Russian series 03 - The Eagle's Fate (2 page)

‘But…’

Luda stopped suddenly, but it was obvious that she had been about to say ‘You can’t go alone!’ She substituted lamely, ‘Well, of course I’ll go with you! After all, I’ve been with you since you were a little baby, and you don’t think I’d let you go off all that way by yourself! Why anything might happen! And besides, it wouldn’t be proper!’

‘Very well, then,’ Nadya replied. ‘Now, open your bundles and pick out the things you must have, and remember, you’ll have to carry them!’

Luda did as she was told somewhat tearfully, and Nadya had to shake her head at several things which were obviously too large or too heavy, so in the end, Luda was left with one small bundle. The food, which had been stowed in a large bad, was unpacked and made into two bundles, one for each of them to carry, for, as Nadya pointed out, they might be separated. The very idea filled Luda with horror.

‘Well, then!’ Nadya said when that was done. ‘We’d best be off!’ She went to put on her redingote and bonnet, then thought that they were hardly suitable for a long journey on foot, and substituted a dark green cashmere shawl, old but warm and light in weight, covering her head with it like a peasant.

‘Shouldn’t we wait until tomorrow? It’s nearly noon already,’ Luda asked tentatively.

‘It’s barely eleven, and you said that the French will be here tomorrow, ‘Nadya pointed out.

‘You’re not going without praying?1 Luda exclaimed.

‘Of course not.’ Nadya bowed her head and recited the prayers for those about to start on a journey. She said them in Russian, although she normally thought, wrote and spoke in French, like any other Russian lady in her class of society, even to Luda, who had picked up enough of the language to converse, if rather ungrammatically.

On the way downstairs, Luda made one last protest.

‘Countess Kalinskaya might not be at Ryazan. She’s got other estates.’

‘She’s always at Ryazan at this time of year, especially if her brother’s away.’

‘Perhaps Count Kalinsky isn’t away. Why should he be?’

Nadya stopped at the foot of the stairs, faced the woman, and said fiercely, ‘You know very well that her brother is Count Orlov—Count Kalinsky was her husband. You also know that Count Orlov is in the Chevalier Guard. You don’t expect him to be at home when Russia is at war, do you?’

Luda made a little shrugging gesture of surrender and said no more.

Nadya locked the house door behind them, wondering if there was any point, and set off down the lane. On the brink of the river of people in the main street, she hesitated, disconcerted and frightened by their numbers and the ruthlessness with which every individual seemed to be progressing. They were elbowing aside the elderly and slow, knocking children aside if they were on foot, forcing the walkers to give way if they were driving vehicles.

She glanced back once at the old house, feeling no particular regret at leaving it, for it had been a lonely, uncomfortable place, dirty, infested with vermin, where it had been a struggle to keep herself and her few belongings clean. Its only attraction had been its cheapness, and it did contain almost all she had left of the old life…Nadya squared her shoulders and pushed resolutely out into the street, Luda close on her heels, muttering prayers and crossing herself repeatedly.

In a few hundred yards, the street entered the wider thoroughfare that ran where once the wooden wall stood which had here divided the White City from the outer Wooden City. There was considerable confusion as people wanting to go eastwards fought to cut across those trying to go south-east. At first Nadya was unsure what to do, frightened by the struggling mass of people, but she suddenly realised that a large waggon in front of her was turning across to the right, and she hastily got close to its left side, praying it would not overturn in the crush, and pulling Luda with her. Somehow the waggon forced its way through, and Nadya and Luda got safely across and were swept on until they were through the gate in the city wall behind the Foundling Hospital.

Immediately outside the gate, the column of people and vehicles slowed down, despite the wider streets in the outer suburbs. Groups of soldiers were drawn up on some of the areas of empty ground and in the small market gardens, apparently resting or perhaps waiting for orders. Nadya wondered if perhaps the rumours that Moscow was not to be defended were untrue, and the soldiers she had seen earlier were only marching to their positions in the defences, not leaving the city. There were certainly no more moving along the road now, as far as she could see.

