Russian series 03 - The Eagle's Fate (19 page)

‘And you’d rather go back to that than accept Tatya’s charity?’

‘I can’t go back to it. When I started to live like that, I had enough furniture—the old pieces that couldn’t be sold—but now I’ve lost those, and the sort of house I lived in has gone too. There won’t be such cheap lodgings in the new buildings in Moscow. I don’t know what I’m going to do—it’s all so hopeless…’

Afterwards, she could not recall whether she had moved forward or if it was Andrei, but somehow her head was against his should, the silver braid of the frogs chill against her cheek, and his hands were resting on her upper arms, not exactly holding her, but very near it.

‘You are a silly little mouse!’ he said quite kindly. ‘If your positions were reversed—if you were as rich as Croesus and Tatya was alone and down to her last kopeck—how would you feel if she refused your offer of a home because she thought it was charity and was too proud to accept? Think about it, for goodness’ sake! And why assume it would be for the rest of your life? I take it you’ve no vocation for celibacy, or anything of that sort, so you’ll probably find a comfortably rich husband before long. He’ll come across you a great deal more easily in Tatya’s company than if you’re hiding away in a poky little attic somewhere!’

Nadya gave a sob at the sheer irony of him talking of some putative husband when she was actually leaning against the one man she could ever think of marrying, but he apparently took it for some sort of disagreement, and went on, ‘You mustn’t lose hope, you know! You can’t, for that matter—you’d have fearful difficulty losing yourself!’ Then, in a totally different tone, ‘There’s someone coming!’

Nadya straightened up and stepped away from him, pulling her hood up over her head, although there was too little light on the stairs for anyone to see her face, and began to descend the next flight, Andrei only a step behind her. On the next landing, where there was a small, dirty window, they met a figure which must belong to the village on the roof, climbing homewards with a very large basket full of loaves of black bread. He or she drew back against the wall, bobbing a jerky bow over his basket, and Andrei gave him or her a word of greeting in Russian. The voice which replied sounded male.

When they came to the next window, three flights further down, Andrei stopped Nadya by saying ‘Wait a minute’, and putting a hand on her shoulder, swung her round to face what light there was, then produced a large white handkerchief from his sleeve and carefully dried the tears from her cheeks.

‘Lick!’ he commanded, holding the handkerchief against her lips and sounding exactly like a nurse with a tearful child. Nadya obediently licked, and he rubbed her cheeks, frowning with concentration.

‘That’s better. Can’t produce you in the State Apartments all tear-stained. They’d wonder what I’d been up to!’ he said in his usual dry tone, as he pushed the handkerchief back up his sleeve. ‘Quite seriously, though—you must stop fretting yourself into a decline and start trying to enjoy life a little! After all, you’re infinitely better off than those souls on the roof, aren’t you, just as they’re better off than most other serfs?’

Nadya immediately felt ashamed of herself, and then it suddenly occurred to her as they descended the last few stairs, that Andrei had actually sounded quite concerned about her, and by the time they had traversed the dark passage and emerged into the gallery ‘like insects from the panelling’ as Andrei remarked, she was sufficiently cheerful to laugh.

‘That’s better!’ he said encouragingly. ‘Now come and see something interesting!’

He took her through more opulently decorated and furnished rooms, round a corner or two, then stopped before an enormous glass case, in which stood a metal tree with a mass of oak leaves on its branches. A life-sized peacock perched on an upper branch, and a squirrel sat on the lowest. There was a cock to one side, and the ‘ground’ was strewn with ivy and mushrooms, beside one of which a cricket jerked rhythmically. Everything was enameled in its proper colours, perhaps a little exaggerated in brilliance, and round the edge of the base was a wide decorative band of worked bronze set with faceted crystals which gleamed in the light pouring in through the large, clean windows.

‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ Nadya exclaimed, admiring the workmanship.

‘You hadn’t seen it before?’ Andrei asked.

‘No.’

Suddenly, the faint, sweet chimes of the Peter-Paul Cathedral clock drifted across the river, playing the Imperial Anthem, followed by the strokes of the hour. Simultaneously there was a whirring sound, and the scene trapped inside the glass case stirred to life. The peacock spread and raised its tail in display, shook its head and turned slowly round, exactly like a real bird. The cock preened, and the owl which sat in a cage handing from another branch—which Nadya had not had time to notice before—moved its head and blinked its eyes as the cage revolved and the bells which decorated it tinkled a tune.

The squirrel was moving too, but before Nadya could move round far enough to see what it was doing, the noon gun at the fortress surrounding the Peter-Paul Cathedral crashed out, jarring the windows in their frames, and the marvelous automaton subsided into its former stillness.

‘What a wonderful thing!’ Nadya exclaimed, walking round to look at it from the side. ‘Is it a clock? The cricket seems to be marking the seconds.’

‘Yes. Can you see where it shows the hours and minutes?’

Nadya looked carefully, but without success, Andrei watching her with a smile lighting his face, and eventually he told her to look at the largest mushroom. A little window in the top of it revealed the hour in Roman figures and the minutes in Arabic ones.

‘Prince Potyomkin had it imported from England, and then the Empress Yekaterina acquired it—I can’t recall whether he gave it to her, or if she bought it from him. When it arrived, it was all in pieces and packed in a case, and it took Potyomkin’s clocksmith nearly a month to work out how to assemble it,’ Andrei told her as they returned through the interminable succe3ssion of salons and halls. ‘This place is full of wonderful toys, but I think that’s one of the best of all! I suppose we’d better not stop to look at any more, or Tatya will wonder where we are.’

