near her, though she had seen him looking at her from time to time. She was aware of him wherever he was in the room, even if she was not looking at him; she could feel him on her skin like a radiance. The memory of his love, their passion, the touch of him, was small and secret in her mind, something she would take out later, when she was alone, and examine, for pleasure or pain, probably both. What to do about it was beyond her to consider for the moment. She was tired; she wanted nothing, only to be left alone.

Count Tchaikovsky was obliged to dance one or two duty dances, and it was while he was thus away from her side that Sergei took the opportunity to approach her. She was engaged in the delicate task of untangling the clasp of her fan from the net-mesh of her reticule into which it had hooked itself in her lap, and noticing at last that a pair of white breeches and silk stockings had been stationary in front of her for some moments, she looked up to encounter Sergei’s flushed face and over-bright eyes. He was, she realised with a sinking heart, not sober.

‘So, I have you to myself at last,’ he began unpromisingly. ‘I began to think if that dog Tchaikovsky didn’t go away and leave you alone, I should be obliged to come over and let some of the air out of him.’

She met his eye questioningly, and he gave a twisted grin. ‘Yes, I am a little foxed,’ he said, reading her thoughts. ‘Well, it’s expected on occasions like this, when the champagne flows. Every man in uniform will drink himself into a stupor tonight. Mess hospitality, you know!’

She made a small gesture of dismissal. ‘Don’t let me prevent you from enjoying yourself.’

He flung himself down at her side. ‘Don’t be angry with me, Anna! Why have you been so distant with me? What have I done to upset you?’

‘Nothing – nothing in the world.’

‘Is it because I haven’t come to Pyatigorsk before now? But you must have known that I would have come if I could. We’ve been at full stretch, every man, trying to hold back the Chechen – raids every day, and at night too. I couldn’t have come before.’

‘I didn’t expect you,’ she said truthfully.

‘Then why are you offended?’

‘I’m not offended, Seryosha. I’m just tired,’ she said. She had no feelings to spare for him at the moment, one way or the other. ‘Just leave me be.’

He was hurt. ‘You’ve changed,’ he said abruptly. ‘It can’t be that Tchaikovsky creature! Why, he’s barely a man – just a clothes-wearer. Why do you let him hang around you?’

‘He’s very kind to me.’

‘It’s not kindness! Can’t you see the fool is flirting with you? Don’t be taken in, Annushka! You’re too trusting.’

This was exhausting. ‘Basil Andreyevitch has asked me to marry him,’ she said. ‘He is perfectly honourable.’

‘Marry him? You can’t marry him! What have you told him? Why is he still hanging about you? You haven’t accepted him, have you?’

‘No–’

‘Then he has no right to plague you. I’ll have to teach him some manners,’ Sergei said triumphantly. ‘If he comes near you again, I’ll settle him for you, don’t worry.’

‘Please, Sergei, I can’t bear this,’ Anne said, putting a hand to her brow; but he caught it in both his and lifted it to his lips, kissing it fervently.

‘I know, my darling! I’ve been away from you too long, and you’ve had to bear the sorrow all alone. But everything will be all right, you’ll see. Don’t be angry with me, Annushka! I didn’t neglect you on purpose.’

Anne tried to pull her hand away. Everything will be all right! How many more people would promise her that, when it was plain that everything was coming to pieces, would never be all right again? ‘Don’t, Seryosha! People are looking.’

‘Let them look! I don’t care! I want the world to know about us!’ He kissed her hand again, and then turned it over and began to kiss her wrist. ‘Angel!’

She struggled, half tearful, half angry, pushing at his hard, muscular shoulder with her free hand, and making no more impression on it than on a rock. His fingers were making red marks on her arm.

And then out of nowhere the Count was there, his voice icy.

‘Sergei Nikolayevitch, release Anna’s hand. You’re annoying her. Are you drunk so early in the evening? ’

The hard tone, the formal appellation, acted like cold water. Sergei dropped Anne’s hand, and started up, and then his face began slowly to colour. He straightened to attention before his father and said with dignity, ‘You are under a misapprehension, sir. I am not drunk, and I was not annoying Anna Petrovna.’

‘Forgive me,’ the Count said with cutting irony. ‘I was judging by appearances. When a young man is trying to kiss a woman in a public place, and she is struggling to prevent him, I can only suppose she finds it an annoyance. And when that young man is my son, I assume that only excess of drink could lead him so to forget himself.’

Sergei glowed with anger. ‘Appearances can deceive, sir. There is nothing improper in my attentions. I am going to marry Anna – she and I are promised to each other.’

If it weren’t so horrible and so tragic, Anne might have laughed, to see the look of disbelief on the Count’s face, rapidly followed by shocked doubt. Knowing his son, he realised that Sergei would not tell such an outrageous lie without some reason. He stared at him, then looked to Anne for enlightenment, and read some consciousness in her eye. His expression changed. Knowing he had no right to her only made his jealousy the more bitter.

‘Perhaps I have been deceived,’ he said in a hard voice. ‘Must I congratulate you, mademoiselle?’

Don’t be a fool, she thought wearily, but those were not words she could say to him, not in public, not in front of Sergei.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I am not going to marry Sergei.’ Out of the corner of her eye she saw the young man’s start of protest, but she could not spare him her attention at the moment. She was looking into the Count’s eyes, holding his gaze steadily.