She realised that the hold-up ahead must be caused by the bridge across the River Yauza, a tributary of the Moskva. The bridge was wooden and not very wide, for it had never before had to carry so much traffic. Also, the ground sloped down quite steeply between the city gate and the river, and some of the heavily-lade carts and waggons were having trouble negotiating it. Thank good ness the road was hard and dry after a week of fine weather.

‘What’s happening?’ Luda asked anxiously from behind her. ‘Why are we going so slowly?’

‘Because the bridge is ahead.’ Nadya replied. ‘I expect they’re only allowing so many carts and people across at a time.’ Luda sounded afraid almost to the point of hysteria, so she tried to distract her by pointing out a strange conveyance nearby. A large tub had been tied on a low, flat car, and a whole family of children sat in it, looking about them with wide eyes. It was quite a funny7 sight until one realised that their mother was sitting by the driver, crying as if her heart would break, and the children were puzzled and afraid.

Slowly, the mass of people moved forward down the slope, and Nadya became aware that the uproar of shouting men, wailing children, terrified cows and goats being pushed and pulled about in the crush and poultry confined in boxes and being jounced about on carts seemed to be greatly increased ahead, and frequent screams rose above it. There was also splashing, as though some people were going into the water instead of on to the bridge. Although she had managed to keep to the edge of the crowd, afraid of being crushed in the middle, Nadya could not see ahead for more than a few feet.

Suddenly the ground under her feet changed from trodden earth to wooden boards, and the pushing, jostling and shouting around her increased.

‘We’re on the bride!’ she cried to Luda, glancing back to make sure that the servant was still close behind. As she turned back to what was in front of her, she caught a glimpse of the shawled head of a woman two or three people ahead, and to her surprise, the woman seemed suddenly to turn sharply to her right, then fall backwards, screaming wildly.

Startled and shocked, Nadya glanced to her own left, and was horrified to see that she was about to step on to the part of the bridge over the river, and the edge of the roadway was guarded only by a low wooden rail, hardly higher than her own knee. The woman had fallen off into the river, which swirled, dark and strong-flowing, many feet below!

Nadya tried to call a warning back to Luda, but she dared not turn her head, for the press of people behind was forcing her one amid the pushing, heaving, desperate crowd, and it seemed that she must either be crushed or fall and be trampled underfoot, or be pushed over the low rail into the river.

Many people must have met one or the other of those fates on the Moscow bridges. A dozen times or more, Nadya saw a cart lurch violently as its wheels went over some obstruction, saw someone caught off balance go down and not rise again,. heard the screams and splash of someone fallen over the rail. Once it was someone so close behind her that he or she caught at Nadya’s skirts, so that for what seemed a long time, she thought she must be dragged over too, but suddenly the weight pulling on her clothes vanished and she staggered forward, keeping her feet with difficulty as, far below, she heard the splash as the unknown wretch hit the water.

The Yauza was not nearly as wide as the Moskva, but that crossing seemed to last a lifetime. Long before she reached the middle, Nadya found herself crying and praying in an incoherent babble, desperately fighting to stay on her feet as she was elbowed and shoved about, perilously near the rail, and constantly tripped by the uneven wooden surface, the obstacles of dropped belongings, and other things so horrible that she dare not think of them.

Then, unbelievably, there was hard, rutted ground beneath her feet, sloping up, away from the river, and soon there were buildings on either side. She looked back to say something about the relief to Luda, but there was no sign of the woman.

Puzzled and frightened, not daring to think of the likely explanation, Nadya was swept on with the crowd for some way, frequently looking behind, but still not seeing that bright blue shawl. At last, the pressure eased as the road forked and many people turned off towards the Rogozhskoe Gate. A little way ahead, there was a wooden church with a dozen steps before it. When she reached it, Nadya mounted the steps, searching the road behind from the top, frantically looking for the blue shawl and familiar plump features amid the sea of approaching faces. Luda still failed to appear.