They took a different route from that by which they had come, passing through more of the State Apartments, Nadya looking about her at the pictures which covered the walls of most of the salons, and the beautiful architectural details of the great halls. At one point Andrei suddenly drew her to one side and hissed ‘Curtsey!’ as the small, erect figure of the Empress Dowager swept past, followed

By a group of her ladies, all the guards coming to attention and the various officers and officials saluting or bowing, so that a flurry of movement and stamping feet marked her progress along the gallery, like the wind passing through a field of corn.

‘She’s still very beautiful,’ Nadya said quietly after she had gone.

‘A very clever lady,’ Andrei observed. ‘Intelligence and beauty are a rare combination.’

They descended the great Jordan staircase to the ground floor, and found the vast vestibule almost empty now, only the guards still in their places, although even they seemed to be on the move, for they were going through some sort of military evolution which involved much stamping of feet, marching a short distance, turning with more stamping, marching back, and stamping themselves back into their original places.

‘What are they doing?’ Nadya asked.

‘Keeping awake, probably. They have to move occasionally, or their feet take root and break up the marble floor,’ Andrei replied in the dry tone which Nadya now recognized as a sign that he was joking. ‘The real reason is that they tend to get cramp or turn faint if they stand still too long. The Emperor doesn’t like them to fall flat on their faces too often.’

When they reached the door into the courtyard, the footman took Nadya’s pass from her and raised a white-gloved finger to summon Andrei’s carriage, then bowed them out in a very formal fashion.; On the way home, Nadya said, ‘thank you for arranging that for me, and for all your kindness. I will think about what you said, and try to be more thankful for what I have, and less fretful about what I can’t have.’

She thought as she said it that he had given her a great deal to be thankful for that he would never know, just by being kind, although he had treated her rather like a child in need of a treat to compensate for some juvenile upset by taking her to see the peacock clock.

He had been looking out over the side of the carriage when she started to speak, and had half-turned his head towards her. ‘You are an odd little mouse!’ he said, and leaned forward to smooth out the anxious little crease between her brows with his forefinger, then returned to his contemplation of the passing scene, leaving Nadya puzzled by his remark, which she assumed must refer to the nondescript colour of her hair, and quite fluttery inside from the small caress-like touch of his finger.

To add to Nadya’s happier frame of min, when they reached home she found that her money had arrived, all new gold rouble pieces in neat rolls wrapped in paper, and delivered by one of the clerks of Lev’s man of business, so there was one less thing to worry about.

Tatya had, of course, delayed luncheon until they returned, and she and Irina wanted to know all about the visit to the Palace, listening with great interest to Nadya’s description of the village on the roof, which they had known nothing about before.

‘I don’t know how Andrei found his way about,’ Nadya finished. ‘It’s hard enough in the great rooms, but when it comes to invisible door and little dark passages—I didn’t even know they existed!’

After luncheon, as they were drinking coffee in the garden-room, Irina asked if they would like to hear Lev’s latest letter, which had arrived during the morning, and, of course, they would, so she produced it and began, as usual, in the middle, omitting the opening sentences.

‘It seems incredible that the nightmare of these past weeks is over, although there is still plenty to remind us, for the passage of the French is marked by the wreckage of an army which virtually ceased to exist by the time the remnants reached the frontier. Boris and I were privileged to see the very last man cross the Niemen, and it was indeed a privilege, for he’s the bravest fellow I’ve ever encountered—Michel Ney. I’ll tell you about him when I come home.

‘At present, we’re comfortably settled in Vilna. Boris and I sharing a pair of rooms in the University with the Karachev brothers. Tatya may recollect the younger, Vladimir, who is Nikolai Volkhov’s First Battalion Major and acting commander of his Regiment in his absence. Vassily, the elder, is so often abroad that I doubt if she’s met him, for he invariably has his nose in a book when he’s at home. I can’t imagine how or why he joined the Army, but it appears that it’s a temporary arrangement as he’s sent in his papers, as I have too.

‘Vladimir and Boris (who is not nearly as young as he was) are staying in, the former being a true professional, and the latter having an ambition to see the last of Bonaparte, in Paris for preference. The rumour here is that Alexander Pavlovich intends to continue the pursuit when our Army is rested and re-formed, having the same ambition as Boris, but he has agreed to manage without my valuable assistance, so I should be home by the end of January, if the War Ministry doesn’t succeed in losing my papers completely.

‘I shall be glad to leave this place, as it stinks of mortification. The hospitals are packed to overflowing, as are the monasteries, and the corpses are stacked like firewood in the fields outside the town, awaiting the thaw before they can be buried, although most of us think they should be burned before then. I’m sorry to mention these unpleasant things, but I know that you are no empty-headed Petersburg ninny and understand that they can’t be ignored. I’d rather die than put you through what we’ve endured, but I must tell you a little about it or you may find difficulty in understanding how I feel about some things.

‘I wish I could be with you and Tatya for Christmas, but we’ll be making what cheer we can here and thinking of you. See if you can find some poor wounded fellows to flirt with and brighten their lives, but don’t forget that you’re spoken for! Tatya, no doubt, will please herself, as usual!’

‘Insolent fellow!’ Tatya commented, but she was laughing as she said it.

Chapter Eight