‘Do you mean to tell me there is nothing between you?’

He wanted, needed her denial; yet she felt Sergei like a weight on her consciousness. There had been nothing between them, in the sense that his father meant; yet she could not quite do that to Sergei. She had done such wrong by him already. She said, ‘I am not promised to him. He is mistaken.’

‘But Anna–’ cried Sergei.

Now she flung him a look. ‘I did not accept,’ she said firmly. ‘I told you it was impossible.’

‘Nevertheless,’ the Count said in a voice of bitter darkness, ‘it seems he did ask you. I had no idea – how long has it been going on? There must have been a great deal more – affection – between you than I ever imagined possible between a governess and her charge.’

He was being unfair, and he knew it: Sergei had never been her charge. But he wanted to punish her, to hurt her.

She looked at him sadly. ‘Ah, no,’ she protested softly.

The anger drained from his face, leaving him only puzzled. ‘Anna, what happened? You didn’t love him, did you?’

‘How could I help loving him? He’s your son,’ she said.

Sergei looked from one to the other, hearing the warmth, the unmistakable intimacy of the exchange. They were not words spoken merely between employer and employee. The wine flush drained out of him. He was suddenly horribly sober.

‘Papa – not you and Anna?’ He met Anne’s reluctant eyes. ‘Was that why you said it was impossible?’ She didn’t answer. His fists clenched, the words burst out of him. ‘You and Papa? How could you? It’s disgusting!’

Anne could bear no more. She got to her feet, desperate to escape. She swayed, and the Count was there, steadying her. He would always do that – he loved her, he understood.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Go out on to the terrace. No one will follow you.’

She looked up at him blindly, and then stumbled away.

The warm evening air seemed hard to breathe. The terrace was empty, thank God! She leaned against the balustrade and stared into the shadows of the shrubbery beyond. Before her the darkness sang with a monotony of cicadas; behind her the strains of music drifted out from the brightly lit ballroom; between the two she was suspended in a world of anguish. She contemplated the devastation of her life; and the hot, bitter tears began to fall.

Some time later, she was aware that someone was near her. She tried to stop herself crying. Her reticule was left behind on the sofa in the ballroom: she had no handkerchief, and wiped at her wet face uselessly with her fingers. She struggled for control, not wanting to expose herself to impertinent curiosity. Then someone put clean linen into her hand, pleasantly scented. She recognised the scent. It was Basil Tchaikovsky – only him.

‘Here,’ he said kindly. ‘Go on – it’s a good, big one.’

She took it, dried her face, pressed it to her eyes. He was standing beside her, shielding her from anyone who might be looking from the ballroom. She tried to thank him, and began crying again.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, and took her in his arms. There was nothing of the lover in the gesture – he held her against his shoulder in kindness, simply to let her cry more comfortably. He was almost motherly. At first the very quality of his kindness made her cry harder; but at last the sobs began to ease, and after a while she was able to draw a long, shuddering breath and mumble, ‘I’m sorry.’

He held her a moment longer, and then put her gently away. ‘All done now?’ he said. She uncrumpled his handkerchief – damp now – from her clutch, and wiped her face again.

‘I think so,’ she said unsteadily.

‘I saw something of what happened from across the room,’ he said, and then gave her a rueful smile. ‘Fascinating people, these Kirov men! I’m not surprised you fell victim. Which one was it? Or was it both?’

She looked at him in blind misery, hardly hearing what he said. ‘What am I to do?’ she said. ‘What am I to do?’ The tears welled up again helplessly. ‘My life is ruined.’

‘Oh, surely not,’ he said gently. ‘A little contretemps – it will blow over. It will all be forgotten in a day or two. Lives are not ruined in ballrooms – it doesn’t happen, you know.’

She shook her head dumbly. He didn’t know the full gravity of it. ‘I shall have to go away. But what can I do? Where can I go?’ she said. She was utterly lost, helpless, bewildered.

Tchaikovsky looked at her carefully. ‘There is something you can do,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to press you when you are obviously upset – but if you want to get away from them, you could marry me. My offer still stands.’ She said nothing, and he wasn’t sure if she had heard him. ‘I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to escape them. They do tend to engulf everything around them, like octopuses – well, Nikolai Sergeyevitch does, at any rate, and I imagine young Sergei is going to be just the same one day.’

His light voice, easy as the little night breeze, drifted on past her, soothing her, dispersing the fog of pain, leaving her feeling empty, beyond emotion. She wanted to lean against him, to close her eyes and sleep; but she knew it was not fair.

‘You know that I don’t love you,’ she said. ‘Can you really want me to marry you on those terms?’

‘I don’t mind why you marry me, so long as you marry me,’ he said lightly. ‘It will be all right, you’ll see.’

Running away, she thought. Cowardly. But what else could she do? She must escape, and she had nowhere else to go. She was worn out, and he offered her a haven. As long as she was not deceiving him, there could be no harm – could there?

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Does that mean you will marry me?’ he said cautiously.

She hardly knew what she had meant by it; but she said again, ‘Yes.’

She heard him draw a deep breath of relief and triumph, and then, permitted now, he drew her against him again. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly into her hair. ‘You won’t regret it. I’ll make you happy, you’ll see. Everything will be all right.’

Anne stared over his shoulder at the ground. I feel nothing, she thought, nothing at all.