‘Lost somebody?’ called a cheerful, red-faced man in the drab smock and tall felt hat of a waggoner. He was perched high on the front of his waggon above the rumps of a pair of good stout horses, and must have a good view over the crowds.

‘An old woman in a bright blue shawl.’ Nadya called back.

‘Fattish, round red cheeks, with a green bundle?’ he asked, his face suddenly looking far from cheerful.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry—you won’t find her. She went over the edge of the bridge.’

Nadya stumbled back against the wall of the church, shocked and sickened, staring unseeingly as the waggoner passed one, giving her a sympathetic glance over hi shoulder. The noise and the mass of humanity, the heat and the dust, seemed to rise up in a solid wall of sheer horror until she almost fainted. And then, gradually, the panic receded and she pushed herself away from the wall, weighted by her father’s old army canteen full of water, and she stepped down to the road and moved on with the never-ending stream of people, dazed and hardly knowing what she was doing.

Presently she became aware of her surroundings again, and found that she was passing through the Kolomna Gate in the earth bank of the outer customs barrier. She automatically glanced down to make sure that her reticule, which contained the passport without which no one might enter or leave a Russian, city, was still hanging from its chain, securely twisted round her wrist. But the barrier was wide open, and the half-dozen guards were standing about, well out of the way, watching the people go by. They looked depressed and worried, but whether this was because of their inability to do their job because of the volume of traffic, or because they were anxious about their immediate future, was not clear. At least they were still at their posts, so presumably the city government was still in control.

Beyond the barrier, the road stretched on interminably towards Kolomna and Ryazan, straight and broad, with wide grassy margins, as the Empress Yekaterina had long ago decreed, with a tall whitewashed stone marked at every
verst
giving the distance from the last town and to the next. It traversed a rolling countryside, well-wooded, with a few fine houses set in great parks contrasting with the rows of wretched wooden cabins in the occasional village set amid little fields of stubble and great pastures. The village seemed deserted, as if the inhabitants, seeing the great exodus from Moscow, had joined it in panic.

By now, Nadya had recovered from the first shock of losing Luda sufficiently to notice that the villages were not only lacking people, but animals and poultry, and many haystacks were smouldering. If the French came this way, they would find forage as scarce as they had found it further west, on the long road through Vilna and Smolensk.

Her feet were aching so much now in her thin-soled shoes that every step wan an effort, but she had too far to go to dare waste time resting, for it was already far into the afternoon. Besides, if she stopped it would be much harder to start again. At least she could walk on grass, which was softer than the road. However, this soon probed less of an advantage than she expected, for the ground on the grass verge was extremely uneven, and she frequently tripped, painfully wrenching her ankles, so she wearily returned to the hard, stony road.

Now that the column of refugees had thinned out so much, Nadya no longer had to concentrate on keeping her feet and avoiding being knocked over by a cart, and she realised how hot and wretched she was. Her shoulders ached as the valise and the bundle of food dragged on her arms, her long skirts hampered her legs, shortening the length of her strides, and the dust, rising in a thick haze from the dry road, got into everything, filling her eyes with painful grit, parching her mouth and throat, making her face sore. She began to doubt her ability to go on much longer.

A hundred and fifty
versts
to Ryazan—not very far, one would have thought! A day’s journey on this good road in a carriage—less, if one hurried! Even the carts and waggons, passing her in unending succession, would be there before the end of the next day.

But to walk—that was different! She would have to stop somewhere, to eat and rest, and she began to dread the coming night. All the other people on the road, as far as she could see, were peasants and working people from the poorer districts of the city, for all those who owned or could afford to hire a carriage had passed long ago, and she could see no one she could ask for help and protection.

As she looked about her, Nadya realised that at least she was not alone in her distress, for everyone was suffering from the dust, everyone was shaken and frightened by their terrible experiences in getting out of Moscow. Many of the poorest people looked utterly exhausted, and were even throwing down their precious bundles because they could no longer carry them. Children were wailing with hunger and weariness, and even some of the more fortunate folk in the carts seemed not to have thought to bring water or food, for she heard many of their children, too, crying out for a drink, for something to eat.